December 2021: An I-Novel Discussion Questions

[Alison]

1.) I've read a lot of artist origin stories, but I was really happy to read one about a woman! It had echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and maybe The Bell Jar. I know there are surely elements of No Longer Human, but I need to reread that one. I'm excited to read more I-novels!

2.) Mizumura was skeptical An I-Novel could be translated into English at all. It was disappointing to lose the bilingual aspect of the writing in translation. I'm not sure what was in English and what was in Japanese in the original.

3.) I reviewed An I-Novel for the Asian Review of Books:
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten.... I summarized it as "a self-conscious successor to Japanese literature’s Shishōsetsu (“I-Novel”), an early 20th-century genre of autobiographical fiction. Although there are many flashbacks, the action of the novel itself takes place over the course of a single day in Mizumura’s life: the day she decides to take her graduate school oral exams and then return to her native Japan as she has always planned.

4.) The narrator's general feeling of displacement really resonated with me. That she gave up something she couldn't reclaim by leaving Japan. That she isn't sure she can ever really go back.

5.) Location is critical to the story. That's the central question: how crucial is place to cultural identity.

6.) While her observations about racism in the US are spot on, the narrator is naive about racism in Japan. She describes Japan as “a country where the notion of race was as abstract as the notion of winter for people living near the equator," which obviously isn't true.

[e.h.d]

omg this book has been on my to read list for ages, i will try to give it a go soon!! thanks for choosing it!!