The Spatial Organization of “Provisionality” and the Breakdown of Language：Bodily Border-Crossing and the Formation of Subjectivity in Hideo Levy’s Kari no Mizu

This article examines Hideo Levy’s Kari no Mizu (2008) not as a simple travelogue of inland China, but as a literary exploration of how a traveling self is formed through physical or bodily border-crossing. Border-crossing here refers not only to movement across national borders, but also to the ways a body is marked and repositioned through the other’s gaze, being named, spatial control, economic asymmetry, illness, and aging.</br>The article also approaches the text on the basis of its I-novel-like qualities, understood not as producing direct autobiography but instead a narrative form that invites readers to relate the third-person narrator to an authorial body and experience. It examines how spaces of mobility such as trains and roads, as well as departure and destination spaces like stations and hotels, repeatedly place the narrator in the position of an outsider; how religious and hygienic boundaries produce distinctions that collapse at the level of bodily sensation; and how the images of the alley and the wall bring this logic to a climax. The article ultimately argues that subjectivity in Kari no Mizu emerges not as transparent self-expression, but at the point where language falters and the self is exposed.