Reimagining the Japanese Literary Canon: Literary Multilingualism in Contemporary Japanese Literature

Abstract The study of contemporary Japanese literature is still based on a compartmentalised canon rooted in an arcane paradigm that values the author’s linguistic and national background more than it values their works. Thus, examples of literary multilingualism in the writing of national authors, as well as the works of translingual writers, are only sparsely acknowledged. Even more rare are occurrences in which works of national and translingual authors are regarded as part of the same literary scene. This article proposes a comparison between the national authors Murakami Ryū and Shimada Masahiko, and the translingual writer Levy Hideo, to highlight the similarities between their language to argue that the current national approach to Japanese literary study needs to be questioned in light of the relevance of multilingual writing as a consequence of the cultural contacts that have influenced the Japanese language.