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Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-Ji, and Tawada Yōko

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Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-Ji, and Tawada Yōko Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko Victoria Young Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of East Asian Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies March 2016 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2016 The University of Leeds and Victoria Young iii Acknowledgements The first three years of this degree were fully funded by a Postgraduate Studentship provided by the academic journal Japan Forum in conjunction with BAJS (British Association for Japanese Studies), and a University of Leeds Full Fees Bursary. My final year maintenance costs were provided by a GB Sasakawa Postgraduate Studentship and a BAJS John Crump Studentship. I would like to express my thanks to each of these funding bodies, and to the University of Leeds ‘Leeds for Life’ programme for helping to fund a trip to present my research in Japan in March 2012. I am incredibly thankful to many people who have supported me on the way to completing this thesis. The diversity offered within Dr Mark Morris’s literature lectures and his encouragement as the supervisor of my undergraduate dissertation in Cambridge were both fundamental factors in my decision to pursue further postgraduate studies, and I am indebted to Mark for introducing me to my MA supervisor, Dr Nicola Liscutin. It was Nicola who first handed me a copy of Yuhi by Yi Yang-ji and suggested I read Tawada Yōko, knowing that I would relish such prose. Nicola’s seminars and supervision opened up a world of fascinating ideas and insights that had a profound influence upon my early thinking. I thank Nicola greatly for having remained a dear mentor and friend even after I left her formal supervision. Funded initially by a Japanese government scholarship, I then conducted research at Waseda University in Tokyo for three and a half years. This time was made richer by the generosity of Professor Katsukata=Inafuku Keiko, Chair of the Institute for Ryukyuan and Okinawan Studies, and the diverse array of scholars who gathered there. It is saddening that the Institute has just closed as I write this in March 2016, but I hope that the bonds forged there will continue long into the future. From my second year, I was fortunate to be welcomed enthusiastically into Dr Kanai Keiko’s postgraduate seminars. These communities not only provided academic sustenance but their informal gatherings were incredibly fun. Likewise, I thank Professor Kina Ikue and Professor Kurosawa Ariko, both of whom always made time for me on my visits to Okinawa, treated me to many good meals, and provided vital opportunities for presenting and discussing my research. I send my heartfelt appreciation to my primary supervisor Dr Irena Hayter for continually challenging, inspiring, and encouraging me through her deep theoretical knowledge and insight, and her close critical readings of earlier drafts. It is to Irena that I owe the opportunity to return from Japan in order to complete the Ph.D once and for all, and I feel extremely privileged to be her student. I am also grateful to my second supervisor Dr Eric Prenowitz for patiently helping me to break down complicated and confusing theory, and for offering a valuable perspective from which to consider my research beyond the borders of Japanese Studies. My sincere thanks go to Professor Hugo Dobson for his guidance both professionally and research-wise during our time working for Japan Forum, and to Professor Kyle Ikeda and Professor Davinder Bhowmik for their kindness and interest in my research since we met in Okinawa in 2004. Kyle also provided specific feedback on an article draft that contained a more tentative form of arguments that were rewritten and woven back into Chapter One. I also extend my iv thanks to Dr Gitte Hansen, Dr Daniela Moro, Dr Hannah Osborne, and Caroline Mahoney. These friendships formed in Japan happily continue to this day and have brought me much comfort, wisdom and laughter throughout the writing of this Ph.D. This thesis would never have reached completion had I been without my close family and friends. Above all others, I am humbled by the constant support of my parents who have provided a valuable dangling carrot (and the occasional brandy) to get me through tougher times. It is my deepest regret that my father passed away during my second year before he could see the finished thesis, although I think that he would be proud. I dedicate this work both to his memory and to my fabulous mother. This is all thanks to you. v Abstract This thesis presents a reading of borders, difference, and translation in selected fictional writings by Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko. Each of these three writers is typically considered within distinct sub-genres of Japanese fiction: Okinawan, resident Korean (zainichi), and border-crossing, respectively. While each of these categories prescribes certain characteristics and aesthetics, the narrative works discussed here frequently subvert those expectations. In particular, in terms of narrative and writing strategies each shares a commonality of interest and approach as yet unearthed, crucially, in the challenge each poses to standard Japanese as a narrative language through their uses of other vernaculars, multiple voices, and fragmented narratives. These analyses are foregrounded by a critical consideration of border-crossing literature whose emphasis on overcoming inequalities and focus on the fluidity of passage has been celebrated amid the return of cosmopolitanism. By contrast, Chapter One presents strategies of hybridity and polyphony in Sakiyama’s ‘Kuja’ narratives that incite hidden memories of the past and terrorise the Japanese language. In Chapter Two, the protagonists in Yi’s Kazukime and Yuhi enact a similar violence against the text and their own bodies to leave irreducible gaps of absence and silence. Chapter Three focuses on Tawada’s The Travelling Naked Eye, wherein the protagonist’s linguistic displacement is accompanied by the fragmentation of her vision, bringing questions of sight and blindness to bear on the preceding focus on language. By tracing shared concerns with voice, silence, female bodies, memory, and colonial experience, this combined study reveals the ways in which the texts discussed here cast linguistic and spatial borders as rupture, loss, and irretrievable distance. Although such strategies are precarious, I argue that these narratives empower through their conscious engagement in struggles with difference and distance vis-à-vis a hegemonic Japanese national/linguistic centre: struggles that an emphasis on “crossings” threatens to overlook. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………….………………………………………………………………………iii Abstract……………..………………….………..…………………………………………………………………………v Table of Contents………………………..…………………………………………………………………………….vi Notes………………………………………..……………….……………………………………………………………viii Introduction: On borders and bordering on………………………..………………………………………1 Chapter One: Hybridity, Polyphony, and Spectrality in Sakiyama Tami’s ‘Kuja’ Stories 27 1.1 Introduction: The terror of hybridity…….…………………………………..………….……….27 1.2 Locating ‘Kuja’…………………………………………………………………………..…….…………….41 1.3 Entering the ‘abyss’: “Monologue of an Is(olate)land Dream”….…………….………50 1.4 The hybridity of the ‘half-breed’……………….…………………………..………….……………56 1.5 The voice of resignation: “And so it goes in an Invisible Town”.….……………….…63 1.6 Embodying the borderland: “Passing through Twilight Phantasms”…………….…71 1.7 The voice of response/ability: “Night Flight from Pingihira Hill”.……………………78 1.8 The voice of (un)translatability: “When the Figuru Winds Blow”.….……………….84 1.9 The voice of accusation: “What Shadows Stand in the Midday Moon”…………..92 1.10 Translating the abyss: “Variations on a Kuja Fantasia”………………………………..99 1.11 Conclusion…..……………………..……………………………………………………..……………...110 Chapter Two: Silence, Violence and Absence in Yi Yang-ji’s Kazukime and Yuhi……….114 2.1 Introduction: The violence of ‘not telling’………………………………………………….…114 2.2 Kazukime…….……………..…………………………………………………………………….……….…122 2.3 Shame, shamanism, hysteria……………………………….…………………………………….…128 2.4 Hysteria repeating…………………………………………………………………….....................136 2.5 Water, semiosis, and the fluidity of meaning…………………………………………….…144 2.6 Foreshadowing Yuhi……………………………….……….…………………………………………..153 2.7 Yuhi……………..……….…………….……………………..……….…………….….……………..........156 2.8 The spectre of unknowability…………….…………………….........................……….….166 2.9 The violence of the silent text……………………..…..…………….……….…….…….………174 2.10 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..…………..……….….……187 Chapter Three: Blindness, Duality, and Duplicity in Tawada Yōko’s The Travelling Naked Eye……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….191 3.1 Introduction: Travelling, mis-seeing and the exilic double……………………………191 3.2 The Travelling Naked Eye………………………………………………………………….……….…204 vii 3.3 Critical appraisals: Insights and blind spots ….………………………………………………209 3.4 Identification and the melancholic gaze…………………………………………………….…217 3.5 Displacement, asymbolia, and the unreadable text……………….……………….……226 3.6 Desiring the colonial mother(land)……….………………………………….……………….…235 3.7 Melancholic translation…………………………………………………………………………….…243
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