Remembering or Misremembering? Historicity and the Case of So Far from the Bamboo Grove

A recent controversy in the USA centres on classroom use of Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s semi-autobiographical So Far from the Bamboo Grove (1986), a novel focused on the flight of Japanese settler families to Japan after the liberation of Korea at the end of World War II. Taught in a literary and histo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inChildren's literature in education Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 85 - 93
Main Author Lee, Sung-Ae
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.06.2008
Springer
Subjects
Asian History
Childrens Literature
Education
Foreign Countries
Japan
Korea
Language and Literature
Language Education
Linguistics
Memory
Novels
Original Paper
Social Sciences
Sociology
War
World History
South Korea
Japan
Perpetrators and victims
Historicity
Memory
Korea
World War II
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Summary:A recent controversy in the USA centres on classroom use of Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s semi-autobiographical So Far from the Bamboo Grove (1986), a novel focused on the flight of Japanese settler families to Japan after the liberation of Korea at the end of World War II. Taught in a literary and historical vacuum under the thematic umbrella of “courage and survival,” the novel has been criticised as an example of “perpetrator as victim” representation. Because of its assumed high “truth value,” life-writing positions itself very specifically as a narrative of a “witness” recounting her story. The resultant authentication of suffering may thereby render issues of historicity effectively irrelevant. Diverse interpretative communities may thus read the novel in incompatible ways.
ISSN:0045-6713
1573-1693
DOI:10.1007/s10583-007-9059-z