著者

グアリーニ レティツィア

出版者

国際基督教大学ジェンダー研究センター

雑誌

Gender and Sexuality (ISSN:18804764)

巻号頁・発行日

no.13, pp.111-136, 2018-03-31

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Yu Miri made her debut in 1988 and 1994 as a playwright and a novelistrespectively. Since her career started with Fish Festival (Sakana no matsuri),awarded the prestigious Kishida Prize for Drama (Kishida Kunio Gikyokushō) in1993, and Family Cinema (Kazoku cinema), awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1997,Yu Miri wrote extensively about the family. Both in her fiction and non-fictionworks she has described the collapse and rebirth of the modern family, exploringthe role of the father and his relationship with the daughter. In her works she hasoften depicted daughters who are caught in between love and hate toward theirfather, and who cannot escape from his control. The family is a well-known theme in Yu Miri's work, which has been oftendiscussed. On the other hand, not much attention has been paid to thefather-daughter relationship yet. The aim of this paper is to analyze how therepresentation of the father-daughter pair has changed from Yu Miri's earlyworks until the publication of the non-fiction book Family Secret (Famirīshīkuretto) in 2010, and the way Yu Miri used literature as a tool to distanceherself from two fatherly figures who have effected her literature since herdebut: her real father, who is considered the model for many of the fathers whoappear in her early works, and Higashi Yutaka, who is considered her literaryfather by the writer herself. In this paper I will first focus on the representation of the father in Yu Miri'searly works, and I will compare it with the father-daughter relationship as it isdepicted in Family Secret. As I demonstrate in the first section of this paper,both in her early novels and essays Yu Miri has often written about dysfunctionalfamilies, focusing especially on the depiction of abusive fathers. With FamilySecret, her first nonfiction work, she has again tried to use literature as a toolto escape from the father's control, this time showing that memories, in theirreproduction of the past, are nothing more than fiction. I will then look at the "post-family" Yu has created in the tetralogy Life (Inochi),and the way this topic has been further developed in the novel After the Rainand Dreams (Ame to yume no ato ni). I will focus on the way the ideology ofthe modern family is overcome in this novel, and how the father-daughterrelationship in it depicted differs from Yu's previous works. After the Rain and Dreams is an important work also because it deals with thedeath of Yu's literary father, Higashi Yutaka, and his relationship with the writer.In the final section of this paper I will move onto an analysis of the novel Black(Kuro), showing how Yu Miri, after mourning Higashi throughout the tetralogyLife, has distanced herself from her mentor, and finally become independentfrom the power of his words.