Masao Miura’s Autobiographical Narrative: Un-Soviet Practices in Soviet Kazakhstan

Abstract

The article analyzes the memoirs of Masao Miura about his life in the USSR. The aim of the publication is to introduce Miura’s recollections into academic discourse and to highlight the significance of his autobiographical narrative. The author examines Miura’s behavioral patterns and his strategies of adaptation within a new social context. Particular attention is given to narrative techniques in his stories about rural Kazakhstan in the 1940s and 1950s – an environment inhabited by many repressed individuals and marked by pockets of archaism within a rapidly modernizing region. Having escaped ideological indoctrination, Miura lived with greater personal freedom than ordinary Soviet citizens, which allowed him to build a successful career. Nevertheless, he eventually returned to the occupations he had observed as a child in Sakhalin – fishing and hunting. What began as a life path shaped by coercion ultimately transformed into one guided by personal choice rooted in childhood experience.