ABSTRACT
As O - e continued to write, his characters developed an ever-increasing
awareness of psychological confinement and an ever-increasing pressure to break out. In ‘Seventeen’, and its sequel, ‘Seiji sho-nen shisu’ (‘A Political Youth Dies’, 1961), the self-image of the youthful protagonist undergoes a spectacular transformation, with violence, sadism, dominant sexuality and right-wing political activism replacing the passivity and alienation so characteristic of previous anti-heroes.1 A decade later, O
- e refined these themes in
a novella, ‘The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.2 The three stories form a continuum. Ingrained in each of them, and central to their understanding, are the existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and the psychoanalytical theories of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957).3
