Ken Ito, author of An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese NovelĪt its heart, An I-Novel is a deep meditation on the writer’s internal life, on straddling cultures and wanting to be at once authentic and original. The resulting observations are unsparing, sharply ironic and often very funny. In the process, the work upends the assumptions of the I-novel, a genre thought to provide unmediated access to its male, Japanese author. In Minae Mizumura’s novel, multiple languages and literatures mediate an expatriate girlhood’s dislocations of nationality, race, class, and gender. The metaphorical cherry on top is that Mizumura is an exquisite storyteller, and hers is a story well worth reading. Mizumura’s novel is a genuinely pleasing read, satisfying for its insights into a life between cultures, to be sure, but also for its resonances that affirm how similar are the concerns that occupy us all. Visually challenging, narratively robust, and emotionally compelling. Or you can just read it for the gorgeous prose, and it would be more than enough. You can read it as a feminist literary landmark, or to inspire a conversation on language and its role in bridging the differences that distance forces upon people who love each other. You can read An I-Novel as a great example of the Japanese I-Novel trend in literature. An I-Novel is a very fine novel of the experience of growing up between (more so than in) two cultures - cultures which were, on top of it, much more markedly different at that time - and of trying to find one's place, in every respect. An I-Novel is not just about rejecting English – it dramatises this rejection in its form New StatesmanĪ fascinating literary experiment, but also a fascinating exploration of identity, place, language, and self. Mizumura’s fiction has a daring, playful streak, too. ![]() Boston Review An I-Novel combines these two elements – the drama of decision-making and interiority, or that which propels the reader and that which compels them – in purified, vacuum packed form. NPR Books An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem. ![]() For readers intrigued by questions of globalization, literary politics, or translation An I-Novel is a complete must-read, but, no matter what your interests, this is not a book to be missed. is an intellectual powerhouse, and Carpenter's chatty, fluid translation more than keeps up with her thinking. New York Times Book Review An I-Novel is an intriguing, nuanced portrait of a family in flux, and of a young woman finding her creative center between two worlds. And they do so without the slightest whiff of nationalism. Mizumura’s books reclaim the particularity, the untranslatability, of her own language. It’s not difficult to read, since Mizumura is a fluent and entertaining writer. In an age of so many books about identity, An I-Novel stands out for the tough questions it poses. Mizumura’s work is deeply insightful and painstaking but never precious. a brilliant document that seems, if anything, more relevant today than upon its original publication. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.Ī genre-defying meditation on emigration, language, and race. ![]() Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English-and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the “I-novel,” a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family’s arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s.
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