Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy by Gabriele Koch (review)

Abstract

The decision to limit comparative digressions in this text, however, does not weaken its central argument or the importance of the two-world vision it presents. What is perhaps most exciting about Two-World Literature is that it opens a serious and thoughtful dialogue about a writer who, like so many writers today, has stepped beyond the limiting barriers of national literatures, yet has also avoided the pitfalls of one-world thinking—parochialism, universalism, hyper-relativism. There certainly is nothing parochial about Ishiguro’s writing or about his approach to the world at large. He occupies a liminal space between two cultures, bi-cultural if not quite bilingual (he does not read or write Japanese), playfully manipulating cultural stereotypes and constructing characters who, like himself, perhaps, remain just a little confused about where they are, how they got there, and where they belong. This is actually not a bad place to be; indeed, it has freed Ishiguro to reinvent the two worlds he inhabits in his own image, according to his own imagination, without reference to the expectations of others. Suter’s work has most usefully positioned Ishiguro within that body of unapologetically (and why should they apologize?) “misfit” writers who are the present and future of writing in a world that has long since gone global. Two-World Literature is a welcome contribution to the ever-widening conversation about world literature and global writing.