The Palimpsest City: Memory, Errancy, and Urban Subjectivity in Contemporary Arabic and Japanese Literature

Abstract

This article proposes an in-depth comparative study of representations of the city in two contemporary literary corpora, Arabic literature and Japanese literature, through a deliberately decentered problem: the city is considered not as a mere setting or narrative backdrop but as a text to be read, deciphered, and rewritten, a symbolic space charged with cultural, memorial, and identitarian meanings that literature contributes as much to constructing as to representing. By comparing the urban poetics of Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, and Ibrahim al-Koni, on the one hand, and those of Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, and Kōbō Abe, on the other, the article argues that the contemporary city constitutes in both literary traditions a paradoxical space: at once a site of dissolution of traditional identities and a space for the emergence of new forms of subjectivity and belonging. The comparison reveals that the two traditions develop convergent narrative strategies to account for the urban experience of modernity, particularly errancy, disorientation, solitude, and the archaeological reading of ruins as modes of inhabiting the city, while maintaining profound differences rooted in the specific cultural, historical, and political inheritance of each society. Finally, the article proposes the notion of the palimpsest city as a central comparatist concept, enabling an understanding of the dynamics of memory, forgetting, and reinvention that traverse both traditions.