The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, Mari Kotani, and Takayuki Tatsumi, "This Conflict between Illusion and Brutal Reality: An Interview with Yoriko Shono"This Conflict between Illusion and Brutal Reality:
An Interview with Yoriko Shono
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, Mari Kotani, and Takayuki Tatsumi
Yoriko Shono was born in 1956 in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture. She lived with her parents in Ise until she finished high school; then she went to Nagoya where she spent two years at a university preparatory school. She was finally admitted to the Faculty of Law at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, from which she graduated in 1980. In 1981 she received the Twenty-Fourth Gunzo Prize for New Writers for her novel Gokuraku (Heaven). For the first four years of this period, she lived in a small apartment in Kyoto, and then she moved to Hachioji, where she continued to lead a reclusive life in a one-room flat. This lonely experience gave her a good opportunity to write a new existentialist novel Nanimo Shitenai (Doing Nothing) in 1991, for which she received the Thirteenth Noma Literary Prize. In the wake of the Japanese bubble-economy age from the late 1980s through the early nineties, which she found completely futile, Yoriko Shono became more and more creative in her writing. The year of 1994 was her annus mirabilis. She received two major literary awards: the Seventh Mishima Yukio Prize for the novella Nihyakkaiki (The 200th Anniversary of the Dead) and the 111th Akutagawa Prize for her haunting novella Taimu Surippu Kombinato (Time Warp Complex). Her late 1990s major works include: Haha no Hattatsu (The Development of My Mother), Paradaisu Furattsu (Paradise Flats, 1997), and Tokyo Yokai Fuyu (The Floating Ghosts of Tokyo, 1998). (TT)
Takayuki Tatsumi: Why don’t we start by having Sinda and Larry tell us their anecdote about what happened recently that reminded them of Blade Runner and Time Warp Complex?
Sinda Gregory: When we were driving up to the Los Angeles airport to come to Japan, we drove by Long Beach. Larry and I had been reading Time Warp Complex so it was very much on our minds, but when we saw the area, it just felt very much like the Blade Runner ambience your protagonist felt during her train ride in Time Warp Complex.
TT: Didn’t Ridley Scott shoot some of the scenes in Blade Runner there?
Larry McCaffery: I’m pretty sure he sampled some of those Long Beach images for the opening of the film.
SG: He used a filter over the camera to give it a very odd light.
TT: So maybe you, Yoriko, should visit that area. It might not be very different from Kawasaki, the industrial area south of Tokyo that you describe in Time Warp Complex.
Yoriko Shono: Does this mean that those scenes were more or less universal? I know that when I was describing the Japanese streets or shopping malls in Time Warp Complex I was unwittingly distorting the original or primary scene. I naturally see the landscape through a kind of "filter," so that when a landscape is in front of me, my thoughts stimulate and react against each other. I really wanted to emphasize or foreground this sense of distortion or unfamiliarity in the consciousness of my readers.
LM: This seems related to what I was saying in a lecture that I gave other day at Keio University on the topic of postmodernism. I said that in the nineteenth century when the realistic novel was emerging, one of the roles of the writer was to bring the unfamiliar into literature to make it seem familiar. At that point there were still all of the exotic, unfamiliar places that ordinary readers had no access to except through fiction. But it seems to me that one of the most important roles of postmodern writers is to find a way to make the familiar seem unfamiliar. Because today we’re living in a world that contains so many different, strange things, like the landscapes we were driving past in Long Beach, or the street scenes and malls Yoriko describes, but these things now are taken for granted. One of the reasons what she describes in Time Warp Complex is very important is because she is able to defamiliarize what is familiar.
YS: I usually call this "another reality" or "alternate reality."
SG: We want to apologize at the beginning of our interview: since Time Warp Complex is your only book so far that’s been translated into English, we’re going to have to focus most of our questions on that work. Do you feel it’s typical of your work so far?
YS: In retrospect, Time Warp Complex is not what I would consider my "major work." But as for translation purposes, since there are all kinds of proper nouns of the factories, I think this will help convey the atmosphere of the town even for English readers. What I consider as my major work is Restless Dream but this would be very difficult to translate. Restless Dream was an effort to ascertain the construction of the Japanese language; all kinds of puns and anagrams appear and it relies deeply on the fact that it was written in Japanese. Moreover, there appear many types of patriarchal discrimination by Japanese men towards women, and as an infrastructure, I used the Japanese genesis myth of Izanagi and Izanami. In this sense, I think that Nihyakkaiki or The 200th Anniversary of the Dead, which brought me the Mishima Literary Award, might be more appealing to the American or English speaking audience, if ever translated into English.
TT: I agree. English readers might enjoy this novella very much because it basically sounds Lovecraftian and is full of zombies.
SG: Is there any possibility that there might be a translation available of this book?
TT: A French version might appear, so maybe we can get hold of that.
LM: Since Time Warp Complex is not representative in some ways of your work generally, maybe you can tell us about what made you shift into this other nonrepresentative way of writing?
YS: I started on Restless Dream when I was in my twenties, and I spent most of my thirties completing it. Through this work, I was able to capture the basic structure of Japan and the Japanese sensibility, in my own way. In other words, the story is about what Japan looks like when seen from my own perception, my own recognition of the Japanese world. Restless Dream was a starting point as well as a sort of mainframe or foundation for my writing. Afterwards, I came up with the motifs for Time Warp Complex by going to Umi-Shibaura, or for The 200th Anniversary of the Dead, for I had missed my dead grandmother so much that wanted to meet her again. These experiences were no more than cues of not so much importance for what I wanted to write about in Time Warp Complex—but the basic framework for what I was doing had already been provided from Restless Dream.
LM: Do you recall what the initial impulse was that got you started? For instance, did Time Warp Complex start with the dream of a tuna that opens the book?
YS: As a matter of fact, yes, I did see a dream of a tuna, but it wasn’t like I wanted to actually meet him. This tuna of my dream was somewhat cyborglike and quite handsome as well, but that doesn’t mean I would really fall in love with him. What I had in mind from the beginning, as a theme of this story, was "does love really require an other?" For example, in the eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki wrote a story in which her simplest descriptions of the garden and the wind convey the atmosphere of love.
Mari Kotani: You can find many of these princesses in that novel. They write songs and they find themselves in the atmosphere of love.
TT: They achieve this sense of love by looking at things, rather than human beings. This reminds me of what I have been thinking in terms of the "celibate machine," because you can fall in love even with yourself. You don’t need any existence of the other.
YS: In my own case, at the outset of Time Warp Complex I thought, "Is this love without the other something that is universal? " So, by immersing myself into the longing to meet the tuna, I wanted to pursue what it would be like to be in love without an other. But while I was writing this story, I was asked to do a report for a magazine and I visited Umi-Shibaura—the actual setting of Time Warp Complex. That is where this "feeling of love," which was a mere illusion, got knocked away by the powerfulness of reality. This conflict between illusion and the brutal reality functioned as a springboard that allowed me to finish up my story.
LM: The train station you describe in the story has one end that opens up onto the sea while the other end is at the factory. Was that based on a real train station? It seemed very symbolic.
YS: Yes, it’s a real train station. I’ve described it as the way it is.
SG: You said that Restless Dream has a discursive framework. Would you tell us what that means a little bit more specifically?
YS: Let’s take sexual discrimination. Until recently, we used to employ the word uwaki, which means "having an affair" or "committing adultery," but then it changed to furin, which is frequently used these days. Since this term represents the relationship between men and women (although it connotes sexual discrimination depending on its usage), it is used for both sexes. On the other hand, uwaki, which is obsolete lately, is a concept applicable of men who make mistresses just for pleasure. On the contrary, if a married woman had a love affair outside her matrimony, it meant adultery or infidelity. It was almost a crime.
LM: We have an English statement for having a mistress, but there is no equivalent of a woman’s doing the same thing.
YS: Uwaki was negative while furin had a rather equal connotation between man and woman, but in the course of time, this word was consumed and again it was generalized. Although we coin new words to express something, the newness gradually wears the negative connotation again. This can be said about any word that has a discriminating implication.
TT: I would say that Restless Dream is an allegory or a fable of discrimination in light of linguistic experiment. Also, uwaki is a phrase that’s used when a man has an affair and furin is for women to have an affair. What Ms. Shono is writing about is something like gender politics.
SG: Is the statement that is associated with the feminine more negative? That is, if I have an affair, is that considered more negative than if Larry has an affair? And does the word itself convey a moral judgement?
TT: No, the point is the time shift, difference of the ages. Up until the mid-eighties, whenever we were talking about an affair, it meant that a man would be the one having it. But then there was a TV series titled "Friday Wives" in which housewives had affairs.
MK: "Friday" has a double meaning. First, it was broadcasted on Friday and so that is the reason why it was titled as such. But Friday is also the day when everybody relaxes and enjoys themselves, like in "Friday night fever."
TT: Thanks to this TV program, the general public became aware of the fact that wives can have affairs, too. A gender shift.
YS: But gradually, the once "equal" phrase, furin, became contaminated. By the way, I think in German, women who are considered hysterical or stupid—really, just about every negative statement centers around femininity. I’ve heard that in Germany some negative words such as "hysteria" or "stupidity" are related with the nature of femininity, and that those German words correspond to "air-head" or "hysterical women" in Japanese.
Anyway, within this contamination process, you can see that there is the fundamental construct. Within this construct, all the filth, the vice and the responsibility, gathers to the weaker ones. Furin started out as an equal term, but gradually women ended up with disrespect. So to respond to Sinda’s question about whether or not a man or a women having an affair is thought of as being equal in Japan, the answer is no! A man is intact even though he might be having an affair, but a woman would not be. So the structure contaminates a new word and the contamination goes to the weaker ones. For me, "the weaker ones" means all those being discriminated against, including women. Also what we call Kegare (the filthy, the unclean) is associated with various kind of discrimination.
Another point is the fact that we Japanese use words that are easy to control and we try to be understandable, but this particular way of expressing ourselves is only tracing the way the dominator sees the world. In order to get out of this kind of invisible restriction, it was necessary in Restless Dream for me to do a linguistic experiment or decontextualization. But there is a limit to this, because if you go too far, it will make no sense to the general public.
MK: One way to express this "invisible restriction" is to say that women have to evaluate themselves by using the words of the dominator.
YS: There is a distortion and I wanted to see this distortion, which is brought by the phoniness of the dominator. I just want to get back the word from the dominator. There is a prince who appears in Restless Dream who is not at all attractive but he keeps the most beautiful woman in the world. This beautiful woman was greatly abused. The prince would have dozens of love affairs but this woman would always forgive him with a smile (although, ironically, she poses to be a woman of the seventies, being liberated and all, like Jane Fonda). Therefore, the prince would say "You are a good woman."
On the other hand, the main character (her name is Peach-Tree-Flying-Snake) is abused as well, but in a different way. For example, the prince would always say, "You are a baka-onna (stupid woman), a histeri-onna (a hysteric woman)!" Unlike an anima which is praised but ruled by the prince, this Peach-Tree-Flying Snake is abused and despised. This is the reason why she can plan to defeat the prince someday.
What I tried to do was to analyze these repulsive words and find out what kind of fraud or hidden implications they are made of, why these words have so much power. The story ends with the main character destroying not only the stage on which the prince stands, but also the world.
SG: I understand you studied law. This seems perhaps relevant to Time Warp Complex because so much of the story seems to be about playing with language in a way that I associate with what lawyers do. Can you talk a little bit about your background generally, and how law might have prepared you to become a writer in particular?
YS: It was a matter of chance, of course, but I was influenced by the content of what I studied at law school. I specialized in civil-suit law, especially in the process of lawsuits involving civil and commercial matters. Civil lawsuits deal with nothing but the private rights, such as the rights of property, therefore they don’t really have much to do with crime and punishment; the language in that field becomes very abstract, sometimes bringing about the arguments or the theories completely based on logic. The maniacs involved in these types of lawsuits for the money or the right of property are greedy but calm. Sometimes they will come up with all kinds of excuses, claims, and sophistry. Our duty is to hold them back to common sense. For example, a lawsuit over the boundary line—a person claims that the boundary line is here. He loses the case. But according to logic, he can have a whole case if he tries it again, changing his claim by one millimeter—which is rather ridiculous. Through this, I was able to see the gap between logic and common sense, and I also myself enjoy these sorts of logic games. Moreover, I was taught to doubt the most logical, to defamiliarize what we have long taken for granted. For example, women are taught to be "feminine," or "womanly." But from the perspective of civil law, we have to begin with the definition of the word womanly, almost to the last centimeter or last millimeter.
SG: In America we, too, had a myth of "womanhood," a true woman cult; this was especially true in the South until about the end of the nineteenth century. My grandmother was affected by it, but after the appearance of the "new women" who came in with the turn of the century, the cult of the true women disappeared.
YS: Is it true that the women in the South used to be prohibited to eat in the presence of a man?
SG: No, but the men would be served first. One of the things that come through in Time Warp Complex is that there is the power of logic and there is language that is logical, but these sorts of logical structures may not have anything to do with what is true.
YS: In the case of Time Warp Complex, by illustrating a certain person’s point of view, I was hoping that I would be able to imply something to the readers. It was like a fight against the language and the world, or in other words the world made up by words. What I tried to present in Time Warp Complex was people’s activities in the age of Showa, and the city of Tokyo reflected on the narrator’s view and her memories. I wanted to offer the very Zeitgeist, not in the mass-media way of representation, but from a very personal standpoint. Also in my other novel, Doing Nothing, I described through the narrator’s viewpoint the scene of the ceremony of the emperor’s accession on TV, and the bodyguards who protect the royal family who happen to get on the train with the narrator (these episodes are based on my own experience). In these cases, I avoided writing political discourses and criticizing it consciously at all. Instead, I tried to describe what I really felt and its details correctly as it were rather than using some stereotype. I wanted to create a fictional space which contains a critique of Japanese language already deformed and of the thoughtlessness of mass media through the force of my extremely private compositions.
LM: The logic of this story to me didn’t seem indeterminate: it was more poetic. That is the process of word play and association. Illogical, perhaps, in the sense that, say, surrealism seems illogical, but not indeterminate.
YS: I have used indeterminacy, but this is a strategy. I try to refute the prejudice by using logic. This is an effective strategy to reveal the phony side of the language. There is a Japanese literary tradition called watakushi-shosetsu, or the "I"-novel (or private novel) in which the author depicts himself in detail. My aim is to dig up the alternate reality, and to do this, I start with the existence of the "I," my own subjectivity. Once given the "I" within the text, the text will develop naturally. In this procedure, defamiliarization, decontextualization, or the poetics of indeterminacy are merely a means rather than a purpose.
LM: You mentioned that you began Time Warp Complex with that dream of meeting a tuna, but how did this story evolve? Did you know where it was going or prepare any kind of outline, or did you rely on the subjectivity to just take you to wherever it was going?
YS: I usually set the theme beforehand. The first one-third of all my books— twenty to fifty pages according to whether it is a novel or short story—is usually improvised, or written quite offhand. The rest, I rather consciously try to follow the theme. I speculate, meditate, study a lot before starting to write. Not really planning, but more of a free-association, waiting for the muse to inspire me to write.
As for Time Warp Complex, I wanted to combine fantastic scene of the sea and a tuna fish I dreamed of, with a love without the substantial lover. I had already written a novel called Sea Animal dealing with the sea—not the real sea but the one in our dream or our TV screen. The protagonist keeps the love for that illusionary sea, such as the love without the substantial lover. However, when I actually went to Umi-Shibaura for conducting research, I came across a series of compelling realities that were to lead us to this fantastic sea. In other words, I had seen too many signboards on the way to Umi-Shibaura, which is located right in the middle of the industrial sea. In such a place, "the scene of the ruin" that I described at the very beginning of the novella is only a fantasy, since the area has historical necessity, and moreover, there are people living there. Therefore, I tried to walk around the area as indifferently as possible, just depending on my senses and cutting off my preoccupations. I went there twice, and one time I kept walking and taking notes for almost six hours with a short break for eating Soki noodle, as I depicted in the story.
TT: Like becoming a medium for God.
SG: In the beginning of Time Warp Complex, the woman seems crazy, but by the end of the story, she seems to be more sane.
YS: Before capturing the "alternate reality," things often seem rather absurd in my writing. But while I hit the keys of my word processor, I find the point where I can come to terms with the meanings of the words and use expressions that are understandable to the common reader without killing or sacrificing this "alternate reality." I reflectively find the limit to which I can destroy the familiar and yet still create something my readers can relate to. As for Time Warp Complex, the main character just happened to turn out as seeming sane and balanced, but some of my other works end in a complete chaos for the main characters.
MK: Would you tell us about you and the Japanese genesis story? You often seem to be intrigued by it—for example, in works like Glass Doll or Restless Dream.
YS: Yes, I have used the Izanagi and Izanami’s motif in several of my books. According to the origin myth of Japan, there were these two gods, Izanagi and Izanami. Izanami, who is a goddess, seduces Izanagi, a male god. The female was the one to take initiative and as a result, their child was "incomplete." This one was abandoned, thrown into the sea. Then Izanagi seduces Izanami, Izanami bears a child, and this one is healthy. Thus, the land of Japan is populated.
As the very last child, however, Izanami bears the god of fire (or maybe it was the god of lightning) and by this delivery, Izanami burns to death and goes to Hades. Izanagi goes after her only to find her horrible dead body all covered with and full of maggots, so he runs back. Izanami chases him, but Izanagi rejects her and blocks her by setting up a gigantic rock between the boundaries of this world and the other. Izanami, now standing behind the rock, curses Izanagi’s people saying that she will kill 1,000 of them every day. Izanagi replies, "Then, we shall bear 1,500 a day."
Now through this myth, there are several points of interest. One is the way Izanami was "punished" for seducing the male and taking initiative. Second, Izanagi’s final reply, which seems to indicate that the man is in charge of even having children.
TT: All of this already discloses the patriarchal construction of Japan. Our nation could not have been established without the disproportion of gender politics.
LM: And your works have used this mythic framework as a means of reexamining some of these mythic residues that usually go unexamined?
YS: Yes. But all of this is a taboo in Japan because it is, of course, related to the royal family. It is difficult to talk about this kind of thing in the major media, unless you are ready to be chased by those who raise an uproar and try to assassinate not only you but also your family by misreading your works. Most writers avoid this sort of investigation because it is too dangerous. I know how dangerous it can be because I am from Ise, where there is a shrine that is dedicated to Amaterasu-Oomikami, the first god of Japan. Some rightwing terrorist who was opposed to collecting taxes from the Ise shrine once tried to bomb the state office. But anyway, the story of Izanagi and Izanami, or that of Amaterasu-Oomikami, are very familiar to me.
TT: I would like to add that many critics say that Ms. Shono has to have a lot of guts to write about Ise; this is very scary stuff.
YS: Yes. But I don’t care, since I don’t waste my energy on the useless fights, nor challenge the aggressive people. I will write works which can be understood by the audience with a discriminating palate.
TT: Ise is sort of like deep Japan as compared to the deep South. This is a perfect title for this interview . . . "Deep Japan" or "Journey into the Center of Deep Japan."
SG: Or, "In the Heart of the Heart of Japan," like William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.
YS: But I’m not sure if Ise is really so equivalent to the American South. Mie people often say that Ise is the spiritual hometown of Japanese. Perhaps Ise is more comparable to the Mayflower on which the Pilgrim Fathers came. However, some say that the relationship between religious ceremony of Ise shrine and the royal family is not the same as it used to be in the ancient times. Religion sometimes gets involved with the political elements.
SG: Actually, I would say the heart of the heart of America is probably located more in some place like Des Moines rather than the deep South, because the deep South is so gothic and extreme. Anyway, you mentioned that you grew up in Ise. When did you leave there?
YS: After graduating from the high school in Ise, I lived in Nagoya for two years and then in Kyoto for nine years. I came to Tokyo about ten years ago. I’ve been living here since then.
LM: What made you not to pursue a career in law and shift into writing novels?
YS: I first wanted to major in science but I changed my mind to pursue law without any ideas about the future. I felt it was very natural for me to start writing.
LM: Were you writing fiction as a young woman while you were studying these other things?
YS: Yes. I entered the faculty of law in Ritsumeikan University in 1976 and I started writing fiction, and sending them to the publishers around this time. In 1981, my first novella Gokuraku (Paradise) appeared in the magazine Gunzo, for it got the Gunzo award for a promising young writer. Although since then I kept writing and my subsequent works were published in the literary magazines, I had to spend almost a decade before I publish the first book, Doing Nothing, which ended up winning the Noma Bungei Prize for a new talent.
SG: In Time Warp Complex, there is a story about the main character’s mother who worked as an engineer, but who was sabotaged by a male worker. So in a very subtle way, I think this is a very feminist story because the train station is where her mother tried to break through the patriarchy and was sabotaged; so then you have her daughter coming back to the train station and being faced with the same dilemma.
YS: Forty years ago, my mother was the first female student to be accepted in Mie University. She was studying agricultural science, and on campus she was very popular, but sometimes being pampered as well as suppressed. As for job-hunting, there were no precedents so she was able to get a job under the same conditions as men. She started off her career as an analyzer in a soy sauce company and then switched to Toshiba, the electronic company, as a researcher of the metal materials (somewhat similar to the mother in Time Warp Complex), but there, her boss asked her to marry him. Not liking him, she changed her job again, married my father who was her university classmate, and started teaching chemistry at a school. Then a situation comes up where they had to cut salaries. Where should they start? Of course, they decided to start with women teachers. So my mother was forced to once again quit her job.
TT: So in this sense, the mother in Time Warp Complex is a projection of Ms. Shono’s mother.
LM: What do you think of gender equality?
YS: I don’t want to generalize. What matters most is how I myself live. Nobody, whether man or woman, has the right to force me into thinking how and what a woman should be. I don’t want to listen to antifeminists, misogynists, or even feminists who try to impose their opinions on me. The only standard that I am able to rely on, and believe in, is my own.
SG: But you are lucky to have a mother who had that kind of background, because your mother must have instilled these values in you that made it more possible to be an artist.
YS: In my novels, there are these eccentric fathers or mothers who are the embodiment of power against which we have to fight. And some people think that my novels are confessional or autobiographical, that the eccentric family figures are really my family. But this is not so. I am very proud of my father, mother and brother. I had a very happy childhood and I appreciate them. I just wanted to mention this because too many people misunderstand my works as being totally autobiographical.
LM: I noticed that in Time Warp Complex, there are references of The Wizard of Oz and several other children’s stories. Were there any children’s writers—or any other authors, for that matter—that you have been particularly influenced by? And when you were starting out as a writer, were there any woman writers that you could look to as a kind of model?
YS: I have always admired the works of Mari Mori, the daughter of Oogai Mori, a famous writer of the early 1900s, who introduced many things from German culture into Japan. She is one of the first writers who picked up yaoi, the Japanese equivalent of the K/S fiction as a literary theme. But I don’t think I was "influenced" by her, although I liked her works and, while reading them, I did learn how to write sentences that go back and forth between illusion and reality. Maybe the way I punctuate sentences or my style and rhythm has a little something to do with my reading her. I also like Mishima’s early works: Confession of the Mask was especially impressive to me. As for children’s stories, I was very attracted by the retold stories for children such as Kojiki and Ugetsu-Monogatari, a Gothic story published in 1776.
LM: What is your opinion about the younger generation of Japanese women writers like Amy Yamada and Banana Yoshimoto? Do you feel any affinities to what they are doing?
YS: Amy Yamada and Banana Yoshimoto are both younger than I but they were also both recognized as writers much earlier than I. I am a writer of the nineties whereas they are of the eighties. Also, the eighties for me was a very difficult time to live. During the eighties, when Japanese economy was in its prosperity, people had a tendency to mock someone thinking seriously or fighting against society. Anything dismal was regarded as evil, materialism pervaded everywhere in our society, and the spiritual aspect of people was neglected completely. Those who had never read serious literature criticized it. Nevertheless, I had no intention to go back to the past since I had already seen the self-righteousness, failure, or insensitiveness of political movements in the seventies. Besides, there existed strong prejudice against women writers.
LM: Of course, both Yamada and Yoshimoto have both been writing much more traditional, realistic stories. There are certain general themes about alienation and a sense of displacement, confusion that your work seems to share with theirs. And yet, you have chosen not to write in traditional realist forms. Why is this?
YS: Although my early works were written in the old-fashioned style, I don’t write a traditional "I"-novel. However, sometimes I feel strong sympathy with the "I"-novel writers. Writers like Kunio Ogawa and Shizuo Fujieda, who are highly admired literary figures and are now in their fifties or sixties, used to write very traditional realistic stories, confessional stories, and "I"-novels. But through their exploring of the deeper "I," suddenly it was as if they had reached a certain point. They paradoxically broke into an illusionary realm, surpassed the limit of reality and suddenly very unrealistic stories appear in their works.
TT: The more you explore yourself, the more unrealistic your fictions become.
LM: This is exactly what happens with, say, James Joyce.
YS: Well, as I have said, I do have a strong attachment for some "I"-novel writers. There is always the "I" in the center of my works, as well as my "eye," not other people’s, which I use to see things through. I am opposed, however, to following only the form of the "I"-novel without facing the truth of yourself, the alternative "you," the alternate "reality."
In connection to influences, I’ll end this up with one comment about Banana Yoshimoto. This is just a guess, but I think she has something in common with a manga writer named Yumiko Oshima. Amy Yamada used to be a manga writer herself. I, too, used to read a lot of mangas. What is it with female writers and mangas? Well, there was a time when certain types of women were not accepted as writers because of their themes and motifs. Their female elements had long been neglected in the field of literature. I think the important themes in the subcultures such as manga are left and dismissed in the world of commercialism.
TT: They are not commercially incorporating these influences of mangas into their fiction but just digging up the hidden agenda in feminist literature from within the manga subculture, not from the literary fields. A perfect summing up for the interview.
Transcribed by Reiko Tochigi; translated by Hisayo Ogushi