What does it mean to speak in the voice of a mother who cannot speak her “mother tongue”? To write of an ethnic body that has been forcibly de-ethnicized through the processes of assimilation? This chapter answers such questions by highlighting the works of three major Zainichi Korean women writers: Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil. Through close readings of Lee’s Nagune Taryon: Eien no tabibito (Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler), Yū’s Uo no matsuri (Festival for the Fish), and Che’s Jini no pazuru (Jini’s Puzzle), the chapter shows how these writers turn the contradictions and pluralities of the ethnic body into the source of cogent feminist critique.

Introduction

What does it mean to speak in the voice of a mother who cannot speak her “mother tongue”? To write of an ethnic body that has been forcibly de-ethnicized through the processes of assimilation? In the writings of Zainichi (lit. residing in Japan) Korean authors Lee Jungja, Yū Miri, and Che Sil, the answers to such questions are necessarily plural, and necessarily dialogic: oriented not only to the Japanese body politic that comprises their primary readership, but also to the heavily male-dominated canon of Zainichi literature itself. Like other texts in that canon, the works highlighted in this chapter—Lee’s poetry collection Nagune Taryon: Eien no tabibito (1991, Nagune Taryong: Eternal Traveler*), Yū’s play Uo no matsuri (1992, Festival for the Fish*), and Che’s novella Jini no pazuru (2016, Jini’s Puzzle, 2016; translated as The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart*)—also feature fractured families, anxieties of linguistic/ethnic/national belonging, and the long shadow of Japan’s imperial past. But rather than discourses on mother tongues, we find literal mothers and their literal tongues; rather than the psyches of abusive fathers or husbands, we find the scars of abused women; rather than the troping of ethnic signifiers, we find the material signs of ethnicity.

These writers’ emphasis on the materiality and historicity of the gendered, racialized body is especially significant given the intertwined nature of nationalism and family ideology in modern East Asia. As Anne McClintock has argued,