During a three-day visit to Taiwan, Yu Miri, a Japanese-Korean writer, attracted numerous fans at the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE). Her appeal lies not only in the gentle and graceful appearance, but also in the clear-cut yet profound ideas that she had to share.
At the Fnac Literature Cafe, (the Fnac book store was Yu Miri's official host), held at the TIBE venue, more than 200 fans queued each day to get her autograph.
Yu responded warmly to the attention, signing her name with a traditional Chinese brush.
"Redemption is something that doesn't exist; a scar can never be completely healed. I don't write for these reasons. I just feel that I would die without creation, without expressing myself," the award-winning writer said, responding to questions about her controversial, highly autobiographical works.
Yu was born in 1968, the eldest daughter of Korean parents, in Yokohama, Japan. She was the product of a broken family. Her parents separated when she was still a child, and more than once she witnessed scenes when wives of her mother's married lovers would come looking for their husbands at her home.
As the offspring of Korean parents, her school life in Japan was not easy. Yu wrote that she never spoke to any of her classmates during her high school years and on several occasions, the quite and unsociable teenager attempted suicide. At 18, she became an actress at the Tokyo Kid Brothers theater, and later she founded the Seishun Gogatsu-to theater (Youth in May).
All these unhappy experiences became material for her books, which have received a very high level of recognition in Japan. Family Movie (1997) won her the Akutagawa Literature Prize, Japan's most prestigious literature prize. She was the youngest person ever to have won this prize. Previously, her play Fish Festival had been awarded the Kishida Kunio Drama Prize. Another novel, Fullhouse, won the Izumi Kyoka Prize and Noma Bungei Newcomer Literature Prize.
Yu's writing looks at the cruel world and the darkness within her own heart. Family Movie looks at a dysfunctional family that poses as a picture of happy normality to make a family documentary film.
Fullhouse and Specimen of Family look with a cold eye at the hatred and bizarre behavior of families falling apart. Other works, such as Encyclopedia of My Private Talk has stories that reveal her ideas about sex. There is a story about a daughter's ambiguous ties with her father's mistress. They talk about sizes of breasts and share sexual knowledge and experience with each other.
In Encyclopedia, Yu Miri admits that she is writing about her own father complex and her sexual experience with different men. Also, she writes about her experiences of being sexually harassed. Instead of feeling shocked or hurt, she wrote that she even felt somewhat indulgent and let the harassment continue. "I did not feel any discomfort. To me, those men were just sad, miserable and ridiculous beings," she wrote.
Yu never resorts to sensationalism or exoticism when writing about human feelings or sex, nor has she even romanticize the world of her own misery. Tender and beautiful, Yu never shies away from reality but maintains a sense of alienated distance. Forthrightness and honesty have become her most powerful weapons in staking her claim as a writer.
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