真杉靜枝是日治時期在臺灣成長的女性作家,對於故鄉的辯證關係,日人女性的「家」之所在,是她念茲在茲的書寫企圖。〈南方之墓〉(1934)可說是她的早期作品中,最具代表性的一篇。以日人女性的觀點,描寫殖民地空間的禁錮,男性家長制的陰影,「南方」儼然是一個墮落的殖民地隱喻,也是葬送女性青春的墳墓。但是到了1930年代末期,她開始重新詮釋臺灣,〈南方的語言〉(1941)透過木村花子的命運流轉,寄託殖民地成為日人女性新故鄉的政治寓言。這兩篇小說的敘事轉折,也印證真杉靜枝的文學轉折。從女性之墓到女性新故鄉,日人女性作家的土地認同,既投射對男性家國體制的欲拒還迎姿態,也不乏地理空間的豐饒想像。透過她的作品,可以看出當時她對愛情的期待、時代的焦慮、甚至國家的想像。
Masugi Shizue was a woman writer who grew up in Taiwan during Japanese rule on the island. The dialectical relationship between ”home” and ”homeland” had been the major concern in her writing project. The short story ”Tomb in the South” was seen the most representative one among her early works. It, from the viewpoint of Japanese woman, depicted colonial space as a prison overshadowed by patriarchal dominance. ”South” was like a metaphor of colonial degeneration and was no difference to the tomb that buried the youth of women. However, toward the end of the 1930s, she began to reinterpret Taiwan with the short story ”Language in the South”, in which the protagonist Kimura Hanako's fate was elevated to a political allegory implying that the colony had become Japanese women's new homeland. Thus, the literary turn of Masugi Shizue was embodied in the narrative turn as exemplified in these two stories. When the tomb was turned into new homeland for a woman as reflected in the stories, this writer's national identity ambivalently expressed her resistant and embracing attitudes toward male state system. These works fully exposed her eagerness for love, her anxiety over wartime, and her imagination of nation-state.