井伏鱒二『花の町』における多言語空間の語り方

This article examines a work titled "Hana no Machi" published by Masuji Ibuse in 1942. This work is set in Singapore, where Ibuse was commissioned as a member of the army press corps, and depicts six ethnic groups communicating with each other using various means, including their native languages and English. Many prior studies have pointed to Ibuse's strong interest in language behind this work, especially regarding the issue of the Japanese language, which was forced into a perilous position by contact with a different language. In light of this, the purpose of this paper is to clarify Ibuse's linguistic consciousness by examining how he depicted a multilingual space in which he was assumed to use only Japanese. The analysis yielded the following results. The first method is to carefully explain each utterance from intention to means and content through the narration of the ground text. The second method is to shift the point of view in the middle of the work to foreground only the Japanese and English utterances, while backgrounding the Malay and Chinese utterances. The third method is to use different styles of writing in conversational texts according to the speaker's origin, position, proficiency, etc., and to write the intermixture of languages.