Alles nur Theater? Gender und Ethnizität bei der japankoreanischen Autorin Yū Miri (review)

"Nothing but playacting?" This is one possible English translation of the title of Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt's monograph (based on her doctoral dissertation submitted to Trier University). The subtitle, which could be translated "Gender, Ethnicity, and the Japanese-Korean Author Yū Miri," underlines two points: First of all, following the example of the first German-language study on the subject,¹ Iwata Weickgenannt uses the term "Japanese-Korean" (japankoreanisch) and not, for instance, the designation zainichi adopted in Japanese and some Anglo-American research. Iwata-Weickgenannt thus situates her study within the German tradition of research on the Korean minority and its literature, scholarship that has received little attention outside of Germany. Secondly, and more importantly, the book is not about gender and ethnicity in the works of Yū Miri. Instead, Iwata-Weickgenannt points to a subtle interconnection between literature and life: "Not only [Yū's] literature, but she herself is considered, in the final analysis, a 'work'" (p. 423; translations from German by the reviewer).

This phenomenon in itself is nothing new in Japanese literature, as Irmela Hijiya Kirschnereit has pointed out;² Iwata-Weickgenannt, however, enlarges on the concept of literature as life by bringing in the dimensions of theater, the media, and performance. Such an approach is justified not only by Yū's own beginnings as an actress and a playwright and by her later exploitation of media such as TV and blogs, but also by the postmodernist cultural climate in general, with its intermedial penetration of all aspects of life. Under such circumstances, identity is no longer a stable, essentialist category: it must instead be constantly enacted and reenacted, and it threatens to implode without the gaze of the onlooker. Iwata-Weickgenannt thus describes Yū's large-scale novel Hachigatsu no hate (At the End of August) as follows: "The novel can be read as an investigation about the nature of identity. The result is a completely different, kaleidoscopic conception of identity as multiply fractured, as an unavoidably heterogeneous conglomeration that has been brought together by force" (p. 430). Indeed, there would seem to be only one unchanging and constant factor in Yū's works, as Iwata-Weickgenannt points out—indeed it is almost the quintessence of her study: Yū's consistent refusal to allow herself to be reduced to any one single, simple identity (p. 431).

To reach this conclusion, disarmingly simple as it may appear, Iwata-Weickgenannt carefully collects her arguments over the course of more than four hundred pages. In the first roughly fifty pages, she states the theme of her study, namely, the investigation of the concept of identity and difference. For this purpose, she explains, she intends to address the forms of social discourse that influence how Yū's figures see themselves, specifically concentrating on gender, class, and ethnicity (p. 15); a few pages later, she mentions "performative elements," thus pointing to another significant concept for her study. Iwata-Weickgenannt then introduces further important elements of her analysis, such as speech-act theory and deconstructivist and post-structuralist theory, before rounding out her introduction with a brief biography of Yū and a discussion of research on the literature of the Korean minority in Europe, North America, and Japan.

After this introduction, Iwata-Weickgenannt chooses in part 1, "Contextualization," to present the relevant theoretical background that she will need to discuss the works themselves in part 2, "Text Analysis." The topics that must be discussed in order to draw valid conclusions from Yū's complex and involved works are themselves complex and involved. They encompass the discourse on motherhood and the family in modern Japan, the history of the Korean minority in Japan, the literature of the Korean minority in Japan (including the relatively new phenomenon of female zainichi authors), and autobiographical writing. These topics are all crucial to an understanding not only of Yū's life and works, but also of the artwork that constitutes...