KANSAI DIALECT AS PROTEST: IDEOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN KAWAKAMI MIEKO AND NOSAKA AKIYUKI
Date
2021
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Nosaka Akiyuki’s “America Hijiki” and Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to Ran both utilize Kansai dialect in their investigations of the influence of hegemonic systems of language and power upon the individual’s dialectic of gender and self. Tracing the nature of dialect in each narrative as symbolism complicates and deepens the possible meanings of each texts’ ideological concerns. The hybrid perspective of the narrative of America Hijiki between the present narrative of postwar 1960’s Japan, voiced in 3rd person standard Japanese, and the memories of war and the US occupation, voiced in first person dialect, illustrates the disassociating effect on the self caused by incongruous personal and social memories. The memories that illustrate the emasculated Japanese male ego disrupt the standard narrative of postwar economic success and Japanese virility both linguistically and figuratively. This disruption symbolizes the state of all men who experienced US occupation and victory in WWII now surrounded by a society that wishes to forget. Chichi to Ran, directly translated as Breasts and Eggs, is a multi-voiced narrative from two women’s perspectives detailing the experiences with/of their bodies, society, and each other. These women’s voices struggle with the interpersonal and personal turmoil caused by societal construction. The narrative symbolically protests these same constructions and binaries by positing a hybrid ‘neo-dialect’. The voices of patriarchal norms in the novel are most perfectly embodied by an absent father whose obfuscations of his responsibility to the woman with whom he fathered a child are spoken in the standard Japanese. By contrast, these women’s narrative voices and dialogues are represented in a hybrid ‘neo-dialect’ of Osakan and standard. The content of these women’s experiences but also this hybridity, itself, contests the neat categories of language and gender expectations therein.
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Literature, Asian literature, Japanese, Kansai Literature, Kawakami Mieko, Literature, Nosaka Akiyuki, Osaka
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71 pages
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