In the Language Not of Their Own : Japanese Literature in Taiwan(<Special Issue>The 57th JLA Convention (2nd Day))

Abstract

In the 1930s, when Japan possessed Taiwan as its colony, literary works written in Japanese by Taiwanese authors had begun to appear there. As a result, Taiwanese literature consists of the works written not only in their own language but also in the language not of their own. The group of works called "colonial literature" still remains a problem hard to handle in the history of Taiwanese literature. In this essay, I will focus on Ro-Kakujyaku, one of the colonial writers. The three kinds of strategies he employed in writing novels in the foreign language - adoptive, linguistic, and corporeal - will shed a new light on both Taiwanese and Japanese literatures.