2020 Volume 102 Pages 71-86
This paper examines Mizumura Minae's Shishōsetsu from Left to Right (1995) in terms of plurilingualism, which assumes that both writer and reader are proficient in multiple languages. Specifically, I consider the question of why Minae, the protagonist, decides to write in Japanese rather than English. I approach this issue by imagining the books Minae could have written in English but chose not to. I discuss the question of how and why she made this decision not only in terms of Minae's education in American schools, but also with reference to several relevant contexts, such as the fall of “the West” and the rise of multiculturalism in American academia, Japanese Studies in the United States, narrative temporality in the novel, and the self-referential use of the shishōsetsu (I-novel) genre. Mizumura's novel shows that the question of language choice in pluralingual conditions raises a series of fundamental questions about linguistic expression in general.
