Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Takako, and Yi Yangji have all written travel narratives that describe the transnational lives of women from Japan who reside and travel in countries around the world, including Argentina, France, and South Korea. Their literature combines elements of autobiography, travel writing, and fiction in stories that exemplify the movements of the modern nomad, a figure described by Vilem Flusser as one who travels back and forth between international spaces, thereby establishing cultural networks that extend across national borders. Their stories interrogate distinctions between categories of belonging, such as homeland and exile, foreigner and native, resident and wanderer.

Introduction

The transnational narrative as a literary category includes an immense variety of writings of disparate genres, ranging from practical travel guides to works of fiction set in foreign places, as exemplified by the array of texts presented in this chapter. It is a category that incorporates traditional travel writing, or first-person, non-fiction narratives, but is more capacious in its inclusion of works of fiction, third-person stories, and the wide variety of literature that generally describes travel and cross-border lives and identities in the modern age. It is a literature whose space is oriented along a network of simultaneous transversal movements across the globe in every direction, and which participates in the reshaping of transnational consciousness by dismantling borders, both national and conceptual (Edwards 2018, 29–30).

As key theorists on travel writing and transnationalism have frequently noted, modern scholarship on travel writing originally grew out of an examination of the Anglophone tradition, and has largely been focused on critiquing colonial values and imperial agendas found in texts written from a European perspective (Pratt 2018, 221). As the paradigm of transnationalism reorients studies of both travel writing and postcolonialism, transnational narratives from Japan appear as a special case, one that throws spatial binaries for a loop, as they describe movements that originate from East Asia, from one of the world’s economic powerhouses (and thus the Global North), by travelers who set out in every direction (other Pacific islands, South Korea, South America, Europe, Africa, etc.), and whose cultural and ethnic allegiances are diverse, as demonstrated by the work of the writers surveyed in this chapter.