Organizer: Keiko Nakano, John Carroll University
Chair: Reiko Tachibana, Pennsylvania State University
Discussant: Reiko Yonogi, Indiana University
As globalization is an important phenomenon in the twentieth century, the presence of international writers has rapidly increased in the Japanese literary world, and a diaspora of writers from Japan can be seen around the world. For these transnational authors, experiencing cultures different from their heritage seems to have served as a spur to their imagination and creativity, but also as a focus for writing about personal dislocation and quest for personal/ethnic identity. In this panel, we explore postwar women writers in three cultural situations: (1) Japanese women who have lived in the U.S. for many years, who have come back to Japan, and who write in Japanese or in a mixture of Japanese and English. Representative examples are Oba Minako and Mizumura Minae; (2) Japanese women who now live in foreign lands rather than in Japan, and who have abandoned Japanese to write only in an adopted western language (English), such as Mori Kyoko; (3) Women writers who were born of Japanese parents, raised in foreign countries and who write in English rather than in their parents’ tongue, such as Joy Kogawa (Japanese-Canadian).
Characterized as hybridity and heterogeniety, their narratives repeatedly demonstrate the frustrations of minority or marginalized status, exhibit conflicts of gender, generation, and culture, and often, voice a sharp criticism of their native lands as seen from a geographical and ideological distance.
Living in Two Cultures: Oba Minako’s Hybrid World
Reiko Tachibana, Pennsylvania State University
As a forerunner of transnational women authors, Oba Minako (b. 1930) demonstrates the ways in which her experience in two cultures—American and Japanese—opens up a global and cosmopolitan perspective in her writing. As a woman imbued with the traditions of Japan’s patriarchal society, Oba’s experiences over ten years in the U.S. and her absorption of an "alien" culture have caused her to see herself anew as an individual, an awakening also demonstrated in her writings. By focusing on two novels, Urashimaso and Ojo no Namida (Tears of a Princess), I will investigate Oba’s quest for identity through her protagonists who, like Oba, return to Japan after many years’ absence and feel "alien" among her fellow countrymen.
Like other postwar women writers of Japan, Oba’s stories reflect, in a unique way, the inheritance of Heian literature. The Heian women authors’ appeal for autonomy, that is, to be released from a "caged bird" status, echoes her quest for identity. Her choice of languages (the occasional insertion of English), multi-cultural characters (including those of mixed parentage), and multi-layered structures (folklore and intermingled present and past) creates a world of two dimensions—mythological world (veiled world of Heian) and realistic world (contemporary world of Japan). Oba’s hybrid and heterogeneous narratives help the reader not only to understand the multiplicity of transnational characters, but also to reflect the reader’s own situation as one living in an age of rapid globalization at the end of the twentieth century.
My Country: Love and Hate in the Works of Kyobo Mori and Minae Mizumura
Keiko Nakano, John Carroll University
In the last twenty years, quite a few bicultural Japanese women writers have come to prominence in the Japanese literary world. These include Minako Oba, Michiko Yamamoto, Fumiko Kometani, Yoko Tawada, and Minae Mizumura, among others. Although they utilize different literary forms of self-expression, they seem to have a common theme—that is, the search for individual and ethnic identity.
In my presentation, two bicultural works will be examined: Kyoko Mori’s The Dream of Water: A Memoir, and Minae Mizumura’s Shishosetsu: From Left to Right. In comparing these works, I will explore the function of their linguistic choices, and literary techniques and forms to demonstrate the emotional ambiguity between Japanese and American cultures.
Both works interweave the theme of creating a double-layered identity of sorts, with other themes such as familial and cultural conflicts. Although both writers pursue common themes, they describe their bicultural lives using different linguistic styles and forms. Mori, who has been living in the U.S. for over two decades, writes in English about her memories of girlhood in Japan, while Mizumura, who now lives in Japan after a twenty-year residence in the U.S., chooses a linguistic blend of Japanese and English to portray her life in the U.S. Their stories—Mori’s "memoir" and Mizumura’s "shishosetsu" (I-novel) in diary form—function as their journey toward self-discovery.
Finding Difference Along a Road of Identity
Cathy Steblyk, University of Alberta
Joy Kogawa cautions that each Japanese Canadian Nisei writer like herself should be considered individually, though she also declares that "the Japaneseness does show in our (Nisei) work." Through Kogawa’s statement and her writing, I will look at both the politics of difference and this possibility of Japanese ethnic identity. I will investigate, moreover, the ways in which the academic community, in its careful attention to the micro-politics of identity, has become wary of the macro-politics of ethnic difference and the isolation of culturally distinct characteristics to a group of writers.
Kogawa’s transcultural writing of identity features themes of discrimination, dislocation, exile, and acculturation, as well as the issues of dual ethnicity. Language is also seen as a source of cultural affiliation for this Nisei writer, as a vehicle through which the institutions of the dominant and the voice of the writer’s identity speak. As can be traced through Jericho Road (1977), Obasan (1981), Naomi’s Road (1986), Itsuka (1992), and The Rain Ascends (1995), in contrast to the marks of the evacuation experience and a deliberate migration away from Japanese customs the Nisei once exhibited, the restoration of a Japanese-Canadian identity and a recuperation of an ethnic community history that is apparent not only in Kogawa’s oeuvre, but also in Canada today, shows a willingness to re-establish a Japanese cultural connection. In many ways, Kogawa’s literature of the subaltern in Canada has helped achieve a sense of a core Japanese Canadian experience and identity, but is it possible to define it?