Non-English Illness Narratives: New theoretical approaches

The necessity of advancing the study of illness narratives written in non-English languages and produced in non-Anglophone contexts, as well as for developing theoretical frameworks that account for the linguistic and cultural specificities of those settings is the argument of this paper. Specifically, it advocates for a linguistically and theoretically grounded approach to illness narratives that engages with the distinctive cultural and social background of Japan.It examines how, in countries like Japan—where traditional patriarchal ideologies remain deeply rooted, and where women's speech and eloquence are often culturally devalued and suppressed—the theoretical framework of illness narratives, which centers on the act of "telling" as a form of self-expression, patient agency, and meaning-making, may not fully align with the cultural realities of Japanese society. Drawing on published Japanese illness narratives, this study highlights the discrepancies between these narrative theories—largely developed in Anglophone contexts—and the sociocultural conditions in Japan, where women have historically been valued more for their silence and obedience than for their ability to express or articulate their experiences.Analysing illness narratives through published works, both fiction and nonfiction, has become a common methodological approach in the medical humanities. However, this practice often presumes that the texts being analysed are written in English. Examined in this study is how established methods of illness narrative analysis may encounter limitations when applied to a Japanese literary text: Mitomerarenu Yamai (1992) by Keiko Yanagisawa. The book is based on the author’s experience of living with an undiagnosed illness and feeling abandoned by the medical system, both as a woman and as a person. The interpretive dissonance that arises when theories developed in Anglophone contexts are applied to narratives shaped by different cultural and linguistic backgrounds is explored. Also reflected in the study is the discomfort that may emerge when researchers translate and present such illness narrative texts as though they were originally written in English without explaining how they were translated.Ultimately, greater attention to the linguistic, gendered, and cultural dimensions of illness narratives is called for. The argument in this paper is for the inclusion of non-Anglophone perspectives, which have been largely overlooked, in the broader discourse of illness narratives, narrative medicine and the medical humanities.