     The "I" who is the protagonist of "The Newsboy"is a young Taiwanese who went to Tokyo after his family was scattered following the appropriation of their farmland by a sugar production company as part of its land acquisition scheme.  After posting what little money he had for the security deposit, he was given a job as a newspaper delivery boy, but he was soon fired because his first twenty days' work only netted four yen twenty-five sen.  His father, who, up to the time when the family land was appropriated, served as the village headman,  was locked up in the local police station because he refused to impress his seal [i.e.,  refused to sell the land], and this was the reason for his death;  the land, then valued at 2000 yen, was appropriated with a compensation of only 600 yen, and the family had no recourse but to disperse.  His sick mother, who put all her dreams in her son's future, sold off the family home, realizing 150 yen, and after she sent almost all of it for school fees to her son, who would not give up the hope of going to school, hard as it was, she committed suicide by hanging herself.  The "I"of the story, bearing up under all this trouble, eventually met a character named Itô, to whom he was introduced by his friend Tanaka, and he joined them in a strike against the newspaper agency that had fired him.  After that, on board the ship that was taking him back to Taiwan, he expressed his conviction:  " Such a lot of hard work as in these last months! That was the way most faithful to my mother's dying words."

     This is only a summary of the story, which does not convey the rage of the author, but, in selecting it for publication, the judges unanimously evaluated it as a work overflowing with real human feeling that is sure to engage the reader.  Miyamoto Yuriko said  of this work, "It overflows with real human feeling,"and wrote, "We understand that it is necessary for the author to achieve a higher degree of artistic craft, but this is beyond his present powers.  Read and appreciated for the good things that are present in it as it is, it still has the power to captivate the reader's heart completely." And Takeda Rintarô tells us, "It has a childlike subjectivity throughout, but that results all the more in a pleasant honest face revealed, and there is none of the false sophistication of facile workmanship as seen in many of the other entries;  hence it leaves one with a very favorable impression, and the degree to which it achieves expressiveness is also great." Tokunaga Tadashi, Kamei Katsuichirô, Fujimori Nariyoshi, and Kubokawa Ineko all submitted criticism of a similar drift. Certainly there was depicted here the sad situation of the mass of common people in a colonial land. Not even its immaturity works as a hindrance to its expression of true feelings.  The only thing is, a bad influence lingers in the form of schematic presentation borrowed from proletarian literature, especially in the last part of the stony where the strike occurs.  Reading this, one feels that the plot of the strike is contrived.

1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|   Next