Tense Alternation in Japanese Literature: Translating Free Indirect Discourse and Focalization in Kashimada Maki’s Meido meguri

Haydn Trowell

doi:10.5195/jll.2021.190

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of tense alternation in Japanese literary narrative, making specific reference to Kashimada Maki’s (鹿島田真希) novella Meido meguri (冥途めぐり Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012) as a case study. It argues that tense alternation in sentence‑final predicative verbs should be regarded a stylistic technique that serves as an indicator of free indirect discourse and of focalization through a central character, and that it moreover establishes an opposition between external narration and internal focalization. It then illustrates how this dynamic is employed in Meido Meguri to create a contrast between a mode suggesting narrative distance and another suggesting mental interiority. This paper thus highlights a significant linguistic difference in the construction of free indirect discourse in Japanese and English narratives.

Highlights

In Japanese literary narratives, it is not unusual to find a frequent pattern of alternation between the ‐TA and ‐(R)U verbal conjugations, commonly termed the past and non‐past tenses respectively.[1]
Such an alternation can be found in Kashimada Maki’s 鹿島田真希 (b. 1976) novella Meido meguri (冥土めぐり Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012), which employs this phenomenon as a crucial stylistic technique in the depiction of its protagonist Natsuko
Concluding Remarks In the present paper I have proposed a solution to the tense–aspect debate that explains tense alternation in third-person Japanese‐language narratives in terms of relative tenses for conjugable parts of speech in non‐predicative positions, by which verbs in the ‐TA form indicate the anterior tense, while those in the ‐(R)U form indicate the non-anterior tense, and focalization for those in sentence‐final predicative position, by which sentences marked by the ‐TA form signal the detached, objective standpoint of the narrator, while those marked by the ‐(R)U form signal the subjective standpoint of a focal character active in the narrative

Summary

Introduction

In Japanese literary narratives, it is not unusual to find a frequent pattern of alternation between the ‐TA and ‐(R)U verbal conjugations, commonly termed the past and non‐past tenses respectively.[1]. Sentences (ii), (iii), and (vi) through (viii) in the source text are predicated by verbs in the non‐anterior ‐(R)U tense, and so temporal deixis is assigned to Natsuko in the present moment of the scene.

Results

Conclusion