Crickets in the weeds: Yū Miri, critical sonority, and the crises of the everyday

Abstract

Yū Miri (1968 ∼) is one of contemporary Japan’s most celebrated authors, and is particularly noted for her contributions to so-called Zainichi literature, or writing by ethnic Korean residents of Japan. Indeed, the majority of scholarship on Yū and her writing has approached both through this paradigm, and has emphasized (in different ways) questions of Zainichi-ness therein. In this essay, I offer a reading of Yū’s 1998 novel Gold Rush and ask what might be revealed if we change tactics, and foreground the sonic dimensions of her writing. Specifically, I argue for attending to what I call critical sonority, which I understand as a complex, tactical deployment of sound as trope, as a way to lay hold of a powerful critique of everyday life in contemporary capitalist Japan. This new approach to Yū’s writing helps to render audible critical interventions that cannot necessarily be reduced to (but that also does not dismiss or discount) questions of nation, ethnicity, or citizenship – and helps us to think about hitherto unheard modes of critical praxis in other libraries and forms of cultural production, as well.