Reshaping Japanese Animal Tales and Transgressing Gender Paradigms in Alexander Chee’s Novel Edinburgh

Abstract: This article analyzes how Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh (2001) explores the motif of transgression by transposing traditional Asian tales into a contemporary American setting. In this novel, the east Asian narratives on the fox trickster, endowed with supernatural powers and the ability to shapeshift into a human being, intersect with the coming-ofage story of a young Korean American boy who struggles to deal with his homosexual identity and with the trauma of sexual abuse. Edinburgh thus employs the motif of the shapeshifting fox, which transgresses the boundaries between humans and animals, to deal with the transgression of the heteronormative paradigm. The retelling of the border-breaking fox trickster becomes a means by which the narrator reframes his family’s past traumas during the period of the Japanese occupation of Korea and relates them to his own experience in the narrative present, through his difficult journey to assert his own identity and find his voice.