@article{oai:nichibun.repo.nii.ac.jp:00000265,
 author = {TSUSHIMA, Michiko},
 journal = {Nichibunken Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies},
 month = {Jan},
 note = {This essay shows how the aphasiac experience found in the work of Kōra Rumiko (a contemporary poet born in 1932) is linked to her attempt to “overcome Japanese modernity.” According to her own account, when she was a child, she existed in a state of aphasia in a broad sense. She felt that she was outside the language that surrounded her, like a foreigner. This feeling was related to her strong “resistance to their language”–the language of the powerful, or the language of intellectuals. When she was twenty years old, language came back to her in the form of poetic language. Ko¯ra’s entire work (her poetry, novels, and criticism) is characterized by its questioning of Japanese modernity–the inability of Japanese modernity to face “the other” (especially, Asia and women). And this critique of Japanese modernity is inseparable from her reflection on the problem of language. Her work that originates from the aphasiac experience seeks to “overcome modernity” by “recovering the lost language.” In her poetry, she tries to recover language as “the place” where the subject produced by Japanese modernity is overcome.The significance of Ko¯ra’s work lies in its attempt to revive the language of “the other,” i.e. what is oppressed in the historical process of the formation of the modern nation-state of Japan which is inseparable from the formation of the national language. It tries to resuscitate the language in the emotional and primitive horizon of being, the language that is connected to action, or the language that is linked to the woman’s body.},
 pages = {153--173},
 title = {In Search of Lost Language : Kōra Rumiko and the Aphasiac Experience},
 volume = {15},
 year = {2003}
}