This article compares Nozawa Hisashi’s The Last Song and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Schooldays to analyze their characteristics and differences as coming-of-age novels. It examines the protagonists of both works as they grow through a process of wandering, maturation, and arrival, and explores the social images and authors’ worldviews that each work reflects. In particular, it focuses on the process of personal growth and social maturation, as well as the periods and philosophical differences between the two authors.
Preface
Just as people have different favorite types of music, people have different favorite novels and genres to which they are drawn. The thrill and emotion I felt when I read Hisashi Nozawa’s The Last Song for the first time this year cannot be conveyed in my inadequate writing skills, but what made this book particularly moving to me compared to other novels is that it is not a conventional love story, but rather a story of young people’s dreams, their wanderings in pursuit of them, and their coming of age, which resonated with my own dreams. This book is a relatively unknown contemporary Japanese novel, and there is no research on it, and very few people in Korea know about it. Therefore, it would be meaningful to compare and analyze the genre of this book, define it, and study what similarities and differences there are. This book depicts the growth of young people and can be defined as a coming-of-age novel for several reasons. But first, let’s take a look at what a coming-of-age novel is.
The definition of a coming-of-age novel is as follows “A coming-of-age novel is a novel that deals with the inner development of a young person. The author’s personal and universal liberal arts ideals are expressed in the unfolding of the ideals and frustrations of youth, when the passion for self-fulfillment is stronger than at any other time and most likely to be realized.” They also add the following about coming-of-age novels “There are two elements of this type of coming-of-age story that reflect the author’s worldview. One is the personal growth story of the protagonist, and the other is the author’s criticism and insight into the essential problems of the times that affect the protagonist’s education.”
The Last Song has the above-mentioned characteristics of a coming-of-age novel in that it deals with the personal growth story of the young protagonists while reflecting on and criticizing the social issues of the time in Japan. Wilhelm Dilthey, a philosopher who has systematically defined the history and concept of the coming-of-age novel, says that Goethe’s works show human maturation through various stages, characters, and life stages, and that he would like to name a class of novels such as Wilhelm Meister’s Schooldays as coming-of-age novels, which he defines as novels that depict the process of maturing through self-discovery and recognizing one’s mission in the world through various experiences in struggle with reality. As Diltai notes, Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period is the quintessential coming-of-age novel, so it is an appropriate example to analyze the characteristics of The Last Song as a coming-of-age novel through comparison.
Therefore, in this blog post, I will analyze the characteristics of Last Song as a coming-of-age novel and how it differs from other coming-of-age novels by comparing it to Wilhelm Meister’s Classroom. I will not give a detailed description of the novel’s plot, as I will introduce an overview while analyzing the characteristics of the novel.
Comparative analysis with ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Schooldays’
Comparative analysis of the works in terms of personal growth
We usually divide the elements of a coming-of-age novel into three stages: the wandering stage, the maturation stage for internalization, and the temporal paradise stage, but in this blog post, we will use the term “reaching” because the meaning of the word “paradise” is appropriate for “Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period,” which is about reaching an ideal, but not for “Last Song,” which is about finding one’s own path through maturity.
In Wilhelm Meister’s Schooldays, the main character, Wilhelm, grows through three stages: wandering, maturity, and arrival. Fascinated by theater, Wilhelm falls in love with an actress named Marianne, but is shocked when he realizes she’s an unfaithful woman and sets out on a journey. He meets a theater troupe, which rekindles his passion for theater and inspires him to pursue it as a career. He then goes through a period of constant wandering and wandering, recognizing the limitations of theater. Wilhelm’s wanderlust is best summarized by his reflection on his past. “I was with them too long, and when I look back on the time I spent with them, it’s like looking into an infinite void; there is nothing that remains with me now from those days.”
The protagonists of The Last Song also grow through three stages: wandering, maturation, and arrival. The first stage of wandering, unlike in Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period, takes place through music instead of theater. The three main characters – Shukichi, a popular band leader at a local house; Rinko, a local station employee; and Kazuya, who works as a national railroad employee with his father – are united by music and spend their wanderlust traveling back and forth between Tokyo and the provinces. Their wanderlust and conflict culminate when Kazuya goes missing before a performance.
In Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period, the process of maturation is not only experienced through theater, but also through the process of leaving the theater world and entering the Order of the Tower. Wilhelm’s inner maturation is achieved through his exposure to the world of religion and education, as well as the nun’s quest for absolute inner autonomy, and his education in the Order of the Tower, which serves as a trigger for Wilhelm’s inner maturation and a turning point in the structure of the play.
In The Last Song, this maturation is achieved through Rinko’s search for and persuasion of Kazuya, who has gone missing, and Kazuya’s return to the stage. With a big performance in front of thirteen thousand people, the trio’s dissonance culminates in Kazuya’s disappearance before the show. Kazuya is afraid of change, and Rinko urges him to change and choose his own path: “It shouldn’t be a choice between the three of us. With your legs, with my legs…it’s a path you choose alone.” With that, Kazuya returns to the concert hall, and the three say goodbye. This process depicts the maturation of the main characters as they stop wandering and wandering.
In “Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period,” the process of arrival is symbolized through marriage. Lee, Jin, and Moon suggest that Wilhelm’s process of reaching the ideal is accomplished through his marriage to Natalie, a classicist woman who balances practical activity with sublime introspection, symbolizing his ultimate goal: a return to the realistic civic world and the completion of his education. Wilhelm’s youthful wanderlust and vagrancy are overcome through inner maturation through theater and education, and in the end, Wilhelm reaches ultimate completion through his marriage to Natalie.
In The Last Song, the process of arrival is not through marriage, but through music. The three protagonists go through a process of inner maturation, realizing that they must part ways in order to move on, and they say goodbye and start their lives anew. The three’s farewell and new beginnings are symbolized through Kazuya’s final song, “Last Song. “I’m alone now. I first realized today that being alone is this lonely, this scary, this cold. I sing, this is my last song for him.” Kazuya’s final song symbolizes the end of the road the three of them have traveled together, but also the beginning of their own journeys. Rinko says as she listens to Kazuya sing. “From now on, we will go our separate ways. Kazuya’s last song is still going on. I got up from my seat, turned my back to the stage, and started walking down the aisle. From now on, my journey begins.” While the three protagonists don’t reach a stable world, such as marriage, they do reach a turning point in their lives: the end of their journey together and the beginning of a new life. The difference in the ideal worlds reached in the two works reflects the differences in the societies and worldviews of the artists, which we will analyze in more detail later.
In terms of personal growth, it would not be a stretch to say that the two works have three common processes of wandering, maturity, and arrival, and that they have the structure of a coming-of-age story. However, unlike Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period, The Last Song does not reach the ideal of paradise, but rather comes to the conclusion that each person begins a new path. One could argue that ‘The Last Song’ is not a coming-of-age story when it is said that a coming-of-age story consists of three stages: wandering, maturity, and paradise, but if we consider the concept of a coming-of-age story as a novel that depicts the process of self-discovery and maturity through various experiences in Wilhelm Diltai’s struggle with reality, the last stage may not necessarily be an idealized paradise, but a new turning point. What’s important is that the novel depicts the process of maturing through various experiences in real life.
The Last Song also differs from Wilhelm Meister’s Classroom in that it depicts the maturation process of the three protagonists together. This is because the use of music in The Last Song was necessary to show the interaction between the three protagonists and the characters around them, and this is why the process of growth through the interlocking dreams of the three protagonists and the characters around them differs from the process of growth in Wilhelm Meister’s Classroom.
Comparative analysis of the works on a social level
‘Wilhelm Meister’s Lesson in Love’ is Goethe’s magnum opus published in 1829, and took more than 50 years to complete. The context of the time was the French Civil Revolution (1789) and the formation of a patriarchal manorial state in Germany, which called for the formation of a citizen class. The French Revolution, the chaotic social changes in Korea, and the humanistic liberal arts ideas that advocated the development of the naturalness inherent in man gave rise in Germany to a coming-of-age story that emphasized the process of inner maturation. In his work, Goethe presents Wilhelm’s maturation through his liberal arts education at the Tower and his marriage to the ideal woman, Natalie. According to Nietzsche, Wilhelm’s involvement in the Tower symbolizes the reformative process of society’s endless internal struggle against the entrenched structure of capitalism, suggesting that the contradictions of a rapidly changing society can be resolved through the perfection of inner cultivation. This is because the aforementioned German humanistic liberal arts ideas influenced Goethe: In Goethe’s The Lesson of Wilhelm Meister, the rapidly changing social conditions of the Civil and Industrial Revolutions are represented in the story of Wilhelm’s wandering, which Goethe suggests can be overcome through the liberal arts and harmony.
In The Last Song, published in 1994, the social landscape of Japan’s economic downturn, dubbed the Lost Decade, is reflected in the wandering of the three protagonists and the characters around them. The band’s formation, challenges, and failures are representative of young Japanese people wandering through the economic downturn. Shukichi’s band, which was united through the dream of music, fails and wanders through a series of failures, depicting the dreams and wanderings of young Japanese people in this era. Through these figures, the author criticizes the lethargy of Japanese youth at the time, and encourages readers through the determination and self-discovery of the three young men at the end of the novel. However, Hisashi does not propose reform through cultivation and harmony like Goethe; through the three protagonists finding their way through separation at the end of the novel, the author urges young people to overcome their frustrations and move on with their lives. This stems from Hisashi’s values of wanting external problems to be solved by standing up and confronting them directly through self-discovery rather than through inner discipline and the perfection of the liberal arts. However, the difference between the two works is not only due to the author’s worldview, but also to the differences in society at the time, with Germany, which was undergoing a rapid structural revolution with humanistic ideas taking hold, and Japan, where a long economic stagnation was the main problem, rather than structural reform across the country.
Closing thoughts
In this section, we have analyzed the structure and characteristics of the coming-of-age novel “The Last Song” through a comparison with “Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period” and examined the differences between the two works due to the differences in the social conditions of the time and the author’s worldview. Both works have the structural characteristics of a coming-of-age novel, including the three stages of wandering, maturity, and arrival, and have in common that they reveal the author’s worldview through the inner growth of the protagonists.
However, at the level of personal growth, the final stage reached in both works is different as an idealized paradise and a new turning point, and the dreams and growth that are fulfilled in both works are differentiated between Wilhelm’s personal growth and the growth of Shukichi, Rinko, and Kazuya. On the social level, we could see many differences between the two works, and depending on the time period in which they were written and the worldview of the authors, the society reflected in the works and the solutions presented by the authors were different.
Whether it’s the pursuit of cultivation and harmony or self-discovery through overcoming frustration, there is no single answer, but the fact that both artists try to positively impact the world through their works and offer their own solutions makes them valuable and meaningful to study. I would like to add that by analyzing a relatively unfamiliar novel called ‘The Last Song’ and defining its genre based on it, I tried to understand the work more deeply and hear the author’s voice based on the similarities and differences that can be identified by comparing a modern novel that can be found around us with the classic ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Classical Period’.
