Script Choice as a Defamiliarization Technique in Kuroda Natsuko’s ab sango

ABSTRACT

This article explains how writing-restricted variations in contemporary Japanese literature can be central to the author’s overall literary project, using Kuroda Natsuko’s ab sango (2012) as an example. Kuroda’s novel is written in a highly experimental style that deviates from standard Japanese writing conventions in many ways, including direction of writing, the use of Western punctuation marks, and script choice between hiragana and kanji. While many readers dismissed her style as being difficult for the sake of being difficult, this article will argue that Kuroda’s writing represents an important example of script choice being used as a defamiliarization technique – Kuroda’s unusual script choices make familiar words unfamiliar to the reader. In doing so, Kuroda defamiliarizes the Japanese language itself, revealing the arbitrariness of script choice-related rules. She also brings awareness to the fact that the Japanese writing system contains many possible ways of representing the language, beyond what is most used today. I conclude the article by comparing Kuroda’s literary aims to those of contemporary exophonic authors such as Tawada Yoko and Hideo Levy, whose works also play with the conventions of written Japanese.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Prior to her Akutagawa Prize, Kuroda had published Ruiseitai meijaku with a small publisher called Shinbisha. However, this work is now out of print and difficult to obtain.

² ab sango was the first horizontally-written novel to receive the Akutagawa Prize.

³ https://www.amazon.co.jp/abさんご-黒田-夏子/dp/4163820000 (accessed 12 October 2020).

⁴ The genders of the parents are deliberately kept ambiguous in the novel, but the interpretation I am using here matches Kuroda’s actual biographical details. Kuroda herself has said in interviews that the novel is based on her life, although not all details are true (Kuroda & Agawa, 2013: 149).

⁵ An English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter, titled An I-Novel, was published by Columbia University Press in March 2021.

⁶ Kuroda (2013b: 158) has demonstrated this openness in interviews, saying that one of the reasons she writes horizontally is because it makes it easy to incorporate other horizontal forms of expression, including the Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals, and even musical notes.

⁷ Translations of examples and excerpts are by the author.

⁸ According to the ‘Kōyo bun ni okeru kanji shiyō tō ni tsuite [On the use of kanji in official documents]’, which was released together with the latest update to the jōyō kanji list on 30 November 2010.

⁹ For further exploration of how Takahashi challenges official and authoritative-sounding rhetoric see Tokita (2017) and Yamada (2011).

¹⁰ Tawada describes exophony as ‘the general state of being outside of one’s mother tongue’, encompassing categories such as ‘migrant literature’ or ‘creole literature’ (2012b[2003]: 3).

¹¹ This Chinese reading (in Wades-Giles romanisation) is the one used for a partial English-language translation by Chiang (2013).

¹² Tawada’s two-character kanji names in Hikon are also similar to those of Kuroda’s characters in her later published (but earlier-written) book Kanjutai no odori (2013c). Although Kuroda does indicate the readings of these names, they are all highly unusual, as in 毬犬 (marīnu) or 錆入 (sabīri).