ABSTRACT
Mizumura Minae (b. 1951) and Hideo Levy (b. 1950) began their careers as writers of Japanese literature around the same time. Mizumura published her first novel Light and Darkness Continued (Zoku Meian) in 1990 and Levy published A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard (Seijōki no kikoenai heya) in 1992. Apart from the fact that Mizumura is Japanese by birth and nationality and Levy American, they share a number of common points – both are multilingual, both received an academic training in the United States, both made a conscious decision to write in Japanese rather than English, and above all, both express a genuine concern in their fiction and non-fiction for the future and possibility of Japanese language and literature. As their literary careers matured over the past quarter of a century, they have come to represent two trajectories in the development of contemporary Japanese literature. Mizumura represents the legacy of Japanese literature as ‘national literature’, that is, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, ‘literature written in the language and idiom of a particular country’ (Miller 2002: 3), and Levy is the voice of Japanese literature as ‘post-national literature’, or cross-border literature, in a multilingual, multicultural literary milieu where writers venture outside the home country and mother tongue and challenge the links between language, race, culture, and nationality.
