Baku Yamanoguchi’s Literary Space and Epistemic Distance －Okinawa and Tokyo, and a Poet standing in between－

Abstract

This study assessed the aspects of the literary space perceived by the Poet Baku Yamanoguchi of Okinawa. He was born in Okinawa and started his writing activities in earnest in Tokyo. The time when Baku Yamanoguchi wrote, living in Tokyo is the period when cognitive interaction and discourse became concrete as the view of the main land of Japan on Okinawa and Okinawa’s view of the main land of Japan crossed. Baku Yamanoguchi’s literary world that could not but have physical and cognitive distances from both Tokyo and Okinawa could not but be placed in multiple locations in which he could not belong to either accordingly. In addition, sometimes, he took on a task that he should reproduce his innate environment in a strange way. In his poems, Okinawa was represented as a place where denial and affirmation could be established simultaneously or space that could hardly be expressed without contradictory language. His boundary experiences in which he repeatedly had identity confusion and loss of self, sought orientations and had missing views describe Okinawa, but it is desperately impossible to pass on the information about Okinawa.