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 development of the protagonists of both works through a process of wandering, maturation, and arrival, and explores the social images and worldviews of the authors. 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 music, people have different favorite novels and different genres to which they are drawn. My inadequate writing skills cannot do justice to the thrill and emotion I felt when I first read Hisashi Nozawa’s The Last Song this year, 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 growth 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.” It also adds 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 characteristics of a coming-of-age novel as mentioned above in that it deals with the personal growth history of the young protagonists while reflecting on and criticizing the social problems of Japan at the time. 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 various experiences in struggle with reality, recognizing one’s mission in the world, and self-discovery. 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 this novel and how it is different from other coming-of-age novels by comparing it to Wilhelm Meister’s Classroom. I will not give a detailed description of the plot of the novel, as it is not widely known, but I will introduce an overview while analyzing the characteristics of the novel.

Comparative analysis with Wilhelm Meister’s The Age of Teaching

Comparative analysis of works in terms of personal growth

In general, the elements of a coming-of-age novel are divided into three stages: the wandering stage, the maturity stage for internalization, and the temporal paradise stage, but in this blog post, I will use the term “reaching” because the meaning of the word “paradise” is suitable for “Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period,” which is about reaching the 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 to discover that she is an unfaithful woman, so he 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 in his reflection on his past. “I was with them too long; 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, maturity, and arrival. Unlike Wilhelm Meister’s Class Period, the first stage of wandering 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 wanderings traveling between Tokyo and the provinces. Their wanderings and conflicts 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 religious world and the nun’s quest for absolute inner autonomy, and his education in the Order of the Tower, and the world of religion and education that is revealed through this is both a trigger for Wilhelm’s inner maturation and a turning point in the structure of the work.
“In The Last Song, this maturation is achieved through a series of events, including Rinko’s search for and persuasion of the missing Kazuya, 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 attainment of the ideal is symbolized through his marriage to Natalie, a classicist woman who balances practical activity with sublime introspection, and that this symbolizes his ultimate goal: a return to the practical 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. Their parting and new beginnings are symbolized through Kazuya’s final song, “The 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 illustrates the differences in the societies reflected in the two works and the artists’ worldviews, which will be analyzed 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 novel. However, unlike Wilhelm Meister’s The Classroom, 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 Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of a coming-of-age story as a novel that depicts the process of self-discovery and maturity through various experiences in the struggle with reality, the last stage may not necessarily be an idealized paradise, but a new turning point. What is important is that the process of maturing through various experiences in real life is revealed in the novel.
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 other characters, and the dreams of the three protagonists and other characters are intertwined, which is why the process of growth in The Last Song differs from the process of growth in Wilhelm Meister’s Classroom.

Comparative analysis of the social dimension

“Wilhelm Meister’s Lessons from the Classroom was published in 1829, and is a magnum opus that took Goethe 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, and in Wilhelm Meister’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 liberal arts and harmony.
In Last Song, published in 1994, Japan’s economic downturn, known as the Lost Decade, is reflected in the wandering of the three main characters and the people 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 these 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.

Conclusion

In this section, we have analyzed the structure and characteristics of a coming-of-age novel through a comparison with Wilhelm Meister’s The Classroom, 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 share the structural characteristics of a coming-of-age novel, including the three stages of wandering, maturity, and arrival, and 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 writers are trying to positively impact the world through their works and offer their own solutions makes their works valuable and meaningful to study. “I would like to add that by analyzing a relatively unfamiliar novel, The Last Song, and defining the genre based on it, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the work 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.