The local and the universal: rereading Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Milky Way Railroad
The local and the universal: rereading Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Milky Way Railroad

Summary/Abstract: The book analysed in the present paper is a popular work belonging to one of Japan’s highly appreciated authors, Kenji Miyazawa (1896 – 1933). The study addresses the question of translatability in a particular cultural environment. By introducing and analyzing the way that this notion may be applied to Miyazawa’s text, we intend to outline and explain the interaction between different cultural levels at the beginning of the twentieth century: the scientific one – as a part of the Western inheritance – and the Japanese one – as a representative for the East by that time. What we intend to obtain consists of a better way to deal with non-Western cultural areas’ otherness, one of the most recent concerns which are present within any of the East-West dialogues. Through the simple vocabulary that he uses in his short novel called Milky Way Railroad, Miyazawa manages to direct the attention of the readers worldwide towards some of the local (Japanese) values that merge with many universal values. It is the stories that Miyazawa creates, that make his text easy to permeate East and West, as well as many other cultural areas. It is his imagery that changes the local symbols into a significant part of our universal cultural inheritance, bringing Miyazawa closer to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

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