IWASAKI Shota (University of Tokyo)
“A Moment in Everyday Life: A Study of Kojima Nobuo’s ‘School of Stuttering’”

The Japanese novelist Kojima Nobuo (1915-2006) came to be well-known through literary critic Eto Jun’s interpretation of his work. Eto regarded Kojima’s literature as rooted in a conflict between the modern and the native. According to Eto, Kojima’s way of apprehending the world in his literary works emerges out of this conflict. Especially, as for the problem of language, Eto thought that the conflict appears as the binary opposition of “English and Japanese,” “standard Japanese and the dialect” in his literature.

However, reading Kojima’s early short stories, we notice another theme. It is “everyday life”. He tries to describe scenes of everyday life, where characters who want to live peacefully is thrown into the hard situation before they knows it. As in the novel of Franz Kafka, there is a moment of sudden transfiguration, in which situations change dramatically with surprising suddenness. He tries to describe the moment in everyday life.

In “The School of Stuttering” [Kitsuon gakuin], one of his early short stories, Kojima considers a language itself in everyday life. He represents stutter as the work of “someone invisible,” who is different from the self in spite of being inside of the self. It appears only in the moment of articulation, upon speaking the words. According to Eto, stutter may occur by a conflict between a regional dialect (=the native) and the standard language (=the modern). However, I suggest that stutter in the story reflects a foreignness in the self, rather than a conflict between the modern and the native as emphasized in Eto’s interpretation.

By showing that, what did Kojima describe? He described that there is a moment of changing the system that restricts us in everyday life.



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