日本のサンタクロース――カレン・テイ・ヤマシタの『熱帯雨林の彼方へ』における非同化的日系主体とその贈与精神――

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  • Japanese Santa Claus: Levi-Strauss’ Perspective of Nonassimilation and the Spirit of Charity in Karen Tei Yamashita’s <i>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</i>
  • ニホン ノ サンタクロース : カレン ・ テイ ・ ヤマシタ ノ 『 ネッタイ ウリン ノ アナタ エ 』 ニ オケル ヒドウカテキ ニッケイ シュタイ ト ソノ ゾウヨ セイシン

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<p>In the author’s note of her first postmodern novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita refers to the French Jewish anthropologist and scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss. As a young anthropologist in Brazil in the 1970s, Yamashita may have reflected herself on Levi-Strauss, who viewed Brazil through a minority perspective.</p><p>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest was completed while Yamashita was struggling to write her historical novel Brazil-Maru (1992). This novel was planned to be finished before Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. The story behind these different styles of novels reveals Yamashita’s laborious efforts in portraying Japanese colonial subjectivity in Brazil. What she saw in Brazil were colonialists who developed their own business by destroying the nature in Brazil and not Japanese immigrants as a repressed minority group, as she recognized from her own ethnic roots based on internment experiences.</p><p>Thus, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest features Yamashita’s Japanese American understanding of the Japanese immigrant in Brazil. Yamashita presents Kazumasa Ishimaru as the protagonist in the novel who is a young Japanese immigrant with a plastic ball floating a few inches above his head and is unable to assimilate into the Brazilian society. Because of his dysfunctional physical characteristics, critics view him as a postmodern antihero who is a dehistoricized character and thus represents the unrepresentable. Against the current criticisms focusing on Kazumasa’s postmodern dysfunction, this essay explores Kazumasa’s inability to assimilate in terms of it representing an autonomous immigrant subject belonging to the multiethnic nation of Brazil. Focusing on Kazumasa’s nickname “a Japanese Santa Claus” and his charitable acts, the essay analyzes the gift economy discussed by Levi-Strauss in his 1952 article, “Burned-out Santa Claus” and attempts to view Kazumasa as an actual historical representation of Japan in the 1990s. Levi-Strauss, in this article, criticizes France accepting American economic support through the Marshal Plan enacted after WWII but later blaming the United States for its capitalistic influence on the nation. Santa Claus, according to Levi-Strauss, portrays separate non-Christian elements that are not assimilated into a Catholic nation―the modern immigrant icon of American capitalism and the pre-modern ritual of nature worship. The U.S. supporting France parallels the support Japan received in the 1990s under “the New Marshall Plan”. By calling Kazumasa “a Japanese Santa Claus,” Yamashita adopts and embodies the act of giving, by reconstructing Levi-Strauss’ narrative of Santa Claus within this postmodern novel.</p><p>The essay first analyzes how Levi-Strauss’ “giving theory” is reflected in Kazumasa. The main purpose of this essay, however, is not to simply analyze Levi-Strauss’ influence on the novel but to investigate Yamashita’s intention of presenting a transnational Japanese subject whose inability to assimilate into the society eventually becomes a subject of criticism of postcolonial Brazil, which had been radically Americanized during globalization.</p>

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