East Asia Seminar will begin at 5:00 PM in Room 8/9 at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Two-world Cinema: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Living

The idea of “World Literature,” a concept referring to literary works that for various reasons transcend national borders, that came to prominence in the early 2000s, has attracted criticism of Eurocentrism and neo-colonialism in recent years. One of the most poignant criticisms is that it is based on what Aamir Mufti has described as “one-world thinking,” the practice of erasing linguistic and cultural specificity through a unified perspective, which typically coincides with that of the Eurocentric and/or Anglocentric First World (Mufti 2016, 5–6). In my previous work on Kazuo Ishiguro (Suter 2020) I have argued that this author’s oeuvre represents a radical alternative to such paradigm: by creatively exploiting his Japanese and English bicultural heritage, I contended, Ishiguro has been able to produce what I called a “two-world literature,” a form of literary fiction that is capable of addressing broad human issues without presenting the values of a dominant culture as universal ones. Building on that analysis, in this talk I will examine Kazuo Ishiguro’s script for the film Living, directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru (co-written with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni). I will look at how Living deploys narrative strategies similar to those used in Ishiguro’s novels, while the medium of movie script adds a further layer of complexity to them, producing a new form of “two-world cinema.” I will further compare it with Kurosawa, Hashimoto, and Oguni’s script for Ikiru, looking at how some symobilc objects are “translated” and redeployed in more complex forms, to show how Ishiguro builds his own multiple perspective on Kurosawa’s humanism, that was grounded in a refusal of both political authoritarianism and epistemological preconception, but moves beyond it to challenge not only Anglocentric, but also anthropocentric “one-world vision.”
 
Rebecca Suter is associate professor of Japanese studies at the University of Oslo, where she teaches and researches in modern Japanese literature, comparative literature, and Asian cultural studies, with particular focus on cross-cultural representations. She has previously worked at the University of Sydney, Brown University and Harvard University. Her most recent book is Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels. Her current research projects looks at the portrayal of Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries and cultures in the Japanese collective imagination.