Exophonic Literature in Japanese as New World Literature

Abstract The dominant notion that modern Japanese literature is a national literature – written (only) by ethnic Japanese, whose mother tongue is Japanese, in the Japanese language, for a Japanese reading audience – is recently challenged by writers who are non-native speakers of Japanese, having been born and raised outside of Japan, and, after having migrated to Japan, deliberately chose Japanese as their literary language, thus becoming authors of literature in Japanese. This article shows how these writers decenter the Japanese language, Japanese literature, and ultimately ‘Japaneseness’ as such – on the plot-level of their texts as well as by stylistic and linguistic means. I argue that this kind of literature aims at de-nationalizing the understanding of ‘Japanese literature’, and in that sense can and should be read as new world literature.