The Present of Nanyo Fantasy as a Healing Space：Desire for Purity in Banana Yoshimoto’s <I>Niji</i>

Abstract

The Yoshimoto banana of <Niji> depicts “Nanyo” = Tihiti as a medium for healing and recovery. The space could be this medium because it was a place overflowing with purity and primacy. However, due to this desire for purity and primacy, the possibility of otherness = hybridity = uncanniness is castrated in the space. Therefore, the danger of a kind of modern violence is included in <Niji> which talks about pure and beautiful healing and recovery. In addition, Yoshimoto Banana talks about connection with the world based on the assumption of “family” as the basis for restoring “pure me” and “primary me.” However, by setting the unit of “family,” the possibility of “me=subject” who continues to worry about himself, such as Kenzaburo Oe, is eliminated.</br>Of course, this very point may be the possibility of “new literature,” and the background of the times in which individuals in the 2000s who cannot be the subject are being expressed. However, in reverse, it can also be read as a text that shows the danger that an individual in the impossibility of subjectivity in the 2000s can desire purity and unity and exclude and loathe “others.”