Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Inciting Difference [1 ed.] 9781040029725, 9781032564869, 9781032564876, 9781003435761

Citation preview

Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature

This book examines contemporary debates on such concepts as national literature, world literature, and the relationship each of these to translation, from the perspective of modern Japanese fiction. By reading between the gaps and revealing tensions and blind spots in the image that Japanese literature presents to the world, the author brings together a series of essays and works of fiction that are normally kept separate in distinct subgenres, such as Okinawan literature, zainichi literature written by ethnic Koreans, and other “trans-­ border” works. The act of translation is reimagined in figurative, expanded, and even disruptive ways with a focus on marginal spaces and trans-­border movements. The result decentres the common image of Japanese literature while creating connections to wider questions of multilingualism, decolonisation, historical revisionism, and trauma that are so central to contemporary literary studies. This book will be of interest to all those who study modern Japan and Japanese literature, as well as those working in the wider field of translation studies, as it subjects the concept of world literature to searching analysis. Victoria Young is the Kawashima Associate Professor in Japanese Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Selwyn College

Routledge Contemporary Japan Series The Origin of Japan’s Protectionist Agricultural Policy Agricultural Administration in Modern Japan Hironori Sasada The Crisis in Pro Baseball and Japan’s Lost Decade The Curious Resilience of Heisei Japan Paul E. Dunscomb Civil Defense in Japan Issues and Challenges Edited by Yasuhiro Takeda, Jun Ito, and Yusuke Kawashima Mobile Japanese Migrants to the Pacific West and East Self-searching, Work, and Identification Etsuko Kato Critical Review of the Abe Administration Politics of Conservatism and Realism Edited by Yoichi Funabashi and Koji Nakakita Lay Zen in Contemporary Japan Tradition, Interpretation, and Invention Erez Joskovich Japanese Whaling and the People Behind It A Look from Within Nadzeya Shuteva Dark Heritage in Contemporary Japan Relics of an Underground Empire Jung-Sun Han Space and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature Inciting Difference Victoria Young For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Contemporary-Japan-Series/book-series/SE0002

Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature Inciting Difference Victoria Young

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Victoria Young The right of Victoria Young to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-56486-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-56487-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-43576-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Japanese literature in the world

1

1 The “trans-border” turn

17

2 Translating the literary past

31

3 Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami

48

4 Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji

72

5 Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yō ko

92

Epilogue: Re/translation

113

Bibliography Index

122 130

Acknowledgements

This book is not about Okinawa or “Okinawan literature”, but it finds its roots there. In May 2001, I flew for the first time to Tokyo. After landing in Narita International Airport, I headed straight for Haneda from where I took another flight to Naha. I was 19 years old and had not yet begun to study Japanese. On that first day in Chatan, a town in the central part of Okinawa’s Main Island (Okinawa hontō), my hosts fed me soup made from pork intestines, dressed me in a red kimono to celebrate my informal ‘Coming of Age’, then drove me through congested streets to a lookout point from which I gazed upon the wide-­open roads and central runway of Kadena Marine Air Base. I was bewildered, hot, awkward, and in awe. That first week in Okinawa exposed me to the questions of language, history, memory, and storytelling that have fuelled my academic passions since, and which underpin this research. It is an honour to now reach the point of publishing this monograph. I offer my sincerest thanks to Stephanie Rogers and the teams at Routledge and Taylor & Francis for steering me through the process with such clarity and patience. As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, I was very fortunate to receive the support of my professors to veer from the designated path and spend my year abroad in Okinawa. Nakahodo Masanori and the late Okamoto Keitoku permitted me to audit their graduate seminars at the University of the Ryukyus, even though I was still a third-­year undergraduate. Kyle Ikeda, Kina Ikue, and Kurosawa Ariko were extremely patient in answering my questions and making sure that I did not lose the threads of conversation. Asako Uehara, Shizuko Arashiro, and the Komatsu family welcomed me into their homes and shared aspects of life in Okinawa that I could never have experienced otherwise. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Morris for instilling my confidence to pursue postgraduate studies, and to Nicola Liscutin, whose lessons in Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London challenged me to consider anew what it meant to take Japan and Literature as objects of research. My ongoing development as a scholar would not have been possible without the friendships I formed as a research student at Waseda University funded by the Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship. Words enough cannot thank Katsukata=Inafuku Keiko and Kanai Keiko for their unending kindness. The members of the former Institute of Ryukyuan and Okinawan Studies became

Acknowledgements  vii my academic family and I still miss our Friday night yuntaku-­kai at Kō bai. Davinder Bhowmik’s willingness to share her then unpublished work on Sakiyama’s writing was generous and stimulating. Mike Molasky nurtured my thinking with honest and productive steers as to the direction that my academic enquiries might take. I also thank Suzuki Tomoyuki and his colleagues at the Institute for Okinawan Studies at Hosei University for involving me in their projects, including the opportunity to appear in conversation with Tawada Yō ko. This project really took shape under the guidance of my PhD supervisors at the University of Leeds. Irena Hayter and Eric Prenowitz each made salient recommendations and asked necessary, provocative questions. Reiko Abe Auestad’s ability to string my intentions at an EAJS postgraduate workshop helped me to connect my ideas together. The detailed and thoughtful examiners’ reports of Steve Dodd and Mark Williams lit the way for turning that thesis into a book. As I began to embark upon that task, my colleagues at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge provided robust advice and practical support. I extend particular gratitude to Barak Kushner for his important and energetic feedback on early iterations of articles, presentation scripts, and the manuscript presented here, and to Richard Bowring, whose unparalleled willingness to read at speed and offer rigorous and constructive critique was pivotal in getting the first draft over the line. Laura Moretti read through and helped me revise the earliest book proposal. I gained profoundly from sharing my ideas with the talented undergraduate and postgraduate students in my department. The fellowship and staff at Selwyn College enveloped me in good sense, care, and humour; long may the tradition of “Wheels-­off Wednesdays” endure. I was granted valuable opportunities to share and refine key portions of my arguments in talks delivered at SOAS, University of London; the University of East Anglia; the Japan Society in London; Tokyo University of Foreign Studies; and Nagoya University. The first section of Chapter 3 first appeared in an article published in Japan Forum. while an earlier version of Chapter 5 was first printed in Japanese Language and Literature. I am grateful for the discussions that those invitations generated, and to the editors and anonymous reviewers of both publications for their feedback. Bill Marotti sponsored my visit to UCLA in the autumn of 2019 and proved a fantastically energising mentor when I felt like I had hit a wall. My time in California was further enriched by interactions with Michael Emmerich, Seiji Lippit, Mimi Long, and Satoko Shimazaki. Andrea Mendoza and Wendy Matsumura’s invitation to speak at UCSD was pivotal in helping me to reconstruct my thinking. I thank the extended Kushner-­Davidson family for ensuring that I was fed, watered, and entertained while adjusting to life in the US. Toeda Hirokazu’s assistance enabled me to visit Waseda University as an academic researcher during the summer of 2022 when Japan’s national borders were still closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, thus granting me access to materials without which completing this manuscript would have been

viii Acknowledgements impossible. Special thanks go to Doug Slaymaker, who was a steady rock and patient reader when I struggled to get my words and thoughts in order. This long project bears the traces of many more people all around the world who through good times and bad have spurred me on with their intellectual curiosity, kindness, and good cheer. I am sincere in my thanks to you all. My father passed away while I was a second-­year PhD student. My mother has been unswerving in her belief that I would get it done. I dedicate this book to both of them.

Introduction Japanese literature in the world

Setting the scene: Japanese, literature, translation In 2018, The Emissary (Kento ̄shi) won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, one of five annual prizes presented by the North American non-­ profit organisation, the National Book Foundation.1 This novel by Tawada Yō ko, first published in Japanese in 2014, was translated by Margaret Mitsutani in 2017 just one year before it received the prize. Since moving from Japan to Germany in 1982, Tawada has produced a rich oeuvre of fiction and literary essays in both Japanese and German, winning multiple accolades in both languages. The National Book Award thus reinforced Tawada’s already solid reputation as a writer of critical, international acclaim. The Emissary’s win also broke new ground within the history of this literary prize. The National Book Award for Translated Literature was established in 1967 to celebrate works of fiction, exclusively, by writers both living and dead. However, the National Book Foundation suspended the award in 1983 and only reinstated it in 2018 with a new rubric that today recognises the work itself, while the author must still be living. The Emissary was the first translated novel to win this award in thirty-­five years and under these revised conditions. In the years since, other works of Japanese fiction have produced a streak of related achievements in this category. In 2019, The Memory Police, Stephen Snyder’s translation of Ogawa Yō ko’s Hisoyaka na kessho ̄ (1994), was listed among the finalists. In 2020, Tokyo Ueno Station, Morgan Giles’s translation of Yu Miri’s JR Tōkyō-­ eki Ueno-­kōen-­guchi (2014), became the second Japanese work in three years to win the prize, while in 2022, a more recent work by Tawada (Chikyū ni chiribamerarete, 2018) translated by Mitsutani as Scattered All Over the Earth (2022) was also named as a finalist. These National Book Awards offer a compelling point of departure for this examination into the critical relationship between Japanese literature and translation. In the first instance, this attention seems timely and necessary given the degree to which this prize has elevated works of contemporary Japanese fiction in translation to international recognition at an unprecedented rate: The Memory Police aside, the other winners were based on originals first published within the last ten years. It is also notable that the rate of success by DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-1

2 Introduction Japanese works within this recently reintroduced literary award is so far unmatched by works in any other language. What is more, each of these writers and all but one of these translators are women. The broader global acclaim of Japanese literature today is thus a cause for excitement because it coincides with a greater degree of diversity in terms of the writers and texts that are gaining visibility. This current situation is even more remarkable given that just three decades earlier, in December 1988, the Japan Foundation invited representatives from five United States publishers to Tokyo to address their concerns that interest among North Americans in translations of fiction by modern Japanese writers, and indeed in books written about Japan, was on the wane.2 As the reintroduction of the National Book Award for Translated Literature indicates, these successes by works of Japanese literature have coincided with a resurgence of popular and critical interest in literary translation at large. While the PEN Translation Prize has been in place since 1963, a proliferation of new awards dedicated to literary translation has followed PEN’s report in 2007 that translated books accounted for less than three per cent of the American market and two per cent of the British market, while in both cases an even smaller proportion of those publications were classed as literature.3 These include the Best Translated Book Award announced in 2017 by “Three Percent,” an initiative launched at the University of Rochester in New York State in direct response to the PEN report; and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, first presented by the National Book Critics Circle in 2022 in memory of the Latino poet, playwright, and long-­standing member of their board. Other prizes already in existence have altered their criteria for eligibility along similar lines. To offer one example that foreshadows the National Book Award’s revised Translated Literature Prize, the Man Group announced in 2015 that their International Booker Prize (formerly the Man Booker International Prize) would no longer reward a living author for their body of work, irrespective of whether it had been written in English or not, and would instead recognise a single, translated book. These shifts bring into focus key changes in how literary translation is being perceived and, one might argue, performed. The trend towards honouring single works allows for greater possible diversity including authors who may still be just developing their careers, while the emphasis on works by living authors has encouraged a shift towards translations of contemporary writing. This has brought greater dynamism and immediacy to the field, while the greater opportunities that exist today for translators and authors to engage in live dialogues with one another at public events and via online platforms are also injecting energy and interest into the creative and collaborative dimensions of translation as an art form.4 Whereas “invisibility” was once a hallmark of the translator’s art, these developments suggest that literary translation is undergoing a process of demystification.5 This idea manifests in real terms in calls to print the names of translators on the front covers of their translations together with the author as a matter of best, ethical practice.6 Signs that Japanese literature is performing especially well during a period in which translation is itself undergoing some sort of resurgence raise a

Introduction  3 fundamental but unanswerable question: what is Japanese literature? To be clear, if the present situation implies that Japanese literature names a coherent or stable entity that exists a priori, ready to be accessed through translation, I advocate a more deconstructive approach that treats this label as the subject of constant construction, negotiation, and translation – a central term that I deploy in literal, figurative, and expanded ways – by a rich cast of actors, including writers, critics, readers, and prizegivers. To use inverted commas around “Japanese literature” is cumbersome, especially when one’s job title and academic field might depend on it, however in this book the term is always under contention. By interrogating the borders and margins by which Japanese literature is circumscribed, I seek to delineate the ways in which Japanese literature itself is constructed through translation, and in the roles that translation has played in driving Japanese literary studies – and by extension, Japanese Studies – as academic disciplines. A similar approach is necessary to interrogate what “translation” refers to in this context. Indra Levy, for example, opens her edited volume on Translation in Modern Japan by declaring that “[m]odern Japan is a culture of translation…the idea seems so self-­evident as to require no further comment, and yet we have only begun to unravel its manifold implications.”7 A more recent edited volume, Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context begins, “Japan has often been portrayed as a ‘translation superpower’ and Japanese history is a history of translation”.8 These resonant statements indicate a shared point of departure from which to interrogate the extent of influence and specific impacts that translation from other languages into Japanese has had upon the development of modern Japanese society. However, in the present climate, the image of Japan as a “translation superpower” (hon’yaku taikoku) to be found throughout existing scholarship in Japanese and English, and which has pertained to the high number of books including literary works that translators made available in Japanese throughout the modern period, has evidently begun to evolve. In 2018, Publishers Weekly reported that Japanese ranked as the fourth most translated language of all works of fiction to appear in the US market that year; the highest non-­European language in the list.9 If the title of “translation superpower” still holds value for Japan in the present, today it owes less to the extent to which works of fiction are translated from other languages into Japanese than to the number of literary works produced originally in Japanese that are translated into the world. What becomes of the untranslated? The growing popularity of Japanese literature in translation today might be read as no more than a reflection of readers’ tastes and how these evolve in dialogue with social change and the pressures and practices that shape their own lives. However, as the concerns raised by the Japan Foundation in 1988 attest, literary translation is also important as a branch of soft power. The US–Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, which was inaugurated in 1979 as the first prize devoted to works of

4 Introduction Japanese fiction in English translation, makes explicit in its naming the role of literary translation as a project geared towards cultural diplomacy.10 Norma Field’s essay, “The Way of the World”, also emphasises how translation was deployed in the “scholarly rehabilitation” of Japan after the Second World War and the US occupation, and thus occupied a central role in the development of Japanese Studies as they are practiced today.11 When viewing the contemporary situation through this lens, one might argue that the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble at the end of the 1980s provided a new context that required remediation. As Masao Miyoshi asserted, the cultivation of Japan’s image as an “economic superpower” on account of its impressively fast-­paced recovery and advancement following the devastation of the Second World War also sought to reconstruct the nation in the postwar period as a bastion of culture and peace.12 The possibility that Japan might stand as a “translation superpower” offers an alternative yet resonant posture in the post-­bubble era of economic decline. The title given to Mitsutani’s translation of Tawada’s novel in the US, The Emissary, seems befitting for a cultural envoy in a burgeoning era for literary translation. It is therefore imperative to recognise the role of the nation in this context. While my focus is on Japanese literature, the nation underscored by the National Book Awards is unequivocally the United States, as The National Book Foundation emphasises in its mission statement “to celebrate the best of literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture”.13 While the main National Book Award insists that an author must be a US citizen for their work to be eligible for consideration, it is impossible to impose the same restriction onto a work of translation that involves an author and translator who will not necessarily share the same nationality. To circumvent this impasse, the Prize for Translated Literature only accepts nominations of translated books that belong to an American publisher. This solution also indicates one way in which translation is deployed in the commercial service of the US publishing industry. Julia Lovell has highlighted the importance of the US marketplace in the context of China’s campaign during the 1980s to have one of its writers achieve a Nobel Prize for Literature, as the utmost literary accolade.14 China’s anxious desire for its literature to gain this recognition – which in Lovell’s diagnosis amounted to a “Nobel complex” – was in evidence until 2000 when Gao Xingjian became its first homegrown writer to win the prize. By contrast, Japan produced not only the first Nobel Literary Laureate from East Asia – Kawabata Yasunari – in 1968, but also a second prizewinner, Ō e Kenzaburō , in 1994. Even so, one might argue that the annual discussions around Murakami Haruki’s chances of becoming a third winner that pervaded much of the 2000s suggested a related manifestation of the Chinese ‘complex’. In more recent years, both Tawada and Ogawa have entered the annual Nobel rumour mill, mirroring how success in one award can add to expectations in the context of others.15 This situation also indicates that efforts by scholars and translators to increase the number of translations from Japanese by women writers are

Introduction  5 paying off.16 While it is undeniable that this attention to diversity and inclusivity is important and necessary, it reinforces the impressions that the politics of global literature are underwritten by the annual calendar of prizes which generate the greatest buzz, and that these remain underpinned by Western aesthetic values to which writers from other contexts must aspire. This concern with recognition in the English-speaking world dovetails with discussions that today circulate around the question of “world literature” within Japanese literary studies at large. The turn towards world literature as a serious object of scholarly enquiry has been shaped by several key actors since the 1990s. Within Japanese literature and literary studies, the iteration that has taken hold most strongly is that outlined in David Damrosch’s What is World Literature?17 In this early volume, Damrosch stated that “world literature” no longer named a discreet category of texts but could instead be understood as a “mode of circulation and of reading” by which literary works “gain value” in translation and “take on new life” in new cultural contexts.18 Moreover, “[a] work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin”.19 Since 2003, Damrosch has developed these definitions through his prolific engagement with the topic, and as the author and editor of multiple books and journals. However, his early work still appears to be cited most frequently within studies produced in Japanese and in English, and this in turn has helped to transform the understanding of the Japanese term “world literature” (sekai bungaku), which was traditionally used in the sense of “foreign literature” specifically excluding Japanese fiction, into a label that it now seems important for Japanese texts to also carry. No Japanese writer has epitomised this model of global success more than Murakami Haruki. As David Karashima’s examination of Murakami’s success has delineated in detail, when we read Murakami’s work in translation, we are never reading the author’s words alone but are entering a world that is also the result of efforts in selection and curation by a host of publishers, editors, and translators.20 The nature of the publishing industry ensures that the same claim might be made of any writer, whether they become big in translation or not. However, of greater interest here is the effect that Murakami’s popularity has had upon the target readership of Japanese literature. The scholar and literary translator Stephen Snyder has argued that Murakami’s writing at least in part “thematizes and demonstrates its own translatability”, while it “succeeds in translation and finds a global audience exactly because it is intended for translation from the original place of its creation”.21 At the same time, Snyder’s critique cautions against the limits of this approach so long as it runs the risk of conditioning readers and publishers to expect the same kind of literary voice from all other Japanese writers, and thus threatens to construct a homogeneous image of Japanese literature that overlooks the wider diversity of texts produced in Japanese. But what makes a text “translatable”? This unanswerable question hovers behind discussions of what makes a “good” translation that makes the latest

6 Introduction proliferation of prizes possible. Echoing Snyder’s arguments, Emily Apter has written, “[w]hen the problem of a globalising mass culture and public culture is approached from the perspective of translatability, new and important questions of cultural commodification and, thus, ideology arise. How do some works gain international visibility, while others do not?”22 For Apter, one answer lies in interrogating the extent to which writers and other cultural producers “consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their art forms”.23 However, so long as translatability appears little more than a hazy and imprecise virtue constructed by a market whose success hangs on the commercial value of translation, then it seems certain that any writer or literary work that remains out of global sight in translation can be perceived as a failure. On one hand, there is an apparent need to find a language by which to speak of those writers who consciously or unconsciously build untranslatability into their work in an affirmative sense, and not only as a means of resisting the “homogenisation” of literature in translation that troubles Snyder. On the other, it seems necessary to deconstruct this notion of translatability and consider what alternative visions of translation might emerge by turning attentions to those texts that lie out of sight. The structure of this book This book is organised into two main sections in which I first discuss how contemporary Japanese literature has been constructed around ideas of translation and translatability, and then go on to conduct a series of close, critical analyses of hitherto untranslated texts that serve to deconstruct that metanarrative. In Chapters 1 and 2, I interrogate the story alluded to above, and consider certain factors that have aided the rise of Japanese literature in global consciousness since the early 1950s. To be sure, this trajectory is not the result of any single effort or steady climb, but rather results from multiple historical moments and political forces. I begin in Chapter 1 by tracing the emergence in the late 2000s of a concern with “trans-­border literature” (ekkyō bungaku) within Japanese literary circles. This discourse coincided with the gaining in prominence of several non-­native writers of Japanese prose and might be interpreted as a response to the demand such writers posed for a new, more inclusive scholarly vocabulary within Japanese literary studies. To be sure, it is at this historical moment that “world literature” transformed from a distant and distinct category into a symbol of inclusion that Japanese texts might acquire. However, in its insistence that non-­native writers have brought about a new, multilingual era within Japanese literature, the more recent “trans-­ border turn” also appears to revise literary history by side-­lining the existence of earlier generations of writers whose prose was already crossing linguistic boundaries, including those of Okinawan and ethnic Korean descent. To disentangle the complex threads of this current moment, this chapter foregrounds two “literary lectures” published by Iwanami Shoten in 1954 that speak directly to the topics of world literature and translation. In fact, for all

Introduction  7 its purported newness, the drive within contemporary trans-­border literature – namely, to negotiate a point of entry for Japanese literature as a national product into the (Anglophone) world – seems to replay these debates that were already underway in the early aftermath of Japan’s occupation by the US (1945–1952). These essays also offer a valuable and resonant counterpoint to read alongside Norma Field’s essay published in 1998, in which she highlighted the role demanded of translation for rehabilitating Japan’s global image since the 1950s.24 In short, the approach taken within this chapter reveals that writers of Japanese literature were already exploring possible connections between literature and translation as possible pathways to of national remediation and global “healing” in ways that anticipated the current landscape by over half a century. The needs for healing and remediation underpin the second historical moment in this longer narrative: namely the so-­called triple disasters of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated Japan’s northeastern coastline on March 11, 2011. In Chapter 2, I argue that the scholarly excitement around “post-­disaster literature” has further contributed to a revision of contemporary literary history and the exclusion of those voices whose relatedness to the disasters are not so easily identifiable when viewed from the hegemonic centre. Indeed, the wealth of interest in “post-­disaster literature” since the early 2000s suggests how the disasters have rejuvenated Japanese literary creativity and its associated scholarship, paving the way towards what Kimura Saeko has termed a “new Japanese literature”.25 However, it is also possible to see how this drive towards “post-­disaster literature” has contributed to the marginalisation of other aspects of Japanese literary production. To unpack this problem, I anchor my critique in a close reading of two short essays written on either side of the pre-­/post-­disaster divide: a short essay about the dangers of historical amnesia that the Okinawan writer Sakiyama Tami wrote in 2003, as demands were growing to revise Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, and a speech that Murakami Haruki delivered to an audience in Barcelona upon his receipt of the International Catalunya Prize three months after the disasters in 2011 struck. Murakami’s essay has received attention owing to its critical stance vis-­à-­vis Japan’s reliance upon nuclear energy for its “post-­war” recovery despite having witnessed the destructive power of radiation through the atomic bombs that were dropped onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Aside from the author’s antinuclear agenda I consider the power of those connections that he makes between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima to create a loop between the present and 1945 that runs the risk of foreclosing from historical memory experiences of Japanese imperialism and wartime aggressions. Together, these two opening chapters interrogate what are the stakes for contemporary Japanese fiction when translation emerges as a measure of success. The following three chapters perform close, critical readings upon texts that appear to resist that formula by rendering the act of translation in multiple, different ways. To be clear, the narrative above valorises translation as a process by which works of literature come to global visibility. But just because

8 Introduction a text is not visible in the global domain does not mean that it does not exist or cannot be read. Derrida frames this logical possibility in relation to a text’s iterability, the quality by which it remains readable even when the reader or recipient is absent.26 In a less theoretical sense, to emphasise literature in translation – in English translation – is to overlook the initial readership that untranslated texts presume. This formula also has implications for what the markets invested in translation and publication deem as measures of translatability: a slippery term that runs the risk of becoming the grounds for excluding a body of texts on the grounds of their perceived incommensurability. To reiterate, if Apter’s argument holds that writers may respond to the current global market by inscribing translatability into their work, then the possibility that a writer could defy this demand and write in ways deemed “untranslatable” deserves greater consideration. If the processes invested in constructing and promoting Japanese literature today are guided by some inherent yet indefinable affinity and amenability to translation, it is an increasing matter of urgency to ask which texts that self-­image obscures. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 trace respective strategies deployed in works of fiction and literary essays by Sakiyama Tami (b. 1954), Yi Yang-­ji (1955–1992), and Tawada Yō ko (b. 1960) that challenge what it means to translate. For most of their careers, these three writers have been associated with categories that represent subgenres of Japanese fiction: Okinawan literature (Okinawa bungaku), zainichi literature (zainichi bungaku), and trans-­border literature (ekkyō bungaku). However, the ease with which these categories are deployed conceals the reality of just how difficult it is to delineate them. In broad terms, Okinawan literature encompasses the prose fiction, poetry and plays produced by writers who live and work in the islands of Japan’s southernmost prefecture. Formerly the separate Ryūkyū Kingdom, these islands were colonised by the Meiji state in 1871. As part of the forming Japanese nation-­state, Okinawans were forced to endure oppressive cultural assimilation and discrimination on account of their perceived backwardness from the mainland. These rifts were deepened by the devastating land battle fought on Okinawan soil between US and Japanese troops that lasted from April to June 1945 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 160,000 civilians: between one-­quarter and one-­third of the population. While the rest of Japan was released from US control in 1952, occupation in Okinawa ensued until 15 May 1972 when it was “returned” to Japanese rule. The body of fiction produced by ethnic Koreans and their descendants, commonly grouped as zainichi literature, carries its own legacies of colonisation, war, and US military occupation. The term zainichi (literally ‘resident in Japan’) denotes those subjects whose presence follows Japan’s colonisation of the Korean peninsula in 1910 until the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, and the outbreak of war that tore their homeland into North and South, forcing many to remain in Japan. Both literary categories carry the legacies of war and Japanese imperialism, including repeated processes of enforced linguistic assimilation under Japanese imperialism. And yet, due to the contents of the

Introduction  9 stories that they tell, these multilingual works have tended to be handled separately from the Japanese trans-­border literature that emerged in the late 2000s, which is associated with a newer generation of non-­native writers of Japanese prose and Japanese-­born producers of fiction in other languages, whose works are considered to crisscross national and linguistic boundaries. The ways in which stories are anthologised is helpful for illustrating the limits of these distinctions. Among works in Japanese, the subtitle of the collection Okinawa bungaku sen: Nihon bungaku no ejji kara no toi (Selected works of Okinawan literature: Questions from the edge of Japanese literature, 2003), explicitly positions the Okinawan texts it contains at the periphery of a national literature. The precarious existence of texts at the spatial limits of a national literary imaginary is also exacerbated with the threat of a temporal, expiration date. Isogai Jirō , the editor of the Zainichi bungaku zenshu ̄ (Complete works of zainichi literature), has recalled that the keynote speech at a symposium that coincided with that publication in 2006 pointed to the “end of zainichi Korean literature” (zainichi chos̄ en bungaku no shus̄ ei).27 For Isogai, the gradual shift from zainichi chos̄ en bungaku, wherein the word chos̄ en underscores Korean identity specifically, towards the shorter zainichi bungaku) indicates more strongly a change of direction than an end overall. However, it seems ironic that the completion of an anthology as a symbol of canonical construction and inclusion can coincide with pronouncements of that body of work’s possible “end”. Moreover, Isogai recalled a debate as to whether this publication as a “complete works” (zenshu)̄ would be better titled as a “selected works” (senshu)̄ , thus exposing the limits of selection that is central to any anthology. It therefore seems unsurprising that to date there has been no collection of “trans-­border” Japanese writing, given the emphasis that this category places on myriad, possible connections beyond Japan and the challenge to encompass them all. However, recalling that in Japan, world literature was formerly a body of works produced outside of the nation, it is noteworthy that two of the three works written in Japanese to be included in the thirty-­ volume Sekai bungaku zenshu ̄ (Anthology of world literature) published by Kawade Shobō Shinsha in 2011 were respectively by the “father” of zainichi literature, Kim Talsu (1919–1997), and the Okinawan writer, Medoruma Shun (b. 1960).28 The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a rise in English translations of these works of fiction that was subsequently lauded for promoting the diversity of Japanese literature. The progenitor for this shift in the instance of Okinawan literature, Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (2000), provides a case in point.29 This subheading is in one sense informative, providing context for a non-­specialist, English-­language readership. However, as Kina Ikue has written in a salient critique, the need to label these Okinawan stories in relation to a mainstream national literature also limits the texts that Southern Exposure carries to “the imagination and interpretation of the colonisers” and presents Okinawan fiction as a “variant of Japanese literature” that

10 Introduction “can never cross national literature boundaries [unless as] an exotic Other holding a Japanese passport”.30 Just as Masao Miyoshi once wrote that it appears that only for “the rich, the world is indeed transnational and deterritorialised”, Kina’s criticism highlights how within contemporary Japanese literature, “trans-­border” movement is a privilege afforded only to some works of literature and not others.31 The recourse to publish Japanese fiction produced outside of the mainstream in discreet anthologies, though important for making such texts visible, repackages and repurposes the problems described above. The challenge recurs in such subsequent anthologies as Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa and the first English anthology of zainichi fiction, Into the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan.32 These titles also betray the impressions that Okinawan and zainichi stories lie in the darker, more mysterious recesses of Japanese fiction, while translation offers the means of bringing these texts to light. My effort to read works by Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada in a single study expresses a desire to read across the categorical boundaries that have kept their works separate and to forge new solidarities. As my critical analyses will show, the stories and essays by these three women writers deploy linguistic, stylistic, and thematic devices that speak to significant commonalities that are useful for deconstructing the act of translation. These include the uses of multilingual wordplays and orthographic mixings, each of which poses a different challenge to the reader/translator. At the time of writing, no full translation exists of the works that I discuss. However, by focusing on these texts I do not mean simply to advocate for more translation. Rather, I suggest that we heed the call from within these texts to challenge what it means to translate in figurative, expanded, and intriguing ways. Their protagonists may be read as translators; not only between languages, but also across history as they excavate repressed stories of the past that challenge dominant narratives in the present. These translators also inscribe their narratives across different material registers of the voice, the body, and written text, punctuating and puncturing their stories with moments of silence, wordless gaps, and bodily wounds. Translation in these texts is therefore predicated not upon smooth acts of bridging, crossing, or healing, but rather foregrounds disruption, fragmentation, plurality, and even pain. The result is a series of texts that continually push at the boundaries of legibility and translatability, and thus stage a challenge to the contemporary emphasis upon translation and its intertwined presumptions of global connection and remediation. Inciting difference The phrase “inciting difference” that subtitles this book is my translation of the phrase ishitsu o tachiageru that Sakiyama uses to describe her writing practice in her essay, “Shimakotoba de kachāshı ̄”, which I discuss in depth in Chapter 3. In foregrounding Sakiyama’s phrasing, I acknowledge the impact

Introduction  11 that her work has had on my reading of literature in Japanese since I first encountered her distinctive and dynamic prose as an undergraduate at the University of the Ryukyus in 2004. By beginning with Sakiyama, I also challenge an entrenched approach by which writers located in the ‘margins’ follow those located in the ‘centre’ and are then held to account according to the latter’s norms and conventions. In fact, Sakiyama’s work rejects such binaristic thinking by denying a central position to any locale – be that “Japan” or “Okinawa” – and implores us to deconstruct the premises that inform these relational terms. I also mean to show how Sakiyama’s advocacy of the mutually imbricated practices of writing (citing) and agitating (inciting) offer valuable insights into related strategies that extend beyond her specific example. In these ways, “inciting difference” provides a critical and vibrant framework that underpins this research in its goal not to overcome difference through translation, but to consider what it means to translate differently. The opportunity to seek an alternative vision of translation beyond that which informs a world literature predicated on Anglophone scholarship already exists in the specific imagery of the Japanese term, hon’yaku 翻訳. Whereas the Latin etymology of the prefix “trans-­” guides English speakers to imagine translation as a lateral movement that creates a bridge across spaces and borders, hon’yaku incorporates the ideogram 翻る (hirugaeru) that means ‘to flutter,’ ‘to turn over,’ or ‘to suddenly change’. Tawada has herself highlighted this aspect through onstage performances by turning a glove inside out, and more explicitly in an interview with the German literary scholar Bettina Brandt in which she explained that the term “suggests a slightly dramatic and romantic gesture [that] makes it possible to show the flipside of something in an unexpected way”.33 To translate differently therefore means to interrogate the imposition of an Anglophone meaning onto this term as it pertains to the construction of boundaries around national literatures that must subsequently be traversed. By witnessing other strategies and effects of translation in the works analysed here, I hope to reveal surprising flipsides of contemporary Japanese literature. Translating differently also engenders an ethical means of engaging the perceived differences by which the writings of Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada have been separated into specific genres within Japanese fiction (Okinawan, zainichi, and trans-­border), and of revealing how these dividing lines have helped to constitute the national literature. By reading Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada together, I do not seek to overlook or deny the respective cultural and historical specificities that inform their works. Rather, by reading these various strategies of discordance and disruption as a means of fighting against erasure, and of the effacement of difference, the analyses that follow repeatedly lead back to those concerns. As I identify, these strategies write back against the imposition of a national language in ways that confront readers of Japanese with the hegemony of their mother tongue. However, in the contemporary context I foreground translation as a suitable term by which to also confront the narrative and figurative allusions to gaps, wounds, and silences within these works, and

12 Introduction the material attributes of written Japanese in terms of multiple orthographies, distinctive wordplays, and ellipses that disrupt the surfaces of these texts. To be sure, these strategies resist easy translation into the singular script of English, posing a challenge to reconsider the process and goals of translation beyond transporting the literary work from one national, linguistic context into another. By reimagining translation as a flawed process, they moreover highlight the need to retain those cracks and interruptions as inherent and necessary elements of the stories and histories that they tell. I limit myself to this restrictive selection of authors because of the richness of these literary works that each require deep analysis rooted in detailed, close readings with or without translation in the wings. I also mean to make more evident the lines of dynamic encounter that may take shape when these texts are treated individually, freed from old conventions to write their webs of intertexuality and connection anew. This attention to practices of writing, difference, and translation, suggests one further consideration that underpins this research, and which also emerges from Sakiyama’s essay: inciting. Before undertaking the writing of this book I was surrounded by calls to decolonise within my institution in the UK and which followed such global movements as the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests initiated in South Africa in March 2015. These engagements have sought to contest the legacies of institutionalised colonialism in terms of memory, iconography, and representation. Within the literary classroom, strategies to support this process have emphasised broadening the critical scope and focus of reading lists to include textual identities that have been formerly excluded on account of their race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. At the same time as navigating such commitments to inclusivity and diversity, debate has ensued about how these intellectual and ideologically driven practices relate to earlier, more turbulent processes of decolonisation that foreground the necessity of violence, as in the writings of Frantz Fanon, and the promotion of linguistic difference as a refusal to enrich the coloniser’s tongue, as implored by Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (1986).34 That calls to decolonise within the UK have taken shape around the specific, historical example of the British empire is important and inevitable. However, this situation also generates different questions, challenges, and opportunities for Japanese Studies within the UK. This is not a mere question of inclusivity. On one hand, Japanese Studies can learn from this wider, academic provocation following Kuan-­Hsing Chen’s suggestion that decolonisation within East Asia remains only at an “initial” stage as a result of the ongoing dominance of the United States during the “so-­called post-­cold-­war era of globalisation”.35 On the other, moves to decolonise that are rooted in British institutions and literature produced in the English language stand to gain when invited to consider alternative forms of empire and linguistic conventions that are also necessary to narrate the imperial past and its continuing legacies in the present. Dialogue invested in deepening the enquiries into the possible meanings and practices of decolonisation in the cases of Japan and Japanese literature is

Introduction  13 increasingly urgent and necessary. In the first instance, amid a growing push to expand the “canon” of Japanese literature in English translation, the insights offered by English and postcolonial literary studies teach us that translation is also a mode of appropriation.36 This issue is perhaps most evident in the case of Okinawan fiction, whereby the process of translating into English is fraught with difficulties owing to the intermingling of standard Japanese and regional multilingual expressions, and since translation from Japanese to English amounts to rewriting from one coloniser’s tongue into another. However, more mainstream Japanese fiction is not exempt from this challenge. Although Japanese literature may now be seen as integral to world literature, the present situation appears to have forestalled the associated need to pull at the nation’s historical threads. Working in the other direction, in paying attention here to the roles played by the voices of Japan’s former colonised within the construction of Japanese literature, I also seek to remind the programme of academic decolonisation in the UK that the formulations and legacies of empire come in myriad forms. The literary works considered here describe multiple migrations across spatial and temporal borders, blurring some boundaries into uncertainty while actively constructing others. The act of reading through these works makes it impossible to subscribe to any single methodology. However, it has been helpful to refer to the “spatial approach to identity and difference” developed by Susan Stanford Friedman in her book, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, which centred the “locations of identity formation within the mappings and remappings of ever-­changing cultural formations.”37 This new approach, which Friedman crystallised in her theory of “geographics,” enacts a “move from the allegorisation of the self in terms of organicism, stable centres, cores, and wholeness to a discourse of spatialised identities constantly on the move.” Friedman further qualified this movement by adding that it is “not the ordered movement of linear growth, but the lack of solid ground, the ceaseless change of fluidity, the nomadic wandering of transnational diaspora, the interactive syncretisms of the ‘global ethnoscape,’ or the interminable circuitry of cyberspace.” The strength of Friedman’s ideas for my purposes is their ability to articulate the different sites, trajectories, connections, and distances upon which the textual identities of a work of fiction is based, without privileging just one. Instead, following Gloria Anzaldúa, Freidman treats identity in terms of a dialectic that occurs in “the spaces of dynamic encounter – the ‘contact zone’, the ‘middle ground’, the borderlands, la frontera”.38 Importantly, Friedman also pointed out that borders are not only a point of connection but “have a way of insisting on separation at the same time”.39 The influence of Mappings upon this research therefore lies in its suggestion of a means of connecting commonalities without effacing difference, of attending to the necessarily multiple, multi-­layered, and contradictory presentations of the border that run through these texts and my readings both as a static line and active process. Whereas Friedman’s approach in Mappings promotes “border talk” as a means of shifting away from silence and invisibility, however, the

14 Introduction texts discussed in this thesis are proactive in inscribing both. Moreover, Friedman’s spatial configuration must be expanded to incorporate temporal and material dimensions that connect back to the past and its ghosts. It is in these radical ways that the writings of Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada incite difference and distance, for the borders that run through their narratives are integral to their survival even while they vibrate on the cusp of erasure, absence, even death. Reading and translating through the gaps, shadows, and silences that these texts inscribe, my analyses attest to the empowering nature of these works of fiction that an emphasis on border-­crossing threatens to overlook, while simultaneously gesturing towards potential new commonalities, solidarities, and intertextualities beyond the frame. To reiterate, this study of respective, untranslated works of Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada addresses two central aims. First, this selection allows me to contribute to the scholarship on these texts that challenge what it means to translate, and thus what it means to be translatable. Keeping my selection small enables me to practice close reading that brings the itinerant linguistic and textual strategies to life. By paying attention here to texts that sit outside of the translated canon of fiction written in Japanese, I also seek to carve a space for their strategies in relation to what Francesca Orsini terms the “multilingual local” to question the expectations of the “famously slippery, apparently expansive, yet surprisingly narrow category” of world literature.40 Having set out the stakes of this critical undertaking in relation to the present excitement surrounding the status of Japan’s literature in the world and with the term “world literature” in its new clothes, this book, perhaps counterintuitively, concentrates on what might at first appear to be marginal. But by showing how such concerns with the self (Japan) and other (the world) serve to hide difference within, one can reveal not only the process of marginalisation itself with its subtle silencing of the oppressed, but also the potential that may be contained within this very difference. It is for this reason that the focus is on those texts that the narrative of global translatability excludes, which lie at the thresholds where the imagined borders and margins of Japanese literature merge, intertwine, and conflict. For if the margins of Japanese literature reinforce the category’s limits, the recognition of a national border that must be transgressed does less to dismantle that boundary than to reinscribe the sense of separation that it represents. Rather than continue to segregate Tawada’s “trans-­border” texts from Sakiyama and Yi’s more “marginal” works, inciting difference means attending equally to borders and margins as framing devices that are specific, seemingly incongruous, and yet complicit in constituting a vision of Japanese literature – as a national and world literature – at their core. Notes 1 The same translation was released in the UK by Granta as Last Children of Tokyo. According to Mitsutani, Granta changed the title due to feeling uncomfortable with The Emissary. However, Mitsutani added that Tawada was critical of the word “last” in the British version due its overtones of nostalgia that are “quite foreign to

Introduction  15 the mood of the narrative of The Emissary”, and its potential to evoke other titles such as The Last Samurai. See: https://www.waseda.jp/inst/wihl-­annex/ interviews-­en/628 2 See Edward Fowler, “Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–44. 3 Esther Allen, ed. 2007. To Be Translated or Not to Be: PEN/Institute Ramon Llull Report on the Situation of International Translation. Barcelona: Institute Ramon Llull. 4 In the UK, The Guardian newspaper has been particularly proactive in promoting the voices of literary translators and explaining why their cause matters, to the extent that their online version now has a distinct “Fiction in Translation” section. 5 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London: Routledge, 1995). 6 See, for example, Jennifer Croft, “Why translators should be named on book covers,” The Guardian, 10 September 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2021/sep/10/why-­translators-­should-­be-­named-­on-­book-­covers (accessed 3 December 2023) 7 Indra Levy (ed.), Translation in Modern Japan (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011). 8 Nana Sato-Rossberg & Judy Wakabayashi (eds.), Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context (London; New York: Continuum, 2012). 9 Chad Post, “The Plight of Translation in America,” Publishers Weekly, 1 March 2019, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-­topic/industry-­news/publishernews/article/79407-­the-­plight-­of-­translation-­in-­america.html (accessed 1 November 2023). 10 See website of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture: http://www. keenecenter.org/translation_prize.html 11 Norma Field, ‘“The Way of the World”: Japanese Literary Studies in the Postwar United States.’ In: The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States, edited by Helen Hardacre. Leiden: Brill, 1998, 227–293. 12 Masao Miyoshi, ‘Japan is Not Interesting’. In Trespasses: Selected Writings, edited by Eric Cazdyn, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson (New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2010), 197. 13 See the National Book Foundation’s website: https://www.nationalbook.org/about­us/mission-­history/ 14 Julia Lovell, The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press), 2006. 15 There is no single, direct line of causality here since Tawada had already been discussed in the context of the Nobel Prize before her National Book Award win. However, it is undeniable that her receipt of this award in 2018 has added to expectations that she could be a Nobel contender. 16 See the reflective commentary by Ginny Tapley Takemori, an acclaimed translator and member of the Strong Women, Soft Power initiative: https://glli-­us. org/2018/05/26/strong-­women-­soft-­power-­by-­ginny-­tapley-­takemori/ 17 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 18 Ibid., 24. 19 Ibid., 4. 20 David James Karashima. Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami. New York: First Soft Skull ed. 2020. 21 Stephen Snyder, ‘The Murakami Effect: On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature’, Literary Hub, 26 August 2020. 22 Emily Apter, ‘On Translation in a Global Market’. Public Culture 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 2. 23 Ibid. 24 Norma Field. “The Way of the World”.

16 Introduction 25 Kimura Saeko, Shinsaigo bungaku ron: Atarashii Nihon bungaku no tame ni (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2013). 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 307–330. 27 Isogai Jirō , “Zainichi” bungaku no henyō to keishō (Tō kyō : Shinkansha, 2015), 250. 28 Volume Three of this anthology dedicated to short fiction contains Kim’s “Pak Tāri no saiban” (The trial of Pak Tari) and Medoruma’s “Umukaji tu chiriti” (Cast in shadow). The third Japanese text to be found is Ishimure Michiko’s “Kukai jō do” (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow), which constitutes a full volume. 29 Michael S. Molasky and Steve Rabson (eds.), Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). 30 Kina Ikue, ‘Locating Tami Sakiyama’s Literary Voice in Globalizing Okinawan Literature’, International Journal of Okinawan Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 19. 31 Masao Miyoshi, ‘Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality’, Comparative Literature, (Autumn, 2001), 292. 32 Melissa Wender (ed.), Into the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010); Davinder L. Bhowmik and Steve Rabson (eds.), Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). 33 Bettina Brandt, ‘Scattered Leaves: Artists Books and Migration, A Conversation with Yō ko Tawada’, Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 1 (2008): 12–22. 34 See especially, Frantz Fanon, ‘Concerning Violence’, in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 35–106; Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London, Nairobi, Portsmouth N.H., Harare: James Currey, 1986). 35 Kuan-­Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). 36 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-­ Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 37 Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 19. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Francesca Orsini, ‘The Multilingual Local in World Literature’, Comparative Literature 67, no. 4 (1 December 2015): 345.

1

The “trans-border” turn

The “trans-border” turn The story that connects the Japan Foundation’s concerns over the declining popularity of Japanese literature abroad prior to 1989 and the rise to global acclaim of multiple works of fiction by the late 2010s, can be narrativised in multiple ways. This chapter foregrounds the language of “crossing borders” as it pertains to this context. In its broadest sense, border-­crossing offers an apt metaphor for the work of translation that transports literary works and facilitates their encounters with a new and increasing international readership in other languages. However, “border-­ crossing” has also developed in Japan across this historical period to take on increasing cultural and theoretical significance. This shift might be traced back to 1991, when the Okinawan poet and cultural theorist Imafuku Ryūta wrote in his book, Kureorushugi (Creolism) that cultural “border-­ crossings” (ekkyō 越境) were “bringing about great changes within hitherto fixed principles of ‘place’, ‘territory’ and ‘boundary’”.1 The following year, Imafuku honed his definition within the specific context of “world literature” as an idea that would allow him to cast off the binary separation of centre and periphery, and explore the plurality of worlds that people and literatures traverse.2 In an echo of Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing of the “borderland” as a site of collective belonging wherein marginalised peoples might resist the impositions of colonial control, Imafuku introduced “trans-­border” as an opportunity to valorise the literary production of writers located outside of the canon as migrants and colonial subjects, and to forge new solidarities that are not governed by the structures of either the nation or the empire.3 While Imafuku’s intervention followed a global concern with borders within postcolonial studies, it coincided with the move to harness the language of “border crossing” to express the more figurative movement by which a writer chooses to produce fiction in a language other than their mother tongue. This move was necessitated by the growing impact that non-­ native writers of Japanese prose had upon Japanese literature in the same period. To cite the most prominent examples, in 1992 the American-­born writer Levy Hideo won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for his novel Seijōki ga kikoenai heya (A  Room Where the Star-­Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard), while in 2008 DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-2

18  The “trans-border” turn Yang Yi, a writer born in Harbin who learned Japanese as an adult, became the first non-­native writer of Japanese fiction to receive the Akutagawa Prize for her novel, Toki ga nijimu asa (A morning when time blurs). Further history was made when in 2021, Li Kotomi became the first Taiwanese writer to win the Akutagawa Prize with Higanbana ga saku shima (The island where the spider lilies bloom). These inroads have generated mixed appraisals. On one hand, even while granting their awards to Levy and Yang, the comments of some members of the Akutagawa Prize judging committee reveal greater ambivalence about the standard of their Japanese prose.4 On the other, the decision by writers to produce in Japanese has generated excitement, especially amid concerns articulated most prominently in the publication of Mizumura Minae’s Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de (When Japanese falls apart: In a century dominated by English, 2008), that amid the rising hegemony of English, furthered by the global economic and political standing of the United States, the rise of India as a former British colony, and the centrality of English in the current internet age, the fate of a “local” language such as Japanese and the literature that it might produce were at risk.5 Rather than continue these debates, my focus here lies in the impact of this turn towards “border crossing” as it has manifested in a growing scholarly interest in “trans-­border literature” (ekkyō bungaku), upon Japanese literature and literary studies in an era of translation and “world literature”. The edited volume, Ekkyō suru bungaku (Literature that crosses borders, 2009) offers one of the earliest articulations of this “trans-­border turn” within Japanese literary studies. In his editor’s introduction, Tsuchiya Masahiko, a professor of German and Comparative Literature at Osaka University, underscored “border crossing” as a quality inherent to all literature produced within the context of increased international travel and multiculturalism that has enabled both writers around the world, and their texts, to traverse hitherto uncharted linguistic spheres and share in the collective reality that globalisation presents.6 In addition to this focus on literal, spatial journeys, the contributions of Tsuchiya and his fellow authors traced more figurative crossings that might destabilise sex-­ and class-­based boundaries, and considered how boundaries might even be “dissolved” under conditions of postcolonialism and postmodernism.7 The apparent ubiquity of “border crossings” in contemporary literature might raise the question of why this trend is worthy of note. However, while any study requires a process of selection, the subjects that Tsuchiya and his contributors engaged cast light on how their project imagined and thus served to construct this literary category. These choices include the Martinique-­born writer of French, Edouard Glissant, Chicano fiction, and German “trans-­ border” fiction, following their scholarly specialisms that lie within European, Western, and Comparative literatures. However, this attention to writing produced under conditions of postcolonialism that was asserted in the editor’s introduction, does not bear out in the selection of Japanese writers: Mizumura Minae, the Swiss-­born novelist David Zopetti, and Tawada Yō ko. This omission may seem trifling but for the gap it creates between “trans-­ border

The “trans-border” turn  19 literature” focused on international writers that might connect writing in Japanese to Western literary traditions, and the origins of the term as expressed by Imafuku as a critical and potentially decolonising practice by which writers who share experiences of imperialism might forge new collectives outside of their national canons. Given that Imafuku is from Okinawa, the irony of the new “trans-­border” literature is that it makes use of a coinage whose emergence at least within the Japanese context, it ultimately excludes. One must not overstate the degree to which this divergence can be attributed to a single scholarly intervention. Nor should one deny the extent to which selections are also informed by the specific combination of skills and area of expertise in any individual scholar’s possession. However, the question of who is included and who is not matters because of the role that selections play in cultivating the fields, categories, and genres in which they are invested. In this critical context, Tsuchiya connects “trans-­ border literature” explicitly to “world literature” (sekai bungaku) as another category through which texts might “transcend the territories of national literatures”.8 However, the emphasis upon transnational writings and exclusion of multilingual examples from, for example, ethnic Korean or Okinawan literatures, betrays the fact that the image of “trans-­border” offers little with which to deconstruct those national boundaries from within. The growing commercial and critical influence that “trans-­border” carries today as a buzzword through which to promote Japanese literature’s connectedness to a world literature constructed through translation into English runs the risk of forgetting the tensions and absences that are also tied to the history of this term. To disentangle this contemporary scene, I will first track back to the 1950s and discuss the third special issue of the Iwanami kōza: Bungaku (Iwanami Essays: Literature) series published in 1954 titled “World Literature and Japanese Literature”. This series followed the “Politics and Literature Debate” of 1946–47 that unfolded within a series of roundtable discussions and special issues in the pages of the journal Ningen, and interrogated the relationship between politics and literature, particularly in relation to Japan’s imperialist past.9 The Iwanami essays tackled similar questions of war responsibility among writers of fiction, and engaged international literary and philosophical trends against a historical backdrop of independence movements, the (re)birth of nations released from empire, conflicts on the Korean peninsula, and a nascent Cold War. The full contents of the third volume of the Iwanami essays attest to this critical context.10 However, the Iwanami lectures also constituted a separate endeavour that addressed matters of world literature and translation, and thus offer a localised and historicised insight into the distinctive legacies of Japanese literary history. In the second section, I seek to reintegrate the lost possibilities of the term “trans-border” that arose in the early 1990s into the contemporary literary scene, while reading its redeployment against the concomitant rise of a “literature written in Japanese” (Nihongo bungaku) that reveals related concerns with which we can better appreciate the “trans-­border” discourse of today.

20  The “trans-border” turn The Iwanami essays: “World literature and Japanese literature” In 1953, Iwanami Shoten began publishing a series of literary essays that sought to reframe the relevance of Japanese literature amid a new, postwar and post-­occupation context.11 Appearing in April 1954, “World literature and Japanese literature” (Sekai bungaku to Nihon bungaku) was the third in this series of collected essays after “What is Literature?” (Bungaku to wa nani ka), and “Japanese society and literature” (Nihon no shakai to bungaku).12 In his editor’s introduction, Takeuchi Yoshimi established the need for reconsidering the position of Japanese literature within a world still wounded from the ravages of war. As a renowned scholar of the modern Chinese writer and critic Lu Xun, Takeuchi sought to dismantle the “skewed bias” towards Western Europe that had, as he saw it, resulted from the universal spread of cosmopolitanism. Although Japan had a strong reputation for translating foreign literature, particularly from France and Britain, this had fuelled its reputation as a “latecomer” (kōshinkoku) after the West. Takeuchi therefore proposed that the future of Japanese literature lay in leaving behind its past and re-­evaluating its relatedness to other literatures, including those of China and the Soviet Union, whose writers paid attention to the wills of their people. Takeuchi labelled this new, possible collective a “literature of the oppressed” through which writers might play an active role in facilitating the process of healing the world’s suffering (sekaiku 世界苦).13 If writers were to prevent their leaders from once again descending into totalitarian politics, Takeuchi proposed that they must “internalise ‘the suffering of the world’ into their ethnic bodies and carve it into their flesh using their own scalpels”.14 Takeuchi thus imagined writing on the side of the oppressed as a masochistic practice through which Japanese writers might come to terms with their recent history. However, when he suggested that this literary collective might also include Germany as a nation that “has licked the same bitter cup of fascism”, he betrayed an excessively euphemistic attitude to the extent of Japan’s former aggressions. If Japanese literature could carry the power to heal the wounds of war, then Takeuchi’s positioning of Japan on the side of the “oppressed” also indicates a desire to seize this opportunity to remediate the nation: a task that would require the reconstruction of more than just its literary past. Takeuchi’s references to healing connected directly to the first essay in his special edition: Nakajima Kenzō ’s “The possibility of world literature”. Nakajima’s enquiry was based on one central question: “what value does Japanese literature have when seen from the perspective of ‘world literature’?” In keeping with Takeuchi’s critical view of cosmopolitanism, Nakajima rejected the idea that world literature should collapse the boundaries between national literatures. Just as the possibility of a shared, global humanity was rooted in the fact that each person inhabited their own national context, Nakajima argued that the “worldliness” (sekaisei) of a work of literature is contingent upon the universal fact that each carries its own national identity. Indeed, the possibility of world literature resided not in shared sympathies but

The “trans-border” turn  21 rather in accepting that “we exist mutually outside of understanding” one another (tagai ni rikai no soto ni aru).15 For Nakajima, this retention of difference was paramount if reconciliation (kaishō) was to be achieved in a world “bloodstained by two great wars”. Although he wrote of a universal condition of “world suffering” (again, sekaiku), Nakajima insisted that the nature of that suffering differed from people to people, place to place. If world literature was to bring about new healing and understanding, then it would have to attend to the multiplicity of these experiences.16 This idea led Nakajima to give a central position to translation. Translation, he argued, has been embedded within Japan’s literary history ever since the Meiji era, during which distinctive value was ascribed to works of “foreign literature” (gaikoku bungaku): a trend that persisted in the rising popularity among Japanese readers of works imported from Europe and North America. This rate of consumption, however, had also shaped Japanese perspectives of the world: by unequivocally latching that image onto “the West”, these literary influences had turned Japanese attentions away from Asia, and in turn guided Japanese readers to infer that their neighbours, including China, were located “outside of the world” (sekaigai).17 While Takeuchi wrote of this “skewed bias” as a platform from which to consider new collectives, Nakajima presented more sharply the stakes of this imbalance by suggesting that when Japan is allowed to position its neighbours in this way, the next step is a repudiation of possible connectedness and it is this route, if taken to its extreme, that leads to fascism. Nakajima therefore addressed his essay to “Japanese people, as people of Asia” (Ajiajin de aru nihonjin), evidently to re-­establish this sense of relatedness that in the postwar world order appeared at risk of becoming lost.18 And yet, Nakajima’s essay fails to name any of Japan’s former colonies outright, while his interests in understanding, literature, and translation provide no space whatsoever for works of fiction written by Okinawans or by Koreans within recent memory of empire. It therefore appears that while the healing that world literature promises banks on suturing the wounds of the past, this did not mean engaging those more disruptive histories embedded in narratives of war and imperialism. At first, this omission seems striking within the context of an essay that places suffering and healing at its centre. However, it also relates to the image of Japan as a nation undergoing its own process of rehabilitation following the widespread reforms put in place during the occupation years. In other words, Nakajima and Takeuchi’s presentations of Japan and Japanese literature as global forces of healing in 1954 also indicates that in their view, Japan itself was also being healed. In this context, translation comes alive as the thread that binds the scars of the past, not only by forging connections by which Japanese literature might be read seriously outside of its own borders, but also as a means of presenting and representing the nation anew on the global stage. Nakajima is thus less concerned with the image of the world that literary translation constructs for Japanese readers than with the role it carries in shaping Japan’s image in the world. Nakajima noted that in the past, some works of

22  The “trans-border” turn Japanese fiction circulated in translation thanks to their promotion by Japanese scholars while others had depended on the whims of “foreign” readers (gaikokujin). In most cases, the international impact of these works had been all but non-­existent. However, since the Second World War, he argued, foreign nations had developed a greater interest in Japan in a “complicated sense”. Nakajima’s opaque phrasing alludes to the growing number of foreign scholars, especially from Britain and the US, who were being sent to Japan in the early years after the postwar, and who were entrusted with the task of choosing works of fiction to translate. While this climate was fuelling the production of more translations of Japanese fiction into other languages, Nakajima expressed concern about the choices that were being made. In addition to prioritising older works of literature, in Nakajima’s view these translators were guided less by aesthetic considerations such as the work’s use of language or critical value, and more by their individual interpretations of “Japan’s political reality”.19 As such, their selections could not offer the foreign reader a representative view of Japanese literature in its wider context, and thus ran the risk of misrepresenting Japan and its fictional range. Nakajima’s recognition that Japan’s global literary impact was heavily dependent upon historical and political factors also resonates with the conditions that Norma Field traced in her 1998 essay, “The Way of the World”.20 This state-­of-­the-­field essay presents a close reading of the historical and existential agendas employed in the writing of literary history. Foremost among these, it emphasises the role of the Second World War and the US occupation in informing the backdrop against which Japanese Studies had come to be practiced by the end of the twentieth century, as a project motivated towards the “scholarly rehabilitation” of Japan.21 While the educating of ordinary Japanese constituted one strand of this endeavour, literary translations of Japanese fictions into English formed another. Owing to the formidable talent of a generation of scholar-­translators, through these decades appeared the formative translations that have defined the canon of modern Japanese literature since – among them works by Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel literary laureate, and Tanizaki, a Nobel nominee. Although Field writes favourably of the “aesthetic allure” within these works that warranted their translation, she also concedes that their suitability was contingent upon their “minimal depictions” of war and of the atomic bombs, thus confirming Nakajima’s much earlier critique. This resonance continues when Field highlights that in the 1960s, emphasis was placed upon classical poetry and premodern prose that, though foundational to Japan’s literary history, also served to distract from the present moment. As she moves through history, Field’s critique also illustrates that decisions over what to translate and what not to translate are themselves subject to the passage of time, as when the “political urgency of a particular historical moment that inspired the first generation is…necessarily long gone”.22 What Field’s scholarly focus in the late 1990s in the United States brings to bear, and which lies beyond the scope of Nakajima’s concerns as a writer in Japan half a century earlier, is the fundamental role that translations and the

The “trans-border” turn  23 scholars who produced them played in the formation of Japanese Studies as a discipline, and thus, in constituting “Japan” as an object of knowledge. As Field argues, translations of Japanese fiction did not merely respond to “commercial interest” but have also provided the primary materials for generations of scholars in the decades since. The motivations of those scholars cannot be exempt from the legacy of that “complicated” interest of which Nakajima wrote in 1954. In fact, Field’s approach dovetails with Nakajima’s supposition by confirming the investment made on the part of American scholar-­translators at precisely that same time to construct a canon of “Japanese literature” that might in turn cultivate a new generation of readers who would carry Japanese literary studies into the future. Like Nakajima, Field describes a selection of available texts in translation that remains limited to a handful of modern authors from the mainstream, together with the greater weight still afforded to premodern works, including poetry and Noh plays. The main difference is that from the vantage point of 1998, Field perceives the shifting attentions towards “minority writers” who might also help to diversify the field, the publication of an anthology of Okinawan literature, for example, which would result in Southern Exposure, together with the earliest examinations of zainichi fiction. Field’s emphasis that Japanese Studies as an area of academic study has depended upon translation since its inception, in particular literary translation, makes a clear case for why both literature and translation should be taken seriously. Translations create readers, among whom are the peers, and “peers in the making” of the future field. As Field pointed out, however, the scope of those translations only extended to literary texts while giving less attention to accompanying debates that Japanese writers and scholars were themselves forming at the time. The Iwanami essays, in particular Nakajima’s contribution, provide a salient yet overlooked dialogic antecedent to Field’s later critique. From “Japanese literature” to “Literature written in Japanese” The virtual dialogue presented here between Nakajima and Field places emphasis upon the product of translation, be it a work of fiction or the image that such a text creates, but translation is also the process of transformation by which texts move between languages and can even give rise to changes within language itself. It is this idea that Kawamori Yoshizō addressed in his essay, the eighth in the Iwanami volume, titled “The various issues of translation literature”. Marking a shift from Nakajima’s more cautious thesis, Kawamori contended that “translated literature” (hon’yaku bungaku) contains a radical potential to influence Japanese writers by exposing them to new narrative styles and themes that they might “transplant” (ishoku) into their own writing. Such practices were already in evidence, he argued, among the younger generations whose fictions were reinventing the written word through the wider availability of a standardised set of kanji and new uses for the phonetic scripts. Treating translators alongside the great writers of the bundan, that elite circle whose work defined Japan’s modern literary canon from within, Kawamori

24  The “trans-border” turn made a plea to younger writers that they should turn to translated fiction for the inspiration to “destroy the Japanese language” and then, make “great efforts to construct [that language] anew”.23 Kawamori’s essay contains lengthy expositions of specific challenges and strategies for translating English vernacular and idioms into Japanese, but of greater interest is the bold provocation encapsulated within his final analysis: “I pray that a new Japanese will be born of translation. Strike that, translation must give birth to it.”24 Kawamori’s entreaty that the Japanese language and its literature had to be “remade” through translation returns us to language and translation as key concerns within the “trans-­border” literary studies of the present. Indeed, discussions of “trans-­ border” literature during the past decade have moved towards Nihongo bungaku (“literature written in Japanese”) as a neologism that allows a move beyond the restrictive, essentialist presumptions of Nihon bungaku (Japanese literature) by emphasising Japanese as the language in which works of fiction can be produced irrespective of the author’s national identity. To be sure, Tsuchiya already incorporated this term within the “trans-­border” vision of his edited volume by presenting Tawada as a Nihongo (Japanese-­ language) writer on the grounds that her acclaimed work in German makes her more than a mere “Japanese writer”. However, this definition raises its own problems given that quite apart from her prowess in other languages, when Tawada writes in Japanese she does so as a native speaker. One might also question how to locate Tawada’s fictional works penned in German in relation to this Nihongo bungaku. Kaku Nan’en further complicates this picture in his introduction to the volume Bairingaru na Nihongo bungaku: Tagengo tabunka no aida (Bilingual Japanese-­language literature: Between the multilingual and multicultural), which introduces writers of Nihongo bungaku as “non-­native” writers of Japanese prose and “writers from overseas”.25 While the modification of ‘Japanese’ with ‘bilingual’ adds an uncomfortable tension, Kaku’s definition makes Tawada’s inclusion somewhat untenable. The tensions and limits of Nihongo bungaku come into fuller focus when one reads this term against its frequent translation into English as “Japanophone literature”. True, this expression is somewhat less unwieldy than “Japanese-­ language literature” or “literature written in Japanese”, but the use of the suffix -phone also suggests a possible affinity between this branch of Japanese literary studies and related trends elsewhere within postcolonial and world literary studies, including Anglophone, Francophone, and Sinophone. The emergence of the “Francophone” and “Francophonie” as terms that refer to French speakers and writers located around the world and the variants of French that they use, such as Quebécois, followed the dissolution of the French empire in the 1960s. Similarly, Shu-­Mei Shih has reconsidered the term “Sinophone” as it straddles “both ethnic minority cultures within China and cultures of settlement and immigration outside of China”.26 As Nayoung Aimee Kwon has written, the origins of the “Japanophone” can also be traced back to the conditions of empire and the need to differentiate Japanese prose written by colonial subjects, in particular ethnic Koreans.27 A further permutation can be credited

The “trans-border” turn  25 to Kim Sŏ kpŏ m (b. 1925), who reclaimed this term in his 1972 essay Kotoba no jubaku (The manacles of language) to interrogate whether as an ethnic Korean, the act of “writing in Japanese” could ever constitute a decolonising practice.28 The evolution of the term “Japanophone” is instructive for a critique of “trans-­ border literature”. As Travis Workman has highlighted, the term Nihongo bungaku is inadequate because following the abrupt end of the Japanese empire, it was only ethnic Koreans resident in Japan, and Okinawans, who continued to navigate between their own languages and the imperial tongue.29 In other words, whereas Francophone indicates some degree of historical continuity and geographical diversity, post-­1945 writing in Japanese is overshadowed by historical discontinuity, namely the abrupt shift from empire to occupation, and a geographical boundedness to Japan’s national borders as they are drawn today. Kwon’s work furthers this critique by identifying the emergence of a “global Japanophone” whose celebration has compounded the absence of a “postcolonial Japanophone” and among whose ranks she includes Levy, Mizumura, and Tawada.30 Although the history of Nihongo bungaku predates that of “trans-­border”, both terms thus appear to have been subject to a process of revision, especially since the 1990s, that has resulted in the marginalisation, corrosion, and ultimate disappearance of the colonial past. Moreover, the need for two images of “Japanophone” exposes the fact that the effort to reimagine Nihon bungaku as Nihongo bungaku does little to alter the borders by which either body of literature is defined. For this reason, the connection to “trans-­border literature” appears necessary, not as a mere synonym for “bilingual writing in Japanese” but as a stepping-­stone by which Japanese literature might keep up with trends that are redefining other world literatures, without needing to disturb the colonial traces that haunt its past. In an examination of the “shifting borders” of Japanese literature published in English, Numano Mitsuyoshi gave credit to three groups of writers: Murakami Haruki and the Nobel laureate Ō e Kenzaburō , whose fictions moved “from inside to outside” in translation to initiate Japanese literature’s “internationalisation”; the “new phenomena” of bilingual writers such as Tawada, Mizumura, and Levy; and the “younger generation” that includes the Iranian-­born Shirin Nezammafi and Yang Yi who, he writes, chose Japanese as the language of their fictions “by their own free will”.31 This phrasing sidesteps the earlier generations of writers who had no choice but to write in Japanese as an enforced, imperial tongue. Numano’s references to the “inside” and “outside” of Japanese literature does less to reconstruct the borders than it does to further entrench their existing positions. One might also be critical of Numano’s reference to “internationalisation”, which recalls those policies of the same name (kokusaika in Japanese) that Japan popularised in the early 1990s to reshape its politics, industry, and education in ways it hoped would be favourable to Europe and the United States. In Marilyn Ivy’s critique, these “internationalisation” programmes appeared to promote “openness” and “cosmopolitan expansiveness (even while retaining the national frame)” even though in reality they sought “the thorough domestication of the foreign and the dissemination

26  The “trans-border” turn of Japanese culture throughout the world”.32 The parallel between these critiques suggests that “trans-­border” literature in the present is also guided by an intention to promote the national literature as a valuable, global, cultural commodity for the future. However, the Iwanami essays provide evidence that the past is still with us. It is possible to argue that Murakami Haruki’s work since his global debut has in fact finally fulfilled Kawamori’s hopes for a new literary language. Murakami’s global status remains indisputable today, but his 1992 interview in The New York Times Book Review also must be recalled for cementing the author’s reputed proximity to international literature and translation early in his career”.33 For it was in this interview that Murakami first admitted his teenaged aspirations to write in English despite his lack of proficiency, and professed his desire to “create a new kind of Japanese language” by transposing idioms he encountered while reading US novelists such as Raymond Chandler.34 Moreover, Murakami expressed his vision to “reconstruct our language” by doing “something new”, namely by “trying to break through the barrier of isolation so that we can talk to the rest of the world in our own words”. These ideas may have appeared radical to an Anglophone readership in the early 1990s, but by rereading the Iwanami essays, one sees that they also put forward the same ambitions that Kawamori had expressed half a century earlier. Why “world literature” now? In World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics (2021), Theo D’Haen asks “why ‘World Literature’ has come to occupy such a central place in literary studies, primarily in the US but increasingly so elsewhere, since, roughly speaking, the turn of the twenty-­first century”.35 D’Haen argues that world literature has been continually defined and redefined since Goethe first coined the term. While this applies throughout world literature’s history, for D’Haen the resurgence of this question in the 2000s, which has itself taken place on a worldwide scale, indicates that “the process of re-­positioning a number of national literatures, or perhaps even the very notion of ‘national’ literature, are/is undergoing in a changing global context”.36 D’Haen’s approach, which examines world literature in the European, (North) American, and Chinese contexts, underscores the importance of linguistic and cultural specificity in understanding how disparate literary and cultural entities construct “world literature” differently, guided by their respective needs and desires amid “shifting fates”. The confluence of factors outlined in the introduction to this chapter illustrate the corresponding context by which Japanese literature’s fate shifted in contact with renewed literary interest in relation to the nation, its borders, and its connectedness to ‘the world’. In reading across the contemporary, global context, one must also heed the lessons of Japan’s own literary past. The Iwanami lectures reveal that the

The “trans-border” turn  27 expectations placed upon Japanese literature in the present to measure up to a new, global standard have a precedent. Nakajima’s insistences that the ethnic identity of the literary work stems from its language, and that those ethnic/ linguistic borders are paramount to any meaningful imagination of “world literature”, suggest the specific historical origins that informed the anxiety within Japanese literature around a new generation of multilingual writers. At the same time, Nakajima’s unambiguous locating of Japan within Asia and his appeal to possible connections based on similarities of historical experience and political orientation remind us that in 1954, Japanese literature’s vision of the world was also under a process of construction: one that was increasingly focused on translating, learning from, and connecting to the languages and literatures of Europe and the United States. Already in Nakajima’s essay, one witnesses the seeds of tension between this shared Asian identity and the need to ground his discussion of world literature in the literary historical context of Europe and the United States. Likewise, Kawamori’s thesis only conceives of translation in relation to the languages of Europe, and English in particular. The rise of world literature within English-­ language comparative literature seems to close off the pathway to Asia once and for all. And yet, in the essay cited above, Numano Mitsuyoshi also connected the awarding in 2008 of the Akutagawa Prize to Yang Yi to her heritage within “a culture that uses Chinese characters, which are shared by Japan”.37 Numano’s tone is celebratory, however his attention to Yang’s national and linguistic identity also betrays a paradox in which the effort to reimagine Japanese literature as multilingual and diverse still relies on the proximity of other writers to the Japanese language, even when it is these writers that the greater project of Japanese literature as world literature threatens to omit. It is therefore possible to reread the specific disturbance caused by Yang’s Prize not only as a challenge to the existing borders of the national literature but also as a reminder of connections that this national literature has suppressed in its process of forging ties with a more US-­and European-­centred world literature. The connection between translation and world literature within Japanese literature precede the more recent turn highlighted in D’Haen’s work. The goal of this chapter has been to locate within Japanese literature a turn towards “trans-­border” elements that elucidates the salient dynamics of this discourse across this specific history. It is therefore also crucial to highlight the centrality of “trans-­border” imagery in contemporary and retrospective treatments of Japanese literature during the Heisei era (1989–2019). In 2009, Kawamura Minato reflected that the literature of Heisei Japan was “pregnant with a global and trans-­border nature”.38 Ten years later, Daniela Tan’s “five theses of Heisei Literature” built on Kawamura’s suggestion that “border crossing” (ekkyōsei) as “the one element that permeates almost all aspects of Heisei bungaku”.39 The difficulty here is that by asserting the ubiquity of border-­crossings within contemporary Japanese literature, one begins to lose sight of the term’s critical complexity and meaning. Nghi Ha Kien has accused the trend towards

28  The “trans-border” turn “crossing the border” of having transformed this “once highly politically charged catchword” into a depoliticized attitude of the mainstream society, referring to a phenomenon only attached to the colorful and entertaining surface of the economy of popular culture and not necessarily including any basic political questions such as institutional access, group interests, profits for whom, decision-­making process, political rights etc.40 Although Kien writes from the context of German literary and cultural studies, his critique of “border crossing” as a “catch-­all-­word and an all-­in-­one-­ solution” seems to hold value in light of these related trends in Japanese scholarship that I set out at the beginning of this chapter.41 Indeed, recalling Numano’s suggestion that for Yang and Nezammafi, Japanese “was not imposed…by irresistible force” but a language chosen of “their own free will”, one witnesses the potential for an emphasis upon spatial and linguistic borders alone to de-­historicise Japanese fiction in ways that run the risk of effacing other lines of identity, difference, language, and movement that already crisscross through that terrain. What appears missing from the contemporary scene is the emphasis that the Iwanami writers place upon pain and healing. However, Numano’s analysis culminates in the possibility of a “third vision” for deconstructing the national literature’s borders contingent on the impact of the 9.0 earthquake that struck Japan’s northeastern coast on March 11, and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown. As a pivotal moment of the Heisei era, the impact of these disasters upon contemporary Japan cannot be downplayed, and this assertion holds in the case of Japanese literature. In Chapter 2, I therefore examine the next part of the “trans-­border” story by which presumptions of Japanese literature’s globality and translatability converge with the emergence of a “post-­disaster literature” in the years since 2011 in which translation is reconceived as the connective tissue charged with the task of healing the post-­ traumatic nation. Notes 1 Imafuku, Ryūta. Kureōrushugi. (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1991), 105. 2 Imafuku, Ryūta. ‘Sekai bungaku no ryotei’. In Ekkyō suru sekai bungaku VOICES FROM BORDER, edited by Paul Bowles (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1992), 2–31. 3 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012). 4 Having criticised Yang’s prose one year earlier when her story Wan-­chan had received a nomination for the prize, on the grounds that her phrasing was “too coarse to be regarded as Japanese”, the novelist and former right-­wing Governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintarō remarked of this newer work that “her writing may have matured, but the fact that the author (of this story about Chinese students) is herself Chinese does not guarantee its literary value”. The author and critic Ikezawa Natsuki echoed this sentiment when he stated of Toki ga nijimu asa that “in terms

The “trans-border” turn  29 of skill, it was perhaps not the most perfect work”. See: https://prizesworld.com/ akutagawa/jugun/jugun139YI.htm 5 Mizumura Minae, Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō , 2008. 6 Tsuchiya Masahiko, Ekkyō suru bungaku (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2009). 7 Ibid., 2. 8 Ibid., 8. 9 For a detailed discussion of this debate, see: Michael Bourdaghs, “Early Freeze Warning: The Politics and Literature Debate as Cold War Culture”. In: Atsuko Ueda et al. (eds.), Literature Among the Ruins, 1945–1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018, 2018), 17–42. 10 The full list of essay titles and authors reads thus: Nakajima Kenzō , “The possibility of world literature” (Sekai bungaku no kanōsei); Shinmura Takeshi, “The Second Great War and literature” (Dai-­ ni ji taisen to bungaku); Kaneko Yukihiko, “Revolution and literature” (Kakumei to bungaku); Inoue Shō zō , “Fascism and literature” (Fasshizumu to bungaku); Yanaihara Isaku, “Existentialism and literature” (Jitsuzonshugi no bungaku); Nakano Shigeharu, “Literature of oppressed peoples” (Hikenpaku minzoku no bungaku); Okazaki Toshio, “Issues encompassed within Chinese Literature” (Chu ̄goku bungaku no fukumu mondai); Kawamori Yoshizō , “The various issues of translation literature” (Hon’yaku bungaku no shomondai); Minami Hiroshi, “Capitalist people, socialist people” (Shihonshugiteki ningen, shakaishugiteki ningen); Takeuchi Yoshimi, “What constitutes independence within literature?” (Bungaku ni okeru dokuritsu to wa nani ka). 11 Takeuchi Yoshimi (ed.), Sekai Bungaku to Nihon Bungaku. Iwanami Kōza. Bungaku: Dai 3-­kan. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1954). 12 This title echoes that of Sartre’s 1948 essay which was published in Japanese translation in 1952. 13 The Koj̄ ien definition of sekaiku suggests that it may approximate the German word, Weltschmerz, however the specific kanji, ku 苦 also has strong Buddhist connotations. Alas, neither Takeuchi nor Nakajima elaborate upon their use of this term. 14 Takeuchi Yoshimi, Sekai bungaku to Nihon bungaku, 19. 15 Nakajima Kenzō , “Sekai bungaku no kanōsei”, in Sekai bungaku to Nihon bungaku, edited by Takeuchi Yoshimi, 20. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 Ibid., 13. 20 Norma Field, “The Way of the World”. 21 Kawamori Yoshizō , “Hon’yaku bungaku no shomondai”, in Sekai bungaku to Nihon bungaku, edited by Takeuchi Yoshimi, 233. 22 Ibid., 254. 23 Ibid., 241. 24 Ibid. 25 Kaku Nan’en, Bairingaru na Nihongo bungaku: Tagengo tabunka no aida, (Tokyo: Sagensha, 2013), 13. 26 Shu-­mei Shih, ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’, PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 709–718. 27 Nayoung Aimee Kwon, ‘Japanophone Literature? A Transpacific Query on Absence’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 537–558. 28 See Kim Sŏ kpŏ m, ‘“Nihongo bungaku” no rekishisei’, Border crossings: The Journal of Japanese-­Language Literature Studies, https://www.bcjjl.org/upload/pdf/ jjlls-­2-­1-­4.pdf), no. 2 (2015): 4. 29 Travis Workman, ‘Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature’, PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 701–708.

30  The “trans-border” turn 30 Nayoung Aimee Kwon, ‘Japanophone Literature? A Transpacific Query on Absence’, Modern Fiction Studies, 64, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 537–558. 31 Numano Mitsuyoshi, ‘Shifting Borders in Contemporary Japanese Literature: Toward a Third Vision’. In Approaches to World Literature, edited by Joachim Küpper (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 160. A scholar also of Russian Literature, Numano actually begins his essay by claiming the impact of Dostoyevsky’s work upon Japanese letters. He upholds this argument in his collection of essays on world literature. See: Mitsuyoshi Numano, Sekai bungaku ron: Vol. 3, Tetsuya no katamari (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2020). 32 Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2–4. 33 Jay McInerney, ‘Roll Over Basho: Who Japan Is Reading, and Why (Interview with Murakami Haruki)’, New York Times Book Review, 27 September 1992, https:// www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/books/roll-­over-­b asho-­who-­j apan-­i s-­r eading-­ and-­why.html 34 Ibid. 35 Theo d’Haen, World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics. (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 28. 36 Ibid. 37 Numano Mitsuyoshi. ‘Shifting Borders in Contemporary Japanese Literature’, 156. 38 Kawamura Minato, ‘Heisei bungaku to wa nani ka: Gurō barusei to ekkyō sei o haranda bungaku’, Imidas, 9 September 2009, https://imidas.jp/jijikaitai/l-­40067-­09-­01-­g148 39 Daniela Tan, ‘Funf Thesen Zur Literature der Heisei-­Zeit’, Bunron: Zeitschrift Fur Literaturwissenschaftliche Japanforschung, no. 6 (2019): 21–56. The other features to which Tan draws attention are the increasing presence of women writers, the impact of digitalisation, the more mainstream acceptance of stylistic devices derived from horror and fantasy fiction, the development of a neo-­proletarian literature in the wake of economic uncertainty, and the recurrence of nostalgia that seeks to offset the increasingly simultaneous nature of communication. 40 Nghi Ha Kien, ‘Crossing the Border? Hybridity as Late-­Capitalistic Logic of Cultural Translation and National Modernisation’, Transversal: Polture and Culitics, 29 June 2006. 41 Numano Mitsuyoshi. ‘Shifting Borders in Contemporary Japanese Literature,’ 156.

2

Translating the literary past

Introduction: Translating disaster The Heisei era names the thirty-­year reign of the emperor Akihito. It commenced with the death of his father, Hirohito, on January 7, 1989, and ended with Akihito’s abdication of the throne on April 30, 2019. In the years since 2016, when Akihito announced his intention to stand down, narrative reflections have portrayed Heisei Japan as a nation challenged by crisis and decline. The ironic coincidence of Hirohito’s death with the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble has led social and political commentators to dub the era the “lost decades” whose stagnant legacy remains in a “lost generation” of unemployed and disenfranchised youth. As the historian Paul Dunscomb has written, the further coincidence of Hirohito’s death with the end of the Cold War also brought about changes within the global context in which Japan had been operating, and caused a collision between Japan’s rigid political and economic structures and the demands of younger, less traditionally minded generations.1 Dunscomb’s reflection, written one year prior to Akihito’s abdication, characterises the changes that took place during Heisei-­era Japan in reference to terms such as decline, tribulation, and resilience that suggest sustained periods of difficulty and gradual change. However, he also highlights certain catastrophic events that punctuated this period, most notably the Hanshin-­Awaji Earthquake that shook the area around Kobe with a magnitude of 6.9 on the early morning of January 17, 1995; the release of sarin gas onto the Tō kyō subway on March 20 of that same year by followers of the quasi-­religious sect Aum Shinrikyō (“Supreme Truth”) that killed thirteen commuters and injured many more; and the “triple disaster” of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 and triggered a nuclear meltdown, and which collectively marked the “signature moment of Heisei Japan”.2 The Heisei era provides a strategic framing for my enquiry here given that its dates coincide with Japanese literature’s transformation from an object of concern according to the Japan Foundation in 1988, to the subject of international celebration symbolised by The Emissary’s success at the National Book Awards in 2018. This context moreover offers a historical grounding from DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-3

32  Translating the literary past which to investigate the anomaly of this situation, which runs counter to the terms of loss and disaster with which the Heisei era has been more closely associated. All but one of the works that I analyse in the following three chapters were written during the three decades following 1989; the exception being Yi Yang-­ji’s novel Kazukime (1983), which I discuss in Chapter 4. However, my intention is not to delineate a theory or metanarrative of “Heisei Literature” per se. Rather, the goal of this chapter is to interrogate what other factors have shaped contemporary Japanese literature in recent years and examine what other problems of history these new demarcations reflect. If the narrative of Japanese literary success during the Heisei era has been facilitated by renewed energy and excitement around translation, then it is necessary to examine what translation means in this shifting literary terrain, which texts this new approach privileges, and which it overlooks. While the previous chapter focused on the “trans-­border” turn that arose since 2008, my focus here lies on the development of a “post-­disaster literature” that followed the devastating earthquake of March 11, 2011 and its aftermath. These disasters affected writers and scholars in three profound and interrelated ways. The first observable impact is material: recall that the two translated works of Japanese fiction to win National Book Awards in 2018 and 2020 were both written after 2011 and allude to that real-­world event either euphemistically, as in the haunting presence of some prior catastrophe in Tawada’s The Emissary, or more directly, as in Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, whose narrative is told by a ghost of the tsunami. The second pertains to genre, since the publication in 2013 of Kimura Saeko’s Shinsaigo bungaku ron: Atarashii Nihon bungaku no tame ni (Post-disaster literature: Towards a new Japanese literature) concretised “post-­disaster literature” as an urgent scholarly concern.3 Third, the reference in Kimura’s subheading to newness calls attention to the possibility that the disasters might play a role in regenerating Japanese literature at large. The idea that “post-­disaster” literature derives from a distinct, catastrophic moment may seem at first unrelated to the “trans-­border” turn whose roots lie in a wider reappraisal of translation as a gateway to global success. However, the publication on March 11, 2021 of Sekai bungaku toshite no shinsaigo bungaku (‘Post-disaster literature’ as world literature) ten years to the date of the major earthquake affirmed a degree of connection between the two.4 In fact, an awareness of the wider world beyond the nation has lain within “post-­disaster” literature since its inception. Kimura had already suggested this connection in her second volume on this topic, Sonogo no shinsaigo bungaku (Post-disaster literature: A reappraisal), by emphasising the global impact of the triple disasters and suggesting that since post-­disaster fictions “take on the task of history”, they can be read as “a pending question shared by the world, and a matter of primary concern within the world’s literature”.5 However, one might also consider other borders that have proven instrumental in the construction of “post-­disaster literature”, and how these compare to the “trans-­border” imaginary that I have already articulated. Firstly, mirroring the geospatial boundaries that “trans-­border” literature must cross, post-­disaster literature is

Translating the literary past  33 concerned with a temporary boundary that manifests as a historical moment of rupture. Secondly, while trans-­border literary studies emphasise the translation of the text, Kimura’s claim that since the earthquake and tsunami no work of literature can be read in the same way as it was before, suggests an alternative yet resonant translation of the reader whose perspective is indelibly transformed by their knowledge of the disasters even before their interaction with the text. Kimura’s framing suggests that the “post” of “post-­disaster” marks an irreversible transformation of Japanese literature into a perpetual, “post-­disaster” mode. In this, she connects the impact of the disasters to that of the “postwar” as the nearest, historical precedent to have torn through the texture of modern Japanese fiction. As she wrote in her first volume on this topic, “[j]ust as wartime literature is completely different from postwar literature, through the experience of the Great East Japan earthquake, something has been lost, and something has been born”.6 To be sure, lexical similarity in Japanese between the “postwar” (sengo) and “post-­disaster” (saigo, shinsaigo) suggests one way in which the former might haunt the latter. This resonance has also found expression in subsequent academic engagements with “post-­disaster” fiction including in English, such as Rachel DiNitto’s Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster, which places “atomic bomb literature” (genbaku bungaku) as an “important touchstone and subtext” for reading literature since “3/11”.7 DiNitto’s analysis affords a useful, wider intertextual framework in which to locate “Fukushima fiction” beyond singular methodologies connected to, for example, disaster literature, and draw particular attention to resonant nuclear themes. As DiNitto highlights, “[t]he birth in 2011 of a new generation of nuclear victims (hibakusha) was a shocking déjà vu”.8 On one hand, “post-­disaster literature” presents an opportunity to engage history anew. However, the opportunity to “take on” history also opens the danger of revising history in ways that have the potential to ignore other stories whose connectedness to the catastrophic events of 2011 appears less immediate or clear. For example, one might interrogate the stakes when literary discourse foregrounds the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that can tend to emphasise Japan’s experience as a historical victim and constructs a loop between 2011 and 1945 that threatens to obscure Japan’s role as a perpetrator in acts of war. In Sengo to iu ideorogı ̄: rekishi, kioku, bunka (The ideology of ‘postwar’: History, memory, culture), Kō Youngran highlights this problem with respect to the term “postwar” (sengo). For Kō , the “postwar” must be viewed as a “construct” since by claiming its “point of origin” (kiten) to be Hirohito’s statement of surrender broadcast on August 15, 1945, it has given way to memories [that] have been edited according to a bias that is limited to the war with America. Moreover, this agrees with Japan’s narrative of the end of the war (shūsen). This imagination does not extend to the era during which Japan expanded its colonies, or the time when it was succeeding in war.9

34  Translating the literary past The Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun similarly notes in his book Okinawa ‘sengo’ zero nen (Okinawa ‘postwar’ year zero) that the “postwar” era is a fallacy constructed through the image of Japan’s “peace” constitution and the relative stability in daily life brought about by Japan’s economic growth which at the same time has allowed the public to ignore the outbreaks of war and ongoing tensions across many parts of Asia since 1945, and the reality that Okinawa Prefecture remains under occupation by US military forces.10 It is impossible to expect that every work of Japanese literature can address both the nation’s past aggressions and the suffering it caused from the perspective of its victims. However, together, Kō and Medoruma indicate a bias within historical narratives of Japan’s “postwar” era that tilts towards the US and away from Asia against which we might also consider the resonant term “post-­ disaster” more critically. To begin with, one might consider the connections upon which “post-­disaster literature” draws. For example, a survey of scholarly works produced in the years since 2011 reveals a tendency to present works of literature and films from the US and, to a smaller extent, Europe, as relevant intertexts, without exploring possible connections to the wealth of productions by writers and filmmakers in Asia following such catastrophic events as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the tsunami that devastated the Indonesian coast at Banda Aceh, or the earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan Province in 2008.11 A separate but simultaneous line of enquiry within post-­disaster literary studies emphasises the possible relevance of methodologies developed in relation to literary responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001, aided by the coincidental symmetry of “3/11” and “9/11” when these dates are abbreviated according to Japanese and American conventions. If the line that separates the “pre-­” and “post-­” disaster periods of literature has re-­entrenched certain biases within referential points chosen to further Japanese literature and its associated academic field, then there are signs that awareness of the disasters is also causing scholars to reframe the literary past along similar lines. This dimension finds explicit expression in DiNitto’s description of the 2011 disasters as a “defining moment for contemporary fiction, jolting it out of the twenty-­year malaise that had followed the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 1990s”.12 If this claim can be said to hold true of Japanese literature in the mainstream, it bears noting that during the years between 1988 and 2000, an unprecedented number of ethnic Korean and Okinawan writers earned recognition from the Akutagawa Literary Prize, including Sakiyama Tami, who was nominated for the award in 1988 and 1989, and whose work I take up in Chapter 3; and Yi Yang-­ji, who won in 1988 with Yuhi, one of two novels that I discuss in Chapter 4.13 After 2000, however, margins falls into decline again until Yang Yi’s win in 2008, which as I discussed in Chapter 1, turned attentions to “trans-­border” writing within a more global literary vision. At its crudest, “post-­disaster” literature therefore seems to re-­enact certain trends that I traced with respect to “trans-­border” approaches in the previous chapter, and which favour strengthening connections between Japanese

Translating the literary past  35 literature and the West at the risk of marginalising others. The following sections of this chapter further this argument by reading two, short, non-­fiction pieces by contemporary authors that cast light on this function of the pre-­and post-­3.11 divide. The first is a short essay titled “Lost things: A prohibition against forgetting” and penned in 2003 by Sakiyama Tami, another Okinawan writer contemporary with Medoruma Shun, whose critical work I cited above. The second is a speech that Murakami Haruki delivered upon receiving the International Catalunya Prize in June 2011, “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer”. While both essays promote a humanistic plea that Japan should recall the lessons of history, reading them together shows how writing before and after “3.11” can remember the past differently. While resisting the tendency to relativise the words of a mainstream Japanese male author with those of a female writer from Okinawa, the differences in how these words have been received also allows a deeper inspection of the problems of translation set out in the preceding chapter. History revisited: “Lost things: A prohibition against forgetting” Sakiyama Tami is best known as a writer of fiction but throughout her career she has also published short essays and critiques for local newspapers and literary journals. Her first collection of these writings, Nantō sho ̄kei (Vignettes from the southern islands), was published in 1998. The title encapsulates the setting of Sakiyama’s early fictional stories, many of which unfold on small, unnamed islands that are at once reminiscent of the Okinawan archipelago yet subvert the dominant associations of Okinawa’s tropical, ‘healing’ landscape into a hostile environment defined by bottomless black seas and an aggressively searing sun. The vignettes contained within this first volume of essays, almost all of which fall under two pages in length, offer quasi-­autobiographical perspectives that ground the tone of Sakiyama’s writing within her lived experiences and reveal her love of Okinawan folk songs and jazz that inform the rhythms and musicality of her words. Sakiyama’s second essay collection, Kotoba no umareru basho (The place where words are born) was published in 2004.14 This second volume appeared similar to Nantō shōkei in terms of format, comprising short, literary essays this time accompanied by critical reviews of recently published fiction by other Okinawan authors including Medoruma.15 Although several individual pieces in Kotoba had already been printed in Okinawan newspapers and literary magazines, the single volume was highly anticipated by readers of Sakiyama since it followed her polemic essay Shimakotoba de kachāshı ̄ (“Inciting with island words”, 2002) that put forward an explicitly terroristic strategy for decolonising modern Okinawan fiction in the wake of 9.11 through the use of a distinctive vernacular, and two works of fiction – Yuratiku yuritiku (To-­ing and flow-­ing) and its prequel Hotara panasu yoteki (Dregs of the tale of Hotara) – written in this revamped and radical literary language.16 As well as offering insights into the apparently new direction that Sakiyama’s writing was taking,

36  Translating the literary past Kotoba registered a more critical tone that situated the challenge of inscribing Okinawa’s multilingual breadth and particular sounds in written Japanese, against the pressing concerns of history and memory on individual, local, national, and international scales. “Lost things: A prohibition against forgetting” is a very short essay embedded within the pages of Kotoba but it is arguably one of the most important in the collection.17 Sakiyama begins by painting herself in caricature as a lifelong “scatterbrain” (turubayā, an Okinawan term that she follows with a translation into Japanese as bon’yari) forever losing her purse despite her low income as a “cram school” (juku) teacher. However, in the penultimate paragraph, she changes gear from berating her own forgetfulness to questioning the stakes of public memory loss. If all that was lost was some personal belonging, that would be the end of it, but I could swear that within communal history there is something called public memory that must never be forgotten. We have an absolute imperative to remember the mistakes of that tragic war and never repeat the experiences of “Hiroshima”, “Nagasaki”, and “Okinawa”. However, political circumstances in recent years both around the world and within Japan seem to be conveniently forgetting, or doctoring, even those experiences that must be remembered, and deliberately pushing their agendas to rationalise that violent history once again.18 The original publication date of this essay is August 31, 2003, just one month after Japan’s parliament under Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō approved the dispatch of Self-­Defence Forces (SDF) to support the United States’ military campaign in Iraq. Sakiyama’s direct target is therefore the implications of this decision in fuelling conservative campaigns to delete Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution that since 1947 has demanded Japan to renounce its right to bear an offensive military. In the closing paragraph, however, Sakiyama furthers her counterattack by referring to two commemorative dates whose origins lie in 1945: irei no hi 慰霊の日, the “day of consoling the spirits of the dead” (otherwise translated as “Memorial Day”), which is marked locally each year on June 23 to remember the official end of the Battle of Okinawa; and shūsen kinenbi 終戦記念日, which names the national day of commemoration for the “end of the war” held annually across Japan on August 15. As Sakiyama continues: Here in Okinawa, the recent occasions of irei no hi and shūsen kinenbi that followed soon after, felt less like pleas for the peace of humankind and more like ceremonies for deepening sadness. What are we supposed to do when faced with war memories that are in the process of being twisted and forgotten? If I were to suggest creating an Article for those memories that must not be forgotten, and promulgating a prohibition order against forgetfulness for the future of humanity, would you laugh it off ?19

Translating the literary past  37 Sakiyama foregrounds her vantage point from within Okinawa, and the chronological ordering of these two dates puts Okinawa first. Since irei no hi is only commemorated in Okinawa, Sakiyama’s essay also hints at the imbalance that commonly privileges the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the national memory, including in the contemporary, post-­disaster world. Sakiyama’s essay also arrived at the culmination of a turning point within Okinawan literature (Okinawa bungaku). For Nakahodo Masanori, who with the late Professor Okamoto Keitoku remains one of the most important figures within modern Okinawan literary studies, the turn of the twenty-­first century saw a noticeable increase in the attention given to writing from Okinawa. In a round table also in 2003, Nakahodo cited as evidence the publication of key works, including the Okinawa bungaku sen: Nihon bungaku no ejji kara no toi (Selected works of Okinawan literature: Questions from the edge of Japanese literature). In response, the novelist Saegusa Kazuko expressed her high expectations that while “our country’s literature (watashitachi no kuni no bungaku) has been losing its sense of tension (kinchok̄ an), Okinawan literature seems unique in possessing the ability to concentrate its energies into generating works of thematic substance”.20 Saegusa thus labelled the early 2000s as a “turning point” for Okinawan fiction and suggested optimism for the decades to come. While Saegusa’s assessment of the national literature resonates with the metanarrative of Japanese literature’s malaise and recovery cited above, her words also witness the opportunity for the roots of that rejuvenation to emerge from within its margins. Nakahodo’s analysis is instructive for re-­reading Sakiyama’s essay here thanks to his critical weaving between Saegusa’s notion of a “turning point” and a dialogue on the joint topic of “Atomic bomb literature and Okinawan literature” conducted between the cultural and literary critic Komori Yō ichi, the writer Inoue Hisashi, and Matsushita Hirofumi, a professor of literature at Chikushi Jogakuen.21 For Nakahodo, if it had once seemed daring to consider these two genres together, the pairing was now warranted following the achievement of Ō shiro Tatsuhiro to become the first writer from Okinawa to win the Akutagawa Literary Prize in 1967, which established “Okinawan literature” as a solid strand of the fiction produced during the Showa period (1936–1989). Nakahodo also pointed to textual and thematic silences that haunt in resonant ways works of fiction that write of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa.22 However, Komori emphasised a key distinction since “while Okinawa has come to be narrated in multiple ways, there remain many urgent cries sealed both within stories of the war and the humiliation (kutsujoku) of Okinawa’s postwar narrative”.23 In response, Matsushita insisted that writers from Okinawa must find a language through which to unleash those cries that apparently “have no bearing upon Japanese memory”.24 Matsushita’s point thus highlights the gap between mainstream Japanese memories of the war and those of its colonies and neighbours: a difference that also manifests in Sakiyama’s juxtaposition of the Okinawan observance of irei no hi alongside the national commemoration of the “end of the war”.

38  Translating the literary past These historical, political, and literary critical contexts imbue Sakiyama’s references to “public memory” (which she writes in katakana as paburikku memorı ̄) and “communal history” (kōkyo ̄ no rekishi) with multiple layers of meaning. Sakiyama’s romanisation of an English term alongside the Japanese kōkyō, which might also be translated as “public”, layers a dimension of multilingual ambiguity onto her critique of the vagaries of memory and memorialisation. Sakiyama’s sudden shift from comically blithe irritation at her own absentmindedness to more rigid language also produces a stark contrast that accentuates her fears over the double threat whereby individual memories are corroded, not only by the effects of ageing but also by the targeted efforts of political actors to rewrite the past on the national and international stage. The reference to “war memories…being twisted and forgotten” anticipates the increasing fervour of nationalist, historical revisionism that Sakiyama takes up most explicitly in her series of seven short stories that were first published between 2006 and 2008, and rereleased in 2017 in the single volume, Kuja Phantasms. As my analysis in Chapter 3 reveals, these complex, interwoven narratives run counter to the demands of right-­wing historical revisionists for a simple, linear account of national history, promoting instead alternative histories told through the polyvocal and haunted spaces of Kuja. But already in “Lost things”, Sakiyama’s parodic twisting of legal language suggests the magnitude of what is at stake when personal amnesia, collective history, and “public memory” collide – and the task of the writer to fight back. History revised: “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer” On June 11, 2011, Murakami Haruki spoke to an audience in Barcelona as the recipient of the International Catalunya Prize. Unlike Murakami’s many prior accolades that honour his work as a writer of fiction, the International Catalunya Prize celebrates “individuals who have contributed to the development of cultural, scientific and humane values around the world”.25 In his acceptance speech, “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer” (Higenjitsu-­teki na musōka toshite), Murakami addressed the disasters that had struck northeastern Japan just three months earlier, taking aim at the government and national electric companies for imposing the view that Japan needs to rely upon nuclear technology, and at the Japanese people who should have taken collective responsibility for the “many victims who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki” by saying “‘no’ to the atom”.26 Murakami’s speech has been commended for having “contributed to the resetting of the antinuclear agenda in Japan”.27 However, the writer also faced accusations that his retroactive chastising of Japan’s nuclear agenda ignores a body of literature and a keen antinuclear movement that has continued to develop since 1945”.28 My interest in Murakami’s speech lies not in questioning the motives behind the author’s antinuclear critique but rather in the manner with which his language appears to construct a limited and hegemonic national identity. Although the Catalunya Prize does not require Murakami to represent the nation,

Translating the literary past  39 throughout his speech Murakami refers to “we Japanese” (wareware nihonjin), “the Japanese people”, and a “Japanese mindset” (nihonjin no seishinsei), whose image he typifies as “a people who tend not to get angry easily” and “the only people in history to experience the blast of an atomic bomb”.29 The brevity and clarity of this imagery meets the demands of a public speech presented on an international platform. However, Murakami also frames these references with his response to the triple disaster, thus drawing parallels between these events that foreshadow the trend within contemporary, post-­disaster discourse as to how those historical connections are imagined and retold. In “Unrealistic Dreamer”, Murakami emphasises the monogatari, or act of storytelling, as that which might weave together these two, historical points. As a “professional writer”, Murakami places himself within in a collective effort to plant vibrant new stories and make them sprout and flourish. Those stories will become our shared story. Like the songs that are sung when sowing the fields, our stories should have rhythms that encourage the people as they carry out their work. Professional writers took up that role in the past. We supported the rebuilding of Japan after it was reduced to scorched earth by war. We must return to that starting point again.30 This reference to a “starting point…scorched by war” suggests both the historical moment and the physical space of Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, the site where the first atomic bomb landed. However, to speak of August 1945 as a “starting point” implies a temporal reset that recapitulates the same misgivings against which Kō and Medoruma warned above. The desire for a new, “shared story” with which to “rebuild” the nation also indicates the desire for repair and healing in the wake of disaster and trauma, and the role that literature might undertake in that process of remediation. However, the possibility of collective narrative is always already limited by the community that it imagines and people it includes. As Oka Mari reflected in her study of memory and narrative, when public memory recalls the atomic bombs, the image of those who suffered is overwhelmingly, ethnically Japanese, while Japan’s “other” war dead are condemned to fall out of public consciousness through death, silencing, and repression.31 The ethnic Korean writer, Kyō Nobuko, echoed these sentiments in her acclaimed, lyrical work, Koe: Sennen saki ni todoku hodo ni (Voices that may resound for one thousand years), in which she wrote of initial responses to the 2011 disasters: Immediately around the world, beautiful, rhythmical phrases rang out with slogan-­like familiarity: “Fight on, Japan” (ganbarō nippon), “connectedness” (kizuna), “the Japanese nation is strong” (nihon wa tsuyoi kuni). But what of the countless voices that those strong assertions erase? What of the countless voices that are scattered by the irresponsible forces that bind those phrases? Have we become so ignorant? In this here and now, where are the words to accommodate the voices that we really need to hear?32

40  Translating the literary past The juxtaposition of Sakiyama’s short essay and Murakami’s speech provide one illustration of the lost voices to which Oka and Kyō are attuned. In simple terms, while “Lost things” speaks of “the experiences of ‘Hiroshima’, ‘Nagasaki’, and ‘Okinawa’,” Murakami’s writing in June 2011 makes space only for the “the horrific results of those nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. My goal is not to seek integration for Okinawan texts into a “post-­disaster” literature; it is impossible to invoke every possible referent in a short speech. However, amid the ethical calls to solidarity that cut across the popular slogans repeated by Kyō , Murakami’s speech, and the growing interest in post-­disaster literature that privileges certain intertextual relations, the absence of Okinawa suggests a possible danger of which Sakiyama’s essay already warned in 2003. This limitation is related in part to the dominant framing of “3/11” as a singular, transformative, and catastrophic event. In Stef Craps’s analysis, the adherence to a “traditional, event-­based model of trauma” derives from a Eurocentric paradigm that emerged out the history of Western modernity.33 The issue is that these approaches occlude alternative structures of trauma such as racism, colonialism, or military occupation, and thus “marginalise or ignore traumatic experiences of non-­Western or minority cultures”.34 If it appears on the surface untenable to connect such a critique to the context under examination here, it bears reminding that the foundational texts of Japanese post-­disaster literary and cultural studies emphasised commonalities and connections with disastrous events that occurred in the West, with 9/11 as an important, contemporary touchstone. And, in foregrounding cultural productions from the US and Europe rather than from Asia as possible intertexts, those earlier approaches have learned from Western scholarly models. Just as Kyō ’s words expressed concern for the lost voices of the disasters, it also seems productive to contemplate how the foregrounding of a Western articulation of trauma within the early development of Japanese post-­disaster literature, and the related expectation that post-­disaster fiction today epitomises what might be termed “trauma literature” today, have marginalised other expressions of traumatic experience to be found in Japanese prose produced both before and after 2011. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said proposed reading contrapuntally, a term borrowed from music, as a means of teasing out those elements that lie in the margins and gaps of a text and which betray the structures of colonialism that underpin the central narrative and its presumptions.35 Said offers the example of Sir Thomas Bertram, the protagonist’s benefactor in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, who is also a plantation owner and beneficiary of the slave trade. Contrapuntal reading relies on an understanding of what a canonical text might elide and an effort to heed those silences; to articulate both what the dominant narrative oppresses and those aspects that are hidden but which might offer some mode of resistance. This attention to possible counterpoints underpins each of the textual analyses that follow in the remaining chapters of this book. However, here I have attempted to read Murakami’s speech together with Sakiyama’s essay as a test case which, following Said, might pave the way towards decolonising “post-­disaster” Japanese literary studies.

Translating the literary past  41 An event-­based image of trauma anticipates that Japan’s former and present colonies are unrelated to the “3.11” disaster zone, owing in part to their geographical separation. However, we might heed Michael Dylan Foster’s reminder that [f]or all its randomness, disaster (and recovery) rarely affects people equally. Often it lays bare the biases and fissures of our communities, highlighting structural and economic inequities, exacerbating existing prejudices of race, gender, religion, and other factors. Although we may all be survivors, our distinct and often incompatible experiences of the  “same” disaster drive home the difficulties of sharing our stories, reminding us of the challenges of empathy.36 Okinawa lies over 1,750km from Fukushima and did not experience any tremors that day. However, Chris Nelson bears witness to a different sort of impact in his recollection written in the early aftermath of the disasters that “the tides of distant events… stirred the rhythms of everyday life” in Okinawa as telephone calls, news reports, anxious travellers, and refugees seeking respite from ensuing aftershocks and fears over airborne radiation, all streamed into the islands.37 Slogans such as “Let’s go, Japan!” decorated the sides of buses, ostensibly to promote Okinawans’ inclusion in the national community and solicit their support in the recovery. Nelson’s account exposes how the supporting role expected from Okinawa was not only possible from its geographical distance from the epicentre but was also facilitated by the presence of Japanese Self-­Defence Force and US military bases that had the material means – ships, aircraft – with which to transport much-­needed supplies to the disaster zone. In Nelson’s reflection, this scenario constituted [a]n ambivalent moment for many Okinawans, stirring their own memories of kindness and exploitation. They know that these same airmen and Marines, their jobs completed, will return to the bases that have dominated the Okinawan landscape since the end of the World War II.38 The reference to kindness and exploitation also highlights the expectation of Okinawa as a chain of “healing islands” (iyashi no shima) that was promoted in the 1990s tourist boom and which was itself informed by the mainland’s colonialist and quasi-­orientalist gaze. This is not to ignore those scholarly enquiries that have turned attention to the shared, colonial imposition of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima located in Japan’s north east, and the burden of US military bases that Okinawa is forced to bear in the south west.39 It is also important to note that Kimura’s second volume does include a brief reference to a short story by Medoruma Shun, titled Denreihei (“Army Messenger”, 2004), in which an Okinawan man is haunted by a headless figure dressed in Japanese military attire.40 Kimura’s

42  Translating the literary past aim is less to elucidate any “post-­disaster” feature from within Medoruma’s work than to underscore the multiple ways in which memory and trauma can manifest in literary works. This brief reference suggests the ways in which post-­ disaster literary approaches carry within themselves the potential to evolve and account for more diverse articulations of memory. By extension, it suggests a pathway by which examples both from within the Japanese literary mainstream and its margins might write back against the Eurocentric expectations of trauma theory; a problem to which this chapter will return. Here, it is necessary to connect this attempt to bring Sakiyama and Murakami’s voices together and the interrelated issues of disaster, trauma, literature, and healing that they raise to my central concern: translation. If, as DiNitto’s work highlights, Murakami is influential to the extent that he could “put the Fukushima accident and questions of responsibility on the global map in a way that few can”, one might apply the same thinking with respect to the limited community of “we Japanese” that “Unrealistic Dreamer” constructs on an international stage and the stories that it might share.41 While the global accessibility of Murakami’s speech can be accredited to his success as a widely translated author, which in turn fuels a demand to keep his words available via open online access in translated form, Sakiyama’s multilingual turubayā remains within the pages of a book yet to be translated, and thus constitutes one of those lost voices whose residues are at risk of becoming more difficult to see in Japan’s post-­3/11 literary terrain. Healing the wounds In Teikoku no bōrei: Nihon bungaku no seishin chizu (Ghosts of empire: Mapping the spirit of Japanese literature), Marukawa Tetsushi traces the spectral formations of nation and empire that have constructed, and been constructed by, modern Japanese literature.42 Published in 2004, the same year as Sakiyama’s essay collection, Marukawa’s book locates his task of reading within the “dead of night”, by which he describes the dark period since 9/11 in which multiple dead have emerged. Out of fear that the generation who can remember the Second World War are dying out and taking with them our chances to inherit their stories, Marukawa stresses the “need to be aware of this deep, black darkness so that we can recognise with clarity those ‘ghosts’ for what they are”.43 While Marukawa is concerned with the disappearing residues of the wartime past, the death toll that followed the catastrophes of March 11th, 2011, and the nationalist undertones to be found in early recovery efforts provide a context in which his imperatives also hold true in the “post-­disaster” present. Trauma theory has in the context of post-­disaster literary approaches promised one way of broaching this impasse. DiNitto’s work, for example, examines works of literature in concentric circles radiating out from the epicentre of the disaster zone and considers how traumatic themes manifest across those different distances and perspectives. DiNitto also argues how successful narratives of cultural trauma can bind together even disparate figures into a collective

Translating the literary past  43 that suffers a specific event or mourns a particular loss, while her readings of specific literary works show how those narratives can help to delineate who that community includes and excludes.44 Roman Rosenbaum has presented a further ethical dimension predicated on healing, by suggesting that “[b]y exposing people’s deep trauma, the primary function of post-­3/11 literature in Japan has become palliative care”.45 The title of a monograph by Chiba Kazumiki echoes this notion by asking, “Can contemporary literature heal the ‘wounds of disaster’?”46 The suggestion that literature can help to heal the (national) community in the wake of disaster brings renewed urgency to the development of literary studies in the Heisei era overall. However, as argued above, the incorporation of trauma theory into post-­disaster literary studies demands caution because it follows a model by which Japanese texts – those which are included – are employed in the service of testing a theory established elsewhere. This trajectory can be traced in the chronology by which Japanese medical practitioners co-­opted the English term “trauma” (torauma) into their lexicon only in the 1990s to replace the more euphemistic “wounds of the heart” (kokoro no kizu) as a name for mental conditions and signs exhibited by survivors of the atomic bombs, among others.47 The attention to “healing” (iyashi) as a buzzword in Japan followed in the 1990s in response to the suffering from economic collapse and other social ills, but this was also in tandem with a “traumatic turn” that emerged within North American humanities disciplines following the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History in 1991.48 There are other good reasons to be cautious of this recourse to trauma and healing in the service of post-­disaster literary studies. Yutaka Suga has flagged the ethically compromised standpoint of researchers and experts who flock to regions affected by disaster ostensibly driven by empathy and a desire to provide support, and yet also stand to profit in terms of their professional development.49 While Suga is engaging his field of cultural anthropology, his critique raises an uncomfortable question to the writers and scholars whose work connects to post-­disaster literature and its study: which of course, includes myself. Anne Rothe underlines another, biting critique by suggesting that the ensuing misappropriation of trauma discourse from the fields of medicine and psychology to diagnose literary and culture phenomena is nothing shy of “irresponsible nonsense”.50 Rothe’s language rails against the specific Western context of trauma studies linked to the Holocaust, and especially Caruth’s work referred to above. However, the questions that arise from her description of “the celebration of trauma as a quasi-­sacred icon of ontological but inherently unknowable truth” and the “unethical” applications of this methodology hold value across contexts where disaster, narrative, and the scholarly intersect.51 Of course, these should not only concern literary and scholarly approaches in the Japanese post-­disaster vein but are relevant to related work in the wake of other traumatic events and experiences. The growing symbiosis between world and post-­disaster literary approaches matters because both are predicated on the image of translation as a means of

44  Translating the literary past border-­crossing, in the former, and healing, in the latter. By drawing this figurative comparison, I do not mean simply to offer “border-­crossing” and healing as metaphors of one another, resonant though they are. Rather, I witness in this resonance an expectation that translation in the literal sense might offer a means of actual healing for post-­disaster Japan. To wit, as DiNitto has argued, Japanese fiction writers have turned “a disaster into narratives of trauma that speak to the concerns of global, national, and local audiences”, but this is facilitated by the work of translators who help to transport those works composed in Japanese to a wider, more international readership.52 The discussions in the previous chapter and this have each traced a specific moment within contemporary literary history whose contributions have re-­ energised Japanese literature during the last three decades: first, the “trans-­ border” turn; and second, the 2011 disasters. While there is no causality between these two events, the contemporary merging of post-­disaster world literature and the collaborations of key scholars that are facilitating that development, attests to their inherent resonances and sympathies. To be specific, in both world and post-­disaster approaches the outlook of Japan’s national literature appears to have become more international, or global. Second, this globality is most obviously realised through translation. Third, this desire for translation is rooted in a sense of postmodern crisis or disaster and is modelled on an idea of traumatic closure, or healing. This summary suggests that for all its presumed novelty, the current climate in fact rearranges components that were already being debated in 1954 in relation to Japan’s national literature, world literature, translation, and the need to find therein the means for resolving global suffering (sekaiku). Moreover, as in 1954, the opportunity by which Japanese literature might provide healing also reveals that it, too, demands translation as part of that healing process. As the analyses above indicate, the healing properties of post-­disaster world fiction are contingent upon a revised literary history that excludes those texts that will not translate into the tools of repair. To lay out these stakes in explicit terms, the literary discourse that presents “3/11” as a moment of sudden transition has the potential to distract from other injustices and states of crisis that existed prior to the disasters and which continue today. The tendency to connect the series of disasters that began on March 11, 2011 to the atomic bombs of August 1945 as a resonant moment of historical rupture also carries the potential to reimagine the history of those disasters in keeping with a specific, dominant narrative of Japanese history, while further suturing the wounds of those traumatic events by connecting Japanese “post-­disaster” literature to an imaginary world literature through the work of translation. Having established the stakes of this field, I now embark upon a series of close readings of literary texts that resist the urge towards narrative closure and healing, and revel instead in the realms of cacophony, unspeakable gaps, and open wounds. In the next chapter I begin with Sakiyama Tami’s Kuja phantasms, whose portrayals of the ghostly, US military base town offer a space out of which the voices of the dead might confront the threat of their own erasure and find a way to be heard in the world.

Translating the literary past  45 Notes 1 Paul Dunscomb, ‘The Reign of Emperor Akihito, 1989–2019: A History in Five Key Words’, Education About Asia 23, no. 3 (2018): 33–38. 2 Ibid., 35. 3 Kimura, Saeko. Shinsaigo bungaku ron: Atarashii nihon bungaku no tame ni. (Tō kyō : Seidosha, 2013). 4 Kimura, Saeko, and Anne Bayard-­Sakai, eds. Sekai bungaku toshite no shinsaigo bungaku. Tō kyō : Akashi shoten, 2021. 5 Kimura Saeko, So no go no shinsaigo bungaku ron. (Tō kyō : Seidosha, 2018). 6 Kimura, Shinsaigo bungaku ron, 9. 7 DiNitto, Rachel. Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2019, 4. The term “3/11” regularly appears in this context as a numerical abbreviation of March 11th, the date on which the first earthquake struck. 8 Ibid., 5. 9 Kō Yonran. “Sengo” to iu ideorogı ̄: Rekishi, kioku, bunka. Tō kyō : Fujiwara Shoten, 2010, 10. 10 Medoruma Shun, Okinawa ‘sengo’ zero-­ nen (Tō kyō : Nihon Hō sō Shuppan Kyō kai, 2005). 11 This is despite the existence of several, equally valid and worthy intertexts, including: Feng Xiaogang’s 2010 feature film Aftershock that centres on the 1976 Tangshan earthquake but was made in the aftermath of Sichuan; the 2013 Chinese film Fallen City, directed by Huang Hong, about the 2008 earthquake; the 2009 Korean film, Haeundae, which references the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, and imagines a similar tsunami that erupts in the Sea of Japan and devastates the popular seaside district of Haeundae to the north-­east of Busan. 12 DiNitto, Fukushima Fiction, 1–2. 13 Two Okinawan writers won the award during this period: Matayoshi Eiki for Buta no mukui (The Pig’s Revenge, 1996) and Medoruma Shun for Suiteki (Droplets, 1997). Of ethnic Korean writers, Yū Miri was nominated for Furu hausu (Full House) in 1995 and won one year later for Kazoku shinema (Family cinema), while Gen Getsu also followed his nomination for Oppai (Breasts, 1999) with the award-­ winning Kage no sumika (Where the shadows dwell, 1999). Although Tawada’s work lies separate from these contexts, her win in 1993 for Inu muko iri (The Bridegroom was a Dog) followed the nomination of Perusona (Persona, 1991), whose story involves an ethnic Korean character. 14 Sakiyama’s title might also be translated as “The place that is constructed by words”. I consider similar ambiguous titles in my reading of Tawada Yō ko’s work in Chapter 5. 15 Like Sakiyama, Medoruma (b. 1960) has garnered a strong reputation for engaging problems of historical narrative, legacies of war, personal memory, and the myth of Okinawan pacifism. In his short work “A Koza Town Story – Hope” (Machi-­monogatari Koza–Kibo ,̄ 1999), an Okinawan man kills an American child before sacrificing himself by self-­immolation. Through shared references to “guerilla warfare”, crimes committed by US military personnel, and subsequent protests, violence, and suicide, this story connects intertextually with Sakiyama’s writing discussed here. While a detailed comparison lies beyond the objectives here, one might argue that the ironically hopeless ending of “Hope” contrasts with a more empowering, less final view to be found in Sakiyama’s texts. 16 Shimakotoba de kachashi will be analysed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 17 Sakiyama Tami, “Wasuremono – Bō kyaku kinshirei”. In Kotoba no umareru basho (Tō kyō : Sunagoya shobō , 2004), 47–49. 18 Ibid., 49. 19 Ibid.

46  Translating the literary past 20 Saegusa Kazuko, cited in Nakahodo Masanori, Okinawa bungaku-­ shi sobyō: Kindai, gendai no sakuhin o otte. (Naha, Okinawa: Borderink, 2018), 146. 21 筑紫女学園. Chikushi is sometimes read as Tsukushi. I follow the Romanisation given on the University’s homepage: https://www.chikushi.ac.jp/ 22 More recently, Murakami Yō ko has warned against conflating these literary responses or of expecting absolute empathy between what they represent given that Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa since each signify different experiences. Rather, she advocates for creating a discursive space in which those differences can “jostle against one another” and give birth to alternative discussions. See: Murakami Yō ko, Dekigoto no zankyō: Genbaku bungaku to Okinawa bungaku (Inpakuto shuppankai, 2015). 23 Nakahodo Masanori, Okinawa bungaku-­ shi no sobyo ̄, 149. Komori’s phrasing recalls April 28th, 1952, the date on which the Treaty of San Francisco was signed between Japan and the Allied Powers to end the United States’ occupation across all territories in Japan aside from Okinawa, and which is known in the prefecture as kutsujoki no hi (Day of Humiliation). 24 Ibid. 25 See the description provided by the awarding body: https://presidencia.gencat.cat/ en/tramits/tramits-­temes/Premi-­Internacional-­Catalunya-­00001 26 All English citations are taken from this published translation unless marked otherwise. See Murakami Haruki, “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer”. Translated by Emanuel Pastreich. The Asia-­Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 29 No 7, July 18, 2011, https://apjjf.org/2011/9/29/Murakami-­Haruki/3571/article.html (accessed September 4, 2022). The full text of Murakami’s Japanese speech can be accessed here: https:// www.kodomo-­kenkou.com/shinsai/info/show/968 27 Roger Pulvers, “Murakami, the No-­Nuclear Principles, Nuclear Power and the Bomb”, The Asia-­Pacific Journal, Vol 9, Issue 29, No 6, July 18, 2011. 28 DiNitto, Fukushima Fiction, 93. 29 Murakami Haruki, “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer”. 30 Ibid. 31 Mari Oka, Kioku/ Monogatari (Tō kyō : Iwanami shoten, 2000). 32 Kyō Nobuko, Koe: Sennen saki ni todoku hodo ni. (Tō kyō : Pneumasha, 2015), 12. 33 Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 2. 34 Ibid. 35 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism. (London: Vintage, 1994). 36 Carl Lindahl, Michael Dylan Foster, and Kate Parker Horigan. We Are All Survivors: Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery. 2022, viii. 37 Christopher Nelson. 2011. “A Letter from Okinawa”. Hot Spots, Fieldsights, July 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-­letter-­from-­okinawa. (accessed June 10, 2023). 38 Ibid. 39 For one of the most important contributions on this idea, see: Takahashi Tetsuya, Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima, Okinawa. (Shūeisha: Tō kyō , 2012). 40 Kimura Saeko, So no go no shinsaigo bungaku ron. (Tō kyō : Seidosha, 2018). 41 DiNitto, Fukushima Fiction, 96. 42 Marukawa Tetsushi. Teikoku no bōrei: Nihon bungaku no seishin chizu. (Tō kyō : Seidosha, 2004). 43 Ibid., 24–25. 44 DiNitto, Fukushima Fiction. 45 Roman Rosenbaum, ‘Post-­3/11 Literature in Japan’. In When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, edited by Roy Starrs, 91–112. Leiden, Netherlands: Global Oriental, 2014.

Translating the literary past  47 46 Chiba, Kazumiki. Gendai bungaku wa ‘shinsai no kizu’ o iyaseru ka. (Tō kyō : Minerva Shobō , 2019). 47 Ran Zwigenberg. ‘“Wounds of the Heart”: Psychiatric Trauma and Denial in Hiroshima’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 67–88. 48 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, Md.; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 49 Suga Yutaka, ‘Into the Bullring: The Significance of “Empathy” after the Earthquake’, in Carl Lindahl, Michael Dylan Foster and Kate Parker Horigan (eds.), We Are All Survivors: Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery. (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2022), 27–41. 50 Anne Rothe, ‘Irresponsible Nonsense: An Epistemological and Ethical Critique of Postmodern Trauma Theory’. In Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, edited by Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 181–194. 51 Ibid., 191. 52 DiNitto, Fukushima Fiction, 10.

3

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami

Locating “Kuja” Sakiyama Tami’s “Kuja” series presents a powerful inscription of the “voices we need to hear” that are rooted in Okinawa’s unfinished histories of war and occupation. These seven short stories first appeared in the journal Subaru between January 2006 and March 2008, and were republished in 2017 under a single title, Kuja genshikō (Kuja phantasms).1 Aside from the seventh story that reads explicitly as a return to the first through a recurring protagonist and the use of narrative flashbacks, these individual works of fiction do not appear to follow sequentially. Rather, they assert their connectedness through shared thematic concerns and imagery foregrounded in fragmentation, violence, and loss, and their associations with the shifting, fictional backdrop of Kuja. In its name and appearance Kuja evokes Koza, a district of Okinawa City flanked by the US bases of Futenma and Kadena. As a popular bar district frequented by military servicemen, Koza is deeply connected with the violence and volatility of Okinawa’s occupation, expressed most plainly in the uprising that took place during the night of December 19, 1970, after a car driven by a US soldier hit an Okinawan citizen. Although the victim survived his injuries, the Military Police’s decision to release the driver without charge ignited an already explosive situation that resulted in violent clashes between approximately 4,000 civilians and 300 armed police and left smashed windows and burned-­out cars in their wake.2 Although the town was formerly known to locals as Kujā, Michael Molasky has suggested that its current name evolved through mispronunciations by US military troops. The phonic changes of ‘ku’ to ‘ko’ and ‘ja’ to ‘za’ also suggest the correction of Okinawan speech patterns to conform to standard Japanese pronunciation. However, the name Koza is today officially obsolete following its merger in 1973 with a second municipality, Misato. Although residents voted in favour of retaining the name Koza, which also carried unique status as the only place name in Japan recorded formally in katakana, the authorities elected to rename the district ‘Okinawa City’. As Molasky argues, this decision, made one year after ‘homeland reversion’, exposed a desire to clean up Koza’s hybrid origins and its associations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-4

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  49 with the base town that epitomises Okinawa’s troubled history of conflict under US occupation. Sakiyama’s “Kuja” excites these layers of language, history, and protest. By recalling the erasure of Koza and its historical roots as Kujā, Sakiyama’s fictional setting unlocks a source of fragmentation, social unrest, and latent revolutionary potential grounded in Okinawa’s modern history. In the context of Okinawan literature, Kuja invites connections to other base-­town narratives, including Higashi Mineo’s coming-­of-­age story “An Okinawan Boy” (Okinawa shōnen, 1971), which Sakiyama has credited as a key inspiration for her writing, and “Love Suicide at Kamāra” (Kamāra Shinjū, 1984), Yoshida Sueko’s melancholy narrative of an ageing prostitute.3 The setting of Sakiyama’s first story in a run-­down theatre, where the former acting troupe “Kuja” used to perform, also conjures up the plays of Chinen Seishin (1941–2013) who in the late-­1980s produced “Koza adaptations” of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.4 At their visually most vibrant, Sakiyama’s descriptions of the bars and their mixed-­race patrons even bring to mind the early scenes of Hara Kazuo’s 1974 documentary Extreme Private Eros: Love Song, as Kina Ikue has suggested, and Ishikawa Mao’s expressive, black-­and-­white photography taken inside Koza’s bars.5 And yet, as Sakiyama also describes the distinctive language by which Kuja is narrated using the mimetic term gujaguja, which echoes the Japanese gochagocha (chaotic, confused), she also implies that Kuja as a “mash-­up” of Koza and other sites that thus exceeds any regional specificity. In fact, across all seven stories, Kuja and its referents shift across the central Okinawan base towns, the red-­light district of “Chiji” (Tsuji 辻) in Naha, and even Miyako Island to the south. The “Kuja” stories come to life through these myriad historical and literary associations. However, Sakiyama’s “Kuja” does more than reinscribe Koza’s lost origins into her own fictional space. In a short, reflective “travel essay”, Sakiyama writes of Koza’s personal significance since she and her family relocated there in 1969, one year before the Koza uprising and three years before “reversion”.6 For this “island girl” from Yaeyama, the sight of American soldiers swaggering through the streets and the many occurrences of military-­ related incidents and protests made Koza “a scary place” that was both “isolating and alienating”.7 As a self-­proclaimed immigrant, and out of respect for earlier literary depictions of Koza, Sakiyama was reluctant to write her own version of this space until her mother was diagnosed with cancer. In her mother, a woman who worked in the bases by day and cleaned hotels by night, Sakiyama recognised a female perspective that had been hitherto denied a voice. She penned Kuja’s first story by her mother’s deathbed, drawing inspiration from that “voice and image that would not manifest in words” while giving life to her unofficial narratives of Koza.8 Sakiyama writes of “a deep rift between Koza and Okinawan City”, gesturing to the limitations of gentrification by which the town’s renaming can never make up for its stark, stagnant reality, and absence of Koza’s former vitality. Sakiyama’s critique also reveals the context in which she situates her writing:

50  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami It’s not only about wanting to embed the historical vicissitudes of a singular, local city. I also wondered whether I could bring “Koza” to life as a word within a more universal literature.9 For Sakiyama, Kuja is not a means by which to mend the scars in Koza’s lived history. Rather, as she chooses to “set aside” the etymology of Kuja – which is distinct from the actual city formerly known as Kujā – Sakiyama places her interest in the “muddied, eerie resonance” of these two syllables that reimagine Koza in all its hybridity, confusion, and latent revolutionary potential.10 In other words, Kuja appears as an unstable entity, visible only in the shifting descriptions that overlap, contradict, and intersect through these stories. Sakiyama’s push to continually reinvent the space of Kuja within each story encapsulates its early presentation as black, bottomless, and “the epitome of the abyss”. This constant deferral takes Kuja beyond the “local” to deconstruct the boundaries of containment that have long separated Okinawan stories from a more mainstream Japanese narrative, and gestures towards a more “universal” collective. Kina Ikue has proposed that we should read in Sakiyama’s adept weaving of her local voice into the wider historical and geopolitical context an urgent countermove against the demands of global literature that threaten to erase colonised agencies from view. While Okinawan literature has been summoned to further the multicultural and multilingual perception of Japanese literature for the new age of globalisation, this “does not necessarily emancipate Okinawan voices from their marginalised positions in both social and cultural institutions”, as it relies on retaining Okinawa’s image as an “exotic Other”.11 For Kina, globalisation “justifies the presupposition that those places are marginal” and perpetuates the “acceleration of the memories ingrained in those places towards oblivion”.12 The power of Sakiyama’s fiction is that it engenders a resistance against globalisation that has de-­centred the place that she believed to be the centre of her existence, and that has trivialised what she has treasured, her places and her language, in other words, her subjective vision and voice.13 In this chapter, I develop the critique that Kina has articulated from the vantage point that I outlined in the previous chapter with respect to Sakiyama’s fears that historical memory in Japan is in the process of becoming “twisted and forgotten”. In keeping with the notion that the growing importance of translation to Japanese literature during the Heisei era has caused some literary voices to become lost, the stories under analysis here target the rise of right-­wing, historical revisionism following the formation of the Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho wo tsukuru-­kai) in 1997. Led by a professor of education at Tokyo University, Fujioka Nobukatsu, the Tsukuru-­kai saw the purpose of historical teaching as serving the Japanese state and making its subjects proud. The Tsukuru-­kai then, as now, have sought

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  51 to safeguard Japan’s national history by removing anything that might put the nation’s past, and by extension its present image, in a problematic or critical light. To achieve this goal, the group identified the need for a new narrative based on what they term a “healthy nationalism” that would restore national pride. In practice, this meant adhering only to putative fact-­based objectivity, and “revising” history into a clear narrative that is linear, familiar, and assured.14 This situation came to a head for Okinawa when in May 2005, Tsukuru kai representatives visited Okinawa to “discover the truth about the mass suicides”. That same year, Kobayashi Yoshinori, an associate of Fujioka, published his propagandistic manga Okinawa-­ron (On Okinawa) that portrayed the suicides as acts of loyalty to the Japanese emperor. The situation escalated when in March 2007 the Japanese Ministry of Education applied for permission to censor all references in school history textbooks to the role of Japanese soldiers ordering (meirei) or coercing (kyōyo ̄) Okinawans to take their own lives in so-­called “mass suicides” (shūdan jiketsu) at the height of battle in 1945.15 This move led on September 30, 2007, to the largest island-­wide protest on record, gathering an estimated 110,000 people. In the fictional setting of Kuja, Sakiyama deploys multiple strategies that write against this attempt to revise history. The narrator of the fourth story, “Pingihira zaka yakō” (Night flight on Pingihira hill, 2007), makes this agenda explicit when she claims: “If you want to learn the ‘truth of history,’ then your history books are a waste of time”.16 In a more figurative sense, Sakiyama portrays Kuja as a space that evolves through violent breaches of its own borders by “outsiders” (yosomun): a euphemistic name for the mainland tourists who arrived and never left, for the military presence that lurks in the town’s shadowy margins, and for the ghosts of the past who, believed to have been forgotten, resurface and demand that their stories are heard. By situating Kuja on the boundary between life and death, Sakiyama develops an explicit, parodic subversion of Okinawa’s image as a place of healing. This evocation is powerful because, contrary to the demands of linear history and collective narrative to suture the wounds of history, Kuja’s continual movement resists closure so that other stories can emerge. In short, Kuja creates a space in which those “memories that must not be forgotten” to which Sakiyama alludes in her essay “Lost things”, might find a place of belonging no longer regulated by a national narrative that would have them marginalised or erased. As anticipated in Sakiyama’s desire to write Koza as a “word” (kotoba) within a “more universal literature”, this analysis also demands an engagement with the writer’s distinctive approach to language. To be sure, Kuja recalls the title of Sakiyama’s essay collection that featured “Lost things” as a “place where words are born” (kotoba no umareru basho). For in Kuja, the task of giving voice to those narratives that the history textbooks wish to forget also means rejecting the rigid, written grammar of Japanese: a language imposed by the coloniser. At the same time, it invokes an alternative translation of that title that is made possible by the ambiguous nature of the Japanese particle no as “a place that is born of words”.

52  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami Inciting language: “Shimakotoba de kachāshı̄” Sakiyama has always inscribed Okinawan vocabulary and grammar patterns into her writing. However, the publication in 2002 of “Shimakotoba de kachāshī” marked a ramping up in the degree of linguistic experimentation and complexity that Sakiyama would explore in her texts. Published as a chapter in an academic volume edited by the Okinawan poet and cultural theorist, Imafuku Ryūta, “Shimakotoba” is a longer, scholarly work divided into three sections that weave textual criticism with the explication of her own literary strategies. The essay has not been translated but remains one of Sakiyama’s feistiest and most distinctive works to date. Shimakotoba names the multiple, mutually unintelligible “island words” to be found “from Amami to Sakishima, inclusive” in colloquial phrasing that captures that collective’s plurality. Kachāshı ̄ then names a popular dance regularly performed at weddings and parties across Okinawa. Characterised by participants making a whisking movement with their hands in the air, the name kachāshı ̄ derives from the “island word” variant of the verb meaning “to stir” (kachāsu) but in Sakiyama’s essay it also suggests the root of the verb “to write” (kachun). The primary target of Sakiyama’s intention to “stir up” or “incite with island words” is language and the historical erasure of Okinawa’s multilingual voices. While the common Japanese terms Okinawa-­hōgen or Okinawa-­ben reduce Okinawa’s multilinguality to a single, subsidiary dialect of the standard language, “island words” denote in more neutral terms a diverse and wide-­reaching collective. Sakiyama’s preference for the term shima, a word that in Okinawa signifies both the physical island and the separate communities that reside there, decentres the authority of Okinawa Main Island that formerly housed the capital of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, and makes space for the vernaculars found across the archipelago. By representing both key terms of her title in katakana, Sakiyama ensures their equality in terms of length and appearance. By writing Shimakotoba, an uncommon Japanese term that nonetheless reproduces standard pronunciation, in a script that is associated with words of non-­native origin, Sakiyama further defamiliarises and decentres the national tongue. In these ways, Sakiyama’s lexical and orthographic choices act out the very disruption that they describe through a “technique of inciting” (kakimaze no waza) that perfectly emulates the “frenetic dance” of the kachāshı ̄. Sakiyama’s attempts to inscribe Okinawa’s multilinguality also pit her against the inherited legacies of modern Okinawan fiction. The first section of Shimakotoba traces Okinawa’s literary history and the strategies used by her predecessors to combat the repeated assimilation of their languages. Beginning with the example of a classical Ryūkyūan poem in order to illustrate the almost “spell-­like” incomprehensibility of Okinawa’s earlier literature for Japanese readers, Sakiyama then criticises two well-­known modern novellas that are written in near-­standard Japanese with only occasional hints of “Okinawan-­ style” language: Yamagusuku Seichu’s “Kunenbo” (The Kunenbo Orange Trees, 1911), and “Kame kō baka” (Turtleback Tombs, 1966) by Ō shiro

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  53 Tatsuhiro. Sakiyama notes that in both texts Okinawan words are placed only in sections of dialogue that add a splash of “local colour” while ensuring legibility for a Japanese reader. This is not entirely surprising. Yamagusuku (1884–1949), regarded the first writer of modern Okinawan fiction, spent many years among the literati in Tokyo and Kunenbo was first published in the acclaimed poetry journal Hototogisu. Ō shiro (1925–2020) was a highly respected and prolific figure within Okinawan letters, but as the first Okinawa-­ born writer to win the Akutagawa Prize in 1967 (notably, still during occupation) for his novella “Kakuteru patı ̄” (The Cocktail Party), he also became a strong advocate for seeking the acceptance of Okinawan stories within a Japanese national literature. Sakiyama’s criticism of “Turtleback Tombs” must be further contextualised. Ō shiro wrote this novel one year before his Akutagawa win, and added the subtitle, “A topographical record of experiments in dialect” (jikken hōgen o motsu aru fudoki). As Ō shiro reflected in a three-­part essay first printed in the newspaper Ryūkyū Shimbun in 2000, his goal had been to create a stylised “Okinawan language” that could “invade Japanese prose”.17 The rise in prominence of Okinawan writers since reversion, as illustrated in three further Akutagawa Prizes awarded to Higashi Mineo (1971), Matayoshi Eiki (1996) and Medoruma Shun (1997), suggested to Ō shiro Okinawa’s growing confidence in its own culture and its cultural liberation from the mainland (“Yamato”). Inspired by learning that Okinawan words had even gained entry into some Japanese dictionaries, he declared his desire to write Okinawan so that it would become more accessible by limiting the number of non-­standard, conspicuous sentence particles, and by adding kanji to communicate the meaning of unfamiliar words. In so doing, Ō shiro was searching for a way of “expanding the field of expression within Japanese literature” through which “a truly decolonialized literature will be born”.18 The eminent literary scholar Nakahodo Masanori noted the value of these efforts in a round-­table discussion titled “On Okinawan Literature and the Use of Dialect” when he reflected that Ō shiro had helped to reintegrate dialect into Okinawan literature amid mainstream demands for a “common language” (kyōtsūgo).19 While espousing the merits of his own writing, Ō shiro’s essay also launched a critical attack against Higashi, Medoruma, and Sakiyama, whose experiments with language he claimed were putting the future of Okinawan literature at risk. As these writers were in the habit of scattering Okinawan words throughout their prose irrespective of context, Ō shiro accused them of “an unproductive scattergun approach” (fumō na ranpatsu), a term that recalls a round-­table debate in the inaugural issue of Shin Okinawa bungaku in 1966 that asked, “Is Okinawa’s literary landscape barren?” (Okinawa wa bungaku fumō no chi ka), and suggested that any progress made by his own and subsequent Akutagawa Awards had been reduced to nought. Moreover, Ō shiro argued that these writers were misleading their readers by glossing unfamiliar Okinawan words with kanji whose pronunciations appeared closer in terms of sound even while their meanings were distinct (for example, writing chura with

54  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami 清 – kiyoi, “clear” – instead of 美 – utsukushii, “beautiful”), while these supplements to the text also invited Japanese readers to “skip over” these Okinawan words, thus rendering them invisible. As a result, Ō shiro feared that this younger generation was giving away the opportunities both to promote their local language and to allow Okinawan cultural and linguistic metaphors to leave their mark on the national tongue.20 Sakiyama’s essay appeared two years later and reads as a direct response to Ōshiro’s critique. In a clear, self-­parodying tone, Sakiyama denied that she used her Okinawan identity to claim misguided authority or defensively shelter behind local colour in retaliation for belonging to a minority, and she even mocked her own use of dialect as “incorrect”. Against claims that her language choices appear unnatural, Sakiyama called out the limitations of Ō shiro’s self-­ titled “experimental dialect” as “obscuring the oral quality” of Okinawan voices into something “literary”. Not only did this inscribe Okinawan language into the “speech of a trendy mainlander”, but by forcing Okinawan words to “cosy up” to Japanese, such writing raised the “danger that they will be appropriated and stabilised” into a “conservative, supplementary position” that would then affirm Okinawa’s own subaltern status.21 In Sakiyama’s reading, Ō shiro’s decolonial ambition was entangled with his desire that Okinawan fiction be embraced within a national standard, and so ran the risk of simply replicating the recolonisation of Okinawa’s languages and literature. In further response, Sakiyama set out in unapologetic terms her own strategy for casting “island words” into Japanese prose: I wanted…to dismantle the position of Okinawan words that have been swept up against their will into standard-­like Japanese. It’s not about asserting some regional identity or other by latching “dialect” onto Japanese like a tailfin. I simply wondered, reckless as it may be, whether or not one could conceive of inciting a relationship between heterogeneous languages while keeping their heterogeneity intact.22 The reference to a “tailfin” offers a further metaphor for Japan’s appropriation of Okinawa, that also mocks Ō shiro’s habit of tagging Okinawan-­style suffixes to the end of his Japanese sentences. To counter this, Sakiyama insisted on inciting “heterogeneity” to offer a far more ironic, and deeply antagonistic mode of inscribing multilingual Okinawa. In Shimakotoba’s second section, Sakiyama unleashes the full intent of what she labels her “guerrilla strategy” that extends beyond inciting linguistic difference to wrest open history. While the term “guerrilla” would suggest a figure fighting against the nation, it evokes multiple other associations within Okinawa’s past. It first suggests the young men who had been rounded up by Japanese troops and deployed into “homeland defence battalions” against possible American invasion.26 Second, it recalls the role of US military bases and troops stationed in Okinawa during the campaign against Vietnam. In her essay, Sakiyama then adds a further more contemporary layer onto this image

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  55 when she describes how the “tower” (biru) of Japanese language will be blown to smithereens as a result of a suicide attack (jibaku tero) by island words.27 Writing just one year after 9.11, Sakiyama then checks herself in an almost comic moment: “Did she say ge, gerilah?!” However, by writing the term “strategy” in Japanese as 作戦 (sakusen), Sakiyama locates her actions in a “writerly battle” centred on language which, unlike human life, can withstand being “orphaned, exiled…[and placed on] the brink of death”: shinigatagatah (死にガタガター). Here Sakiyama inscribes the “difficulty of dying” (shinigatai) with the onomatopoeic gatagata which, amplified by the Okinawan adverb shı ̄ni (“extremely”), suggests rattling, heavy gunfire and structural collapse. Despite these destructive metaphors, her essay ultimately imagines a future in which Japanese might rise again and “join hands with shimakotoba, pulverised and scattered – no hard feelings – before being swept away by shimakotoba’s rhythms and explosive blasts, freed from mutual understanding, and left to dance the kachāshı ̄”.28 Sakiyama’s injection of the kachāshı ̄, a celebratory dance, into this disruptive intention marks a particularly strong strategy of decolonisation when read against the essays of Gima Susumu, a writer who was once connected to the radical student journal Ryūdai Bungaku. Written in the 1970s, Gima’s essays are critical of the erasure of Okinawan languages through linguistic assimilation, which was denying Okinawans the ability to narrate their innermost thoughts and personal histories. In Gima’s writing, literature suggests a potential compromise between the world of ideas and acts of violence to give expression to Okinawa’s “colonial ghosts”, although he also appears cautious that such writing could also lose its direct, political impact.23 Gima’s ideas connect most directly to those of Sakiyama when he recalls the sight of civilians dancing the kachāshı ̄ next to blazing, upturned cars in the immediate aftermath of the Koza uprising. In no place in his writing does Gima endorse violence, although as a reader of Frantz Fanon, whose work today forms a central pillar of questions of decolonisation, Gima does accede that the expression of violence signifies a visceral form of communication in circumstances where language has failed.24 The kachāshı ̄ thus offers a site of contact, wherein the “beautiful rhythms” of the dance “collide with the whole body and cause it to tremble” in a way that “symbolises” Okinawa’s “visceral outpouring” in the absence of language.25 Sakiyama’s image of the kachāshı ̄ arising phoenix-­like amid scenes of destruction directly recalls such “visceral outpouring”, the difference being that whereas Gima sees violence as an alternative to language with the kachāshı ̄ dance erupting at the margin, Sakiyama’s essay suggests and indeed performs a violent dance within language itself by talking of “island words” (shimakotoba) being planted in her prose “like bombs”. In Sakiyama’s interpretation, the kachāshı ̄’s rhythmic collisions enact “a barbaric dismantling of the world order, an insolent strategy, a reckless rule-­ wrecking”,29 which precisely describes the effect of Sakiyama’s writing that forces Japanese orthography to bend to the pattern of Okinawan speech. Here, Sakiyama reveals the impact she felt when first encountering Higashi Mineo’s

56  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami prizewinning novel, An Okinawan Boy (Okinawa shōnen, 1971), in which furigana glosses retain the oral/aural quality of Okinawan speech (つね、 つねよ ウ

ウ

し、起きれ、起きらんな!), and katakana interjections (肝がホトホトしてきて、 ヒィ ーッヒィーッヒィーッ) that punctuate the text in “breathtaking” (肝ホトホト) ways.30 Sakiyama’s emulation of Higashi’s linguistic devices in her own writing marks the start of her effort to create a language that can be neither appropriated by standard Japanese nor seen as a straight approximation of the regional dialect it transcribes.31 The third and final stage of Shimakotoba brings Sakiyama’s life-­and-­death struggle to its violent conclusion within a short fiction. In a desolate landscape “to the south”, “Rı ̄-­chan” ( ちゃん, the kanji for Japan glossed with a Chinese-­ like reading) and “Shima-­chan” (シマちゃん), the victim and aggressor of a “suicide attack”, appear in a literal war of words that has pushed each to “the brink of death” (again, shinigatagatah). 「あ、ま、まって、シマちゃん、早まるなっ、こんな所まで来てやったの に…アガッ、 アガッ…あれっ、 なんで、 わたしがシマちゃんコトバを使ってる のよ、あ 、まってったら 、シ マちゃん … アガッ、アガぁー … い や だ ぁ…こんなのぉ」 Hey…wa-­ , wait, Shima-­ chan, don’t speed up, I’ve come all this way…agah, agah…hold up! I’m using your island words…Ah, if only you’d wai…Shima-­chan, agah agAH…I don’t…like this…32 Sakiyama renders this violence on the page by writing in increasingly fragmented strings of spiky katakana interspersed with ellipses while the narrator can only cry out in response as the hallmarks of “Shima-­chan-­speak” (Shima-­ chan kotoba) bleed into her words, “agah” being an Okinawan exclamation of pain akin to the English “ouch”. Sakiyama then closes the essay by panning out to a second layer of external narration that questions whether this story, whose “battered” words replicate the landscape and characters they write, will ever be able to gain circulation in the world (seken) as a “Japanese-­language novel” (nihongo no sho ̄setsu).33 In this moment, Sakiyama calls out the real condition whereby in order for Okinawan fiction to be seen within the world it must first find recognition within Japan’s national literature. By stirring the dynamic movements of the kachāshı ̄ into language, “Shimakotoba” presents a stinging literary criticism and an agenda of language as terror, culminating in the representation of that potential destruction within fiction. This shattering textual performance is highly provocative and pushes the communicability of language to its brink. However, the narrative ellipsis on which the essay ends, leaves open the possibility that those dying fragments may yet find their way into the world. Sakiyama does not demand her work to be accepted into a ready-­made “Japanese literature”. To do so would be to repeat the pattern of colonial and linguistic assimilation. Instead, by exploiting the material possibilities of multiple Japanese orthographies, her

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  57 guerrilla-­like strategy allows Okinawa’s multilingual orality to infiltrate and destroy that context so that it might be constructed anew. As seen above, the very visceral language in Sakiyama’s essay borders challenges the reader while her explicit calls towards incitement are difficult to endorse. It is perhaps for this reason that few have engaged Shimakotoba in relation to her literary oeuvre to date. However, if one reads these strategies within the explicit context of language and literature alone, then one sees how through its audible conflicts and visceral collisions, such writing blasts open spaces out of which new imaginations and powerful literary forms might emerge. It is with this expectation that the “Kuja” stories make their presence known.

Narrating the abyss: “Is(olate)land dream duchuimuni” The first Kuja story, Is(olate)land dream duchuimuni (hereafter “Duchuimuni”), is told in the first person by a freelance photographer from the Japanese mainland. The narrative opens with this narrator caught in a nightmarish vision that manifests as a war cry erupting from a throat ripped open, – Uaaawh, aaawh, cawcawh, aaw-­eeh, aaaawh, aaw-­eeh. I sense someone, somewhere, is striving to make their imprisoned whereabouts known, aimlessly facing the empty sky, tortuously flailing their snake-­like arms. If I listen closely, there is a mournful sense of separation in that cry. A crazed spirit, searching for his corpse that one day suddenly vanished from sight, scratching and plucking the dark, empty sky, screaming with the full might of his throat.34 With this cry “clung about his neck” (kubi ni betotsuiteiru) the narrator jolts awake in a rundown theatre. Clearly shaken by this “muddied dream”, the narrator recalls how he came to “Okinawa”, which is rendered in katakana, to produce a monochrome album of photographs of the “landscape of the abyss” (fuchi). In flashback, we witness his ambitions appear thwarted as the landscape he views through his camera lens becomes blurry as though resisting his gaze, and even gives him the sense that it is looking back at him. Furthermore, despite his intentions to head for Cape Hedo, the scenic promontory at the northernmost tip of Okinawa Main Island, the narrator takes the wrong bus which brings him inland instead to this town named Kuja. There, the narrator spots a flyer pinned to a window about an acting troupe also named “Kuja” that reads, “[r]emember that town, those people, today: Day △, month ○, year 200X”, and prompts him to seek out a run-­down theatre. When he encounters only a lone girl sitting on stage drawing noisily on a cigarette, the narrator grows impatient and suspicious. However, as the girl speaks the Okinawan greeting of welcome, gusūyō, and launches into a dynamic, solo performance – the duchuimuni of the story’s title – she unleashes the stories of Kuja’s past and transfixes the narrator to his seat.

58  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami In “Duchuimuni” Sakiyama presents Kuja as the deepest manifestation of an Okinawa upturned. While tourist pamphlets write Okinawa in katakana to exoticise the region as an ersatz foreign destination, Sakiyama’s use of the script suggests a second layer of defamiliarisation by which the picture postcard image is also alien. Kuja “even right in the middle of the day…is cast in gloomy darkness and shadow”, and is permeated by the reek of decay, mould, and even a “murderousness”. Through references to the town’s squalid “alleyways” (roji) and “body odour”, the narrator suggests an intertextual connection to Nakagami Kenji’s Kishū saga (1976–1983) that also take the roji as their setting and subject. Nakagami’s roji provides a pertinent intertext given the term’s linguistic resonance with Kuja, and as an urban landscape that also evolves, only in this case as the direct result of construction work performed by the family of labourers at its narrative centre. As I elaborate below, the distinctive narrative voice of Kuja also foregrounds the importance of rumours resonant with what Mark Morris has emphasised as Nakagami’s uses of gossip as a form of narration that underwrites social bonds, generates more gossip – and thus stories – and can even enact violence.35 Whereas the expansion of the roji is emblematic of the expansion witnessed in Japan’s economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s, however, Kuja is a more melancholic space, haunted by the mimetic representation of black “mud-­slime”– sozororo, dorororo – that warns of something more ghostly and foreboding brewing beneath the surface.36 The narrator’s identity as a male photographer places visuality as a key theme within this opening text. Hence, both Watanabe Eri and Onaga Shihoko have drawn on Susan Sontag’s essays on photography in their critical readings of the work. To be sure, the narrator’s stated intention to capture the Kuja landscape on film repeats the gaze that is structured by the quasi-­colonial, quasi-­Orientalist desires of mainland Japanese capitalist and tourist ventures. However, as Watanabe Eri has also argued, the narrator’s labelling of Okinawa as the “landscape of the abyss” betrays a more dismissive attitude.37 In fact, in contrast to his “photography mates who brag endlessly about being experts on Okinawa”, the narrator comments that “no matter how many times I come here, it is just an elusive group of isolated islands”.38 For Watanabe, the narrator’s ambivalence is the first stage in a process of dismantling the presumed dichotomy between the his gaze and the object he claims that he wants to photograph. This binary then breaks down further as the landscape appears to come alive and refuses to remain still as would be expected of a photographic object or background.39 Moreover, as the narrative continues, the narrator’s vision is also disturbed by repeated waves of black “mud-­slime” that he senses flowing over his entire being, pinning him to his seat and casting him into a series of feverish dreams. In Watanabe’s Freudian interpretation, the narrator’s shifts between the two states of sleep and wakefulness, dream and reality, open up within the text a “time-­space wherein the repressed is awakened”.40 Helpless to resist, the narrator thus appears to Watanabe as a kind of translator who is forced to mediate “the voices and memories of Okinawa” within his dreams and “bring them into a Japanese-­language discourse”.41

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  59 Watanabe’s approach separates the setting of Kuja and the language of its creation, but the two are in fact intimately connected in Sakiyama’s construction. As the narrator explains when defining Kuja as the “epitome of the abyss” (fuchi no fuchi), the abyss is: the place that rises from between two landscapes at odds with one another. It is the rupture into which the abandoned ones of the world sink, the pit of the world, a border from which one gazes back at the world.42 Kuja thus emerges as the fictional manifestation of Sakiyama’s desire as expressed in her essay, Shimakotoba, to write in a language that keeps heterogeneity and difference intact. However, Kuja also more than a canvas into which Sakiyama can insert her own literary language. Recalling the title of Sakiyama’s recent essay collection that featured “Lost things” discussed in Chapter 2, Kuja is both a “place where words are born” and a “place that is born out of words”. This is what gives Kuja its seemingly endless potential both to generate stories and to regenerate itself in different guises across the seven stories. Although Kuja is set up as the background to these stories, from the moment its landscape begins to move in response to the narrator’s camera lens it also functions as though a character in its own right, its own shifting movements acting as the catalyst that drives each story forward. In “Duchuimuni” the task of narrating these “abandoned” stories in language falls to Takaesu Maria, the young performer who the narrator encounters inside the theatre. Maria’s one-­woman show is in part formed of deeply personal recollections, including that of a young girl she discovered cowering in the street, apparently having suffered some sexual or other violence, and of the grandmother who raised her and died stepping out in front of a car after the implementation of new road rules following the occupation. However, as Maria takes on the role of relating Kuja’s memories, she also recalls the “bogged-­down ditch-­mud guerrilla war” conducted in Vietnam and the racially motivated fights between US servicemen in the Kuja streets. For Maria to recall global events that predate her birth, including a conflict fought on foreign soil, appears perplexing. However, this device is in keeping with a thread that runs through the Kuja series wherein the ability to speak of the past is not the sole prerogative of the person who experienced it first-­hand. Most poignantly to this story, Maria’s reference to Vietnam also highlights the fact that the military bases on Okinawa were pivotal to the US’s campaign in that war, as indeed they were to the Korean war fought earlier and the US’s involvement in Iraq since. Maria’s duchuimuni therefore breaks down the illusion that Okinawa has reached a state of “postwar”. By weaving actual, global history into these stories, Sakiyama also reasserts Okinawa’s role within a global context that is not tied to its subaltern existence as a Japanese colony. But like Kuja, Maria is not just the “site” or mouthpiece through which those stories appear. Rather, as the daughter of an Okinawan woman and Filipino-­American soldier, Maria is as Kina describes her, “the corporeal

60  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami embodiment of memories accumulated through the ages in Kuja”: memories which, as we have seen, which span the lives of the town’s individual women and Okinawa’s wider, geopolitical standing throughout the second half of the twentieth century.43 Maria emphasises this corporeality in her performance as a pina ̄, a (usually derogatory) derivative of “Filipina”: Look at this cute, jet-­black hair of mine. My rounded eyes that go round and round. My full-­fleshed lips that make me look like a good kisser. To old men from all over the world they carry a special sex appeal. And look here, at this firm butt (she twisted a little and stuck her bottom out to the side). Above all else, the colour of my skin is soo beautifully tanned, but I’ll stop you right there from whatever dream you’re about to dream up. No way am I like those Japayuki entertainer girls you longed for in the olden days. That was a shame, hai hai hai hai (she clapped both hands, pan pan pan).44 Maria’s knowing appeal to her physical differences and the erotic charge they engender brings to the fore the commodification of mixed-­race bodies and the post-­occupation reality of Okinawa, where Filipina women have been recruited, even by force, to hostess, bar, and sex work.45 The onomatopoeia of her clapping reinforces her point, recalling the figure of the wartime panpan girl. While Maria’s identity would usually marginalise her even within an Okinawan context, in Kuja her hybridity is central to her ability to narrate the past, since it serves as a constant reminder of the foreign military presence that in turn serves to connect Okinawa to the world. This involves a deeply political statement. As Mitzi Uehara Carter has argued, mixed-­race Okinawans have often had the sites of war and occupation superimposed onto their bodies, including the crimes committed by US troops and their affiliates. She notes that while mainland Japan witnessed a “hāfu boom in the early twenty-­first century that idealised mixed-­race children as “‘bridge people’” capable of traversing linguistic and cultural boundaries towards a new future, multiracial identities in Okinawa are bound instead to the rhetoric of national security that justifies the Okinawa bases, one that has been oppressed since the US occupation.46 Moreover, such subjects have feared the potential that their bodies have to “trigger intense war memories or ostracism”.47 And yet, this is precisely what makes Maria’s performance so powerful and dynamic within Sakiyama’s fiction. As in Shimakotoba, this ability is intimately rooted in Maria’s language. On one level, Maria’s performance in Japanese is already radical on the grounds of her non-­native identity: だって、 ホラアナタさアタシのこのニッポン語のしゃべくり、 いちおう理解で きるでしょ。 それがなによりの証拠だってばアタシがニッポン人であるって いう。 ニッポン語をしゃべるからニッポン人?ああ、 なんかスカスカな感じす るねこの文脈。 ま、 それはそれとして。

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  61 さッてもさッても、 グスーヨー。 I mean, look, you can more-­or-­less understand this Japanese spiel of mine, right? That’s what I’m saying is proof above all else that I’m Japanese. I speak Japanese therefore I am Japanese? Ahh, this context rings pretty hollow, doesn’t it? Well, let’s leave that aside. Anyway, aanyway, gusūyō.48 More importantly, Maria’s speech is rendered in multiple orthographies that replicate Sakiyama’s “island words” by moving “in constant flux from Japanese to Kuja-­speak (Kuja-­go) and back, transforming each tongue as it goes”. Just as Sakiyama detonates “island words” into Japanese throughout Shimakotoba, Maria’s “Kuja-­speak” epitomises the hybrid speech of the colonised as simultaneously contaminated by imperial grammar while carrying the potential within to destabilise the imposition of a national language and identity. Furthermore, the effect is inscribed in the text as a shabekuri, an unrelenting flow of speech that evokes the kind of multiple, competing voices associated with manzai comedy, and yet spoken by one, hybrid voice. This persistent and insistent dialogue (one might even say diatribe) thus presents the duchuimuni, a word that is usually understood to mean “monologue”, as a polyvocal tour-­de-­force. Sakiyama writes the word duchuimuni in different ways throughout, sometimes only in katakana, but on other occasions in combinations of kanji and hiragana: 独り言, 独り物言い, 独り芝居. Each of these variants suggest a “monologue” or “one-­person performance”, but this constant retranscription and the doubling effect produced by using a mixture of kanji and hiragana supports the impression that this “monologue” is multi-­voiced in its conception. These strategies extend across Maria’s narration of Kuja and its stories, for it is only through challenging the notion of a homogenised national language (and a single Okinawan dialect) that she can take a stand against a nationalist revision of historical narratives that has sought to silence the voices on its periphery. Maria’s positionality is already contextualised by her murky surroundings of the abandoned theatre, but her role as an unofficial voice of Kuja is emphasised by the presence on a bookshelf to the side of the stage that bears a copy of “Idiotic Washizumu” (Suttoko dokkoi Washizumu), a parodic reference to the magazine series, Washizumu, launched in 2002 by Kobayashi Yoshinori 小林よしのり. Kobayashi is well-­known as a manga artist, associate of Fujioka, and honorary director of the Tsukurukai, who since the early 2000s has used his publications – including his Sensō-­ron (Theories of war) and Okinawa-­ron (Theory of Okinawa) – to promote right-­wing values and evaluations of Japanese history.49 The title of Washizumu states this motive explicitly as a play on words that merges the Japanese first-­person pronoun washi with “fascism”. In a mocking twist, Sakiyama revises Kobayashi’s name as Ohayashi Ashinori 大林あしのり that replaces the first kanji of his family and given names, respectively meaning “small” (ko) and “good” (yoshi), with kanji to denote their opposites of “big” (ō) and “bad” (ashi).

62  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami As Maria’s performance culminates, the torrent of memories that it unleashes assails the narrator, who feels a “line of shadows” wash over his eyes like waves and pull him once more into an uneasy sleep. Here, he senses that In Kuja, it was as though the memories that refuse to die, of soldiers who fought in field battles in that age, still hang in the air. It was as though the thoughts of those people hung up on the cause and effect of those memories, of drinking mud and gnawing sand, were coiling around me. Or else it was as though the smell of the darkness oozing up slowly from beyond the bounds of people’s memories was weaving an endless dream of ditch-­dirt mud.50 In a bid to remain conscious he reaches for his camera, but Maria’s piercing gaze upsets his sense of perspective, forcing him to miss his shot and fall to the floor. By the time he has regained focus, Maria has disappeared and the narrator senses “a black curtain suddenly descend, blinding me, and I sank into the world within”.51 When the narrator finally awakens in the empty theatre clutching the original flyer, it is as though the performance by ‘Kuja’ had never even happened. Fittingly, for a work predicated on the resistance to closure, the narrator comes to realise that it is less the words spoken than the “wild illusions that bubbled up out of the gaps in Maria’s narration” that pull him into the abyss. At the story’s close, the faces of the former performers of the troupe “Kuja” begin to float up into view, and the narrator is suddenly transported to Cape Hedo, his intended destination at the beginning. The landscape at the cape began to tremble restlessly. The wind had come up. Having lost the power of the sun the surface of the sea was beginning to change into colour. It rose into a crest of spume and alternated between flashing glimpses and hiding the bellies of the waves. At last, my field of vision stretched out infinitely. The dense smell of water arose. It came neither from the sea nor from the rain. It was the smell of a shroud of darkness arising from between the cracks under my feet.52 With this, Maria’s duchuimuni releases Kuja’s voices so that they might transport the narrator of this first story of the series deeper into its narrative landscape. Translating the abyss: “Variations on a Kuja Phantasia” “Kuja genshikō hensō” (“Variations on a Kuja phantasia”, hereafter “Variations”), the seventh and final Kuja story, returns to the narrator of the first, who has been absent throughout the five, intervening texts. The word hensō of this title usually refers to variations in the musical sense, and this story develops the previous narrative of “Duchuimuni”, which the text briefly describes as a zensō, or

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  63 prelude. Seven days have now passed, counted in the seven stories of the series, and the narrator is continuing his pursuit for the landscape of the abyss. However, the “unvanishing echoes of voices” unleashed by Maria’s “tumultuous duchuimuni” have destroyed his photographic sense of perspective. Recalling the central tropes of sight and visibility on that first story, here again the narrator can no longer aim his lens at the landscape, which appears transformed and, as if alive, pulling him “into an abyss that I cannot see”. The story takes an increasingly fantastical turn, as the narrator stumbles upon tens of small grave-­like mounds covered with grass, and a diminutive, old lady and red-­headed teenager who possesses a “strangely non-­human air”. Before long, a small community has gathered to hold a yunkui, the name given to a local “ceremony for righting the world”.53 Although the narrator appears only to have travelled on foot, words such as shinka/shinakanuchā, both terms denoting friends or relations, and practices such as utōrı ̄, a custom of toasting whereby the same cup is taken, refilled, then passed from one person to the next, mark this sacred site with the dialect and cultural traditions of Miyako Island which lies roughly 300km south of Okinawa’s Main Island. As an “outsider” the narrator finds himself alternately excluded and welcomed into the observance. Through this mode of participation the narrator negotiates his position as an initial outsider to the community, yet one who, having given up the touristic ambitions of his photography, is able to occupy a more ambiguous position as both spectator and participant. At fifty pages in the 2017 bound volume, “Variations” is double the length of each of the preceding six “Kuja” stories, and much of this text elaborates on the strange setting described above. However, the climax comes when the narrator finds himself encircled by the members of the community who begin a frenetic dance (sōbuyo ̄ kachā), in whose “hoh-­hoh-­hoh rhythm” the narrator witnesses as the means by which the shinka can “cast out the grievances from their chests” and “recover their blocked, oppressed memories”. Although the narrator is at first “unable to translate the meanings of the words”, as everyone loses themselves further into the dance, he begins to perceive in the raised singing voices the reclamation of the community’s suppressed memories. And, through this act of listening he learns to translate: “Whispered like a game of word association, they were a series of private confessions. Some that reached my ears were translatable…”. Here, the narrative voice changes to represent a series of confessions that shift, split, and overlap with one another to speak of traumatic pasts. As the cacophony of voices dies away, the narrator notices an older man. Referring to himself as washi, another first-­person pronoun that here commonly connotes an elderly male, the man wrestles with his memories as the narrator listens on. The scene is very long and what follows is an edited excerpt: I didn’t want to remember, but I finally did […] a memory that fills me completely with dread…I definitely recall seeing them that day, piled upon one another inside a trench by the sea, their necks wrung like

64  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami chickens, their thin, black arms cut to pieces, their eyeballs scooped out like fish, their red, weeping stomachs lain bare…I’m sure I saw it, and even when they had no more breath left, their screaming voices soaked into the wall of the trench…but no, that’s not quite right…my memory is…trying to hide something…because the truth is…the truth is not that I saw them, but that it was I who played the ringleader who brought such a fate upon them…it was I who killed them, or was it? Was I not forced? But none of that matters, there is no sense in such debate, because it was I who killed them.54 The torrential nature of this confession mirrors Maria’s duchuimuni from the earlier text. One can even point to textual echoes such as the refrain, nani o kakuso ̄ – “what have I to hide?” – with which Maria reveals her Filipina identity. However, this scene is most significant, and gruelling to read, because it makes direct reference to the “mass suicides” that took place at the height of the land battle fought on Okinawa. Moreover, in the old man’s struggle to see whether he was the one being “coerced” or the “central perpetrator” responsible for their deaths, addresses the question of whether Japanese troops commanded and coerced Okinawans into taking their own lives, or whether, as the likes of Kobayashi have claimed, Okinawans acted voluntarily out of loyalty to the Japanese emperor. Through listening to the old man’s testimony, the narrator ultimately learns to repeat the ceremonial dance himself, a process that unlocks the way to recall his own forgotten past. And in so doing, the narrator realises that herein lies the restorative significance of the ceremony for a traditional community facing potential crisis: “I wondered whether the only means to burst out of this present moment of crisis was this peculiar ceremony they called yunkui”.55 Walter Benjamin famously wrote in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “[t]o articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes up in a moment of danger”.56 That danger is already defined within the context of historical revisionism. Yet it arrives more palpably for the narrator and the community into which he has now joined when on the final pages a “legion of bulldozers” tear into the yunkui ceremonial space. Sensing his time to act, the narrator strives desperately to find a language powerful enough to prevent this impending destruction. As ceremonial chants once more increase, the narrator curls his body into “the shape a bullet, opens his blocked throat and lets rip”.57 On this silent scream the novel, and the Kuja series, end. However, this image of language as a bullet also ricochets back through the narrative space as far as the opening scene of “Duchuimuni” and thus the whole series by echoing the “war cry erupting from a throat ripped open” that pervaded the narrator’s first nightmare vision. The overlapping of the two images that bookend the Kuja series reveals the disquieting possibility that even from the opening of the series the narrator is already a “crazed spirit” detached from his corpse and chasing his

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  65 own disembodied voice. This image is a not uncommon in Okinawan fiction as it recalls the loss of one’s mabui, or spirit, which in Okinawan cultural tradition expresses a form of sickness, trauma, or loss.58 In the context of historical narrative, it also means that this man from the mainland in fact ends the narrative as he had already begun it: as fragmented and conflicted as the memories that beckoned him deeper into the abyss. The figure of the abyss as a scene that “rises up between two landscapes at odds with one another” does not merely describe the setting of Kuja or serve as a metaphor for the constantly transforming language that inscribe these stories; it also summarises the abyssal, structural interplay through which these narratives reveal themselves. Translation en abyme In February 2007, one month after publishing the fourth Kuja story, the journal carrying the series, Subaru, printed a round-­ table discussion between Sakiyama and three literary scholars – Kina Ikue, Okamoto Yukiko and Kurosawa Ariko – titled “Okinawa, disutopia bungaku” (Okinawa, dystopian literature).59 Much of this discussion circled around the question of what interventions fiction might make amid a socio-­political reality that had given rise in recent memory to such incidents and injustices as the rape in 1995 of a 12-­year-­old schoolgirl in Kin Village by three US military personnel and, in 2004, the crash onto Okinawa International University of a military helicopter that was later revealed to have been carrying radioactive Strontium-­90. In Sakiyama’s view, it was impossible to deny the jolts that these military accidents and crimes committed against civilians sent through Okinawan society. However, she argued, these shockwaves also concealed the more endemic violence that is perpetuated against the region through the immovable presence of the US bases themselves. For Sakiyama, the danger was that Okinawa’s subjugation had been “normalised” to the extent that it had become invisible and hardly worthy of comment in the daily life of the prefecture. As a wake-­up call, she added “[p]erhaps, for Okinawa, the political reality is that terrorism is the only option”.60 Sakiyama’s comment is provocative because it steps outside of the fictionalised space created within her essay, Shimakotoba, and into a discursive realm that appears to be inciting direct action. However, Sakiyama’s statement must be contextualised as a response to the political reality whereby Okinawa’s image and status is still dictated by Japanese and US foreign policy. In 1970, for example, Gima described Okinawa’s colonial condition as “two worlds co-­ existing in one plane, divided by a border” that positions Okinawans as “outlaws” in their own homeland.61 The attacks of September 11th, 2001 imposed another divide between those who supported the US as defenders of justice, and those who did not. Okinawans protesting the US military presence be that on the grounds of opposing all war or specific campaigns, thus appear to be on the wrong side of the law, as revealed in the rise in arrests of anti-­base activists including Medoruma, who was held in custody for 8 hours in 2016 for straying

66  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami into US controlled waters in a protest opposing the construction of a new offshore facility at Henoko to the north of Okinawa’s main island. In a further move to reframe – and frame – civilians as unlawful, threatening, and even insurgent, at a press conference on 30 January 2013, Jimi Shō zaburō , a former minister in Kan Naoto’s government, claimed that calls from within Okinawa for independence could lead to separatist movements carrying out “domestic guerrilla attacks” and “terrorist bombings” in Tokyo.62 Against this context Sakiyama’s comment appears challenging to defend, though it depicts unflinchingly the volatility of this situation. The blurring between writing and activism attest to the ongoing presence of war in Okinawa’s present, and thus the impossibility of ignoring history by rendering it as only a concern for the past. The debates around historical revisionism in the mid-­2000s crystallised this view. One danger of this rewriting of history is that it can lead to the ultimate erasure of the past and those who lived it. In The Ghosts of Empire, Marukawa Tetsushi describes the revision of Okinawa’s history as a continuation of the violence of war, US occupation, and political hegemonic oppression across the region. This situation, Marukawa argues, appears to be slowly seeking to establish a reality from which Okinawan memories of the war are “erased”. The “dead” are again today forced to stand on the “brink of death” (shinikiwa). In other words, towards the “death” of the “dead”.63 For Marukawa, Sakiyama’s fiction is emblematic of the possible ways in which literature might offer a means of “touching the dead” before they are lost forever. Although his arguments address works that Sakiyama (and Medoruma) published in the 1990s, before the “Kuja” stories appeared, Marukawa’s reading resonates with the texts discussed here by his use of the term shinikiwa that echoes the repeated phrase shinigatagatah in “Shimakotoba”, and the broader warning that to tie up the loose ends of history into a single narrative, at least in the case of Okinawa, not only constitutes a threat of historical amnesia in the present but also of exorcising those stories out of the past. Sakiyama’s complex, non-­linear Kuja narratives counter the conventions of this revisionism. As in the testimonies of Maria and the old man, these seven individual stories accommodate the voices that history education in the present needs to hear. However, the full potential of this resistance to a reductive or simplistic narrative is reached in the very structure of these seven stories, one that binds them together, and which only became apparent with the publication of “Variations”. For, on one hand, the narrator’s transformation suggests that “Variations” functions as the “after” to the “before” of “Duchuimuni”, much like a translation to its original. Although the narrator is originally blinkered by his attempts to capture the landscape in a photograph, the new perspective afforded by his experience of listening to Takaesu Maria’s polyphonic “monologue” allows him to see beneath that surface. No longer driven by a need to

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  67 take photographs, the narrator is embraced by the landscape that once resisted his gaze. Yet by listening, he discovers the multiple stories that this ceremony releases and whose existence is under threat. As this forms his point of entry into the community’s ritual dance, it enables him to fight to save the community’s sacred space from destruction. However, as already described, the image of the abyss that doubles within the narrator’s silent scream as a point of simultaneous breakage and return, restores to this reading the questions of translation and history that underpins this research. One finds an echo, to begin with, between this image and Walter Benjamin’s closing lines in “The Task of the Translator”, in which he writes of Hölderlin’s translations from Sophocles that “meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language. There is, however, a stop.”64 In Sigrid Weigel’s reading, the better translation of Benjamin’s German term (halten) would not be “stop” but “hold” due to its ability to suggest both an “arrest” and the sense of “having something to hold onto, which prevents the plunge into the abyss”.65 In Kuja, the movement between each story from the base town to the landscape of Miyako threatens to take the narrator further away from his point of departure, and thus drives the series towards meaninglessness. However, the narrator’s scream arrests this descent by carving an opening not only for the other “Kuja” stories, suggested by the voices that become gradually “translatable” to him, but to a cycle of possible re-­readings of the opening and closing narratives themselves that unfold through multiple ambiguities, intertextualities, and allusions to real events. In fact, in a foreshadowing of the gaps and silences that emerge in Yi Yang-­ji’s stories discussed in Chapter 4, and the graphic wounding of the protagonist’s eye that closes Tawada’s novel discussed in Chapter 5, the narrator’s open-­mouthed scream implies a mode of translating Kuja’s past that resists the strictures of knowable language, thus taking her deconstructive and decolonising movement to its extreme. The silent scream also takes on theoretical significance in the context of recalling a past to which one did not bear witness first-­hand. Here, Sakiyama’s commitment resonates with Lisa Yoneyama’s reading of Benjamin, in which she has argued that the translator is akin to a critical historiographer tasked with transferring the memories of the past to future generations, even when she has no direct experience of the event herself.66 Born in 1954, after the war experiences she so often describes, Sakiyama has been sensitive to this challenge throughout her career. However, Kuja’s evocation of the “mass suicides” strikes at the heart of debates around the tōjisha – the one who experienced the event – and questions who has the ability, or the right, to tell whose story. As noted in the previous chapter, the triple disasters have created a new community forged around shared stories in the “post-­disaster” world. However, the mass suicides cannot be shared in this way. As articulated by the Okinawan literary scholar, Okamoto Keitoku, the only means by which the “postwar generation” might acquire knowledge of those tragedies is for each to ask: if faced with the same situation, what would I have done?67 As Shinjō Ikuo has written, this line

68  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami of questioning takes place in the uncertain realm of the past conditional, and thus does not afford the postwar subject any stable, clearly demarcated identity.68 However, this effort to reach some historical moment couched in unknowability is also meaningful. For one, it offers a way of giving voice to others who are on the brink of being edited out. For another, it resists a collective narrative which, in the case of the “mass suicides”, is that governed by the will of those acting in support of the nation, including the Japanese military who stand trial for their actions in that arena.69 Sakiyama’s writing of Kuja evokes this discursive context. First, when the old man who appears before the narrator in “Variations” speaks of “coercion”, his convoluted testimony pushes past the desire to create a simply and objective ‘truth’ which fuels the desires of historical revisionism, and instead bears witness to the fraught process of any act of remembering and retelling the past. Second, by positioning her male, Japanese narrator as the listener and, ultimately, the mouthpiece for these stories, Sakiyama dismantles the notion of the tōjisha who stands merely in the privileged position of the onlooker, and instead ensures that this tourist implicates himself in the situation and uncovers that capacity within him to become the aggressor. As the narrator’s call at the end of Variations reverberates with his image at the beginning of the Kuja series, we witness this encounter between his present situation, where he began, and what he might have become. Through this more speculative evocation of the tōjisha position, Sakiyama’s stories do not assume to stand in for the lost voices of Okinawa’s past or recall that past “how it really was”.70 However, her writing of the Kuja abyss calls its readers to lend an ear to the multiple, conflicting ghost stories that echo therein. Sakiyama’s disruptive use of language gives Kuja the power to incite specific narratives of Okinawa’s past. The purpose of this chapter has been to assert that while Sakiyama’s multilingual “island words” defy the conventions of the national language, this does not render her stories either untransmissible or untranslatable. Rather, her “Kuja” stories perpetuate a mise-­en-­abyme through which those narratives might continue to recall the past. The background of historical revisionism from the late 1990s to the mid-­2000s teach us why these concerns mattered to Sakiyama in the years when she first wrote Kuja. However, the marginalisation of Okinawan voices within the recent drive towards world literature, which is foreshadowed in the closing question of Shimakotoba that asks whether these “little stories” written in “island words” of “an island to the south” might enter the world as literature written in Japanese, teaches us that they also matter in the field of contemporary Japanese fiction today. Notes 1 All citations in this book refer to the 2017 volume, Kuja genshikō, unless otherwise indicated. The titles and original publication dates of these stories in Subaru are as follows, with my suggested translations:「孤島夢ドゥチュイムニ」“Kotō mu duchuimuni” (“Monologue of an is(olate)land dream”) (January 2006); 「見えないマチから ションカネーが」 “Mienai machi kara shonkanē ga” (“And so it goes in an Invisible

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  69 Town”) (May 2006); 「アコウクロウ幻視行 」“Akō kurō genshikō ” (“Passage through twilight phantasms”) (September 2006); 「ピンギヒラ坂夜行」“Pingihira zaka yakō ” (“Night flight from Pingihira Hill”) (January 2007); ヒ∆グル 風ヌ吹きば」 “Psiguru

kaji nu fukiba” (“When the I>iguru winds blow”) (May 2007);「マピローマの月に立 つ影は」“Mapirō ma no tsuki ni tatsu kage wa” (“What shadows stand in the midday moon”) (November 2007);「クジャ奇想曲変奏」“Kuja kisō kyoku hensō ” (“Variations on a Kuja phantasia”) (March 2008). I discuss the fifth title in this series more in this book’s concluding chapter. 2 This incident is commonly referred to in Japanese as the “Koza Riots” (Koza bōdō), however some scholars reject this term for framing the actions of Okinawans in predominantly unpredictable, savage, and destructive terms. Gima Susumu favoured so ̄do ̄ (騒動) in his essay to encapsulate both noise and the dual sense of movement as action and activism. Wesley Ueunten proposes hōki (蜂起), a figurative “awakening” or “stirring” of the “hornet”, to encapsulate the sense that civilian anger had been brewing throughout years of oppression, and on account of the care taken by Okinawans to target American cars, identifiable by their licence plates, and the preparedness of women in the bars who had Molotov cocktails at the ready. See Wesley Ueunten, ‘Ikari no umi kara no funki: Amerika gunsenryō ka no Okinawa ni okeru Koza hō ki’, in Gendai Okinawa no rekishi keiken: Kibō, arui wa mikessei ni tsuite, ed. Ichirō Tomiyama, trans. Makoto Arakaki (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010), 359–81. This active role of women highlighted in Ueunten’s account supplements the agency given to women in Sakiyama’s fiction, by which she seeks to subvert portrayals of Okinawa as a passive, female victim. 3 Higashi’s story has been translated by Steve Rabson in Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas (Berkeley, California: Center for Japanese Studies, 1989). Yoshida’s story appears in Southern Exposure translated by Yuki Ohta. Kamāra is directly adjacent to Koza. 4 Respectively, Koza-­ban: Donzoku (1986) and Koza-­ban: Godo ̄ (1988). In Sakiyama’s first ‘Kuja’ story, the fleeting appearance of this ghostly troupe suggests a potential reading of the ‘Kuja’ stories as themselves constituting a theatrical performance by its members. A dramatic scene at the climax of the seventh ‘Kuja’ story invokes further intertextualities to Chinen’s most famous play, “Jinruikan” (The house of man, 1976). 5 Ikue Kina, 2011, “Fuchi o ibasho to suru monotachi e: Sakiyama Tami no Kuja rensaku shō setsu ni okeru kioku to kō kan”, in Kokyō no toporoji: Basho to ibasho no kankyō bungaku ron (Tokyo: Suiseisha), 181–200. 6 Sakiyama, Tami. “Tokubetsu kikō essei: Koza ijū shiki”. Bunka No Mado, no. 33 (2011): 11–14. 7 Ibid., 12. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 14. 11 Kina Ikue, “Locating Tami Sakiyama’s Literary Voice in Globalizing Okinawan Literature”, International Journal of Okinawan Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 20. 12 Ibid., 25. 13 Ibid. 14 Minoru Iwasaki, Steffi Richter, and Richard F. Calichman, “The Topology of Post-­1990s Historical Revisionism”, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 507–38. 15 Aniya, Masaaki. 2008. “Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan’s Textbook Controversy”. Translated by Kyoko Selden. The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 6 (1): n.p. 16 Sakiyama Tami, Kuja genshikō (Fukuoka: Hanashoin, 2017), 83.

70  Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami 17 Ō shiro Tatsuhiro ‘Dochaku no hyōgen’. In Ōshiro Tatsuhiro zenshū dai 13 kan (Tokyo, Bensei Shuppan, 2002), 420–426. 18 Ibid., 426. 19 Ō shiro et al. 1998. 20 Ō shiro, ‘Dochaku no hyōgen’. 21 Sakiyama, 2002, 168–69, original emphasis 22 Ibid., 169. 23 Gima Susumu, Ryu ̄kyū-­ko ̄: Okinawa bunka no mosaku (Tokyo: Gun Shuppan, 1979), 74. 24 Ibid., 78. 25 Ibid., 79. 26 Sakiyama uses the term gokyōtai, an alternative name for the Imperial Blood and Iron Corps (Tekketsu kinno ̄tai) who were recruited from Okinawan schoolboys between the ages of 14 and 17. 27 Sakiyama, 2002, 170. 28 Ibid., 180. 29 Sakiyama, 2002, 171. 30 In Japanese, 肝 (kimo) refers to the bodily organ of the liver but in its Okinawan reading chimu it denotes an abstract emotional quality much like the Japanese kokoro, as in the expression chimuyami (肝 病 み) that denotes traumatic anguish or heartache. Sakiyama’s description of her “breath-­taking” (chimu hotohoto) excitement upon reading Higashi’s prose adapts his use of the same phrase. 31 Sakiyama, 2002, 176. 32 Ibid., 180. 33 Ibid. 34 Sakiyama, Kuja genshikō, 5. 35 Mark Morris. “Gossip and history: Nakagami, Faulkner, García Márquez”. Japan Forum 8, no. 1 (18 April 2007): 35–50. 36 This refrain repeats throughout all seven stories. The sound evokes Sozorogoto (“Rambling thoughts”), a poetic series by Yosano Akiko that was published in the inaugural issue of the feminist journal Seitō (Bluestockings) in 1911. There is a resonance between the closing line of “The Day the Mountains Move”, which reads “All the sleeping women are now awake and moving”, and the sense harboured by the narrator of “Duchuimuni” that “someone, somewhere, is striving to make their imprisoned whereabouts known”. 37 See: Eri Watanabe, “Yume no kotoba no riariti – Sakiyama Tami ‘Kotō mu duchuimuni’”, Gensō bungaku, kindai no makai e, ed. Hirotaka Ichiyanagi and Morio Yoshida (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2006), 183–97, and Shihoko Onaga, “Sakiyama Tami ‘Kotō mu duchuimuni’ ron: Ryō kai fukanō na ‘tasha’ to hen’yō sareru shintai”, Studies of Society and Culture in Ryukyu and Asia, no. 17 (2014): 31–47. 38 Sakiyama, Kuja genshikō, 9. 39 Sontag argued that “[t]o photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” See: Susan Sontag, On Photography, (London: Penguin, 1979), 4. 40 Watanabe, ‘Yume no kotoba no riariti’, 183. 41 Ibid. 42 Sakiyama, Kuja genshikō, 9. 43 Kina Ikue, “Fuchi no tasha o kiku kotoba: Sakiyama Tami no Kuja rensaku shō setsu ni okeru kioku to kō kan”, Suisei Tsūshin, no. 24 (May/June 2008 Joint Issue) (2008): 60. 44 Sakiyama, Kuja genshikō, 15–16.

Inciting the past / Sakiyama Tami  71 45 Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory. Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations. London, New York: Routledge, 2001, 68. The name Japayuki, literally “Japan-­bound”, is another slang term for these women. 46 Mitzi Uehara Carter, “Mixed Race Okinawans and Their Obscure In-­Betweeness”, Journal of Intercultural Studies 35, no. 6 (2014): 649. 47 Ibid., 651. 48 Sakiyama, 2017, 21. 49 This title further echoes in the appearance of a narrating voice identified only as washi in the seventh Kuja story that I discuss in the next section. 50 Sakiyama, 2017, 20–21. 51 Ibid., 25. 52 Ibid., 26. 53 The yunkui names an actual ceremony performed across the Okinawan islands, including Miyako. The name is thought to share roots with the Japanese yo o kou 世を乞う as a means of redressing imbalances and restoring prosperity to the world. 54 Sakiyama, 2017, 180–181. 55 Ibid., 181. 56 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn (New York, Schocken Books, 1968), 253. 57 Sakiyama, 2017, 189. 58 See for example, Medoruma Shun, ‘Mabuigumi’. Translated by Kyle Ikeda in Manoa 23, no. 1 (2011): 112–134. 59 Sakiyama Tami et al., ‘Zadankai: Okinawa, disutopia no bungaku’. Subaru: Bungei Kikanshi, vol. 29, no. 2 (2007): 172–191. 60 Ibid., 182. 61 Gima, Ryūkyū-­kō, 72–73. 62 Little was made of Jimi’s remarks but each of the two main daily newspapers in Okinawa, The Okinawa Times and the Ryukyu Shimpō, reported his words verbatim the following day. 63 Marukawa Tetsushi. Teikoku no bōrei: Nihon bungaku no seishin chizu (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2004), 194. 64 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 262. 65 Sigrid Weigel, Body-­and Image-­Space: Re-­reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines. (London; New York: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 176. 66 Yoneyama Lisa, ‘Hon’yaku/ shokuminchishugi/ hihanteki kisō: Varuta Ben’yamin to Nihon gunjū ianfu’. In Kyōiki no bungaku: 21 seiki bungaku no sōzō 2, ed. Imafuku Ryūta (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003). 67 Okamoto Keitoku, ‘Suihei jiku no hassō’. In Okinawa bungaku zenshū dai-6 kan (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1992). 68 Shinjō Ikuo. ‘Kiku shisōshi: Yakabi Osamu o yominaosu’. In Okinawa no kizu toiu kairo, 2014, 69–90. This chapter of Shinjō ’s book is dedicated to the historian Yakabi Osamu and examines his assiduous reading of Okamoto’s essay. 69 Ibid., 177. 70 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 255.

4

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji

The dangers of silence The essays and works of fiction by Yi Yang-­ji are, like those of Sakiyama, keenly engaged with the difficulty of articulating the past. However, for Yi this challenge is altogether more intimately connected to her individual experiences as an ethnic Korean in Japan, or zainichi cho ̄senjin. In the critical, autobiographical essay, “I am a Korean” (Watashi wa cho ̄senjin, 1975), Yi considers the meaning of this term in relation to her identity. In the first instance, chōsenjin names the Korean roots that were taken from Yi at the age of nine when her father naturalised the family to Japanese citizenship.1 The label is also the source of pain since her father was motivated by the desire to pass into Japanese society without ethnic discrimination. However, Yi’s accounts of her parent’s devastating divorce and her personal struggles, including a suicide attempt in her teens, reveal the inescapability of the heavy history that marked her parents’ lives as Koreans in Japan, and the failure of the hope that naturalisation would prevent that suffering from being passed on to the next generation. To speak and write as a chōsenjin is for Yi a means of reclaiming the Korean part of herself which was denied to her through the “involuntary, automatic” imposition of a Japanese nationality. At the same time, Yi argued that there is a need to challenge the superficial account of history that has forced Koreans into a passive position so that “historical truth” (rekishiteki jijitsu) can be restored.2 Rather than claim to speak for the wider ethnic Korean community, Yi’s quest is rooted in personal pledge to someday “bear her Korean name”(chōsenmei o nanoru): that is, to leave behind her legal Japanese name, Tanaka Yoshie, and begin to live and write as Yi Yang-­ji. Such an act would mark a “defiant” (chōsenteki 挑戦的) gesture against “Japan as a whole”, and reclaim the discriminatory label chōsenjin for herself.3 Within a wider, historical context, Yi’s step towards reclaiming her Korean identity constitutes a more significant move to challenge the violence with which the Japanese colonial authorities transformed Koreans into loyal “imperial subjects” (kōmin). By introducing religious reform and imposing the use of Japanese, the kōminka movement sought to Japanise Koreans to the extent that they would willingly support the war effort; and of particular relevance to Yi’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-5

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  73 essay, they imposed the use of Japanese names through the policy known as sōshi kaimei 創氏改名 that was introduced in February 1940.4 As Wan-­You Chou has explained, while the official rhetoric of sōshi kaimei suggested the creation of a new name, in reality Korean subjects simply “lost their own names”.5 Although the family names “Yi” and “Tanaka” bear no obvious connection, Yi’s use of the same kanji (良枝) for her personal name, reading it Yang-­ji rather than Yoshie, proposes a way of maintaining a hold on both of her identities. In tandem with a tendency within studies of zainichi identity and literature, discussions of Yi’s fiction have often foregrounded tropes of in-­betweenness, particularly vis-­à-­vis Japan and Korea as two possible poles of identity. Carol Hayes, for example, has described the “tortured dualism” within Yi’s fiction that maps onto the writer’s negotiations of her own cultural identity.6 Similarly, Catherine Ryu has written of how the eponymous character of Yi’s 1988 novel Yuhi, which I discuss in later in this chapter, sits within the “turmoil” that zainichi Koreans face through their “hybrid identity…rooted in the interstices of two nation-­states”.7 My own analyses of Yi’s fiction in this chapter draw on a related concern with ambiguity. However, rather than dwell on how this trope manifests itself in relation to cultural articulations of zainichi identity, whether they express the lived experiences of the writer or the imagined lives of her characters, my enquiry centres upon the narrative ambiguity that derives from the silences and absences that pervade Yi’s fiction. These silences and absences highlight the ways in which Korean voices, especially those of women, have been erased and forgotten from history. Resonant with Sakiyama’s concerns about Okinawan voices discussed in the previous chapter, Erik Ropers has highlighted how in the case of Korean wartime experiences, the construction and mediation of Japan’s national history renders some lives visible and obscures others from view.8 Yi spoke to this issue directly in a separate essay, titled “Entering the rhythm of sanjo” (Sanjo no ritsudō no naka e, 1979).9 The sanjo refers to a complex form of Korean music and Yi’s essay in part describes her aspirations to master this as a student of the gayageum (12-­stringed, plucked zither). But at its heart, Sanjo expresses Yi’s pain and protest at the treatment of Lee Deuk-­hyun, an ethnic Korean wrongly imprisoned in 1955 for the murder of a female manager from the Marushō company for which he worked as a delivery driver. As Yi highlights, Lee’s incarceration began in the same year of her birth, suggesting an alternative life that might have been hers. More critically, Yi’s essay makes explicit the injustice of the Japanese judicial system that “swallowed up a lone man and denied him the breadth of emotions, time, and possibilities that were his way of life”.10 However, Yi’s writing also incites silence in ways that disrupt the role and function of narrative, and the desire to fill in those gaps. In “I am a Korean”, Yi recalls the fear that she felt when the people around her fell quiet in the context of her parents’ divorce.11 In her fiction, she harnesses this terrifying potential by creating characters who are already absent or choose to not speak.

74  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji In this, Yi’s writing resonates with Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s suggestion that instead of interpreting silence in a single sense that might “place women on the side of negativity”, we should explore the possibility that the absence of their voices can also signify a “will not to say or a will to unsay, and…a language of its own”.12 The powerful, poetic critique that Lee Chonghwa articulates in Tsubuyaki no seiji shiso ̄ (Murmur as political thought) is also resonant and productive.13 Lee argues that the act of making women’s voices available in the public domain of a patriarchal society also makes them vulnerable to being appropriated by others or erased anew: “in the aftermath of having told everything, everything disappears, and it is lost again”.14 How then, Lee asks, might we be able to tell our stories without deferring to a language of binaries that situates the powerful against and above the oppressed? What dynamics are at play when the prevalent structure demands as “proof ” stories that are shocking, provocative, or difficult for the speaker to tell? What is at risk in the act of “telling”? And, what does it mean “not to tell”? Lee therefore suggests that “existential ambiguity” offers a more subversive route via in which resides “the options of daring not to speak, or perhaps to have lived without speaking, or else of continuing to live in the now-­present (kongen 今原) without speaking so much as a word”.15 This chapter will trace the silences that resound in two works of fiction by Yi: Kazukime (1983) and Yuhi (1988). Written five years apart, both works play with a notable, crucial device, namely the absence of their central protagonists. However, each does so in its own distinct way. Kazukime narrates through multiple third parties the descent of its anonymous protagonist, a young Korean woman in Japan, into a pattern of dangerous, self-­ destructive behaviour including bulimic purging, alcohol abuse, and ultimately, suicide. This motif of the absent protagonist then recurs in Yuhi, for which Yi won the Akutagawa Prize in 1989 and which was her last completed work before her death from myocarditis at the age of 37. However, whereas Kazukime’s prose is characterised by unflinching, visceral descriptions of bodily violence and pain, the physical absence in Yuhi gives the later work a far more spectral quality. This turn suggests a different, more empowered solution to the problems of silence, absence, and violence that permeate each work, contributing an additional interpretation to the multiple uses of “translation” that connect the respective literary analyses throughout this book. Specifically, by questioning what happens when translation is called upon to fill in the gaps left within Japanese (literary) history, this reading interrogates what other possible meanings might be sought in those silent spaces that haunt the archive. History repeating: Kazukime Kazukime was printed in the April 1983 issue of Gunzō five months after Yi’s debut work, Nabi taryon, appeared in the same magazine.16 The narrative traces the life and death of a young, nameless woman, referred to only in the third-­ person as kanojo (she/her), whose identity as an ethnic Korean provides a

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  75 source of ongoing personal discrimination that has triggered a spiral of physical and psychological symptoms.17 The opening chapter establishes this pattern by focusing on kanojo’s fear as a high-­school student that an upcoming lesson in her social studies textbook centred on “Korea” (Cho ̄sen) will expose her ethnic identity to the class. This is compounded by the alienation that kanojo feels at home following her mother’s remarriage to a Japanese man, a marriage that seems characterised by shouting and further abuse, and evident tensions with her younger Japanese stepsister and older stepbrothers. The background context of a tatemae ceremony to celebrate the erection of the physical framework of the house adds to the sense of construction: the more common, figurative use of tatemae refers to a physical demeanour feigned to conceal one’s private thoughts, much like the English word “façade”. With seemingly nowhere to turn, on the day of the class kanojo is overcome with nausea and runs away from school. After collapsing in front of the porch of her home, kanojo loses her grasp of what is reality and what is a dream. Her mother calls first a doctor and then an “old woman” whose “purification ritual” eventually brings the girl back to consciousness. One week later, overcome by the same fear, kanojo leaves the family home for good.18 Kazukime is divided into eight chapters, of which the above scenes constitute the first. In the second, the narrative shifts its attentions to Keiko, kanojo’s younger, Japanese stepsister. After being estranged years for several years, Keiko had been prompted by her impending coming-­of-­age ceremony, which marks entrance into legal adulthood in Japan, to visit kanojo at her apartment. However, instead of an opportunity to reconnect or make amends, Keiko discovers kanojo’s body in the bathtub, the result of an apparent suicide. The shock triggers within Keiko memories including her own “inferiority complex” that resulted from unfavourable comparisons with kanojo’s beauty and academic diligence. Keiko’s reflections also reveal that kanojo returned briefly to the family home following the death of her mother – Keiko’s stepmother – and stole a considerable sum of money. While these episodes appear to explain the rift that developed between the two stepsisters, Keiko also indicates some desire for connection in her memory of kanojo’s “downward-­looking, hollowed profile, and her lifeless, pallid skin that turned the sense of inferiority she felt in relation to kanojo into something close to sympathy”.19 The chapter ends as Keiko finds herself wondering how to comprehend the ten years since kanojo entered her life and the fact now of her death. This oscillating pattern between a limited, third-­ person narration of kanojo’s life in the past, and Keiko’s efforts to resurrect that life in the present, continue through Kazukime’s subsequent six chapters. In the former, we witness glimpses of kanojo’s ongoing battles with episodes of bingeing and purging in the family home, her rape by both Japanese stepbrothers, unwanted sexual advances from her male teacher, and the event of her suicide. In the latter, Keiko contacts the names of people she discovers in an address book that she has found in kanojo’s apartment to learn more of her stepsister in the years since she left home. In this regard, Kazukime proceeds in a manner akin

76  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji to a mystery novel driven by the narrative’s attempts – assisted by Keiko – to reveal more about the absent protagonist at its heart. However, this effort is always already deferred by the third-­person pronoun that implies some shared knowledge between the reader and narrator even though kanojo’s name is never revealed. Through its complex structure and reliance upon kanojo as an empty signifier, Kazukime disrupts the supremacy of linear narrative and instead raises the question of what the story, however it is told, is not allowing us to see. The term kazukime (潜き女) is an old Japanese word still used in some coastal areas to denote women who dive for fish and seafood. This context is far removed from the contents of Yi’s novel. However, the image of a diving woman appears apt as a metaphor for the ambiguous existence of the novel’s protagonist who comes in and out of view. The fact that Yi writes this title in syllabic script alone also enables more than one interpretation. The verb kazuku (潜く “to dive”) has a homophone in a second kazuku (被く “to wear”, “to don”), which can in more idiomatic contexts carry the alternative meanings of shouldering responsibility or loss, and of being injured or deceived. The multiple abuses that kanojo experiences make Kazukime an undeniably difficult, emotional, even triggering read. However, Yi’s raw, visceral depictions also reinforce the novel’s central critique of narrative by suggesting how the body itself might serve as a medium through which alternative visions of past that have been denied in language can emerge. This mechanism is prefigured in Yi’s description of the sanjo in her earlier essay, as it is through the “continual motion” and “incessant, relentlessly unstable sense of rhythm” of her performing body that she gives voice to the story of Marushō incident and its framing of Lee Deuk-­hyun. In the narrative space of Kazukime, kanojo’s body expresses other, traumatic, historical injustices. In exposing kanojo’s rape by her Japanese stepbrother, an agony amplified by a resultant pregnancy, termination, and the fact that her mother refuses to accept this horrifying truth, the narrative adds her observation that if she was ever to leave the family home, Keiko may well be forced to submit to this “role” in her stead.20 This short, euphemistic reference encapsulates the “comfort women” system wherein women from Japan’s colonies, especially Korea, were recruited and forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese Army during the Pacific War. Although Kim Hak-­sun’s testimony did not bring this dark history to mainstream public attention until 1991, other survivor stories were certainly already in circulation from the 1970s and 1980s in both Japan and Korea. These included Noh Su-­Bok’s account that was released through the Korean media in 1982, one year before Kazukime was published and the same year in which Yi made her first visit to Korea.21 The implicit criticism of language and its inability to express the past that is intrinsic to Yi’s novel is made explicit in the fourth chapter in which Keiko meets Morimoto Ichirō , kanojo’s former lover. Morimoto recalls meeting kanojo while drinking with his friend, Kō ji, and Kō ji’s brother, at the bar where she worked. One week later, at a party held by the three men, Kō ji’s brother – who remains nameless but in Morimoto’s memory has a habit for getting

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  77 quickly bored and antagonistic – goads kanojo by repeatedly shouting the word kotoba before launching into a speech that sounded more like a “lecture on dialectics”.22 As I noted in my discussion of Sakiyama’s “Shimakotoba” in Chapter 3, kotoba can signify both an entire language and a single word; like Sakiyama, Yi writes the term in katakana, which makes the term appear abstract and thus emphasises its multiple meanings. Although kanojo is initially silent, her eventual response seems equally obscure: It’s all just layer upon layer of continuities and discontinuities on repeat, a cyclical recurrence, an endless metabolism, that much is obvious.23 This outburst jars both as a rare, direct citation of kanojo’s speech, and through her almost academic, theoretical language that seems out of context for a drinking party among friends. However, these words also encapsulate the circuitous, duplicitous quality of language that can generate and reproduce some narratives while excluding others. And yet, the object of kanojo’s critique appears to go beyond language when she continues: Come to think of it, someone once said it had the makings of a ghost story. I mean, I can buy that…It’s more terrifying to accept it with my body than in my mind, but I think it is terrifying. Ghost story? … She seemed to wish to say no more on the matter and with that, clammed her mouth shut and twisted her face.24 With this, Morimoto’s recalls that the conversation ended, foreclosing the opportunity to learn what her reference to a “ghost story” might have meant. It is not until Morimoto’s memory of another evening that the novel provides its possible answer. By this time, the pair were living together and one evening arriving home from work, Morimoto discovered kanojo in their futon with her “calves and thighs covered with bruises, and blood-­soaked gauze and bandages on her wrists and chest” from wounds that she confesses to have inflicted upon herself.25 Later still that same evening, Morimoto found kanojo lying limply on the bathroom tiles as though collapsed from the heat. However, when he asked her what had happened, she explained that she sensed an earth tremor, before launching into a long, impassioned speech during which she recalled the 7.8 earthquake that shook the whole Kantō region at midday on September 1, 1923. The earthquake and the 114 tremors that followed wrought widespread destruction, sparking a total of 187 fires that burned down private dwellings and official buildings, and leaving between 100,000 and 140,000 dead. On September 2, the authorities instated martial law, and soon after, false rumours began to circulate of Koreans committing such crimes as arson and poisoning local water supplies. The situation was escalated by the Japanese military and police force began arresting and beating Koreans in the streets,

78  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji aided by vigilante civilians swept up by the spirit of mass hysteria. The most common estimate is that between 6,400 and 6,600 Koreans were killed in the earthquake’s aftermath, while witness accounts describe in horrific detail the extent of the torture to which many of the deceased were subjected, including base acts of mutilation.26 Kanojo’s account rebels against the censorship by the Japanese right that has throughout history sought to revise, deny, and forget the 1923 massacre of Koreans.27 The passage is worth quoting in full despite its length. Throughout, kanojo addresses Morimoto as “Itchan”, a pet name that abbreviates his given name of Ichirō . Itchan, if another massive earthquake like the Great Kantō Earthquake strikes again, I suppose more Koreans will be slaughtered. Perhaps they’ll be made to say things like “one yen and fifty sen” or “ten yen and fifty sen” and then be stabbed with bamboo spears. But I don’t think that would happen next time around. Things have changed in the world since then. Most of them can now pronounce their words so that they sound almost identical to Japanese speakers. Hey Itchan, if I was going to be killed would you say I was your lover and hug me tightly, and say that you would go together with, with me? No, next time we will definitely not be slaughtered. But that would put you and I in a bind. You would have to kill me. I’d make a run for it, and some crazy Japanese would chase after me brandishing a bamboo spear or a Japanese sword. I’d be unable to outrun them, and whack, they’d stab me in the back and stab my chest and I’d thrash about covered in blood. It hurts you know, really it does…The other day, you were gripping hold of a sharpened kitchen knife. It made my body tingle with excitement, just as when we are having sex. I came to realise why I have never liked cooking. I’m frightened by it, and I couldn’t bear that tingling sensation. That’s why I tried to cut my wrists and chest with the kitchen knife. It hurt. And the blood, it really spewed out. I wanted to see what would happen if I plunged the blade in, but I grew scared when I imagined that even more blood would gush forth…So then, I tried hitting my legs with a hammer. That hurt too. You know, Itchan, I could be massacred, but then what would happen if they didn’t kill me? Would I be Japanese? It really is so painful, you know, when all that blood is pouring out.28 As Morimoto describes kanojo’s words as “wild rambling”, this passage is reminiscent of the old man’s traumatic recall in Sakiyama’s “Variations” was discussed in the previous chapter. Given that Sakiyama’s “Kuja” is a landscape haunted by ghosts, kanojo’s words can also be read as a “ghost story” (kaidan) of sorts.29 Kanojo’s fear that another earthquake could bring about another massacre bears witness to the notion that like language, history also plays out in “layer upon layer of continuities and discontinuities”. This interrelatedness of

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  79 language and history is revealed in kanojo’s reference to stories that those Koreans who appeared to be Japanese were identified according to their distinctive pronunciation of certain Japanese words: a situation that Sonia Ryang has described as “the tongue that divided life and death”, wherein “mispronunciation…was tantamount to declaring one’s killability”.30 This context makes clear the connection between kanojo’s self-­harm and the novel’s ongoing critique that language can conceal and betray as much as it can reveal. Within the logic of Yi’s work, the coincidence of kanojo’s blood-­soaked, wounded body not only re-­enacts the violence of the history she relates. It also confirms the need for another form of language – here, fought aggressively and painfully through kanojo’s body – to make that retelling possible. However problematic this recourse to the body, Yi’s text offers a further trope through which to articulate its significance: hysteria. Morimoto closing memories move to the New Year, around which time kanojo developed a “spasm” in her jaw that Kō ji’s brother likened to a “tick, typical of the symptoms of hysteria” (hisuterı ̄shō tokuyu ̄ no sho ̄jō rashiku, chikku).31 This suggestion is echoed elsewhere in the text when a doctor asks kanojo whether she has a touch of “neurosis” (noirōze).32 Such language appears challenging as a means of reducing kanojo’s psychical instability to a gendered form of madness. However, in The Newly Born Woman (2008), Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément present the hysteric as a possible conduit through which the (hi)stories of the repressed might break forth.33 Yi’s text generates the possibility of a more ‘hysterical’ reading along this more empowered line; not only through her description of kanojo’s literal “body language” but also through multiple literal and figurative and references specifically to the womb. Midway through the novel, kanojo’s mother dies of uterine cancer, while kanojo herself ­undergoes several abortions. We learn in the novel’s sixth chapter from Kayo, kanojo’s former neighbour and the second contact from the address book with whom Keiko eventually meets, kanojo also intended to mark her own coming-­of-­age ceremony by requesting a full hysterectomy. While this drastic measure alone might suggest a means of resisting the imposition of normative, procreative womanhood, it takes on a deeper significance rooted in ethnic difference when kanojo claims that in the past, Japanese doctors “would remove the womb and ovaries so that Korean women could not reproduce”.34 Kanojo’s suicide in the penultimate chapter replays the interaction of language, the body, and the desire to invoke unspoken histories for the last time. Again, the text begins with language as kanojo hears a “low, chant-­like voice” (unari goe) that commands her to “go out, go out into the middle of the water” (dete ike, mizu no naka ni dete ike).35 Yi’s phrasing appears counter-­intuitive, the imperative form “go out” (dete ike) jarring with the apparently inward direction towards the centre, but it also recreates the “endless metabolism” that underpins kanojo’s philosophy of language. In fact, this language also echoes the refrain used by the “old woman” during the ritual healing that kanojo undergoes in the novel’s opening chapter. But as kanojo “sinks her body into the bathtub, and then her head”, the cycle created in language now returns

80  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji kanojo to her past as she senses being transported to the shores of “Saishūtō ”, the Japanese name for Cheju Island, and the homeplace of her biological father. As Melissa Wender has noted, Yi’s phonetic writing of Saishūtō in katakana overlays this proper noun with an alternative, homophonic reading as a “final island”, suggesting that this personal history, too, is marked by continuities as well as discontinuities.36 Most crucially, kanojo’s return to her symbolic fatherland is coterminous with the return of a more public yet silenced history connected to the chamsu – the Korean name for the “diving women” of Jeju that approximates to the Japanese term, kazukime. Chamsu have for centuries been diving in the waters around Jeju Island for fish and seafood using only traditional methods and clothing.37 While myths abound about these women as “mermaids” due to their abilities to stay underwater for up to three minutes at a time unaided by breathing apparatus, and to withstand the tremendous pressure at depths of up to ten metres below sea level, their critical, historical significance lies in their active resistance against Japanese imperial rule. The Sehwari market protests mark the culmination of this dissent following the Japanese government’s takeover of the Jeju Haenyeo Association in 1930 that saw the imposition of exploitative pricing structures among other oppressions. On the night of January 12, 1932, hundreds of divers gathered bearing the hoes and sickles that marked their trade and threatened the Japanese governor of Jeju, Taguchi Teiki, before being held back by imperial police. Many of the women were subsequently arrested and imprisoned, and several died due to the wounds that they sustained from police torture, which in some cases included waterboarding.38 Yi’s text never relates this history outright, but the title of her novel, which initially seems so disconnected from the story it tells, invites us to catch a glimpse of this past as it floats just beneath the text’s surface. The short, closing chapter of Kazukime brings these questions of the unsaid to the fore. As Keiko prepares for her own coming-­of-­age ceremony, she has lost interest in the intricately decorated kimono that she collected on the day that she discovered kanojo’s body. Instead, her mind is distracted by an odd feeling (mushi, literally insect), the “true identity” of which she is “unable to grasp” (tegotae ni tsukamenai) but which aches in her chest when she thinks of kanojo.39 Within the textual space, this unknowable “insect” suggests that kanojo is now living within Keiko, blurring the boundaries of self and other. And within this closing image, Keiko appears to have embraced kanojo in all her radical alterity. Thus, Keiko dials a third number from kanojo’s address book but the moment that the call is answered, she hangs up the receiver. In a text that frustrates the expectations of storytelling at every turn, Keiko’s refusal to uncover any more about kanojo is the only logical outcome. In this way, Kazukime allows the image of kanojo to haunt its narrative without ever pinning her down, the spectral embodiment of multiple others whose pasts have been forgotten and lives remain unaccounted for. In short, it is the ultimate “ghost story”.

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  81 The violence of the silent text: Yuhi Yi’s novel Yuhi was published in the November 1988 issue of the literary journal Gunzō, five years after Kazukime. While Yi produced several works in the intervening period, Yuhi was awarded the 103rd Akutagawa Prize in January 1989, making Yi the first female, ethnic Korean writer to take this honour and Yuhi her most acclaimed work. The novel is named for its central protagonist, Yi Yuhi, an ethnic Korean student from Japan who for the past six months has attended the prestigious “S University” in Seoul to study linguistics while staying in the home of two Korean women: an aunt (Ajumoni, as the Japanese transliterates the Korean term in katakana) and niece (Onni). If this title creates the expectation of a first-­person narrative, however, the novel begins with Onni replacing the telephone receiver following Yuhi’s call from the airport to bid her farewell. The narrative thus traces through Onni’s first-­person perspective the two Korean women’s first evening as they recall their memories of Yuhi and attempt to come to terms with the fact that she has now gone. Yuhi derives narrative momentum from the absence of its eponymous protagonist. As well as triggering Onni’s narrative voice into action, Yuhi’s sudden departure has generated an apparent mystery at the text’s heart: namely, what caused her to abandon her studies and leave the two women’s home? For example, Kawamura Minato has interpreted Yuhi as caught in a bind between two possible “points of arrival” – her radically unfamiliar “parental land” (Korea), and the “other’s country” (Japan) – wherein those “aspects [within her] that have become Japanese” (nihonjin-­ka shita bubun) prevent her from ever being able to belong fully to either place.40 In a similar vein, Takai Yūichi argued that the crux of this novel lies in Yuhi’s apparent “struggles” to become a “fully-­ fledged Korean” (kankokujin ni narikiru).41 Kankoku Shinbun (Korea Press), the Tokyo-­based newspaper of the Korea Residents Union of Japan, even described Yuhi as “an oversensitive narcissist” whose decision to leave Seoul was “not a tragedy but amounted to nothing other than her fleeing from reality” as a result of her “excessive self-­centredness”.42 By assuming that the nation exists a priori, and that Yuhi’s visit to Korea expresses her attempt to adopt or adapt to a more “Korean” identity, these readings all interpret her premature return to Japan as a failure. However, the fact that the text already begins without Yuhi establishes her absence as a far more fundamental critique of the conditions upon which the acts of knowing, telling, and – ultimately – translation, are predicated. In a clear difference from the visceral excess of the female body depicted in Kazukime, Yuhi only offers scant references to Yuhi’s physicality and in terms that emphasise its liminality, such as her “androgynous features”, “petite build”, and “child-­like face” that cast doubt upon her 27 years of age.43 The text emphasises this unknowability when it claims that “the only unambiguous truth was that Yuhi is no longer here” (Yuhi wa inai to iu jijitsu dake wa hakkiri to shite ita). Indeed, the phrase Yuhi wa inai repeats several times within Onni’s narration like a musical refrain that reminds the reader that “Yuhi is not

82  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji here”.44 This phrase also contains a possible double meaning through which a more profound absence builds: as Onni confirms towards the novel’s end without even reference to Yuhi’s name, “[she is] no longer in this country. [She is] nowhere” (Kono kuni ni wa mō inai. Doko ni mo inai).45 Yuhi thus manifests as a highly ambiguous figure traceable only through Onni’s memories of such intangible attributes as her voice and gaze. Descriptions of these qualities fill the text as if haunting Onni, yet these qualities also lose their form as Yuhi’s gaze becomes “steeped” in her voice, and that voice is later rendered as “a voice that does not become” (koe ni naranai koe).46 Yi’s novel plays with the materiality of her prose to represent the elusive quality of this voice early in the novel as Onni recalls Yuhi describing the rocky mountains that lie behind the Korean women’s home: (岩).47 Yi’s prose splits Yuhi’s voice into three, beginning with the Korean hangeul (bawi) that is glossed with the Japanese approximation of this pronunciation written in katakana (paui), and followed in parentheses by the kanji that reveals the meaning (“rock”) to Japanese readers. Recalling Sakiyama’s efforts to represent Okinawan voices in Japanese script, the need for multiple orthographies indicates the impossibility of capturing Yuhi’s multilingual utterance in a single Japanese or Korea script. This is just one example of the various orthographic plays that Yi scatters through Yuhi, and which animate on the surface of the text the concern with language that flows through its core. This premise is flagged by Yuhi’s chosen specialism of linguistics, but it is most keenly evident in her apparent struggles to master Korean. To continue the quote begun above, Onni reflects: I thought about how Yuhi used to vocalise the word and in a hushed voice tried to recreate the way said it. The more she tried to emphasise the wi sound, the more awkward the voice that resounded in my mind.48 Ryu has argued that Onni’s focus upon Yi’s particular pronunciation represents her “desperate attempt to fill Yuhi’s absence” through that voice, guided by an approach that reads Onni’s connection to Yuhi as inherently empathetic and informed by desire.49 However, Onni’s memory of Yuhi’s “awkward” pronunciation also betrays a more critical view that follows her unofficial and self-­ appointed role as Yuhi’s language tutor. Through this personal investment, Onni is repeatedly drawn to note Yuhi’s failings at essential skills for the fluent use of Korean such as her clumsy handwritten hangeul, her difficulty at following the rules for spacing words (ttieosseugi, or tiosugi if one transliterates the phonetic Japanese in Yi’s text), and her inability to pronounce plosive sounds. Yuhi’s difficulties to master Korean suggest a plausible reason for her decisions to withdraw from her studies prematurely and leave. Other of Onni’s memories attest to the psychological toll that these encounters with Korean inflicted upon Yuhi. On a trip into the city to buy a new desk, Onni recalls Yuhi being overcome by the cacophony of Korean sounds and chattering around her to the point of physical collapse, and “rejecting” (kyozetsu) Onni’s

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  83 own voice.50 Yuhi even likens the “caustic, bitter, superior” Korean that is spoken at school and in the city to a “tear gas bomb” while “just hearing it makes it hard for me to breathe”.51 These violent responses also find reflections in Onni’s own reaction to Japanese. For Onni, this former colonial language is “dangerous” because it carries the possibility of circulating ideologies promoted by Chō sen sō ren, the Japan-­based organisation that holds political sympathies to the communist North Korea.52 When Yuhi begins chanting under her breath in Japanese on the same shopping trip, the words sound to Onni “like a curse”.53 However, the linguistic layers of complexity within Yuhi go beyond pitting Japanese and Korean, and indeed the two women, against one another. In Yuhi’s only utterance that the text reveals during the aborted attempt to buy a desk, Yuhi’s language is fragmented in a way that defies the grammar of both Japanese and Korean: “Onni, go, desk, I want to buy”.54 Contrary to the aggressive Korean she hears outside, Yuhi’s claim that she “likes” the Korean spoken by Onni and her aunt also complicates the picture, and suggests rather a conflict between personal and public modes of language. This possibility has led several critical engagements with the novel to unpack its representation of language according to psychoanalytical models. Ryu, for example, has read Yuhi as “first and foremost a psychoanalytic drama of language” in which she considers Yuhi’s “unrepresentable” language as an example of the “Lacanian real”.55 Relatedly, Okano Yukie has asked whether Yuhi’s rejection of the “violent incursion of language” during the episode in the city might be attributed to a “type of hysteria”.56 By reappraising Yuhi’s wordless cries and silences as a means of resistance against the hegemonic and symbolic grammar that defines either national language, these approaches suggest a way of reappraising Yuhi’s decision to abandon her studies from a sign of failure or defeat into a radical and empowering move. Rather than emphasise Yuhi, the fictional character, my interests lie in how Yuhi, the body of text, enacts a challenge against the demands of representation that takes language to its destructive and self-­destructive limits. While Yuhi herself is “nowhere”, Yi’s prose in Yuhi brings textual materiality to the fore. In a work thematically underpinned by questions of language, Yi’s prose is filled with idiomatic references containing the Japanese word meaning mouth (kuchi, kō 口): words are seldom “spoken” but “leave the mouth” (kuchi kara deru 口から出る,) or are “sent from the mouth” (kuchi ni dasu 口に出す). Some characters speak in “muffled” (kuchigomori 口ごもり) tones, while some “clam up” (kuchi o tozasu 口を閉ざす); others “interject” (kuchi o hasamu 口を挟む), and some “lose voice” (kuchi o kikanai 口をきかない) altogether. Further examples abound in references to “badmouthing” (waruguchi 悪口), “tone of voice” (kuchō 口調), “verbal debate” (kōron 口論), and in the more figurative uses of this kanji in compound nouns including “sleeve opening” (sodeguchi 袖口), “entranceway” (genkan-­guchi 玄関口), “doorway” (doa-­guchi ドア口), and the adjective “regrettable” (kuchioshii 口惜しい). As should be clear, these phrases are not only idiomatic. The ideographic representation of “mouth” in these recurring phrases produces a visual effect on the surface of Yi’s text by which this story of an absent protagonist seems itself to beckon open-­mouthed.

84  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji This invitation to read Yuhi as a textual performance is reinforced through Yuhi’s drunken outburst in the middle of the night in which Onni encounters Yuhi scrawling the Korean term to mean “our country” (uri nara) in hangeul. Yi’s prose is again glossed with katakana and followed in parentheses by the Japanese bokoku, literally “mother country”:

(母国) These loaded words suggest the agony of national belonging and the struggle for Yuhi as an ethnic Korean raised in Japan to claim either term. However, Yuhi continues:

(オンニ 私は 偽善者です 私は 嘘つきです)57 A single translation of this multilingual text might read: “Onni, I am a hypocrite, I am a liar.” By invoking the liar’s paradox, Yuhi’s words derail any attempt to know her. This trick is then repeated when Onni recalls these words on her own terms, embedding them at the heart of her own narration. Indeed, Onni appears aware of this herself when she reflects that despite her efforts to express her feelings to her aunt, “as soon as I put them into words, they somehow seemed to deviate from how I actually felt”.58 These moves towards narrative unreliability challenge any ambition to uncover Yuhi’s mystery. In fact, such a project is undermined even further by the revelation that Yuhi makes to Onni in their final telephone call, that she has left a bundle of 448 handwritten pages in the desk drawer, but when Onni asks whether she must respect the contents as private, Yuhi replies, “…but Onni, I don’t expect you’ll be able to read it. It’s in Japanese”.59 The manuscript thus sits within the novel as a further aporia to which access is denied, and one which instigates within Onni a sense of “terror” (obie).60 Of course, this need not have

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  85 been the case. For despite Onni’s explicit lack of Japanese knowledge, the novel Yuhi is written in Japanese. This fact enables us to read Yuhi from its onset as a work in translation within which her manuscript represents an inaccessible, untranslated aporia. The question of what Yuhi’s manuscript contains therefore constitutes another mystery within this literary work alongside the unknowability of its protagonist. Rather than grant insight into this Japanese text illegible to its stated narrator, Yi’s prose employs translation as a means of writing over the colonised Korean narrator’s tongue in the language of her former oppressor. And yet, the single detail that is revealed about Yuhi’s manuscript – namely its 448 pages in length – seems too specific to be overlooked. If one witnesses in this number a date, April ’48, then Yuhi’s manuscript suggests in an obscure fashion the uprising and massacre on Jeju Island that began on April 3, 1948, and which is more commonly referred to in Japanese as the “3.4 Incident” (San-­ yon jiken). On this night, rising tensions against the US military occupation ignited a popular protest and communist guerrilla rebellion which incurred a violent, authoritarian crackdown against the “reds”. In the six years that followed, over 30,000 of Cheju’s population were killed through a “red hunt” in which houses were searched and individuals were screened. Seong-­Nae Kim, whose work has engaged questions of state violence and traumatic memory in this context, has described how the effects of anticommunism in South Korean following its separation from the DPRK “effectively silenced the public memory” of the massacre for over half a century.61 The possibility that Yi invoked this date in her text while any reference to it remained under strict taboo, lends Yuhi’s manuscript with an even more compelling power in case she, too, has enacted a similar rebellion in producing these pages of Japanese in the textual space of South Korea. Such a reading would also delineate another radical move alongside Kazukime’s invocation of the chamsu that incites Jeju’s past – especially with respect to acts of violence and of protest – within Yi’s literature. This violence is redoubled in Onni’s final interaction with the text. The final memory to assail Onni sets the scene as she recalls Yuhi’s theory of a “language crutch” (kotoba no tsue). In Yuhi’s explanation, each morning she wakes to the thought of the sound ah. However, she is never certain whether this is the Korean a (아), after which she would take up the “crutch” to continue with the pattern ya, o, yo ( , , ), or the Japanese a (あ), from which would follow i, u, e, o (い、 う、 え、 お). With this voice “still clear” and Yuhi’s image “projecting onto my eyelids”, Onni feels summoned to Yuhi’s writing and with a “lump” in her chest akin to the insect that haunts Keiko in Kazukime, she utters her own, multilingual sound: . The presence of a Japanese sound within the voice of this expressly monolingual narrator is a distressing sign that Onni’s own “crutch has been snatched away” leaving her “unable to walk”. It also exposes the impossibility for the Japanese language to express this Korean woman’s voice without being shaded by the legacies of linguistic assimilation enforced during the colonial era.

86  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji The latent violence of this history is moreover unleashed in the very next lines as Yuhi’s handwritten Japanese and hangeul conspire to become fine needles that pierced my eyes while their sharpened tips gouged deep into my eyeballs. But nothing came after. The resonance of 아 caught inside my throat, but whatever sound followed 아 would not come. As I scrabbled for the next sound and tried to turn it into voice, the bundle of needles writhed and gored inside my throat, which erupted into flames.62 In Ryu’s reading, this scene marks the point at which Onni comes to share Yuhi’s “agony of languages”, and thus symbolises her ability to embrace that irreducible otherness without judgement.63 However, the violence of this image also speaks to something that exceeds any attempt towards closure. The fact that it originates from Onni’s engagement with Yuhi’s “text” also seems significant. Recalling that in Kazukime, Keiko’s efforts to learn about kanojo are predicated in the oral – stories narrated through in-­person encounters facilitated at first by the telephone – Yuhi’s manuscript makes explicit the problems of writing and history that leave so many undocumented. Until those histories are made accessible, they cannot be transmitted, as the theft of Onni’s voice attests. And yet, it seems that a voice made of needles and flames may also be the most apt metaphor through which to speak of those absent pasts, the acts of violence that those stories cannot fully contain, and the forces by which they have been erased. Translation across the cut There is nothing to suggest that Kazukime and Yuhi share any special connection among the novels within Yi’s oeuvre. Yi produced several other titles in the five years that separate them, and the latter makes no direct reference to the former. However, a reading of both works in conjunction appears productive to consider key points of similarity and difference between them. Most obvious among these, both narratives are shaped around an absent, central protagonist. The difference is that in contrast to the very visceral depictions of the body in Kazukime and the knowledge of her death that haunts the text, Yuhi’s absence only manifests in the novel’s own assertion that “Yuhi is nowhere”, and the replacement of her physical body with a body of text that vacillates between “Yuhi’s text” (Yuhi no moji) to “Yuhi as text” (moji ni natta Yuhi). One might also look to other points of comparison, since in Kazukime the central figure remains anonymous while Yuhi gives its leading figure a name – making her the only named fictional character in the novel. While the narrative action of Kazukime takes place in Japan, Yuhi is set entirely in Korea. These two novels therefore seem connected, but it is a connection that hangs on a point of disconnection: namely, the act of hanging up a telephone.

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  87 To repeat, while the last words of Kazukime tell us that “Keiko hung up the telephone”, the opening line of Yuhi reads, “As soon I hung up Yuhi’s telephone call, I lost all sense of composure.”64 In both sentences Yi writes the Japanese verb kitta, which in a broader semantic context means “cut”. It is therefore impossible not to hear these two verbs echo in one another. In the vein of this research that seeks alternative images of translation beyond mere bridging, this textual resonance offers a form of translation predicated on separation, even violent severance, in which the latter work revises the former. But as this shift transfers the visceral agonies and pains that Kazukime enacts upon kanojo’s body into the outwardly disruptive “body” of Yuhi’s text, it enables a more subversive and empowered reading of both absent protagonists to come to the fore. In these differences crystallise the fundamental shift that can be witnessed between these two novels. While these apparent symmetries and symbioses are pleasing to trace, the aim of reading Kazukime and Yuhi in dialogue does not stop here but rather serves as an opportunity to interrogate the silences and absences that haunt the globalising direction of Japanese literature. To be clear, Yi Yang-­ji did not engage the question of world literature in her work directly. However, the narratives examined in this chapter carry significance in this context because the attitudes that they display towards the incompleteness of narrative and the violence of selection suggest apt parallels to the processes by which some works of fiction in Japanese have succeeded in crossing borders while others have not. In “Venus in Two Acts”, Saidiya Hartman illustrates how a related mode of writing might work in relation to the silences left by women within the archive of Atlantic slavery.65 Venus is the “dead girl” named in the documents that record the trial of John Kimber, the captain of the slave ship who was tried for murder.66 However, Hartman writes, “Venus was not that Negro girl but another one who died at the hands of the captain and who was mentioned briefly during the trial”.67 This double presence of Venus produces the paradox around which Hartman’s essay revolves. On one hand, Venus has a name by which history records her existence. However, given the “hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances” and the fact that “these circumstances have generated few stories”, the question “[w]ho is Venus?” is an impossible one.68 Hartman’s essay therefore asks, how can narrative “embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it?”69 Hartman’s approach resonates with this reading of Yi’s two novels because they, too, resist the desire to fill in the gaps; closure is not possible, and much less desirable when it forecloses our access to the “hundreds of thousands” of other stories that might have been told. Seen from this perspective, the narrative and thematic strategies that pervade Yi’s texts instead urge us to imagine the conditions by which the women’s voices at their centres have been silenced while, at the same time, respecting the fact that some silences also follow a

88  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji refusal to speak. To recall, while kanojo does ultimately recount the massacre of Korean lives in 1923, she follows her profound statement on language by refusing to speak. In a parallel move, the invisible narrator-­cum-­translator of Yuhi refuses to make legible Yuhi’s handwritten text even when one presumes that there should be no linguistic barrier that prevents her from doing so. Yuhi is not kanojo, no more than Hartman’s two Venuses are the same. However, in the process of imagining a dialogue between their respective silences, what emerges is a mutual concern and shared confrontation with the limitations of narrative representation in all its possible continuities and discontinuities. As this dialogue leads the shadow of each girl to haunt the other, it brings a power to Yi’s stories that resides in the speculative. This is related to the question of the tōjisha that arose through my reading of Sakiyama’s “Kuja” stories in the previous chapter. However, where in that context, the question asked was “what would I have done?” Yi’s fiction subtly rephrases the stakes to ask, “what might she have become?” Yi’s stories remind us of the violence that putting stories into words can do. In the case of Korean narratives, writing in Japanese is always an act of colonisation and appropriation. To translate those stories again into a language such as English is to threaten the irreducible differences that emerge on their surfaces, epitomised in Onni’s fragmented, bilingual voice. Or to rephrase, Yi’s writing forces us to reconsider how translation might instead expose the aporia, tensions, and incommensurable events that give birth to the desire to tell, at the same time as they expose the violence by which those narratives were ever silenced in the first place. As Hartman concludes, “[t]he necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future.”70 Yuhi’s “crutch of language” offers a fitting, though ironic, idiom that destabilises the fixity of any singular narrative and instead leads to multiple possible endings for another – the other – story to emerge. Notes



1 2 3 4

Yi Yang-­ji, “Watashi wa chōsenjin”, Yi Yang-­ji zenshū (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993), 579–592. Ibid., 589. Ibid., 591. For a helpful summary and comparison of these policies as they were implemented in Korea and Taiwan, see Wan-­yao Chou’s “The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations”, in Duus et al. (1996) The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 5 Ibid. Chou’s phrasing deliberately echoes the title of the 1970 autobiography by Korean–American writer, Richard E. Kim, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1998). 6 Carol Hayes, “Cultural Identity in the Work of Yi Yang-­ji”, in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, ed. Sonia Ryang (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 134. 7 Catherine Ryu, “Spatially Conceived: Gender, Desire, and Identity in Yi Yang-­ji’s Yuhi”, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 11 (2010), 148. 8 Erik Ropers, Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan: Histories against the grain (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019).

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  89 9 Yi Yang-­ji, “Sanjo no ritsudō no naka e”, Yi Yang-­ji Zenshū, Tokyo: 1993, 592–605. 10 Yi Yang-­ji, “Sanjo no ritsudo ̄ no naka e”. In Yi’s telling, folowing the discovery of the manager’s body, Lee was arrested alongside his colleague, Suzuki Kazuo, despite neither being proven guilty of the crime. While Suzuki, a Japanese national, received a custodial sentence of fifteen years, Lee was sentenced to life imprisonment, a discrepancy that in Yi’s retelling exposes the anti-­Korean prejudice within the Japanese legal system. After Lee’s eventual release, she became friends with him and remained so until his death. 11 Yi, Watashi wa chōsenjin, 579. 12 Trinh T. Minh-­ha, “Not You/Like You: Post-­Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference”, Inscriptions 3–4, 1988, n.p. 13 Lee Chonghwa. Tsubuyaki no seiji shiso:̄ Motomerareru manazashi kanashimi e no soshite himerareta mono e no. (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998). 14 Ibid. This edition of Lee’s book is without page numbers. 15 Ibid. The term kongen is not standard but might be understood in a similar sense to Walter Benjamin’s references to Jetztzeit. Lee’s idea of “living on” also resonates with Benjamin’s presentation of translation in his essay “The Task of the Translator” as a kind of “afterlife” of the original work. 16 No English translation of this work exists but the title comprises two Korean words: nabi, meaning ‘butterfly’ and taryon, which is associated with the fuller term shinse t’aryong (shinsei taryon in Japanese transliteration) that names a traditional form of oral lamentation. 17 I refer to this character as kanojo throught this analysis to avoid any unhelpful confusion through the use of multiple third-­person female pronouns with Yi, the writer, and Keiko, the fictional character. 18 The term “old woman” obscures whether this figure comes from a Japanese or Korean tradition of shamanism. 19 Yi, “Kazukime”, 70. 20 Ibid., 85. 21 See: Bang-­Soon L. Yoon, “Imperial Japan’s Comfort Women from Korea: History & Politics of Silence-­Breaking”, The Journal of Northeast Asian History 7, no. 1 (2010): 5–39. Feminists also began to join the cause during the 1970s in tandem with the movement against the Korean government’s sponsorship of ‘Kisaeng’ sex tours. 22 Yi, ‘Kazukime’, 77. 23 Ibid., 78. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 80. 26 Sonia Ryang has written that “conscientious attorneys” suggested a death toll closer to 10,000, while some conservatives have claimed that there were only two Koreans killed. For Ryang’s description of the massacre including eyewitness testimonies, see: Sonia Ryang, “The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan’s Modern National Sovereignty”, Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 731–48. 27 There exists a multitude of academic publications that enquire into and educate about the massacre, and the context and events that led to its occurrence. However, Richard Lloyd Parry writing in The Sunday Times on the eve of the centenary of the earthquake attested to the Japanese government’s ongoing denial. See Parry, Richard Lloyd, “Japan denies massacre of Koreans after 1923 earthquake”, The Times, August 31, 2023. 28 ‘Kazukime’, 81–82. 29 Although kanojo’s comment to Kō ji’s brother that “someone once said it had the makings of a ghost story” appears in that context to be a non sequitur, a possible connection appears in “A Letter to My Child” (Ko ni okuru tegami) by the writer

90  Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji Shimazaki Tō son that ran in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper between October 8 and October 22, 1923. In this immediate account of his experiences of the earthquake and its aftermath, Tō son wrote of the Korean survivors of the massacre as “the very same people who had seemed such frightful apparitions in the eyes of our fellow citizens”. This English translation can be found in William E Naff, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Tōson. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 444. 30 Ryang, Sonia. “The Tongue That Divided Life and Death. The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans.” The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, September 3, 2007, Volume 5, Issue 9. 31 ‘Kazukime’, 80. 32 Ibid., 92. 33 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2001). 34 Ibid., 89. While accounts of the forced sterilisation of Korean women remain few, some have begun to enter the public domain. See, for example: Yamasaki, Nobuko Ishitate-­Oku(no)miya, “Body as Battlefield”, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture 12, 391–414. 35 ‘Kazukime’, 94. 36 Melissa L. Wender. Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, 143. In a move resonant with my proposed hysterical reading, Wender also describes the presentation of this island in the text as “womblike”. 37 Chamsu is the Korean term that most closely approximates to Yi’s title, although these women are more commonly referred to as haenyeo (literally “sea women”). Interest has risen in these women since 2016, when their diving practice became the first all-­female activity to be inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/culture-­ of-­jeju-­haenyeo-­women-­divers-­01068). In 2020, Vogue magazine even featured a special article that celebrated these “sea women” as symbols of an endangered, female strength (https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-­and-­lifestyle/article/sea-­womensouth-­korea). 38 For a succinct English summary of the Sehwari protests in relation to the poetry of Heo Young Seon, see: Leo T. S. Ching and Hyesong Lim, “Voices from Cheju (Jeju): Towards an Archipelagic Imagination”, The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 15, 2023, Volume 21, Issue 7, Number 2. 39 ‘Kazukime’, 95. 40 Minato Kawamura, ‘I Yanji: “Sutehime” no monogatari’, Gunzo ̄ 47, no. 9 (1992): 163. 41 Takai, Yūichi, Sō Aono, and Kō ichirō Tomioka., “Dai-­hyaku gojū roku-­kai sō saku gappyō ”. Gunzō 43, no. 12 (1988): 332. 42 Anon, “Akutagawa-­shō jushō saku ‘Yuhi’ I Yan-­ji”, Kankoku Shimbun, 4 April 1989. 43 ‘Yuhi’, 405–406. 44 Ibid., 394. 45 Ibid., 450. The omission of the subject in these two sentences would be ungrammatical in English but is permitted in Japanese. 46 Ibid., 393. 47 Ibid., 394. 48 Ibid. 49 Catherine Ryu, ‘Beyond Language: Embracing the Figure of “the Other” in Yi Yang-­ ji’s “Yuhi”’, in Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A  Critical Approach, ed. Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams (London: Routledge, 2006), 321. 50 ‘Yuhi’, 422.

Translating the gaps / Yi Yang-ji  91 51 Ibid., 437. 52 Ibid., 404. 53 Ibid., 421. 54 Ibid., 423. 55 Ryu, “Beyond Language”, 315; 319. 56 Okano Yukie. “‘Kotoba’ e no kaigi: I Yanji ‘Yuhi’ no sekai”. Shakai bungaku (11), 1997, 86. 57 ‘Yuhi’, 429. In this passage Yi incites a further quality related to the materiality of her text by imposing the same rules of spacing that exist in Korean grammar into Yuhi’s Japanese, which would not usually contain any spaces. This gesture also appears somewhat ironic given that Onni is critical of Yuhi for her failure to follow the rules of Korean spacing. 58 Ibid., 423. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Seong-­Nae Kim, “The Work of Memory: Ritual Laments of the Dead and Korea’s Cheju Massacre”, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion ed. Janice Patricia Boddy and Michael Lambek, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013, 224. 62 Zenshū, 449. 63 Ryu, 2006, 327. 64 Yi Yang-ji zenshū, 95; 393. 65 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 6. 66 Ibid., 7, original italics. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 3. 70 Ibid., 14.

5

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yō ko

The trouble with “trans-border” As a writer whose image has come to exemplify the cosmopolitan “trans-­ border writer”, Tawada Yō ko might seem to be an unlikely candidate for deconstructing the goals of that endeavour. Unlike Sakiyama and Yi, whose works have long been situated on the margins of the national literature, Tawada’s global reach has long been assured. One month before The Emissary won the National Book Awards for Translated Literature in 2018, Tawada was honoured as the recipient of a Japan Foundation Award, an annual prize bestowed upon writers, scholars, and other cultural figures whose work is seen to promote Japanese culture throughout the world. In a press release at the time, the Japan Foundation celebrated Tawada as a “bilingual writer” who has “pioneered a new trans-­boundary realm of literature, while helping to further free Japanese literature from the language barriers that confine it”.1 However, just as I have argued that Sakiyama and Yi each write works that challenge the definitions by which they are defined and confined, here I wish to tease out those more subversive strands in Tawada’s writing that challenge her position as a “trans-­border” writer par excellence. Just as Sakiyama’s stories decentre “Okinawa” as a literary setting and Yi’s characters push against the expectations of a singular, zainichi identity that is always caught between Japan and Korea, in contrast to the writer’s own linguistic proficiency and impressive resumé of international engagements, Tawada’s narrators also frequently subvert the transgressive image of “trans-­border” by appearing damaged, haunted, trapped, and mute. As a prelude to an analysis of Tawada’s writing, one might even deconstruct the National Book Awards ceremony itself. Footage of the evening, which was streamed live from a plush venue in New York City on November 14, 2018, remains available via the National Book Foundation’s homepage.2 The format and setting follow the tradition of televised award shows, as the author and translator of the winning title are invited onto the stage. However, Tawada did not attend the ceremony on the night of The Emissary’s win, and the translator of this work, Margaret Mitsutani, was instead joined by the acclaimed writer Monique Truong. The fact that Truong is a Vietnamese refugee who arrived in DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-6

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  93 the US in 1975 foreshadows the textual analysis that I take up in the main part of this chapter. But her appearance in Tawada’s stead at this ceremony for international recognition also suggests performative possibilities for Tawada’s literature on the global stage. Neither Tawada nor Truong have commented publicly on this role-­switching, but there is a degree of playfulness in Truong’s opening words to the audience, “As the more astute of you may have realised…” The custom format of the ceremony in which the prizewinners are invited to read from the original work and its translation offered a clearer opportunity to play with audience expectations of language and identity since, Truong read from Mitsutani’s English translation while Mitsutani, the American-­ born translator, recited from Tawada’s Japanese prose. Such moves run throughout Tawada’s written oeuvre. In a short presentation delivered at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in San Diego on March 6, 2004, titled “Tawada Yō ko Does Not Exist”, the writer drew attention to the lack of platform given to writers of fiction at such events and claimed that “nonexistence” defines the “usual state of the writer being discussed at a literary conference”.3 In other words, within the conventions of the conference, the writer is substituted by her work. However, for Tawada this overlooks the contrast between the writer’s individual body and the text that in today’s information age can be duplicated ad infinitum by electronic means. For Tawada, the physical book sits between these two, with a “special aura” that is less easily cloned, but which has the power to conjure the writer herself. As her speech continues, Even so, when a person appears in front of the reader and claims “I am the one who has written this book”, can the reader believe it? Is there not in fact something a bit odd about this? While reading a book, one usually imagines what the writer looks like. The imagined writer rarely conforms to the actual one, but that is not sufficient reason to proclaim that the imagined one is an error. The authorial image produced from the work is the true author, and the living person who exists as the author may be, in relation to the text, a complete stranger.4 In contrast to the academic symposium, the literary awards ceremony demands the writer’s presence as a guest of honour. As such, Truong appears to be no more than a “complete stranger” to the novel in translation that is being honoured. And yet, Truong’s position is not entirely divorced from Japanese literature: her novel The Sweetest Fruits invents a fictionalised biography of the writer and scholar Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), who was famed for his English translations of Japanese folktales, as told from the perspectives of three, key women in his life.5 Truong’s connection to Japanese literature, oblique though it may seem, is helpful for framing an alternative and lesser explored facet by which Tawada’s Japanese writing might find its way in the world. Rather than seek the expansion of “world literature” by tracing how Tawada’s fictions inhabit and inscribe

94  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko a new literary terrain, this chapter will read in her work salient challenges to the trans-­border/world literature paradigm. Indeed, Tawada’s status might be compared to what Shu-­mei Shih has termed an “exceptional particular” in that her work raises universal acclaim at the same time as it occupies a unique position within trans-­border literary studies. Yet it is by these means that Tawada is well-­placed to expose those tensions between “Japanese” (national) and “world” literatures that were delineated above.6 At first glance, the two works discussed here appear to endorse Tawada’s reputation for transgressing national and linguistic boundaries: the book-­ length essay Ekusofonı ̄: Bogo no soto e deru tabi (Exophony: A trip outside the mother tongue, 2003) has come to define her multilingual writing practice, while the novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (The travelling naked eye, 2004), about a Vietnamese student displaced in Paris, was the first for which she wrote two versions simultaneously in Japanese and German (Das Nackte Auge, 2004) without a separate translator. However, all international translations of this novel are based on the German text, while Ekusofonı ̄ remained untranslated until its publication in Korean in 2019. Therefore, these two texts also interrogate what celebrations of Tawada’s global success presume within the context of trans-border and multilingual fiction as they are discussed in Japan today. By focusing on moments of rupture, asymmetry, and untranslatability within these texts, I will suggest how Tawada’s writing has more in common with the two writers analysed in the preceding chapters than one might suppose. In so doing, Tawada’s work is useful for destabilising the recent fetishisation of literary “crossings” as it gives rise to hitherto unseen intertextualities through which to find alternative connections between contemporary Japanese fiction and the world. Revising the border: Ekusofonı ̄ Ekusofonı ̄ was Tawada’s first collection of essays written in Japanese.7 Unlike Katakoto no uwagoto (Stumbling ramblings, 1999 [2007]), which meanders through theoretical discussions, literary critiques, and comically surreal short stories, Ekusofonı ̄ presents a singular, book-­length engagement with the topics of linguistic exile, movement, and literary production. The book is ordered in two sections: the first comprises critical vignettes headed with the name of a city that assumes the role of a virtual background; the second is a shorter series titled “Adventures in the German language” that deftly deconstructs German expressions through comparisons with the corresponding Japanese.8 In the eyes of comparative literature scholar Nishi Masahiko, the rich connotations of cosmopolitan playfulness in Ekusofonı ̄ make for a “highly pleasurable book” whose “carefree prose epitomizes its author’s distinctive characteristics and takes the reader along on her travels”.9 The book has also come to define Tawada’s multilingual writing practice, with Marjorie Perloff describing her as a “leading practitioner of…exophonic writing”.10 The irony is that unlike Tawada’s works of fiction, Ekusofonı ̄ has not been widely translated. In other

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  95 words, while “exophony” has become hugely important to the transnational critical field concerned with Tawada’s work, the associations of this term and the frequency of its citation exceed the anticipated readership of the book itself. Although it may appear jarring to the English reader, I transliterate Tawada’s title accordingly as Ekusofonı ̄ to draw attention to this gap between the writer’s specific intervention and the more common assumptions by which this term has come to be used in academic critique. One might account for this gap by arguing that Tawada did not coin “exophony” herself but encountered the term at a literary symposium in Dakar in 2002 through the work of Robert Stockhammer.11 In their book Exophonie: Anders-­Sprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (Exophony: Other-­languagedness in/ of Literature, 2007), Stockhammer and co-­ authors Susan Arndt and Dirk Naguschewski define exophony as an act of writing in a language that is either not (or not exclusively) one’s mother tongue, or that does not belong to one’s environment.12 In this first instance, the authors recall the roots of exophony as a term initially used to describe literature by African writers produced in the European languages that were imposed upon them by their colonisers. In the second instance, they analyse the intimate connection between “other-­ languagedness” and global histories of trade and colonial migration wherein people themselves move into new territories and languages.13 While this twofold definition appears to characterise exophonic movements in terms of moving “inside” and “outside”, the authors also insist that exophony involves a “stepping out of one’s voice” that pertains to all acts of writing literature (much like Tsuchiya, cited in Chapter 1, wrote of “trans-­border” as an inherent quality within all literature).14 For Tawada, the attraction of “exophony” lies in its “fresh” sound that evokes “a kind of symphony” and its promise to embrace multiple sub-­ categories of fiction such as “migrant” or “creole” without being limited to one of them. At its most universal, Tawada heralds exophony as “the norm” (tsūjo ̄) within all literature while, as an “adventurous idea brimming with curiosity and creativity”, it embraces the practice of creative writing “outside of the mother tongues in which writers are enveloped and restrained”, irrespective of whether this is a result of colonisation, exile, or individual choice.15 Given that Tawada’s texts frequently question the relationship between original and translation, it seems apt that her book was published four years before the collaborative volume that resulted from the symposium which inspired it. However, Tawada’s work also differs by refraining from identifying or defining exophony in straightforward, academic terms. Writing from her distinctive, reflexive position as both a literary scholar (she has a PhD in German Literature from the University of Zürich) and creative practitioner, Tawada writes more poetically as a fish who “perswimbulates” (oyogiaruite) the seas to “feel the linguistic situation of various lands with my scales”.16 As this metaphor rejects claims to a stable identity based on geographic or linguistic terrain, it prefigures Tawada’s specific attitude towards exophony as the state of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue. In Japanese, her ambiguous subtitle Bogo no soto e deru tabi barely

96  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko conceals this additional sense, doubling its more common translation “(the exophonic subject’s) trip outside the mother tongue” with the simultaneous possibility that this initiates “the mother tongue’s trip outside (of itself)”. This double meaning supplements the utopian image of exophony with visceral, even painful undertones. The scales of the quirky “perswimbulating” fish that opens the book’s “Foreword” are haunted by more painful images that recur in Tawada’s earlier novels, including the flaking, bloodied skin of the protagonist in Das Bad (The Bath, 1989), who is herself shadowed by a spectral doppelgänger in the form of a woman who burned to death, and blistering sores on the arms of the struggling translator who narrates Moji ishoku (literally “Transplanting letters”, 1999).17 These wounds suggest the physical pain and damage that exophonic displacement inscribes upon the borders of the body, as Dennitza Gabrakova’s work has discussed.18 They also foreshadow a more violent intention within Tawada’s writing. In an interview published in 1997, Tawada recalled the “incredibly unpleasant and exhausting sensation” of her early encounter with the German language as it “invaded my being with increasing vigour”, and expressed her desire to “ruffle the scales of the dragon who resides within language” as a counterattack against her mother tongue whose hold felt too strong to escape.19 In Ekusofonı ̄, Tawada echoes this desire to retaliate by peeling back the layers of language and reminding her readers that the kanji introduced to Japan around the fifth century are no less “foreign” than contemporary “words of foreign origin” (gairaigo), even though only the latter mark their difference materially by appearing in katakana. By describing kanji as “a singular kind of migrant into Japan”, Tawada pulls the scales from her readers’ eyes so that they might recognise that the mother tongue is neither axiomatic nor pure.20 In Ekusofonı ̄, this deconstructive approach to language that has consolidated Tawada’s appeal also suggests prescient critiques of contemporary debates over trans-­border literature. This is particularly so in the first – and longest – two essays of the book: “Dakar: Exophony is the norm” and “Berlin: Colonial spellbinding”. In “Dakar”, Tawada begins by considering Francophone literature by Senegalese writers (a nod to the entrance of “exophony” into critical lexicon) and the case of “migrant literature” (imin bungaku) in Germany. In the absence of corresponding genres in Japan, Tawada highlights the “Japanese-­language literature” (Nihongo bungaku) produced by writers of Chinese and Korean ancestry, “whose central position therein complicates their labelling as ‘minorities’,” and writers such as Levy Hideo who defy the assumption that only those born with Japanese as their mother tongue can produce novels in Japanese. The challenge for these writers, as Tawada sees it, is not the task of writing but the prejudices that they face when their fiction is judged only in terms of how their Japanese prose measures up against native fluency: ‘good’ (jo ̄zu) versus ‘bad’ (heta). Moreover, Tawada’s comments highlight a further shortcoming by which the emphasis on language relegates enquiries into “what” writers write about to the question of “how” – and “how well” – they write.

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  97 For Tawada, this impulse links back to the origins of Japan’s modern national identity and its “latent inferiority complex” in relation to “the West”. Following the collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy” in the early 1990s, the study of European languages such as French and English gained popularity among Japan’s middle classes. The goal was less to fulfil some tangible ambition than simply to become “good” (again, jo ̄zu) as evidence of one’s high social standing. In Tawada’s critique, these desires for personal and cultural advancement recalled the will of Japanese subjects in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to shake off the image by which they were regarded as “barbarians” (yaban) in the eyes of Europeans. Both then and now, she claims, Japan displayed the signs of its ideological colonisation by the “Westerner” as an abstract symbol of authority. This realisation is behind the dismay she recalls having felt upon arriving in Germany in the early 1980s and seeing middle-­aged Japanese tourists whose “fervent spending” on designer goods and high-­end restaurants barely concealed their “aggressive” desire to belong. For Tawada, this spectacle encapsulated Japan’s intention to sidle up to “European civilisation…merely as the civilisation of the consumer”, while the popular phrase Ajia ni iku (“I’m off to Asia!”), expressed a complementary mental distance from its closest neighbours. To those detractors who, she imagines, might defend this position by asserting that one can learn French simply because it is fun and crave French food because it is delicious, Tawada counters that the damaging consequence of these trends is that they lose sight of the legacies that have bound and divided these regions throughout history. History, she writes, then becomes “no more than the flecks of a rubber eraser swept off a desk” leaving the intertwined legacies of “Eurocentrism and twisted national purism…untouched beneath a 10,000 yen note”.21 In “Berlin”, Tawada pushes these ideas further in relation to Europe, particularly Prussia in an earlier period of modern Japanese history. Bookended by readings of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), “Berlin” considers the case of Mori Ō gai (1862–1922), an army medic dispatched to Germany to study hygiene in the 1880s who became a formative figure in modern Japanese literature as a writer and translator of classic works by Goethe, Kleist, and even Shakespeare via the German translation. As Reiko Tachibana observes in her historicising critique of Ekusofonı ̄, Tawada is reluctant to accept parallels between herself and this literary predecessor despite having arrived in Germany at the same age – 22 years old.22 However, by reading Ō gai’s work, Tawada claims to have learned that the challenges to “absorb, emulate and resist ‘western-­ness’” reach back to the advent of Japan’s modern history.23 Indeed, she credits Ō gai’s fiction with helping her to see better than any textbook that history is constructed in such a way that allows people to cast off the vestiges of tradition and don the new accoutrements of modern civilisation.24 In Ō gai’s 1909 short story, Daihakken (A great discovery), in which the narrator (a Japanese man in Germany like the author himself) recalls an encounter with a German minister who finds incredulous the assumption that a man who wears split-­toed straw sandals could learn anything about hygiene. Today, Tawada

98  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko argues, Japanese people wear shoes rather than waraji or zor̄ i, but this is not because footwear evolves naturally like tadpole transforms into frog. As Tachibana cogently traces, Tawada’s return to Ō gai allows her to reexamine the ideological foundations of the national language (kokugo) and national polity (kokutai) of the Meiji period that were being instituted at the time of his writing, and which offer another historical cornerstone by which to construct a deeper account of what it has meant to live in cultures and write in languages other than one’s own throughout Japan’s modern, national culture and literature.25 Tawada published Ekusofonı ̄ before trans-­border literary studies took hold in Japan; her arguments were prescient. By highlighting the “dark shadow” cast by Japanese colonisation within Asia and its role in “imposing” exophony upon its neighbouring countries, she demonstrates her awareness of historical and colonial dimensions that appear missing from contemporary, trans-­border approaches.26 She also contextualises that amnesia within the desire for Japanese literary works to gain acceptance within some virtual construction of “the West”. Anticipating how translation, especially into a European language like English, has become the hallmark of international success, Tawada writes: I don’t aspire to cross the border; I want to reside within it. There is something more important than language in that moment of hesitation: a sense that I can truly feel the border. It would be tedious if the world were submerged in some boring, shallow, business English that can be transmitted anywhere. I do not mean to speak ill of English or place French on a pedestal. But that moment is important in which the strange regionality unique to a place thickens, and that’s precisely what develops the urge to cross the national border.27 By drawing a distinction between the “border” (kyōkai) and the “national border” (kokkyō), Tawada reveals the border itself to be multiple and varied, and in so doing, she makes possible an alternative scenario in which not every act of translation – in the trans-­border sense – is transgressive. The will to pause before the border invites an alternative view of world literatures. By coincidence, Ekusofonı ̄ was published in 2003, the same year as David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? The appearance of Ō gai, one of the first translators of Goethe into Japanese, also recalls Damrosch’s point of departure in Goethe’s Weltliteratur. But whereas Damrosch’s work today is now a world text, translated, and cited in multiple languages, Ekusofonı ̄ speaks consciously to a readership familiar with Japanese, and continues to exist primarily within that context alone. The prolonged absence of any translation of Ekusofonı ̄ until the Korean version appeared in 2019 does not prove that its appeal is limited to Japanese literature, however. To be sure, in addressing a specifically Japanese readership and critical context, Ekusofonı ̄ affirms that exophonic writing is rooted in its own time and place. But as a challenge to the postwar Japanese worldview built upon English and Europe as linguistic and

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  99 cultural authorities, Ekusofonı ̄ deconstructs the idea that only travel, translation, and circulation from East to West qualify as entry into the world. And by removing that abstract world as a destination, Tawada sets the conditions to witness other migrant presences already within Japanese literature, including those of her fictions to come. The travelling naked eye that does not travel Tawada first wrote of Vietnam in her 2000 novella Chantien bashi no temae de (In Front of Trang Tien Bridge).28 Written in Japanese only and translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani, the story follows a Japanese woman living in Berlin who is invited by letter to the Vietnamese city of Hue.29 The protagonist’s journey takes her past various sites that force confrontations with the history of war, including the network of tunnels at Củ Chi used by Viet Cong fighters. Before crossing the bridge into Hue, however, a fog descends around the bus she has boarded and the novel ends. Four years later, and one year after Ekusofonı ̄, Tawada published the Japanese novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (The travelling naked eye) alongside its German counterpart Das Nackte Auge (The Naked Eye).30 Told in the first person (‘I’), the narrative follows a young Vietnamese girl who travels to Berlin in 1988 to represent the “raw voices of victims of US imperialism” at an “All Nation Youth Conference” on behalf of her school in “Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon”.31 On the night before the conference, however, she is kidnapped by a young man named Jörg who takes her to his hometown, Bochum. In her attempt to escape, the narrator stows away on a night-­train that she believes will take her to Moscow, only to discover that she is bound instead for Paris. The revelation causes “everything before my eyes to turn black”, a blindness that prefigures the narrator’s status as an illegal immigrant forced to hide from French police.32 As she finds shelter in the darkness and virtual spaces of the cinema, in particular the films of French actress Catherine Deneuve, the novel hinges on these mutually implicated aspects of visuality and visibility that shape the narrator’s ambiguous existence as an unseen “I” and an unseeing eye. One might read these two narratives together since, as Susan Anderson writes, Trang Tien Bridge “addresses in concentrated form the ongoing effects of colonialism and war that Tawada explores from a different perspective in her novel Das Nackte Auge”.33 However, despite key points of connection, this later German work does not merely reroute and revise the earlier story. In terms of form, the existence of an additional, Japanese “travelling naked eye” already complicates this expectation. In Anderson’s analysis of In Front of Trang Tien Bridge, the bridge into Hue suggests a point of connection, but since it remains uncrossed, it in fact represents a limit that cannot overcome the river that flows beneath. Citing an essay Tawada wrote in German, Anderson explains how Tawada plays on this theme through slippages in language, changing the ‘r’ of Brücke (“bridge”, as a point of connection) to an ‘l’, to create Blücke, a made-­up word that acts as a stumbling block to the reader, but

100  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko one which also invokes the noun Blicke (“gaze”), whereby “looking for the meaning of a word is like viewing a gap under a bridge”.34 In a similar vein, the implied linkage between the German Das Nackte Auge and its English translation is disrupted by the Japanese version, which remains officially untranslated. If Tabi o suru hadaka no me offers a different perspective to In Front of Trang Tien Bridge, it does so not as mere continuation of the earlier work. Rather, the juxtaposition of these texts suggests a more radical interpretation through which the story of a Japanese woman’s journey from Germany to Hue, a location situated itself on the former border between Vietnam’s north and south, is translated into the fragmented, double vision of a Vietnamese woman who becomes transported first to Germany and then to France. The question of what the Vietnamese narrator sees is raised by the juxtaposition of her narrative against Deneuve’s onscreen performances. Tawada’s novel traverses thirteen chapters, each of which marks the passing of a subsequent year from 1988 to 2000, and whose titles borrow from Deneuve’s films.35 In the opening paragraph, the narrator describes in detail the closing moments of Roman Polanski’s 1965 cinematic thriller Repulsion. Deneuve plays Carol, a Belgian woman who suffers a psychological, ultimately murderous breakdown while living alone in London. At the film’s close, Deneuve/Carol lies unresponsive as the camera pans from her vacant stare across the room strewn with objects, before zooming in on a “glaring” young girl in an “old, family photograph” until the shapes of her eyes become obscured. In the narrative description of this scene, Carol’s “projected eye [that] sees nothing” combines with the blurred image of the girl in the photograph’s eye to confirm that vision here is unstable, even absent. In fact, despite only seeing this film “in a cinema in Paris one year later”, the narrator begins to suffer the same visual delusions as Carol witnesses in her apartment while being held captive by Jörg. While this opening scene positions the narrator as a spectator through her recollection that “this was the first film in which I saw you”, it also interpolates Deneuve and the roles she plays into a fraught dialogue in which the narrator internalises those multiple, troubled modes of blindness and mis-­seeing.36 Comparing the pronouns that constitute this dialogue helps to illustrate how differences manifest in Tawada’s German and Japanese versions. In Japanese, a speaker can choose from multiple personal pronouns according to their status in relation to their addressee. The narrator of Tawada’s Japanese work refers to herself as watashi, a standard term for a younger female speaker, and addresses Deneuve as anata, a term that connotes a sense of familiarity, even endearment. By contrast, the German text writes “ich”, a pronoun empty of markers connoting age or gender, and the formal second-­person pronoun rendered strikingly in full capitals as “SIE”. While the Japanese dialogue creates a degree of intimacy between the two characters, the German text keeps a distance between them. This relationship shifts again in Susan Bernofsky’s English translation from the German, which writes “you” in lower case against the capitalised first person, inverting the relationship pairing of “ich/SIE” as “I/you”.

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  101 A further critical paradox produced by Tawada’s two “originals” is that each has generated its own interpretative paradigm. Japanese literary scholars, for example, have foregrounded questions of visual ambiguity and spectatorship. Nakagawa Shigemi’s work draws on studies of cinema and perception within art and media to articulate the text’s paradoxical relationship between visual and linguistic “blindness” (mōmokusei), while Slaymaker suggests that as the narrator’s vision merges with the camera lens it effects a cyborg-­like transcendence of her material body.37 While these analyses foreground technologies of looking in the present, the broad trend of German literary scholarship has leaned towards the historical and political themes presented by the novel. Julia Genz highlights the idiomatic function of the eye as a historical witness while interpreting the encroachment of Deneuve’s cinematic image into the narrator’s vision as corroding her ability to see the “naked truth” of her colonial past.38 Related analyses suggest the adventures and perils of migration, with Petra Fachinger highlighting the novel’s “picaresque” elements that “subvert colonial ideologies”, and Leslie Adelson’s description of “a tale of mobility and multilingualism embedded in palimpsestic spatial and temporal metanarratives of postcolonialism and postcommunism”.39 It almost seems ironic that in German scholarship the narrative emerges as one of movement despite only the Japanese title referring to a “travelling” naked eye. To trace these differences is not to pit one approach against one another but to highlight the challenges of analysing a novel against existing critiques produced within specific, area-­and language-­based disciplines. On one hand, the existence of plural texts opens up critical possibilities, as in Charles Exley’s study that foregrounds the Japanese narrative, which he reads as a “film novel”, draws on Japanese and German scholarship, and cites Bernofsky’s English translation from German.40 However, on the other hand, Tawada’s simultaneous production of two texts in two languages means that they neither follow a traditional schema of an original and its translation nor can be reconciled into a single version. As a result, this strategy creates the conditions by which the two versions do not absolutely align. As these texts glance off one another to greater and lesser degrees, they also reveal an intrinsic, teleological tendency of language to actively guide the direction of a text. While it seems inevitable to conclude that Tawada’s writing in different languages produces different reading experiences, these different, scholarly critiques are nevertheless compelling as they make explicit the stakes of close reading in an age of translation. They also bring to the fore the the quality that Brett de Bary has described as extant throughout Tawada’s writing and which always already constitutes a “theoretical practice” that “constitutes a way of looking, through language, at language itself ”.41 In other words, translation here never claims to be transparent, but resonates rather with the narrator of Yuhi who translates Onni’s Korean narrative into Japanese while refusing to reveal Yuhi’s Japanese manuscript. The inconsistency that emerges between the German and Japanese versions of Tawada’s title encapsulates this idea by staging a mistranslation that, to

102  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko continue de Bary’s visual metaphor, also seems connected to the protagonist’s aversion to looking straight on. The double meaning of “glance” as a momentary, interruptive collision and an obliquely directed gaze reanimates the cinematic focus of Tawada’s novel which, at its centre, reimagines the disorientating experience of losing one’s language in visual terms. As the narrative progresses, the narrator’s unstable vision is paralleled by her increasing inability to use language until she is rendered speechless. In retrospect, this loss of vision is already anticipated when, upon her arrival in Berlin, she can “no longer recall a single line” of her speech on US imperialism as if “having brought my writing to a distant country, it no longer looked like something that I could trust”.42 These sentiments resound beyond the text of this unreliable narrative that unfolds in Japanese and German rather than the Vietnamese voice one might expect of its narrator. Within the context of this novel predicated on film, they also resonate with Tijana Mamula’s film-­based scholarship that emphasises the centrality of vision in the experience of linguistic displacement.43 In Mamula’s study, the non-­ verbal sounds and images of cinema can compensate for the de-­ territorialised subject’s loss of language, which manifests in the breakdown between signs and meanings, as well as the possibility of forging new associations. For example, Mamula considers the French filmmaker Marguerite Duras who, perhaps fittingly, spent her childhood in Vietnam before moving to France at the age of seventeen. In Mamula’s interpretation based on Duras’s interviews and cinematic work, Duras’s departure from Vietnam resulted not only in the loss of a practical language by which she could name her surroundings, but also the “perceptual reality that this language originally mediated”. Placing focus upon Duras’s India Song (1975), which centres on the wife of the French Ambassador to India in the 1930s and her many extramarital affairs, Mamula highlights the preponderance of place names, proper nouns and adjectives that gesture towards these missing links and paves the way towards “multiple imaginings and spectatorial projections”.44 Mamula’s analysis suggests a reason for Tawada’s narrator to likewise seek solace in the cinematic image in order to navigate her physical alienation and loss of language in Paris. However, as Tawada’s novel is by contrast to Duras’s film a work of narrative fiction entirely, it also inverts this premise. Rather than presenting onscreen imagery as the means of substituting for, and renegotiating the meaning of, lost linguistic referents, Tawada’s narrator offers her reader glimpses only of those sights and objects that she is able to name. The reliability of this narrator’s vision is undermined further through the myriad intertextualities that Tawada incorporates with reference to Deneuve’s extensive and experimental oeuvre. The multi-­ layered intertextuality that Tawada achieves in this work is both ecstatic yet maddening as it frustrates readerly expectations of narrative coherence and mimetic writing; it can never be certain what the narrator sees, if she sees at all. However, this strategy is also

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  103 ingrained in the natures of cinema, spectatorship, and the structures of looking. In terms of feminist film scholarship, the positioning of the text’s narrator as a female cinemagoer invokes a plethora of critical tools and psychoanalytical engagements with the im/possibility of the female gaze. This unreliability of the narrator’s vision is further amplified since Deneuve’s most acclaimed performances stem from avant-­garde and experimental films that themselves subvert and deconstruct themes and structures of looking. As the narrator becomes immersed into the fictional worlds of Deneuve’s films, she comes to identify with the actress and the characters that she portrays to the extent of losing her own sense of self.45 As she sees Deneuve’s faces in a copy of the fashion and film magazine Ecran, the narrator reflects: Inside the cinema I become a blazing retina reflecting the screen while the rest of my body vanishes. The woman named “I” ceases to be. I have come to feel as though no other woman exists apart from you.46 For Mamula, cinema emerges in the individual frames as well as the gaps in between, as a work of montage with the “capacity to deny visibility as much as to indulge it”.47 Tawada’s novel recreates that medium in text to produce an ironic first-­person narrative that disguises its narrator as much as it reveals and which at its extreme, calls into question whether this narrator even exists. In a similar paradox, despite apparently seeing Deneuve everywhere, the narrator refuses to say her name. Since the only hint towards the actress’s identity is a dedication to C.D. in the opening pages of both the German and Japanese versions, the reader’s recognition of Deneuve depends on her international celebrity and the reader’s knowledge of cinema. A star in the sense that Richard Dyer describes as “extensive, multimedia, and intertextual”, Deneuve’s image became particularly diverse in the 1990s as it was “rendered more complex still by the ongoing dialogue between the on-­ screen and off-­ screen ‘Deneuves’”.48 As the narrator encounters Deneuve precisely in this decade, her story articulates this complexity. However, this is also overshadowed by Deneuve’s national, symbolic status as the “grand dame of French cinema”, former face of major fashion houses including Chanel and L’Oréal, and most literally as the model for Marianne, the female embodiment of “la République”, from 1985 until 1989: the year in which the narrator arrives in Paris. Deneuve’s appearances within the text incite this contradictory combination of radical alterity and familiarity within the colonial mother(land) personified. Deneuve’s presence ensures that the history of French imperialism in Indochina is also positioned at the centre of Tawada’s narrative. This connection and fact of Vietnam’s colonial past is most strongly evoked through references to Régis Wargnier’s acclaimed historical epic Indochine (1992), which sits at the centre of the novel. In Indochine, Deneuve plays an “Asiate” plantation owner who adopts an orphaned Vietnamese princess, Camille. The film

104  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko allegorises the demise of French Indochina through the relationship of these women who are ultimately torn apart after they become rivals in love, leading Camille to reject her stepmother and join the revolutionary fight for regional independence. In Panivong Norindr’s critical reading, Indochine presents a romantic fiction structured by French collective nostalgia akin to the “colonial blues”, which seeks to reorder the past into a linear historical narrative.49 However, while Norindr’s critique presumes a French audience, Tawada’s narrator finds meaning in this film as the first in which she sees someone who “seemed to look like me”. Despite “never [having] seen a country by the name of Indochina anywhere other than in a Parisian cinema”, Indochine allows the narrator to envisage herself in the role of Éliane’s daughter until her limited language is reduced to a kind of “baby-­talk…[that] crumbles apart and scatters all over the floor”.50 This imagination of language as something physical, tangible, and which can cause the speaker to collapse or stumble runs throughout Tawada’s writing. Here, it connects specifically to the current text’s concern with vision as the narrator seeks to escape from the film’s “primitive, clear language” in Éliane’s “ambiguous” (meihaku ni naranai) face that “flees from the violence of images to create a new space beside the story that draws me in”.51 After witnessing this colonial era ending on screen, the narrator decides to rectify her immigration status by obtaining a fake Japanese passport, travelling to Thailand to marry a fellow Vietnamese expatriate, and legally returning as his wife. Having entered Paris illegally from a former colony and communist country, the narrator’s sense of difference from Japanese tourists in the city is stark. Recalling Tawada’s criticisms in Ekusofonı ̄ of Japanese visitors in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s, the narrator also sees in the wealth and propriety of these tourists a way of being that is not permitted to her. The name of Japan alone connotes a nation beset with the “contradictions of capitalism” that have demanded it export even its women as “geisha” to thrive, while its former colonial administration of Indochina deemed more “destructive” (hakaiteki) than the French.52 Yet above all other identities for which her physical features might pass, “Japanese” is the one to validate her presence. With the help of a black-­ market dealer nicknamed Heron – a cryptic pun, perhaps, on the Japanese name for this bird, sagi (鷺), that is homophonic with the word meaning “fraud” (詐欺) – she obtains a fake passport. To complete the narrator’s disguise her fiancé takes her shopping to buy “monogrammed designer fashions” that make her “look like a Japanese woman”, prompting her to ask whether the “consumerist desire of capitalism” now glows in her eyes.53 However, the narrator fails to pass through Charles de Gaulle airport and is detained by border control inspectors. Thereupon, Jörg catches up with her and kidnaps her once more to Bochum, whereupon he chastises her for wearing “dirty, worn-­out sandals made from tyres”, a reference that recalls the dép lốp worn by Viet Cong fighters. With these words, the narrator appears to lose any grasp that she had on the present and as her language breaks down, she words reveal an as-­yet unspoken history that she recalls as “misery itself…”:

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  105 that was all it was, a wretched deception, first realize that, and then, forget, those images that have passed. Yes, I’ll forget. But in order to do so I must poke out my eyes with the second hand of a clock.54 This violence implies the novel’s climax but is followed by a short closing chapter interwoven with Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000). Told in a third-­ person register, the chapter introduces Selma (a character in von Trier’s film played by the Icelandic singer Björk), a Czech immigrant in Berlin and her blind neighbour who despite her “grey hair streaked with blonde” and “European appearance” claims to be Vietnamese.55 As this blind woman explains that she lived in Paris for ten years but lost her sight trying to save a “young, foreign girl” who was stabbed to death in Alexanderplatz in 1988, she uncovers an alternative story in which the narrator was murdered on the night she arrived in Berlin. As this narrative coda casts a ghostly shadow over the preceding chapters, the blind woman embodies this liminality through the masking of her professed Vietnamese roots by Deneuve’s iconic image. The narrator’s desire to blinding herself transforms herself and her text and exposes the possibility that always already existed: that the narrator never left Berlin and only her eye travelled. It also allows the reader to see her, first in the glimpse of her sandals and then in the eye that she pierces. Rather than foreclose the narrator’s ability to see once and for all, this scene forces the reader to look into her eyes and witness her presence as a Vietnamese woman within this Japanese text. Having been concealed and overlain by Deneuve’s cinematic appearances, here the narrator inserts herself back into her story. As the blind woman explains: “You see, vision is like a tear. It’s not that one can see through the tear but rather that vision is the tear. That is precisely why it cannot be seen.”56 The Japanese term used here meaning “tear” or “rift” (sakeme 裂け目) contains the character for “eye” (me 目) within it. Through this idiomatic use of the “eye”, like the eye of a needle, the image of the narrator blinding herself does not put an end to vision but opens out towards new modes of seeing. Towards another vision? In the central section of her scholarly journal The Wretched of the Screen, the visual artist Hito Steyerl considers Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which a cat is confined to a box and may or may not be killed by radiation poisoning.57 In Steyerl’s artistic account of this theoretical problem, so long as the box remains sealed it symbolises a “state of indeterminacy” in which resides the possibility of two cats – one dead, one alive – and it is only by looking that one discovers the truth of whether the cat has been poisoned or has survived.58 One might trace the same logic in Tawada’s novel, only the latter deals the

106  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko opposite blow: the narrator’s self-­blinding opening her narrative to multiple uncertain, even contradictory possibilities. The ambiguous, open ending to Tawada’s novel recalls its presence in two “originals” and the problem of world literature. As already noted, to date only Das Nackte Auge has been translated, first into French as L’oeil Nu (trans. Bernard Banoun, 2005) and subsequently other languages including English ̀ trans. Thu (trans. Susan Bernofsky, 2009) and Vietnamese (as Mă̆́t trân, Hương, Thanh Tâm and Cẩm Nhung, 2011). While these translations transport Tawada’s novel into “the world”, they do so bound in covers that identify the French edition as a work of “Littérature allemande” and mark the English text as “translated from the German”. The Vietnamese title also translates as “The naked eye” with no mention of “travelling”, while its translators are elsewhere connected to works originally written in English, suggesting that it in fact is a layered translation based on Bernofsky’s English rendition of Tawada’s German text. The expanding circulation of this text is filled with possibilities. However, the difficulty from the perspective of Japanese literature is that these transactions bypass Tawada’s Japanese-­language novel and erase it from global sight. Even though Tawada’s marketability continues to rise there is surely little commercial justification for publishing a second translation of a contemporary text already in circulation, especially when the author herself continues to produce new works. Like its narrator who fails to travel on a Japanese passport, Tawada’s Japanese “travelling” naked eye is left before the border while its German counterpart moves on in translation instead. Tawada’s text-­in-­double fights against the effects of translation that contain and erase, however, by forcing open a more radical space between these texts. On her visa application to study in Paris, the narrator writes a pseudonym: “Thu Hương” ( ).59 As “a false name that I had not yet used”, the choice seems arbitrary.60 However, within a narrative structured around a generic “I” and “you” the narrator draws attention to this alias when she signs it again on a school application form and muses, “when I wrote ‘Thu Hương’ I had the feeling that I was writing about someone else” (tanin no koto o kaiteiru).61 Almost spookily, this name echoes that of one of the Vietnamese translators of Tawada’s novel. However, it also invokes the writer Dương Thu Hương, who in 1989 (the year in which Tawada’s narrator arrives in Paris) was expelled from the Vietnamese Communist Party after speaking out against the corruption and elitism of its leadership. In 1991, Dương was arrested and imprisoned without trial under the charge of smuggling secret documents. Following intervention from Amnesty International, Dương was freed after seven months, and in 1994 she travelled to Paris to be awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Although offered political asylum in France, Dương refused and returned to North Vietnam. Her passport has since been withdrawn and there remains a ban on publishing her novels in Vietnam. Dương’s third novel, The Paradise of the Blind (Những thiên d̄ường mù) was published in 1988, the year in which Tawada’s novel begins, and tells the story of Hang, a bright

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  107 young Vietnamese woman studying in Russia.62 When a telegram arrives summoning her to join her sick and demanding Uncle Chinh in Moscow, Hang is obliged by her mother, Chinh’s only sibling, to make the journey. As she boards the night-­train, Hang reminisces about her childhood and the Land Reforms (1953–56) that tore up her country and family. Owing to its depictions of these Reforms that angered the authorities in Vietnam, The Paradise of the Blind was withdrawn from publication in Vietnam but in 2001 it became the first Vietnamese novel to appear in translation in the United States.63 By writing “Thu Hưon ̛ g”, Tawada’s narrator opens a space into which the life and work of this literary namesake writes back. The Paradise of the Blind is one chapter shorter than Tawada’s novel with a less convoluted structure that alludes to blindness through street beggars and soothsayers with the paradoxical gift of “seeing”, and the delusion and amnesia through which political propaganda averts its eyes from history. These texts connect, however, in Hang’s observation that “Japanese: The name alone was like a certificate of respectability, a passport that opened all the doors in the world to them.”64 From here, myriad textual coincidences come into view, invoking scenes and spaces left outside of Tawada’s narrative frame: of the Vietnam that her narrator left behind and the journey that might have been had she boarded the Trans-­ Siberian line bound for Moscow as intended and not headed to Paris. The central narrative strands and characters of Dưon ̛ g’s novel describe the oppressions suffered by Vietnam under its foreign colonisers and national leaders alike. Reading this work through the lens of Tawada’s, one finally hears the “raw voice of victims of US imperialism” that is lost on her narrator’s arrival in Berlin. This intertextual discovery offers more than another thought experiment when read against contemporary history. On September 4, 2019, three Vietnamese workers in Japan filed a lawsuit against the Hiwada construction firm for forcing them to carry out decontamination work in the vicinity of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant whose meltdown was triggered following the earthquake and tsunami that struck the northeastern coastline of Japan on March 11, 2011. These three men had arrived in Japan in July 2015 through foreign internship programmes that promised training and employment in construction and engineering. Instead, they found themselves cleaning up areas such as sewers contaminated by hazardous radioactive substances, guided by limited or misleading information, and often after their wages had been withheld. On October 23, 2020, Nikkei.com, the online site of the Nihon keizai shimbun, reported that the case was settled at the Fukushima District Court with Hiwada agreeing to pay its former trainees 1.71 million yen in compensation.65 However, the Hiwada case marks the third occasion since March 2018 in which Vietnamese trainees have testified publicly about their conditions, suggesting a system of exploitation whose full extent is yet to be seen. At first glance the Hiwada lawsuit therefore suggests the perils of migration across national borders. It also casts light on the economic and social differences experienced by Vietnamese citizens who today comprise Japan’s third largest migrant community yet live and work while remaining largely out of sight.

108  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko In an essay titled Idō no naka ni sumau (To live amid movement, 2014), Iyotani Toshio describes the story of modernity as one of borders and movement: of land being demarcated within national borders, and of human efforts, needs, and desires to cross those lines.66 As the era of globalisation has blurred the boundaries between living in one place and moving around, however, it has become difficult to tell these stories of migration and migrants that contributed to and constituted the modern nation-­state. Iyotani therefore claims that in the case of Japanese migrant studies, the time has come to give linguistic expression to experiences of colonialism, repatriation, and migrant workers to Japan and rewrite those narratives into a history that cannot be appropriated or erased by the nation. Such a need is all the more pressing following the increased numbers of people in Japan who remain displaced since the disasters of 2011. For Iyotani, such a migrant literature (imin bungaku) does not frame migration as a transgressive movement across abstract spaces, but as an interrogation rooted in place and borders by which the structures that define texts and people come into view. Reading Tawada’s work in relation to Iyotani’s framework presents an opportunity by which to move away from the trans-­border approaches outlined in Chapter 1 of this book. In fact, while in Ekusofonı ̄ Tawada seemed uncertain that migrant literature could ever emerge in Japan, in a dialogue with the Taiwan-­ born writer Wen Yūjū published in 2019, Tawada asked whether it might finally be possible to observe such a literature taking shape.67 Contrary to its popular “façade” (tatemae) as a homogenous nation, Tawada writes, Japan is home to many migrant communities. Furthermore, with governmental policies seeking to increase the foreign workforce, those numbers stand to increase. Tawada understands that a subsequent literature takes time to appear since it is usually the second and third generations who begin writing and publishing as the benefactors of university educations paid for by the hard-­earned wages of their parents and grandparents. However, the prospect holds excitement since if those stories do appear, they will have the potential to change the national literary landscape as a new branch of “Japanese-­language literature” (Nihongo bungaku).68 In all of this, Tawada’s Vietnamese narrator is not arbitrary. Tawada reflected on Vietnam’s significance to her novel in an interview with the German literary scholar Bettina Brandt in 2006. A few years ago I realized that Vietnam is an equally interesting scene from which to observe the last one hundred years of history. That is, of course, a topic that is much too big to be discussed right here and now, but still. First, we had Indochina and French colonialism, then Japanese colonialism, and ultimately the Vietnam War with the United States. All these powers were there to conquer and destroy, some might say to help, but, in any case, all penetrated the country. Now we like to say that the Cold War is over and that, instead, we are in the middle of a conflict with the Islamic world. It is not accurate, however, to say that a conflict is over and another has begun. No, all conflicts are related. In my eyes, the

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  109 Vietnam War is not over, and colonialism in Southeast Asia is not over either…Our present becomes more visible when we look at it from the perspective of that which is only supposedly over.69 The story that connects Vietnam to the history of Japanese literature is, to borrow Tawada’s words, “much too big” to follow through here. But to bear witness to the presence of this Vietnamese narrator suggests how we might read the ambiguities of her novel themselves as creating a new space beside that history that draws us in to see the world anew through her eyes. It is too early to tell whether the stories of the claimants in the Hiwada trial will ever be told either by the media, in their own words, or as part of a literature yet to come. It also remains to be seen whether a new Japanese “migrant literature” holds the key for further exploration. The promise of newly invented and reinvented categories of literature is almost invariably curtailed by their need to contain – and thus exclude. However, the alleged exploitation of Vietnamese workers in Fukushima affirms the urgency of thinking through these challenges today. It is certainly possible to argue that bearing witness to these connections in Tawada’s novel promises an affirmative response to Numano’s assertion that the 2011 disasters have radically altered Japanese fiction so that no work, even those written prior to 2011, can be read in the same way today. But this project also carries significance beyond questions of Tawada’s fiction and its position between the boundaries that define what constitutes “Japanese”, “German”, and “world” literatures. As Wen remarks in language that paraphrases the blind woman in Tawada’s novel, “if there are no gaps (ana) visible it can feel like there is no escape, but once one notices that gaps exist, one realizes that this is not the full picture”.70 By writing gaps into their own textual visions, the works by Tawada examined here make connections that are unimaginable within a world literature based on trans-­border crossings alone. In this way, the question of where Tawada’s texts find themselves in the world becomes less meaningful than the recognition of those voices that already look back through their pages. Notes 1 https://www.jpf.go.jp/e/about/press/2018/dl/2018-­015.pdf 2 https://www.nationalbook.org/watch-­t he-­2 018-­n ational-book-awardsceremony-­live/ 3 Tawada Yōko, ‘Tawada Yōko Does Not Exist’. In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 13. 4 Ibid., 15. 5 https://www.jusfc.gov/creative-­artists-­programs/creative-­artist-­exchange-fellowshipfinalists-­for-­2015/ 6 Shu-­mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition”, PMLA 119, no. 1 (2004): 16–30. 7 Tawada Yō ko, Ekusofonı ̄: Bogo no soto e deru tabi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2003). 8 Tawada has reproduced this second section only in German under the title, Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (Konkursbuch, 2010). My analysis here focuses on the first section that has no such equivalent translation in German (or English).

110  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko For a detailed discussion of Abenteueur, see Marko Pajevic ́, “Adventures in Language: Yō ko Tawada’s Exophonic Explorations of German,” Oxford German Studies 48.4 (2020): 494–504. 9 Nishi Masahiko, Bairingaru na yume to yūutsu (Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 2014), 150. 10 Marjorie Perloff, “Foreword”, in Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, vii. 11 Tawada, Ekusofonı ̄. 12 Stockhammer, Arndt, and Naguschewski’s book has not been translated into English. My reading of this work is aided by Matthias Zach, who helpfully cites these key definitions directly in German with English translations. See Zach, “Extraterritoriality, Exophony, and the Literary Text”, in Ex(tra)Territorial: Reassessing Territory in Literature, Culture and Languages/ Les Terroires Littéraires, Culturels et Linguistiques en Question, ed. Didier Lasalle and Dirk Weissman (Amsterdam; New York: University Paris-­ Est Créteil, 2014), 217–44. “Other-­ languagedness” is Zach’s translation. 13 Zach’s translation writes this term in italics. 14 Stockhammer et al, cited in Zach, “Extraterritoriality, Exophony, and the Literary Text”, 221, original emphasis. 15 Tawada, Ekusofonı ̄, 6. 16 Ibid., i. 17 Yumi Selden’s translation of “The Bath” appears in Tawada Yō ko, Where Europe Begins (New York: New Directions Book, 2007), 3–55. However, the Japanese “original” of this English translation only appeared in print in 2015 in a bilingual volume produced by the Tübingen-­based publishing house konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke under the somewhat different title of Urokomochi (Scaleskin). Margaret Mitsutani’s translation of this story as “Saint George and the Translator” is included in the 2007 collection of Tawada’s short stories titled Facing the Bridge (New York: New Directions Book), 107–175. 18 Dennitza Gabrakova, The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 19 Tawada Yō ko and Yoshikawa Yasuhisa, “Intabyū: Kotoba ni sumu doragon, so no gekirin ni furetakute”, Subaru: Bungei kikanshi 3 (1997): 85. 20 Tawada, Ekusofonı ̄, 107. 21 Ibid., 12–13. 22 Tachibana Reiko, “Tawada Yō ko’s Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany”, in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 153–168. 23 Tawada, 2003, 17. 24 Ibid. 25 Tachibana, “Tawada Yō ko’s Quest for Exophony’, especially 155. 26 Tawada, 2003, 61, 65. 27 Ibid., 35. 28 Tawada Yō ko, “Chantien bashi no temae de” in Hikari to zerachin no raipuchihhi (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000). 29 Margaret Mitsutani’s translation of this work is included in Facing the Bridge, 49–106. 30 Tawada Yō ko, Tabi o suru hadaka no me (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2004); Yō ko Tawada, Das Nackte Auge (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag, 2004). 31 Tawada, Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 9. Unless otherwise stated, all citations from the novel are taken from this Japanese version and all translations my own. The corresponding passage in the German text highlights the narrator’s Vietnamese identity slightly differently, giving the speech’s title as “Vietnam als Opfer des amerikanischen Imperialismus” (Das Nackte Auge, 7). Susan Bernofsky’s English translation renders this as “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism” (The Naked Eye, New Directions, 2009).

Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko  111 32 Tawada Yō ko, Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 50. 33 Susan C. Anderson, “Water under the Bridge: Unsettling the Concept of Bridging Cultures in Yō ko Tawada’s Writing”, Pacific Coast Philology 50.1 (2015): 48. 34 Ibid., 49. 35 The full list of chapters reads as follows. In each case, the first year indicates the temporal setting within Tawada’s narrative and the second gives the year in which each respective film was released: 1, 1988/Repulsion, 1965; 2, 1989/Zig-­zag, 1974; 3, 1990/ Tristana, 1970; 4, 1991/The Hunger, 1983; 5, 1992/Indochine; 6, 1993/Drôle d’endroit pour une recontre, 1988; 7, 1994/Belle du jour, 1966; 8, 1995/Si c’était à refaire, 1976; 9, 1996/Les Voleurs, 1996; 10, 1997/Le dernier Metro, 1980; 11, 1998/Place Vendôme, 1998; 12, 1999/Est-­Ouest, 1999; 13, 2000/Dancer in the Dark, 2000. 36 Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 50. 37 Nakagawa Shigemi, “Shikaku to iu ‘mō moku’: Tawada Yō ko ‘Tabi o suru hadaka no me’ no gengo jikken”, in Modaniti no sōzōryoku: Bungaku to shikakusei (Tokyo: Shinyō sha, 2009), 247–271; Douglas Slaymaker, “Travelling Optics in Yō ko Tawada”, in Études Germaniques 653 (2010): 665–71. 38 Julia Genz, “Medien als Kulturmvermittler? Mediale Gewalt und Transkulturalität in Yō ko Tawadas Das nackte Auge und Schwager in Bordeaux”, in Yoko Tawada. Fremde Wasser, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Tübingen: konkursbuch Claudia Gehrke, 2012), 186–202. 39 Petra Fachinger, “Postcolonial/Postcommunist Picaresque and the Logic of ‘Trans’ in Yō ko Tawada’s Das Nackte Auge”, in Tawada Yoko: Poetik Der Transformation, ed. Christine Ivanovic (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2010), 297–308; Leslie A. Adelson, “Rusty Rails and Parallel Tracks: Trans-­Latio in Yō ko Tawada’s Das Nackte Auge”, in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, ed. Birgit Mara Kaiser (New York; Oxon: Taylor and Routledge, 2015), 117. 40 Charles Exley, “Gazing at Deneuve: The Migrant Spectator and the Transnational Star in Tawada Yō ko’s ‘The Naked Eye’”, Japanese Language and Literature 50.1 (2016): 53–74. 41 Brett, de Bary. “Theory, Fiction, and the Lightness of Translation: Tawada Yō ko’s Schwager in Bordeaux/ Borudō no gikei (ボルドーの義兄)”, ed. Douglas Slaymaker. Tawada Yoko: On Writing and Rewriting. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020, 18. 42 Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 13. 43 Tijana Mamula. Cinema and Language Loss: Displacement, Visuality and the Filmic Image (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2013). 44 Mamula, 2012, “Metaphorically seeing: the place names of Marguerite Duras”, Screen, 53: 1, Spring 2012, 37. 45 The film scholar Mary Ann Doane warned of this danger thus: Identification as a mechanism is conceptualised as reducing the gap between film and spectator, masking the absence upon which the cinematic representation is founded. Image and sound, reconfirming each other’s depth, proffer to the viewer a lived space inhabited by bodies similar to his or her own. Nevertheless, although the film’s task may appear to be that of drawing the spectator in, of obliterating a distance, it must not be too successful. While for the male spectator, identification provides a mechanism for mastery over the female image, Doane bases her argument upon a Freudian reading in which for the female spectator, identification and “closing the gap” is central to the hysterical symptom. See: Doane, Mary Ann. “Misrecognition and Identity”, Cine-­Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies 3.3 (Fall 1980): 25–32. 46 Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 70. 47 Mamula, Cinema and Language Loss, 2.

112  Beyond “trans-border” / Tawada Yōko 48 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies Film Stars and Society (London: Routledge, 2004), 3; Christina Johnston, “Deneuve in the 1990s”, in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, ed. Lisa Downing and Sue Harris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 137. 49 Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 133. 50 Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 116. 51 Ibid., 134. 52 Ibid., 25, 127. 53 Ibid., 175. 54 Ibid., 258–259. 55 Ibid., 262, 264. 56 Ibid., 265–266. 57 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 58 Ibid., 139. 59 The katakana rendering of the name here reads “Tu Fon”. The Romanised form “Thu Huong” (without diacritics) appears in Tawada’s German text and Bernofsky’s English translation. 60 Tabi o suru hadaka no me, 151. 61 Ibid., 176. The same sentence appears slightly different in German (and English translation): “Ich trug den Namen ‘Thu Huong’ ein and bekam dabei das Gefühl, als würde ich das für eine andere Person tun” (Tawada, Das Nackte Auge, 121). Accordingly, Bernofsky’s English translation reads, “I wrote down the name ‘Thu Huong’ and felt as if I was doing this for some other person” (my emphasis). 62 Thu Hương Dương, Paradise of the Blind, trans. by Phan Huy Dương and Nina McPherson, New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 63 Harriet Blodgett, “The Feminist Artistry of Vietnam’s Dương Thu Hương”, in World Literature Today 75.3/4 (Summer–Autumn 2001): 31–39. 64 Dương, Paradise of the Blind, 229. 65 The agreed settlement was less than fourteen per cent of the total sum requested by the trainees, which exceeded 12 million yen. However, the ruling was significant due to the court’s unusual step to declare publicly that decontamination work was not a primary objective of the internship programme. This stance echoed a public statement by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, as reported in the English-­language newspaper The Japan Times on September 5, 2019, that decontamination work fell beyond the trainee programme’s description. 66 Iyotani Toshio, “Idō no naka ni sumau” in “Kikyō” no monogatari/ “idō” no katari: Sengo Nihon ni okeru posutokoroniaru no so ̄zōryoku, ed. Toshio Iyotani and Hirata Yumi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2014), 5–26. 67 Tawada Yō ko and Wen Yūjū, “‘Imin’ wa Nihongo bungaku o dō kaeru ka?” Bungakkai 73.1 (January 2019): 200–213. Wen’s name is written 温又柔 and can be transliterated either according to Japanese reading as On Yūjū, or as Wen Yō rō to approximate how the Taiwanese reading would be rendered in phonetic Japanese. Following the author’s request, I transliterate her name here as Wen Yūjū, which combines the two (personal conversation with Wen). 68 Ibid. 69 Bettina Brandt and Yō ko Tawada, “The Postcommunist Eye: An Interview with Yō ko Tawada”, in World Literature Today 80.1 (2006): 45. 70 Tawada and Wen, “‘Imin’ wa Nihongo bungaku o dō kaeru ka”, 212.

Epilogue Re/translation

The rise and rise This book has considered the role that translation has come to play during the last three decades in constructing the image of contemporary Japanese literature as both a national and a world literature, from two mutually imbricated approaches. The first half traced the interplay of these terms and how their meanings have developed in relation to the vicissitudes of modern and contemporary Japanese literary history. The second examined essays and works of fiction by three writers that question, subvert, and even resist the current, mainstream trend towards translation as a lateral process synonymous with crossing national and linguistic borders to connect with the rest of the world. The strategies that these literary works deploy are various and complex, yet each implores us to consider the questions of what it means to translate, and how we might translate differently: that is, to consider how and why texts might refuse the image of translation as a means of bridging and suturing, and instead revel in the realms of heterogeneity, incongruity, and even absence. The fact that Japanese literature has continued to thrive on the contemporary, global stage of literary translation since 2018 assures that these enquiries remain current. In 2020, Stephen Snyder’s translation of Ogawa Yōko’s The Memory Police also made the shortlist of the 2020 International Booker Prize, followed in 2022 by Sam Bett and David Boyd’s translation of Kawakami Mieko’s 2009 novel, Heaven (Hevun). That same year, four years after their collaboration saw The Emissary take the first National Book Award for Translated Literature, Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani once more found themselves among the list of finalists for the same prize with Scattered All Over the Earth (Chikyū ni chiribarameta, 2018 [2022]), the first book in a trilogy that continues in the quasi-­dystopian vein of The Emissary. It was perhaps too much to expect that Tawada and Mitsutani might take the same honour for a second time and so soon after the first. However, their nomination alone marked an unparalleled achievement for this writer-­and-­translator pairing. It also continued a trend that to this day is reaffirming the importance of female writers and translators in driving the success of Japanese literature on the global stage in terms of visibility, critical acclaim, gender diversity. DOI: 10.4324/9781003435761-7

114 Epilogue As I noted in the Introduction to this book, these positive steps are also aided by the growing excitement around literary translation that shows no signs of slowing down. As a clear indicator of how these developments continue to dovetail, in November 2022, the Society of Authors and Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation announced the launch of a Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize to celebrate translations into English from Japanese. According to the website of the Society of Authors, this new award will be their first “dedicated solely to translations from an Asian country”.1 Together, these prizes confirm the active capabilities by which translators and their translations are continuing to shape the contours of Japanese literature as it appears on the global stage. This book departed from a simple thesis: that in addition to treating contemporary Japanese literature as something that exists and can then be translated, it is also necessary to recognise the ways in which translation constructs that which we term “Japanese literature”. In fact, the opportunities for global recognition through translation are now having visible impacts upon writers and publishers working within the domestic, Japanese literary context as well. The 2017 English-­language publication of Breasts and Eggs offers perhaps the most famous example.2 This work appeared as a translation by David Boyd and Sam Bett of Kawakami Mieko’s novella of 2008, Chichi to ran.3 However, Kawakami’s original was a much shorter work that the author proactively extended by revisiting one of the work’s central protagonists, Natsu, ten years after her narrative had begun, and it is this that forms the basis of the English translation. To be sure, at 448 pages in hardback and 432 in paperback, this revised version appeared to better meet the expectations of an international market for how long a novel should be. What is significant is that in 2019, Bungei Shunjū retroactively published Kawakami’s revised version in Japanese under the new title Natsu monogatari (“Natsu’s Story”), thus granting access to this ‘translation’ also to readers of Japanese.4 One might also point to the release of Imamura Natsuko’s Murasaki no sukāto no onna in June 2022 in bunkobon (pocket-­sized softback) format. Imamura’s novel was first published in 2019, the same year as Natsu monogatari, and won the 161st Akutagawa Award.5 The English translation by Lucy North appeared just two years later, under the title of The Woman in the Purple Skirt.6 This order of events may seem unremarkable, but the description of the work on the bunkobon (a compact, paperback format) edition as a “translation publication (hon’yaku shuppan) available in 17 languages and 23 countries/ regions” reveals that translation and international recognition are now important for marketing original works to Japanese readers, and even within a short timespan following publication.7 North also wrote the critical afterword (kaisetsu) that accompanies the text in this softback version. In the established tradition, these short essays were commonly been written by literary scholars or other writers of comparable prose.8 North’s contribution in this case constitutes an unprecedented move that leads the way towards enabling translators to shape critical receptions of the literary work, garner further public

Epilogue  115 recognition of their labours, and speak directly about the specific challenges and linguistic choices that the faced when translating the work from Japanese to English. On the surface, these developments appear to do little more than replicate a pattern that was already in play by the end of the 1950s. Norma Field’s essay, cited in Chapter 1, also suggested the ways in which translators and their translations contributed to the “mutual constitution of canon of modern Japanese literature and a general readership of English speakers”.9 However, whereas the period of literature that Field engaged built upon the work of academics who were also active as translators, the contemporary scene is also giving birth to a growing cohort of full-­time translators with their own networks that may intersect with the academic field, but which also carry their own strengths of influence that are helping to drive the popular market for translations even further. Translating differently With so much to celebrate, it is with trepidation that one attempts to ask what else might be at stake. To be sure, the publication of more translations is of multiple benefits to the field of Japanese literary studies. Not only are these texts enticing a new generation of young people to apply to Japanese Studies courses so that they may become able to read the original works, but they are also providing a far wider range of texts from which instructors can build our syllabuses than we had access to as students. In keeping with the greater number of stories written by women there are also signs that translators are pushing other angles of diversity. Hence, 2022 saw the publication in English of The Colour of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart, Takami Nieda’s translation of the Jini no pazuru (Jini’s puzzle) by the ethnic Korean writer Che Shiru 崔実.10 This was followed one year later by Morgan Giles’s translation of Yū Miri’s The End of August (Hachigatsu no hate, 2007), an epic narrative of a Korean family from the period of Japanese colonial rule to the present.11 As this latter title comes from the same author and translator whose work, Tokyo Ueno Station (JR Ueno-­ eki Ko ̄en-­guchi) won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, it is possible to trace the lines by which success in translation can be mobilised in progressive directions. However, the interconnected desires of a growing readership of Japanese fiction in English on one hand, and the investment within Japanese literature – including the scholarly field – into securing a place for this national literature in an expanding Anglophone, global marketplace also suggest some reasons to be cautious. As I wrote in my Introduction, today it is becoming more commonplace for the names of translators to appear on the front covers of the books that they have translated, while the restructuring of recent awards has led to the greater recognition of the translator’s creative role alongside the author in bringing the work of translated literature to life. It is therefore conspicuous that despite this rise in visibility for the translator herself, the expectation

116 Epilogue remains that her work should remain unseen. The announcement for the new Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize makes this explicit by advising that the “The winning translation will make for faultless reading or reading where there is no indication that the original language was not English.”12 Such phrasing returns us to the issue of translatability, which in my arguments I have deliberately sought to avoid. However, to venture a possible definition of this slippery term as it occurs in the current context, translatability indicates a quality by which a translation should be read in the public knowledge that it is a translation even while it effaces any signs of its original. In the three preceding chapters, I have introduced three writers – Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada – whose respective writings, I argue, offer an alternative, more disruptive view. The works that I have analysed in the preceding chapters have not yet appeared in any conventional translation, although this does not mean that they are “untranslatable”. Rather, I venture that their textual strategies invite, or more properly incite, us to imagine the work of translation differently. In fact, there are examples of works by each of these writers already in English translation that enable me to reinforce this point. An early work by Sakiyama to appear in translation was “The Tale of Wind and Water”, by Kyoko Iriya Selden & Alisa Freedman.13 It bears highlighting that the story appeared in an anthology devoted to writing by “Japanese Women Writers” and Sakiyama was the only writer from Okinawa to be included. As Davinder Bhowmik has written, this work appeared at a point of evident transition in Sakiyama’s writing from her earlier stories set within “lost islands” to those that explored “lost sounds”.14 Indeed, the story carries many devices that Sakiyama continued to develop in the “Kuja” series analysed in Chapter 3. The narrative is told from the perspective of a male narrator from the Japanese mainland who visits Okinawa, where through his encounter with a young, mixed-­race woman called Satō and a second woman, apparently a local prostitute, whose figure blurs with that of a siren who inhabits the murky seas around the island.15 As in “Kuja”, these encounters have the effect of destabilising what the protagonist sees. While Sakiyama’s use of multiple orthographies is less radical here than in those later stories, “Fūsuitan” also presents material challenges that make this text challenging to translate. However, the most striking gap between Sakiyama’s text and the English “Tale” comes in the form of a scream that the siren emits at the story’s climax, as the male protagonist is about to depart back to “Yamato” from where he came. Sakiyama renders this scream as a series of unintelligible, unspeakable signs: ⊗●△◎.16 In translation, this line does not appear at all.17 While this omission surely cannot be attributed to any sole actor, it intrigues because there is no ostensible reason for it on linguistic or semantic grounds: these symbols make no sense in either Japanese or English. The erasure of the siren’s scream thus indicates a reluctance towards orthographic difference in translation and in the English text, even when this textual materiality is central to Sakiyama’s writing strategy. It  also removes an evocative expression of the “failure to

Epilogue  117 communicate” which, in Davinder Bhowmik’s interpretation, is of critical importance to this literary work.18 This siren’s scream offers one example to indicate why language and multilinguality matter. The primary, obvious implication of its deletion is that it creates two radically different experiences for readers in English and Japanese. This may be inevitable in any translation, and especially when moving from one language whose standard written expression requires three orthographies  – hiragana, katakana, and kanji – to one such as English that has no comparable equivalents. One finds it also besets the few translations of Yi Yang-­ji’s writing. While there still exists no full translation in English of any of Yi’s fictional works, an excerpt of Yuhi, discussed in Chapter 4, was published in 1991.19 The extract takes up the novel from midway through the narrative and continues to the closing scene in which the Korean niece feels the memory of Yuhi’s voice snatch away her own “language crutch”. While Yi’s original text combines hiragana, katakana, and hangeul, Constance Prener’s translation into English must instead describe these textual effects: “It depends on whether it’s the Korean ah or the Japanese ah.”20 At stake is not only the loss of the visual, material impact contained within Yi’s multiple orthographies into the singular, Roman script of standard English; by omitting the combination of scripts that Yi uses to represent Yuhi’s heterolingual utterance , this translation also dulls the power of this text to upset the reader. As above, rather than seek to appraise these translations on immeasurable grounds of quality, I cite these examples because they each remove something – namely an attention to materiality – that is fundamental to each of their originals, and because it is the knowledge of these elements that has made the readings I present in this volume possible. On the surface, these omissions indicate not only the visual implications at stake when a successful translation is measured in terms of smoothness, fluidity, and the “faultless reading” experience that it creates. At a deeper level, they also pose the question of how to translate a work that already in its original form refuses to conform to such expectations. Indeed, while Prener’s insertion of the terms “Japanese” and “Korean” helps to illustrate the importance of multilingual expression within Yuhi, it obscures the more complex of Yi’s textual strategies that push against the rigid separation between these two, national languages. The erasure and substitution of elements in translation therefore constitutes more than a matter of appearances, and its ramifications can be profound. For example, in the case of the title of Sakiyama’s fifth “Kuja” story, one finds a small, equilateral triangle to the top right of the katakana that is read as hi (ヒ). While standard Japanese permits two small dots that could turn this hi into a voiced bi ビ or a circle to produce the aspirated pi ピ, the triangle is not legible as a diacritical marker. That is, triangles are simply not used in this way. In fact, this triangle marks Sakiyama’s attempt to render the sound psi which occurs in vernacular from Miyako Island.21 This knowledge suggests the meaning of this word as ‘cold’, which would make a smooth translation possible. However, this

118 Epilogue also raises an ethical dilemma in the translator of Sakiyama’s texts that resonates with the issues of memory, narrative, and transmissibility that pervade her stories. For to provide in English a possible meaning of this term is to erase the substance by which Sakiyama’s title is otherwise illegible in Japanese. Not only this; it also loses sight of the opportunity to translate this character in a more creative way that favours materiality over meaning, as in my own effort to rewrite the curved section of the Roman letter ‘P’ as a triangle: I> The example from Tawada’s writing that forms the basis of discussion in Chapter 5 may seem distant from this concern. However, the fact that only the German text, Das Nackte Auge, has appeared in English translation as The Naked Eye, while the Japanese work, Tabi o suru hadaka no me, has not, presents another example by which the act of translation can result in a demonstrable, material absence. In my critical reading, I traced how the Japanese and German versions produce different readerly effects, which in turn have produced different critical paradigms that offer glimpses into the ways in which translation can affect academic practice within the field. To wit, the ability of Tawada’s multilingual writing to generate scholarship in multiple languages has helped to bring together interpretive paradigms and critical insights that might have before remained rooted within the distinct fields of Japanese or German Literature. It is also possible to connect the growing interest in “trans-­ border literature” within Japanese literary studies produced in English, including this book, to Tawada’s importance as an established and continually energising pioneer. This opportunity poses exciting possibilities for the future of Japanese literary studies to transcend its own boundaries and forge connections to related lines of enquiry from the perspectives of other literatures. However, the efforts to stimulate discussions that transgress the borders of Japanese literature also run the risk of relegating relevant scholarship published in Japanese to the critical margins unless it, too, is translated. While primarily addressing the aporia left by untranslated works of Japanese literature in the contemporary, world literature scene, this research has also sought to emphasise the importance of engaging secondary materials in Japanese for keeping the field intact.22 As a countermeasure against an increasingly “expanded” version of comparative literature gaining traction since the mid-­1990s revitalisation of world literature, Francesca Orsini implores us to attend to what she calls the “located and multilingual”.23 In Orsini’s definition, location means not simply a geographical, historical, or cultural context but also a position, an orientation, a necessarily partial and particular perspective, a standpoint from which one inhabits and views the world.24 A located approach of this sort allows one to take in multiple, open, and conflicting structures, and thus allows one to move away from, circumvent, and deconstruct the “easy binary of local vs. global” which inevitably elevates “the world” as an abstract and distant space to which admission is always governed

Epilogue  119 by those who locate themselves in the centre. Orsini upholds this project of a located approach by emphasising the multilinguality that exists within any given location, each of which constructs and encodes that location differently. Although Orsini’s focus is the Indian subcontinent, her call towards the located and the multilingual offers a useful language for expressing the aims of my research, to transgress a notion of Japan and Japanese either in relation to some abstract “world” to which the comparative, “trans-­border” approach might gain access, or as the dominant centre that oversees and regulates the nation’s margins and borders. I consider my efforts in this research to read alternative visions of translation and borders within the writings of Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada to be each in their own way both located and multilingual. In the main, these endeavours have entailed a deconstructive attitude towards the narrative, structure, and languages of each work’s composition. In each case, these analyses have presented decolonising possibilities by bringing to light unspoken or oppressed histories. Finally, by refusing to read these works of fiction only in relation to a perceived “margin” or “border” of the national literature, my readings have engaged in efforts to decentre the image of “Japan” that “Japanese literature” conjures and to suggest alternative intertextualities and visions of “the world”. If a single image or idea unites the preceding analyses within this project, then it is its attention to texts that display a resistance to, and refusal of closure. Whether in the gaping abyss and crying caves that the narrator’s scream opens up as it rips through Sakiyama’s “Kuja” stories, the harm and self-­harm enacted upon the female, Korean body in Kazukime, the figurative splintering by which Yuhi’s language tears through Onni’s throat, or the figurative echo of this image in Tawada’s Vietnamese protagonist’s piercing of her own eye with a clock needle, the texts that this research examines lay their wounds bare. However, these works do not merely invoke wounds as literary themes or tropes. In a world (and model of “world literature”) in which translation is invoked in language through metaphors of connection, healing, and suture, these works also ask what might result when we envisage translation as an act that wounds. I am arguing that such a critical intervention is necessary because it exposes the structures by which the current drive towards translation in a global, Anglophone age privileges some texts before others: namely, those which are more easily translated. More specifically, it highlights the situation in which other works, at least so long as they remain untranslated, continue to be forgotten, omitted, and excluded from those articulations of Japanese literature that foreground the importance of crossing borders and entering the world. The goal of this research is therefore not simply to encourage translation as an important and necessary task. By reading through the gaps, wounds, silences, and across the irreducible cacophonies to be found in the writings of Sakiyama, Yi, and Tawada, I have traced alternative images that can also temper the contemporary scene weighted towards Japanese literature that succeeds according to one model of translation, and thus enable other texts, intertexts, and contexts to come into view. This is the ‘flipside’ of the narrative with which

120 Epilogue this book begun: one which foregrounds the role played by those texts that remain thus far untranslated in shaping our perceptions of Japanese literature today; and one that asks how we might allow those texts to teach us to translate differently. Notes 1 “Introducing the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize”, The Society of Authors, November 29, 2022. https://www2.societyofauthors. org/2022/11/29/introducing-­the-­great-­britain-­sasakawa-foundation-translationprize/ 2 Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs. Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd (London: Picador, 2021). 3 Kawakami Mieko. Chichi to Ran. (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2008). 4 Kawakami Mieko, Natsu Monogatari (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū̄, 2019). 5 Imamura Natsuko, Murasaki no suka ̄to no onna. (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Shuppan, 2019). 6 Imamura Natsuko, The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Translated by Lucy North. (London: Faber & Faber, 2021). 7 This description is printed on the obi or “belt” that is a common feature within Japanese publishing which wraps around the physical book. 8 Chieko M. Ariga, “Text versus Commentary: Struggles over the Cultural Meanings of ‘Woman’.”, in The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, ed. Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 352–87. Ariga’s critique concerns the prevalence, at the time of her writing, of kaisetsu that were printed at the end of works of fiction by women but which were written by men, and the gendered implications of this juxtaposition. However, her analysis into the role of kaisetsu as an aid and steer intended to assist readers in comprehending the literary work is useful here also. 9 Norma Field, “The Way of the World”, 233; original emphasis. 10 Chesil, The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart. Translated by Takami Nieda (New York, NY: Soho Teen, 2022). It is curious that this story, which centres on an ethnic Korean teenager, was marketed in English as Young Adult Fiction. The presentation of the author’s name on this book as one word is also misleading. In fact, “Chesil” should carry a space in Romanisation since Che is the author’s family name, and Sil her given name. 11 Yu Miri, The End of August. Translated by Morgan Giles (Sheffield: Tilted Axis Press, 2023). 12 The Society of Authors, “Introducing”. 13 Sakiyama Tami, “The Tale of Wind and Water”. Translated by Kyoko Iriya Selden & Alisa Freedman. More Stories by Japanese Women Writers: An Anthology, ed. Kyoko Selden and Noriko Mizuta (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2011). 14 Davinder L. Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2008), 168. 15 Sakiyama Tami, “Fūsuitan”. In Okinawa bungakusen: Nihon bungaku no ejji kara no toi. 2nd edition. (Tō kyō : Bensei Shuppan, 2015), 384–398. 16 Sakiyama, “Fūsuitan”, 398. 17 Sakiyama Tami, “The Tale of Wind and Water”. 18 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 170. 19 Lee Yang-­Ji, “Yu-­Hee”, in New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan, trans. Constance Prener (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), 55–68. 20 Lee Yang-­Ji, “Yu-­Hee”, 67.

Epilogue  121 21 Personal conversation with Sakiyama Tami, August 2022. 22 For an inspiring articulation of this problem in relation to Theatre Studies, see: Carriger, Michelle Liu, and Eero Laine. “‘Cultivating a Small Field’: On the Work of Citation in Theatre and Performance Studies Scholarship.” Theatre Topics 33, no. 2 (2023): 83–89. 23 Francesca Orsini, East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023). 24 Ibid., 4.

Bibliography

Adelson, Leslie A. ‘Rusty Rails and Parallel Tracks: Trans-­Latio in Yō ko Tawada’s Das Nackte Auge,’ in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, edited by Birgit Mara Kaiser. New York; Oxon: Taylor and Routledge, 2015. Allen, Esther, ed. To Be Translated or Not to Be: PEN/Institute Ramon Llull Report on the Situation of International Translation. Barcelona: Institute Ramon Llull, 2007. Anderson, Susan C. ‘Water under the Bridge: Unsettling the Concept of Bridging Cultures in Yō ko Tawada’s Writing,’ Pacific Coast Philology 50, no. 1 (2015): 48. Aniya Masaaki. ‘Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan’s Textbook Controversy’. Translated by Kyoko Selden. The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 6, no. 1 (6 January 2008): n.p. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012. Apter, Emily S. ‘On Translation in a Global Market’. Public Culture 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 1–12. Ariga, Chieko M. ‘Text versus Commentary: Struggles over the Cultural Meanings of “Woman”’, in The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, edited by Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, 352–387. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. ‘The Task of the Translator,’ in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. Translated by Harry Zohn, 2nd ed., 15–23. New York; London: Routledge, 2004. Bhowmik, Davinder L. Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance. London: Routledge, 2008. Blodgett, Harriet. ‘The Feminist Artistry of Vietnam’s Dương Thu Hương,’ World Literature Today 75, no. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 2001): 31–39. Bourdaghs, Michael. ‘Early Freeze Warning: The Politics and Literature Debate as Cold War Culture,’ in Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism, edited by Atsuko Ueda et al. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018, 17–42. Brandt, Bettina. ‘Scattered Leaves: Artists Books and Migration, A Conversation with Yō ko Tawada’. Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 1 (2008): 12–22. Brandt, Bettina and Yō ko Tawada, ‘The Postcommunist Eye: An Interview with Yō ko Tawada’. World Literature Today 80.1 (2006): 45. Carriger, Michelle Liu, and Eero Laine. ‘“Cultivating a Small Field”: On the Work of Citation in Theatre and Performance Studies Scholarship’. Theatre Topics 33, no. 2 (2023): 83–89.

Bibliography  123 Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chen Kuan-­Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010. Chesil. The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart. Translated by Takami Nieda. New York, NY: Soho Teen, 2022. Ching Leo T. S. and Hyesong Lim, ‘Voices from Cheju (Jeju): Towards an Archipelagic Imagination’. The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 21, no. 7 2023: 2. Chou, Wan-­yao. ‘The Kōminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations,’ in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, 40–68. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis; London: Minnesota, 2008. Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Croft, Jennifer, ‘Why translators should be named on book covers’, The Guardian, 10 September 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/10/why-­translators-­ should-­be-­named-­on-­book-­covers (accessed 27 Dec 2023). d’Haen, Theo. World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. de Bary, Brett. ‘Theory, Fiction, and the Lightness of Translation: Tawada Yō ko’s Schwager in Bordeaux/ Borudō no gikei (ボルドーの義兄)’, in Tawada Yoko: On Writing and Rewriting, edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Signature Event Context,’ in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, Brighton: Haevester, 1982, 307–330. DiNitto, Rachel. Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019. Doane, Mary Ann. ‘Misrecognition and Identity’. Cine-­Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 25–32. Dunscomb, Paul. ‘The Reign of Emperor Akihito, 1989–2019: A History in Five Key Words’. Education About Asia 23, no. 3 (2018): 33–38. Dương, Thu Hương. Paradise of the Blind. Translated by Phan Huy Dương and Nina McPherson. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies Film Stars and Society. London: Routledge, 2004, 3. Exley, Charles. ‘Gazing at Deneuve: The Migrant Spectator and the Transnational Star in Tawada Yō ko’s “The Naked Eye”’. Japanese Language and Literature 50, no. 1 (2016): 53–74. Fachinger, Petra. ‘Postcolonial/Postcommunist Picaresque and the Logic of “Trans” in Yō ko Tawada’s Das Nackte Auge,’ in Tawada Yoko: Poetik Der Transformation, edited by Christine Ivanovic. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2010, 297–308. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Field, Norma. ‘“The Way of the World”: Japanese Literary Studies in the Postwar United States,’ in The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States, edited by Helen Hardacre, Leiden: Brill, 1998, 227–293. Fowler, Edward. ‘Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction’. Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–44. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

124 Bibliography Gabrakova Dennitza, The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Genz, Julia. ‘Medien als Kulturmvermittler? Mediale Gewalt und Transkulturalität in Yōko Tawadas Das nackte Auge und Schwager in Bordeaux,’ in Yōko Tawada, Fremde Wasser, edited by Ortrud Gutjahr. Tübingen: konkursbuch Claudia Gehrke, 2012, 186–202. Gima Susumu. Ryūkyū-­kō: Okinawa bunka no mosaku. Tokyo: Gun Shuppan, 1979. Hardacre, Helen. The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Hayes, Carol. ‘Cultural Identity in the Work of Yi Yang-­ji,’ in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, edited by Sonia Ryang. London: Routledge Curzon, 2005, 119–139. Iida, Ichishi, Yutaka Ebihara, and Genkaiken (eds). Higashi Nihon daishinsai-­go bungakuron. Tō kyō : Nan’undō , 2017. Ikue Kina, ‘Locating Tami Sakiyama’s Literary Voice in Globalizing Okinawan Literature’, International Journal of Okinawan Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 11–29. Imafuku, Ryūta. Kureōru Shugi. Tokyo: Seidosha, 1991. ———. ‘Sekai bungaku no ryotei,’ in Ekkyō suru sekai bungaku VOICES FROM BORDER, edited by Paul Bowles. Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1992, 2–31. Imamura Natsuko. Murasaki no sukāto no onna. Tō kyō : Asahi Shimbun Shuppan, 2019. ———. The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Translated by Lucy North. London: Faber & Faber, 2021. Isogai, Jirō , “Zainichi” bungaku no henyō to keishō. Tokyo: Shinkansha, 2015. Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Iwasaki, Minoru, Steffi Richter, and Richard F. Calichman. ‘The Topology of Post-­ 1990s Historical Revisionism’. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 507–538. Iyotani Toshio, ‘Idō no naka ni sumau,’ in ‘Kikyō’ no monogatari/ ‘idō’ no katari: Sengo Nihon ni okeru posutokoroniaru no sōzōryoku, edited by Toshio Iyotani and Hirata Yumi. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2014, 5–26. Johnston, Christina. ‘Deneuve in the 1990s,’ in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, edited by Lisa Downing and Sue Harris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 129–143. Kaku, Nan’en. Bairingaru na Nihongo bungaku: Tagengo tabunka no aida. Tokyo: Sangensha, 2013. Karashima, David James. Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami. New York: Soft Skull, 2020. Kawakami Mieko. Chichi to ran. Tō kyō : Bungei Shunjū. 2008. ———. Natsu monogatari. Tō kyō : Bungei Shunjū, 2019. ———. Breasts and Eggs. Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. London: Picador, 2021. Kawamura Minato, ‘I Yanji: “Sutehime” no monogatari’. Gunzō 47, no. 9 (1992): 162–165. ———, ‘Heisei bungaku to wa nani ka: Gurō barusei to ekkyō sei o haranda bungaku’, Imidas, 9 September 2009, https://imidas.jp/jijikaitai/l-­40-­067-­09-­01-­g148 (accessed 15 May 2023). ———. Shinsai Genpatsu Bungakuron. Tō kyō : Inpakuto Shuppankai, 2013. Kien, Nghi Ha. ‘Crossing the Border? Hybridity as Late-­Capitalistic Logic of Cultural Translation and National Modernisation’. Transversal: Polture and Culitics, 29 June 2006. Kim, Seong-­Nae, ‘The Work of Memory: Ritual Laments of the Dead and Korea’s Cheju Massacre’, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion edited by Janice Patricia Boddy and Michael Lambek. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013.

Bibliography  125 Kim Sŏ kpŏ m, ‘“Nihongo bungaku” no rekishisei’, Border crossings: The Journal of Japanese-­Language Literature Studies no. 2 (2015): 4–6. https://www.bcjjl.org/upload/ pdf/jjlls-­2-­1-­4.pdf Kimura, Saeko. Shinsaigo bungaku ron: Atarashii Nihon bungaku no tame ni. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2013. ———. So no go no shinsaigo bungaku ron. Tō kyō : Seidosha, 2018. Kimura, Saeko, and Anne Bayard-­Sakai. Sekai bungaku toshite no shinsaigo bungaku. Tō kyō : Akashi shoten, 2021. Kina Ikue. ‘Fuchi o ibasho to suru monotachi e: Sakiyama Tami no Kujā rensaku shō setsu ni okeru kioku to kō kan,’ in Kokyo ̄ no toporojı ̄: Basho to ibasho no kankyo ̄ bungaku ron. Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2011a, 181–200. ———. ‘Locating Tami Sakiyama’s Literary Voice in Globalizing Okinawan Literature’. International Journal of Okinawan Studies 2, no. 2 (2011b): 11–29. Kō , Yonran. ‘Sengo’ to iu ideorogı ̄: Rekishi, kioku, bunka. Tō kyō Fujiwara Shoten, 2010. Kwon, Nayoung Aimee. ‘Japanophone Literature? A Transpacific Query on Absence’. Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 537–558. Kyō , Nobuko. Koe: Sennen Saki Ni Todoku Hodo Ni. Tō kyō : Pneumasha, 2015. Lee Chonghwa. Tsubuyaki no seiji shiso:̄ Motomerareru manazashi kanashimi e no soshite himerareta mono e no. Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998. Lee Yang-­Ji, ‘Yū-­Hee,’ in New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan. Translated by Constance Prener. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991, 55–68. Levy, Indra (ed.), Translation in Modern Japan. Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011. Lindahl, Carl, Michael Dylan Foster, and Kate Parker Horigan, eds. We Are All Survivors: Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery. 2022. Lovell, Julia. The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Mamula, Tijana. ‘Metaphorically seeing: the place names of Marguerite Duras’, Screen 53, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 36–53. ———. Cinema and Language Loss: Displacement, Visuality and the Filmic Image. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2013. Marukawa, Tetsushi. Teikoku no bo ̄rei: Nihon bungaku no seishin chizu. Tō kyō : Seidosha, 2004. McInerney, Jay, ‘Roll Over Basho: Who Japan Is Reading, and Why (Interview with Murakami Haruki)’, New York Times Book Review, 27 September 1992, https://www. nytimes.com/1992/09/27/books/roll-­over-­basho-­who-­japan-­is-­reading-­and-­why.html (accessed 5 January 2023). Medoruma Shun. Okinawa ‘sengo’ zero nen. Tō kyō : Nihon Hō sō Shuppan Kyō kai, 2005. ———. ‘Mabuigumi.’ Translated by Kyle Ikeda. Manoa 23, no. 1 (2011): 112–134. Minh-­ha, Trinh T., ‘Not You/Like You: Post-­Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference’. Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): n.p. Miyoshi, Masao. ‘Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality’, Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 283–297. ———. ‘Japan is Not Interesting’ Trespasses: Selected Writings, edited by Eric Cazdyn, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2010, 189–204. Mizumura Minae. Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō , 2008. Molasky, Michael S. The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory. Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations. London, New York: Routledge, 2001.

126 Bibliography Molasky, Michael S., and Steve Rabson (eds.). Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000. Morris, Mark. ‘Gossip and history: Nakagami, Faulkner, García Márquez,’ Japan Forum 8, no. 1 (2007): 35–50. Murakami Haruki, ‘Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer’. Translated by Emanuel Pastreich. The Asia-­Pacific Journal 9, no. 29 2011: 7. Murakami Yō ko, Dekigoto no zankyo ̄: Genbaku bungaku to Okinawa bungaku, Inpakuto shuppankai, 2015. Naff, William E. The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson / William E. Naff. Honolulu: Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011. Nakagawa Shigemi, ‘Shikaku to iu “mō moku”: Tawada Yō ko “Tabi o suru hadaka no me” no gengo jikken,’ in Modaniti no so ̄zo ̄ryoku: Bungaku to shikakusei. Tokyo: Shinyō sha, 2009, 247–271. Nakahodo, Masanori. Okinawa bungaku-­shi sobyō: Kindai, gendai no sakuhin o otte. Naha, Okinawa Borderink, 2018. Nelson, Christopher. 2011. ‘A Letter from Okinawa’. Hot Spots, Fieldsights, July 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-­letter-­from-­okinawa. (accessed June 10, 2023). Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London, Nairobi, Portsmouth N.H., Harare: James Currey, 1986. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-­Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Nishi Masahiko, Bairingaru na yume to yūutsu. Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 2014, 150. Norindr, Panivong. Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Numano, Mitsuyoshi. ‘Shifting Borders in Contemporary Japanese Literature: Toward a Third Vision,’ in Approaches to World Literature, edited by Joachim Küpper, 147–166. Germany: Akademie Verlag, 2013. ———. Sekai bungaku ron. Vol. 3. Tetsuya No Katamari. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2020. Oka, Mari. Kioku/ Monogatari. Tō kyō : Iwanami shoten, 2000. Okano Yukie. ‘“Kotoba” e no kaigi: I Yanji “Yuhi” no sekai,’ Shakai bungaku 11 (1997): 86. Onaga Shihoko, ‘Sakiyama Tami “Kotō mu duchuimuni” ron: Ryō kai fukanō na “tasha” to hen’yō sareru shintai,’ Studies of Society and Culture in Ryukyu and Asia 17 (2014): 31–47. Orsini, Francesca. ‘The Multilingual Local in World Literature’, Comparative Literature 67, no. 4 (2015): 345. ———. East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023. Ō shiro Tatsuhiro. ‘Dochaku no hyō gen,’ in Ōshiro Tatsuhiro zenshu.̄ Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2002a, 420–426. ———. ‘Okinawa bungaku: Dō ka to ika,’ in Ōshiro Tatsuhiro zenshu.̄ Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2002b, 427–431. Ō shiro Tatsuhiro, Masanori Nakahodo, Tsuyoshi Shima, Fumiko Isa, and Masahiko (discussant) Shima. ‘Okinawa bungaku to hō gen katsuyō ni tsuite’. Urasoe Bungaku 3 (1998): 9–47. Pajevic ́, Marko. ‘Adventures in Language: Yō ko Tawada’s Exophonic Explorations of German,’ Oxford German Studies 48, no. 4 (2020): 494–504. Parry, Richard Lloyd, Japan denies massacre of Koreans after 1923 earthquake,’ The Times, August 31, 2023. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘Foreword’ in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007.

Bibliography  127 Post, Chad, “The Plight of Translation in America,” Publishers Weekly, 1 March 2019, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-­topic/industry-­news/publisher-­ news/article/79407-­the-­plight-­of-­translation-­in-­america.html (accessed 20 Dec 2023). Pulvers, Roger. ‘Murakami, the No-­Nuclear Principles, Nuclear Power and the Bomb,’ The Asia-­ Pacific Journal 9, no. 29 (2011): 6. https://apjjf.org/2011/9/29/Roger-­ Pulvers/3570/article.html. (accessed October 1, 2023). Rabson, Steve. Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas by Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and Higashi Mineo. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1989, reprinted 1996. Ropers, Erik. Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan: Histories against the Grain. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2018. Rosenbaum, Roman. ‘Post-­3/11 Literature in Japan,’ in When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, edited by Roy Starrs, 91–112. Leiden, Netherlands: Global Oriental, 2014, 91–112. Rothe, Anne. ‘Irresponsible Nonsense: An Epistemological and Ethical Critique of Postmodern Trauma Theory,’ in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, edited by Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria, 181–194. Switzerland: Springer, 2016. Ryang, Sonia. ‘The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan’s Modern National Sovereignty’. Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 731–748. ———. ‘The Tongue That Divided Life and Death. The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans’. The Asia-­Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 5, no. 9 (2007): 1–13. Ryu, Catherine. ‘Beyond Language: Embracing the Figure of “the Other” in Yi Yang-­ Ji’s “Yuhi”,’ in Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach, edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. ‘Spatially Conceived: Gender, Desire, and Identity in Yi Yang-­ Ji’s Yuhi’. Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 11 (2010). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Sakiyama Tami. ‘Shimakotoba de kachāshı ̄’. Kyōiki no bungaku: 21 seiki bungaku no sōzō, vol. 2, ed. Ryūta Imafuku. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002, 157–180. ———. ‘Wasuremono – Bō kyaku kinshirei,’ in Kotoba no umareru basho. Tō kyō : Sunagoya shobō , 2004, 47–49. ———. ‘Tokubetsu kikō essei: Koza ijū shiki’. Bunka No Mado 33 (2011): 11–14. Sakiyama Tami, ‘The Tale of Wind and Water’. Translated by Kyoko Iriya Selden, Alisa Freedman, Kyoko Iriye Selden and Noriko Mizuta, More Stories by Japanese Women Writers: An Anthology. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2011. ———, ‘Fūsuitan,’ in Okinawa bungakusen: Nihon bungaku no ejji kara no toi. 2nd edition edited by Keitoku Okamoto, Toshio Takahashi, and Hidehiko Motohama. Tō kyō : Bensei Shuppan, 2015, 384–398. ———. Kuja genshikō. Fukuoka, Japan: Hanashoin, 2017. Shih, Shu-­mei. ‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition’, PMLA 119, no. 1 (2004): 16–30. Shinjō Ikuo. ‘Kiku shisō shi: Yakabi Osamu o yominaosu’. Okinawa no kizu to iu kairo 2014: 69–90. Slaymaker, Douglas. ‘Travelling Optics in Yō ko Tawada,’ Études Germaniques vol. 65, no. 3 (2010): 665–671.

128 Bibliography Snyder, Stephen. ‘The Murakami Effect: On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature’, Literary Hub, 26 August 2020. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1979. Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Suga, Yutaka, ‘Into the Bullring: The Significance of “Empathy” after the Earthquake,’ in We Are All Survivors: Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery. edited by Carl Lindahl, Michael Dylan Foster and Kate Parker Horigan. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2022, 27–41. Tachibana Reiko, ‘Tawada Yō ko’s Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany,’ in Yō ko Slaymaker, Douglas (ed.), Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, 153–168. Takahashi Tetsuya. Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima, Okinawa. Shūeisha: Tō kyō , 2012. Takai, Yūichi, Sō Aono, and Kō ichirō Tomioka. ‘Dai-­hyaku gojū roku-­kai sō saku gappyō ’. Gunzō 43, no. 12 (1988): 332 [325–344]. Takeuchi, Yoshimi. Sekai bungaku to Nihon bungaku. Iwanami Kōza. Bungaku: Dai 3-­kan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1954. Tan, Daniela. ‘Funf Thesen Zur Literature Der Heisei-­Zeit’. Bunron: Zeitschrift Fur Literaturwissenschaftliche Japanforschung 6 (2019): 21–56. Tawada Yō ko, ‘Chantien bashi no temae de’, in Hikari to zerachin no raipuchihhi. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000. ———. Ekusofonı ̄: Bogo no soto e deru tabi. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2003. ———. Tabi o suru hadaka no me. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2004a. ———. Das Nackte Auge. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag, 2004b. ———. ‘In Front of Trang Tien Bridge’. Translated by Yumi Selden. Facing the Bridge. New York: New Directions Book, 2007a, 107–175. ———. ‘The Bath’. Translated by Yumi Selden. Where Europe Begins. New York: New Directions Book, 2007b, 3–55. ———. The Naked Eye. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 2009. Tawada Yō ko and Wen Yūjū, ‘“Imin” wa Nihongo bungaku o dō kaeru ka?’ Bungakkai 73, no. 1 (2019): 200–213. Tawada Yō ko and Yoshikawa Yasuhisa, ‘Intabyū: Kotoba ni sumu doragon, so no gekirin ni furetakute,’ Subaru: Bungei kikanshi 3 (1997): 85. The Society of Authors, ‘Introducing the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize,’ The Society of Authors, November 29, 2022. https://www2. societyofauthors.org/2022/11/29/introducing-­the-­great-­britain-­sasakawa-foundationtranslation-­prize/ Tsuchiya, Masahiko. Ekkyō suru bungaku. Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2009. Uehara Carter, Mitzi. ‘Mixed Race Okinawans and Their Obscure In-­Betweeness’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 35, no. 6 (2014): 646–661. Ueunten, Wesley. ‘Ikari no umi kara no funki: Amerika gunsenryō ka no Okinawa ni okeru Koza hō ki,’ in Gendai Okinawa no rekishi keiken: Kibō, aruiwa mikessei ni tsuite, edited by Ichirō Tomiyama, translated by Makoto Arakaki. Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010, 359–381. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. London: Routledge, 1995. Wakabayashi, Judy and Nana Sato-­Rossberg (eds.), Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context. London; New York: Continuum, 2012. Watanabe, Eri. ‘Yume no kotoba no riariti – Sakiyama Tami “Kotō mu duchuimuni”’, Gensō bungaku, kindai no makai e, edited by Hirotaka Ichiyanagi and Morio Yoshida Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2006, 183–197. Weigel, Sigrid. Body-­and Image-­Space: Re-­reading Walter Benjamin. Translated by Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines. London; New York: Taylor & Francis, 1996.

Bibliography  129 Wender, Melissa L. Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Wender, Melissa L. (ed.). Into the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011. Workman, Travis. ‘Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature’. PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 701–708. Yamasaki, Nobuko Ishitate-­Oku(no)miya, ‘Body as Battlefield,’ Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture 12, (n.d.): 391–414. Yi, Yang-­ji. ‘Kazukime’, in Yi Yang-­ji zenshū. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993, 63–95. ———. ‘Yuhi’, in Yi Yang-­ji zenshū. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993, 391–450. ———. ‘Watashi wa chō senjin’, in Yi Yang-­ ji zenshu ̄. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993, 579–592. ———. ‘Sanjo no ritsudō no naka e’, in Yi Yang-­ji zenshu.̄ Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993, 592–605. Yoneyama, Lisa. ‘Hon’yaku/shokuminchishugi/hihanteki kisō – Varuta Ben’yamin to Nihon gunjū ianfu’, in Kyōiki no bungaku: 21 seiki bungaku no sōzō, vol. 5, ed. Ryūta Imafuku. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2003. Yoon, Bang-­Soon L., ‘Imperial Japan’s Comfort Women from Korea: History & Politics of Silence-­Breaking’. The Journal of Northeast Asian History 7, no. 1 (2010): 5–39. Yu Miri. The End of August. Translated by Morgan Giles. Sheffield: Tilted Axis Press, 2023. Zach, Matthias. ‘Extraterritoriality, Exophony, and the Literary Text,’ in Ex(tra) Territorial: Reassessing Territory in Literature, Culture and Languages/ Les Terroires Littéraires, Culturels et Linguistiques en Question, edited by Didier Lasalle and Dirk Weissman. Amsterdam; New York: University Paris-­Est Créteil, 2014, 217–244. Zwigenberg, Ran. ‘“Wounds of the Heart”: Psychiatric Trauma and Denial in Hiroshima’. History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 67–88.

Index

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. 3/11 see Great East Japan Earthquake 9/11 40 abyss: in Kuja 50, 57–59, 62–63, 65, 67–68, 119; mise-­en-­abyme 68 Akihito 31 Akutagawa Literary Prize 18, 27, 114; Okinawan and ethnic Korean writers 34, 37, 53, 74, 81 Anglophone 7, 11, 24, 115, 120 anthologies 9–10, 23, 116 Anzaldúa, Gloria 13 Apter, Emily 6 atomic bomb literature (genbaku bungaku) 22, 33, 37 Aum Shinrikyō 31 Benjamin, Walter 64, 67 Bhowmik, Davinder 116–117 bundan 23 border-­crossing see trans-­border literature

Deneuve, Catherine 99; Dancer in the Dark 105; Indochine 103–104; Repulsion 100; star persona 102–103 Derrida, Jacques 8 DiNitto, Rachel 33, 34, 42, 44 Dương Thu Hương 106–107

ekkyō bungaku see trans-­border literature ethnic Korean literature see zainichi literature exophony (ekusofonı ̄) see Tawada Yō ko Fanon, Frantz 12, 55 Field, Norma 4, 7, 22–23, 115 foreign literature (gaikoku bungaku) 21 Francophone 24–25, 96 Friedman, Susan Stanford 13–14 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, meltdown of 28, 31; see also Great East Japan Earthquake

canon see literary canon Catalunya Prize see Murakami Haruki chamsu see Cheju; Kazukime Cheju 85; 4.3 incident 85; chamsu (aka haenyo) 80, 85, 90n37; see also Saishū tō Che Shiru (aka Chesil) 115 Chinen Seishin 49 collective narrative 20–21, 39–42; Kuja as resistance to 51, 68 comfort women 76 compulsory mass suicides see shūdan jiketsu

gaikoku bungaku see foreign literature genbaku bungaku see atomic bomb literature Gima Susumu 55, 69n2 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize see prizes for literary translation Great Kantō Earthquake 77–78; massacre of Koreans 79 Great East Japan Earthquake 7, 32–33, 45n11, 107; see also Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize see prizes for literary translation

Decolonisation 119; “Decolonise the Curriculum” 12–13, 19; in East Asia 12

hangeul 82, 84, 86 Hanshin-­Awaji Earthquake 31

Index  131 healing see collective narrative, sekaiku, trauma studies Heisei Literature (Heisei bungaku) 27, 32 Hirohito 31, 33 Hiroshima bombing, Hiroshima bombing 7, 33, 36–38, 40; see also atomic bomb literature historical revisionism 38, 50, 64, 66, 68; Tsukuru kai (Society for History Textbook Reform) 50, 51; see also Kobayashi Yoshinori; shūdan jiketsu Hiwada trial see Vietnam hon’yaku 11 hon’yaku bungaku see translation literature hon’yaku taikoku see translation superpower hysteria 78–79, 83, 111n45 Imafuku Ryū ta 17, 19, 52 imin bungaku see migrant literature International Booker Prize see prizes for literary translation internationalisation 25–26 irei no hi 36–37 Iwanami Essays: Literature: as counterpoint to Norma Field “The Way of the World” 19–23, 25–26; introduction by Takeuchi Yoshimi 20–21; Kawamori Yoshizō “The various issues of translation literature” 23–24, 26–27, 23, 26; Nakajima Kenzō “The possibility of world literature” 20–23, 27 Japan Foundation 2, 31; recognition of Tawada Yō ko 92 Japanese-­language literature (Nihongo bungaku) 19, 24–35, 56, 96, 108 Kawabata Yasunari 4, 22 Kawakami Mieko: success of Heaven (Hevun) 113; translation of Breasts and Eggs (Chichi to Ran) 114 Kawamori Yoshizō see Iwanami Essays: Literature Kawamura Minato 27, 81 Kim Sŏkpŏm 25 Kim Talsu 9 Kimura Saeko 7, 32 Kobayashi Yoshinori 51, 61, 64; see also historical revisionism Kō Youngran 33 Koreans in Japan (zainichi chōsenjin) 8, 73; kōminka movement 72; massacre of see Great Kantō Earthquake

Koza: historical roots 48–49; riots 69n2; see also Gima Susumu Kyō Nobuko 39 Lee Chonghwa 74 Levy Hideo 17, 96 Li Kotomi 18 literary canon 19, 22–23, 40, 115 Lovell, Julia 4; see also Nobel Prize for Literature Mamula, Tijana 102–103 Man Booker Interational Prize see International Booker Prize Marukawa Tetsushi 42, 66 Marushō incident (Marushō jiken) 73 materiality of text 12, 14, 56, 116; in Yuhi 82–83, 91n57, 116–118 Medoruma Shun 35, 39, 41, 42, 45n15; Okinawa ‘postwar’ year zero (Okinawa ‘sengo’ zero nen) 34 Mizumura Minae 18, 25 migrant literature (imin bungaku) 96, 108 monogatari 39 Mori Ō gai 97 Murakami Haruki: as world literature 25–26; Nobel Prize buzz 5; “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer” (Catalunya Prize speech) 7, 38–40, 42; “The Murakami Effect” 5–6; The New York Times Book Review interview 26 Nagasaki bombing 7, 33, 36–38, 40; see also atomic bomb literature Nakagami Kenji 58 Nakahodo Masanori 37 Nakajima Kenzō see Iwanami Essays: Literature National Book Award for Translated Literature 1; accolades by works of Japanese literature 1, 113, 115; see also prizes for translated literature National Book Foundation 1, 4, 92; see also National Book Award for Translated Literature Nihongo-­bungaku see Japanese-­language literature Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o 12 Nobel Prize for Literature: China’s “Nobel complex” 4; Japanese winners 22, 25 Numano Mitsuyoshi 25, 27–28, 30n31, 109 Ō e Kenzaburō 4, 25 Ogawa Yō ko 1, 4, 113

132 Index Oka Mari 39 Okinawa: as “healing islands” 35, 41; relation to 3/11 41; see also shūdan jiketsu Okinawan literature 8–9, 11, 13, 19, 37; relation to Japanese-­language literature 25; see also Akutagawa Prize On Yū jū see Wen Yū jū orthographies in Japanese: challenges of translation 116–117; Sakiyama’s use of 10, 12, 52, 61, 116; see also hangeul; materiality of text Orsini, Francesca 14, 118, 119 Ō shiro Tatsuhiro 37; Sakiyama Tami’s response 53–54 PEN report on translated literature 2 post-­disaster literature 7, 28, 32–34, 37, 40, 42–44; as world literature 32, 44; see also trauma studies prizes for translated literature: Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize 114; Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize 2; International Booker Prize 2; “Three Percent” Best Translated Book Award 2; see also Nobel Prize for Literature prizes for literary translation 1, 2, 4, 15, 23, 92, 113, 115, 128 revisionism see historical revisionism Ryū kyū Kingdom 8, 52; see also Okinawa Said, Edward 40 Saishū tō 80 Sakiyama Tami: “Fū suitan” (The Tale of Wind and Water) 116; Kotoba no umareru basho 35; “Kotō mu duchimuni” 57–62, 66; Kuja genshikō (single volume edition) 48; “Kuja kisō kyoku hensō ” 62–65, 66, 68; Nantō shōkei 35; “Pingihira zaka yakō ” 51; “Psiguru nu kaji ni fukiba” 68n1; Shimakotoba de kachāshı ̄ 10–11, 52–57, 77; “Wasuremono: Bō kyaku kinshirei” 36–38, 40, 51, 59; Yuratiku yuritiku 35 sekai bungaku: Japanese definition 5, 9, 19; see also Iwanami Essays: Literature; world literature sekaiku 20–21, 29n13, 44 Shinjō Ikuo 67, 71n68 Shirin Nezammafi 25 shūsen kinenbi 36

shūdan jiketsu (“compulsory mass suicides”) 51; references in Sakiyama’s “Kuja” stories 63–64; see also historical revisionism Snyder, Stephen 1, 113; see also “Murakami Effect” Steyerl, Hito 105 Takeuchi Yoshimi see Iwanami Essays: Literature Tawada Yō ko: Das Nackte Auge 94, 99, 100; Ekusofonı ̄ 94–99, 104, 108; “In Front of Tran Tienh Bridge” (Chantien-­bashi no mae de) 99, 106, 118; Scattered All Over the Earth (Chikyū ni chiribamerarete) 113; Tabi o suru hadaka no me 94, 99–105, 118; “Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist” 93; The Bath (aka Das Bad/ Urokomochi) 96, 110n17 The Naked Eye (English translation from German) 106, 118 Three Percent 2; see also prizes for literary translation tōjisha 67–68 trans-­border literature 6–9, 18–19, 24–26, 32, 96, 118 translatability 5, 14, 63, 67; see also Apter, Emily; untranslatability translation literature (hon’yaku bungaku) 23; see also Iwanami Lectures: Literature translation superpower 3 trauma studies: critiques 40–41, 43; in post-­disaster literature 42–44 Trinh, T. Minh-­ha 74 Truong, Monique 92–93 Tsuchiya Masahiko 18–19, 24, 95; see also trans-­border literature Tsuruku kai see historical revisionism untranslatability 6, 8, 68, 94, 116; see also translatability Vietnam 94, 100, 108; Hiwada trial 107; war 54, 59 Wen Yū jū 108 Wen Yō rō see Wen Yū jū world literature 5–6, 9, 11, 13–14, 17–19, 87, 93–94, 98, 106, 109, 118–119; as healing 21; see also sekai bungaku

Index  133 wounding 67; as metaphor for translation 10–11, 119; in Kazukime 77–79; in Tawada’s oeuvre 96; see also sekaiku Yang Yi 18, 25, 27, 34 Yi Yang-­ji: Kazukime 32, 74–80, 85–87; Nabi taryon 74; “Sanjo no ritsudo no naka ni” 73, 76; “Watashi wa

chō senjin de aru” 72–73; Yuhi 34, 73, 81–86, 101, 117, 119 Yoneyama, Lisa 67 Yoshida Sueko 49 Yū Miri 1, 115 zainichi literature 8–11, 23, 73; see also Akutagawa Prize