Nightmares in Translation: The Noir Imagination in Contemporary Asian Fiction

Texts falling under the broad categorization of ‘noir’ are unique in their navigation of the complexities between personal and national identities and the fears they elicit. Often conceptualized through what David Madden describes as 'the nightmare version of the American Dream' (9), the noir phenomenon was initially a distinctly American one. However, the concept has since traversed the historical and geographic confines of its inception. Now a popular genre across the globe, it stands to reason that in its translation to international contexts, these nightmares now manifest with terrifying diversity.
While contemporary examples of the noir imagination in Southeast Asian contexts are perhaps most closely associated with the neo—and now neon—noir films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, this paper will shift focus to its manifestation in contemporary fiction of the twenty-first century. Specifically, this analysis will concentrate on novels that have been translated into English, are widely published in international contexts, and fall broadly into the category of noir fiction. These include Pyun Hye-young’s City of Ash and Red (2010) and The Hole (2017), Natsuo Kirino’s Out (1997) and Real World (2003), Kanae Minato’s Confessions (2008) and Penance (2009), and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007).
This paper aims to address two key questions. First, how do these texts imagine this duality—the intimate struggle of individuals and the larger cultural fears they embody—as a distinctive characteristic of, and thus participate in, the noir tradition? Second, beyond their commercial value, how does classifying them as 'noir fiction' facilitate the translation and dissemination of texts that might otherwise remain inaccessible to a wider anglophone audience?