In his talk, Prof. Kono will discuss the question of plurilingualism in contemporary Japanese literature in the contexts of recent trends in Japanese literary studies in and outside Japan. In particular, the talk will focus on the question of how the protagonist of Mizumura Minae’s Shishosetsu from Left to Right (1995) decided to write a novel in Japanese within the cultural and academic milieus of the 1980s in the United States. The presentation will be given in English.