Script Choice as a Defamiliarization Technique in Kuroda Natsuko’s ab sango

ABSTRACT This article explains how writing-restricted variations in contemporary Japanese literature can be central to the author’s overall literary project, using Kuroda Natsuko’s ab sango (2012) as an example. Kuroda’s novel is written in a highly experimental style that deviates from standard Japanese writing conventions in many ways, including direction of writing, the use of Western punctuation marks, and script choice between hiragana and kanji. While many readers dismissed her style as being difficult for the sake of being difficult, this article will argue that Kuroda’s writing represents an important example of script choice being used as a defamiliarization technique – Kuroda’s unusual script choices make familiar words unfamiliar to the reader. In doing so, Kuroda defamiliarizes the Japanese language itself, revealing the arbitrariness of script choice-related rules. She also brings awareness to the fact that the Japanese writing system contains many possible ways of representing the language, beyond what is most used today. I conclude the article by comparing Kuroda’s literary aims to those of contemporary exophonic authors such as Tawada Yoko and Hideo Levy, whose works also play with the conventions of written Japanese.