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Document Type

Article

Abstract

Contrary to its title, the 1968 Nobel Laureate for Literature Kawabata Yasunari's early diary Jyurokusai no nikki (Diary of a Sixteen Year Old) is anything but an unassuming chronicle of a single year in a young man's life. The complicated structure of reality in this work is constituted by homologous realities belonging to several distinct discourses which when read together co-signify something that none separately could. Certainly, we become privileged readers who, as we read, share a quest not just to perfect the mandate of self-knowledge but also to perfect the language of memory, identity and culture as the privileged, precarious instruments of its representation. But the very illusion of reality is revealed, illusion, as reality breaks down into questioning and circular subjectivity. Hence, a reading of the diary cannot help but hold a dual focus. On the one hand, it calls attention to the importance of component texts, insisting that the autonomy of individual texts--or the sedimentation that I have read as abstracted story--is a misleading notion and that a work has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Each is the artifact of a performance we recognize as self-discovery, and when taken together, the resultant hierarchy of discourses signifies a dynamic performance corresponding to a synergic reality not necessarily manifested in any single instance of specific discourse. Yet, insofar as it focuses on intelligibility, on meaning and the configuration of meaning, such a reading on the other hand acknowledges the contributions of component texts to a composite code via an overt instance of manipulation that makes possible the various effects of signification. In fact, the structuring itself signifies that each component text cannot be seen as analogous to--reduced to, as it were--individual perspectives of some amorphous reality. In addition to the failures and confusions of memory, these representations are inscribed within an infinitely complex process of deciding what from a lifetime of experience is to be included, what can be left out, what and whom, where and when to stress, and when to subordinate.

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