1943, called The World of Shi Chi in later editions, he went the following year to Shanghai to work for the Japan-Chinese Cultural Association. It was in 1945 that he saw at first-hand what he had regarded as the inevitable fall of his own arrogant people, not that he considered himself freed from responsibility.
In the opening chapter of Ssu-ma Chien, Takeda had written: "Ssu-ma Chien was a man who remained alive in shame. Whereas any man of high rank would not have cared to survive, this man did... Completely driven to bay, fully aware of the base and disgusting impression he gave others, he brazenly went about the task of living. Even after his castration... Ssu-ma Chien continued to live, feeding and sleeping on a grief that day and night penetrated his entire body. He tenaciously persisted in writing Shi Chi, writing it to erase his shame, but the more he wrote, the more shame he felt." Takeda sounded elated in the discovery that a man so despised could evolve a philosophy which could turn the tables on the world that had so ruthlessly rejected him. But Takeda's voice was decidedly the voice of one who shared the same indignation, almost the identical shame of the castrated historian. For Takeda's own feelings to finally burst their bounds, he had to be a soldier in China, gun in hand as he stared at the mutilated bodies of Chinese peasants, their houses burned to ashes, their villages and towns destroyed.
Though Takeda had never been violently anti-imperialistic, he had nevertheless been part of the movement against Japanese imperialism in China, had loved the Chinese, had majored in their literature and formed lasting friendships among them. As the son of a Buddhist priest and as a priest himself, he was supposed to preach the absolute negation of violence and killing. The realization of these multiple betrayals must have been torturing him as he witnessed what his countrymen had done to the Chinese. So intense was his guilt that one can imagine how relieved he must have felt in identifying himself with Ssu-ma Chien. But Ssu-ma Chien's feelings were based on righteous indignation, while all Takeda could do was kick himself, and identification was easier than downright self-accusation. Perhaps the objectivity which resulted in Takeda's masterful unity in Ssu-ma Chien was due partly to whatever confidence was left him that separated him from the ancient Chinese chronicler—some small, secret zone of safety which kept Takeda from being as "bad" as the castrated man. One more final blow was needed to hurl Takeda outside this zone of safety where he could dissect his very soul and ask him self what he was, what man was. That final blow was Japan's unconditional surrender. The novelist Takeda confronted it in its fullest impact, in all its immediacy. It is not surprising that Shi Chi and "The Revelation of St. John" were the two books he read for support during his dangerous day-to-day life in postwar Shanghai.
Takeda returned to Japan in 1946. The following year Hokkaido National University offered him a position as associate professor of Chinese Literature. At the same time his energetic career as novelist, critic, and essayist was underway. He published "Trial" (1947), a short story in which a young Japanese soldier, an intellectual, kills an old Chinese couple, not in the line of duty but out of pure whim as if to test a mathematical formula. During this year of hunting for war criminals and extracting confessions for war crimes and, by extension, developing a hatred for war itself or the kind of social system that engenders war, Takeda's exposure of the dangerous potentiality in all of us to become senseless murderers was poignantly shocking. This Outcast Generation (1947), his first full-length story, which he saturated with his Shanghai experiences, placed him among the important postwar writers.
In 1948, he left teaching to devote his full energies to writing. Month after month he published stories and essays. In a time of hunger and black marketeering, Take-da seemed most alive, most sensitive, most hard-working. His glaringly colorful descriptions of human beings driven to bay under extremity perfectly corresponded to the postwar era, the Japanese nation's precarious survival in a world where the old values had apparently gone bankrupt. In one story after another Takeda posed radical questions that forced his readers to confront the meaning of human existence, whether he recorded his own experiences as a soldier in China or as a civilian in Shanghai or his bitter-funny apprenticeship as a Buddhist priest. The number of stories, novels, and essays he has written is astounding. Two decades after the war Takeda remains one of the most prolific writers in Japan. His materials, no longer limited to the autobiographical, represent bold forays into every area of human experience. "No phenomenon," said Takeda in a preface to a collection of his works, "escapes a novelist as uninteresting." As Japan has settled in the ways of peace, he has often been criticized for having an excessive interest in the dark side of human nature, but Takeda has retorted that in peace or war man is always faced with extremes, the chief of which is man himself. The mysterious complexity of man is Takeda's continual concern, especially so in This Outcast Generation and Luminous Moss.
This Outcast Generation is important not only because it is the starting point in Takeda's career as a novelist, but because it provides a key to his unique thought, presented in this story in easily recognizable novelistic form. It offers a sharp contrast to the formal "disarray" of Luminous Moss, whose theme, on the other hand, parallels and intensifies the serious considerations of the earlier story.
Against the background of defeated Japanese in Shanghai, This Outcast Generation deals with the conflict of thre Japanese men over the love of a Japanese woman. Compared to the gigantic military conflict that had just ended, the winning or losing of a woman seems almost petty, almost unworthy of comparison. Yet a parallel exists. War and love are intensely, peculiarly human affairs. The crucial point of the story is that human nature, submerged in the enormous mechanism of war, is re-examined in terms of individual human beings in their most private selves, in their most immediately felt experiences.
Without the impact of defeat, the narrator Sugi would never have been capable of murdering someone for love or for any other reason. In Sugi's attitude toward the woman's dying husband and the "powerful" man Karajima, we see what Sugi has learned by living in a place where, however unwillingly, he has been on the side of the strong. At the end of the war what has been brought home to him is not simply the grief or apathy of the defeated. What he realizes so starkly is the way war solved the conflict in such clear-cut, simple terms, so much so that it allowed no room for moral ambiguities. The victors in the war needed no justification or rationalization. Even the defeated felt willing to submit to the force of the "logic" of defeat. The narrator believes that justice of some supreme order has emerged. Perhaps such self-justification is part of the defense-mechanism of the subdued. Yet it is as if Sugi thinks himself freed from responsibility in life, as if some universal collapse, like apocalypse, has come true. But most of all his view borders on a naturalistic view of nature, applied in this situation to war and defeat. Sugi sincerely feels he may as well be killed. He has concluded that not many men do not deserve death. This sort of detachment or nihilism helps him to confront without compunction or guilt the dying husband, the man whose wife Sugi loves. The dying is part of the order of things and has nothing to do with what Sugi does or does not do with the man's wife. That the living are stronger than the dying is so obvious no justification whatever is needed.
The narrator is fully aware of the same reasoning in confronting Karajima, the man of power. While pursuing him, Sugi feels he is pursuing someone only to be killed. Sugi is prepared to say his own dying is also in the order of things. By a curious turn of events, however, the narrator becomes the victor. He ought to be overjoyed, yet finds himself totally despondent. Something he sees in the expression of the dying Karajima shocks him into another recognition. Sugi has always thought Karajima power incarnate, not a man, not a human being. At Karajima's death the narrator realizes for the first time that Karajima was also human, also mortal. What Sugi feels is not relief but something like compassion, an awareness of his solidarity with Karajima as human beings. The narrator's beliefs are jolted.
But already the very fact of Sugi's having gone out to "kill" in order to "protect" a woman has belied that belief. The dramatic moment of conversion occurs when Sugi becomes conscious that he is refusing to be a non-entity in the order of things, the logical force of which he had once accepted as if it were some divine decree. Once shaken in this belief, he finally becomes aware that his acquiescence to the order of things, that is, to his being a nonentity, is actually the reverse side of his unconscious desire to be the strong. He had suspected that
