Sospensione e cristallizzazione spazio-temporale nelle prime opere di Ogawa Yōko

This article focuses on the concepts of time and space in the earliest novels written by Ogawa Yōko (b.1962). Influenced by the religion practiced by her family, the Konkō-kyō, Ogawa creates a new world where there are no boundaries between spaces and times, and all the creatures can live in the same settlement moving now in the present now in the past. A certain distinction between the Japanese concepts of uchi and soto is however maintained. All the aspects introduced above, can be easily seen in particular in the short novels Agehachō ga kowareru toki, Kanpekina byōshitsu and Shishū suru shōjo. Rather than focusing on the story itself, Ogawa shows the feelings of the characters, mainly women, twisted like new concepts of space and time.