連帯の共同体精神と歓待の倫理からみる津島佑子の『葦舟、飛んだ』

Abstract

With the description of the northeastern China as the descriptive topos and the appearance of a lot of the northeastern area as the historical background, “Flying Reed Boat” authored by Yuko Tsushima has not gotten the spotlight it deserves compared to the reputation of the author and the value of the text of the book in the academy circle. However, in this book, the author has handled a lot of issues which she had obtained for a long time and tried to write. Here, she described the related historical issues and the social topic at the time of writing. In addition, the book has introduced many new things in terms of more complicated narratives, unique development in storytelling and the trial of expanding the range of text. “Flying Reed Boat” can be analyzed from various perspectives as it handles various closely connected levels of human and social issues ranging from the gender discourse to the understanding of the historical context with respect to the cultural and anthropological approach. In this paper, the “community of solidarity” and “mind of hospitality” would be focused on for the discussion of this book though they have not been often handled as the key words in her later works. A few embadded narratives and main issues contained in the main part of the book were analyzed as they totally handle the topics of various discourses and the social issues in modern and contemporary history. In addition, the author’s idea about human problems and the implication of the topics of the work were handled from the social and ethical perspectives. Specifically, in Chapter 2, the lives of two women’s fetuses which were differentiated by the value of hospitality were analyzed by using the case of past suffering of Yuki Baba’s friend and the case of Nami who lives in the present in the text. In Chapter 3 and 4, the adoption issues of the orphans created by the war and the life of several kinds of diasporas were analyzed to describe how the motif of community mind and the ethics of the hospitality work there. In addition, related to that, the symbolic implication of the ending scene which was dramatically expressed through the symbolic placeness and metaphorical play was researched. From this study, it was found that “Flying Reed Boat” is a text which handles various historical cases and instructive narratives in the past and emphasizes the community mind for mutual prosperity and the ethics of hospitalization for others as they get more important at the present time when conflict and confrontation have become aggravated and that it also has its own unique narrative aesthetics.