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This chapter suggests that the self facing its extinction may make particularly concerted, wild, mad reactions to the impending nothingness of its identity, in late work of a new, unbound creativity. There have, over the ages, been artists in all sorts of media who have had the capacity for self-reinvention late in their careers—often involving a whole new manner, a “late style” that is often their principal claim to greatness in the eyes of posterity. The chapter then assesses the relation of self-reinvention to self-dissolution. In the limiting circumstances of self-dissolution come such phenomena as Beethoven's late quartets—which, in his by then total deafness, he could not hear—or Matisse's late cutouts—these being a return to the art and techne of childhood at a point where he could no longer wield the paintbrush, in which one can find the brilliant invention of a new “period” in his work in response to necessity.

Early ‘Asiatic’ writers, seen as exotic and oriental outsiders, were also often expected to embody ‘foreignness’, and provide ‘alien’ perspectives on Britain, usually in prescribed terms. This chapter explores the contrasting modes of ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignising’ self-translation reproduced respectively in the writings of the self-Westernised Nirad Chaudhuri and M. J. Tambimuttu. After coming to Britain in 1938, the equally anglicised Tambimuttu adopted a self-consciously ‘Asian’ cultural identity that embodied ideas about the East produced in the West. Such assertions of cultural difference, pre-shaped in orientalist terms for Western consumption, do not transform the centre, and offer a marked contrast to Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao's politicised efforts to nativise Standard English and to ‘Indianise’ the European novel. Unlike Anand who moved in radical political circles, on arrival in Britain Tambimuttu gravitated towards counter-cultural aesthetic movements. Tracing Chaudhuri's and Tambimuttu's varied development from the 1940s and 1950s onwards, this chapter shows that ironically Tambimuttu's self-reinvention as an ‘Asian’ allowed him to engage and be absorbed into his new environments to a far greater extent than the self-colonised Chaudhuri.

This book examines the everyday lives of Japanese migrants who have reinvented themselves as artists in contemporary New York City. Drawing on research carried out between 2005 and 2006 in New York City and between 2003 and 2007 in Tokyo, the book explores the tension between optimistic self-reinvention and material and logistical constraints on self-realization, as well as the more ephemeral and intangible qualities in NYC that migrants value so highly. Focusing on the bohemian, artistic class of Japanese migrants—visual artists, graphic designers, fashion designers and stylists, dancers, musicians, and writers—the book approaches migration as well as the narrative and representational practices surrounding it as forms of aspirational self-making. It shows that the story of Japanese migrant artists in NYC offers important insights about Japan beyond its borders. This introduction uses everyday life as a framing device rather than an explicit theoretical concept, drawing from Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday as the mundane moments where the “ordinary man” or “common hero” subverts and resists hegemonic power in creative ways.

This chapter examines what it calls the triumphalist migrant narrative through conversations with Japanese migrants in New York City. Through an analysis of two historical fictional stories by migrants living abroad, Nagai Kafū's “Nezame” and Mori Ōgai's “Maihime,” the chapter shows that the migrant's trajectory out of Japan and to NYC is about “pushing the reset button” on life, a means of starting life anew as an adult. It also explores the ways in which the triumphalist migrant narrative fetishizes the everyday as the paradigmatic site for individual self-reinvention. Comparing urban everyday life in NYC with that in Tokyo, it argues that the former is fetishized as a symbol of social dynamism completely absent at home. Finally, it interprets Japanese migration to NYC as a practice of jibun sagashi, or self-searching.

This epilogue shows that Japanese migrants see New York City as an ideal stage for enacting grand projects of self-reinvention; they go to NYC to realize the selves they aspire to and imagine themselves to be, rather than discover who they “really are.” It cites the case of Naoko to discuss some of the typical difficulties faced by migrants who return home to Japan, particularly in terms of the job market. Returnees tend to reflect longingly on NYC and speak nostalgically of their time there, rather than talk about the process of reintegration. It also explores issues of aging and gender for returnees, along with the idea of “blank spaces” in migrant work histories. Finally, it highlights the ambivalence inherent in Japanese migration—the uncertainty about whether or not one is really engaging in the kinds of self-reinvention one purports to.