ABSTRACT
In the history of Asian Francophone cultural manifestations outside of Indochina, the French-speaking authors of the first generation, readers, and translators of the masters, create a kind of paradigm. In China as in Japan, since the forced opening up of the ports that led to the first contacts with foreigners arriving at the concessions, trading posts, and lease territories, the desire to know the Other became an imperative. In this situation, thousands of young people flocked to France and became Francophones. The appearance on the Chinese and Japanese literary scenes of these French-speaking authors, whose works marked a break with the preceding forms of literature, brought into being the phenomenon of cultural cohabitation. 1 Born from the encounter with European literatures that served as a catalyst, this literature of cohabitation traversed its national and homogeneous domain by acquiring a westernized poetics of the novel. From that point, literary creation embraced many different forms, which bore the imprint of the enthusiasm that these French-speaking held for French fiction. A change then took place, in which the previously rigid models of literary creation were revised.
