Haunting and Spiraling: Unnatural Characters and Temporalities in the Fiction of Oyamada Hiroko

This dissertation sketches a descriptive poetics of two recurring features in the fiction of Oyamada Hiroko (b. 1983): characters that resist characterization and have an unstable identity, and representations of time that violate mimetic conventions. Drawing on unnatural narratology, it tests these elements against models of character and narrative time that rest on mimetic assumptions, and argues that they strain or exceed those models in ways best described by Stefan Iversen's notion of permanent defamiliarization (2016), proposing new categories to deal with Oyamada’s unnatural characters and temporalities. It then considers what recognizing these elements as antimimetic affords interpretation, finding that they reflect Oyamada’s concerns with everyday life and the sense of stagnation of the Heisei period. The thesis makes two contributions. First, it extends the study of Oyamada beyond Kōjō (The Factory, 2010) and Ana (The Hole, 2013) through close readings of seven further narratives published between 2015 and 2024, most of which have not yet received scholarly attention. Second, it brings unnatural narratology, so far applied to Japanese literature mainly in Tawada Yōko's overtly antimimetic work, to ostensibly mimetic fiction, showing how resources of Japanese grammar can produce unnatural configurations that the field did not anticipate.