Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the poetics of hybridity and transnational imaginaries in work by Itō Hiromi dealing with the question of language and crossing borders while living abroad. This paper is concerned with the implications of bilingual editions and translation as an affective, embodied engagement.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, the Japanese literary landscape has gradually transformed as plurilingual authors incorporated different languages into their texts in Japanese in the original and/or in their translated versions. Some of the strategies to incorporate foreign elements into a text in Japanese are mixing languages, glossing, translating, and playing with the different writing systems in Japanese. The act of translation seems to be embedded into the very Japanese orthography—with its three notational systems, for example—which presupposes certain hybridity. Itō Hiromi’s (b.1955) work stands out for its representation of mothering and embodiment, but this paper is concerned with her depictions of “mother tongues” and “linguistic mothers,” as articulated by Tawada Yōko when discussing her experience of learning a foreign language. This paper explores the poetics of hybridity and transnational imaginaries at play in Itō’s writings while paying special attention to bilingual editions of her work and translation as an affective, embodied engagement.

This paper introduces Nihongo (1993), a series of poems that deal with the poet’s experience of being an outsider while crossing borders by living abroad. Here, Itō writes in a way that deconstructs language to the point of altering it; as if it had been translated from a different language, as if it had transformed from a mother tongue into a linguistic mother. I also introduce other poems, such as “The Maltreatment of Meaning” (1991; trans. 2005) and “Nashite Mounen” (1993; trans. 2005) that deal with the very question of language, and the three poems included in the collection of poetry, Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan, edited by Rina Kikuchi and Jen Crawford (2017), in which the texts of the Japanese poems are printed vertically, next to their English translations by Jeffrey Angles. How do we read bilingual editions? Is the translation often lacking as it is measured against the original? To reflect upon bilingual versus monolingual publications, I draw on Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity,” defined as the giving, receiving, or even explosion of form in relation to translation, and consider my own affective, embodied engagement with Itō’s work as a reader, scholar, and translator.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I shall explore language, gender, and identity issues in Li Kotomi’s Higanbana ga saku jima. Li flips our current power dynamics, in a post-pandemic and xenophobic world where only some women have the power. But even this brand-new world turns out to be exclusive.

Paper long abstract:

Li Kotomi’s Higanbana ga saku jima (The island where red spider lilies bloom, 2021) has been acclaimed by Japanese and international critics for its use of language—a mixture of contemporary Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Ryukyuan languages for which the novel has been labeled “untranslatable”—and the gender issues it refers to. Language and nationality, as well as gender and sexuality play a crucial role in contemporary Japanese literature and relate to the patriarchal history of Japan as a nation-state, and of the Japanese language itself.

Li Kotomi builds her narrative around three characters, all of whom meet on “Island,” have different sensibilities, and serve to explore and question gender and power issues. What at a first glance seems to be a sort of utopian society and a story of empowerment (on Island, family system is deconstructed and there is not such a thing as “mother” or “father”, and women called noro “rules” the community), however, turns out to be another example of an exclusive society, where familiar old tropes are flipped, but fail to create inclusivity. According to Susan Napier (1995), “movement” is an important aspect of both utopias and dystopias, but in utopias history is something which is rewritten or rediscovered and in dystopias it is absent, or something to escape from. As the two young protagonists, Umi and Yona, learn the history of Island, they find out that their rewritten history is the result of a past of violence and exiles perpetuated by men, and that it is intertwined with language and gender issues.

Nevertheless, from a gender perspective, the power noro turns out into a failure, as the society is repressive regarding men – similarly to Naomi Alderman’s The Power. At the same time, the use of language reminds us of the power of Japanese as depicted by Iwaki Kei’s Farwell, my orange.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore the interconnectedness between language and identity in Wen Yuju’s novella Eien nenkei (2021). I apply an intersectional approach to examine the protagonists’ relationships with Japan’s history of imperialism, its patriarchal institutions, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese dictionary Nihon kokugo daijiten defines the terms bogo as “the language one learns first during childhood” but then it further paraphrases it as bokugo, that is to say, “the language of the country where one was born, or to which one belongs.” Thus, images of ownership and belonging are strictly connected to the idea of “mother tongue” and the literary composition outside of it has been often viewed as a challenging literary activity. Nevertheless, contemporary authors, in particular so-called ekkyō sakka (border-crossing writers) and bairingaru sakka (bilingual writers), proved that the idea of national literature enclosed within a homogeneous linguistic system breaks down when it comes to describing what is happening in Japan today. At the same time, they show how the idea of “mother tongue” cannot leave aside an analysis of Japan’s history of imperialism. Furthermore, recent literary works shed light on the necessity of addressing the issues of language and nationality in connection with gender and sexuality, in that an intersectional approach is essential to understand the experience of suppression and discrimination of younger generations. Wen Yuju’s literature is an important example in this regard: she has positioned herself as a Japanese-language writer of Taiwanese nationality and her literary works move beyond the concept of mother tongue while exploring the interconnectedness between language and identity.

This paper analyzes Wen Yuju’s novella Forever Young (Eien nenkei, 2021), where the author depicts the evolution of the relationship between three friends: Hayashi Yukiko, Hayashi Mirei, and Hayashi Keiichi. While the three protagonists share one of the most common last names in Japan, their lives are very different, in that their nationality, gender, and sexual orientation, among other aspects, shape the way they experience the world inside and outside the language of the country they belong to. The aim of this paper is to explore the intersections depicted in Forever Young: How do past and future intersect in the lives of young “Japanese” people? How do our linguistic/national/gender identity and sexual orientation shape our relationship with Japan’s history of imperialism, its patriarchal institutions, and the most recent “pandemic othering?”

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses theories of space by Lefebvre, Soja and Maeda Ai as well as cognitive literary theories to analyze the poetic spaces of Saihate Tahi. It suggests that these can be read as “sites of resistance,” playing with normative spatial behavior and conventional ways of reading poetry.

Paper long abstract:

When a poem written on the ground suddenly appeared around Ōmiya station in spring 2020, it caused a sensation on Twitter and irritation among residents. Only a few months later, poet Saihate Tahi revealed that she was responsible for the poem, stating that it was a commissioned work for the 2020 Saitama Triennale entitled 'Shi no kasoku / shi no teishi'. However, due to the postponement of the Triennale, the installation became a phenomenon that occurred out of context. People encountered the poem unexpectedly and literally re-read the urban space surrounding them. It transformed the everyday space of a regular street into “an-other” (cf. Soja, 1996). 'Shi no kasoku / shi no teishi' is just one example of Saihate Tahi’s recent experiments with exhibiting poetry in space, publishing her poems in the physical space of an art gallery, a hotel room, a back alley, or in the virtual space of the internet. In order to read her “poetic spaces,” readers have to move their bodies along the lines of the poems, turn around, or change directions; they are asked to interact with the poems, sometimes destroying, sometimes reassembling their words.

Using Saihate Tahi’s poetic spaces as an example, this paper examines the intersection between poetry and space in contemporary Japanese poetry. It combines Henri Lefebvre’s “triad of space,” Edward Soja’s “thirdspace,” and Maeda Ai’s notion of “hare” to suggest that these poetic spaces can be read as sites of resistance that play with normative spatial practice and conventional ways of reading poetry. When studying the relationship between poetry and space, the focus is often set on a poem’s content and the representation of particular spaces in the text. However, this paper will address how we can productively apply theories of space and cognitive literary studies to analyse a poem’s form and its reader response, especially when it lies outside conventional publishing practices.

Another aim of this paper is to discuss the (un)translatability of Saihate Tahi’s poetic spaces, exploring the possibility of making her works accessible for an audience outside Japan without losing their aesthetic and sensual qualities.