Poetika paměti v aktuálních českých překladech současné japonské literatury
The Poetics of Memory in Recent Czech Translations of Contemporary Japanese Literature

Summary/Abstract: The article examines how memory is transformed from a theme into poetics in currently translated Japanese prose: it is not only the content of memories, but also the manner of narration and organization of meaning. The introductory section outlines the reading horizon of the Czech audience, for whom Japanese literature functions as a „mirror and distance“ and at the same time as a selection shaped by translation and publishing filters. Against this background, the text defines memory as a practice that occurs in repetition, in objects, in places, and in rituals, and proposes three analytical levels: neurobiological (memory disorders), media (artefacts and memory aids), and collective-political (social forgetting, trauma). Short explorations of selected titles (Nakajima, Kawakami, Hase, Kawaguchi, Murakami) show that memory in Japanese prose often transitions from individual ownership to a shared, relational infrastructure, and that returning to the past does not serve to „correct“ facts, but rather to rewrite meaning. The core of the study is a comparison of Ogawa‘s novel The Professor‘s Beloved Equation and Hiiragi‘s framework prose Photographers of Memories. While Ogawa addresses memory as a time-limited capacity and shifts identity to mathematics, ritual, and caring for others, Hiiragi situates memory in a liminal photo studio, where the past is curated and staged through photography. The article concludes that in both cases, memory does not arise from completeness, but from working with deficiency: from how loss and selection are transformed into a narrative order that holds human life together even in moments of disintegration.

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