It’s not “I,” It’s “You”: Second Person Narratives on the Train in Butor, Kurahashi, and Tawada

Lecture by Atsuko Sakaki, Professor, Department of East Asian Studies and Center for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Sakaki writes: Taking the notion of “bordering” rather than “border-crossing” as a principle of translation (or more broadly translingual practices) to be upheld in the critical rethinking of “world literature,” I suggest that it should be entirely appropriate and productive to posit the train as an equivalent of translation: an inhabited and experienced space-time rather than a transparent medium for transfer between Point A and Point B. Often taken to be an instrument, showcase, and symptom of modernity, the train, I argue, defies modern homogeneous time and geometrical space, and fills corporeal and psychic experience with involuntary memories, kinetic movement across non-territorial spaces, and performative identities. If, instead of authenticity and fidelity, the values to be sought in translation as bordering are adjacency and reciprocity, then, rather than flattening distance between discrete places, the train itself becomes loaded with encounters with and shared experience among passengers. Those contacts are incidental and tangential yet potentially intense and haunting. With this in mind I discuss three second-person narratives of long distance railway journeys: Michel Butor’s La Modification and its pastiche; Yumiko Kurahashi’s Kurai tabi (Blue Journey); and Yoko Tawada’s Yôgisha no yakô ressha (Suspects on the Night Train). We imagine in them “you” and “I” not as two discrete entities facing each other, but being side-by-side, exchanging positions, and unraveling from each other—bordering, indeed, that the train makes happen. 

Sponsored by the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the East Asia Program Translation Initiative and, Department of Asian Studies