Проблемы литератур Дальнего Востока

5. Literatures of Far East & South East Asia: Past and Present Issues of Far Eastern Literatures: Materials of the 11th International Scientific Conference. June 27–29, 2024 79 Sinitsyn Alexander (Kunstkamera) asin@kunstkamera.ru Gabitova Arina (SPbSU) Traditional Japanese Sword as a Carrier of Literary Narrative The Japanese sword (Nihonto) is generally regarded as an example of traditional weaponry, a piece of decorative art, an archaeological or historical artifact. However, quite often the sword acts as a specific carrier of various texts that differ in content and execution technique; some of such texts can be viewed as literary narratives in their own right. The most common sword inscriptions are fulfilled in the engraving technique on the blade tangs and are confined to the name of swordsmiths, place and date of manufacture of their blades. Such signatures are more likely of historical and epigraphic significance and, with rare exceptions, can hardly be specified as pure literary works. However, there are sword inscriptions of quite a different type. For example, some blades excavated in the 5th-6th c. burial mounds are decorated with long votive texts containing from a dozen up to a hundred or more characters inlayed in gold or silver. Such swords as “Seven Horns Sword”, “Sakitama-Inariyama Sword”, “Eta-Funayama Sword”, “Inaridai-ichi Sword” belong to this group. Another group of sword inscriptions are magic spells and mantras addressed to Buddhist guardian deities, sometimes in combination with the so-called “Buddhist characters” bonji (stylized letters of the Sanskrit alphabet symbolizing particular deities). One more group of sword inscrip- tions are short mottos or slogans, for example: “Ichi dan — issai dan” (“The first strike is the final strike”); “Yamato Damashi” — “The Spirit of Japan”; “Tenka fubu” — “Military power rules the Universe”; “Sonno: jo:i” — “Defend the Emperor, expel the barbarians”; “Ichigo-hitofuri” — “One [precious] sword for the whole life”, etc. Finally, there are blades whose main ornamental motives are poems by famous Japanese poets, both ancient and modern (10th — 20th cc.), such classic poetic masterpieces as “Poems by 6 Immortal Poets”, “Poems by 36 Immortal Poets” and “Poems by one hundred Poets” are in their number. Keywords: Japanese sword, votive text, motto, poetry. Sokolov Anatoly (IOS RAS), ansokolov@mail.ru Writer Nguyen Thanh Viet: War, Memory, Vietnam Today, Nguyen Thanh Viet is the best-known Vietnamese-American writer and intellectual leader of his national diaspora. In 2016, he, a university professor and journalist, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in the category of Best Fiction for his debut novel The Sympathizer (2015). The work is a «multi-layered immigrant story» told by «a man of two minds and two countries: Vietnam and the United States». The author mixed memory, political criticism and history. The book presents a special perspective on the war — from the perspective of how political views clash with personal attachments. Nguyen Thanh Viet was born in Vietnam in 1971, and his family moved to the United States in 1975. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and has been working at the University of Southern Cali- fornia since 1997. The writer also works in the genre of short prose and non-fiction. He is the author of the documentary novel Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), which tells about the events of the Vietnam War, a collection of short stories The Refugees (2017). His new novel The Committed, which develops the plot and themes of The Sympathizer, was released in 2021. In addition to teaching and writing, Nguyen Thanh Viet is a cultural critic for Los Angeles Times and has been honored with many awards and grants in the field of education. Keywords: literature, emigration, diaspora, Nguyen Thanh Viet, USA, Vietnam.