If Lolita Could Tell : Echoes of Nabokov in Kazuki Sakuraba’s My Man |
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Rafael Vinícius Martins |
九州大学大学院地球社会統合科学府博士後期課程 |
If Lolita Could Tell |
Correspondence
Rafael Vinícius Martins ,Email: rafael.vinicius.martins@gmail.com |
Published online: 30 June 2019. |
Copyright ©2019 The Global Institute for Japanese Studies, Korea University |
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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ABSTRACT |
This article discusses the narrative of child sexual abuse present in Kazuki Sakuraba’s celebrated novel My Man(2007), an aspect that has been ignored by critical approaches towards this work so far. My Man narrates the relationship between Hana and her stepfather Jungo. Noting that discussions of this novel have focused on incest and yet ignored the child sexual abuse suffered by Hana, this article proposes observing the intertextuality with Vladimir Nabokov’s worldwide famous novel Lolita(1955) as a mean to understand the specificities of Sakuraba’s way of representing the theme of abuse in girlhood. It first discusses the difference between the two works’ narrative voices to explain a shift in the status of power of the abused heroine. It then considers the problematization of the child-adult dichotomy in Sakuraba’s works, highlighting the deconstruction of power relations deliberately employed to express the conflicted subjectivity of a girl affected by years of domestic abuse. |
Keywords:
Kazuki Sakuraba, Literature about Child Abuse, Literature about Girls, Comparative Literature, Contemporary Japanese Literature
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キ―ワ―ド:
桜庭一樹, 児童 性的虐待についての文学, 少女について の文学, 比較文学, 日本現代文学 |
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