Paper short abstract:

Reiko Abe Auestad's paper finds in Tsushima Yūko's novels a strategy that intensifies readers' relations to characters in a way that depends for its ethical force on the readers' knowledge of Tsushima's own life.

Paper long abstract:

Avishai Margalit distinguishes between an ethics "that tells us how we should regulate our thick relations" with family, friends, and others who are close to us, from a "morality" that concerns our "thin relations," with those with whom we share only a common humanity. While Margalit points toward the difficulty of reconciling these two, in this paper I argue that Tsushima Yūko's novels show how the distinction can be disrupted. I read Warai Ôkami (Laughing Wolves ) against her more explicitly autobiographical work, "Mahiru e"—as a novelistic experiment at turning "thin relations" into "thick" ones through the act of remembering.

In a 2001 interview with Shishôsetsu kenkyûkai, Tsushima argued that it is impossible to write a work of fiction which is not somehow rooted in the authorial "I," and that all fiction is therefore a form of "shishôsetsu." Overemphasis on the value of fictive imagination and so-called "socially important themes" can, she warns, not only kill the "I" in a work, but can also kill off its relation to humanity (and thus its status as literature) altogether.

Many of Tsushima's novels are haunted by deaths of people close to her in real life, including her father, Dazai Osamu, her mentally handicapped brother, and her own son. At the same time, the novels enable the "rebirth" of these figures by way of affective association and creative remembering. Indeed, the great power of Tsushima's novels lies in their ability to evoke the presence of these ghosts. The network of affective associations that they trigger in us through our knowledge of her life creates the very visceral qualities that render "thick" our ethical experience of reading about these people whom we have never met.