Student radicalism and revolutionary hypocrisy

Student radicalism and revolutionary hypocrisy emerge in the novel as a conflict between emancipatory language and the conduct of those who claim to speak for change. The university strike is broken by riot police, its leaders return to lectures, and Midori’s memories of a folk-music club expose the same gap on a smaller scale: Marxist vocabulary and revolutionary slogans coexist with intellectual posturing, exclusion, and unequal expectations of women. Together, these episodes make political disillusionment a matter of both public performance and ordinary practice.

The strike and its return to routine

During the summer holidays, the university calls in riot police, who break the barricades and arrest the students inside. The narrator treats the crackdown as part of a wider pattern of the period, but regards the apparent purpose of the occupation skeptically: the students have not sought to dismantle the university so much as to shift the balance of power within it. He is indifferent to that aim, and feels nothing when the strike is crushed.

In September he returns expecting to find damage, but the campus is intact: the library books remain, offices have not been destroyed, and the student affairs office has not been burned. The contrast between barricades and an undamaged institution sharpens his uncertainty about what the protest accomplished. When lectures resume under police occupation, the former strike leaders are among the first to attend, taking notes and answering roll call as if the strike were over, despite the absence of a declaration ending it. Their earlier denunciations of students who questioned the strike now sit uneasily beside their own return to class.

The narrator asks these former leaders why they are attending lectures rather than continuing the strike, but receives no straight answer. His suspicion that attendance marks and academic penalties may matter more to them than their proclaimed cause deepens his contempt for the movement’s leadership. He imagines that the same people who demanded the university’s transformation are helping reproduce the society they condemned. The reversal makes the political language look less like a binding commitment than a performance that can fade when circumstances change.

Midori’s experience of political language

Midori’s criticism comes from her own experience as a working-class student who joined a folk-music club because she wanted to sing. Instead, she recalls, new members were assigned Marx and lectured on the social and radical obligations of folk music. Unable to understand the reading, she admitted as much at a meeting; the club members treated her as unintelligent and socially unfit. Her account places the failure not in her refusal to learn but in a group that uses political ideas as a test of belonging while refusing to explain them.

When Midori asks plain questions about terms such as imperialist exploitation and the educational-industrial complex, the members become angry rather than answer. She argues that a movement claiming to represent workers cannot make itself inaccessible through jargon and then scorn working-class people for not understanding it. Her objection is practical as well as ideological: if the stated goal is to stop exploitation, political discussion should be intelligible to those whose labor is being exploited. The club’s response exposes a divide between its declared constituency and its everyday treatment of a working-class member.

Midori further suspects that the club’s grand language serves the members’ own status and appetites. She describes men who use impressive words to attract new women while behaving in ways that contradict their egalitarian claims; she expects that, after graduation, they will cut their hair and take jobs at Mitsubishi, IBM, or Fuji Bank. The point is not simply that the members may later enter corporate employment, but that their political identity appears compatible with the institutions they denounce. Their slogans do not prevent them from imagining conventional success for themselves.

Rice balls, gender, and material life

The club’s late-night political meeting gives Midori a concrete example of how inequality persists beneath revolutionary talk. Each girl is told to prepare twenty rice balls for midnight snacks. Midori brings rice balls filled with umeboshi and wrapped in nori, but afterward hears complaints that she has not supplied other food to accompany them. The other girls’ rice balls contain cod roe, salmon, or fried egg. What presents itself as a small dispute over food reveals that the political gathering has assigned women the work of feeding its participants, while the women are judged by the quality and variety of what they provide.

Midori’s anger at the complaints follows her anger at the club’s treatment of her questions: both episodes make the movement’s ideals collide with its internal habits. The members can speak of social transformation, yet the meeting reproduces a division of labor that they do not appear to question. The food itself also makes the criticism specific. Midori’s provision is dismissed as inadequate even though she has done the requested work, turning revolutionary solidarity into another setting where women’s labor is expected and evaluated.

Her account widens beyond the club to her family’s dealings with tax inspectors. Midori recalls that the inspectors come to her father’s business and scrutinize the accounts, while the family has to host them with an expensive meal. She insists that her father, despite being poor, never cheats on his taxes; nonetheless, the inspection proceeds as though low income itself invites suspicion. Her description grounds her skepticism in the unequal pressures of working life rather than in an abstract rejection of political change. Asked whether a revolution would alter the taxman’s behavior, she doubts it.

From disillusionment to a different commitment

Midori leaves the folk-music club in June, furious with members who, in her view, are afraid to reveal what they do not know and substitute shared books and slogans for genuine understanding. Her dismissal of their idea of revolution is tied to the preceding examples: the contempt directed at her questions, the unequal work expected of women, the mismatch between anti-capitalist language and anticipated corporate careers, and the tax inspector’s power over an ordinary family. She does not claim that exploitation is acceptable; she questions whether the club’s performance of revolutionary belief can change the conditions it names.

The novel also connects her account to the narrator’s response to the broader student movement. He judges the slogans of two helmeted students who interrupt a lecture on Greek tragedy to demand political debate as unimaginative, despite saying he has no problem with their political position. Their leaflets call for a new all-campus strike and the destruction of the educational-industrial complex, but he finds the writing and speech uninspiring. Midori’s remembered club and the classroom interruption thus meet in a recurring criticism: political formulations lose force when they become rote language detached from thought and practice.

The narrator’s own response to the post-strike university is not active political organization. For a time, he attends lectures but refuses to answer when his name is called, a gesture he knows is pointless and which further isolates him from the other students. By the second week of September he has concluded that university education is meaningless, yet continues attending because he has no immediate social ambition that requires him to leave. He recasts study as training in how to deal with boredom. This withdrawal is distinct from Midori’s critique, but both expose a failure of political belonging: the proclaimed collective purpose does not produce a convincing community for either of them.

Midori’s final turn is deliberately personal. After rejecting the club’s version of revolution and doubting that revolution would change the taxman’s conduct, she says that love is what she will believe in. The statement does not resolve the social problems she has described or establish that love can reform them. Instead, it marks a change in the scale of her commitment: she turns away from a political language she has experienced as exclusionary and hypocritical toward a bond she regards as more credible. In the novel’s account of student radicalism, that choice is less a general political theory than the consequence of having watched revolutionary ideals fail in the places where they should have mattered most.