@inproceedings{oai:kokubunken.repo.nii.ac.jp:00002161,
 author = {Gabriel, Philip and GABRIEL, Philip},
 book = {国際日本文学研究集会会議録, PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE},
 issue = {14},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {pdf, In many ways Shimao Toshio's novel Hi no utsuroi (1976) can be read as a continuation of his earlier "Shi no toge" series (the series of stories published between 1960-1976, published as the fulllength novel Shi no toge in 1977.) While Shi no toge depicts the struggle of a man coming to terms with his wife's mental breakdown, Hi no utsuroi portrays the same cast of characters dealing with the husband's chronic depression. Broadly speaking, the role of husband and wife have been reversed here, with the wife now taking the lead in attempting to find a way to help her husband escape his mental distress.
The strategy the wife employs involves forcing the husband to confront death for, as the reader comes to realize, it is the fear of death which is a major factor in the husband's depression. In several powerful scenes, the wife attempts to bring her husband face to face with the realities of death, and the narrative clearly reaches a climax with the husband's realization of the mutual relationship between the fear of death and his mental anquish, after which is depicted his partial physical and mental recovery.
While the novel can thus be read in terms that might emphasize Shimao's Catholic beliefs-i.e. as depicting a resurrection from death or the fear of death (which the book accents by ending at the Easter season)-there is a strong, unresolved conflict in the novel which resists such a simple reading. Both the novel's title (which may be translated as "The Passing of the Days"） and its diary format underscore the flow of time in the narrative. In addition the narrator (the husband) constantly pleads for a restoration of a "normal"sense of the flow of time. At the same time, though, the narrator resists this flow of time by constantly viewing the present as overlapping with the past in a move which tends to blur the distinction between the two. The narrator's dilemma is this: his fear of losing a normal sense of the passage of time (i.e. losing a normal mental state) is in conflict with his realization that the restoration of a normal time sense (that is the narrative flow itself) leads to only one conclusion, namely the death which he so much fears.
The article concludes by commenting on the close relationship between dreams and past experience in Hi no utsuroi and speculates that the division of Shimao's oeuvre into surrealistic "dream" works and shishosetsu based on his own experiences may be less valid than some imagine.},
 pages = {106--117},
 publisher = {国文学研究資料館},
 title = {研究発表　島尾敏雄『日の移ろい』試論},
 year = {1991},
 yomi = {ガブリエル, ヒリップ}
}