Warning: Somespoilersahead (Kitchen—Banana Yoshimoto, Norwegian Wood—Haruki Murakami, Socrates in Love—Kyoichi Katayama)

Analyticality

In my most recent post, I went down a nostalgic memory lane of experiences with Japanese literature, setting up a background for my upcoming Digital Artefact* on Japanese short stories and the culture’s reflection between the lines—the stories are like age rings of a tree, looking at which one can observe the subtle changes in history and culture, especially among the everyday citizens. Now that I have had some time to distance myself enough from my own writing, it is only apt that I practise looking at that narrative with some objectivity, dissecting the emotional with a more logical approach to bring out the autoethnography aspect.

Autoethnography (my illustration)

The essence of autoethnographic research lies in the analyticitywith which the researcher (in this case, myself) frames their story, using “theoretical and methodological tools”…

Here’s to all the memories of the very few Japanese fiction books I have had my nose stuck in so far and my upcoming autoethnographic journey into Japanese short stories.

***

Kitchen book cover (n.d.)

I first picked up a copy of Kitchenby Banana Yoshimoto eight years ago, when I was bored out of my wits at a sleepover at my cousins’. I barely remember the details of that story now—other than that it is a short window into the life of a make-shift family of a young orphan, her friend and his transgender mother—but the afterward melancholic feeling and indescribable afterthought, so alien to a thirteen-year-old back then, still surfaces so vividly at any sight of the book cover.

Such emotional discomfort stimulated by that first encounter with Japanese literature had me steering clear from the genre during my entire early teenage years…