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Paper short abstract:

Taking the work of Kimura Yūsuke, Yū Miri, and Arai Takako as examples, my presentation outlines an important literary strategy to inscribe, resist, and inadvertently reconfirm marginality in post-3/11 literature, namely the use of non-standard dialectal speech.

Paper long abstract:

The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 hit a region that was traditionally regarded as periphery in many ways—politically, economically, culturally, and, last but not least, also linguistically. The literature that emerged from the 3/11 calamity echoes with the voices of the marginalized. My presentation outlines what could be considered an important literary strategy to inscribe marginality, namely the use of non-standard speech. Particularly if read against the post-3/11 debate on structural inequalities and domestic exploitation as deeper causes of the nuclear disasters, the inclusion of significant passages written entirely in Tōhoku vernaculars reveals political undertones. However, as my three case studies show, the implications differ depending on the discursive position of the respective author.

In Kimura Yūsuke's Isa no hanran (2012, Isa's Deluge), for instance, the protagonist leaves Tokyo for his Aomori hometown several months after the disaster. Through stories of rebellion about his disappeared outcast uncle, he slowly reconnects, and begins to identify with the local language and northern Japan's history of oppression. In this process, the author's native tongue, the Hachinohe dialect, takes center stage, allowing for the novel to be read as post-colonial project of "writing back" to the center.

Zainichi Korean writer Yū Miri, on the other hand, did not have any particular connections to Fukushima before moving there after the disaster to better understand the hardships of the suddenly uprooted local population. She had to rely on a local "translator" to give voice to her Fukushima native characters in the "history from below" outlined JR Ueno-eki kōenguchi (2014, Tokyo Ueno Station).

Lastly, I consider a collaborative translation of Ishikawa Takuboku's poems into the Ofunato vernacular, rendered by elderly female survivors in the area and edited by poet Arai Takako in 2017. Focusing on the presentation of the work rather than the actual translations, this section is concerned with issues of power and (un)representation in relation to language. Overall, my presentation uses dialectal speech in post-3/11 literature as a starting point to explore the related issues of authenticity, performance, appropriation, and paternalism in contemporary writing.