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Paper short abstract

"Provisional Self in Kibei Literature: Reexamining Minoru Kiyota's War Narratives" examines Kiyota’s memoir of his WWII and Korean War experiences written in Japanese and in English translation. It explores the different expressions of self across both narratives and what they convey and occlude.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the narrative and ideological complexities embedded in Minoru

Kiyota’s accounts of his service as a Japanese American language mediator during the Korean

War, focusing on the striking discrepancies between his original 1990 Japanese text Nikkei

hangyakuji and its 1997 English translation Beyond Loyalty. As a Kibei—an American of

Japanese ancestry educated in Japan—Kiyota occupied a liminal cultural position that shaped

both his wartime experiences and his later self-representation. By analyzing the divergent

narrative strategies of the two versions, this study argues that the instability of Kiyota’s

identity as an intermediary manifests not only thematically but structurally at the level of

narrative voice.

The English translation, published during a period of renewed attention to Japanese

American redress following the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, adopts a first-person

autobiographical mode that aligns with Asian American literary traditions emphasizing

collective testimony. Translator Linda Klepinger Keenan frames the work as a personal

narrative of resilience and civil rights advocacy, situating Kiyota within a broader community

of Japanese Americans seeking to articulate the long-term consequences of wartime

incarceration. In contrast, the original Japanese version employs a third-person fictionalized

narrator, “Keiichi,” which Kiyota justifies as a means of capturing psychological truth beyond

the constraints of documentary literature. This choice produces a deliberate ambiguity

between narrator and protagonist, reflecting the author’s own unsettled sense of self as both

insider and outsider in the United States and Japan.

Through close readings of key scenes depicting the protagonist’s fraught role

mediating between U.S. military personnel and Korean allies, this paper demonstrates how

each version constructs a different relationship between author, narrator, and audience. The

English text presents a coherent autobiographical “I,” while the Japanese version blurs

narrative boundaries, creating a provisional and unstable subjectivity. These narrative

divergences parallel Kiyota’s broader reflections on the challenges of serving as a cultural

bridge between Japan and the United States, particularly amid postwar racial tensions and shifting geopolitical landscapes.