Shibasaki Tomoka's Literature of Location

Abstract

The writer Shibasaki Tomoka (b. 1973) grew up in Osaka and still considers herself to be an Osakan through and through, although she has now lived in Tokyo for well over a decade. Her first novel, A Day on the Planet (Kyō no dekigoto, 2000), was turned into a (substantially different) film in 2003. Many of her stories and novels are set in the Kansai region of Japan, and in 2006 she won the Oda Sakunosuke Prize, at that time awarded to works with a connection to Kansai. In 2014, when she won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, for her novella Spring Garden (Haru no niwa), she was a decade and a half into her writing career. The story translated here, “Right Here, Right Here” (Koko de, koko de, 2011), is the product of Shibasaki’s mid-career, at a point when she was starting to give greater attention to questions of memory and history. Even in Tokyo, Shibasaki continues to write stories set in her native Osaka. Her Osakan characters speak to one another in the dialect of Osaka, Osaka-ben, which Shibasaki rightly distinguishes from Kansai-ben, the more commonly applied term encompassing the dialects of the entire region. To outsiders, Osaka-ben is often considered earthy and brash; it is heard across the nation as the province of Japanese comedy. For many Osakans,