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Paper short abstract

Through a reading of Zainichi Korean author Fukazawa Ushio's recent novel about the comfort women issue, this paper will explore ethical issues of storytelling and appropriation. Who has the right to tell a story, and can someone who does not "own" a story tell it truthfully?

Paper long abstract

Ever since her debut in 2012, Zainichi Korean writer Fukazawa Ushio has been a critical voice in contemporary Japanese literature, giving voice to people who are silenced, overlooked, and forgotten – often Zainichi Koreans, but also others subject to discrimination and inequality in contemporary Japanese society, such as women and migrant workers.

In her recent novel, however, her protagonist is a “Yamato” Japanese – a young aspiring novelist travelling to Okinawa for research, hoping to achieve fame and recognition by writing about something controversial, such as the comfort women issue. Along the way, she receives many words of warning: that this issue is too difficult, too politically charged, too massive for her to handle. Some even say it straight out: “Anything a Yamato person writes about the Okinawan war will be a lie”.

These harsh words form the fundamental question that inspires this paper: Are certain topics off limits to certain writers? Who can tell a story truthfully? Does one need to have personal connections to an issue in order to shed light on it? Ever since the Second World War, and in a European context in particular in response to literature about the Holocaust, the ethics of narration and storytelling have been fiercely debated. Narrative, in particular fiction – literature – has been seen as something that violently imposes order where there is none, or as a form of appropriation.

Inspired by Hanna Meretoja’s non-subsumptive model of storytelling, which focuses on dialogical exploration over appropriation, this paper will seek to demonstrate how Fukazawa’s novel opens for new insights and deeper understanding. Her novel follows two stories in parallel. One is the story of Hana, this young, naïve – and ignorant? – writer flailing to find her “breakthrough” plot. The other is the story of a nameless young Korean girl, brought to Okinawa to work as a prostitute for the Japanese army. My reading will show that it is precisely in the juxtaposition of the stories of these two women, and the manner in which they become intertwined, that the potential for a non-subsumptive dialogue lies.