GENRE POLYPHONY OF THE CONTEMPORARY MULTICULTURAL NOVEL (BASED ON K. ISHIGURO’S AND Y. TAWADA’S WORKS)

This article explores the genre characteristics of the contemporary multicultural novel, drawing on the British and German-Japanese literary traditions. It has been found out that novels focusing on the search for lost identity and the formation of a new one are typically of a hybrid nature. The genre modifications identified in the works by the German-Japanese writer Y. Tawada (“Memoirs of a Polar Bear”, “Suspect on the Night Train”) and the British writer of Japanese descent K. Ishiguro (“A Pale View of Hills”, “An Artist of the Floating World”, “The Remains of the Day”, “Never Let Me Go”, “Klara and the Sun”) confirm the assumption that the contemporary multicultural novel is inherently heterogeneous. Concurrently, it has been demonstrated that in their fiction, Y. Tawada and K. Ishiguro draw not only on Western European but also on Eastern literary traditions. A vivid example of Eastern narrative strategies is the employment of unreliable narration, omissions, understatements, as well as the watakushi-shōsetsu genre and the Eastern parabolic form. On the whole, the literary works of the aforementioned authors represent a prime example of literary hybrids containing elements of such genres as the bildungsroman, anti-bildungsroman, coming-of-age novel, science fiction, pseudo-fiction, dystopian fiction, and travelogue. The thematic field of the investigated texts suggests that the contemporary multicultural novel serves as a model of intellectual philosophical prose. It actualizes the issues of identity search, intercultural interaction, responsibility, self-sacrifice, humanity, and humaneness in today’s defragmented and digitalized world. The authors construct tragic fictional dimensions wherein artificially created beings prove to be more humane and, in many instances, morally superior to their creators. The willingness to sacrifice one’s own life is particularly characteristic of characters in multiple works by K. Ishiguro. At the same time, the focal point of Y. Tawada’s literary experiments is the creation of a new space devoid of any cultural markers, which broadly correlates with postcolonial theories and H. Bhabha’s concept of the “third space”. It is within this realm that liberation from socio-cultural stereotypes occurs, and the value of human life is proclaimed regardless of its socio-cultural markers and roles.