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NISHI Masahiko December 5, 2014
Bilingual Dream and Melancholy,Jinbun Shoin, 277p. ISBN-10: 4409160966 ISBN-13: 978-4409160961 2,800 yen+tax
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■Contents
The word of "bilingual" may sound actually in Japan so hopeful and
optimistic. Bilingualism seems to be one of the conditions of success in
life for everybody. And more and more attentions, on the other hand, are
paid to bilingual or multilingual poets and novelists, who dare write not
naturally, that is, in their own mother tongue but in a later acquired
language.
My initial question was how about the situation of bilinguals produced in
the history of modernization in Imperial Japan and its peripheries and how
they were depicted in the Japanophone literature and Japanese American
literature.
Starting from Collection of the Epics of the Gods (1923) I dealt in the end
with John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957). My purpose was to scrutinize the pains
and agonies of being "bilingual", reading one after another writings which
are based on the experiences of the members of linguistic minorities, in
Hokkaido annexed by Japan, in colonial Taiwan, in colonial Korea, in
minority settlements scattered over Japanese mainland and in some states of
the US, densely inhabited by Japanese immigrants and their descendants.
In this way, I tried to emphasize on the necessity of a new style of
comparative literature which could catch up with the global-sized diaspora
and the birth of World Literature.
■Table of Contents
1 Bilingual Daydream and Literary Expressions of an Ainu Lady
2 Multilingual Situation of Colonial Taiwan and Monolingalism of the Novel?
from Sato Haruo to Li Hik-jiok
3 Idealistic Language Policy of Yuasa Katsue
4 Korean and Japanese Bilinguals in the Novels of Nakanishi Inosuke and Kim
Seok-beom
5 Zainichi Korean Novelists and the Issue of "Mother Tongue": Focusing on
Lee Hueson
6 What Is "the Second Generation Literature"?: Zainichi Korean Literature
and Nikkei American Literature
UP:January 22, 2015 REV: March 31, 2015