Fiction critique parodies and multilayered pastiches: the “relation parodique” in the works of Ogino Anna and Shimizu Yoshinori

In this paper, I focus on the “relation parodique” - echoing Daniel Sangsue’s parody of the most famous “relation critique”- that constitutes an omnipresent and structuring force in the works of two versatile contemporary Japanese authors: Ogino Anna (荻野アンナ, 1956-) and Shimizu Yoshinori (清水義範, 1947-). In Ogino’s and Shimizu’s metatextual works, parody and pastiche - whatever their different manifestations - question the notion of a writing that is closely connected to the past and deeply committed in developing the potentialities of the “new”. In other words Ogino’s and Shimizu’s way of playing with the reader’s horizon of experience, allow us to question the relation between postmodern writing and the canonical works of the past that are at once irreverently rewritten and preserved from sinking in the oblivion of a new non-reading audience. Through the examination of some specific examples, mostly taken from Ogino’s “Watashi no aidokusho” (『私の愛毒書』, 1991) and Shimizu’s “Ese monogatari” (『江勢物語』, 1991), I show how the presence of a hypotext is revealed to or concealed from the reader, and how extremely renowned texts of Kawabata Yasunari (i.e. Yukiguni and Izu no odoriko) – that constitute the common hypotext - are reshaped and subverted by an underlying critical deuxième degré. A comparative analysis of the two works that share the same hypotext highlights both the stylistic differences in literary approach and the peculiar way of playing with intertextual materials in the forms of parody or pastiche.