In 2004, Yuko Tsushima and Annie Ernaux, two of the most groundbreaking feminist writers of their generation, met in Tokyo to discuss everything from motherhood, abortion, and the Iraq War, to the ongoing challenges faced by women writers in France and Japan. Along the way, they offered deep and generous readings of one another’s work, revealing the extent to which their literary approaches converged along common themes and concerns, even as they wrote from distinctly different literary traditions.
While literary influence often mirrors geo-political hierarchies, with writers outside ‘the West’ far more likely to be familiar with the work of writers within it than vice versa, Ernaux was well aware of Tsushima’s work at a time when few others in Europe and the United States were—to the extent that she included a quote from Tsushima’s novel O Dreams, O Light! in the epigraph to her 2000 novel Happening: “I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end.”
During their conversation, Ernaux and Tsushima communicated through an interpreter named Shigeki Hori, who is also Ernaux’s main translator into Japanese, and the resulting dialogue was published in the fall 2004 print edition of Mita Bungaku, a Japanese literary journal.
Yet, for many years, the dialogue languished in obscurity, as it was only available through an old back number in Mita Bungaku’s archives. It was only after Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in 2022 that a reader alerted Tsushima’s daughter, the writer and playwright Nen Ishihara, to the fact that a quote from one of her mother’s novels appeared in the epigraph to Ernaux’s Happening—which in turn led Ishihara to learn, long after her mother’s death, that Ernaux and Tsushima had met one another, and that a record existed of their conversation at all.
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