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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses the role of multilingualism and historical narrative in Ri Kaisei's The Woman Who Fulled Clothes and My Sakhalin. I argue that a study of Ri's diverging use of Korean and Russian alongside Japanese in each text reveals their grounding in larger historical narratives.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses the role of multilingualism and historical narrative in the works of Ri Kaisei. Though Ri Kaisei has received considerable study in Anglophone scholarship, the multilingual aspect of his works has yet to be fully explored. The use of language is closely related to key themes in Ri’s oeuvre such as identity, nationalism, and imperialism, and a careful analysis reveals historical and political undercurrents in these works. To this end, I put in conversation Ri’s Akutagawa Award-winning novella, The Woman Who Fulled Clothes, (1972) and his 1975 novella My Sakhalin to reveal the author’s diverging strategies of multilingualism as the Japanese imperialism in the margins of the former text gives way to Soviet hegemony in the latter. My study will rely on close readings of each text and also draw from historian Kerwin Lee Klein’s critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard’s disavowal of historical narrative. Klein argues that in these thinkers’ attempts to escape metanarratives, they relied on their own, new grand narratives, and thus were unable to offer a convincing alternative to historical thinking. While previous scholars (Foxworth, 2010) have labeled The Woman Who Fulled Clothes a ‘little narrative,’ one of Lyotard’s les petits récits, I argue that Ri’s texts are caught up in larger historical narratives, and instead ask us to rethink what we constitute as history. A study of the multilingualism in these novellas reveals their historical grounding.