• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-27
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• 2010

By taking the form of a fictional autobiography, a Japanese American woman writer Lydia Minatoya tries to solve the inexpressible confliction which Japanese Americans experience in their living in America. In her first published fiction, Talking to High Monks in the Snow, the writer faithfully tries to follow the Japanese I-story tradition where meandering of personal petit histories and frequent self-pities are constructed without solid action, characters and plot. Here appear many accidental others whom function as significant yet fleeting subalterns. In contrast, in the second fiction, The Strangeness of Beauty published seven years later, the I-narratives undergoes some drastic transformations by authorial intrusion, dramatic and haiku styles, and appearances of actorial agents. Just working as an invisible yet important stagehand (kuroko in Japanese) behind the stage of life, the author now handles her own self-inquiry through more controllable distance and maturity as directors or photographers often do. However, despite achieving dramatic actions and artistic elegance mainly thanks to her adoption of western masterpieces's grand narratives, Minatoya seems to stop in the midway in her tallying work of fiction with fact by delaying the larger imaginable conflict through which the temporarily gained autonomy can be turned into a disaster anytime. Nonetheless, the reader feels relieved and encouraged after recognizing the fragile Asian female self's transformation as a new, flexible and autonomous self by her unwavering contact with two contrasting cultures and providing silent minority female characters with gradually stronger and uncannier voices.