Paper short abstract:

This presentation will focus on the creative use of horizontal writing in some novels from the turn of the 21st century. Horizontal writing has been generalized in daily life in Japan, but in Japanese books, horizontal alignment can alienate or even disturb the text as literature.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese language, which was originally only written vertically, is now written and printed both vertically and horizontally. The spread of horizontal writing, due to the influx of Western writings during the 19th century, happened less quickly for the eye (reading) than for the hand (writing). Horizontal writing has been generalized due to the increased use of word processors, personal computers and smartphones, while most books in Japanese today are still printed and read from top to bottom, right to left.

It is in this context that we can understand the provocation of Minae Mizumura. Shishōsetsu from left to right (1995) is the first bilingual Japanese-English novel, and the first title in the Shinchō Bunko collection (founded in 1914) to be printed horizontally. The novel is presented as a shishōsetsu, an autobiographical novel, and follows the style of a diary. The heroine, a Japanese PhD student, who lives in the United States since her childhood, writes her diary on the computer by mixing two languages. The genre of shishōsetsu, product of the naturalist trend of the early 20th century, marked by a confessional tone, is an important phenomenon in Japanese literature. Mizumura, through her novel, pays tribute to Japanese tradition, materialized by the old books with vertical lines, while also challenging it. She does so, less by simply typing her work on a computer, and more by writing the book with both languages aligned horizontally. When she cites texts by great writers, she stages the quotes in a confrontation with her own work, between two poles of culture, Japanese and American, literary and spoken, reading and writing. Seeing the computer screen in front of the heroine (and the novelist) materialized on the page of the book, would be quite normal in the world of alphabets. In a Japanese book, horizontal alignment is capable of alienating, or even disturbing the text as literature. This is what I will also show in a few other experimental novels adopting horizontal writing, such as Ishiguro Tatsuaki’s Heisei 3 nen… (No title, 1993), Hirano Kenichiro's Saigo no henshin (2003) or Kuroda Natsuko's ab sango (2012).