유미리의 JR 시리즈에 표현된 ‘일본’

Abstract

This paper considers Yu Miri’s works that reveal the voices of marginalized and excluded people in Japanese society. Yu has expanded the narrative from Yamanote Line of Tokyo to JR(Japan Railways) series, connecting the city and the provinces. The novel Tokyo Ueno Station(JR Ueno Station Park Exit) that won the National Book Awards in 2020 played an important role in this process. In the Yamanote Line series, the novel JR Takadanobaba Station Toyama Exit is a work that critically shows the closure of Japanese society, especially the isolation and death problems felt by the characters in their daily lives, which links to the buried records of those who were brutally killed in modern Japanese colonization and war. The novel Tokyo Ueno Station is a compressed illustration of the modern history of Japan after the war through a space “Ueno” connecting Tokyo and the Tohoku region. This work dramatically contrasts the life of the emperor in the peak of Japanese society and the lowest-ranking people at its opposite point. Lastly, the novel JR Joban Line Yonomori Station is a work that materializes the efforts of the author Yu who moved her residence to Fukushima after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 to communicate with local people and report the problems faced by Japan after the nuclear explosion accident. The critical view of Japanese society represented in this novel evokes the voices of the marginalized people including daily workers mobilized in the workplace of the nuclear accident as well as the victims of the earthquake. It is not known what Yumi-ri’s JR series will do in the future. As long as her works catch the pending issues of Japanese society and communicate with people of various levels, it is expected that Yu Miri will continue to open up the horizon of Japanese literature.