Organizer and Chair: Faye Kleeman, College of William and Mary Discussants: Joan E. Ericson, Colorado College; James Reichert, Stanford University
The past decade had seen a flourishing of interest in the study and translation of modern Japanese women writers, resulting in translations of short story anthologies, several novels and, more recently, Mulhearn's Japanese Women Writers: A Biocritical Source Book. With women writers now being awarded more than half of the literary awards, they no longer occupy the margins. This panel seeks to spotlight three female writers of the nineties whose works have garnered critical attention and popular acclaim. The primary goal of the panel is to serve as a forum to introduce texts that we deem deserving, but which have not yet been translated into any Western language.
In the late eighties, the immense popularity of Yoshimoto Banana's narratives and Tawara Machi's tanka redefined the meaning of contemporary literature. The willing abandonment of any plot structure, the lack of ideological content, and the "lightness" of their language characterizes the poetics of contemporary writing. Alvis's paper cuts through Ogawa Yôko's bland, monotonous surface language, and examines its underlying dynamics. Employing psychoanalytical theory, Alvis examines the paradoxical tensions between the language and the actions it represents. Yonaha's paper looks at the cultural aspect of language in Tawada Yôko's writing. Writing both in Japanese and German while living as an expatriate, Tawada is keenly aware of the vulnerability of being held hostage to one's mother tongue. Kleeman's paper explores Shôno Yoriko's "experimental" language through her distortions of time, space and memory, situating her within the context of contemporary Japanese cultural and literary history.
Language, Violence, and Projection in Ogawa Yôko's "Diving Pool"
Andra Alvis, University of California, Berkeley
My paper will concentrate on Ogawa Yôko's short story, "Diving Pool," (Daibingu pûru, 1989)-a text describing the first-person narrator's imagined (and later, actual) attempts to murder her four-year old adopted sister.
As with much of her work, Ogawa's style in "Diving Pool" is characterized by the punctuation of a bland, almost monotonous, first-person narrative with objectively graphic depictions of violence. This use of language, in my argument, creates a complex state of psychological tension between the first-person narrator and reader. Specifically, it arouses in us feelings of disgust and shock, notably absent in the heroine's own unemotive representations of real and fantasized actions toward her younger sister.
I will argue that the dynamics of language in "Diving Pool" is highly reminiscent of the defense mechanism referred to by psychoanalysis as projective indentification. In projective identification, the subject's mind unconsciously works to ameliorate anxiety by recreating, and then abandoning, this unacceptable emotion in the mind of another. The narrative of Ogawa's heroine, as discussed above, elicits in the reader feelings of horror concerning her actions/fantasies that are never consciously expressed in her own first-person account. It is paradoxically the "flatness" of Ogawa's language, my paper concludes, that conveys to us with disturbing directness the heroine's complex emotional state-a state that simultaneously acknowledges and rejects her violent impulses.
Language and Allegory in Tawada Yôko's Narratives
Keiko Yonaha, Tôyô Eiwa University
Born in 1960 and living in Germany since 1982, Tawada Tôyô writes poetry and fiction in German. Her debut in Japan came, interestingly, after she had been awarded several literary awards in Germany. From her Losing One's Footing (Kakato o nakushite, 1991, Gunzô Shinjin award) and The Canine Adopted Son-in-law (Inu mukoiri, 1992, Akutagawa award) to her most recent Gotthart Railway (Gottoharuto tetsudô, 1996), Tawada demonstrates her linguistic agility and ambivalence toward her cultural heritage.
Tawada once reminisced that as a child, she did not believe human beings spoke any language other than Japanese. Referring to her old self as a "slave of the Japanese language," not only in the metaphorical sense, but also in the most physical way, she insists upon the need to deconstruct language before one even starts writing. Losing One's Footing describes exactly this process of losing one's language (cultural and verbal) in a foreign land. Elsewhere, "itchiness" describes the frustration of translating between two languages, and "thirst," the desire for a new, expressive language. A rail trip through the Alps "runs through the stomach of a Saint."
Tawada's narratives are filled with such corporeal allegories. Her deliberate, at times awkward, narrative style cannot be termed "beautiful and elegant" Japanese. Rather, in this dislodging of the Japanese language system we see Tawada's intention to topple the existing literary language. This paper will examine Tawada's continuous fracturing of meaning through the expression of bodily sensation in her novels.
A World in Flux: Time, Space, and Memory in Shôno Yoriko's Narrative
Faye Kleeman, College of William and Mary
Shôno Yoriko has established herself as one of the most promising new writers with her wistful, musing narrative style and a quirky sense of humor. In two recent short story collections, No Place to Be (1993) and The 200th Memorial (1994), Shôno's constant play on the (un)reliability of memory serves as a vehicle for us to think through the formation, recollection, and appropriation of personal, familial and social memories.
The novella No Place to Be chronicles the author's nightmarish search for an apartment in Tokyo. Focusing on the erection of monuments as a central means of shaping memory, Shôno depicts a destruction of the protagonist's temporal and spatial boundaries that proves devastating to the core of her self-representation.
In the idiosyncratic 200th Memorial, the protagonist recounts her bizarre journey to a traditional family memorial service that gathers together relatives and acquaintances from the last two hundred years. Through the uncertain voice of the narrator, fragments of memories are recollected to construct a family history at once fascinating and disturbing. As time and space are fractured and distorted, a sort of carnivalistic madness displaces the old order.
Shôno's fiction destablizes the "naturalistic" conceptions of space as nothing but a geographical locus and time as a mere succession of fixed and constant historical moments. By reinterpreting, reordering or simply recreating a memory that confronts the hegemonic discourses of time and/or space, Shôno transcends Kant's understanding of time as constituted by the sequential ordering of events in the individual human mind.