Mishima and Murakami on the Todai Riots
The late 1960s student movement in Japan, known as Zenkyōtō, is one of the keys to Haruki Murakami's writing, and Yukio Mishima is one of its most famous literary opponents. In this post we look at Mishima and Murakami against the backdrop of the University of Tokyo (Todai) riots, and what each writer made of that turbulent era. The Zenkyōtō years Zenkyōtō, short for the National Joint Struggle Committees, was a left-wing student movement that swept Japanese universities in 1968 and 1969. Murakami entered Waseda University's literature department in those years and spent seven years there, and it is hard to talk about his work without this background. In his early writing, he looks back at what he gained and lost in that time, and the experience of the student struggle is often the starting point of his literature. It left a lot of pain and loss, and it shaped not just his personality but his view of life. The most famous episode at Todai was the Yasuda Auditorium siege, wh...