Small-Scale Institutions in Karen Tei Yamashita's <i>I Hotel</i>

Abstract This article examines tensions between I Hotel's sprawling, experimental form—which appears tailored to the disruptions of the 1960s and 1970s—and its continual return to the stabilizing function of the hotel itself. I Hotel meditates on the problems and possibilities of literary building, within a historical setting that represents the very epitome of anti-institutionalism. Published at a moment—the aftermath of the 2008 crash—when housing insecurity had again emerged as a significant site of activism, I Hotel examines the utopian possibilities latent within small-scale institutions, even as it also acknowledges the real limitations of such institutions. Rife with productive contradictions, I Hotel depicts the hotel as both real and imaginary, singular and multiple, actual and potential. In doing so, Yamashita's novel suggests ways that literary works help readers conceptualize the difficult territory between revolutionary transformation and institutional reform.