Metafiction, Lexical Ostentation, and Censorship in Umezaki Haruo’s “B-tō fūbutsushi”

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Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. All Japanese personal names are presented in accordance with Japanese custom: surname preceding given name.

2. I shall be considering textual changes among three versions of this novella and have adopted the following conventions in the citations to distinguish among them. “B-tō fūbutsushi” in quotations refers to the first published version in Sakuhin 1, B-tō fūbutsushi italicized refers its first appearance in the eponymously titled collection of stories, and the version that appears in the Umezaki Haruo zenshū is marked as UHZ, from which come all citations that are not directly related to the central typographical argument of the paper.

3. All translations from the Japanese are mine.

4. One of two phonetic syllabaries used in conjunction with characters in written Japanese. A given hiragana is always a single mora whereas a character may be one or more morae.

5. Katakana is a blocky syllabary, distinct in form but not phonetic value from the more supple hiragana syllabary.

6. A later editorial insertion comes on the following page where the full term assaku kōryō (compressed rations) that had been used parenthetically to explicate akkō (C-rats) is not only used, it is given a reading with rubi (tiny print beside the characters). See UHZ 1:135. This aid is not present in the text as it was originally published in Sakuhin (174), nor in the version published later that same year by Kawade shobō (60). The passage of almost two decades between these two and the anthology of Umezaki’s works strongly suggests the existence of an editorial pressure to clarify the unfamiliar terms which may legitimize the intruding voice; however, the fact of the intrusion is of greater significance than its cause.

7. Another change associated with this warning occurred well before this explanatory parenthetical was added. Between the time the story was first published in Sakuhin and the time it appeared as a book later that year, the gloss (rubi) given for the character here rendered as “Morts” was removed. See Umezaki, “B-tō fūbutsushi,” 196 and Umezaki, B-tō fūbutsushi, 60. While this move away from specificity may actually have worked to support the rhetorical device of lexical ostentation, the subsequent editorial intrusion renders any such advantage moot.

8. See Lofgren, “Ideological” 401–02.

9. The irruptions in “B-tō fūbutsushi” are not an isolated phenomenon. In at least one other instance, a short story published a year prior to “B-tō fūbutsushi,” Umezaki utilized this same technique, which occasions the same interpretive strategy, especially as the irruption occurs in a speech act. The protagonist of Gake (“The cliff”), Murakami, tells Kanō, “‘I came from Sa-sig (Sasebo signal unit).’” See Umezaki, “Gake” 91; UHZ 1:53. The general knowledge possessed by Murakami’s interlocutor should be sufficient to allow him to comprehend the meaning of “Sa-sig” because both Kanō and Murakami are in the naval cipher corps, both are on the southern island of Kyūshū, and both share a similar history in the Navy. This parenthetical explanation disrupts the narrative flow and foregrounds the fictional act of writing in precisely the same way as do the examples from “B-tō fūbutsushi.”

10. I owe an unpayable debt to the late Michael Payne for his encouragement very early in the life of this article, and I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading, valuable comments, patience, and faith.