午夜剧场

First, a short anecdote about Germany. The British author John le Carré, who has many fans in Japan, referred to the capital city of Bonn as a "capital village" at the beginning of his Cold War-era spy novel, A Small Town in Germany. While this was certainly an ironic exaggeration, the regional character of this country has its own historical background. Until the end of the 19th century, a unified state did not exist, and the German-speaking world was a patchwork of multiple sovereign states that lacked a cultural and political center like Tokyo or Paris. In that era, where "small towns" and "villages" were omnipresent, an interesting literary genre was born. This series of stories, known as "Village Tales" (Dorfgeschichten), ran counter to the urban novels typical of 19th-century literature. By shining a light on the lives of peasants living in narrow provincial areas, it blossomed into a massive trend that swept across Europe (for those interested, please see my forthcoming edited volume, Western Village Tales).

The German "Village Tale" was a genre that aimed to narrate the life of narrow, limited regions to a broad readership, cultivating a common national spirit toward future national unification. Consequently, one can see a tendency to criticize the old-fashioned ways of rural villages from an urban perspective, but such trends changed with the times. As waves of industrialization and urbanization eventually reached the country, urban residents living amidst civilized clamor began to yearn for the slow life of the countryside. Typical examples of such movements, driven by a backlash against the city, include the "Wandervogel" (Migratory Bird) and the "Homeland Art Movement" (Heimatkunst) that arose at the turn of the century. This flow eventually merged into the agrarian ideology of Nazi Germany. Behind the scenes of the modernization process, which concentrated people's living bases into a few urban areas, the reality of the countryside was sometimes idyllically idealized and sometimes used to justify exploitation from the center, suffering the fate of distortion.

Now, while reflecting on these matters, I feel somewhat conflicted when I hear that the number of people wishing to migrate to rural areas has increased recently, sparked by remote work becoming the default during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just when it seems the general modern flow of population movement from the countryside to the city might finally reverse, the essence remains unchanged. It is merely an attempt to physicalize and repeat the one-sided gaze of desire that the modern city has always directed toward the countryside.