Yōichi Komori

With the new critical approaches and perspectives drawn from narratology and semiotics of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin and so on, he had made a totally new and convincing interpretation on the genealogy of Japanese modern novels in 1890s.

Yōichi Komori is also very influential to the young Japanese literary historians for his theoretical and critical approaches in the research of modern novels.

The critic Masaki Nakamasa (b.1963) points out that “a left turn” for Japanese postmodernism took place in 1992 or 1993, and can be seen in some postmodernist exponents like Tetsuya Takahashi, Yōichi Komori, Hidetaka Ishida, Tetsu Ukai (b.1955) and so on, who draw on modern European, and especially French, thoughts to criticize Japanese conservative power’s whitewashing of wartime crimes, the conservatives’ tendency to suppress historicity.

[4] A9A was established in June 2005 in the names of 9 famous senior intellectuals including Kenzaburō Ōe (b.1935，大江健三郎), the Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature in 1994, the critic Shūichi Katō (1919–2008,加藤周一), Shunsuke Tsurumi (1922–2015, 鶴見俊輔), a well-known philosopher and an anti-war activist, and so on.

As the chief of the Secretariat of A9A, Komori has been desperately attempting to expand further A9A groups irrespective of ideological or political differences and organize a majority of the public in defense of the peace constitution.