Abstract
This chapter deals with the use of dialects in modern Japanese literature with a special emphasis on the writers from the North such as Dazai Osamu, Miyazawa Kenji, and Inoue Hisashi. In the analysis I will explore the possibilities of considering the dialectal literature as bilingual, thus, deconstructing the dichotomy of (national) language versus dialect. I will be paying special attention to Miyazawa Kenji’s works, in which the author defies the comprehensibility of the text, introducing dialectal phrases without any explanations. I argue that such a text demonstrates the greatest potentiality for bilingualism in literature, as it does not contain the alien elements as foreign and explain them away. At this juncture I will be re-introducing critical concepts of “implicit bilingualism” and “explicit bilingualism.”
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Notes
- 1.
In Chapter 2, we observed how both Tsubouchi Shôyô and Tokutomi Sohô were criticizing Futabatei Shimei ’s vulgar style, which was the result (as they saw it) of the excessive conflation of writing and speech. Mori Ôgai in his treatise “On Orthography” totally dismisses gembun-itchi together with the phonetic orthography on the ground that “oral language changes historically, but the written language does not [therefore, the discrepancy is a matter of fact]” (392). In contrast, one of the leaders of the movement, Futabatei Shimei , being a steadfast supporter of vulgar colloquial language, was inclined to aim at the perfect accord of the two. Nevertheless, his opinion was on the whole exceptional. We already analyzed Futabatei’s ideal of complete coincidence between speech and writing in Chapter 3, Section. 4
- 2.
Texts in Chinese have traditionally been interpreted in Japan with the help of various symbols and declentional endings (kunten 訓点) that tell the readers how to decipher the Chinese texts in Japanese. This method is called kundoku 訓読.
- 3.
As we have examined in the previous chapters, both the gembun-itchi style and koku-go were the products of modern national politics. It is inaccurate to conclude, however, that they derived from “Japanese,” which had existed as a “thing.” “Japanese” itself was construed as an ideological construct. We will return to this issue and Motoori Norinaga’s role in this construal in Chapter 8.
- 4.
The original text for this somewhat mild translation of Seidensticker is “koe uchiyugamitaru mono … mosuni (a person whose speech was lame and distorted, answered).”
- 5.
The contrast between the man’s crude accent and his turning into lofty Kannon is the point of this story. Incidentally, the metamorphosis of a man into (or the mis-recognition of him as) Kannon supports the case we made earlier in Chapter 1: that Kannon was originally a male figure.
- 6.
Needless to say, this is not a phenomenon peculiar to Japanese literature. Writers of a variety of literary traditions inserted into their works dialectal expressions for various reasons. Gorky was wont to describe peasants in the suburbs of Moscow with a heavy provincial accent, which Futabatei translated using the northern Kantô dialect .
- 7.
This is the only phrase transcribed in dialect in the work: “ika ni saba daja” (43). The English translator gives up conveying the sense that the phrase is in dialect , translating it simply: “peddlers … shouting out as if they’re angry, in their local accents: ‘Squid and mackerel, angler and aoba, sea bass and hokke!’” (Lyons 299) adding the explanation “in their local accents” that is absent in the original. Another of the few instances of the dialectal expressions in the novel is the word, atofuki, which the author explains as: “In Tsugaru, whenever there’s a wedding or some occasion when large numbers of people are invited to your house, after the guests go home the small remaining number of close friends and family gather up the leftovers and have what they call atofuki to celebrate the hard work they’ve put into the event. It may be local dialect for atohiki” (298).
- 8.
Ichinoseki (meaning “the first checkpoint”) was the southernmost barrier station of the fief of Fujiwara clan, comprising today’s Iwate Prefecture, and so on.
- 9.
Human excretion was widely used as fertilizer in pre-war Japan. The northern region has been a mainly agricultural (and, hence, more destitute) part of Japan and the novelist’s abuse (“stinking of shit”) is based on this association.
- 10.
There are two types of adjectives in Japanese: i-type and da-type. School grammar defines da-type adjective as keiyô -dôshi (adjectival verb). This chimeric characterization is, probably, what bothered Inoue’s school teacher.
- 11.
Neither the Great Dictionary of Japanese Language nor the Great Dictionary of Dialects gives “ameyuji” as an entry, though.
- 12.
As Japanese is an agglutinative language and has a huge number of homonyms, the use of Chinese characters for nouns and verb stems significantly facilitates comprehension in written texts.
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Yokota-Murakami, T. (2018). Dialectal Literature as Bilingual Literature. In: Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8512-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8512-3_5
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