Yu Miri

▪ 1998

      A writer of Korean ancestry living in Japan, Yu Miri won the Akutagawa Prize in 1997 for her novel Kazoku shinema (1996; "Family Cinema"), about a broken family modeled after her own. A narrative Möbius strip, Kazoku shinema told the story of a young woman's reuniting with long-estranged relatives to film a semifictional documentary about themselves. Written in clear and simple language, the novel alternated briskly between real-life scenes and those being filmed for the movie. Yu believed that many people hold their families together by acting out prescribed roles within the social unit. By having her characters play familial roles within their own film, she deftly underscored both the reality and the fiction of family life.

      Yu was born in Yokohama, Japan, on June 22, 1968. Her family was extremely dysfunctional. Her father was a compulsive gambler who physically abused his wife and children, and her mother was a bar hostess who frequently took the teenaged Yu along to parties, where Yu was occasionally molested. One of Yu's sisters became an actress in pornographic films. As a child, Yu became so confused about languages—when to use Japanese or Korean—that she developed a stutter.

      Because she was Korean and because of her difficult home life, Yu was often ostracized and victimized by other children at school. Her parents separated when she was a teenager; she repeatedly tried to commit suicide and was eventually expelled from high school.

      While working as an actress, Yu turned to writing plays and found that distilling her past through writing could help her come to terms with her pain. Besides Kazoku shinema her publications included nine plays, an autobiography, and an additional novel. Each of her works was unsparing in its depiction of destructive family relationships in which individuals were unable to communicate or connect with others.

      Even after receiving a top Japanese literary prize, Yu continued to feel uncomfortable as a non-Japanese in Japan. Though Kazoku shinema was written in Japanese, Yu was enthusiastically embraced in South Korea after her novel was translated into Korean. The book's publication turned up the heat on the simmering Korean-Japanese ethnic stew, however. Kazoku shinema became a best-seller in Japan but was vehemently attacked by members of the conservative press, who felt that Yu had portrayed the Japanese as fools in her novel. Her defenders argued that such critics did not like Yu simply because she was Korean. Yu then began receiving death threats. In February as she prepared to hold a book signing in Japan, a right-wing terrorist threatened to bomb the event. Although her writing was not overtly political, Yu felt that the threat to her freedom of speech forced her to take a political stand by proceeding with the book signing, which was eventually held in Tokyo in June with 24 police officers and security guards to protect her.

REBECCA RUNDALL

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