Postmodern Japanese Brazilian Representations: Bernardo Carvalho’s "O sol se põe em São Paulo" and Shiozaki Shōhei’s "Akaneiro no yakusoku: Sanba do kingyo"

• In Event: Asia and Latin America: Transpacific Imaginaries

Abstract

Ever since the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil in 1908, they have been included as characters in both Japanese and Brazilian cultural productions. Despite this long presence, their representations have been typically historical, emphasizing their immigration history. In this paper, I analyze two postmodern cultural products that feature Japanese Brazilians moving beyond their history of immigration: Bernardo Carvalho’s Brazilian novel O sol se põe em São Paulo (2007) and Shiozaki Shōhei’s Japanese film Akaneiro no yakusoku (2012). In both works, Japanese Brazilians facilitate the narrative, allowing for a postmodern fantasy to heal the wounds of immigration.
In Carvalho’s novel, the fourth-generation narrator seeks to untangle fact from fiction writing the story of a first-generation immigrant, Setsuko. Following her story to Japan, the narrator finds it is intertwined with his own life. In Shiozaki’s film, Ricardo, a Japanese Brazilian schoolboy in Japan stumbles on a kofun tomb where a blue goldfish swims. Wanting to know more about the blue goldfish, he befriends Hanako, a classmate whose father works in the aquaculture business. Together, they protect the fish from the town that seeks to profit from it. I argue that these two postmodern cultural productions attempt to bridge the intimate distances that are characteristic of Japanese Brazilian representations in Brazil and Japan. Moreover, through their postmodern narratives, they seek to celebrate fantasy in order to illustrate new possibilities for Japanese Brazilians beyond the disappointing failures of history.

Author

• Zelideth M Rivas, Marshall University