Paper short abstract:

Hayashi Fumiko left numerous travelogues depicting her journey in and beyond the gaichi of the empire in the 1930s. More than representations of the periphery, a cognitive scrutiny of Hayashi's writing showcases that reading travelogues is an embodied experience through which the empire is imagined.

Paper long abstract:

A prolific writer, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951) left numerous travelogues depicting her journey as a woman and an artist in the 1930s. Despite their intriguing political ambiguity, this group of writings have not gained serious academic attention, due to both a prejudice against the genre and the conventional historical periodization. Yet Hayashi’s trajectory in the outer or potential territories of the Japanese empire before the official outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War was synchronic with or even anticipated the imperial expansion. Travelogue as a genre blends abstract ideologies into the embodied experience of a traveler and detailed albeit selective descriptions of the destination. As a form of first-person narrative, the perception and enunciation of the author-protagonist throughout the travelogues exemplify an appropriated identification between the personal experience and the imperial scheme. An extension of Hayashi’s signature concerns with the urban space, women, the working class, and the writer in the politically subversive Hōrōki (1928-30), the success of which funded her later journeys, in the travelogues these familiar topics gain unprecedented nuance. Examining Hayashi’s travelogues in Harbin (1930), Hokkaido (1934), Sakhalin (1934), Beijing (1937) and Tianjin (1937) in chronological order, this paper argues that they stage a surging national and imperial subjectivity of the traveling woman writer via the representation of landscape, her fellow women, and the people. On the one hand, mobility and writing grant the author the privilege to report the front of the empire to the metropolitan readership, instantiate the nationalization of women, and instruct the communities she identify with to follow suit. On the other hand, while the author-protagonist endeavors to recruit the unfamiliar into the expanding body of the empire, the transition within the corpus of travelogues from early 1930s to the eve of the full-scale war also reveals the irreconcilable conflict between a multinational community and Japanese superiority inherent to the imperial discourse.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will consider some of the dynamics of movement and non-movement in the context of East Asia through a comparative reading of Abe Kōbō’s 1948 debut work _Owarishi michi no shirube ni_ and his 1957 novella _Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu_.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will consider some of the dynamics of movement and non-movement in the context of East Asia through an examination of the repatriation narrative. By “repatriation narrative,” I refer to a postwar Japanese form of testimonial interlocution which features a first-person returnee narrator/author who explicitly or implicitly addresses a national audience that does not share the experience of repatriation; and which temporalizes repatriation as a memory reconstructed in the present, marked on one end by the end of the war and on the other by the returnee’s “homecoming” to Japan. This presentation will consider the discursive limits of the repatriation narrative by reading Abe Kōbō’s 1948 debut work The Signpost at the End of the Road (Owarishi michi no shirube ni) in relation to his 1957 novella The Beasts Head for Home (Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu), focusing in particular on the various literary and geopolitical displacements in both texts. Although Abe Kōbō is today commonly touted as a “cosmopolitan” author whose “universal, dark, ironic” stories comment on the human condition writ large, equally important is his consistent consideration of the specific workings of the Japanese nation-empire. In reading Signpost and Beasts against the larger discursive history of the repatriation narrative, I aim to show how both texts evince a preoccupation with form that is itself a critique.

Paper short abstract:

Taking works of Sagisawa Megumu, Kaneshiro Kazuki, and Kim Masumi as case studies, this paper discusses how Korean Japanese literature transcends national borders by conceptualizing the Korean Japanese minority as closely interwoven with global history, the postcolonial world, and its diasporas.

Paper long abstract:

For a long time, the Korean Japanese minority in Japan was widely unknown in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. In 2017, the global success of the novel Pachinko, published in English by the Korean American author Min Jin Lee, introduced a broader international readership to the Korean Japanese minority and its origins.

In Japan exists a rich corpus of Korean Japanese literature, written by formerly colonialized Koreans living in Japan and their descendants. This corpus can be read as one postcolonial literature amongst others, and some works are accessible in English translation. Despite attaining only small international attention so far, numerous works of Korean Japanese literature deal with questions regarding the role of the Korean Japanese minority in a postcolonial world and its diasporas: How did world history shape the situation of the Korean Japanese minority? In which sense is the existence of the Korean Japanese minority not only a Japanese but a global phenomenon? And does taking into account other postcolonial diasporas contribute to rewrite the history of the Korean Japanese minority?

This paper focusses on these questions by analyzing three Korean-Japanese texts, written in the Heisei-period. Sagisawa Megumu’s novel Saihate no futari (“Two persons at the margins”, 1999) describes the relationship between a Japanese woman and a Korean Japanese man who dies of leukemia. The women’s father is an American GI, who left Japan with the end of the Vietnam War. The man’s mother is a hibakusha. Therefore, the novel presents individual fates as deeply interwoven with global history. The novel GO (“Go”, 2000) by Kaneshiro Kazuki reflects, on the one hand, the division of Korea as a legacy of imperialism. On the other hand, it draws parallels between African Americans in the US, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Korean Japanese minority. Kim Masumi’s novel Nason no sora (“The Sky of Nason”, 2001) is set in Los Angeles, where a Korean Japanese couple lives temporarily. Hence, comparisons between the Japanese community in the US, the Korean community in the US, and the Korean Japanese minority in Japan are frequently made.