著者

黒田 裕子 佐藤 深雪

出版者

広島市立大学国際学部 (Hiroshima City University, Faculty of International Studies)

雑誌

広島国際研究 (ISSN:13413546)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.14, pp.59-74, 2008

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This manuscript analyzes Kyoka Izumi's Furyusen and Kazushige Abe's Sin-semilla in order to explore how the "reality" of Japanese local cities is created. The authors argue that "reality" is created by the process of generating a story which is peculiar to a locality and by sharing that story among the people in the city; the story creates and, at the same time, decides "reality". In addition, each of the stories in the novels --which the authors define as "the database story"--is derived from unique databases. The focus of this manuscript is to explain the creation process of "reality" in these database stories. 13;Set in Kanazawa-city in Ishikawa prefecture during the early 20th century, Furuysen depicts two unique sets of database that are struggling to gain the initiative of the city; the one is a net of national railways and the other is a copy of local family registries. The former is the database that invokes a story of Japan as a modem, collective nation. The latter -which is secretly written by a local philanthropist -is the database that attempts to recreate the "reality" of the traditional city where the local conservatives are desperate to sustain its past glory. 13;On the other hand, in Sin-semilla, which is based on a present-day, small town called Jim-n1achi in Yan1agata prefecture, the young generation in the town is bored with "reality", because it is created by their parents with the cooperation of the American Occupation Forces during the time right after World War ll. In order to find a way out from the boredom and pressure to inherit the "reality-", they attempt to disclose the truth of the town by-processing dataacquired from secret photography. At first, they thought the act of taking secret pictures would be exiting, but they begin to be possessed by a narcotic-like, dazzling effect of the images. However, they find out that the "reality" yielded from the database is quite mediocre; nobody cannot spend their life in this ordinary "reality" as an inherent subject.