Representations of translators and translation in Japanese fiction

This paper examines some 40 Japanese fictional works containing portray-als of translators or translation (here understood as including interpreting). It explores Japanese writers’use of translation as a metafictional device, the extent to which these works (mis)represent reality, whether they are positive or negative depictions, and the insights they provide into how translators and translation are regarded by Japanese authors and, by extension, the Japanese public. Recurring themes are analyzed, such as marginality and identity issues, power and fidelity, author/translator relations, attitudes toward translators, and translation as a profession and business. Of par-ticular interest is the question of how Japanese depictions might differ from those by Anglo-American writers.

Beyond “Transborder”: Tawada Yōko’s Vision of Another World Literature

This article presents a critical examination of “transborder” literary approaches that seek to renegotiate the position of Japanese fiction within the world. The concept of transborder fiction has emerged in recent decades as a means of breaking down the boundaries of Japanese literature that assume agreement between the nationality of a writer and the language of her text. However, as it takes its cues from David Damrosch’s influential study of 2003, What is World Literature?, which suggests that literature gains in value in translation, transborder literature betrays its desires to promote Japan’s national literature in a globalising literary context. This more critical view reveals that despite their calls for greater literary diversity, transborder approaches exhibit problematic tendencies that threaten to erase the multiple flows of language and intertextuality already extant within modern Japanese fiction and turn its eye away from history. This critique is focalised through the writing of Tawada Yōko, whose prolific output of literary works and essays in Japanese and German appear to epitomise the image of transborder writing, and yet which frequently challenge these assumptions. Both the book-length essay Exophony (2003) and the Japanese novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (2004) offer prescient critiques rooted in history that expose moments of rupture, asymmetry and untranslatability, which an emphasis on border crossings threatens to overlook. However, by choosing to peer through those gaps, guided by the latter’s Vietnamese narrator, these texts also incite hitherto unseen connections between Tawada’s Japanese fiction and the world.

Pregnant Violence in Post-3.11 Fiction

This essay explores the violence and the threat of violence associated with pregnancy in Japanese fiction after the triple disasters—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown—of March 11, 2011. There is hardly a female character in this fiction that is not confronted with questions about pregnancy and childbirth. The queries are surely motivated by genuine concern about the humans involved, but they are just as often about control, about a woman’s body as a public item, about responsibility to the child, and then to society at large. Childbearing in a disaster zone is profoundly anxiety-producing; but it is also worth examining how quickly childbirth, and then women’s bodies, become at times metaphor and at times synecdoche, for the trauma and fears of the entire society, in these works. In this article I consider Sono Shion’s Kibō no kuni, Kanehara Hitomi’s Motazaru mono, Taguchi Randi’s Zōn ni te, Kimura Yūsuke’s Seichi Cs, and Furukawa Hideo’s Uma tachi yo, sore demo muku de.