The meaning of life: Regimes of textuality and memory in Japanese personal historiography

This paper explores cultural logics of memory-making and textuality as manifested through discursive practices in Japanese “personal historiography”. It proposes a sufficient conceptualization of the textuality of reading and writing for sociocultural analysis of memory and history from a pragmatic semiotic perspective. Through close examination of two cases of text-making, I identify writing not just as a tool for decontextualization; rather, or additionally, I demonstrate its functions to destabilize or create contexts, in particular contexts of memory-making. This view of writing allows for a perspective that sees the use and production of personal histories as a proleptic act, the one that foreshadows the ways in which texts written as historical account may be recontextualized in future contexts of reading within imagined and actual trajectories of circulation. The analysis based on this perspective reveals the central assumptions and their ironical workings in the discourse and practice of Japanese personal historiography, regarding a distinct kind of self-fashioning, memory-making, and historical consciousness.