부산대학교 도서관

Tanaka Yasuo's short novel Nantonaku, kurisutaru won the Bungei literary prize in 1981, to furious controversy. The novel is a young woman's account of sex and shopping in Tokyo and includes hundreds of footnotes with detailed consumer information. Most critics dismissed the text as a novelistically unsophisticated fashion guide at best or a crude paean to 1980s consumerism at worst. This article, however, argues that the text and the footnotes should be read together as a dialogue that constructs the protagonist's subjectivity and that this dialogic subjectivity contains a subtle resistance to Japan's projects of modernity.