“Ввічлива брехня” Кьоко Морі: мова як опір

Abstract

The article focuses on the book “Polite Lies” by a contemporary Japanese American author Kyoko Mori where she explores the essential problems of Japanese/American social and cultural milieu, formulating a radical verdict on the Japanese language and culture as Polite Lies. Besides being a literary genre, Mori’s book introduces a new vision in a long-standing “politeness discourse” by a wide range of social science researchers, anthropologists, pragmalinguists, sociolinguists. She definitely knows a lot more about this issue, suggesting underlying assumption. Being a transnational bicultural writer, she does not feel marginalized in America neither by ethnos nor by gender, and what is important – she feels utter alienation in Japan, the country of her childhood. In this book, Kyoko Mori considers a variety of subjects: the role of ethnicity, gender and feminism, personal relationship with the inherited culture and her right for personal freedom in choosing culture and language. She creates the image of “home” as an emotional and spiritual space rather than an ethnical location, emphasizing the primacy of personal identity over gender and ethnicity. Kyoko Mori, unlike most Asian American writers, avoids stereotypical images of Japan, as well as a stereotypical literary motif of survival and assimilation in America. Neither is she trapped by a leading theme of Asian American canon – a dramatic search for identity in a new world. Her writings manifest that she has no dilemma provoked by the conflict with the older generation of immigrants. In “Polite Lies” she analyzes those aspects of Japanese culture which restrain her freedom, which caused her to reject her own roots, and which, in fact, are responsible for her mother’s suicide that became a form of tragic escape. Realizing all these, she chooses the only possible way – to resist by speaking and writing in English, by uncompromising analysis of the hidden ethnic phenomenon of Japaneseness that could never be justified by codified ethic norms. Kyoko Mori chooses English as the language of her “voice”. In her memoir, she explains that her mother tongue does not give her freedom of self-expression and diminishes her as a woman and as a human being. Expanding on this problem, Kyoko Mori creates a central image of “polite lies” which embodies general metalinguacultural, sociocultural, psychological observations, as well as delineates the author’s personal drama. She refers to the “polite lies” as to an inherent linguistic and cultural feature of Japanese culture, outlining the inner space – finding evidence in the personal drama of her mother’s life. The book incorporates genre signifiers which are relevant to analytical and personal essays as well as to story genre that unveil the deep cultural roots of “polite lies” and Japanese women’s social, psychological and linguistic vulnerability. Kyoko Mori’s book is a synthetic genre in which the artist’s imagination vibrates with facts and analytical observations that create the images of Japan’s past and present filled with impressions, thoughts side by side with lyricism and artistic psychologism and, besides, what is obvious – reveals her resistance, radical decision to escape and never to return to Japan.