This essay discusses—and introduces to English-reading audiences—the short story “Dare?” (“Who's There?,” 1970) by Gotô Meisei (1932–99). Gotô's story exemplifies his danchi shôsetsu, works of fiction critics found striking for the fact that they were set in spaces heretofore unrepresented in Japanese literature, not least because they were still so new. This was the space of the danchi, enormous apartment complexes designed to house thousands of people and essentially comprising self-contained “new towns” built on the outskirts of Japan's rapidly growing cities during the high-speed growth period (1955–73). Central to my reading of “Dare?” as social critique is the notion, propounded by Henri Lefebvre, that each mode of production produces spaces through which its imperatives are enacted. For this reason, I regard the danchi space as metonymical of the productivist ethos (seisansei) integral to Japan's postwar economic resurgence. Prior to engaging Gotô's story, I demonstrate that the danchi was but one aspect of a thoroughgoing attempt to rationalize all aspects of urban existence; this was essentially Taylorism on a macroscopic scale. I move on to discuss Gotô's depiction of the sterile concrete world of the danchi as evincing how—largely through the unconscious movements of their daily lives—people lived increasingly reified existences, effectively becoming “concrete abstractions.” Gotô elicits an awareness of this condition through two competing chronotopes—spatio-temporal axes of narrative—that are central to “Dare?” One of these is “nature” in a reductive guise. The other is “danchi dailiness,” which comprises the intersection of danchi space with the newfound banality characteristic of nichijôsei, “dailiness,” a term that critics of the time increasingly used to reference everyday life. Qualitatively different from the everyday life (nichijô seikatsu) of earlier points in Japan's modernity, nichijôsei connoted banality as a newly all-subsuming condition. Through the juxtaposition of such chronotopes, Gotô deconstructs the discourse of “miraculous” economic growth.

Peter Tillack examines Kuroi Senji’s “Hashiru kazoku” (Running family; 1970) in the context of debates that arose in the 1970s about the so-called “Introspective Generation.” In contrast to the Marxist critic Odagiri Hideo, who charged that Kuroi wrote politically disengaged literature, Tillack interprets “Running Family” as a critique of the middle-class sensibilities that began to predominate during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth (1955–1973). Analyzing the nonrealistic techniques that Kuroi used to represent a suburb-dwelling salaryman’s relationship to his new car, Tillack shows that Kuroi’s language was influenced by the discourse of advertising as well as a perception that objects have assumed an agency at the expense of human subjects. Tillack thus finds evidence in “Running Family” for the reifying effects of a society increasingly tyrannized by economism. Rather than escaping ideology, Tillack concludes, Kuroi confronted it.

No abstract

Since 1994 the majority of Russian agricultural enterprises have been unprofitable, and have accumulated large liabilities. Their reorganization and liability restructuring is necessary. However, the differences in the financial standing of enterprises should be identified and taken into consideration. Here arises an important methodological task: to choose relevant studies, i.e. criteria for enterprise selection and classification by qualitatively different groups depending upon their financial and economic standing. This is a complex and still unsolved task. This article offers to evaluate the financial standing of an unprofitable enterprise by means of the ratio of the sufficiency coefficient to cover factor costs (K1). Factor costs are determined as a sum of labour costs, depreciation deductions and land costs. K1 enables one to evaluate the ability to preserve basic factors of production. K2 and K3 ratios, which make it possible to account for enterprise ability to survive by means of minimization of depreciation deductions and accumulation of accounts payable, are composed similarly. The ratios between enterprise liability levels and different asset components are also offered, and these make it possible to classify the enterprises by their liability level. Experimental confirmation of the developed scheme were performed with the figures of agricultural enterprises of the Leningrad Region (Oblast) for 1998. These enterprises were classified into five groups. Different approaches to their reorganization were offered.

No abstract