Recreating Woman's Identity in a Trans-cultural In-between Oba Minako's Oregon yume juya

It’s through the intercultural – or trans-cultural – dimension of the years spent abroad, in Alaska, that the writing of Ōba Minako trascends the limits of time and space and develops a new feminine subjectivity. Cultural identity of the migrant – or of the wanderer – is a constant process of construction and deconstruction, doubt, desperate but also false and weaving conviction (Azade, 2001). And the matter sharpens when not only cultural or ethnic belonging, but also gender itself is brought into question (Bhabha, 1994). Still, this displaced identity is free from the strict conventions of Japanese society, as well as from social and cultural structures of the new country. Not completely belonging to one of these universes, the female characters in Ōba Minako’s work can realize themselves as complex, independent, complete women. It’s from this point of view that the present paper aims to read Oregon yume jūya, a poignant and sometimes ironic scrutiny of the migrant experience articulated in terms of a critique to the traditional Japanese patriarchal culture. Here Ōba, some years after her experience abroad, choose to openly deal with autobiographical writing, a genre that has for long time been the favoured expression of subjectivity and, therefore, often adopted in the migrant literature. The main character – in a phase of the writer’s path that we propose to define “post-feminist”- is neither a woman who suffers nor a woman who loves, but a woman who thinks: a subversive and unconventional figure that neither apologizes nor is tamed. The emergence of this new feminine subjectivity is the result of a creative process spread in the ambiguous and ambivalent space between cultures and languages.