The Weight of Secrets: Hidden Mirrors of Identity in Aki Shimazaki's Pentalogy

In Tsubaki, the first of Aki Shirnazaki\u27s series of five novels, a Rashomon 1-like pentalogy in which the same characters try to unravel the persona} traumas oftheir lives right before the atom bornb hits Nagasaki, the city that they have just moved to, one of the main characters, Yukio, cries out: Ce n\u27est pas le temps de chercher la vérité, c\u27est l\u27unité qui compte (Tsubaki 53). ln that instance, he was defending a young Korean unjustly accused of theft. Cou Id the same be said for the rest of Shimazaki\u27s novels? Indeed, in Tsubame, for example, the narrator, a Korean immigrant living in suburban Tokyo must hide her identity during the war to escape persecution and rnurder, has her name changed from the Korean Yonhi to the more Japanese-sounding Mariko, but continues her spiritual camouflage well after Japan\u27s defeat in World War II to the point where her own farnily believes she is in fact Japanese. Je ne parle à personne de mon origine, she explains, Mon fils croit, comme autrefois mon mari, que ma mère et mon oncle sont morts pendant le tremblement de terre, en 1923. La défaite du Japon et ! \u27indépendance de la Corée n\u27ont rien changé à l\u27attitude des Japonais contre les Coréens au Japon (Tsubame 61)

Introduction

[First paragraph] An Excusion at Sea, The Thousand and Second Night, La Guimard ... For over a hundred and fifty years, these plays languished in Jules Verne\u27s desk and then on the dusty shelves of the Nantes Municipal Library before Christian Robin was able to publish them in 2005, in honor of the centenary of Verne\u27s death. That anniversary triggered a plethora of commemorations, new editions of Verne\u27s works, events, and conferences, among many different activities and endeavors. Robin\u27s remarkable collection included all of Verne\u27s previously unpublished plays in a volume titled Theâtre inédit, issued by the Cherche-Midi press in Paris. All in all, Robin collected and edited twenty-one plays that, for the most part, had never even been performed, let alone translated into English. Fortunately, the Palik Series, in addition to stories and novels, and the plays in this volume, has also published the original translation of the theatrical version of Around the World in 80 Days (very different from the novel of the same title), along with six more plays translated for the first time in the volumes Mr. Chimp, and Other Plays and Castles of California

Jules Verne\u27s Very Far West: America as Testing Ground in Les 500 Millions de la Bégum

[First Paragraph] In his famous interview with the American journalist Robert H. Sherard in 1894, Jules Verne, nearing the end of his life, regretted not being able to see America one last time. I should have liked to have gone to Chicago this year, he lamented, but in the state of my health [...] it was quite impossible. I do so love America and the American, he continued, As you are writing for America, be sure to tell them that if they love me- as I know they do, for I receive thousands of letters every year from the States- I return their affection with all my heart. Oh, if I could only go and see them all, it would be the great joy of my life! (Sherard 7). Indeed, the mutual affection between the United States and Verne\u27s works has been so strong that Verne is often even erroneously considered an American writer by many Americans. As Jean Chesneaux has observed, it is not surprising that twenty-three out of a total of sixty four novels take place in part or entirely on American soil, and that important roles are given to American characters as, initially at least, in the mid nineteenth century it was the United States which came the closest to the \u27model of progress\u27 that Jules Verne envisioned for humanity (Chesnaux, Yale French Studies, 112). [Verne] saw America as the frontier linking the known and unknown world, Chesneaux explains. The United States was very much a part of the contemporary political scene and the Civil War, in particular, had made a deep impression [on him]. But at the same time, this country, in the throes of rapid demographic, technical, and economic change, with few real ties to the past, had already become a major futuristic theme (111-112)

Melancholic Mirages: Jules Verne\u27s Vision of a Saharan Sea

L’invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea), Verne’s last novel to be published during his lifetime, would appear to be a paradoxical vision of French colonial involvement as it chronicles the attempts of the French army occupying Tunisia and Algeria to capture Tuareg leaders bent on pushing the French out of the Maghreb on the one hand, and thwarting an environmentally disastrous French project on the other. L’Invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea) is a complex, if not melancholic vision of the limits of French expansionism, however. The real-life French army geographer François-Elie Roudaire and his backer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, seem to fascinate Verne the most. Roudaire’s actual plans for the canal Verne writes about failed miserably but at the end of the novel, a tumultuous earthquake allows the “Saharan Sea” to be completed, kills the Tuareg leader and gives the victory to the French despite all their blunders. That Verne gives his final laurels to a failed inventor rather than flag-waving general serves as a wistful fin-de-siècle coda to what had been such innocently exuberant adventures at the start of his century

Ghosts in the Machine: Narratives of Disappearance in French Fiction from the 1990\u27s

This article examines narratives of disappearance in two French novels from the late 1990\u27s, J.B. Pontalis\u27s Un homme disparait and Marie Darrieussecq\u27s Naissance des fantomes, which are reflective of a general trend towards ghostliness in French fiction towards the end of the twentieth century. The article argues that these novels are emblematic of a fin de siecle malaise that Marc Auge termed surmodernite and that Paul Virilio has identified in terms of an era characterized by so much speed (as a result of an overabundance of technological innovations in communication such as email and faxes) that individuals have become less and less centered or inter-connected rather than the other way around. Pontalis and Darrieussecq\u27s novels are particularly good examples of a certain need for some to vanish within hyper-developed, contemporary spaces. Through an exploration of Pontalis and Darrieussecq\u27s characters\u27 attempts at remembering their own personal narratives, the article will also examine the notion of fleeting traces of memory that linger within the unconscious of many despite constant barrages of memory-numbing stimuli

Fragmegration of Identity in Laurent Cantet\u27s Ressources Humaines and L\u27Emploi du Temps

As James Rosenau has written, localization and globalization came crashing together at the turn of the 20th century in a type of oxymoronic chaos he labels fragmegration that characterizes the confusion people have as to their role in society. It is this identity confusion that Laurent Cantet portrays in his landmark films Ressources humaines (1999) and L\u27emploi du temps (2001). Cantet\u27s protagonists seek their place in society as they cope with the sudden destabilization of their local, national, and globalized identities

The Golems Take New York: The Resurgence of the Golem in the Work of Cynthia Ozick and Thane Rosenbaum

The late twentieth and early twenty first centuries have seen a resurgence of the golem in several major American novels. What factors might lead to such a re-imagining of the golem in American fiction? Cynthia Ozick\u27s The Puttermesser Papers (1997) and Thane Rosenbaum\u27s The Golems of Gotham (2002) re-invent golems no longer anchored in vengeance but in healing, as vehicles for the kabbalistic notion of Tikkun Olam ( repairing the world ). Ozick creates the first female golem to help the lonely protagonist become a reformist mayor; in The Golems of Gotham, the golem is transformed into a team of literary golems who storm Manhattan not only to heal the grief-stricken protagonist but to cure a city from injustices. In these two novels, the golem is updated as a crusader who addresses both the ills of citizens and a collective fin de siècle melancholy

The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880-1914

In an age of the Kindle and e-books, how refreshing and meaningful to read Willa Z. Silverman’s fascinating study, which so eloquently describes a time when printed books not only mattered but were treasured, sought after, and treated almost as lovers at times. Far from being a treatise on monomaniacal, “nebbishy” bookworms, Silverman sheds light on a facet of Belle E´poque history hitherto underdeveloped and introduces us to a colorful, eccentric, artistic, and fanatically driven set of bibliophiles bent on creating a haven for the book, a “bibliopolis,” or as one of Silverman’s subjects, Robert de Montesquiou, put it referring to the importance of a book’s cover, “a portal into a world of illusion” (p. 153)

The Weight of Secrets: Hidden Mirrors of Identity in Aki Shimazaki\u27s Pentalogy

In Tsubaki, the first of Aki Shirnazaki\u27s series of five novels, a Rashomon 1-like pentalogy in which the same characters try to unravel the persona} traumas oftheir lives right before the atom bornb hits Nagasaki, the city that they have just moved to, one of the main characters, Yukio, cries out: Ce n\u27est pas le temps de chercher la vérité, c\u27est l\u27unité qui compte (Tsubaki 53). ln that instance, he was defending a young Korean unjustly accused of theft. Cou Id the same be said for the rest of Shimazaki\u27s novels? Indeed, in Tsubame, for example, the narrator, a Korean immigrant living in suburban Tokyo must hide her identity during the war to escape persecution and rnurder, has her name changed from the Korean Yonhi to the more Japanese-sounding Mariko, but continues her spiritual camouflage well after Japan\u27s defeat in World War II to the point where her own farnily believes she is in fact Japanese. Je ne parle à personne de mon origine, she explains, Mon fils croit, comme autrefois mon mari, que ma mère et mon oncle sont morts pendant le tremblement de terre, en 1923. La défaite du Japon et ! \u27indépendance de la Corée n\u27ont rien changé à l\u27attitude des Japonais contre les Coréens au Japon (Tsubame 61)

Le spectre dans la machine: notions de disparition dans le roman français des années quatre-vingt-dix

This article examines narratives of disappearance in two French novels from the late 1990’s, J.B. Pontalis’s Un homme disparaît and Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes, which are reflective of a general trend towards ghostliness in French fiction towards the end of the twentieth century. The article argues that these novels are emblematic of a fin de siècle malaise that Marc Augé termed surmodernité and that Paul Virilio has identified in terms of an era characterized by so much speed (as a result of an overabundance of technological innovations in communication such as email and faxes) that individuals have become less and less centered or inter-connected rather than the other way around. Pontalis and Darrieussecq’s novels are particularly good examples of a certain need for some to “vanish” within hyper-developed, contemporary spaces. Through an exploration of Pontalis and Darrieussecq’s characters’ attempts at remembering their own personal narratives, the article will also examine the notion of fleeting “traces of memory” that linger within the unconscious of many despite constant barrages of memory-numbing stimuli. Este artículo examina el tema de la desaparición en dos novelas francesas a finales de los años noventa, una novela de J.B. Pontalis y una otra de Marie Darrieussecq que son particularmente representativas de una tendencia fantomática en la novela francesa de finales del siglo. Nuestro texto propone que estas novelas representan un malestar general que Marc Augé llamó sobremodernidad y que Paul Virilio describe en términos de demasiada velocidad en nuestra época. Toda esta velocidad resulta en un gran aislamiento colectivo. Es la razón por la cual los personajes de Pontalis y Darrieussecq quieren desaparecer. Este escrito examina también la idea de “vestigios de la memoria” que existen en el inconsciente de muchas personas a pesar de demasiados estímulos urbanos.Cet article examinera le thème de la disparition dans deux romans français de la fin des années quatrevingt- dix, Un homme disparaît de J.B. Pontalis et Naissance des fantômes de Marie Darrieussecq, qui sont particulièrement emblématiques d’une tendance fantomatique dans le roman français vers la fin du vingtième siècle. Cet article proposera que ces romans représentent un malaise quasi fin de siècle que Marc Augé avait nommé surmodernité et que Paul Virilio avait identifié en termes d’une ère caractérisée par trop de vitesse (venant d’une surabondance d’innovations communicatives tel que les emails et les fax). Or toute cette vitesse aboutit à un isolement collectif plutôt qu’à un brassage. Les romans de Pontalis et de Darrieussecq représentent un besoin parmi certains de vouloir “disparaître” au sein d’espaces contemporains hyper-développés. Par le biais, d’une étude des personnages de Pontalis et de Darrieussecq, cet article examinera également la notion de “traces de mémoire” qui demeurent dans l’inconscient de beaucoup d’individus malgré le grand nombre de stimulants urbains