Chapter 49 A female teacher in a fishing village——Introduction to the Japanese novel "Twenty-Four Eyeballs"

"Twenty-Four Eyeballs" is an anti-war novel written by Japanese progressive female writer Ei Tsuboi.Through the twenty-year experience of a very ordinary and young female teacher in a fishing village, Oishi Hisako, she reflects how much disaster the Japanese imperialists' aggressive policy has brought to the Japanese people.The advantage of this novel is that the author captures the daily life that everyone is familiar with, and describes in a very touching and delicate manner the life of twelve male and female students in the first grade of elementary school in a small fishing village during the war launched by the Japanese ruling class. Miserable.It made us shockingly see the vast number of people who were displaced and suffering in the turbid current of the war of aggression on the Japanese soil; it made us feel aroused by the Japanese people who were still living a life of no independence, freedom, and democracy after the war. Unlimited compassion and care.

When I was young, I read several Japanese novels advocating war of aggression, which praised "Bushido" and "Spirit of Yamato", in which all Japanese soldiers were "loyal to the emperor and patriotic" and "respect death as home".The Chinese youth who are being bullied and oppressed by the Japanese militarists, filled with worry and anger, and deceived by these novels, can easily think that all Japanese soldiers are wholeheartedly serving as cannon fodder for their ruling class, willingly Tool of imperial aggression.We don't know their psychological reality, so whenever we see Japanese soldiers with red caps, we always have a very strong disgust.When I went to Japan after the war, I got in touch with ordinary Japanese people. I saw their miserable lives and their simple and kind nature. deception.I hate those war-advocating literature that oppresses and deceives the people and serves the ruling class!However, "Twenty-Four Eyeballs" is a novel that calls out the inner pain of the Japanese people and exposes the crimes of the Japanese ruling class.It describes the deception and pain suffered by the Japanese people before and after the war, and how helpless Japanese youths went to the battlefield. The Japanese teenagers "in order to eat red bean cakes as much as possible, so they went to become aviation soldiers", singing on their lips:

"...Wearing the seven-button military uniform, looking at death like falling cherry blossoms..." and other facts, tell us nakedly: "Looking at death like falling cherry blossoms like home" was originally sung under such circumstances!How many tears of mothers and teachers are there! Oishi Hisako, who loves life and loves children, when she was young, wore a remade suit and rode a flying bicycle, and walked 32 miles back and forth every day to go to a small village in a small cape to attend classes.She loves the twelve male and female students in her first grade class; she respectfully calls them "Jun", she affectionately calls them nicknames, she is familiar with their family situation, the innocent and simple fishing village children, especially He loves her meticulously.When she was resting with her injured foot, these twelve children, hiding from their families, endured hunger and fatigue, and went to visit her at "Yikesong", a place sixteen miles away that they had never been before.They took a photo together.The simultaneous departure of these children aroused the concern of the parents, but when they came back safely, the parents not only did not blame them, but laughed, "The respect and love for Teacher Dashi has increased even more."

However, the good times were short-lived. At this time, the aggressive claws of the Japanese ruling class had already stretched out from the dense clouds. "The mountain rain is about to come and the wind is all over the building", when Teacher Dashi was in "our school" and became the grade teacher of her students in the fifth grade, the situation went from bad to worse!The ruling class is stepping up conscription and persecuting progressives, and the people's lives have become more miserable.Among the girls, Matsue was forced to work as a waitress in a restaurant by "wearing a Japanese-style hair bun and wearing a kimono." Another girl, Qinjiang, became a nanny. in the hut where the stuff was piled up", and then died.Another girl "Fujiko was sold to others by her parents, just like furniture and clothes..." The boys are going to be drafted into the army.

Oishi Hisako decided to resign in pain. She told her mother: "It's better than this to open a dim sum shop. I'm loyal to the emperor and patriotic every day. I'm really tired." At the same time, the dean warned her: "Everyone is saying Teacher Dashi is the Communist Party, if you are not careful..." Teacher Dashi left, no one "specially persuaded her to stay", "it may be because the students like her too much"! During her eight years as a sailor's wife, "the Sino-Japanese War broke out, Japan, Germany and Italy concluded an anti-communist agreement, and the campaign implemented in the name of national spirit mobilization made the Japanese people feel that even when they were talking in their sleep, they were not Dare to talk about state affairs." But when she saw her five male students going to participate in the conscription inspection, she thought: "If it is still war waiting for this lovely figure in front, then why do people have children? and caressing their children? Why don't people feel sorry for the lives that have been taken away by gunfire? Why don't they stop this situation?" Finally, when she said goodbye to these young people who were secretly sad, she whispered: "But Don't die with honor, and come back alive." But in the end, only two of these five people came back, and one of them was blind!

Eighteen years later, Mr. Dashi, who "lived an inhuman life, must live on," returned to Jiaojiao Village to teach.The painful life during the thirteen years of resignation: the old and sick mother died of exhaustion, the husband who was ill and served on the ship was sacrificed, the daughter who died of illness and ate green persimmons due to hunger, and the daughter who suffered from acute enteritis-Bajin.When the mother died, no monks could be invited to recite scriptures; when the husband died, he only got a wooden plaque saying "death in battle"; ...All of this makes Mr. Dashi "look old, even with white hair... If you bend your waist again, you will be an old lady."

"She is so weak and tired, she can go to teach again this time." It is all thanks to the secret help of one of her female students, Sanae. Teacher Oishi "is so embarrassed that she doesn't even have a dress to wear to class." ", and her eldest son Daji reluctantly sent her to Cape Village every day to be a "teaching assistant" by rowing a boat. When she saw the desolate fishing village again, the children in tattered clothes, and the old school buildings, her tears couldn't stop.She said to one of her female students, Misako: "Before I came here, I felt that I was still as energetic as before, but when I came here, it always made me cry, cry, and think about things that make people cry." ..." From a lively and happy female teacher who rode a bicycle in a suit and passed by like the wind, and was called a "modern girl", eighteen years later, she was decrepit and aging, and her tears kept flowing, and she became a "crying ghost teacher" His nickname, this kind of change, I am afraid that Hisako Oishi is not the only one in Japan!

At the end of the novel, the author arranges two tragic and moving scenes: Teacher Dashi and her female student Misako go to the grave of another female student Qinjiang. In the order of the war, there are many steles standing in front of it, some of which have decayed, and some have fallen down.Among them, Renta, Zhuyi, and Zheng are waiting for a few students, which are newly established.The chaotic social situation is also reflected here. In front of the tombs of these innocent young lives that were taken away, people even forgot the flowers...the ones with the wooden signs are the new military tombs...now people are doing things even in their lives. A stone tablet sent here to talk about the power of masturbation is gone.This is just a small corner of Japan's land, a small cape village, but one has seen the end of many "innocent young lives" who have served as cannon fodder for the Japanese ruling class for decades. In the end, the parents of these new "innocent young lives" were squeezed to such an extent that they didn't even have the strength to erect a stele on their son's tomb.When we see this, can we offer our utmost sympathy to the Japanese people without grief and indignation?

In the end, after life and death passed, five girls and two boys held a welcome party for Teacher Dashi at the Shuiyue Tower by the sea.Although the students still forced to laugh, they said, "It's all like when I was a first-year student."But Teacher Dashi always had tears in his eyes amidst a burst of laughter.When these students passed on the photos they took in "Yikesong" back then, they passed to the blind Isoyoshi, and he said with a smile: "The eyeballs are gone...but I can see this kind of photos... ..." He pointed his index finger at the classmates standing side by side in the photo, but he missed it, and Teacher Dashi said in a crisp voice, "Yes, yes! That's right, it's not bad at all." And her face But there were lines of tears flowing.Everyone was silent.At this time, the two girls who were drunk were singing and singing, and suddenly began to cry, and the story ended here.

This is a flat, intimate, and penetrating novel that resonates with the Japanese people, especially mothers and teachers. It was a hit and made into a movie for good reason.Today, the "Mothers and Teachers' Association", which is surging all over Japan, has made many contributions to opposing war and defending peace, such as sponsoring the ban on atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs, opposing the expansion of US military bases, etc. I think this book is promoting this movement , played its role.February 13, 1957 Preface to "Anthology of Children's Literature" in 1956 This is our second anthology of children's literature.The classification is still in accordance with the previous ones. The arrangement of works in each genre is based on the order of publication or publication.

In this year's novel creation, there are relatively more works reflecting historical struggles.Obviously, when the authors were choosing the topic, in the earth-shattering revolutionary struggles they participated in in the past, some children who fought with adults contributed the greatest strength in their small bodies to liberate and defend the motherland , The strong and brave spirit shown by them left the author with a very deep, vivid and vivid impression.All the background of the story is also familiar and friendly to the author.Therefore, he was able to write it down quickly and smoothly in the excitement of reminiscing.This kind of description of "persons familiar to oneself" approach, I think it is correct. Eight articles including Yang Shuo's "Snow Flakes Fluttering" and Wang Luyao's "Little Star" were selected in this episode.There are also longer ones, such as Sun Xiaoping's "Our Family" and Guo Xu's "Connection", which were not edited due to space constraints. There are fewer works that reflect the life of the school, students, and Young Pioneers than last year, but there are some novel ones, such as "New Classmates from the Provincial City" by Chen Yanrong.This describes a city child who went to a rural school. She and her classmates, the city and country children who grew up in different living environments, spy on each other with curious eyes. From the "pranks" of rural classmates, At the beginning, it developed into mutual love between urban and rural children, mutual complementation of life knowledge, and mutual help in the understanding and application of new things.This kind of topic selection from a special aspect of school life is better than the conceptualization and formulaicization of "picking things up", "from quarreling to unity", "from making trouble to discipline", and children just guess at the beginning. The ending is much stronger. There are not many works reflecting rural life and agricultural production.Here I chose Wang Wenshi's "Youth Assaulter" and Wang Fuhui's "Children in the Society", which are more lively and gratifying.Few of them reflect industrial construction, and it still needs the author's efforts to express the socialist construction of factories, mines, etc. through children's lives.At the same time, there are more works that describe a wide range of social life, which is a welcome phenomenon!Here are nine articles, including Gao Xiangzhen's "How a Sunflower Turned into a Big Mushroom" and Wang Ruowang's "Ah Fu's Treasure Hunt".Qin Mu's "Return to China" reflects the life of overseas Chinese children overseas, and their yearning and love for the motherland.Liang Xuezheng's "A May Night in Taiwan" describes the tragic life of the little compatriots in Taiwan under the rule of the Chiang clique.These two articles will arouse the sympathy and care for overseas Chinese and Taiwanese children from children who live a happy life in the bright environment of the motherland.Ji Kang's "Monpa in Fantasy" describes a young man of the Yao nationality. After fantasizing about being a hunter, the People's Liberation Army, and a painter, he chooses agriculture and wants to "change the backward production methods of our hometown." This article is still written by a Han writer.Many of our fraternal ethnic groups have the same but darker past as the Han compatriots, and have the same bright and happy present and future as the Han compatriots.They have many beautiful legends and stories full of people's life struggles.We hope that there will be more brothers and national writers who can write children's literature as colorful as their songs and dances for children across the country. Generally speaking, there are many works reflecting historical struggles in the novel part, and few works reflecting reality. Although there are reasons for this, it cannot but be said to be a shortcoming.We hope that the writers can go deeper and make themselves as familiar with the background of the characters in the current reality as the background of the characters in the historical struggle, and then it will be good to write. Although the number of essays this year is small, the content is more fresh and lively!Hanzi's is concise and concise, just like the five children she described are innocent and lovely.Ren Dalin's "Friends in Childhood" is written eloquently. It not only vividly describes a few cute little animals, but also sets off the poor life of the working people before liberation, and the author's understanding of the oppressors from them in his childhood. resist.Ye Shengtao's, we can only select a small part of what he has published.Huang Qiuyun's "The Story of Uncle Gao Shiqi" is very well written.Comrade Gao Shiqi is a children's literature writer familiar to children, and they are very interested in his childhood and his life's struggles.Such biographies will undoubtedly be of great help to the formation of children's noble personality.Authors are welcome to write more biographies of historical and recent figures that children love and love.Jiang Shanye's "Bestrov and His Father", from the background of family vacations, describes the friendship between the Chinese and Soviet people as a family, and the image of an old man who is always lively and works non-stop, which is very unique and vivid of. In the garden of poetry the yield is highest.We selected poems by eleven authors.Among them are Yuan Ying's "In America, a Child Was Killed", which expresses the spirit of internationalism, sympathy and friendship, and Ke Yan's "Story of a Little Soldier", which is the most popular among readers.Baisteam's "Mom!Let go! "It expresses children's independent requirements, and it is a relatively unique one. "Camp Outpost" is a young man's own work. The author Liu Junchang was still a middle school student when he wrote this poem. The number of scripts is still small, and the quality is also problematic, the most prominent being the narrowness of the subject matter.Except for fairy tales, most of them are written about Young Pioneers' activities. It seems that children's scripts must be played by children for children!In addition, the "drama" of the script is very poor, and the artificial conflicts are more obvious, which makes people feel forced and unnatural.Children's playwrights have to work extra hard to study the characteristics of this literary genre and special artistic skills, because the effect on the stage is also a very important factor.Here are "Smart Wife" by Liang Yan and Xiong Saisheng, "Little Rooster" by Yao Yifei and Chen Youhan, "Mom Is By Your Side" by Li Qin, and "Golden Apple" by Bai Ye. Among the authors of science and literature, Chi Shuchang was added this year.He combines scientific knowledge with great humor in fantasy stories, which is very fascinating.We chose an article "The Elephant with its Trunk Cut off" co-written by him and Yu Zhi.Scientific and artistic works are very popular with children and should be advocated. We hope that this team will continue to expand. The theme of fairy tales is wider than last year.Deng Shitan's "Living Miners and Dead Bosses" is a legend circulated in the Fuxin mining area.We believe that the authors who have gone deep into every corner of the motherland with the working team of building a socialist society will unearth many fairy tale materials about the life struggles of the people of all nationalities in our country to enrich the content of this field.The fairy tales selected here include Ge Cuilin's "Sydney Tree" and Wu Mengqi's "Little Goose Returning to the Squad".There are six fairy tale poems, including "Shenxian Mountain" by Li Li and "Song of the Magic Brush" by Zhang Yongmei. As for good thrillers, fables, and travel books, which children are still desperately in need of, there is no choice.There are still too few writers working hard on these genres, which is our biggest shortcoming at present! Looking at the catalog of this year's anthology again from the beginning, we feel that this year's children's literature works have made some progress compared with last year in terms of the breadth of subject matter and the depth of description.But from the perspective of the broad field of children's literature—it includes almost all literary genres except its own "fairy tales", and authors can use them freely—we still cannot understand the quality and quantity of children's literature at present. satisfying. However, looking at the authors' names under the works from the beginning, we are pleased to find that nearly half of these names are not familiar characters in the children's literature world, and a large part of them are newly emerging amateur children's literature authors. The future of literature is full of prosperity, very optimistic! At the same time, this situation also raises the question to us that helping and paying attention to young amateur authors is more important than others in the field of children's literature. Last October, the Writing Committee sent out letters asking readers and authors to raise questions they encountered in reading or writing children's literature.Among the dozens of replies we received, most of them mentioned that the current children's literature works are narrow in subject matter, conceptualized, formulaic, preaching is used instead of image infection, and characters have no personality and so on.The second is the lack of writing skills, the language is too obscure, not concise, not beautiful, and so on. We think these problems can be viewed from two aspects.There are two kinds of authors of children's literature. One is old writers with creative experience and literary accomplishment, or authors who can often write something. Starting from going deep into life, you can get something for nothing.They seized an educational problem, drew a frame in advance, and then went to places with many children, such as spending a few team days with the Young Pioneers, going to elementary schools or kindergartens to "live" for a few days, and observing the children's vigilance and reserve After listening to some outstanding facts that I hadn't seen before, I pieced together a story with "contradictions" and "transformations", and then derived some lessons.This kind of work will inevitably be boring and blunt, "the characters have no character", "infection is replaced by preaching"! Authors who are used to writing about adults, when writing guest books for children, often unconsciously forget that what we are dealing with is not an adult who is staring down, but with wide open eyes and nervous eyes. Smile, lest a word slip from your lips, child.We are not familiar with children's lives, do not understand children's psychology, do not take care of children's characteristics, and will not learn from Mr. Lu Xun: try to write "more difficult than doing ancient Chinese", "don't use difficult words", and use "easy to understand words" As a result, what the characters say in the works are all those dull and obscure words of "little adults" or "big adults"! The other kind of children's literature authors, who account for the absolute majority in number, are young people who live among children but have relatively poor literary literacy.These authors are familiar with children's lives, so they are of course "close to the water" in the selection of materials, but their literary quality is poor. They see the phenomenon that can be written, but they can't grasp the outstanding artistic characteristics. Descriptive skills.They are very distressed by this, and they often ask the old writers for instructions on the secret of successful writing. We believe that the success of any kind of labor is not something you get for nothing!There must be a very difficult process of learning and exercising.We just learn, learn, and learn.Learn from old writers, learn from literary masters in the world, read widely and carefully!Keep writing, write well; don't rush for success, don't rush to publish, when we write "handy", we can be regarded as embarking on the road of creation. In addition, we believe that an author of children's literature must have a "childlike innocence" in addition to having a high level of thought and art just like the author of general literature. The so-called "childlike innocence" refers to the psychological characteristics of children. "Children's innocence" is not just innocent and lively, it also includes: A strong sense of justice - so children cannot tolerate and forgive people for lying and falsehood; deep sympathy - so children will utter injustice and shed sad tears when they see people and things that are oppressed and damaged; The envy and admiration of people who are tall, old, and experienced - so they worship famous heroes and imitate the words and deeds of their parents, elders, brothers and sisters. They love life; they like group activities; they like all beautiful, novel, and moving things, and they also like to see brilliant colors and listen to harmonious sounds.They are full of curiosity about new things, have the courage to try, and are not afraid of danger... In view of these psychological characteristics, we must learn to use the language they are familiar with, acceptable and appreciative, to write prose and novels that can inspire their sense of justice and sympathy; Biographies of great people to admire and emulate; as well as beautiful and moving fairy tales, catchy poems, and travel notes, thrilling stories, and scientific literary and artistic works that increase their knowledge and liven their hearts.The effect we seek is: Our young readers are interested in our works and feel fresh, until they finish reading it with admiration, and after closing the book, the background in the book is still a picture in his mind. The vivid pictures and the characters in the book are living people standing up in his mind.Young readers think about it constantly when they are alone, and talk about it enthusiastically when they are together. The whole story makes them grateful and excited. A more honest, braver, livelier, more robust newcomer to a socialist society. The "National Juvenile and Children's Literature Awards Conference" in December 1953 opened up a large area for the creation of children's literature in New China; The editorial of "Reading Materials" seems to have deeply cultivated this land; in June 1956, the call of the Party Central Committee to "let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend" seemed to have soaked this land.Looking around, we saw fresh green everywhere!Judging from the number of 40,000 applicants for the joint call for essays last year by China Youth Daily and Juvenile Literature, it can be seen that there are quite a few people who have tried hard to create children's literature, although the quality is still poor.We hope that young writers will continue to work hard to get acquainted with our subjects—children and teenagers in New China; to be familiar with our real life—the vigorous and lively situation of our motherland in the process of building a socialist society today.Study hard, study deeply, and write a lot.The more experience you accumulate, the more progress you will make.At the same time, as long as there are more writers, we can seek quality from quantity, and next year's anthology will definitely be richer than this year's. February 15, 1957.