When your neighbour is a bear, your fiancé – a dog, and your lover – a tuna. About human-nonhuman encounters in works of Kawakami Hiromi, Shōno Yoriko and Tawada Yōko. A critical posthuman perspective

The present paper considers encounters between humans and nonhumans (especially nonhuman animals), a theme surprisingly frequent in the fiction works of contemporary Japanese women writers. The main characters of two short stories by Kawakami Hiromi are an old-fashioned, well-bred bear, which moves into a new apartment and invites its human neighbor for a walk to the river (Kamisama, 1993), and a mole which, being perfectly aware of its nonhuman origin and appearance, works with humans in an office (Ugoromochi, 2001). The other character of Kawakami’s work, awarded with the prestigious Akutagawa prize (Hebi o fumu, 1996), meets in her real, everyday life a snake claiming to be her mother and trying to draw her into the world of snakes. In turn, in the novels by other famous women writers, Tawada Yōko and Shōno Yoriko, who are counted among the most recognized Japanese authors, we find a dog (Inu mukoiri/The Bridegroom was a dog by Tawada, 1993) and a tuna (Time Slip Industrial Complex by Shōno, 1994) as lovers of the main female characters. In their works, Japanese women writers transgress not only cultural, linguistic and geographical barriers, but above all, they go far beyond the boundaries in force in the anthropocentric universe. Addressing in their works the issue of encounters and close relationships between humans and nonhumans, they openly provoke questions that concern not only Japan, but also the world’s contemporary posthuman thought: questions about human and nonhuman actants, its body, emotions, thoughts and mutual relations in a world where men coexist with other, animate and inanimate forms of being.