Literature After Fukushima: From Marginalized Voices to Nuclear Futurity 9781032258577, 9781032258584, 9781003285328

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Editors’ Note
List of Contributors
Introduction
PART 1 Marginalized Voices
1 Real Eyes Realize Real Lies: Writing ‘Fukushima’ through the Child’s Gaze
2 Animal Stories: Agency after Radiation
3 Voice and Voicelessness: Reading Tōhoku Vernaculars in Post-3.11 Literature
PART 2 Spatial Acts
4 From That Day Forward: Tōhoku, 3.11, and ‘Memory Landscapes’
5 The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village: The Production of Post-3.11 Space in Sakate Yōji’s Lone War
6 Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism—Documentary Theater Responding to the Fukushima Disaster
PART 3 Border-Crossing
7 Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary
8 Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman
PART 4 Nuclear Futurity
9 Humanism and the Hikari-Event: Reading Ōe With Stengers in Catastrophic Times
10 Afterword: Chernobyl’s Past and Fukushima’s Remembered Future
Index

Citation preview

Literature after Fukushima

This book analyzes the social impact of literary works addressing Japan’s 3.11 ‘triple disaster’—2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through an examination of the key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature, the book explores the ongoing dimensions of the disaster, demonstrating how it reframed both social reality and discourse, including trauma studies, ecocriticism, regional identity, food safety, and civil society. The contributions discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts in the literary world, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity in the years after the triple disaster. The cultural productions explored offer a glimpse into the public imaginary and demonstrate how disasters can fundamentally reshape our individual and shared conception of both history and the present moment. This book contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the postdisaster climate of Japanese society, adding new perspectives through literary analysis, and will thus be of interest to scholars and students of Japanese and Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Environmental Humanities, as well as Cultural and Transcultural Studies. Linda Flores is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and the Fellow in Japanese Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford, UK. Barbara Geilhorn is Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo (DIJ) and Adjunct Researcher at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Japan.

Asia’s Transformations Edited by Mark Selden Cornell University, USA

The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asia’s transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyse the antecedents of Asia’s contested rise. 1. Denying the Comfort Women The Japanese State’s Assault on Historical Truth Edited by Rumiko Nishino, Puja Kim and Akane Onozawa 2. National Identity, Language and Education in Malaysia Search for a Middle Ground between Malay Hegemony and Equality Noriyuki Segawa 3. Japan’s Future and a New Meiji Transformation International Reflections Edited by Ken Coates, Kimie Hara, Carin Holroyd and Marie Söderberg 4. Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives Gwyn McClelland 5. Popular Culture and the Transformation of Japan—Korea Relations Rumi Sakamoto & Stephen Epstein 6. The Making of Modern Korea, 4th Edition Adrian Buzo 7. Literature after Fukushima From Marginalized Voices to Nuclear Futurity Edited by Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Asias-Transformations/book-series/SE0401

Literature after Fukushima From Marginalized Voices to Nuclear Futurity

Edited by Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-25857-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25858-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28532-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Editors’ Note List of Contributors Introduction

vii viii ix 1

LINDA FLORES AND BARBARA GEILHORN

PART 1

Marginalized Voices 1 Real Eyes Realize Real Lies: Writing ‘Fukushima’ through the Child’s Gaze

9 11

AIDANA BOLATBEKKYZY

2 Animal Stories: Agency after Radiation

29

DOUG SLAYMAKER

  3  Voice and Voicelessness: Reading Tōhoku Vernaculars in  Post-3.11 Literature

47

KRISTINA IWATA-WEICKGENANNT

PART 2

Spatial Acts 4 From That Day Forward: Tōhoku, 3.11, and ‘Memory  Landscapes’ LINDA FLORES

67 69

vi

Contents

5 The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village: The Production of Post-3.11 Space in Sakate Yōji’s Lone War

91

JUSTINE WIESINGER

6 Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism—Documentary Theater Responding to the Fukushima Disaster

109

BARBARA GEILHORN

PART 3

Border-Crossing

125

  7  Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary

127

DAN FUJIWARA

8 Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman

143

CHIARA PAVONE

PART 4

Nuclear Futurity

161

  9  Humanism and the Hikari-Event: Reading Ōe With  Stengers in Catastrophic Times

163

MARGHERITA LONG

10 Afterword: Chernobyl’s Past and Fukushima’s Remembered Future

180

RACHEL DINITTO

Index

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Acknowledgments

The Tanaka Symposium in Japanese Studies on ‘Literature after 3.11,’ which was held at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, in 2017, marks the inception of Literature after Fukushima. At the time of the symposium, the cultural meanings associated with the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima were still very much in a state of flux. In subsequent years, together with other scholars in the then-nascent field of ‘3.11 studies,’ we embarked on a collaborative journey that mapped out issues raised by the disaster in a growing body of literary works. We would like to thank our contributors for their shared conceptual vision, ongoing commitment, and continued cooperation throughout the publication process. We gratefully acknowledge the Tanaka UK Japan Educational Foundation, whose generous support paved the way for the intensive scholarly exchange at the symposium that ultimately resulted in this publication. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Pembroke College, the University of Oxford, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo. Their funding was invaluable in bringing this project to its completion. Special thanks go to series editors Stephanie Rogers and Mark Selden for their unwavering support and to Hilary Monihan for her consummate professionalism and meticulous copyediting work.

Editors’ Note

Japanese names are given according to the East Asian convention of family name first, unless Japanese authors are writing in a language other than Japanese. The Hepburn system of romanization has been employed throughout, except in cases where an established convention exists for corporate or individual names. Unless specifically acknowledged, all translations included in this volume are attributable to the author of the respective chapter.

Contributors

Aidana Bolatbekkyzy received her MA in Cultural Studies from Nagoya University, Japan, in 2020. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on contemporary Japanese confinement literature. She has a forthcoming publication on food in the nuclear Capitalocene. Rachel DiNitto is Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. Her current research focuses on post-3.11 cultural production. In addition to her monograph Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster (2019), she has published on films and manga relating to the disaster and postwar Japan. Her publications also appear in Religions, The Asia-Pacific Journal, and Japan Forum and in the edited volumes The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga (Roman Rosenbaum, ed., Routledge 2020), The Japanese Cinema Book (Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips, eds., 2020), and Negotiating Disaster: ‘Fukushima’ and the Arts (Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, eds., Routledge 2017). Linda Flores is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and the Fellow in Japanese Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford. She has published on topics including 3.11 fiction and manga as well as on gender and women’s writing. Her current research focuses on identity and historical memory in literary and cultural productions from the Tōhoku region produced after 3.11. Recent publications include ‘Matrices of Time, Space, and Text: Intertextuality and Trauma in Two 3.11 Narratives’ in Japan Review (2017); ‘Jibun no aidentiti e—Takahashi Takako Sora no hate made to Moriyakku Tere-zu Dekeruu’ in Sekai bungaku to Nihon kindai bungaku (Noami Mariko, ed., 2019); and ‘Kouno Fumiyo’s Hi no tori (Bird of the Sun) series as documentary manga: Memory and 3.11’ in Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (2019). Dan Fujiwara is Associate Professor at the University of Toulouse—Jean Jaurès (France) and Research Fellow at the French Research Institute for Eastern Asia (IFRAE). After receiving his PhD from Paris Diderot University, he shifted his

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focus from modern French literature to contemporary Japanese literature. His current research focuses on ‘border-crossing literature’ (ekkyō bungaku) and post3.11 literature, especially the works of Rībi Hideo, Mizumura Minae, and Tawada Yōko. Most recently he published ‘Spherical Narrative Temporality in Tawada Yōko’s Fiction,’ in Tawada Yōko: On Writing and Rewriting (Doug Slaymaker, ed., 2020); ‘Tawada Yōko no shinsaigo shōsetsu ni okeru anji toshite no shinsai. Shinsaigo bungaku no dokusharon no tameni’ in Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku’ (Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai, eds., 2021); and ‘Travel in Rībi Hideo’s Novels or the Search for an Alternative Writing Style in Japanese’ in Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction (Herbert Jonsson, Lovisa Berg, Chatarina Edfeldt, and Bo G. Jansson, eds., 2021). Barbara Geilhorn is Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo (DIJ) and Adjunct Researcher at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. Before joining the DIJ, she worked as Lecturer at the University of Manchester, at Free University Berlin, and at the University of Trier. She has participated in various international projects on Japanese culture and theater and held scholarships from the German Research Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Humboldt Foundation. Dr. Geilhorn has published widely on cultural representations of the Fukushima disaster, negotiations of gender and power in classical Japanese culture, and stagings of contemporary society in Japanese performance. Her recent publications include ‘Towards a Culture of Responsibility—Relating Fukushima, Chernobyl, and the Atomic Bombings in Setoyama Misaki’s Theatre’ in Japan Forum (2021) and the co-edited books Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre (with Peter Eckersall et al., 2021) and Fukushima and the Arts (with Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, Routledge 2017). Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt is Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at Nagoya University, Japan. Her work has focused on geographies of marginality and marginalization in contemporary Japanese literature. Her research is informed by the framework of gender studies, postcolonial literature studies, and ecocritical approaches to literature. She has widely published on Zainichi Korean minority literature, literary representations of precarity, and cultural responses to the Fukushima disaster of 2011. Recent publications include Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (co-edited with Barbara Geilhorn, Routledge 2017); ‘The roads to disaster, or rewriting history in Yū Miri’s JR Ueno Station Park Exit’ in Contemporary Japan (2019); ‘Broken Narratives, Multiple Truths: Writing History in Yū Miri’s The End of August’ in positions: asia critique (2020); and ‘Kuso mamire no inochi—kyapitarosen hihan toshite Kimura Yūsuke no Seichi Cs o yomu’ in Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku’ (Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai, eds., 2021). Margherita Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at UC Irvine. In her first book, This Perversion Called

Contributors

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Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory and Freud (2009), she wrote about the impossibility of female subjectivity and ‘mother-love’ in Tanizaki’s novels from the 1930s. She is currently working on her second book, Carework, Affect, Crackup: Fukushima and Environmental Humanities. Recent publications include ‘Covid Cough and Fukushima Novels: On the Not-Bareness of Life in Environmental Humanities’ in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (2021) and ‘Kimura Yūsuke sakuhin to Kobayashi Erika sakuhin no bokei o tadoru’ in Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku’ (Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai, eds., 2021). Chiara Pavone is a PhD candidate in Japanese Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her BA in East Asian History and Culture from the University of Bologna (2011) and MA in Japanese Language and Literature from Ca’ Foscari University (2015). She is in the process of writing her dissertation on embodiment and the aesthetics of radioactivity in works of post-3.11 literature. Her research interests include ecocriticism, disaster studies, and queer studies. Her latest publication is ‘Shintai to tekisuto: “Shintai bungaku toshite no Itō Seikō sakuhin” ’ in Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku’ (Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai, eds., 2021). Doug Slaymaker is Professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on literature and art of the 20th century, with particular interest in the literature of post-3.11 Japan and of animals and the environment. Other research projects examine Japanese writers and artists traveling to France. He is the translator of Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge (2019) and Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (2016). He is currently working on a translation of Kimura Saeko’s Sono go: shinsai bungakuron. Justine Wiesinger is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Bates College. She completed her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University in 2018. Dr. Wiesinger’s research focuses on the intersections of performance and disaster in Japan, primarily the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters. Her published research includes ‘Glacier or Iceberg? Spatial, Temporal and Contextual Distance in an International Performance of Okada Toshiki’s Time’s Journey Through a Room’ in Asian Theatre Journal (Spring 2021).

Introduction Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn

Literature after Fukushima: An Introduction More than 10 years have passed since March 11, 2011, the day the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster struck Japan’s Tōhoku region. In the days following the earthquake, the massive scale of the catastrophe could scarcely be imagined; over a decade later, the haunting images of the disaster and the moving stories of its aftermath remain firmly embedded in the collective cultural consciousness. The earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant—frequently referred to as a ‘triple disaster’ or ‘3.11’—have had long-lasting and far-reaching consequences. The triple disaster claimed close to 20,000 lives in what was already a sparsely populated region in Japan, and hundreds of thousands of buildings either were destroyed or sustained damage. Since 2011, the reconstruction effort in coastal areas damaged by the tsunami has continued apace, but many towns now house a mere fraction of their former population. The events of 3.11 placed nuclear power and its concomitant issues into even sharper relief than before, and the problems related to the decontamination of irradiated zones remain unresolved. As of 2022, over 40,000 Fukushima evacuees are still unable to return to their homes (McCurry 2021). Over a million tons of contaminated water from the molten reactors may be released into the Pacific Ocean when the tanks at the nuclear power plant reach full capacity by summer or autumn 2023, which will have devastating consequences for local fisheries, agriculture, and the environment (Jiji Press 2022). Against this complex background, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were held, belatedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the summer of 2021. Designated as the ‘Recovery and Reconstruction Games,’ the Tokyo Olympics were meant to celebrate the recovery of the calamity-stricken areas and to signal to the world the official end of the 3.11 disaster. Elaborate arrangements for the games involved support for affected regions and engagement through sporting and cultural events, but many of these plans were either canceled or scaled back dramatically in response to the pandemic. In July and August of 2021, with polls suggesting that 80 percent of the public were broadly against the Olympics going ahead as scheduled (Cleveland 2021), a subdued version of the games was held with few spectators and stringent limitations on the movement of its participants. Arguably, the pandemic pushed the triple DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-1

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disaster and its lingering aftereffects even further out of the public eye. Despite the arrival of the 10-year anniversary of 3.11 in March 2021, it is clear that the recovery is far from complete. Analyzing key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature, Literature after Fukushima aims to keep the ongoing dimensions of the disaster and its global implications at the center of public and scholarly debates. In the decade since the March 11 disaster, the literary community gradually produced works responding to the catastrophic series of events. Some authors expressed a compulsion to write, a sentiment frequently stymied by the frustration of not knowing how best to respond to a crisis of this magnitude. In many ways, such reactions echoed those of authors of genbaku bungaku (atomic bomb literature) dealing with the unprecedented experience of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. As with atomic bomb literature, the question of legitimacy in writing about traumatic events also came to the fore after March 11: Should writing about 3.11 be restricted to those who experienced it firsthand, or perhaps to those who were directly impacted by it? Could those who were not present at the disaster comment on it with any sense of moral authority? These were just some of the ethical quandaries facing authors and scholars in the years and months after March 11. Since then, the creative arts have continued to negotiate this complex positionality, with writers articulating their individual responses through their works. In the world of academia, scholars have followed closely on their heels, examining the artistic productions engendered by 3.11 and its lasting legacy. Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt’s edited volume—Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (2017)—represented the initial wave of 3.11 studies, focused specifically on how the disaster was first portrayed in the literary and visual arts. For many writers, 3.11 constituted a significant turning point; the series of cataclysmic events heralded a new age, a post-3.11 existence that signaled, above all else, fundamental transformations in the fabric of society after ‘that day’ (ano hi), as March 11, 2011, is frequently referred to in both the media and the arts. Literary scholar Kimura Saeko was among the first to designate the period following ‘that day’ as shinsaigo, ‘post-earthquake disaster,’ or simply put, ‘post-3.11’ (Kimura 2018). This declaration raises critical questions: What does it mean to designate an era as ‘post,’ and how does it alter our outlook on the disaster? How does it influence our perspective on the world before the events occurred? Moreover, how does the term ‘post-3.11’ relate to our perception of the ongoing dimensions of the disaster? Time is an important factor in how we interpret the disaster and its consequences. How will the temporal distance of more than 10 years since 3.11 facilitate new approaches to literary works in the years to come? And how will we look at Fukushima literature as part of worldwide developments? Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai’s edited anthology of essays in Japanese, ‘Postdisaster Fiction’ as World Literature (Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku’) (2021) reveals the global nature of research on 3.11 literary productions, contextualizing it as part of ‘world literature.’ The extraordinary nature of the triple disaster notwithstanding, the Fukushima calamity must be situated within

Introduction 3 the broader global context of our contemporary disaster-prone world. Combining a spatial and historical approach, Rachel DiNitto’s monograph (2019) is a key step in this critical direction. Moving from the here and now of the epicenter in Northeastern Japan to national and supranational perceptions of various disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Chernobyl, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, DiNitto sets Fukushima literature in the broader perspective of transnational fiction on catastrophes. The events of 3.11 not only inspired the creative arts but also gave rise to new terms of reference and to fresh ways of looking at the world post-3.11. Literature after Fukushima stands as a testament to this sea change, demonstrating how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and continued unfolding—reframed both social reality and discourse in various areas, including trauma studies, ecocriticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and more. The chapters included in this collection examine aspects of these perspectival shifts in the literary world; the authors show how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the calamity and, in doing so, their works trace the reshaping of Japanese identity in the years after 3.11. The book delves into scholarship by both new and established writers on a wide range of artistic and literary productions, including contemporary theater, public speeches, poetry, and fiction. While the anthology commemorates the events of 2011, it also presents the act of thinking about 3.11 as praxis—as a way of projecting forward into new scholarly directions enabled by the disaster and its associated meanings. The chapters in this book analyze discrete works of literature, but they also construct a dialogue with one another. As editors, we see 3.11 as having given rise to a distinctive mode of analysis shaped by the events of the Great East Japan Earthquake and its impact over the past 10 years and beyond. We hope that Literature after Fukushima will not only memorialize these important works but also gain synergistic momentum with existing and subsequent scholarship. The triple disaster affected the most vulnerable in society in disproportionate ways, and the voices of the disenfranchised are frequently overlooked in scholarship on Fukushima, instead relegated to the realm of the symbolic. A driving force of Literature after Fukushima is our collective desire to shift the focus from center to periphery in our analyses; in other words, we aim to give a voice to those marginalized in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters and to explore their attempts to rebuild communities and lives shattered by the disaster.

Marginalized Voices Chapter 1 of the anthology, ‘Real Eyes Realize Real Lies: Writing “Fukushima” through the Child’s Gaze,’ centers on the representation of children in post-Fukushima dystopian fiction. The experience of the child has received scarce attention in 3.11 scholarship, and Aidana Bolatbekkyzy redresses this situation through the selection of post-3.11 texts that foreground the perspective of children. She compares two works written in proximity to one another, Yoshimura Man’ichi’s Bollard Disease (Borādobyō 2014) and Taguchi Randy’s Riku and the Kingdom

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of White (Riku to shiro no ōkoku 2016). Riku and the Kingdom of White portrays a fifth grader who moves with his father to Minamisōma, a city near Fukushima, just two months after March 11; Bollard Disease depicts children of a fictional town whose citizens have returned to help with its reconstruction after an unnamed disaster has occurred. These child-centric narratives by Yoshimura and Taguchi present complicated and disparate perspectives on 3.11. By drawing them into a comparative relationship, Bolatbekkyzy’s chapter articulates key discourses between the state and its citizenry that emerged as a result of the disaster. Whereas chapter 1 focuses on the perspective of the child, chapter 2 addresses another frequently overlooked viewpoint in 3.11 studies: the subjectivity of animals. Doug Slaymaker’s ‘Animal Stories: Agency after Radiation’ looks at post3.11 fiction that portrays animals that speak. Animals feature prominently in a number of important works of post-3.11 fiction by writers such as Furukawa Hideo, Kimura Yūsuke, Taguchi Randy, and Ikezawa Natsuki. This is no doubt due in part to the many animals abandoned in the sudden mass evacuations of the ‘exclusion zones,’ the areas close to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In his chapter, Slaymaker investigates both animal interiorities and the ways in which agency and language are ascribed to the animals portrayed in such fictional works. Importantly, both Slaymaker and Bolatbekkyzy confront the use of metaphor—whether in portrayals of children or of animals—in post-3.11 writing, a topic that strikes at the very core of writing about traumatic events and disasters. Representation has been a key issue in discussions on postdisaster fiction since March 11, 2011. The Great East Japan Earthquake devastated Tōhoku, a region generally regarded as marginal on many fronts: political, economic, cultural, but also linguistic. Indeed, it can be argued that the literature that emerged from the catastrophe reverberates with the marginalized voices of the region. Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt’s chapter, ‘Voice and Voicelessness: Reading Tōhoku Vernaculars in Post-3.11 Literature,’ investigates the use of nonstandard speech in fiction and poetry, which she identifies as a key strategy employed to inscribe a sense of marginality. She addresses this topic on several fronts, ranging from Kimura Yūsuke’s postcolonial-inspired act of ‘writing back’ in his native tongue, Yū Miri’s multi-layered and dialectical bottom-up rewriting of postwar Japanese history, and Arai Takako’s collaborative ‘translation’ of the work of the early 20thcentury poet Ishikawa Takuboku into the Tōhoku vernacular. In doing so, IwataWeickgenannt’s chapter explores some of the complex and interrelated issues that characterize Tōhoku literature: the question of authenticity and the possibilities and limitations of literary expression.

Spatial Acts Literature after 3.11 increased our awareness of the presence of marginalized voices in Japanese society, simultaneously drawing critical attention to the disputes on space that governed those hierarchical relationships. The disaster suddenly thrust the Tōhoku region into the global spotlight, placing a geographical space on the margins of the nation into the center of a broad range of intersecting

Introduction 5 debates. Chapter 4 by Linda Flores, ‘From That Day Forward: Tōhoku, 3.11, and “Memory Landscapes,” ’ considers the critical role of landscape in post-3.11 literature through an anthology of Iwate-based writers, From That Day Forward (Ano hi kara, Michimata 2015). In their literary responses to the disaster and the recovery, writers from Iwate, Tōhoku, have often emphasized the importance of place, portraying the region after 3.11 as a ‘memory landscape,’ a material and symbolic entity imbued with meaning (Koshar 2000). Stories in the collection invoke, either explicitly or implicitly, The Legends of Tōno (Yanagita Kunio [1910] 1973) and the works of Miyazawa Kenji, underscoring the rich literary history of the region. Flores argues that this process of reconnecting with the past through the memory landscapes of Iwate constitutes an act of fukkō (reconstruction). In other words, through the space of the text, the landscape of Iwate is portrayed as a critical locus that can be rewritten, renegotiated, and reinterpreted over time, forging a new regional identity after 3.11. Discourses on spatiality relating to 3.11 have both aesthetic and political implications, as Justine Wiesinger demonstrates in chapter 5, ‘The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village: The Production of Post-3.11 Space in Sakate Yōji’s Lone War.’ Sakate Yōji was at the forefront of the theatrical arts scene in Japan when he penned his artistic response to the disaster, Lone War, in the summer of 2011. The production had a large cast and embodied multiple perspectives: the voices of government authorities, activists, and displaced rural citizens. Sakate’s play demonstrates the ebb and flow of spatial understandings and determination in the wake of the disaster. In Lone War, this is manifested in the characters’ debates over topics including the ownership of land and whether the government possesses the authority to displace its own citizens. Wiesinger’s nuanced investigation of space in Sakate’s play—how it is conceived, manipulated, and physically staged—links to broader discussions on power relations within post-3.11 discourse. The topographical space of Fukushima in Northeastern Japan was drastically transformed from the site of nuclear power plants into exclusion zones and/or radioactive wasteland after March 11, 2011. In chapter 6, ‘Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism—Documentary Theater Responding to the Fukushima Disaster,’ Barbara Geilhorn analyzes documentary theater from the affected areas by focusing on Ōnobu Pelican’s Kiruannya to U-ko-san (2011). Weaving a dense fabric of fictitious material, newspaper clippings, and reality, Kiruannya and U-ko provides a rich tapestry of the multiple and often contradictory features of Fukushima Prefecture in the aftermath of the nuclear calamity. In her chapter, Geilhorn deftly shows how Ōnobu’s play opposes national declarations of a spatially and temporally limited disaster and offers keen insights into the highly ambivalent emotional landscape of those residents of Northeastern Japan whose homeland was turned into a disaster zone after March 11.

Border-Crossing The disaster of 3.11 resulted in the construction of walls—visible, invisible, and metaphorical; ice walls were erected to prevent the flow of groundwater into the

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Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, controversial and unsightly sea walls were constructed as a form of defense against future tsunamis along coastal regions, exclusion zones were defined according to measured levels of radiation emanating from concentric circles from the epicenter of the nuclear plant, and perceived borders between victims and nonvictims emerged in literature and the arts. In chapter 7, ‘Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary,’ Dan Fujiwara analyzes the work of renowned ‘border-crossing’ (ekkyō) writer Tawada Yōko, who writes in both her mother tongue, Japanese, and her adopted language, German. Tawada is well known as a writer whose work features crossing over boundaries of space (travel) and language (translation). However, since 3.11, Tawada has continued to pen stories about radioactive contamination, many of them set in near-future dystopian Japanese societies in which a nuclear accident has occurred. In his chapter, Fujiwara offers a close reading of Tawada’s 2014 book The Emissary (Kentōshi), examining how Tawada’s ‘exophonic’ writing deals with the paradoxical nature of radioactivity. The threat posed to physical health by radiation was a central concern in the months and years following the meltdowns at Fukushima. In chapter 8, ‘Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s “Dreams of Love, Etc.” and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman,’ Chiara Pavone explores the boundaries of the body on both national and individual levels. She begins by examining the influence of discourses of immunity in 3.11 narratives, arguing that they powerfully shaped the space of the disaster in literature. She contends that 3.11 is portrayed as a ‘somatic event,’ which constitutes an attack on the body of the Japanese nation itself. Pavone then turns critical attention to two post-3.11 works by Kawakami and Murata, which she characterizes as counternarratives to the nationalistic immunological rhetoric. Drawing on the work of contemporary ecocritic Stacy Alaimo (2010), Pavone argues that these works, which contain scenes centered on food and acts of consumption, portray a ‘transcorporeal’ conception of space and the physical body. In her chapter, Pavone contends that both authors attempt to subvert immune retellings of the narrative of the disaster and that these attempts construct new relationships between physical bodies and the environments they occupy.

Nuclear Futurity In chapter 9, ‘Humanism and the Hikari-Event: Reading Ōe with Stengers in Catastrophic Times,’ Margherita Long offers a nuanced overview of Ōe Kenzaburō’s public speeches and journalism after 3.11, highlighting the potential to read his work—both pre- and post-3.11—as postdisaster ecocriticism. Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war, Ōe has spoken powerfully of his support for Article Nine of Japan’s constitution, which renounces Japan’s right to wage war. After 3.11, Ōe similarly called for legislation banning nuclear weapons, and Long’s chapter charts this desire through a close reading of two pre-3.11 texts by Ōe: ‘Light-Circling Bird’ (Hi o megurasu tori), an autobiographical short story from 1991, and Death by Water (Suishi), an autobiographical

Introduction 7 novel from 2009. The Hikari-figure, based on his disabled son who has a keen musical awareness and talent, surfaces in each of these texts. Referencing Isabelle Stengers’s eco-manifesto In Catastrophic Times (Stengers 2015), Long proposes that it is the Hikari-figure who maintains the ‘two-partner game’ with nature, which, according to Stengers, is a critical component in formulating an ethical response to ecological disasters. Long’s chapter on Ōe aptly demonstrates how 3.11 not only influenced conversations in the wake of the disaster but also offered a new framing narrative for preexisting works of literature. In a similar vein, Rachel DiNitto’s afterword, ‘Chernobyl’s Past and Fukushima’s Remembered Future,’ shows how the Fukushima nuclear incident reinvigorated our global collective memory of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, forging a permanent link between the two events separated by over 25 years. In her chapter, DiNitto places the televisual representations of Chernobyl—Chernobyl (Renck 2019) and Dark (Odar 2017)—and post-Fukushima futures as portrayed in Japanese contemporary literature into dialogue to spotlight the key issues that have emerged in this postdisaster environment. She argues that instead of turning to the past, writers such as Tsushima Yūko, Tawada Yōko, Yoshimura Man’ichi, and Kirino Natsuo imagine a future for a post-3.11 Japan in their fiction. DiNitto’s afterword examines this postdisaster discourse through a series of binaries: fact/ fiction, rupture/cyclical futurity, and spectacle/‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2013). She argues that these binaries draw critical attention to how nuclear disasters are remembered and, in doing so, offer potential for reframing historical narratives about traumatic events and for reshaping the contemporary debates that surround them. But what, DiNitto asks, is at stake in these fictional representations of disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima? How does fiction intervene in the realm of public memory? The cultural productions explored in Literature after Fukushima offer a glimpse into the public imaginary and demonstrate how disasters can fundamentally reshape our individual and shared conception of both history and the present moment.

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Cleveland, Kyle. 2021. ‘Introduction.’ Special Issue: Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context. Asia-Pacific Journal 19 (17.1) [online] https://apjjf.org/2021/17/Cleveland.html [Accessed February 6, 2022]. DiNitto, Rachel. 2019. Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Geilhorn, Barbara, and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, eds. 2017. Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster. London and New York: Routledge. Jiji Press, Kyodo News, 2022. ‘IAEA Sees Limited Impact of Water Release at Fukushima Nuclear Plant.’ The Japan Times, April 30. [online] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2022/04/30/national/iaea-fukushima-water-release-safety/ Kimura Saeko. 2018. Sonogo no shinsaigo bungakuron. Tokyo: Seidosha.

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Kimura Saeko, and Anne Bayard-Sakai, eds. 2021. Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku.’ Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Koshar, Rudy. 2000. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870– 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. McCurry, Justin. 2021. ‘Japan Marks 10 Years Since Triple Disaster Killed 18,500 People.’ Guardian, March 11. [online] www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/11/japan-marksten-years-since-triple-disaster-killed-18500-people [Accessed January 25, 2022]. Michimata Tsutomu, ed. 2015. Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Odar, Baran Bo, dir. 2017. ‘Dark.’ Netflix. [online] https://dark.netflix.io/en. Ōnobu Pelican. 2011. ‘Kiruannya to Uko-san.’ Shiata Atsu 48: 121–38. Renck, Johan, dir. 2019. ‘Chernobyl.’ HBO. [online] https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl. Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press. Taguchi Randy. 2016. Riku and the Kingdom of White. Translated by Raj Mahtani. London: Balestier Press. Yanagita Kunio. [1910] 1973. ‘Tōno monogatari. Yanagita kunioshū.’ Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (NKBT) 45: 257−312. Yoshimura Man’ichi. 2014. Borādobyō. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū.

Part 1

Marginalized Voices

1

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies Writing ‘Fukushima’ through the Child’s Gaze Aidana Bolatbekkyzy

Introduction ‘Before “the incident,” ’ observes the narrator of Kawakami Hiromi’s ‘God Bless You, 2011’ (Kamisama 2011), a now deserted riverside ‘had been a lively place where people swam and fished, and families brought their children. Now, however, there were no children left anywhere in the area’ (Kawakami 2012, 40). This is a jarring prospect. It is hard to overemphasize the embeddedness of children in cultural and national discourses of progress, salubrity, and temporality. Indeed, as Helen Hester quotes Lee Edelman, ‘the contemporary world is characterized by a reproductive futurism in which the “child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmic beneficiary of every political intervention” ’ (Edelman in Hester 2018, 34). Another powerful dimension of children is their affective faculty. Perhaps the best-known example would be ‘the victimized child’ (Balanzategui 2018, 171) who emerged in Japanese visual culture after World War II as a particularly emotive symbol of national victimhood and innocence. Yet, as will be seen throughout this chapter, the victimized child is not necessarily the central topos of post-Fukushima literature. Kawakami’s short story is the first literary prose response to 3.11 as a nuclear disaster. It is a revision of her earlier text God Bless You (Kawakami 1998)1, which depicts the day of a woman who goes for a walk with a bear, her new neighbor. The weather is pleasant, as they stroll toward the river, consume food upon their arrival, and bask in the glow of the outdoors. The rewrite follows almost the same plot, sentence structure, and words, but the life and environment are irreversibly altered in the land, that is, now irradiated. One of the few visual differences between the two worlds is the disappearance of children playing outside—like ‘ghosts, an echo of a past that no longer exists’ (DiNitto 2019, 112). Yet Kawakami’s text is but the first among many that would feature children in post-Fukushima literature.

1 The story was first published in a journal in 1994 but only came out in book form in 1998.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-3

12 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy Although almost a decade has passed since the calamity, the question of how the disasters shaped the representation of children in post-Fukushima fiction has largely been left unaddressed. This is especially surprising since children’s vulnerability to radiation is widely recognized. In the aftermath of 3.11, ‘inochi o mamore! (protect life) and kodomo o mamore! (protect our children) were clearly among the most frequently shouted slogans of the recent anti-nuke marches’ (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2017, 115). For many parents, protecting children’s lives was a point of contention with the government about the issues of safety and responsibility. Consequently, children have mostly been addressed indirectly and in tandem with their parents, especially their mothers, as most sociological research focused on the intersection of gender and nuclear activism.2 This chapter attempts to address this gap in literary studies by shifting attention to children in dystopian literature published in post-Fukushima Japan. The analysis zooms in on two novels, Yoshimura Man’ichi’s Bollard Disease (Borādo-byō 2014) and Taguchi Randy’s Riku and the Kingdom of White (Riku to shiro no ōkoku 2016). Published only a year apart and starting at a similar point of departure, each of the stories presents a diametrically opposed stance on 3.11. Reading the two back to back makes for a compelling comparison that sheds light on some of the discourses in post-3.11 relationships between the public and the government in literature. Taguchi Randy’s Riku and the Kingdom of White is a simple story that follows the fifth grader Riku, who moves from Utsunomiya to Minamisōma with his psychiatrist father only two months after 3.11. The relocation was decided upon prior to the calamities, and even the fears of radiation exposure do not preclude them from moving there. Though initially unhappy about it, over the course of the story Riku eventually learns to embrace his new home. In contrast, Aunt Midori, the sister of Riku’s late mother and the only relative mentioned in the story, remains strongly opposed to the relocation but is not given much credence in the novel. On the other hand, Yoshimura Man’ichi’s significantly more complex Bollard Disease is centered on children of the fictional town Umizuka,3 where the citizens have returned to revive the city after a nonspecified major disaster. Narrated from the perspective of Kyōko, also a fifth grader raised by a single parent, the oppressive nature of the city seeps through the narrative devices, such as recurring descriptions of somatic sensations. Although in an obvious nod to the post-3.11 promotion of kizuna (bonds), the fictional citizens take the synonymous musubiai (bonds) as their motto, but in reality, they are deeply distrustful of each other. In the background, Kyōko’s classmates are dying one after another from an unknown disease, however, this tragedy is completely ignored by the citizens. 2 See, for example, Morioka 2013; Wöhr 2013; Kimura 2016, 2017. 3 The author Yoshimura Man’ichi resides in a city called Kaizuka in Osaka Prefecture. Notably, ‘Umizuka’ can also be read as ‘Kaizuka,’ as it might suggest an alternative reality of contemporary Japan. I stick with ‘Umizuka’ because in the story Kyōko mentions a banner hanging in the city hall reading ‘The first town to achieve safety standards—Umizuka,’ with the place name written in hiragana (Yoshimura 2014, 107).

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 13 Halfway through the story, we learn that Kyōko, now a grown woman, is in fact a captive in a penitentiary institution, locked away at the age of 12 for her dissident behavior. The novel itself is revealed to be an instrument of cooperation provided by the authorities to prove her normality for her rehabilitation back to Umizuka. The story ends with current Kyōko declaring that she does not intend to play along with the agenda of her oppressors. This chapter asks what the political role of children is in these examples of post-3.11 dystopian literature. As will be shown, the key differences between the two texts rest in the ways they mobilize children’s perspective: while Bollard Disease is a journey into critical awareness, Riku and the Kingdom of White is a path into voluntary ignorance. The chapter is organized thematically, comparing issues of gender, the politics of child gaze4, ideology, and sickness. The analysis is predominantly centered on Bollard Disease, while Riku and the Kingdom of White serves as a foil for comparison.

Entering the Zone Coincidentally, both stories begin in the houses of the protagonists, Riku and Kyōko, each in a similar situation—talking to flower pots. Riku is bidding goodbye to his old house in Utsunomiya, just before relocating to Fukushima, and this scene has no specific meaning, besides symbolizing Riku’s childishness. In contrast, in Bollard Disease this scene is an introduction to Umizuka’s surveillance society, in the ostensible privacy of Kyōko’s house. When she says hello to a flower—an act she thinks is childish and cute—her mother signals to Kyōko to stop by shaking her head, a visual cue for dame (don’t). She cautions Kyōko to avoid any hazukashii (embarrassing) behavior since she believes there is a hole in a fence separating their house from their neighbors that they are always being spied on through. The constant expectation of being watched but not being able to verify it is reminiscent of how in a panopticon, the inmate’s visibility ‘is a trap’ (Foucault 1995, 200), while the invisibility of the authorities ‘is a guarantee of order’ (Bullock 2010, 54). Consequently, the ‘mere anticipation of the gaze’ induces in Kyōko’s mother an internalized sense of permanent visibility, translating into pronouncedly normative behavior, for power is indeed ‘exercised most effectively by causing subjects to discipline themselves’ (Bullock 2010, 53). But Kyōko is not so readily obedient (a recurrent issue in the novel), as she deliberately talks to a flower knowing her mother will hear her. Notably, the novel depicts a peculiarly anachronistic nondigital surveillance, preventing an interpretation of the novel as critical of technological advancement. Instead, Umizuka’s government relies on secret police represented by mysterious men in suits and a network of citizen informants. By relying on physical bodies, the novel complicates our ability to judge who is spying due to the anonymity of surveillance. In other words, anyone could be a collaborator or an informant, 4 For the work detailing the notion of child’s gaze, see Tribunella 2016.

14 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy placing the reader in the same unknowing shoes as characters in the story in a figurative panopticon. Nevertheless, control and the gaze are exercised not only by the authorities or between the citizens (Kyōko’s mother is always cautiously watching others, albeit not reporting on them) but between the family members as well. Even children participate in this system by reminding each other of the rules of conduct, which are written on the school board. While there is no obvious surveillance in Riku and the Kingdom of White, as a schoolchild in Fukushima, Riku experiences a similar sense of constant physical confinement as a result of numerous anti-exposure measures, such as wearing masks and long-sleeved clothes even during the scorching summer and being barred from playing outside. He aptly describes such schooling experience as resembling prison, but this issue loses importance for Riku in the end. So, what does it mean to narrate these novels through a child’s perspective and how is that political? First, we will examine the case of Riku, followed by that of Kyōko.

Instrumentalizing Innocence, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Living in Fukushima The town Riku and his father moved to mirrors the school’s gloomy atmosphere, making the previously energetic Riku increasingly frustrated and apathetic as he begins to regret the decision to move to Fukushima. Through Riku’s perspective, the novel establishes early on the groundwork for investigating the dangers associated with low-level radiation (exposure) and precisely how it causes illness. It simultaneously asks whether constant worrying is perhaps just as harmful, if not worse. These issues recur throughout the story, mainly through Riku’s conversations and observations of other characters, as he continually ponders them. Mr. Iwamoto, the school principal who Riku sees as the first agreeable adult in Fukushima, answers his question in the following manner: Nobody knows anything about tomorrow. Not even those great scientists; they certainly couldn’t predict the earthquake and the nuclear accident—so what’s the use of worrying? No good can come of it. And that’s why I say we should just carry on with our lives without any worries, even though that may be a little reckless. Peace of mind, after all, is far better than worrying. (Taguchi 2016, 77) This advice against worrying—which is reminiscent of the recommendation sent out by Dr. Yamashita Shunichi5 in real life—is the key message of the novel. As an

5 Yamashita Shunichi is a medical scientist from Nagasaki University who was appointed as radiation risk management adviser in Fukushima Prefecture in March 2011 to give lectures on radiation to the locals. His suggestion that worrying was more dangerous than the radiation caused controversy, and many signed a petition demanding his dismissal.

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 15 encouragement to a child, this may be adequate, but as a message to readers, this is problematic, for it adds to the depoliticization of the meltdowns. Although the story features characters who are critical of the government’s handling of the disaster, in Riku’s eyes they are cynical and distrustful. He judges them, stressing the difference between adults and children: ‘Adults were angry all the time, after all. Adults were complaining all the time, after all. Adults were vindictive, after all’ (Taguchi 2016, 72). Does Riku, with his ‘child gaze,’ have any power? If so, what does that power accomplish? In the following passage, Riku describes the adults who visit the hospital where his father works: There were even those, who came from the city and were bowing and apologizing to children, saying things like, ‘I’m sorry we’ve turned this world into such a terrible place.’ Such adults annoyed Riku very much, making him go, Yeah, okay, whatever! Just let me play, alright? It’s super dull and boring around here; there’s nothing to do. (Taguchi 2016, 71) The novel repeatedly emphasizes Riku’s defiance of adults who worry about the radiation. In other words, by utilizing the notion of children’s innocence and intelligence, the novel depoliticizes the Fukushima meltdowns, downplaying the issues of radioactive contamination and perhaps even encouraging indifference to scientific data. For instance, Riku muses about people like Aunt Midori and her family who only see the statistics; he says, ‘you couldn’t understand anything from just numbers’ (87) without the firsthand knowledge of life in the area. In the foreword to Riku and the Kingdom of White, Masami Yuki writes: ‘Children’s vision and voice are powerful and truthful, and perhaps for that very reason, they are often underrepresented; maybe adults are afraid of children’s perceptive vision’ (11). She suggests that the reason Taguchi Randy wrote from Riku’s perspective is that children’s ‘eyes are less clouded than those of grownups’ (10), indicating a certain authority of a child as a narrator. Yet, there are historical precedents to the national harnessing of children’s voices amid disaster and war. For instance, in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, Red Bird (Akai tori) and other Taishō magazines published selected children’s essays detailing their experiences for adults who ‘valued “childlike” responses to the earthquake as uniquely moving’ (Cave and Moore 2016, 291). More importantly, the essays ‘expressed resilience, and determination to study hard and rebuild an even finer Tokyo’ (Cave and Moore 2016, 5). Similarly, Riku mentally matures throughout his story, embracing an adulthood, that is, obedient, solidaric, and politically disengaged, with group-oriented aspirations. Bollard Disease, on the other hand, uses the child’s perspective to the opposite effect.

Seeing Cracks and Fissures in Umizuka’s Regime of Meaning The choice of narrative perspective is a point of conjunction and departure in the two stories under consideration here. Riku’s arc is narratively and temporally

16 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy straightforward, moving from the disaster’s aftermath in logical progression toward the revival of the region and community. In other words, it is aligning his goals with the national plans for reconstruction, thereby fulfilling his duty as a future citizen. Conversely, Kyōko’s account is nonlinear, disturbed by two narrative voices: Kyōko in the present, an adult, and Kyōko as a child. Caught between the two stages of being (neither fully adult nor a real child), she cannot buttress the logic of homogeneous time and fulfill the child’s role as a vessel of futurity. Furthermore, Bollard Disease is a very visual novel, preoccupied with ways of seeing; the text is replete with acts of nagameru (gazing), kensatsu suru (observing), jirojiro miru (scrutinizing intently), and mirareru (being seen). As John Berger points out, ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak’ (Berger et al. 1973, 7). Kyōko is an observant child who often silently studies her environment, noticing contradictions, and problematic situations that are forcibly silenced or ignored by other children and adults. Her perceptive vision penetrates the facades put up by her community. To capture reality as she perceives it, she secretly draws portraits of others and writes about them in her private diary, a small but significant challenge to Umizuka’s dominant regime of meaning. Kyōko’s relationship with temporal structures and ways of seeing parallels Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘child-seer,’6 a figure that witnesses traumatic situations that it can neither comprehend nor act upon, only gaze at. In Deleuze’s view, the reason a child is particularly fit to be a seer is ‘because in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing’ (Deleuze 1989, 3). The childseer’s power to see through the inscrutable situations becomes the very source of its potential to disrupt teleological narratives of homogeneous time and meaning. David Martin-Jones points out that ‘these are characters who are directly encountering contemporary social and political mutations, and who are mutating along with these historically shifting contexts’ (Martin-Jones in Balanzategui 2018, 126). As a product of its deracinated environment, the child-seer emerges in liminal zones or ‘any-spaces-whatever,’ which are ‘deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste grounds, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction’ (Balanzategui 2018, 129). As a postdisaster town, Umizuka could be one such space, in the process of renovation. Many of its ‘voluntary activities’ are geared toward cleaning the shore and local park from debris. Still, the chemical plant’s chimneys line up densely in the coastal area with red flames rising from them, and the ocean appears dead. Moreover, no place outside Umizuka is ever mentioned, and the city uses only 6 The child-seer first appears in Italian neorealist cinema known for its observational style, following the lower class contending with adversity in post–World War II Italy, in which children are recurring silent observers. While the child-seer is predominantly examined in cinema studies, I borrow this concept here not only because Kyōko seems like a literary incarnation of this character but also to indicate that children’s perceptive vision has been mobilized to expose the terrors of the adult world across media.

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 17 early modern media technology, such as speakers and telephones. Food and everyday items are limited in variety, and most citizens are impoverished. Notably, upon the first mention of the school, Kyōko describes the smell of poverty emanating from her classmate Hiroko’s body, an economic reality they all shared (Yoshimura 2014, 8). While in Riku, children’s bodies were referred to mainly through anti-exposure measures, in Bollard Disease, we predominantly learn about the physiological struggles of children’s bodies. They are more vulnerable to the deadly ailment that starts affecting children in Umizuka eight years after the disaster, an issue totally ignored by the adults. After being denied the chance to mourn her classmate Akemi during the funeral, which was turned into community celebration, Kyōko sees her in a nightmare. Wakamatsu Eisuke suggests that she ‘feels closer to the dead classmates than anyone else. In this story, the dead are sometimes depicted as closer to the living than the living themselves’ (Wakamatsu 2014). In terms of storytelling, children’s suffering is perhaps also more affective. As noted by Thomas Elsaesser, children’s perspective is commonly mobilized in documentaries in order to draw attention to social problems (Elsaesser 2018). Contrary to the idealized and romantic notions of childhood as a time of unadulterated freedom and play, it is simultaneously a period of helplessness and dependence on the adults, and the world the adults make. Additionally, due to their mental immaturity and lack of independence, children are also more mentally susceptible to being molded into desirable subjects, as exemplified by Riku’s story. Bollard Disease could be read as a critique leveled against the passivity of the populace and uncritical acceptance of the status quo, contiguous to Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘infantile citizenship’ (Sturken 2012, 360). It refers to the disempowered, ‘passive and overdependent’ form of citizenship ‘situated within the subjectivity of the child, with childlike emotional responses and childlike naivete’ that relies entirely on the power of the state (360). Accordingly, Kyōko does not remain a child but grows up in the novel, dovetailing the coming of age with her journey from ignorance of the world and society around her to full awareness. Rachel DiNitto makes a similar argument, stating that ‘Yoshimura’s story of a young girl losing her innocence about the world around her serves as metaphor for a willfully ignorant Japanese public coming to terms with the truly horrifying nature of reality post-Fukushima accident’ (DiNitto 2019, 154). On the other hand, this choice of a child’s perspective might be problematic for a writer situating their narrative after the disaster. The period before and the disaster itself are excluded from the story (same in Riku’s case). Using a child as a main character and therefore starting from a position of innocence could be a way of not addressing Japanese society’s complicity in building the nuclear power plants in the first place.

Gender Order: Like Parent, Like Child? Although this chapter is focused on children, it is perhaps impossible not to address the parents and their role in children’s upbringing as their primary caretakers. Both Bollard Disease’s Kyōko and Riku and the Kingdom of White’s Riku

18 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy are raised by single parents, but their perception of the disaster is rather one-sided. Following 3.11, women were seen as embodying resistance to the government’s treatment of radioactive contamination for participating in antinuclear protests and questioning the safety of food from irradiated areas, particularly the foods used for school lunches, whereas men were perceived as pro-state for their relative lack of representation in these activities. Similarly, the novels’ portrayal of parents reflects these conventional gender stereotypes. In the second part of Taguchi’s novel, Riku participates in the charity scheme Fukushima Kids, modeled after a real program7 and travels to the snowy landscapes of Hokkaido with other children from the prefecture. There, Riku is happy to see the adults who ‘didn’t say a word about what scary things might be in store for the future, or whether they were afraid of radiation; they didn’t even complain or express doubts about society or politics’ (Taguchi 2016, 105). Riku’s group is welcomed by their hosts, the Nomura family, with whom Riku develops a close-knit relationship. As the oldest child in the group, Riku learns to lead and be responsible for others as well as to observe manners, internalizing the normative behavior. Moreover, Riku’s maturation is aided by Mr. Nomura and his son Yoichi, who single him out from the rest and spend time with him and talk to him about life and death as an equal. Both are working hard to help others, and Yoichi is studying to become a lawyer to aid the victims of the disaster. Throughout the novel, such men become role models for Riku, with their calm demeanor and nobility. Reinvigorated, Riku, who learned the value of selflessness and optimism in times of adversity as well as a willingness to help others, returns to Minamisōma. If the story valorizes men as embodying virtuousness and exemplary models of adulthood, who does it villainize? Seeing as the women appear in extremes—from the dead but ideal mother, voiceless and subordinate Mrs. Nomura, to the hysterical alarmist Aunt Midori—we can conclude that this gendered dichotomy is by design, and not random. This is significant in the context of 3.11, where gender played a crucial role in coding antinuclear activism after Fukushima: women became the face of protests even when a significant number of men also participated (Wöhr 2013). Women also faced increased levels of discrimination in proportion with their attempts to raise concerns about radioactive contamination.8 Moreover, although many fathers also evacuated with their families, the media exaggerated this as a predominantly female-dominated phenomenon (Wöhr 2013, 220).

7 Riku and the Kingdom of White is one of the few post-3.11 novels that refer directly to the Fukushima disaster and mention real place-names in connection with it. This may be because Taguchi was asked by the administration of Fukushima Kids to write about the children of Fukushima. The author was involved with the project’s PR and fundraising campaigns from the beginning in 2011 until its closure in 2016. Taguchi conducted interviews with children who participated in the program and their parents, who chose to remain in Fukushima after the disasters. 8 For an article detailing the experiences of young mothers with children in Fukushima, see Slater et al. 2014.

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 19 While Aunt Midori is not condemned as unscientific—in fact she is portrayed as obsessed with data—the narrative ultimately dismisses her by casting her into the misogynistic stereotype of women being ‘more emotional than rational’ (Kimura 2016, 17). Notably, her husband, who acknowledges the disruptive consequences of the incident, still maintains that Japan must continue relying on nuclear power for economic progress, the desirability of which is not questioned. As one of the ‘ “worker bee” fathers who devoted themselves to Japan Inc.’ (Kimura 2017, 460), Riku’s father is also rather lenient toward the anti-exposure measures. Thus, the novel follows the conventional divide between the social sphere as ‘masculine’ and domestic sphere as ‘feminine,’ wherein the father is coded as public (strong, state-oriented), and the mother as domestic (weak). Intriguingly, the two parents featured in Bollard Disease are Kyōko’s mother and Kyōko’s classmate Akemi’s father, who exhibit opposing attitudes to the communal bonding in Umizuka. Kyōko’s mother is extremely careful to appear patriotic by buying unnecessary food to feign copious consumption, food which she never feeds to either Kyōko or herself. The mother is a rather contradictory figure, who both confirms and subverts gender stereotypes.9 Her consumption patterns fit the stereotype of women being cautious with food, but her treatment of her daughter does not, as she is both extremely strict and restricting, reminiscent more of a personal guard than a nurturing parent. Ceaselessly monitoring Kyōko’s speech and activities, the mother is distant, occasionally violent, and at times fearsome. Due to Umizuka’s oppressively militant regime, she exhorts control over her daughter before others identify and report Kyōko’s deviation (explained later). The mother remains enigmatic till the end, as Kyōko oscillates between feelings of defiance, fear, and attachment toward her. By contrast, Riku’s late mother recurs in his memories as timid and supportive. Hence, there is no one besides Aunt Midori to interfere with Riku and his father’s life in Fukushima. At the end of the novel, Riku has a phone conversation with his aunt, who again tries to persuade him to join her family in Yokohama. When Riku declines, she goes ‘ballistic, squealing hysterically’ and ‘bellowing like a cow’ (Taguchi 2016, 218). She asks what happens if he falls ill. Riku defies her, declaring: ‘Well, my mother was sick, right? She was born physically weak, right? Is that, like, a bad thing?’ (218), thus concluding his (and his father’s) antagonistic relationship with Aunt Midori. At this, Riku’s father comments victoriously, ‘You’re absolutely right. In fact, you’ve opened my eyes too. Some lessons can only be learned here and nowhere else. I say, it must have been our destiny to come here’ (219). There are two noteworthy things here. First, the father who seems to have been regretting his decision to come to Fukushima is now siding with Riku’s decision, which could be an answer to the earlier question of what Riku’s child gaze promulgates, namely groupism, obedience, and depoliticization. Second, the novel

9 At the end of the novel, we also learn that Kyōko’s father was detained for engaging in dissident activity, and her toddler brother died shortly after their relocation to Umizuka.

20 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy ultimately downplays and relativizes the importance of health and life itself, and Aunt Midori appears even more condemnable for complaining about radiation when she was blessed with excellent health (unlike Riku’s late mother). Moreover, by dismissing Aunt Midori—the only voice who questioned their relocation from their environment—they can go on living and believing in the rightfulness of their ways, deciding once and for all to stay in Fukushima. Thus, by coding the nuclear disaster response in a gendered dichotomy, both novels not only reinforce the prevalent stereotypes but also demonstrate how a child’s worldview is influenced by parental cultivation.

Veiling and Revealing Ideology After his trip to Hokkaido, Riku begins dreaming about social solidarity: ‘how wonderful it would be, he thought, if everyone could live happily together, just like in Hokkaido’ (Taguchi 2016, 202). Similarly, the desire for unity is galvanized into ideology in Bollard Disease. Umizuka’s citizens are admonished to value their bonds with the city and each other above all else. Many returned to Umizuka to rebuild the town after a disaster into an idealistic and cooperative community, with musubiai (bonds) as their motto. It is not uncommon for utopian longings to emerge after disasters. Disasters imply the suspension of the normal order. They offer a chance to reimagine how the world could be, and, consequently, utopian longings often flourish. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki suggests, ‘disasters may lay bare underlying social inequities, fueling demands for a transformation of the existing order’ (Morris-Suzuki 2017, 178). She points out two different visions of national regeneration spurred after 3.11: the hydrangea revolution (ajisai kakumei) and bonds (kizuna). The former refers to the mass antinuclear protests that emerged a month after the disasters and lasted for 18 months, culminating in Tokyo in the summer of 2012. Spontaneous and unstructured, it attracted heterogeneous crowds of participants sharing a longing for ‘a new, more humane, caring and sustainable society’ (Morris-Suzuki 2017, 179). While relatively short-lived, it nevertheless shared international sensibilities with other grassroots movements across the globe. The second and perhaps better-known vision tapped into the nostalgic nationalism for lost traditional values, ‘before Japan’s wartime defeat, postwar occupation and hyper-modernisation’ (Morris-Suzuki 2017, 182), expressed through the rhetoric of kizuna. Although originally kizuna meant ‘intimate and personal bonds such as the love for one’s family or hometown, rather than public relationships,’ following 3.11 the word gained a more explicitly group-oriented meaning, framed as part of a natural predilection for Japanese people (Tokita 2015, 2). For the government, this rhetoric also allowed it to skirt issues of culpability, diverting attention toward the desired national reconstruction. Another problem with this discourse lies in silencing those who dissented. ‘Kizuna bias,’ in the words of Saitō Tamaki, ‘suppresses dissent, and encourages people to work together towards local and national goals rather than thinking

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 21 about how to change society’ (Tokita 2015, 3). Some authors, such as Henmi Yō, expressed their discomfort with the atmosphere of postdisaster Japan, dubbing it ‘cooperative totalitarianism’ (Tamura 2017, 11). As will be outlined throughout the rest of this chapter, the vision of solidarity is rather simplistic in Riku’s story, while Kyōko’s arc contends with perverted notions of utopia hiding behind the mask of unity. And nowhere is this more pertinent in Bollard Disease than at the local school, the institution most tightly interwoven with modern childhood.

Enacting (Anti-)Utopia in Umizuka The school in Umizuka not only mirrors the power play prevalent in the rest of the town, bearing the carceral continuum, but it also espouses mechanisms of social unity and uniformity. As an ideological state apparatus, the daily regimen of this schooling system consists of patriotic quizzes, hymn singing, and subtle but coercive indoctrination through the class rules written on the board. These include ‘trust your senses,’ ‘never complain,’ ‘read the atmosphere,’ ‘let’s bond,’ and ‘we are one’ (Yoshimura 2014, 46). Yet, Kyōko stumbles upon the contradiction of the rule ‘trust your own senses,’ when her report on bullying in the class is met with the reprimanding voice of her homeroom teacher, Fujimura, who urges Kyōko to be properly patriotic instead (55). Consequently, throughout the novel, Kyōko struggles with the misalignment between her perception, which Fujimura dismisses as sakkaku (illusion), and the dominant narrative. As a result of extreme censorship and surveillance, other children are constantly filtering out their perception. Kyōko’s astuteness precludes her from being able to filter hers, and she often resorts to silently studying her environment through observation. Even when she is punished and left standing for failing a patriotic quiz, she seizes this opportunity to observe her classmates in order to one day be able to draw portraits of the entire class (47). Through the class rules of conduct, children are indoctrinated to become considerate but inert subjects following the pull of the collective. The effect of the inculcation is evident in the scene where Hiroko, one of Kyōko’s classmates, raises her voice in a conversation and is reprimanded by the group of girls who normally speak in hushed tones. Unusually stiff and intimidating, the girls point at the board with the rule stating ‘refrain from speaking loudly in the classroom.’ (14–5). Children—like the adults—feign benevolence until someone breaks the rules, policing each other and thereby guaranteeing the reproduction of normative behavior. In addition, teachers routinely conduct patriotic quizzes, and failure to respond quickly and correctly is penalized. For instance, one of the girls, Akemi, is left standing for most of the class, fainting as a result during the lunch break, and the next day she passes away, starting a chain of children’s deaths. Furthermore, an aggressive push toward cherishing musubiai (bonds) is a daily part of the cultivation of children’s worldview. For instance, the social studies teacher proselytizes that everything in the world is connected and that all living

22 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy things die and are born again (88). While the teacher is popular with other children, Kyōko feels that behind the facade of kindness her eyes hide something dark. Kyōko finds such rhetoric dull and repetitive. But repetition is precisely Umizuka’s method of indoctrination. Even the hymn is just a repetition of the city’s name on loop, perhaps to serve a desensitizing purpose. Essentially, this practice and their patriotic class exercises constitute the brainwashing apparatus geared toward the physical body to produce corporeal effects. The hymn is also featured in one of the climactic scenes of the novel. As one of the city’s ‘voluntary’ activities, citizens regularly gather to clean the local park. When Kyōko joins the group, they are tasked with picking up pebbles since everything else is tidy. What follows is a group trance, which entails both physical and mental exertion to occupy the minds and bodies: synchronized picking up of the pebbles, singing, and dancing in sync with music. There are historical precedents for the use of synchronized group movement as a form of behavioral conditioning. In his analysis of modern auditory technologies such as the radio, telephone, and phonograph in Japan, Kerim Yasar argues that the implementation of radio exercise (rajio taisō) in the interwar period was ‘a ritual crucial to the smooth functioning of various Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Yasar 2018, 120), namely the mechanism of bodily control en masse. This continues in the present, albeit in different contexts, such as sporting events and the military. The secret lies in synchronized repetition: Given enough repetition, kinesthesis becomes psychology: The mind creates post-hoc justifications for the actions of the body. To submit one’s body to a voice of authority, to move in sync with a group, to do so every day at set times throughout the day, is to inscribe in the body habits of obedience and a felt, instinctive sense of collective identity. (Yasar 2018, 121) But whether this is truly effective and works on all bodies is questionable. After the cleaning ritual in the park, Kyōko claims to be cured of her perception issues. She feels as if the scales fell from her eyes, as she now sees the world from the collective perspective, musing, ‘I started wondering if until now I had been wearing dirty glasses’ for now everything appears delightful and right (Yoshimura 2014, 147). It seems to have worked, if only temporarily, for she is handed over to the secret police shortly afterward.

Somatic Dissent In contrast to Riku and the Kingdom of White, the body in Bollard Disease is a site of struggle against multifaceted institutional subjugation. Due to the totalitarian regime in Umizuka, the novel is more psychological and physiological. As Wakamatsu Eisuke contends, ‘for the author, the body is the clearest testimony of the soul’ (Wakamatsu 2014), as the novel works simultaneously on a few

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 23 senses. Verbal descriptions of peer pressure aside, Kyōko intercepts her narrative with numerous depictions of somatic sensations and body language. For instance, one day at home she feels compelled to draw portraits of her classmates, but she cannot, since her mother is in the house and might discover her secret diary. So Kyōko does the next prohibited thing: I pulled my bare feet into my face to bite the toenails. My mother told me that I should never do it. I sensed the smell of school shoes from my feet. Since the nails of the thumb are hard, I needed to keep them in my mouth for a certain period of time, and thoroughly moisten them with warm saliva before biting. (Yoshimura 2014, 22) Kyōko’s rebellion against Umizuka’s catchphrase slogan is first made explicit in the scene where she urinates on newly purchased stamps, upon realizing that their symbolical meaning is musubiai (bonds) (Yoshimura 2014, 34). While she never verbalizes her decision and the reasons behind it, it illustrates her bodily aversion to the dominant discourse. Generally, Kyōko’s immediate bodily response to anything patriotic is an urge to urinate, such as when children are singing the Umizuka hymn.10 Tamura Miyuki argues that the novel’s depiction of bodily phenomena related to the excretion of fluids through orifices is ‘an intentional textual strategy’ representing resistance against the society which ‘dominates people by words’ (Tamura 2017, 13). Before she can even verbalize or realize fully, her body acts, breaking docility. Kyōko’s throat itches as she repeatedly coughs during Akemi’s funeral service, while everyone else is celebrating Umizuka by singing the hymn. Wakamatsu Eisuke reads this as a ‘child’s bodily refusal to accept the mourning that was performed’ (Wakamatsu 2014). She also observes the bodily phenomena in others, as for instance during the hymn singing in class: Question number ten: ‘What is the most important thing for the city of Umizuka?’ ‘Communal bonding!’ ‘That’s it. Now everybody!’ The teacher imitating a conductor raised the baton. The fifth-grade students started singing, ‘Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka! Umizuka!’ Mimicking Hiroko, I kept opening my mouth in synch with the song, while looking at Ken, who bent over and secretly spat. He cast me a sideways glance and when our eyes locked, he signaled with his eyes that he was alright. The vomit was dripping down his pants. (Yoshimura 2014, 47–8)

10 Notably, the 3.11 documentary Furusato (2016) depicts a similar scene with schoolchildren singing a hometown song.

24 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy When Kyōko later asks Ken why he vomited, he attributes it to the atmospheric pressure. It could be read as a breach of docility, too, against the glaring peer pressure in the classroom. But seeing as throughout the text, children bleed from the anus and experience abdominal pain, it is also symptomatic of the fatal disease that affects them. Crucially, the children’s demise becomes a new routine unaddressed by adults. This indifference to children’s lives11 goes against the logic of the bio-political role of children. This evokes Giorgio Agamben’s theory of bare life, characterized by the distinction between zoe (biological life) and bios (qualified life), or a ‘conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived’ (Plummer 2019, 69). Moreover, since Kyōko is locked away at the age of 12 into a penitentiary, her life is even further reduced to a minimal existence. Despite the cultural sanctity of children, Umizuka is not safeguarding the children from contracting the deadly sickness in the first place but only concerns itself with the presumably far worse disease of transgression. It is a deliberate choice, as children are sacrificed for the benefit of state control, in favor of hunting down those with ‘Bollard Disease’ (Trimpop 2016).

Transgression as a Disease As seen earlier, Riku and the Kingdom of White assigns moral value to those who decide to stay in Fukushima and reproves individuals like Aunt Midori for their irrational overreaction to radiation. There is another episode that attests to this conclusion. After Riku’s trip to Hokkaido, he notices one day an ill-looking man who stalks his house awaiting his father for a psychiatric examination. The novel clearly suggests that the man did not really get sick from radiation but rather drove himself ill by worrying about it too much. Notably, he is the only sick person that appears in the story, serving as an answer to Riku’s earlier question about the danger of radiation. To drive the point even further, Riku’s father explains it to him: ‘that person’s afraid of radiation. He’s become convinced that the radiation is making him ill, so the symptoms have started to appear for real’ (Taguchi 2016, 195). Moreover, even though it is a male character in a story that glorifies men, it is precisely his ‘wimpy’ behavior that is unfavorably contrasted with Riku’s growing manliness. The sick man is ostracized by his community for ruffling the waters. After this episode, Riku is ridiculed by his classmates for associating with him: One boy then approached Riku and said, ‘Hey, Sato! You and that guy friends or something?’ ‘What guy?’

11 Fujiki Hideaki (2017) discusses the split between life (inochi) and livelihood (seikatsu) in postFukushima documentaries, such as A2-B-C, which deals with the rise of thyroid cysts in Fukushima children after 3.11.

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 25 Looking uneasy, the boy answered, ‘I’m talking about that slightly crazy guy, the one who’s been spreading nothing but lies.’ (Taguchi 2016, 208) The children suggest that Riku should also leave their town, since he is not a native and therefore cannot be trusted. This peer pressure is neither questioned nor problematized in Taguchi’s novel. Instead of admonishing these children, the school principal Iwamoto coaxes Riku into sympathizing with them. Generally, the novel advocates for self-restraint, and during Riku’s stay in Hokkaido, children who ‘obediently observed the time-honored rules of good group behavior’ (179) are celebrated. In Bollard Disease, Kyōko is subjected to an interrogation about the death of her classmate, Akemi, since she is the only child who recalls Akemi’s request to go to infirmary before she fainted. Instead of inquiring about Akemi’s case, the teacher asks trick questions designed to incriminate Kyōko. In other words, reporting is only appropriate if it is about the dissenting behaviors, rather than actual problems, such as bullying. As in the aforementioned scene with Riku, after the interrogation Kyōko is encircled by her classmates, who accuse her of reporting lies to teachers. When Kyōko answers that she is only telling the truth, she is met with an angry attack from Ai, who asks, ‘What even is the truth?’ (Yoshimura 2014, 63). Children are othering Kyōko as a source of fuhyō higai (harmful rumors), jeopardizing the collective harmony, a theme that recurs throughout the novel. Kyōko and others who fail to fit in are perceived to be a dangerous contaminant and must be isolated before they can endanger the rest of community, ‘so that others can continue to believe that they are healthy’ (DiNitto 2019, 157). Thus, both novels illustrate how children turn on each other, replicating the social order. Toward the end of both storylines, the two works almost feel as if they are transgressing the fictional world of the other. In a scene that evokes Bollard Disease’s fascist regime, the ill man in Riku’s story urges the citizens to evacuate from Minamisōma, only to be beaten up for spreading false rumors. He condemns their stance, arguing that ‘there’s a brainwashing campaign going on. It’s terrifying’ (Taguchi 2016, 198). Ultimately, the man is banished from Minamisōma, expelling the last critical voice in the novel. Riku’s father uses this man’s example as a cautionary tale: ‘When you start believing in and worrying over things you cannot see, you trouble not only yourself, but those around you too’ (Taguchi 2016, 196). This event becomes the nail in the coffin in Riku’s perception of the dangers of radiation, as, by the end, he embraces the Japanese government’s rhetoric of ‘no immediate danger.’12

12 Satō Yūya’s short story ‘Same as Always’ (2018), in which a young mother with postpartum depression plots to murder her child by feeding the child irradiated vegetables that were declared safe by the government, prominently features and criticizes this logic.

26 Aidana Bolatbekkyzy Crucially, Kyōko also grapples with the gap between what she perceives and what she is admonished to believe she sees. What in Bollard Disease is a nonconformist disease, in Riku and the Kingdom of White is also condemned as sickness. What differs is the narrative perspective from which the disease is described. In one of the pivotal scenes near the end of the novel, Kyōko witnesses a police crackdown of several rioting citizens outside the hospital: I realized that they were outlaws and kept on viewing the scene expressionlessly when suddenly, without any forewarning, a realization struck me. It felt as if I was stabbed by that conviction. It was so horrific that I tried to deny the realization, but such resistance was meaningless. One of the policemen shouted, ‘This man is sick!’ Feeling drained, I shivered from the chills running down my spine. These people were not taken to the hospital because they were injured, they were arrested because they were sick. And, I was afflicted by the same disease. (Yoshimura 2014, 126–7) Simultaneously, Kyōko realizes that the reason her mother is so strict is that she has the same disease of dissidence. Although she was not outright disobeying the authority, she still attempted to put up a feeble resistance by not consuming the local food or by feigning patriotism. The eponymous bollard in the novel’s title refers to a large metal post typically seen in ports and used for mooring boats. Previous interpretations of the novel’s title, Bollard Disease, suggest that bollards are a metaphor for people like Kyōko who can see the reality for what it is and keep the rest of the community grounded, ‘just as ships will float out to sea if they are not tied to the bollard’ (Tamura 2017, 12). But since these dissidents are locked away, they cannot coexist with the majority since they threaten the status quo. Notably, a bollard is a metal object resembling a nail, quite literally evoking the common expression deru kui wa utareru (a nail that sticks out gets hammered in). The fate of individuals with Bollard Disease functions as a cautionary tale or a warning to others. Although Kyōko tried to convince the authorities that she was normal throughout the story, it ends with her declaring that she was not cured of her disease. Kyōko gives up the vague opportunity to be rehabilitated back into Umizuka to speak her truth: she will no longer obey the authoritarian narrative. She not only condemns the oppressive regime of voluntary delusion in Umizuka but also questions the status quo of the whole nation. Far from surrendering her dissident beliefs, Kyōko chooses to believe her own eyes. And even if she will be erased and forgotten, there will be others like her.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed to shed light on some of the narratives that constellate around the children in post-3.11 dystopian literature. These vessels of futurity articulate the multifaceted ecology of the triple disaster and its aftermath,

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies 27 providing a fecund space for discussing the limits of authority, issues of culpability, complicity, and individual autonomy. As demonstrated, we can reach two very different places from the same point of departure, as the stories not only begin but also conclude in a similar way. Both, Bollard Disease and Riku and the Kingdom of White close by addressing the fictional interlocutor and, by extension, the reader. Kyōko’s indictment is also a wake-up call for readers, whereas Riku is writing to his ex-classmate in Utsunomiya to invite her for a visit to Fukushima. While Kyōko’s diary reveals itself to originally be meant as an instrument of cooperation with the fictional authority, Riku’s story appears relatively harmless at first sight. In essence, these are two versions of the same disaster: a father and son propelling the pro-state narrative, and a mother and daughter who are not allowed to vocalize their opinions lest they be condemned by society. Thus, while Riku and Kyōko are protagonists in their stories, in each other’s story they would be regarded as antiheroes. What to one is freedom, to the other is tyranny.

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Animal Stories Agency after Radiation1 Doug Slaymaker

A significant number of animals appeared in Japanese fiction immediately after the disasters of March 11, 2011.1Most famously, perhaps, were Kawakami Hiromi’s bears in the ‘Kamisama’ stories, beginning with the 1993 version2 and then the post-3.11 version (Kawakami 2011). There are Furukawa Hideo’s horses (2016a), to which I will give some attention here, and Kimura Yūsuke’s postapocalyptic cows and fish (2019). Tawada Yōko has written about animals, polar bears in particular (2011), as well as an entire Babel of animals (2013). Taguchi Randy introduces us to Fukushima ostriches, goats, and cows in her series of stories published as In the Zone (Zōn ni te 2013). Ikezawa Natsuki gave us a veritable ark in The Double-Prowed Boat (Sōtō no fune 2013). Takahashi Gen’ichirō has an animal diary (2015). Kobayashi Erika imagines cats in a radiated environment in Breakfast with Madame Curie (Madamu Kyurī to chōshoku wo 2014). There are others, of course. Few of these animals are mere metaphors for something else—as has been the role of most animals in many human narratives—but are beings with agency and subjectivity, animals with personalities and thoughts, with intent, memories, and stories. I focus here on animals that speak, animals that are more than anthropomorphized creatures serving as stand-ins for human concerns in order to mirror humans and human society. I am paying attention to animals that communicate, that occupy the same terrain as us, may even want to replace us.3 So many animals: this essay is motivated to understand this convergence and to explore the question of the ways the representations of disaster (perhaps more accurately ‘presentations’ of the March 11, 2011, disasters) might be tied to the representations of animal interiorities. I explore how animal interiority is

1 This article has benefitted greatly from the comments of two anonymous readers of an earlier version. Other notes of gratitude follow. 2 This short story was awarded the first Pascal short story debut prize (Pasukaru tanpen bungaku shinjinshō) in 1994. The prize is awarded by Asahi networks in an entirely online process. Thus, the first print version of the story appeared in 1998. 3 I think here of John Treat’s comment on Takahashi Gen’ichirō’s Animal Diary: ‘His animals howl and growl. They are dangerous. They are not cuddly. They vie with us.’ (Treat n.d.). This phrasing also echoes Christine Marran’s conclusion following the invocation of ‘obligate storytelling’ of a ‘literature without us’ (Marran 2017).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-4

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articulated and experimented with, and also the ways that agency and language are ascribed to animals in these works, animals that join humans at an interspecies border. Given the frequency of these kinds of works with ties to the 3.11 disasters, this fiction deserves our attention. The animals in this fiction become central participants in the novelistic task of presenting—rather than simply ‘representing’—imaginative worlds. It seems impossible to fully represent animals and equally impossible to fully represent disaster. The complications involved in writing narratives based on disaster share complications with the writing of narratives that imagine animal interiority. Again, not as metaphors but more like analogs in parallel projects; both are equally resistant to description. Hayden White, among others, have theorized and disambiguated ‘represent’ with ‘present’: ‘Historical discourse wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse is interested in the real—which it approached by way of an effort to fill out the domain of the possible or imaginable.’ He goes on to borrow from De Certeau that ‘the real [. . .] can only be symbolized, never represented.’ The ‘possible,’ the ‘imaginable,’ becomes the realm of fictional narratives (White 2005, 147). Fiction is not a documentary recording; it is not so much a ‘representation of reality’ as a presentation that creates a reality, an act, and that pulls a reality into being and this goes on to influence how we experience the ‘reality’ around us.4 I surmise that one reason for these many appearances of animals may be that the fictional representation of animals, by which I mean the act of reproducing animal interiorities (in contrast to mere descriptions of animals in a fictional landscape) gets at some of the basic issues in writing fiction, issues that have been thrown into relief in the attempts to write after 3.11. These often play at the divide of the human and nonhuman, exploring it via narrative possibilities, prompted by the Tōhoku disasters; or, at least, these stories take that crisis as the catalyst, in a way that suggests a correspondence between the two. That is, the representation of animals and of disaster offers overlapping challenges and impediments to artists; art after the disasters often focuses on this experiment. Furthermore, these experiments are broader than Japan and are of relevance to issues that fiction writers face more generally. To that end, this article will circle around a number of impossibilities in order to focus on the experiment undertaken by these fiction writers, first, the impossibility of representing animals and, second, the impossibility of representing disaster. These animals are engaged in important fictional work. Animals, disaster, fiction; there seems to be a triangle in this that goes something like this:5 1) One angle of the triangle has to do with the representation of disaster. Much of this fiction is trying to express the inexpressible. It is impossible to represent, 4 I owe a debt to Tom LaMarre for helping clarify this point, in conversation with Mimi Long and Ueno Toshiya, in the Anza-Borrego Desert on the occasion of the ‘Japanese Environmental Humanities in the Desert: Graduate Conference and Master Classes,’ University of California, Irvine, December 10–13, 2018. 5 I thank Mimi Long for helping me to articulate this structure. That conversation took place during the Tanaka Symposium 2017. I thank Linda Flores for conceptualizing and organizing that conference.

Animal Stories 31 really, disaster. This is the technical challenge inherent in representation. How does one fictionally recreate the experience of something like 3.11? One can’t. Not fully, not satisfactorily. There is nothing new in this conundrum. In the case of nuclear disaster like that represented by Fukushima (with resonances with Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the challenge also comes in making visible the invisible—namely, radiation. Even light and water are easier to see and describe. (Kobayashi Erika, in her Breakfast with Madame Curie approaches the problem by having the cats of the narrative able to see radiation as light.) The 20th century gave us some of the most formidable challenges to representation: how to convey the concentration camps, the horror and magnitude of modern warfare, the inexplicability of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, which has its own special relevance to the nuclear disaster associated with 3.11. The 21st century seems intent on not being left behind in this tally. 2) For another angle of the triangle, I note the impossibility of representing animal interiorities. It is of course impossible to really represent human interiorities as well, but were I a writer, I would feel a little more confident knowing how to represent a human animal. Because, after all, if I get stuck, I can ask one. I can start by querying myself, or I could ask someone else. We haven’t yet figured out how to ask the animals what they are thinking, about what is going on in their heads, about what makes them what they are. Animal subjectivities remain elusive. 3) The third angle is where these come together. Novelists continue to try both of these impossible representations: disaster and interiorities. The third angle is tethered to imagination because imagination provides the tools for the job. That is, the representation of animals and the imaging of animal interiorities at one base angle is, certainly for post-3.11 Japanese artists, related to the other base angle where the task is to represent and image (and imagine) disaster. Attempts to represent the impossible of animal subjectivities seem to offer some ways to represent the impossible of disaster. Post-3.11 fiction writers in Japan have brought these issues together: the experiments of fiction are employed to give voice to animals; those animals are then deployed to narrate the disasters. Capturing the animals and having them speak may be a way to represent the disaster; the converse is also true: representing disaster seems related to representing animal subjectivities. Having said that, there are still some more basic problems that present themselves at the outset: what is ‘disaster’ and what are ‘animals?’ Even prior to that discussion is the issue of how to refer to the events of March 11, 2011, the day that an earthquake of historical proportions off the northeast coast of Japan spurred a tsunami and led to nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. ‘3.11’ marks a date on a calendar, while ‘Fukushima’ points to a place. ‘Triple disasters’ points to the uneven spread of earthquake, tsunami, and radiation. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake was the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since recordkeeping

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began in 1900. It shifted Japan 73 centimeters to the east; it shifted the earth on its axis by as much as 25 centimeters. The tsunami waves topped 30 meters in some places and wiped the landscape clean. After the disasters, 18,500 people were dead or missing, the single greatest loss of life to Japan since the atomic bombings of 1945. The waves then inundated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and triggered the meltdown of three reactors. Two hundred thousand people were evacuated; there are still huge areas that are uninhabitable because of radiation. It is worth remembering that the radiation was uneven; radiation is not part of everyone’s disaster experience. The disasters were experienced as all three—earthquake, tsunami, radiation—in some places; some areas continue to deal with radiation, other regions recall the water, others the shaking. Christophe Thouny has recently suggested the need for a ‘new cartography’ in considering post-3.11 work, arguing that we need a more robust mapping that can account for both the ‘punctual event’ of March 11 and the ‘ongoing everyday eventfulness’ of postdisaster life (Thouny and Mitsuhiro 2017, 21). We have had trouble accounting for both the moment and the duration. Part of that is the very strong impetus in many quarters to wish it to be ‘over.’ John Whittier Treat, in the context of Japanese atomic bomb literature, explicates how, in the representation of disaster, one must draw from vocabulary ‘some of which limits its meaning and some of which defers it’ (Treat 1995, 32). The words matter and the words are complicated. He then draws from Maurice Blanchot’s aphorism: ‘I call disaster that which does not have the ultimate for a limit: it bears the ultimate away in the disaster.’ Treat continues: ‘[Blanchot] was attempting to fix that word [i.e., disaster] as something ultimately unfixable, a synecdoche of the open-endedness many writers of atrocity have wanted to establish in their works.’ Disaster is always ongoing and open-ended, even if the news, the politicians, and overwhelmed and traumatized individuals would like to tell it differently. Many readers will recall Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cynical, and premature, announcement that the disaster was ‘under control’ in the context of the bid to have Japan be the Olympic host in 2020. This is catastrophe and disaster as limit-experience, marked, for one, by the boundaries of sensibility. The disaster as a black hole, the whirling vortex that threatens to suck all into its center, to wipe and leave blurred, to leave a smudge across the frame of existence, to distort and render unreadable the lines of experience. And in so doing, in erasing all sense and sensibility, it eradicates any confidence we might have in our senses. What we see and are experiencing seems impossible, seems to defy physics; the experience is Surreal: the experience, contrary to any sense, of things that simply should not be—ships on roads, boats on schools, surging waves that would carry professional surfers through rice fields. And if that is the case, what does the breakdown of sense mean for us as human beings? And what does it say about the embodied experience of the world? Among other things, it washes away the foundations of meaning and experience, collapses the pillars of identity. More, what does it mean to the animals with a different play of senses—at least as far as we know. Or can they be calm in the face of it because they know, sense, more, or perhaps because they know, sense, less?

Animal Stories 33 The scholarly corpus on disaster and its experience by humans is vast. The overview provided by anthropologists Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, for example, provides a very useful introduction of these points. As they explain by way of introduction, disasters do not just happen. In the vast majority of cases, they are not ‘bolts from the blue’ but take place through the conjuncture of two factors: human population and a potentially destructive agent that is part of a total ecological system, including all natural, modified, and constructed features. Both of these elements are embedded in natural and social systems that unfold as processes over time. As such, they render disasters also as processional phenomena rather than events that are isolated and temporally demarcated in exact time frames. (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002, 33) That is to say ‘natural disasters’ are often predicated by human interaction and intervention to be the disaster that they are. In this instance, however, the term opposite ‘natural’ is not so much ‘unnatural’ but ‘man-made.’ Contained in any conversation of the Tōhoku disasters are the fuzzy borders separating the ‘natural’ and the man-made or ‘anti-nature.’ This, by extension, leads us to the border between the human and the animal. It is obvious, but worth pointing out, and imagining, the ways in which the disasters would have been different had there not been nuclear power plants located close to the ocean—to state the most obvious—but if human development—housing developments and the concretization of waterways, for example—had not ensured that the tsunami waves were concentrated and then inundated with such spectacularly devastating effect. Or even, to continue, if the collective wisdom of human history had been heeded: it is perhaps too easy now to point to the ravaged houses that had been built within the precincts of hundreds-of-years-old stone markers warning of historical tsunami and further warning not to build beyond this point. Disaster—both the process of getting to one and recovering from one, are slow processes, unfolding across time. (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002, 23)6 Before I discuss the particularities of imagination as deployed by these artists, and then examine some particular works, I want to note that it is not entirely random, not entirely contingent, that writers of fiction about the disasters in Tōhoku were looking to animals to tell their stories. Japanese writers have long lineages to pull from, and we see this in the contemporary fiction. There is a lineage of myth and oral history in the Japanese tradition that might make less resistant 6 Rob Nixon’s (2011) conception of slow violence is relevant here.

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the transition to surreal and supernatural manifestations, a lineage of magical realism—style storytellings and of human and nonhuman animals inhabiting the same realms, which are available for Japanese authors to pull from. This is especially true of authors in Tōhoku. There are many animal stories; it is easy to point to the bears here: bears that have been long associated with Tōhoko, both in the physical fact of bear populations and also the mythic lives of bears, not only that of Ainu traditions of Hokkaido but also that of the Ainu and Emishi and the mainland settlers in Tōhoku.7 There are other animals too, and other styles of portraying those animals in this lineage, such as that which is found in Yanagita Kunio, for example, that informs contemporary writers. But it is probably Miyazawa Kenji who casts the longest shadow in this regard and not merely because of the animals in so many of his stories. He is tied to this narrative in other ways: there was a major earthquake and tsunami in the year of his birth and another in the year of his death, for example. We also know of his long association and identification with the Tōhoku region; of his use of regionalisms and dialectic language and regional sensibility; of his style of storytelling; and perhaps most importantly, for my purposes, of the way that he is among the earliest to write of, to try and represent, animals as sentient beings with societies sharing our space in the world. His animals are rarely gratuitously given human attributes in order to say something about human society; they are individuals in their own rights. Furukawa Hideo, for example, is indebted to Miyazawa as inspiration both in subject manner and in style.8 There are other animals in this pantheon: Furukawa also continuously reminds us of the horses and their long, deep associations with Tōhoku. Given that where I live in the US, in the state of Kentucky, is also a place long associated with horse culture, this has special resonance for me and my students when we discuss these works. I also point to the stories of dairy cattle and beef steers that appeared after the disasters. The media frenzy that has focused on Yoshizawa Masami’s ‘quixotic’ protests to save radiated cows on his ‘Ranch of Hope’ (Kibō no bokujō)9 has provided imaginative fodder for a number of writers such as Kimura Yūsuke. Tōhoku is an area with long histories of human lives intertwined with horse and cow lives. Another comment about location: one of Furukawa Hideo’s points is the way that the tales of horses in particular, but other animals as well, are built right into the narratives, histories, and experiences of this region, as I noted earlier, but also those histories are built into, and reflected in, the geography. Fukushima is

7 For example, Kawakami Hiromi (1998) explicitly ties the bear of her story and the god of her title to the ‘many such gods [that] existed in ancient Japan’ (Luke and Karashima 2012, 44). 8 Private conversation, December 10, 2017, Tokyo. See also the taidan between Furukawa and Suga Keijirō in which Furukawa recalls that in live readings near the time of the disaster he only felt like reading Miyazawa Kenji poems (Kawade 2013, 33). Further, it is worth noting the numerous contemporary retellings of Miyazawa stories that Furukawa has done for the Monkey Business project, including ‘The Bears of Nametoko.’ www.monkeybusinessmag.com/ [Accessed October 2020]. 9 See New York Times 2014.

Animal Stories 35 horse country, it is rugged mountain country, and it has a history of extractive technologies (which reminds me, again, of Appalachia, albeit with coal in the US mountains, and nuclear energy, after coal, near Fukushima) under the control of a distant, colonizing metropolis. In Horses, Horses Furukawa makes much of the fact that the location is the city and region known as Sōma, which he explicates for the readers by analyzing the characters of the place-name: ‘Sō points to a long history, to physiognomy, and ma is the character for horse. There are, in fact, horses there.’ (Furukawa 2016a, 16) The point would seem to be that this is a place of horses, down to the very naming, namings that seem to reach into prehistory. And so, ancient Sōma—the name seems to mean something like ‘reader of horse physiognomy’ (45). So, how to represent such things? Novelists, Japanese novelists in particular, refer to the imagination (sōzōryoku) in ways that I don’t find replicated in English language writers. Imagination also plays a role in representing animal interiority. I have taken, as a starting point in this consideration of animal subjectivities, agencies, and interiorities, the writing of Taguchi Randy. Malamud proposes an ‘empathizing imagination’ as a means to get beyond the border separating human and nonhuman animal: ‘The empathizing imagination can be enlisted to enhance the awareness of sentient, cognitive, ethical, and emotional affinities between people and animals,’ he writes (Malamud 2003, 9; italics original). ‘Empathizing imagination’ is offered as a way to bridge the human–animal divide; the suggestion being that it should not be impossible to employ the immense human brain powers at our disposal and imagine, if not exactly or precisely, certainly in a way, that is, compelling, and conveys with some level of believability, what another creature is thinking. Working off that suggestion, I will explore how a number of Japanese writers propose ways that imagination—representing animals—may also be the means to represent disaster. Suga Keijirō has asked: what does the animal provide us? His answer is that animals provide the possibility of the Other. In the history of humanity, what do we make of the language of animals, of the call of wolves in the wild, a language and style of communication that has developed independently of us humans in the history of evolution? To continue the paraphrase, in answer he suggests that we can’t put a name to it. It is bigger than us. We call it the sacred. It is another version of ‘awesomeness.’ It is profound. Interaction with animals in the wild feels sacred (Hatooka 2012, 133). Furukawa Hideo also provides possible answers to this question of ‘why so many animals.’ In a 2016 interview with Kris Kosaka of The Japan Times, he said: ‘Novelists can’t write realistically about human society while they’re inside it [. . .] so I write through the eyes of dogs, cats or horses—animals that depend on humans for their existence—to depict reality more accurately’ (Kosaka 2016).10 Furukawa’s statement shows him to be compelled by a ‘reality’ he wants to depict

10 This sentiment is also reflected in the conversation with Shigematsu Kiyoshi (Yoshikawa 2012, 181).

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‘accurately.’ This begs a philosophical question and poses a technical problem: not simply what is reality and how might we represent it, but more to my focus, how does one give voice to animals? Furukawa Hideo suggests that when Japanese readers encounter animals at the border of this world and the next (i.e., the supernatural world) in the spaces of forests, for example, they are likely to think of the mythological-other religious space where animals share something of the spirit of Japanese kami. It is the space of cyborgs, mutants, and ghosts perhaps best exemplified in a work such as his One Billion Years a Soldier (Arui wa jūokunen no shura 2016b). We are again at the interspecies border. In the Anglo world, this is the area of horror: when nonhumans impinge, or when the dead and near-dead come close, or when people wander in the forest; rarely is it an awesome space of religious possibility and transcendence. ‘The anxiety at the heart of the genre [of horror] is, indeed, the nature of human being’ (Prince 2004, 2). It is the fright of being human, about being human, about the humanness of the neighbor, the encounter with the other. It touches on the potential instability of the world. Furukawa invokes kamikakushi, as did Yanagita Kunio, in this space in-between. Kamikakushi is the ‘Spirited Away’ that many will think of from the Miyazawa Hayao film, a being kidnapped by the gods and transported into a nether realm: the spirited away place where things might happen, alternate possibilities occur, a place of encounter with the Other. That other is sometimes god-like beings, often animals, often amalgams and mutants. Furukawa suggests that the animal/Other provides a way to better see in this postdisaster fiction, as though holding a mirror before nature not to reflect what is, but to reflect what might be. I am reminded of Hayden White’s words here: ‘The real would consist of everything that can truthfully be said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be’ (White 2005, 147). Furukawa presents human and nonhuman beings that do not simply speak, but that narrate past and future lives. While his Horses, Horses ‘begins with Fukushima’ (to quote the subtitle added in English), it is an animal tale. At novel’s end, we discover that the horses have been given voice, and we find a landscape where horses (and cows and dogs) are central while humans inhabit the margins; the humans become the ghostly ciphers in the landscape (Furukawa in Yoshikawa 2012, 181). Furukawa’s title gestures to the horror of not knowing, of not being able to sense: the horses understand that shifts have taken place in the world around them, that the grass they eat and the ground they stand on, that the light that warms them, contains something that has changed—at least we imagine that we know that they understand this; we imagine that we actually understand, for we know what they cannot fully know, that in the pristine light of a crisp morning, the radiation that flows, like light, and threatens every aspect of existence is less visible than the streaming light that brings beauty to this scene. Again, this is some of the challenge of representability. But it also brings guilt, for this scene underscores how we humans have brought an inexplicable horror to a scene that should simply be beautiful. The intended audience of human readers and onlookers should feel guilty because this beautiful final scene of the book, a scene of beautiful horses

Animal Stories 37 standing in streaming, beautiful light underscores how we humans have brought an inexplicable horror to a scene that should simply be beautiful. It is a horror, radiation is, that we can’t really describe to ourselves, much less to these animals standing in it. Telling animals about radiation—this would be impossible. But to my greater point: here is where the two vectors converge, for while Furukawa is imagining animal voices and representing animal thoughts, (1) and at the same time imagining and representing disaster, (2) the ‘empathetic imagination’ that allows it provides the tool to represent the trauma, but only to us human readers. Because these horses are going to get sick and die. And they do not know it. They may sense it, but what would it mean for them to ‘know it?’ Furthermore, it is a horror, radiation is, this unseen thing bent on killing us, that we can’t really describe to ourselves, much less to these animals standing in it. Telling animals about radiation—this may be the most impossible of impossible things I am touching on. It seems possible this way, through imagination, but it is possible only to us human readers; a strong border separates the animals, yet again. Taguchi Randy, who has long worked on nuclear issues, including extensive writing on and experience in Chernobyl, for example, has important things to say on this topic.11 Among the questions she raises in relation to imagination and fiction writing is: How does one represent the physical effects of a terrifying phenomenon that is totally beyond the sensory capabilities, at least of humans? This is a question, of course, about radiation and our inability to sense it—we cannot see, feel, hear, taste, or smell it—and this fact has exponentially raised the horror of living in a post-3.11 world. By way of example, she suggests that seeing the number 70 on a Geiger counter means dangerous levels of radiation, even if we cannot sense it. We know the number represents something deadly, even if nothing is to be felt. So when she now sees the number 70 on a Geiger counter, she feels nauseous; she feels she will throw up. To paraphrase her point, the tool, the action that gets us from that number 70 to a reality of physical revulsion, is not, of course, the work of the senses, nor is it simply the result of brain activity, of thought; rather, she suggests, it is the work of the imagination. And that sort of imagination makes literature possible: Even though we know the [fictional] world is one woven out of words, we can empathize with the work’s characters and we feel and experience it as an actual experience. [That is, what we experience within a fictional world is no less real and ‘actual’ than what we experience in our physical world.] It is while within the world of the story that we feel excitement, that we cry tears. This is an intellectual activity available only to humans. We have the ability to feel, as real, things that do not exist in actuality. And therefore, by means of that ability, numbers alone can cause me to feel like I am going to throw up. Radiation, precisely because it is invisible to the eye and cannot be sensed, stimulates the human imagination. (Taguchi 2012, 22) 11 In particular, one thinks of Taguchi (2011).

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This is a slightly different imagination from the ‘empathetic imagination’ suggested by Randy Malamud, but there are overlaps in the projects. There is here a defense of fiction and the unreal worlds created by the imagination. What we experience in the fictional world affects the world in which we live. Fiction, and the imaginative work of the writer, can do things. Literature makes a difference. But I also invoke it here to underscore my bigger point, which is that imagination is the tool that enables us to bridge barriers and borders, namely of the human and the nonhuman, and that also may allow us to represent the unrepresentable. Ikezawa Natsuki has also articulated the ‘empathy’ side of the work of imagination in this. One of the ways he has been answering the question of ‘Why write at all in the aftermath of this disaster?’ has to do with empathy, and sympathy, and assuagement. He often borrows from Sartre’s challenge that ‘a novel does not feed a starving child.’ Of course, a novel cannot prevent a child from starving, he writes, but, literature can preserve the dignity of dying and starving children, it has that sort of power. A single child grows close to death and how are we going to make sense of it? It is via literature that we can think about it, explicate it, represent it; there are any number of things it can do. That’s the work of literature, as I see it. (Ikezawa 2017, 7) That is, fiction and art, such as that under consideration in this volume, can raise and deepen our empathy, understanding, and respect for the plight of those who are starving, or otherwise suffering under, a disaster. This adds important layers to our thinking about ‘empathy.’ This, then, is literature as support and encouragement. It also helps explain the irony, explains the absurdity of a collection such as Double-prowed Boat. His response to the criticisms of this work’s overly optimistic ending, of its frivolity in the face of disaster, is to say ‘No, it is precisely because the reality is just too miserable that we need this sort of irony’ (Ikezawa 2017, 7). What motivates such writing, he goes on, is that we need fiction—imagination—for the work of thinking about what happens to those who have died, who have gone over to the other side. There is something eulogizing about this, a sending off of the dead. Kimura Yūsuke gets at some of this in his Sacred Cesium Ground, a compelling tale that follows a woman traveling from Tokyo to volunteer at a cattle farm known in the novel as ‘Fortress of Hope.’ It closely aligns with the actual place and a group of eccentric and fascinating characters, farmers, found in the activism of Yoshizawa Masami and his ‘Ranch of Hope’ mentioned earlier. Here the imaginative mirror is held up not just to the humans, to capture the relationships and subjectivities of the humans, but to the relationships between humans and animals, and among the animals themselves, in this now-nuclear landscape. More than once, Sendō, the farmer of Kimura’s novel, expresses the ways that his future and fate are now tied to that of the animals. His future, and likely he himself, are no different from the animals. He and his cattle, that is, have come to occupy

Animal Stories 39 the same position, at least vis-à-vis human society and the government, in the shadow of the radiation. ‘I have chosen to bind my fate with that of these cattle,’ he exclaims at one point (Kimura 2019, 25). This is a work that also puts all creatures on the same plane: the radiated cattle are being fed radiated feed by radiated humans, none of which know when, or how, or even if, it might end. Of the many assumptions proven to be invalid, our distance from animals is one of them. This is a move beyond empathy, of feeling sorry for animals that share our fate, perhaps a worse fate to one where humans and animals are literally on the same plane. We come to realize that the narrator, and the farmer, are not just creatures on the same animal plane as mammals, but that they are on the same plane as colonized, subjugated creatures in a slave– master relationship. For if Sendō and other farmers in Fukushima assumed that they were in control of their land and livestock, post-Fukushima policies quickly reveal that they are not the—call them what you will—masters, farmers, owners, overlords, slave owners, of these creatures, but rather, that they, the farmers, are equally chattel in the eyes of the actual overlords; they are actually, and equally, disposable resources in the service of the masters in Tokyo and of ministries such as the Ministry of Agriculture. These are not exactly articulations of animal agency—we still don’t know what the animals ‘think’ about it—but it reveals that a profound shift in the imagination of animal space has occurred. Furukawa’s Horses, Horses is a book that does many things. It registers and grapples with the shock and magnitude of the disasters. It is profound in the ways that it presents animal interiorities. It is a narrative that has much to say about a particular region, a history, lived history, landscape, and topography. It is a tale in response to the Tōhoku disasters to be sure, but it is an imaginative and creative tour de force as well, for the way that it takes on a variety of issues and their representations. It is a compelling, and challenging, work, stylistically. These are issues of style, structure, and tone, and of the multiple voices and temporalities reflected therein. For these reasons, I will focus on this work as a means to explicate the triangle I provisionally outlined earlier. Horses, Horses is an account of a Furukawa narrator on a road trip back to Fukushima with three others from his publishing company in the summer of 2011, a few months following the disasters. It is a fascinating, complex, convoluted, often inchoate, rich stream of narratives. It is reportage of encounters on the trip. It is a tale of the area. Horses, Horses is also in interaction with Furukawa’s earlier Holy Family (Seikazoku 2008), a novel whose characters and plot are still clearly very much on his mind. In fact, one of the main characters of that earlier long novel appears in Horses, Horses; he takes up residence and propels the plot. That this character is also a time traveler brings this tale—which Furukawa insists is all true—into the realm of magical realism. It is also a tale about the horses of the title, for they get speaking roles. The opening pages of Horses, Horses record the surreal, overwhelming personal experience of the disasters. The book begins with a conversation between two fictional brothers trying to create a playlist for extraterrestrials. Such an opening alerts us that much more is going on here than a simple travelogue to

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a disaster area: again, its opening gives us a conversation between characters from an entirely different novel, thinking through a playlist for nonhuman creatures from outer space. It quickly moves to Furukawa’s present in the summer of 2011: as a Fukushima-born, Tokyo-based novelist in Kyoto gathering material for a novel, watching TV coverage of the disasters, unable to tear his eyes from the television once he realizes that the earthquake and tremors were not in close proximity—as it seemed it must be, as I think it seemed to all of us who were there—the shaking was so strong that one assumed that surely the epicenter was in whatever prefecture one found oneself when in fact it was hundreds of miles away. Twice removed, that is, from the home that may or may not have been washed out to sea. For the Furukawa narrator, there was the horror of realizing that it was centered near the homes and farms of his extended family, hundreds of miles away; the narrator records the welling of emotion, responsibility, and guilt in the wake of the events, while he is so far away. This via the Furukawa narrator, who was not in the midst of it, but who— like most of us—experienced it from afar and could not tear himself away from the imagery, nor separate emotionally, in empathy. But it is in the raw energy, the starts and stops, the fits and starts, the confusion of genre that makes for a work that captures, or presents, the experience of disaster, not just in the words on the page but in the manner of presentation. The narrator is in the car with an atlas on his lap. Then, the atlas is closed with a precise slap. First the extraterrestrials, then nonexistent brothers, then a disembodied voice that commands and gives structure to the compulsion of the work: a voice that commands ‘Go there.’ Perhaps the voice of God, perhaps prelude to kamikakushi, perhaps the voice heard by someone at the windswept border of sense and sanity, perhaps simply an overactive imagination. From there, the narrative moves to the assault on the senses that the disasters bring: eyes that will not close, followed by sleep that will not come. ‘Now the surface of my eyeballs is totally dried out. More like the dam has burst, actually.’ (Furukawa 2016a, 3). There is both deluge and desert, both overwhelming and emptying. Among the strongest senses: there is both inundation and cleaning out; there is too much to process and too little means to respond. Senses and mental capacity are not up to the task. The sheer force of the triple disasters of March 11, 2011 threatens the dissolution of sense and sensibility. And if that is the situation of the humans, what of the nonhuman actors? The experience overwhelms. Then comes the out-of-body command to ‘Go There,’ which sends the narrator on a road trip to Tōhoku to see, maybe to experience, maybe to do something, but mostly to GO. Of course, to do this thing—fling oneself into the midst of a nuclear meltdown, is crazy, perhaps literally so; it may be suicidal, perhaps self-destructive. These compulsions bring some of the power to this work. He is from the Fukushima area but was not there on March 11. His family was, which leads to some of the panic of clogged phone lines and incomplete communication; he was not there because he was in Kyoto gathering material for a different novel. Horses, Horses thus captures the guilt and concern felt by so many. (For anyone familiar with the narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

Animal Stories 41 this guilt in the face of god-sized nuclear disaster resonates.) It is sometimes reportage, sometimes a travel document, sometimes, often, a fictional novel with magical realism elements. But it is a whole lot more than any of that, and trying to figure out that something compels the questions of this chapter. Horses, Horses is a work of disoriented genre. No one, Furukawa included, knows how to categorize it (refusing to categorize is, indeed, one of the points of his entire project and is especially relevant for a discussion of the sentient-being continuum.) It is one piece of the larger project of imagination and representation. We readers wonder what to call this work: Is it straight up reportage? Is it a fictional account of a ‘real’ trip? There are complicated ways in which this portrayal of the aftermath of the disaster is ‘real’: it is not really a fictional travelogue—for it is an actual travelogue—as a travelogue that is told by one who writes fiction, to borrow Furukawa’s description, it ‘is something a novelist would write’ (Yoshikawa 2012, 177). Yet there are aspects that are more like magical realism than traditional realism—that a character from a former novel shows up in the back seat of the car is one of the strongest evidences of this. Thus, ‘by imagination alone I was able to write this ending. I am not there, Gyūichirō is not there, no narrator is there’ (Shigematsu and Furukawa 2012, 181). It is just animals in the radiated landscape. And while they do not speak, we can sense their agency, what they feel is suggested. They do not speak, but it seems they have communicated. We readers, at least, have an idea, some mental sense, if not physical sense, of what has happened and what is, quite literally, ‘in the air.’ The ways that radioactivity is man-made but impossible to humanly sense is one of the driving horrors and incomprehensibilities of this work. At this juncture grows, the uncanny awareness and freakiness of knowing that the most ominous aspect of these landscapes—the radiation—the thing that we should be fully attuned to and pay special attention to, the quality of this landscape that we know, rationally, cerebrally, via information gleaned through sight and sound, is precisely the thing that registers in no human sensory apparatus. The inability to sense radiation only adds to its ominousness: there is no way as humans to register this human made thing; it exceeds and defies detection by the senses. If this ominous horror in the experience of such a violent force is true for the humans, who ‘know’ of the radiation albeit not viscerally or physically, how much more so must it be true for the nonhumans—namely the horses for which the region is so well known—who sense that something is amiss, for whom the stress of displacement and trauma is recorded in loss of hair, or compulsive pacing, who therefore ‘know’ that the world has changed on them, but cannot discern what it is and have no means to process the information. While the title of Horses, Horses alerts us to expect horses, and while most readers will know it is a record of a return to Fukushima shortly after the disasters, the opening pages deliver on none of those promises. Indeed, it begins off-kilter with a conversation between two fictional brothers from another novel entirely, as noted earlier. It will go on to record the surreal, overwhelming, personal experience of the disasters, but the reader can only wonder how this beginning will get us there.

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One of the most striking moments of Horses, Horses is when we meet Inuzuka Gyūichirō, a character out of a different Furukawa novel; a fictional character, that is—makes an actual, physical, dare we say ‘real’ appearance, in this work. The four people on this road trip had gotten out of their rental car to look at a shrine. When they return and get in the car, the Furukawa narrator is the last to get in. He discovers there are now five passengers—one of them being Inuzuka Gyūichirō. I was the last one to get into the car. It was him. Inuzuka Gyūichirō was there. A fifth passenger. The fifth person in our party. [. . .] The oldest brother of The Holy Family, the one with ‘dog’ in the family name and ‘cow’ in the given name, was in the car with us. (Furukawa 2016a, 66–7) This character from a separate novel is now present in this ‘true’ account of a visit to Fukushima. The Gyūichirō character brings into focus ways to think about interspecies’ modes of beings and webs of agency and interiority. It is the role of Gyūichirō and his ability to speak to animals, as mentioned earlier, and animals that can speak, remember, and share histories that is part of the attribution of agency to them. In short, among the many important things that this work accomplishes, one of them has profound implications for the ways it provides an articulation of being and becoming that encompasses the nonhuman world. For example, close to the end of the narrative we encounter a scene with a number of horses. He is talking to one of them. He, Gyūichirō, asks, ‘So you are a mare?’ ‘Yesss’-is not exactly an answer the horse can provide, but in fact it is a mare. (Furukawa 2016a, 135) and from there they—Gyūichirō and the horse—go on to have a conversation that recalls the trauma of death in former battles, a sense of trauma that overlaps with the trauma that motivated this novel, that of 3.11, and moves on to a forecast of pregnancy for the mare, for a further becoming. Furukawa more fully develops his thinking in an interview with Hatooka Keita: For example, in the first draft of my novel Music the main character, which is a cat, was speaking in the language of humans. But after about two hundred pages I had to rewrite the entire thing. The reason for it is that cats don’t talk. Why don’t they talk? Because they’re cats, that’s why. That’s when the cat named Starbuck came to life. Now, this is not some sort of an ‘animal novel’ set up to negate anthropocentrism; indeed, there is a sense in which it reinforces anthropocentrism. Even so, the main character was now a cat; it represented that sort of narrative shift. In that sense, it is huge.

Animal Stories 43 Now, at something of an endpoint, in Horses, Horses, even though the horses are not speaking, we find that the thoughts of the horses have been rendered into prose. They are not speaking, which even though it may be something of an excuse on my part, they are not made to speak but still they speak; that’s the scenario I was writing. So, in short, in Belka, Why don’t you Bark, the dogs would talk, for MUSIC, I gave up on the talking cat thing, and then, in Horses, Horses, you can take it both ways. Of course, the horses are thinking as horses and whether or not that is translatable for us, well, I have no idea. And then, going forward, I have no idea yet as to how my writing about animals might go. (Hatooka 2012, 90) This interview is from 2012; we now have had a few years to see how the ‘writing about animals might go.’ One of the answers is in the 2016, Billion Years a Soldier. This is a work that introduces all sorts of experiments and complications. It is not just about animals and humans, but robots with nuclear reactors for hearts that are indistinguishable from humans, and cyborg humans and cyborg animals, and, most surprising, a central character, that is, fungus. I merely gesture to this novel, mainly because the nonhuman animals don’t really speak, but a point worth making is the way that not just cyborg animals and robot humans disturb the equilibrium of categories, but how fungus does so. Donna Haraway writes of slime, which I know is not the same, but it is relevant here: ‘I [. . .] [have] always found edification in the abilities of slime to hold things in touch and to lubricate passages for living beings and their parts’ (Haraway 2008, 1). Furukawa enlightens little beyond the fictional text: fungus is neither animal nor human. It’s a third character.12 My extrapolation is that it/they remind us, perhaps more radically than anything else, that our categories are not stable. Or, perhaps, that they are too few. There is a third category. No room for binaries. Humans-animals? Not capacious enough. It follows for all the rest: human/robot, male/female, human/cyborg, human/nonhuman. The cyborgs and robots do this as well, but the fungus throws all the questions and categories wide open. Everything is revealed as continuum. Many of these novels seem motivated by a desire to capture the radiation, the thing most on our minds, the thing invisible, the thing that renders everything different while nothing seems to be different. In Furukawa’s response, we come to feel In the End the Light [of a crisp beautiful fall morning] Remains Pure even though we know it has been muddied and blackened by radiation. In Kimura’s, it is the experience of animal and human both being abandoned, equally ostracized, for the same reasons. ‘What I felt at the time of the disasters was that my imagination, as a novelist, was ineffectual. It accomplished nothing; it saved no one’ (Shigematsu and Furukawa 2012, 178). This question is reiterated in essays in this volume: What can 12 Private conversation, December 10, 2017, Tokyo.

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art do? Can art really change anything at all? Furukawa goes on to write that he realized one of the things imagination could do was to bring an element of hope and possibility to those who had been affected by the disasters. This is paralleled in his activity of what he calls a ‘floating classroom’ (Furukawa 2015), which is an extended arts retreat that he has conducted in Fukushima. He set up a writing retreat/workshop of, for, and by those in the radiated zones. But to my point is that he also identifies this imagination as the thing, the device, and the endpoint of the process that is the ending of Horses, Horses: a pristine morning with no humans. There is a different articulation of the mirror before nature that I quoted from above: here, in an interview with Shigematsu Kiyoshi, he relates it to the fact that the most damage from the ‘natural disaster’ of earthquake and tsunami is more precisely the result of ‘human disaster’ in the form of the nuclear meltdowns, obviously, but also as a result of the massive restructuring and manipulation of the landscape. Thus, what this means is that ‘the humans have entangled all nonhuman beings in this as well. In trying to represent this, humans are writing about humans and cannot stand outside’ (Yoshikawa 2012, 181). Since there is no way to incorporate the experience of these other beings, we cannot, then, capture our own full experience of the situation. And that, he suggests, may be why the tale ends not with a landscape of humans but of two types of animals, namely the cows and the horses. Furthermore, it is not simply the appearance of horses, but Furukawa’s experiment that begins to tie this together in its various facets: the giving voice and agency to animals, the treating them as agents with voices, histories, stories, and narratives, as agents carrying experience and memories of trauma that is not subordinated to the humans, the embodying of experience and use-value that is not for the humans to avail themselves of, but that is equal to, that coexists with, that of humans. Furukawa is insistent on telling the story of history through the eyes of animals. Furukawa wrote, at about the midpoint of Horses, Horses and in italics, that ‘I wrote it for the horses’ (Furukawa 2016a, 78). This comes at the end of a passage full of anger in the retelling of the brutal history of Japan, ‘a history of killing people,’ as Furukawa phrases it, while rehearsing the military history of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century, a history in which horses, like humans, were dispatched as battleground fodder. A history in which horses and humans from the Fukushima area were cultivated, colonized, and mobilized by the ruling warrior class. He would seem to be writing this work ‘for the horses’ as a way for the horses to give voice to their own narratives of this history, a history of disasters and forced evacuations that stretch back long before the events of March 11, 2011. Furukawa’s work is one of the best examples of what I am theorizing here: an account motivated by a desire to imagine and represent the disaster. The road to that goal leads through an account motivated to imagine and represent the subjectivities, histories, and trauma of animals. The fictional projects respond first to the disasters, with the path leading through the subjectivities of animals, to a work that succeeds in giving voice to both. It is a fictional project that others—for

Animal Stories 45 example, Kimura Yūsuke, Taguchi Randy, and Ikezawa Natsuki—have worked with in the wake of the disasters and which overlap with Malamud’s ‘empathetic imagination.’

References Furukawa Hideo. 2008. Seikazoku. Tokyo: Shūeisha. ———. 2015. ‘The Drifting Classroom. The Art of Writing, Reading and Translating.’ [online] http://tadayoumanabiya.com/ [Accessed October 30, 2020]. ———. 2016a. Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima. Translated by Doug Slaymaker and Akiko Takenaka. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016b. Arui wa jūokunen no shura. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hatooka Keita. 2012. Dōbutsu to wa ‘dare’ ka? Tokyo: Shūeisha. Hoffman, Susannah M., and Anthony Oliver-Smith. 2002. Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Ikezawa Natsuki. 2013. Sōtō no fune. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. 2017. ‘Shinsaigo no bungaku wa kanō ka.’ Shakai bungaku 44: 2−17. Kawade Mukku. 2013. Miyazawa Kenji: Shura to kyūsai: Botsugo hachijūnen eikyō hozonban. Tokyo: Kawade shobō. Kawakami Hiromi. 1998. Kamisama. Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. ———. 2011. Kamisama 2011. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Kimura Yūsuke. 2019. Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge. Translated by Doug Slaymaker. New York: Columbia University Press. Kobayashi Erika. 2014. Madamu Kyurī to chōshoku wo. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Kosaka, Kris. 2016. ‘Novelist Hideo Furukawa Views the Fukushima Disaster through Nonhuman Eyes.’ Japan Times, June 11. [online] www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/06/11/ books/book-reviews/novelist-hideo-furukawa-views-fukushima-disaster-nonhumaneyes/#.WFg9yrG-KHt [Accessed June 11, 2016]. Luke, Elmer, and David J. Karashima. 2012. March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. Malamud, Randy. 2003. Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. New York: Palgrave. Marran, Christine L. 2017. Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. New York Times. 2014. ‘Defying Japan, Rancher Saves Fukushima’s Radioactive Cows.’ January 11, 2014. [online] www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/world/asia/defying-japanrancher-saves-fukushimas-radioactive-cows.html [Accessed October 30, 2020]. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prince, Stephen. 2004. The Horror Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Shigematsu Kiyoshi, and Furukawa Hideo. 2012. ‘Ushi no yō ni, uma no yō ni.’ In Shinsai to fikushon no ‘kyori,’ edited by Waseda Bungakkai, 175−99. Tokyo: Waseda Bungakukai. Taguchi Randy. 2011. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima: Genshiryoku o ukeireta nihon. Tokyo: Chikuma purima shinsho. ———. 2012. ‘Bungaku no riaritī.’ Nihon Bungaku 61 (4): 20−30. ———. 2013. Zōn ni te. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Takahashi Gen’ichirō. 2015. Dōbutsuki. Tokyo: Kawade shobō.

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Tawada Yōko. 2011. Yuki no renshūsei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. 2013. ‘Dōbutsutachi no baberu.’ Subaru 35 (8): 112−31. Thouny, Christophe, and Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro, eds. 2017. Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima. New York: Palgrave. Treat, John Whittier. 1995. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press ———. n.d. ‘Japanese Fiction Now: The Animals Approach.’ Unpublished manuscript. White, Hayden. 2005. ‘Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.’ Rethinking History 9 (2/3): 147–57. Yoshikawa Yasuhisa. 2012. Waseda bungaku. Shinsai to fikushon no ‘kyori.’ Tokyo: Waseda Bungaku.

3

Voice and Voicelessness Reading Tōhoku Vernaculars in Post-3.11 Literature Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt

Introduction Post-3.11 literature echoes with unusual voices. Especially in the early years, many novels were filled with the peculiar presence of those who are absent—the dead. Itō Seikō’s Imagination Radio (Sōzō rajio 2013) and Ayase Maru’s Eventually Reaching the Sea (Yagate umi ni todoku 2016) are just two of several texts that feature drowned narrators who need to come to terms with their own death. Itō and Ayase’s uncommon choice of narrative perspective can be read as an attempt to prevent the victims from being reduced to an abstract number and to give voice to those who cannot easily make themselves heard. The present chapter explores voices that are not inaudible in the same way as that of the dead but nonetheless subject to marginalization. My objective is to inquire into the political nature of dialectal speech in post-3.11 literature and to situate this choice of literary voice in the larger discourse of historically grown injustice and structural inequalities that engulfed postdisaster Japan. Hence, it makes sense to begin by sketching that discourse and clarifying why the use of dialect in literature is inevitably political. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns of March 11, 2011, have been framed in numerous ways, ranging from historical comparisons—to previous large-scale earthquakes and the atomic bombings of 1945—to discussions of the disaster region’s position within the Japanese nation state. In one of the most powerful postdisaster narratives, the events of 3.11 are placed in the context of a conflict between center and periphery and are told as a tale of domination and subordination. The Great East Japan earthquake hit a region that had long been regarded as periphery in many ways—politically, economically, culturally, and, last but not least, linguistically. Historian Nathan Hopson points out that ‘when Japan embarked on its quest to modernize in the mid-19th century, historical prejudice, contemporary politics, and economic calculation together led the state to marginalize Tōhoku, creating a ‘ “backward” region in both fact and image’ (Hopson 2017, cover). After 1945, the stigmatization was somewhat eased. Aomori-born writer Kimura Yūsuke, whose work is discussed later, nonetheless confesses to a lingering sense of inferiority even among those born well after the DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-5

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war. Explaining why it took him two decades to write in his native language, he comments: That’s how ashamed I was of my local dialect. [. . .] After coming to Tokyo, I was convinced I must not let out my dialect under any circumstances, which at times made it difficult for me to smoothly communicate with people. (Kimura 2021b, 124) Precisely because of its postwar image as not quite modern, the region came to be regarded as a source of new national values that the defeated nation could turn to in attempting to rebuild from the ashes. And yet, despite the revaluation of Tōhoku’s traditions, the region’s structural dependence remained unchanged. If anything, the ‘economic miracle’ of the postwar period was based on the continued exploitation of the northeast.1 In academic circles, the view that Tōhoku had been effectively transformed into a domestic colony, exploited for rice, cheap labor, and, for that matter, electricity since the modernization rush of the Meiji period, was not new.2 Yet it was only after 3.11 that this discourse went beyond the realm of scholarly discussion. Descriptions of Fukushima Prefecture as an ‘energy colony’ (Honda 2016) subjected to a ‘system of sacrifice’ (Takahashi 2012) found their way into mainstream book publications. Takahashi Tetsuya, for instance, explains the backstory of the Fukushima disaster as follows: Japan’s postwar economic growth was accompanied—and sustained—by large-scale internal labor migration, especially, but not exclusively, of young people from Fukushima and from rural areas throughout the country. As a side effect of this population movement, which ultimately was part of the modernization process itself, the countryside became depopulated. This explains why, out of fear of being left behind, rural areas like Fukushima turned to nuclear power and became dependent on subsidies. The recent accident is thus not unrelated to these developments. (Takahashi 2012, 20–1) Takahashi’s ‘system of sacrifice’ refers to a pseudo-colonial situation where the profit of one party is generated by, and relies on, the continued subordination of another party. Although the livelihood of the dominated group is often seriously

1 See, for example, Hiroshi Onitsuka’s analysis of the reasons behind the so-called nuclear power addiction (genpatsu izonshō) of nuclear power plant host municipalities in the postwar era. Onitsuka argues that the lack of financial independence from Tokyo and pressure from the central government to expand public investment no matter what plunged the local governments into economic dependence (Onitsuka 2012). 2 For an in-depth discussion of the pre- and post-3.11 academic debates on the marginalized position of Tōhoku within the Japanese nation state, see Hopson 2017; for a concise overview, see Hopson 2013.

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affected in the process, ‘the sacrifice is usually veiled, or glossed over as “selfless sacrifice”’ (Takahashi 2012, 27). The power imbalance is either rendered invisible or made to appear inevitable. In the case of 3.11, it is arguably the surge in postdisaster nationalism—seen in anything from ubiquitous recovery slogans to the Eat and Support campaign3 promoting Tōhoku foodstuffs—that served to mask the schism that had opened up between Tokyo and its periphery. Those who were attempting to unmask reconstruction nationalism by pointing to persistent structures of internal exploitation were doing so convinced that national appeals did more harm than use and that ‘reconstruction’ had to mean more than just the restoration of the predisaster state. Implicitly or explicitly, their inquiries into the history of postwar Japan called for a remapping of Japanese political and economic power relations (Oguma 2011). Much of the postdisaster cultural production was informed by and contributed to the discourse on internal power differentials, and hence the literature that emerged from the 3.11 calamity is filled with the voices of the marginalized. The present chapter focuses on one of the key strategies to inscribe marginality in literary texts, namely the use of regional speech patterns. To understand the implications of this linguistic choice, we first need to understand the difference between a language and a dialect. In modern linguistics, the former is generally seen as an umbrella term that subsumes the latter. Dialects are considered subcategories of languages—distinct, but with sufficient similarities to deny them the status of independent languages. Yet, the inevitably hierarchical distinction is ‘not necessarily based solely on the linguistic affinity or relatedness’ (Yokota-Murakami 2018, 12) but involves significant political baggage. The concept of dialect hinges on the emergence of a standard vernacular, which—more often than not—was a new language that developed during the nation-building process. Historically, the establishment of a national language went hand in hand with the repression of local variants. As Takayuki Yokota-Murakami observes, in Japan (too) the implementation of a national language took on a colonialist character: ‘the oppression of dialects in mainland Japan was parallel to the attempts at liquidation of other languages within the Japanese Empire’ (Yokota-Murakami 2018, 64). The underlying assumption of this chapter is that remnants not only of the presumed inferiority but also of the subversive nature of dialects continue to inform language use to this day. To explore the political nature of dialectal speech in post-3.11 literature, I analyze three selected works that contain a significant number of passages written in a Tōhoku dialect from the perspective of un/representation. Kimura Yūsuke’s 3 The Eat and Support (tabete ōen shiyō) campaign was launched by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and the Consumer Affairs Agency soon after the Fukushima Daiichi explosions. The consumption of agricultural produce from Northeastern Japan was framed as an act of patriotism and accompanied by silence regarding food safety. Eat and Support was aggressively promoted at a time when ‘the regulatory framework for managing radioactive food contamination itself was not yet consolidated and there was no conclusive scientific view about the impact of consuming food contaminated by radionuclides’ (Takeda 2017, 475).

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Isa’s Deluge (Isa no hanran 2016), Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (JR Uenoeki kōenguchi 2014), and Arai Takako’s Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation of Ishikawa Takuboku’s Poems (Tōhoku onbayaku Ishikawa Takuboku no uta 2017) all employ regional speech but greatly differ in other respects, such as the position of the author vis-à-vis the disaster area and greater Japanese society, the time of publication, and the process of composition. The comparative analysis shows that while the use of local speech in literary works can indeed enhance criticism of structural inequalities, the interlacing of dialectal voices alone does not guarantee any empowering effect. Without an adequate understanding of the hierarchical power relations dialects remain imbued with, the staging of dialects can easily backfire.

Kimura Yūsuke—Writing Back to the Center Kimura Yūsuke was born in 1970 in Hachinohe, a small town on Aomori’s Pacific coast, which he left for Tokyo upon entering university. Many of his stories, including the one discussed later, are set in or around Hachinohe, which suffered some damage from the 2011 tsunami, while not being completely destroyed. When the 3.11 disasters struck, Kimura had just made his literary debut, taking the Subaru Prize for Seagull Tree House (Umineko tsurī hausu 2010). The novel received attention for its quasi-bilingual dialogues. Kimura glosses dialogic speech written in Hachinohe dialect with a standard Japanese ‘translation’ in rubi4 in the same way that writers of Japan’s ethnic Korean minority—which emerged during Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula (1910–45)—have been inscribing ethnic difference into Japanese (Japanophone) literary texts. In an essay published more than 10 years later, Kimura explains that this choice was inspired by his reading of Paradise in the Sea of Sorrows—Our Minamata Disease (Kūkai jōdo—waga Minamata-byō 1969), Ishimure Michiko’s record of suffering from mercury poisoning in one of Japan’s worst industrial pollution incidents.5 While in Ishimure’s work the dialect underscores the documentary tone of her fiction, Kimura states that it made him realize how time flows differently in different regions of the country, and how dialects are best suited to capture the particular atmosphere of a community. ‘When I was in Tokyo, I was unconsciously thinking that since politics, culture, and fashion are most advanced in Tokyo, I can’t go wrong adapting to Tokyo’s pace (jikan). I believe that somehow, I felt that the

4 Rubi are small-sized annotative glosses placed right next to or above a logographic character to either show its pronunciation or add an extra layer of meaning, such as a translation. 5 From the mid-1930s, a factory run by the Chisso Corporation in the southwestern periphery of Kumamoto released untreated wastewater into the ocean, causing widespread contamination of marine life and damaging the fishing communities living off the sea. Not unlike nuclear power companies, Chisso too had promised to bring prosperity to a poor and isolated region, but while immense profits accumulated elsewhere, it was the geographically isolated and socially marginalized fisherfolk who were made to pay the price. Ishimure’s writer-activism helped draw attention to their suffering, which had been largely ignored by Chisso and the government for decades.

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pace of other regions was hopelessly behind’ (Kimura 2021b, 125). However, the thick dialect of Paradise in the Sea of Sorrows made him realize how unsuited ‘Tokyo’ is as a universal model, linguistically and otherwise: ‘I began to wonder on what grounds the Japanese “standard speech” (hyōjungo) was being referred to as “standard,” and strongly rejected the very idea of such a “standard” ’ (Kimura 2021b, 125). A similar awakening is described in Isa’s Deluge (Isa no hanran), Kimura’s second novel discussed later. Whereas Seagull Tree House appeared shortly before the 3.11 disasters, Isa’s Deluge is one of the earliest novelistic responses, and one of the first to take a quasi-postcolonial stance. Perhaps for this reason, the resistant nuance of dialectal speech is significantly more pronounced here than in the earlier work. Isa’s Deluge was first published in the November 2011 issue of the literary journal Subaru but, despite being nominated for the 2012 Mishima Yukio Prize, was not published in book form until 2016, when it was nominated for the Noma Newcomer Prize. The novel is concerned with the dissimilarity of disaster perception on the ground in Hachinohe and in Tokyo, and with the identity crisis 3.11 triggered for Tōhoku residents of the capital. While Isa’s Deluge hardly touches on the radioactive contamination caused by the Fukushima meltdowns, this is a central concern in Kimura’s second post-3.11 novel, Sacred Cesium Ground (Seichi Cs 2014). In this harsh literary critique of extractivist capitalism, Kimura describes a Tokyoite’s volunteering experience in the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (IwataWeickgenannt 2021). Taken together, Kimura’s postdisaster works are among the most openly political literary responses to the calamity. Isa’s Deluge, the focus of attention here, revolves around Kawamura Shōji, who, having recently turned 40, finds himself in the middle of a mid-life crisis. After quitting his unsatisfying job shortly before the 2011 disasters, he returns to his hometown in Northeast Japan to find out more about his highly nonconformist, often violent, uncle Isa. Although Shōji has never actually met his uncle, Isa started to frequently appear in his dreams after the calamity. On the surface, the story is rather uneventful. After listening to a couple of people’s recollections about his uncle, Shōji attends a class reunion and, after a fistfight with a former classmate, leaves the place. The real drama, however, takes place in the protagonist’s mind, where several imaginative layers intertwine. This reading of the book as a psychological drama is corroborated by the novel’s somewhat enigmatic title, Isa’s Deluge, which assigns central importance to a character who never once appears in the story. It makes sense, therefore, to start the inquiry from the title and to explore the connotations that connect the mysterious Isa to the 3.11 disasters, the indigenous Emishi inhabitants of Tōhoku, and Shōji’s own inferiority complex. Having left Aomori after high school, Shōji has spent most of his life in the capital but failed to build a successful career, let alone make the city his home. Inhibited by the presumed stigma of his Tōhoku origin and intimidated by the confidence of Tokyo’s women, he finds himself unable to adjust to a society that ‘turns on “commodities” and “sex” ’ (Kimura 2019, 85), neither of which he has any connection to. Shōji feels increasingly cornered, and ‘if asked why

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he continued in that place where everything was cramped—well, he no longer remembered’ (Kimura 2019, 93). It is during this dead-end phase of depression that Shōji starts having unusually vivid dreams in which countless bodies begin to rise from the rumbling ground: When they rose, brushed off the dust, stood with confidence, they appeared to be warriors like you would see in ancient Heian-period scrolls. But with pelts around their shoulders, there was also something barbarian around them. Everyone had a bow in hand, a bundle of arrows on their back. (Kimura 2019, 91) It slowly dawns on Shōji that these rising figures—were they awakened by a big earthquake?—must be Emishi, an ancient people that once inhabited the northern part of Japan. Constructed as savage Other and fiercely fought by various regimes throughout Japanese history, it was not until around the Kamakura period (1185–1333) that they were subjugated to central rule. With their legendary arrows, the rising Emishi in Shōji’s dream manage to silence the derisive voice that had been mocking him from above the skies in standard Japanese. Just before awaking, Shōji suddenly realizes that it is his uncle Isa, the Kawamura family’s long-standing troublemaker, who acts as the leader of the strange insurrection. A few pages later, through a conversation with Kakujirō, an old acquaintance of his uncle, Shōji learns that Edo, Kyoto, they imagined [the Emishi] as just a bunch of barbarians with pelts wrapped around their shoulder who drank blood and had blood feuds with their own brothers and stuff. The imperial court, of course, followed this story that the emperor was the end-all and be-all and then tried over and over again to subjugate this uncivilized country, yet the Emishi were always able to resist. [. . .] Kinda sounds like Isa, don’it? (Kimura 2019, 114) Kimura thus constructs a kind of impossible lineage between the forcefully subjugated indigenous population and the current inhabitants of Tōhoku, especially Shōji’s unruly uncle. In other scenes, some of Shōji’s family members are described as having foreign-looking features (Nihonjin banare) that are more resemblant of the sculptured faces of Emishi or Ainu tribes than of most contemporary Japanese. It is important to note though that this connection is entirely imagined and something that first occurs to Shōji in a dream. Yet, the frequent recurrence of this dream and the visual impact of a rising army have an uplifting effect on him, and so do Kakujirō’s tales of Emishi insurrections. Acutely aware that it is just a fantasy, Shōji still ‘couldn’t shake the strong temptation to want to think of Isa as somehow connected to the Emishi’ (Kimura 2019, 115). It is precisely the identification with the inferior position—and the Emishi’s presumably unbroken fighting spirit—that gives Shōji the strength to shake off his internalized self-subjugation to Tokyo’s values. Warmly welcomed by his dialect-speaking

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cousin, he notices that his heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing have calmed down to normal levels. It is hardly a coincidence that the recovery is described in terms reminiscent of the rising of the Emishi in his dream: There are real people here, he thought in his loneliness. He felt the increasingly pale shadow of his former self gaining substance. ‘Must be time to give up Tokyo, maybe time to come back here . . .,’ he thought to himself. (Kimura 2019, 93; second emphasis added) Shōji’s feelings for the Emishi finds its expression in two distinct ways, the first of which is related to language. While in Tokyo, Shōji always ‘conducted himself as though he feared that it would be to his disadvantage to let others know that he was from Aomori Prefecture, and he would excise all Tōhoku regionalisms from his speech’ (Kimura 2016, 94). For this reason, he ‘usually retained the standard Tokyo speech patterns for a while after returning home,’ but this time he ‘completely reverted to the Nambu dialect of the region’ (Kimura 2016, 81) right upon arrival. Nearly all conversations and Shōji’s inner thoughts are rendered in dialect. As in Seagull Tree House, much of this is left untranslated or glossed with rubi indicating standard expressions. Compared to Kimura’s debut novel, the postcolonial impetus to ‘write back to the center’ is, however, much stronger in Isa’s Deluge. Second, Shōji’s wary yet at the same time enthusiastic embrace of the rebellious subaltern fantasy can be gauged from his resolve to write a novel about his uncle. The notes he jots down after his first interviews reveal a life of hardship. Similar to the migrant-worker-turned-homeless protagonist discussed in the next section on Yū Miri’s novel, Isa’s ‘trajectory also replicates the movement of migrant labor in 20th-century Japan, from local fishing industries in decline to migrant labor, also in decline, to prisons and social structures and regional prejudices’ (Slaymaker 2019, 163). Isa’s absence from the novel and the uncertainty about his whereabouts or the circumstances of his possible end make him the ideal surface for Shōji’s projections. As Shōji’s research progresses, Isa transforms into a polyvalent symbol of oppression with an almost superhuman will to resist and survive. This ambiguity is reflected in the multiplicity of voices that Kimura uses to inscribe the fragmented experience of the marginalized: Shōji’s dreams, his many informants’ dialect-tinged narration, his factual notes. We also get to read the first, sketchy draft of the introductory chapter of Shōji’s novel on Isa. In addition, old Kakujirō, Shōji’s key informant, is astonishingly well-read—his bookshelf is filled with works by canonical writers ranging from Latin American masters such as Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Ernesto Sabato, and Jorge Luis Borges to Japanese classics. These allusions do not merely underscore the important role literary imagination plays within the novel. Rather, this explicit nod to magical realism serves to underline the postcolonial perspective Kimura takes in Isa’s Deluge. This literary mode is ‘most obviously operative in cultures situated at the fringes of mainstream literary traditions [. . .] encoding within it, perhaps, a concept of resistance to the massive imperial center and its totalizing systems’ (Slemon 1995, 10). The reference to towering figures of magical realism

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and the spectacular ending of Isa’s Deluge itself reinforce the challenge Kimura’s novel presents to Tokyo’s colonialist attitude. Both Tokyo and Tōhoku function as pars pro toto, each signifying a specific position in an unequal and antagonistic relationship of power. Kimura does not shy away from employing crude binaries to make his point—Tokyo stands for aggressive consumerism, ruthless workplace exploitation, and human indifference, while Tōhoku represents the positive opposites. Yet Shōji himself is living proof of the much more muddled reality. Although he gleefully watches television images of Tokyoites unable to get back to their homes after the earthquake, his downplaying of the relatively minor damage to Hachinohe is chided by his local interlocutors as heartless and, implicitly, Tokyo-centric. The Kawamura family’s own account of the recovery efforts is peppered with harsh criticism of the kind rarely seen in post-3.11 literature. Besides the inadequacy of government measures, which is discussed at length, the widespread reconstruction nationalism annoys the characters the most: ‘That “Hang in there” phrase . . . that sure is a tricky one,’ grumbled Kakujirō. ‘Doncha wonder who it’s even aimed at? Not like it has brought us anything useful. As if spouting words over and over again is good enough. You can say “Hang in there” all you like from far away, and maybe it makes everyone feel like they’ve done something, but the people hangin’in there?’ (Kimura 2019, 123) On the other hand, the family shares a self-critical view of what they perceive as the overly restrained, subordinate response of the Tōhoku survivors: We all got beat up with the earthquake and then the nuclear plant explosion. [. . .] All their damage has fallen on us, and we could be more explicit in arguing our pain and suffering; I mean, if we really thought about it, there is all sorts of outrage that would be appropriate. But being people from Tohoku, it’s just something we can’t do. So then all those people coming to gather information, we can’t help but try to please and talk about bright futures and shit. So the folks from the newspapers and television are quite happy to hear those stories, and that’s what they print. (Kimura 2019, 116) Perhaps inspired by Kakujirō’s conclusion that the survivors of Tōhoku needed a bit more of the Emishi spirit, quiet Shōji unexpectedly stands up to one of his former classmates, Toki-Kan, in the novel’s climactic scene. Unable to reconnect with anyone during the reunion, Shōji simply sits there drinking, when the Tokyobased businessman approaches him, suggesting in standard speech that they go out together in the capital someday. When Shōji does not respond to this uninvited show of comradery, Toki-Kan starts mocking his own former girlfriend, an old flame of Shōji’s, and casually humiliates Shōji as well when he suggests now was the time to take advantage of the woman’s precarious situation. Shōji gets up and

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without any warning punches the man in the face. Although the immediate trigger for this aggression was Toki-Kan’s impertinent behavior, as readers we realize that what Shōji really hits is ‘Tokyo.’ His former classmate, Tokyo-ized Toki-Kan, unknowingly presented Shōji with a choice between continued assimilation (read: subordination) on the one hand and the chance to become Isa and restore his selfesteem on the other. Elated, Shōji leaves the reunion and steps out in the open. Immediately after this showdown, Isa’s Deluge ends with a several pages long, wild hallucinatory vision of an uprising worthy of any magical realist resistance to centralized totalizing systems. It begins as follows: Eventually he began to hear the rhythmic pounding of hooves on the earth. When he came to he found himself in the middle of the woods at night. He was astride a horse, a member of the group of what had been called the Emishi. A rag tied around his head, a pelt over his shoulder, bow and arrows strapped on his back, bird feathers covered his neck, thrust into one side of his belt was a makiri knife and into the other hand a sword with a hilt elaborately woven with what looked to be the leaves of ferns. Emishi—what do they wear beside these pelts? Do they even wear pelts? He had no idea. He didn’t really know so he outfitted them with skintight compression pants and shirts. Didn’t quite make sense but it looked like that fancy heat-tech gear from one of those major clothing manufacturers. And there were others not with pelts but wrapped in blue vinyl tarps and empty cans and empty plastic bottles. And so, since he didn’t know if the Emishi outfitted their horses with saddles or if they steered with reins and stirrups or whatever, they had all turned into the kind of mounted warriors and horses he knew from historical dramas on television. But, whatever the form of all those guys that had fallen into formation behind him, he could not have cared less. Taken together, the full mishmash of familiar images had come together and with the form and force of anger relentlessly advanced forward. (Kimura 2019, 152) Historical victims of oppression, the horse-ridden, pelt-clad Emishi, and incensed contemporary disaster survivors are united in a storm on the capital, during which Shōji somehow finds he has indeed transformed into Isa, the leader of the resurrection. In the chaos, everyone else, too, seems to become Isa, and together they leave a trail of destruction as they trample through the financial district of Marunouchi, past the imperial palace, the Nagatachō government offices, Kasumigaseki’s ministries and, last but not least, the Tokyo Electric Power Company offices in Uchisaiwaichō, before shooting their monstrous arrows to destroy the Diet Building. ‘All those big beautiful shiny buildings constructed with stealthily amassed riches, all were pulverized, blown up, and collapsed with a powerful roar’ (Kimura 2019, 154). As the army of unlikely allies floods the capital like a tsunami, the pun in the novel’s Japanese title—written with different characters, hanran means rebellion—literally erupts into a deluge (hanran) of ‘people, voices, creatures,

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and imagery’ (Slaymaker 2019, 163). The psychological violence Shōji has been enduring all his life merges with the history of oppression throughout the centuries, overwhelms him, and leaves him completely out of his mind, screaming at a street corner in Hachinohe.

Yū Miri—Rewriting History From Below6 The second author to be discussed is Yū Miri, a second-generation Zainichi Korean born in 1968 who debuted in the late 1980s as a stage author and has been writing fiction since the mid-1990s, winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1997. After a long phase of intensely personal, often highly autobiographical writing centered on the feeling of nonbelonging, Yū had gradually shifted to more obviously fictional work as well as to nonfiction writing when the 3.11 disasters struck. She developed a keen interest in the local culture and history, trying to ‘recover what was being lost.’7 For six years, she hosted a weekly 30-minute radio program in which she interviewed around 600 locals about their personal experience of the disaster (Minamisōma n.d.). The program was broadcast via a temporary emergency radio station until its closure in March 2018. In 2015, Yū sold her home in Kamakura and relocated to Minamisōma, thus becoming one of the few individuals to move into the vicinity of the stricken reactor rather than away from it. After the ban on the town’s Odaka district was lifted in the summer of 2017, she settled in the former exclusion zone and opened a bookstore with an attached event space in April 2018. She has been hosting numerous cultural events and staged a rewritten version of one of her earliest theater plays, Still Life (Seibutsuga 1991), engaging surviving high schoolers from the evacuation zone as actors (Yū 2018). Yū explained her move as the desire to ‘move closer to the local experience, even if some gaps inevitably remain.’ Despite years of active involvement with the local community, she revealed that by actually moving there she gained a whole new understanding of the continuing disaster-related difficulties on the ground—difficulties that were hard to perceive from Tokyo, which has long since moved past the disaster.8 Her 2014 novel Tokyo Ueno Station reflects the deliberate shift in perspective that accompanied the author’s relocation. This well-researched novel—Yū includes two long pages of secondary sources—can in one sense be read as pointing to the different realities of center and margin while at the same time problematizing this overly simplistic opposition. Tokyo Ueno Station is narrated by the ghost of a homeless old man born in the same year as Emperor Akihito in what is today Minamisōma. He was part of an anonymous army of unskilled migrant workers who flocked to Tokyo during the postwar economic boom and built the

6 The section on Yū Miri is loosely based on an earlier paper published in Contemporary Japan, 2019, Vol. 31, No. 2, 180–196. Permission for reuse has been granted by Taylor & Francis. 7 Personal conversation on September 26, 2016. 8 Personal conversation on September 26, 2016.

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capital’s modern infrastructure literally with their bare hands. While he was able to support his wife and children in Fukushima, even after 37 years of marriage he had spent less than a year living under the same roof with them. When he is widowed shortly after his retirement, he leaves Fukushima for Tokyo, where he ends up living in Ueno Park, joining the large group of homeless people there. He eventually ends his life by jumping in front of a train. Just as the Yamanote line keeps circling around the imperial palace—a constant point of reference used to highlight the marginalization of the narrator (see Iwata-Weickgenannt 2019)—the bodiless protagonist keeps going through past events. Importantly, the man himself makes no attempt to blame anyone for his misfortunes; in a matter-of-fact tone, he relates his memories, much of which is rendered in the local Hamadōri vernacular. With only six years of schooling, the narrator is not intellectually capable of situating what he perceives of simply as ‘bad luck’ in any larger socioeconomic framework of exploitation and repression. Told primarily as an indirect first-person narrative, the novel may, at first glance, seem to be preoccupied with an individual life story. However, for example, by pointing out that the majority of homeless in the park are of Tōhoku origin—that is, by having the protagonist rejoin the very cohort of migrant workers he had belonged to for so many years—the novel illustrates that the man’s misfortune may not simply be the result of a purely chance string of mishaps but rather is following a typical pattern. As Ishii Masato writes, in the book: [T]here are only three instances in which the protagonist is addressed as ‘Kazusan’. [. . .] His presence remains weak throughout, and not even once does the narrator clearly self-identify. The epitome of benignancy and diligence, he is tread over and knocked down, turning into a collective symbol of those Fukushima men who collapsed and broke down without even knowing the deeper reasons for their misfortune and hardship—he is an average, a ‘prototype.’ (Ishii 2014, 115) Tokyo Ueno Station contains numerous intertextual references to other literary and nonliterary narratives of Japan’s post-Meiji history. The protagonist’s life story is embedded in an intricate web of detailed historical references to events that link today’s Ueno Park to Northeastern Japan, and to Fukushima in particular, and which are retold from the man’s subaltern perspective. The protagonist reexperiences his own death, but catharsis fails to materialize. Apparently unable to fully join the netherworld, his spirit returns to Ueno Park where he hovers around for most of the novel, trapped in a cycle of endless repetition. His transcendental nature allows him to exist in a multitude of spatial and temporal realms, and thus toward the end of the novel, well after his own death, he ‘witnesses’ his granddaughter drowning in the 3.11 tsunami and ‘hears’ snippets of radio broadcasts about the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. Conceptualized as a record of the fragmented recollections and postmortem experiences of a displaced migrant worker, Tokyo Ueno Station may be read as an attempt to inscribe heretofore invisible subjectivities into a dominant

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discourse—be it the narrative of Japan’s ‘miraculous’ postwar economic recovery or that of nationwide solidarity and support (kizuna) in the aftermath of 3.11. The novel clearly draws on postcolonial ways of understanding history, memory, and trauma, themes that are underscored and intensified amply by the local language. In the end, however, the homeless ghostly protagonist in Tokyo Ueno Station remains unable to ‘speak’ and be heard. Rather Yū shows how the poor, uneducated narrator—socially invisibilized in life, condemned to a bodiless existence in death—is assigned a position as an anonymous and essentially mute ‘Other’ by mainstream Japanese society. Yū’s strategic use of the local dialect highlights the aspect of systemic oppression in this tale of death and hardship. As in Isa’s Deluge, the Fukushima vernacular subtly underpins the idea that inconvenient narratives and painful testimonies from the periphery, past, or contemporary should not be deleted from social consciousness. Otherwise, they may come back to haunt us.

Arai Takako—The ‘Tōhoku Grannies’ as Exotic Other The third text in which a northeasterner is given a prominent role is a collection of poetry titled Ishikawa Takuboku’s Poetry as Translated by Tōhoku Grannies. The volume contains translations of verses by the Meiji-era poet Ishikawa Takuboku, one of Japan’s most revered modern lyricists, born in Tōhoku, into kesengo, Iwate’s coastal dialect. The collection was edited by the Tokyo-based poet Arai Takako (b. 1966), who ‘has a growing international reputation as one of Japan’s most original and socially conscious young poets’ (Angles 2017, 156). Author of three collections of poetry, Arai has used her native dialect to write about the lives of the working-class women who staffed the small textile factory that her family owned for generations in Kiryū, a town in Gunma Prefecture traditionally known for its weaving. She was living in Tokyo when the 3.11 disasters struck and participated in numerous public poetry vigils for which she wrote poems that stood out for their rare combination of humor and tenacious criticism. Arai reached out to the disaster region and, in cooperation with the Museum for Japanese Modern Poetry in Kitakami (Iwate), organized a series of poetry events in the city of Ōfunato, one of the communities hit hardest by the tsunamis. The workshops she organized were titled ‘Exciting words—Ōfunato’s voice/s’ (Wakuwaku na kotoba-tachi—Ōfunato no koe). Considering that as in English, koe (voice/s) can have both a literal and a metaphorical meaning, this title firmly places the event not only into the context of disaster relief but also into the post3.11 discourse surrounding the subordinate position of Tōhoku within the Japanese nation state. Between December 2014 and September 2016, nine meetings were held in temporary shelters and at the local welfare center. During the workshops, the mostly female participants, whom Arai affectionately refers to as onba (a local term for elderly women), together produced a translation of 100 tanka, short poems of 31 morae.9 9 Most poems were originally published in 1910 in the anthology A Handful of Sand (Ichiaku no suna, 2017 [1910]), but some were taken from the posthumously published collection Sad Toys

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The resulting 2017 publication, Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation, significantly differs from Kimura and Yū’s novels in at least three important respects. First, Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation is not a single-authored text but the outcome of collaborative work, which gives particular acuteness to the question of representation. Second, the work is closer to an act of rewriting rather than original creation, but unlike Kawakami Hiromi’s rewrite of her debut novella, God Bless You (Kamisama 1998) into God Bless You, 2011 (Kamisama 2011), Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation involves a change of author and (perhaps) ownership. And finally, we are dealing not with prose fiction, but with a genre of poetry, tanka, that is bound by numerous stylistic and linguistic conventions, which make the use of dialect, an even more transgressive affair than in the case of novels. It is also the only text in which the dialect itself takes center stage. Therefore, despite the limitations this presents, the discussion in this section will focus on the way the poems are presented rather than the translation itself. Born in 1886 at the outskirts of today’s Morioka City, Ishikawa Takuboku grew up during a time when Japan was still in the process of creating, and standardizing, a modern version of written Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. Arai points out that throughout his life, Ishikawa struggled hard to overcome his dialect and even took language lessons to acquire the Tokyo dialect. Partly due to the unnaturalness of spoken dialogues in his prose work, he never experienced a breakthrough as a novelist, which was his true aspiration (Arai 2017, 47). Poetry, on the other hand, follows a rigid set of rules and conventions, which he not only mastered but was able to put a contemporary twist on. Although Ishikawa writes about life up north and even expresses nostalgia about his native dialect, it is important to note that he does so in standard speech. We can rule out the possibility that he would have reached the same fame and stature he has today had he written in the local dialect. The translation of his poetry into nonstandard speech is therefore an ambiguous endeavor, especially if considered with questions of regional/national power imbalances in mind. Arai herself seems not entirely sure of the implications of this ‘back-translation’ and concludes her background essay on Ishikawa’s linguistic struggles with a rhetorical question: ‘And now, together with the onba of Ōfunato, I have returned these poems [that Takuboku regarded as a finger-exercise for writing novels] into a local Tōhoku language! Takuboku, are you angry with me, up in Heaven?’ (Arai 2017, 49). Against this background, the guiding question for the analysis below will be how the multiple voices and layers of authorship are represented in the book, and how the editor Arai frames the challenge to the literary canon that this translation inevitably presents. Does Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation indeed contribute to a revaluation of the Iwate dialect and allow for an inscription of regional difference into one of the most canonical works of modern poetry?

(Kanashiki gangu, Ishikawa 2005 [1912]). Arai states that she chose the poems based on their level of recognition while also paying attention to content; despite the gap of a century, many seem indeed surprisingly topical in light of the 3.11 disasters.

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As was the case for other poetry events held in temporary shelters (Thomas 2018), Arai’s workshop was primarily attended by elderly participants. Emphasizing that their generation was one of the last to have grown up with little exposure to mass media broadcasting in standard Japanese, Arai positions her translators as linguistic tradition keepers (Arai 2017, 8). The Ōfunato vernacular is primarily an oral language, as are most dialects. While tremendous efforts have been made to transcribe the pronunciation of the dialect, rhythm, and intonation are more difficult to render accurately. Probably for this reason, the visualization was supplemented with an audio version accessible via QR code. It is likely that readers from distant regions, including Tokyo, would have significant difficulties understanding the recording without looking at the transcription or even Ishikawa’s original. Therefore, the audio material not only is incredibly enriching but also has the effect of actually making Tōhoku voices heard. Yet, if looked at it from the angle of representation, it is troubling that the name of the recorded reader, Kinno Takako, is neither noted anywhere near the QR code nor mentioned in the audio recording itself. Unless one reads the afterword, the identity of the reader– translator remains unknown: she becomes the disembodied representative ‘voice of Tōhoku.’ As shown in the previous analyses of Kimura’s and Yū’s novels, ‘Tōhoku’ is as much a construct as ‘Tokyo,’ and in many ways the two concepts are mutually dependent and define each other. The ‘Tōhoku identity’ Shōji reverts to in Isa’s Deluge is unmistakably marked as a fantasy, while Tokyo Ueno Station inscribes particularity through its focus on the economically oppressed. In comparison, Arai’s collection seems less conscious of the dangers of homogenizing, and for that matter exoticizing, the representation of the translators as ‘grannies from the northeast,’ or Tōhoku onba. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Northeastern Japan was construed as ‘undeveloped’ and ‘backward’ for decades. Precisely for this reason, it also became a source of nostalgic longing for ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity.’ While this trend has its roots in the postwar era, it became more pronounced in the 1980s and has not waned to this day. Similar to the case of Okinawa where old women, and in particular shamans, are cast as personified tradition (Hein 2010), the Tōhoku nostalgia, too, is strongly gendered. The older Tōhoku woman took on a particular valence as a symbol of down-home, earthy authenticity, and wisdom. Arai heavily relies on stereotypes when describing the local language as ‘bodily,’ ‘visceral,’ ‘directly connected to a sense of Self,’ ‘hearty,’ and ‘transcending time’ (Arai 2017, 144–66). The same applies to her use of the word ouna to refer to the workshop participants (Arai 2017, 9). Ouna is an ancient term that is rarely used nowadays; it refers to an old, witty, and tough woman. It is unimaginable to refer to a city dweller as ouna, even if she is old, witty, and tough—ouna belong to a different time and space and are likely to populate legends and fairytales. In short, it is a term that, although clearly intended as an honorific, highly exoticizes the workshop participants. The same could be said about Arai’s description of them as ‘fantastical’ (gensōteki), and the labeling of their translations as ‘poems by onba from the seaside’ (umi no onba no uta) (Arai 2017, 9).

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This Othering extends to the presentation of the poems in the book. Each page is devoted to one verse of which both the original and the translation are given. The transcription of the dialect required significant creativity on the part of the translators, for the local language contains numerous sounds that cannot be adequately represented through the Japanese syllabary.10 Arai’s attempt at reproducing the Ōfunato vernacular’s script results in a curious mixture of kanji that are given unusual readings via rubi as well as small-size syllables from both the hiragana and katakana syllabaries to indicate variations of stress, length, etc. As mentioned, Zainichi Korean authors have long used similar techniques to note differences in their Japanese texts and to overcome the former colonial language from within. Where in Zainichi literature, this technique has been used to imitate the sound of Korean words or to express foreign accents, in the onba translation, the Japanese script is being adapted to the needs of a local variation of Japanese. The collection thus represents a case of testing, perhaps transgressing, but at any rate questioning the boundaries of standard, Tokyo-centric Japanese. At the same time, the translations do not seriously challenge the authority of the original. Whereas Ishikawa’s version is printed in a standard Minchō font, the translation is rendered in a bold Gothic font that is not normally used for poetry collections. By drawing attention to the highly creative onba version, that is, the choice of font marks it as a deviation from the standard, and simultaneously as nonthreatening. It is an instance of marking the marked. The bottom section of each page contains a comment by the editor printed in smaller characters using a standard Minchō font. The first is rather representative of the overall tone. It translates as follows: Once translated by the onba, doesn’t it immediately sound like a poem from the Rikuzen coast? Sunappa refers to the beach that appears when the tide has pulled back. Nagizagutte describes an even stronger state of wetness than [Takuboku’s original] nakinurete [wet with tears]. (Arai 2017, 12) In the context of our questions regarding power relations, voice, and voicelessness, it is remarkable that while the—mostly nameless—onba are the ones who did the actual translation, it is the workshop leader and editor, an established poet residing in Tokyo, who explains the subtleties of the local language. Overall, the book’s composition and layout do little to challenge the unequal power relationship between Tokyo and the periphery, between the standard language and local dialects, but rather confirm existing hierarchies. The choice of font and the addition of commentaries and interspersing essays mean that most of what we hear is Arai Takako’s voice. In fact, the presentation of the translated verse is not unlike a museum exhibition where Arai’s essays and comments serve to frame and process

10 In fact, although often unacknowledged, this is true for any oral language—including so-called standard speech patterns—which is never completely identical to nor replicable in writing.

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the oral and written samples of the local Ōfunato language for easy consumption by the nonlocal reader. In this reading, at least, Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation is reminiscent of salvage anthropology, a term referring to archeological efforts to find, salvage, explain, and exhibit ‘authentic’ cultural information from minor populations before it is wiped out. In this process of musealization, the act of translation itself is but one small step in a larger process that involves the selection, redaction, and preparation for publication, all of which are overseen by the editor–curator, Arai Takako.

Conclusion ‘It’s time to scream! It’s tii—ime to—ooo scree—ea—mm!’ (Kimura 2019, 156). The last line of Isa’s Deluge encapsulates the rage that had built up inside Shōji over years of personal humiliation while also showing awareness of, and giving expression to, frustration about systemic oppression and historical resentment. In June 2018, at the Literature after 3.11 Today conference in Paris, Kimura Yūsuke gave an animated reading of the climactic scene of this novel, which he prefaced by saying: Perhaps more than the content of what I am going to talk about, delivering my voice is what matters most this time. I don’t mean ‘voice’ in any metaphorical sense. Rather, having you listen to my physical voice (nikusei) during this presentation and my literature reading—my voice which is surely tinged by my rage and confusion about everything to do with the disasters—having you listen to this voice might itself have some larger meaning. (Kimura 2018, 172) Kimura’s impressive performance not only reminded the audience of the visceral, bodily quality of ‘voice,’ but revealed that ‘authenticity’ is as central, although perhaps more openly ambiguous, a concept to Kimura as it is to Arai’s collection. Different from Shōji, Yū Miri’s homeless protagonist is unable to scream. In fact, he is unable to utter a sound when he unexpectedly comes face-to-face with the emperor and fully realizes his subaltern inability to speak (IwataWeickgenannt 2019, 191). Therefore, Yū’s palimpsestic rewriting of Japan’s postwar history from the perspective of someone who was no less invisible in life than he is as a ghost can perhaps best be understood as an effort to produce ‘oppositional knowledge’ (Gutman 2017, 41). The objective of what Yifat Gutman calls memory activism is the appropriation of hegemonic models of truth by way of, among other things, testimonies. Different from Kimura, Yū has no particular ties to the region other than that, as a teenager, her mother spent a few years in Fukushima. Rather, it is Yū’s own marginalized position as a member of a diasporic community that sparked her intense interest in, and sensitivity to, the sudden loss of ties to the ancestral lands that the nuclear evacuees in Fukushima suffered. It is the transgenerational memory of colonialism that shimmers through in Tokyo Ueno Station. This is also where Tokyo Ueno

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Station connects to her previous novel Hachigatsu no hate (The End of August, Yū 2004), which also plays with contested memories. Set mostly in colonial Korea, this quasi-bilingual text—no other work of Zainichi literature contains more ‘Korean’ interspersions—integrates a multitude of highly subjective oral accounts into a nonlinear, strongly fragmented, and often contradictory narration (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2020). The similarity between the novels lies in the effort to give voice to silenced histories in order to come to terms with the origins of conflict, be it colonial history or the backstory of Japan’s economic ‘miracle’ of the postwar. Arai’s volume of poetry translation is certainly the most ambiguous when read in the context of the post-3.11 discourse on power imbalances between the ‘metropole’ and the ‘periphery.’ As shown, the question of un/representation and the related problem of power imbalances were clearly not accorded particular importance during the publication process. Yet regardless of how the poems were presented in the final product, the translation workshops seem to have given the participants a new sense of appreciation of their native dialect. In a Mainichi Shimbun article, 84-year-old Kinno Takako is quoted as saying that for us, our dialect is something embarrassing. When we get married or go to the university in some big city, we stop speaking because of it. But thanks to Arai-san’s workshops, I realized that there is much more to our local language, and that it is an important cultural asset. I was able to gain confidence in the language I use every day. (Mainichi Shimbun 2017) In the same article, fellow translator Iwabuchi Ayako, aged 85, reveals that it was the communicative aspects of the project that appealed the most to her (Mainichi Shimbun 2017). The intimacy that grew between Arai and the women can be glimpsed from a documentary movie titled Tōhoku onba no uta: tsunami no hamabe de (Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores, 2020, dir. Suzuki Yoi). Shot after the anthology’s publication, the film takes a fundamentally different approach from the book. Here Arai is clearly positioned as a listener, often sitting in a lower position than her aged interlocutors while several of the women are introduced as fellow poets. Recitals of their work interweave with long passages that are devoted to the women’s life stories. The camera often zooms in on the women’s faces, and it is their voice that carries the audience through the film. As Kimura Saeko observes, having experienced several destructive tsunamis as well as the war, these women must have gone through multiple rounds of reconstruction. And yet, I wonder whether they were in any way involved in the decision-making processes of the plans for rebuilding the disaster areas. It is possible that their voices went unheard. [. . .] What Arai listens to [in this documentary] is history from a female perspective. (Kimura 2021, 4)

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In other words, the documentary captures the testimonies of women from a marginalized region and, different from the Takuboku translations, genuinely succeeds at making minor voices heard—and, in an almost literal sense, visible, and connected to physical (women’s) bodies. In the aftermath of the 3.11 tsunamis, poetry writing circles and reciting events were rather common and, as Martin Thomas shows, played an important role in local trauma therapy. The collective activity—reading, writing, presenting—became ‘not only a stabilizing factor in the everyday life of the people, but also helped them to open their hearts to others’ (Thomas 2018, 1). The documentary about Arai and the women suggests that despite the unfortunate presentation of the translated Ishikawa poetry in the anthology, there is no reason to assume that the collaborative effort should not have had the same effect on everyone involved.

References Angles, Jeffrey. 2017. ‘Poetry in an Era of Nuclear Power—Three Poetic Responses to Fukushima.’ In Fukushima and the Arts. Negotiating Nuclear Disaster, edited by Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, 144–61. London and New York: Routledge. Arai Takako. 2017. Tōhoku onba yaku Ishikawa Takuboku no uta. Tokyo: Miraisha. Ayase Maru. 2016. Yagate umi ni todoku. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Gutman, Yifat. 2017. Memory Activism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Hein, Ina. 2010. ‘Okinawa no obā: (De-)Konstruktionen eines Symbols kultureller Differenz.’ Bochumer Jahrbuch für Ostasienforschung 34: 1–22. Honda Masakazu. 2016. ‘Enerugī shokuminchi toshite no Fukushima.’ Shokuminchi bunka kenkyū: shiryō to bunseki 15: 5–12. Hopson, Nathan. 2013. ‘Systems of Irresponsibility and Japan’s Internal Colony.’ AsiaPacific Journal: Japan Focus 11 (52.2). [online] https://apjjf.org/2013/11/52/NathanHopson/4053/article.html [Accessed April 7, 2020]. ———. 2017. Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast: Tōhoku as Japanese Postwar Thought, 1945–2011. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ishii Masato. 2014. ‘Shisha no gen’ei: Yū Miri JR Ueno eki kōen guchi.’ Minshubungaku 11: 114–7. Ishikawa Takuboku. 2005 [1912]. ‘Kanashiki gangu.’ Aozora bunko. [online] www.aozora. gr.jp/cards/000153/files/815_20544.html [Accessed April 7, 2020]. ———. 2017 [1910]. ‘Ichiaku no suna.’ Aozora bunko. [online] www.aozora.gr.jp/ cards/000153/files/816_15786.html [Accessed April 7, 2020]. Ishimure Michiko. 1969. Kūkai jōdo—waga Minamata-byō. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Itō Seikō. 2013. Sōzō rajio. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. Iwata-Weickgenannt, Kristina. 2019. ‘The Roads to Disaster, or Rewriting History From the Margins—Yū Miri’s JR Ueno Station Park Exit.’ Contemporary Japan 31 (2): 180–96. ———. 2020. ‘Broken Narratives, Multiple Truths: Writing “History” in Yū Miri’s End of August.’ Positions: Asia Critique 28 (4): 815–40. ———. 2021. ‘Doromamire no inochi—kyapitarosen hihan toshite no Kimura Yūsuke no Seichi Cs o yomu.’ In Sekai bungaku toshite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku,’ edited by Saeko Kimura and Anne Bayard-Sakai, 289–310. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten.

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Kawakami Hiromi. 1998. Kamisama. Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha. ———. 2011. Kamisama 2011. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Kimura Saeko. 2021. ‘Onna-tachi no koe o kiku. Suzuki Yoi kantoku Tōhoku onba no uta—tsunami no hamabe de ni tsuite.’ Mi’Te. Shi to hihyō 156 (4). Kimura Yūsuke. 2010. Umineko tsurī hausu. Tokyo: Shūeisha. ———. 2014. Seichi Cs. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. 2016. Isa no hanran. Tokyo: Miraisha. ———. 2018. ‘Ikimono toshite kuruu koto.’ Shinchō 171–81. ———. 2019. Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge: Two Novellas of Japan’s 3.11 Disaster. Translated by Doug Slaymaker. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2021b. ‘Watashi no genten: Kūkai jōdo to Minamata-byō.’ Subaru 118–39. Mainichi Shimbun. 2017. ‘Takuboku kesengo yaku–shinsai ikinuita onba-tachi ga “honyaku”.’ October 13. [online] https://mainichi.jp/articles/20171013/ mog/00m/040/009000c [Accessed March 30, 2020]. Minamisōma Hibari FM 87.0 MHz. n.d. ‘Yū Miri futari to hitori.’ Oguma, Eiji. 2011. ‘The Hidden Face of Disaster: 3.11, the Historical Structure and Future of Japan’s Northeast.’ Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 9 (31.6). [online] https://apjjf. org/2011/9/31/Oguma-Eiji/3583/article.html [Accessed April 7, 2020]. Onitsuka, Hiroshi. 2012. ‘Hooked on Nuclear Power: Japanese State-Local Relations and the Vicious Cycle of Nuclear Dependence.’ Asia-Pacific Journal 10 (3.1): 1–10. [online] https://apjjf.org/-Hiroshi-Onitsuka/3677/article.pdf [Accessed November 15, 2021]. Slaymaker, Doug. 2019. ‘Translator’s Afterword.’ In Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge: Two Novellas of Japan’s 3.11 Disaster, edited by Kimura Yūsuke, 157–69. New York: Columbia University Press. Slemon, Stephen. 1995. ‘Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.’ In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 9–24. Durham: Duke University Press. Suzuki Yoi. 2020. Tōhoku onba no uta: tsunami no hamabe de—Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores. Documentary film. Takahashi Tetsuya. 2012. Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima, Okinawa. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Takeda, Hiroko. 2017. ‘National Solidarity of Food Insecurity: Food Practice and Nationalism in Post-3/11 Japan.’ In Feeding Japan: The Cultural and Political Issues of Dependency and Risk, edited by Andreas Niehaus and Tine Walravens, 475–505. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, Martin. 2018. ‘Lyrik als Traumatherapie—Zur Funktion und Wirkungsweise japanischer Kurzgedichte nach dem Tōhoku-Erdbeben von 2011.’ Bunron—Zeitschrift für literaturwissenschaftliche Japanforschung 5: 1–42. [online] https://crossasia-journals. ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/bunron/article/view/3042 [Accessed March 30, 2020]. Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki. 2018. Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature & Criticism. Toward a New Polylingual Poetics. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Yū Miri. 1991. Seibutsuga. Tokyo: Jiritsu shobō. ———. 2004. Hachigatsu no hate. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. 2014. JR Ueno-eki kōen guchi. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. ———. 2018. Machi no katami. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha.

Part 2

Spatial Acts

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From That Day Forward Tōhoku, 3.11, and ‘Memory Landscapes’ Linda Flores

Introduction Over 10 years have elapsed since the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster of March 11, 2011, and memories of the catastrophe still constitute part of the fabric of daily life in the former disaster areas (hisaichi). Memorials commemorating the loss of lives, livelihoods, and infrastructures dot the landscape of the Tōhoku region in Northeastern Japan, and the term ‘fukkō’ (reconstruction) has become thoroughly embedded into the mindset of the locals. One example of this is the purpose-built stadium completed in 2019 to host the Rugby World Cup, the Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium (Kamaishi Unosumai Fukkō Sutajiamu). It was constructed on a site formerly occupied by two schools located in the town of Kamaishi (Iwate Prefecture), which suffered large numbers of casualties and sustained considerable damage on 3.11. When the disaster struck, all 600 students who attended the schools that day survived by escaping to higher ground, an incident referred to as the ‘Miracle of Kamaishi’ (Bull 2019). Set against the backdrop of the rugged mountain landscape where students and staff took refuge on 3.11, numerous aspects of the stadium’s design and construction evoke the unique character of the region. The stadium features a large, brightly colored shell mural constructed by schoolchildren who survived the disaster. The mural depicts elements of the cultural and historical landscape central to the city’s identity: a rugby ball, sea waves (referencing both the coastal location and the local rugby team, the Kamaishi Seawaves), the steel mill, the SL Ginga steam train (celebrating Iwate writer Miyazawa Kenji), the Kamaishi Daikannon statue, and a tiger (symbolizing the tiger dance [tora-mai] performed in the Kamaishi festival). According to the stadium’s official website, the canopy above the main viewing stand reflects symbols of hope: the wingspan of a bird taking flight and the sails of a ship departing on a new voyage. The stadium logo similarly offers an image of optimism and mirrors the city’s natural surroundings: ‘A red circle in the top left represents the rising sun and the start of a new journey, while three colored waves represent the rich, green mountain forest contrasted with the blue sky’ (Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium n.d.). Parts of the stadium were built from wood taken from cedar trees lost in a forest fire in nearby Ozaki Peninsula in 2017. Six hundred spectator seats in the front rows of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-7

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stands are referred to as kizuna shiito (connection seats), highlighting the support that came from various communities after the disaster. In numerous respects, the stadium was deliberately conceived to reflect the profound connection between memory, the local landscape, and identity in the region after 3.11, a bond that has become even more pronounced in the years that followed. Memorials to the disaster such as the Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium represent what French historian Pierre Nora referred to as lieux de mémoire, entities that have become symbolically significant to a community’s collective memorial heritage (Nora 1996). If we consider the Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium as one such site of memory, the inclusion of the term fukkō in the stadium’s name is instructive; the word itself connotes multiple related meanings: ‘reconstruction,’ ‘restoration,’ ‘rebuilding,’ and ‘recovery.’ In disaster-affected Tōhoku, there are visual reminders everywhere of the ongoing nature of the reconstruction effort, and the word fukkō can be seen engraved on plaques and memorial stones but also on posters and banners even 10 years after 2011. The term has taken on shades of meaning that extend well beyond brick-and-mortar memorials or structures such as the stadium. The 3.11 disaster prompted a ‘reconstruction’ of a different sort: a fundamental rethinking of regional identity that is inextricably intertwined with the act of memorializing the disaster. Nora’s lieux de mémoire are not limited to physical entities such as museums, monuments, or commemorative buildings; they include other sites—novels and texts—as potential sites of memory. This chapter examines one such 3.11 lieux de mémoire, an anthology of stories published just four years after the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster, From That Day Forward: A Collection of Short Stories by Writers from Iwate Prefecture as a Requiem to the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster (Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwateken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, Michimata 2015a). The anthology is edited by Michimata Tsutomu, who is best known as a playwright, screenwriter, and scriptwriter for radio, television, and manga but is also well regarded as an editor and author. Born in Tōno and currently a resident of Morioka City, Michimata is a key figure in the Tōhoku literary world who has played a pivotal role in articulating the catastrophe from a regional perspective after 3.11. From That Day Forward features short stories by writers with personal links to Iwate, one of the prefectures in Tōhoku most impacted by the disaster. These stories are bound together by a strong connection to the landscape, and as I will argue, this extends to the literary landscapes of Iwate. Here I examine From That Day Forward in the context of earlier literary works from the region, specifically fiction by the well-known Iwate author Miyazawa Kenji and the collection of oral tales by Yanagita Kunio, The Legends of Tōno (Tōno Monogatari) (Yanagita 2008). The works of ‘Kenji,’ as he is commonly referred to in Japanese scholarship, and The Legends of Tōno have both seen a resurgence in popularity following 3.11, and I will show that they provide crucial framing for Michimata’s anthology. Ultimately, I argue that From That Day Forward can be read as an attempt to consolidate a regional identity after 3.11, and that this identity is premised on shared conceptions of the landscapes of the region—material, symbolic, and

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literary—which, following Rudy Koshar, I refer to as ‘memory landscapes’ (Koshar 2000).

Tōhoku as Regional Identity before and after 3.11 It comes as no surprise that landscape would be at the heart of an anthology of 3.11 literature by authors from Iwate. The disaster took a tremendous toll on the Northeast: nearly 20,000 people died, with roughly 2,600 still missing (yukue fumei). Of those numbers, there were close to 5,000 dead and over 1,600 missing in Iwate Prefecture alone. The earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc on the physical landscape, with vast swathes of land either effectively erased or dramatically altered. In places like the seaside town of Ōtsuji-chō, sandy beaches along the coastline virtually disappeared; in others, the ground literally shifted position, changing the elevation and topographical features of the land. However, attention to the landscape is not only notable as a focal point for the devastation caused by the 3.11 disaster. As a region, Tōhoku has long been defined by its unique location and topographical features, which scholars have argued played a crucial role in shaping its very character. In The Dictionary of Modern Tōhoku Literature (Kindai Tōhoku bungaku jiten), Matsumoto Hiroaki addresses the relationship between the history and topography of the Tōhoku region and the mindset of its residents, noting the material conditions, such as treacherous winters, that made survival difficult, and a history of hardships1 dating back to ancient times, including famines, natural disasters, uprisings, and failed rebellions. Matsumoto observes that ‘in this prefecture they cultivate the particular topographical features of the land, and this [challenge and the history of the region] casts an intricate shadow on the hearts of the people’ (Nihon Kindai Bungakukai Tōhokushibu 2013, 571). In recent years, Yomiuri Prize–winning author and Fukushima native Furukawa Hideo has also highlighted the marginality of Tōhoku in his post-3.11 novel Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima (Umatachi yo, sore demo hikari wa muku de, 2011). Furukawa articulates his story from a personal perspective, documenting the journey of the author-cum-narrator to the heart of the exclusion zone in Fukushima in the aftermath of 3.11 and links the disaster to the traumatic history of the region. Citing the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki, 711–2), the narrator of Horses, Horses points out that in this oldest extant chronicle in Japan, Tōhoku does not even figure into the narrative, but, in fact, that island was understood to refer only to the kinai imperial holdings near Kyoto, so Tohoku was not included in that story. In other words,

1 Some of the most well-known among these include the Emishi rebellions in the 700s, the Great Tenmei Famine in the 1780s, volcanic eruptions at Mount Iwaki and Mount Asama, and the Tempo Famine in the 1830s.

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Linda Flores from the very beginning, the northeastern prefectures of Tohoku were not even considered part of Honshū. I am sure that this has been on your mind as well. And I assume with those peculiar scales of yours you are calculating the fortune and misfortune that followed from being excluded from those founding myths. (Furukawa 2016, 98–9)

A keen awareness of, and resistance to, the marginalization experienced by the Tōhoku region has a lengthy history, and literary works were a site of engagement and critique well before Furukawa published Horses, Horses. In Hoyt Long’s cogent study of one of the region’s most famous authors, Miyazawa Kenji, he identifies a ‘principle of unevenness’ with respect to the position of Tōhoku within Japan (Long 2012). He attributes this in part to irregular patterns of economic growth across the country during the Meiji period, which led to Tōhoku being relegated as a space that was somehow lagging behind the rest of Japan in terms of development. This sense of being ‘out-of-step’ with the rest of Japan also extended to include the character of the region, with ‘its inhabitants on a lower moral rung than other parts of the country’ (Long 2012, 30–1, 91). In his study, Long demonstrates how Kenji’s literary production extolled the value of the local—by narrating stories about his beloved Iwate—and in doing so, redefined the relationship between center and periphery. According to Long, Kenji imbued the Tōhoku region with new and different meanings through his portrayals of the landscape in his fiction and poetry. Significantly, this celebration of the regional was regarded as resistance against the dominant narrative of Tōhoku identity. There is a growing body of scholarship on Tōhoku identity in the social sciences in both Japan and the West. In Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast, historian Nathan Hopson carefully examines the ‘idea of Tōhoku’ and how it developed over the course of more than half a century from 1950 to the period just after the Great East Japan Earthquake. He identifies a discernible shift in intellectual thought from the postwar ‘noble savage’ image—linked to the idea of Tōhoku as being on a lower moral rung than the rest of Japan—to a post-1980s image of Tōhoku as holding the key to solving the problems of modernity and globalization. Post-1980s Tōhokugaku scholars believed that the region could represent a return to a more authentic past and serve as the repository for a national Japanese identity (Hopson 2017, 200). The work of ethnologist and Tōhokugaku scholar Akasaka Norio also exposes the tensions inherent in defining a Tōhoku identity (Akasaka 2013). In his research, Akasaka attempts to dispel the illusion of ‘common people’ (jōmin) of the northeast of Japan and to relativize conventionally held conceptions of Japan, which he argues have been forged vis-à-vis Tōhoku. Akasaka has argued that the true identity of the Tōhoku region has been eclipsed by the work of the father of folklore studies (minzokugaku), Yanagita Kunio; accordingly, Tōhoku has been defined through a north-south, periphery-center divide. As an ideological corrective to this, he posits the existence of ‘another Tōhoku’ (mō hitotsu no Tōhoku), one that remains to be discovered. This, he suggests, gives rise to not a singular version of Japanese identity but rather to ‘a number

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of Japans’ (ikutsumo no Nihon) (Akasaka 2014). A member of the Great Eastern Japan Reconstruction Plan Council (Higashi Nihon daishinsai fukkō kōsō kaigi), Akasaka’s work, though controversial in many ways, arguably has assumed even greater relevance since the disaster of 3.11. The narrative of Tōhoku regional identity has been framed by these complex and varied discourses of struggle, catastrophe, and marginalization. As such, when we examine an anthology of Iwate-based literature written after 3.11 as a lieux de mémoire, it must be read against this nuanced backdrop of a contested regional identity. Tōhoku regards itself as a region that has been left behind by history and this further emphasizes the importance of preserving memories about the disaster and articulating those efforts from a regional perspective. In her study of trauma writing, Anne Whitehead comments on the importance of positionality when considering landscape, trauma, and memory: The question of positioning that landscape evokes can be regarded as crucial within the current discourse of trauma, for all efforts to confront and remember the past must be preceded by a consideration of the perspective from which we, as belated witnesses, view the event. (Whitehead 2004, 48) The Great East Japan Earthquake disaster refocused discourse on Tōhoku and its identity; just as the region became the object of global attention as a disasteraffected area, writers also sought to represent the voices of the region. Hayley Saul has argued that disasters can provide critical moments for the negotiation of identity: ‘Disasters present a very powerful and often unpredictable context for the formation and maintenance of collective memories and identities because they are often forged in an atmosphere of existential threat’ (Saul 2019, 445). Indeed, given the lengthy historical experience of trauma and the contestation regarding Tōhoku identity, the stakes seem particularly high for such opportunities of collective memory and identity formulation following 3.11.

Iwate Literature after 3.11: From That Day Forward Michimata has edited two anthologies of literature by writers from the region after 2011. The first, titled 12 Gifts—Aid for the Great East Japan Earthquake—Selected Short Stories by Writers from Iwate Prefecture (12 no okurimono—Higashi Nihon Daishinsai shien—Iwate-ken zaijū sakka jisen tanpenshū), consists of a compilation of previously published material by 12 Iwate writers who donated their royalties from its publication to the relief effort (Michimata 2011).2 His second

2 Kitakami Akihiko developed the initial plan for 12 Gifts. Kitakami’s own home in Karumai, Iwate, had flooded some 10 years earlier and, as the recipient of aid in the aftermath, he wanted to repay this perceived debt to society (Michimata 2011, 426). He consulted with another local writer, Takahashi Katsuhiko, and the two decided that in order to offer assistance quickly to those in need, it

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anthology, From That Day Forward, was published in October 2015, four years after the March 2011 disaster, and was intended as a sequel to 12 Gifts. For this, Michimata expressly commissioned stories from Iwate writers on the theme of the disaster. Contributors to From That Day Forward hailed from a variety of literary backgrounds, including well-established authors such as Takahashi Katsuhiko, Kumi Saori, Kashiwaba Sachiko, and the essayist and picture book author Sawaguchi Tamami. Michimata ordered the authors’ contributions according to the year in which each writer was born, imparting both a sense of chronological time and a historical perspective to the anthology. In total, there are 14 short stories penned by 12 authors; the majority were commissioned specifically for inclusion in the anthology, although several were also published in other journals. Structurally, the anthology consists of a table of contents, short stories, black and white photographs, an afterword by the editor, and biographies of the contributors. The black and white photographs in From That Day Forward taken by Morioka-born photographer Matsumoto Shin are a prominent feature of the anthology. The anthology includes a photograph at the beginning of each of the 12 contributed stories. Unlike the countless images of the devastation of the disaster area circulated in the mass media, the photographs in the anthology depict placid images of the local landscape and its residents. The book’s dust jacket, for example, portrays two young girls playing by the sea, with small boats pictured in the distance. In fact, only a few of the photographs clearly portray ravaged sites in the disaster areas. The majority of the images are best described as artistically rendered shots of a variety of photographic subjects: smiling local residents, the sea, seabirds, a close-up of a piece of driftwood, and lone boats in the distance. These ‘paratextual elements’ (Genette 1997, 1) function as reminders to the reader that, while fictional, the stories are representative of the real-life traumatic experience of 3.11 in Iwate. In his afterword to the anthology, Michimata considers the role of literature in times of crisis, noting that when disasters strike, the immediate needs of survivors consist primarily of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. He identifies a collective feeling of helplessness experienced by writers in the wake of disasters: ‘in times of crisis, things like literature are useless’ (Michimata 2015b, 488).3 Nevertheless, Michimata argues that stories (monogatari) possess the power to delve into the depths of human interiority and to unravel our complex emotions. He states, ‘The only way that authors can confront the reality [of the disaster] is to write’ and offers this as the purpose of the anthology (488–9). He also points out that the stories are largely presented without explanation, as though the simple act of reading them is sufficient to convey the message of the authors. He offers scarce commentary on the individual stories themselves but identifies two literary landscapes,

would be more expedient to ask already published writers to republish their works in an anthology rather than commissioning them to write new stories. 3 Playwright, director, and writer Okada Toshiki has also commented on the disaster in this vein; see Geilhorn 2017, 166.

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or what Koshar might term ‘memory landscapes,’ that provide the backdrop for From That Day Forward: the work of Miyazawa Kenji and The Legends of Tōno. By citing Miyazawa Kenji and The Legends of Tōno as literary landscapes, Michimata draws attention to the centrality of a regional identity rooted not just in Tōhoku but more specifically in the space of Iwate. As indicated by the subtitle, which specifies that the writers share some connection with Iwate, the anthology was intended as a local production; indeed, every story in the anthology contains references identifying it as such. The importance of regional identity is made evident, first, through the inclusion of photographs of local sites and residents and, second, through the employment of place names within the stories themselves. The stories reference Iwate-specific locations—towns, cities, train stations, railway lines, police stations, well-known shopping streets, and drinking spots—the majority of which would have resonance only to local inhabitants. One example of this is Matsuda Jukkoku’s ‘The Case of Aina—From the Case Files of Drunkard’s Alley’ (Aina no baai ~ Nonbei yokochō no jikenbo, 2015), a crime story involving a former policewoman and a Tokyo dancer turned actress. The author’s note at the end of the story emphasizes that it is not based on real-life events. However, it is set in Kamaishi and mentions distinctly local places and entities such as the Kamaishi ‘Drunkard’s Alley,’ an alley lined with bars; the Night on the Galactic Railway Train (SL Ginga Tetsudō), the steam train designed around the theme of Miyazawa Kenji’s eponymous story; the Kamaishi Historical Records Display; the Kamaishi Educational Center; local beaches; numbered motorways; and the like. In a similar vein, Sawamura Tetsu’s ‘Towards Another Me’ (Mō hitori no watashi e, 2015) describes the aforementioned ‘Miracle of Kamaishi’ and plans to construct the Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium. From That Day Forward is also a local text in another respect: for these Iwate writers, shinsai (earthquake disaster) refers primarily to the earthquake and tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011; it does not include the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima.4 A large number of post-3.11 texts center on the impact of the meltdowns at the nuclear power plant at Fukushima and the continued effects of radiation contamination on the environment, but in From That Day Forward, the nuclear issue is conspicuous only in its absence. This is not to undermine the grave impact the Fukushima disaster has had on Iwate but rather seems driven by a sense that Iwate does not ‘own’ the nuclear disaster in the same way that it does the other two constituent elements of 3.11, the earthquake and tsunami. Several narratives in From That Day Forward in fact center on the exact day or even the precise moment that the earthquake and/or tsunami struck. ‘Accident Blind Spot’ 4 In fact, only Ōmura Yukimi’s story ‘Swing’ (Suwingu) alludes to the nuclear meltdowns. The protagonist sees an acrylic donation box collecting monies for disaster victims and realizes that unlike in Iwate, for Tokyo dwellers, there is nothing that forces one to be aware of ‘that day,’ 3.11. She thinks to herself, ‘Even if you watch the news about the disaster, there are many broadcasts dealing with nuclear power–related issues, but you cannot learn about the various places on the coast that were inundated by the tsunami in its aftermath, the lives of the people who live there, or the current state of the reconstruction’ (Ōmura 2015, 399–400).

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(Jiko no shikakaku) by Kitakami Akihiko (2015) and ‘The Sea that Day’ (Ano hi no umi) by Saitō Jun (2015) weave narratives that blend the everyday lives of residents of Iwate on ‘that day’ with the extraordinary occurrence of the disaster. ‘The Dog with Long Boots’ (Nagakutsu o haita inu) by Kumi Saori (2015) and ‘Pure Love’ (Jun ai) by Ishino Akira (2015) describe serendipitous events that occurred on the day of the disaster or in its aftermath. Kashiwaba Sachiko’s ‘The Child Who Came from the Sea’ (Umi kara kita ko) is temporally situated after the disaster but evokes the memory of the many children who lost their parents in the tsunami when, during a cherry–blossom viewing excursion, a family discover and take in a lone soaking-wet child who has ‘the scent of the sea’ (Kashiwaba 2015c, 104–5). In each of these stories, it is the earthquake and tsunami, rather than the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, that are explicitly or implicitly central to the narrative.

3.11 and Miyazawa Kenji Another regional element of the anthology can be located in Michimata’s acknowledgment of the influence of the renowned poet, children’s author, and agriculturalist discussed earlier, Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933). Kenji was a native of Hanamaki City in Iwate Prefecture who was relatively unknown during his lifetime but became famous posthumously. He was born in 1896, a mere two months after the devastating Meiji Sanriku earthquake and tsunami, which recorded a magnitude of 8.5 and claimed over 22,000 lives; he died in September 1933, six months after the Shōwa Sanriku earthquake, which claimed just over 3,000 lives. After a short spell in Tokyo, Kenji returned to Iwate in 1921 to care for his younger sister, who died not long afterward. He was known for his social activism and his profound affection for Iwate, which frequently figured as a mythical landscape in his fantastical stories. To this day, Kenji remains one of Iwate’s most famous sons: In his hometown of Hanamaki, there are several museums devoted to his life and works; a Kenji Festival is held annually in September; and images from his stories can be seen throughout the region. In 1996, an anime titled Ihatov Fantasy: Kenji’s Spring (Īhatōbu gensō: Kenji no haru)5 was released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. There are even two railway lines named in Kenji’s honor, the aforementioned SL Ginga and the Iwate Galaxy Railway Line (Iwate Ginga Tetsudō-sen), which began servicing the region in 2014 to symbolize the region’s recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake. The key attraction of the SL Ginga is an old-fashioned steam locomotive with an interior fashioned to reflect the nostalgic flavor of Kenji’s fiction, especially his much-beloved children’s story Night on the Galactic Railroad (Ginga tetsudō no yoru), written in 1927 and published in 1934. Kenji’s influence on the region is such that one could argue

5 The anime was directed by Kawamori Shōji. The English title of the anime DVD is Spring and Chaos, which is taken from the title of one of Kenji’s poetry collections, Spring and the Demon.

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that the setting for several of the stories in From That Day Forward is not merely Iwate, but Kenji’s cherished Īhatov, the term he used for fictionalized versions of Iwate in his stories.

The Legends of Tōno (Tōno Monogatari, 1910) Notably, Iwate—which receives such affectionate prominence in Kenji’s work—is the prefecture containing Tōno City6, a place renowned for its connection to regional legends and folklore and directly linked to the other literary source that Michimata evokes as central to From That Day Forward, The Legends of Tōno. In the concluding sentence of his afterword, Michimata provocatively claims that From That Day Forward can be regarded as a ‘modern day Legends of Tōno’ (Michimata 2015b, 491). Michimata also indicates a link to these tales when he cites Takahashi Katsuhiko’s comments on his contribution ‘Eternity Springs’ (Saru no yu), the lead story in the anthology, that ‘no matter what he tried to write, somehow he ended up writing a monogatari about the disaster’ (489). Takahashi’s statement alludes to an almost intangible connection between The Legends of Tōno and From That Day Forward, two texts written over a hundred years apart that share a common landscape. The Legends of Tōno consists of a compilation of tales told by the storyteller Sasaki Kizen (1886–1933)7, folklorist and native of Tōno City, to Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), widely considered the founding father of Japanese folklore studies, who compiled and published the tales as The Legends of Tōno (Yanagita [1910] 1973). Sasaki met Yanagita in 1908, and together they recorded this extensive collection of the oral tales and traditions of Iwate Prefecture. Although the relatively young Sasaki conveyed these stories—some folklore, some legend, some myth, some tabloid-like news—directly to Yanagita in 1909, many of the stories had been passed down to Sasaki by town elders, which means that their origins may date as far back as the early 1800s (Sadler 1987). A.W. Sadler suggests that the tales are best read as a portrait of the region at the time: ‘Tōno is delineated as it was around the turn of the century, with all its visible earthly and human topography, and its invisible burden of memory and hauntings’ (Sadler 1987, 217). Examining The Legends of Tōno from a literary perspective, Melek Ortabasi argues that the text occupies a social role; it is a communal text that invokes the participation of the reader (Ortabasi 2009). Ortabasi intervenes into existing discourses and argues that Yanagita employed narrative techniques and language to de-emphasize the literariness of the tale so that it better reflected the presentday lived realities of the people of Tōno. She also considers Yanagita’s travel

6 Akasaka Norio has highlighted the importance of Tōno following 3.11. The city was impacted by the earthquake, but due to its inland location and the surrounding Kitakami mountain range, Tōno was spared damage from the tsunami. As such, it served as the perfect location for coordinating the disaster relief effort after the earthquake and tsunami. See Akasaka 2012. 7 In his later years, Sasaki Kizen was also acquainted with Miyazawa Kenji.

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writings, arguing that they encouraged readers to consider landscape as something which bears traces of the region’s cultural history. In that respect, Ortabasi refers to Yanagita as a translator of sorts, whose function was to ‘(re)connect past to present, reader to landscape’ through explanations of accreted historical and cultural meaning (Ortabasi 2014, 81). Expanding on Ortabasi’s research, Amano Yuka connects The Legends of Tōno with Yanagita’s other folkloric works, considering the text as a site of intersection between literature and folklore. She refers to the text as a form of ‘public property,’ and as a textual ‘communal space,’ examining the widespread contention that it formed a ‘textual community to cope with the aftermath of modernization’ (Amano 2014, 117). Amano further argues that The Legends of Tōno can be regarded as a ritual text with a social function, namely to create a textual community premised on readership. These perspectives on The Legends of Tōno inform the present reading of From That Day Forward, which can also be considered as a communal text that forges a critical relationship between the readership and the landscape.

Landscapes and Memory There is a significant and growing body of literature on the study of landscape. The field of study is by no means limited to geography, and landscape can be defined as something that is both ‘mental as well as physical, subjective as well as objective’ (Howard et al. 2019, xxi). In recent decades, theorists have debated the meanings associated with landscape; theories range from regarding landscape as a perspective, or ‘way of seeing’ according to Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), to a return to the materiality of landscape, wherein landscapes are defined as ‘emerging and evolving within social systems,’ as Martijn Duineveld, Kristof Van Assche, and Raoul Beunen have argued (Duineveld et al. 2017). In A Phenomenology of Landscape, Christopher Tilley argues, a landscape is a series of named locales, a set of relational places linked by paths, movements and narratives. It is a ‘natural’ topography perspectivally linked to the existential Being of the body in societal space. It is a cultural code for living, an anonymous ‘text’ to be read and interpreted, a writing pad for inscription, a scape of and for human praxis, a mode of dwelling and a mode of experiencing. (Tilley 1994, 34) Tilley identifies landscape as linked to our consciousness; it is experienced rather than simply depicted or viewed. Tying perception to materiality brings to bear the importance of positionality vis-à-vis landscape, which Whitehead (2004) has identified, and Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing refer to as ‘affect.’ Heholt and Downing define affect in relation to landscape as the body’s immersion in the world; beyond consciousness, beyond, sometimes, even recognized emotion. From the point of view of affect theory

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therefore the landscape is no longer seen as a distant prospect to be looked at, or painted or written about as something removed and external. [. . .] The division between the landscape and the body is collapsed and the focus falls onto the experience of landscape rather than its depiction. (Heholt and Downing 2016, 3) Significantly, numerous scholars have attempted to conceive of the study of landscape in ways that encompass both perception and materiality. Duineveld et al. advocate for a theory of landscape in which ‘discourse’ and ‘materiality’ are not dichotomous categories, and one should not be regarded as ontologically prior to the other (Duineveld et al. 2017, 375). In keeping with this, this study regards landscape as grounded in materiality, though not limited to it as such, as landscapes can also be remembered and imagined. Indeed, the memory and imagination of landscapes attain even greater significance when we consider 3.11 and the scale of the devastation and destruction of the physical landscape of Tōhoku. Following Tilley (1994), I argue that landscapes, like texts, are capable of being written, read, interpreted, and reinscribed. The landscape of Iwate has been written and rewritten over generations through texts such as The Legends of Tōno and the works of Miyazawa Kenji, inscribed as a mysterious place of folklore and the supernatural, and then as a fantastic setting in Kenji’s literature for children. From That Day Forward is both constructed upon and builds on this foundation, contributing yet another layer of meaning and emerging as a memory landscape in the process.

Iwate as a ‘Memory Landscape’ Koshar’s ‘memory landscape’ stems from the German Erinnerungslandschaft, which connotes the mnemonic qualities not only of architectural landmarks and monuments in the narrower sense but also of street names, public squares, historic sites such as World War II bunkers or former concentration camps, and even whole townscapes or natural landscapes. (Koshar 2000, 9) For Koshar, memory landscapes are physical or topographical entities imbued with collective memories and signification through the intervention of human agency. As works of post-3.11 fiction, the narratives in From That Day Forward portray Iwate as a potent memory landscape that takes on symbolic meaning as a site of redemption and returns, a theme that recurs throughout the anthology.8

8 This theme is particularly notable in stories such as: Takahashi Katsuhiko’s ‘Eternity Springs’; Hiraya Yoshiki’s ‘Kanako’; Sawaguchi Tamami’s ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month’; Kikuchi Yukimi’s ‘The Bar Counter by the Sea’ (Umibe no kauntā); Ōmura’s ‘Swing’; and

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Iwate becomes a repository of memories—not only those relating to the disaster, but also historical, cultural, and indeed literary memories of the region. In what follows, I will discuss two representative stories from the anthology that powerfully illustrate this theme. The first, Sawaguchi Tamami’s ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month’ (Suisenzuki no mikka), makes overt reference to the Miyazawa Kenji story ‘On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month’ (Suisenzuki no yokka)9 and evokes the magical landscape of Kenji’s Īhatov (Sawaguchi 2015). The second, Takahashi Katsuhiko’s ‘Eternity Springs,’ recalls the supernatural legends and lore of Yanagita Kunio’s The Legends of Tōno (Takahashi 2015).

‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month’ Sawaguchi’s story prominently features two types of landscapes: the literary landscape of Miyazawa Kenji’s fiction, especially his short story ‘On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month,’ and the mythical landscape of Kenji’s Īhatov. Kenji’s beloved Iwate landscape embodied in Īhatov and the splendor of nature in the region feature prominently in Sawaguchi’s ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month,’ which portrays a young woman whose fiancé numbers among the thousands missing in the tsunami on 3.11. Both the protagonist and her fiancé were environmental scientists and Kenji fans, who had made their home in Iwate surrounded by the resplendent beauty of its natural landscape. Several years after her fiancé’s disappearance in the tsunami, the protagonist still refuses to acknowledge the possibility of his death, even drawing comfort from the fact that his remains have never been found. After 3.11, the protagonist commences her ‘strange husband-less newlywed life’ (Sawaguchi 2015, 325) in their intended marital home. She gives birth to their son, naming him ‘Hikari’ after a line from a poem by Kenji, in the hopes that he will grow up to be ‘in tune with nature’ like both Kenji and her beloved fiancé (327). As in Kenji’s fiction, nature—including animals, insects, sea, sky, and celestial bodies—features prominently in Sawaguchi’s depiction of Iwate. Kenji imagined Īhatov as a magical place steeped in the beauty of nature, as illustrated by an advertisement for his story collection, The Restaurant of Many Orders: There, everything is possible. One can instantly jump over the field of snow and ice to travel toward the north, riding the great wind that circles around the earth, or one can talk with ants that crawl under the red cups of flowers. There, even sins and sorrows radiate in pure, holy light. (Hagiwara 1993, 36) Sawamura Tetsu’s ‘Towards Another Me.’ These narratives portray protagonists who have emigrated from Iwate to urban centers such as Tokyo and then returned, whether permanently or temporarily, after the disaster (Michimata 2015a). 9 Miyazawa Kenji’s ‘Suisenzuki no yokka’ was published in 1924 in the collection The Restaurant of Many Orders (Chūmon no ōi ryōriten, 1956). An English translation of the story ‘Suisenzuki no yokka’ titled ‘The Red Blanket’ was published in Winds from Afar (1972), an anthology of Miyazawa Kenji translations by John Bester. A picture book version titled On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month, translated by Sarah Strong and illustrated by Idou Masao, was published in 1997.

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Like Kenji’s Gauche the Cellist (Sero hiki no Goshu),10 the protagonist possesses the ability to communicate with the natural world: Since I was a young girl, I have been speaking to birds, flowers, insects or creatures in the same way that I do with people. Even now that I am grown, I occasionally find myself unconsciously in conversation with the living things around me. (Sawaguchi 2015, 328) Hikari also possesses this unusual talent, and mother and son dwell together in harmony with nature in their remote woodland home. However, as is well known to the people of Iwate, nature can be cruel as well as kind, and the tension between the two lies at the very heart of Sawaguchi’s story. Counterbalanced to Iwate’s natural beauty is the destructive power of the tsunami that swept the protagonist’s fiancé out to sea. This is brought to the fore when the protagonist and her son discover a picture book of Kenji’s ‘On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month.’11 Whereas Kenji’s story depicts the harshness of Iwate winters, Sawaguchi’s portrays the devastating force of the earthquake disaster. Both works allude to the cyclicality of nature and present death as almost a form of ritual sacrifice. When the protagonist opens the picture book, she is simultaneously lifting the lid off a metaphorical Pandora’s box; the story forces her to confront the reality of her fiancé’s death for the very first time. In Kenji’s story, a ‘Snow Boy’ (yukiwarasu) discovers a child draped in a red cape returning home to his village. The Snow Boy tosses the child a sprig of mistletoe, and just then the weather shifts and the landscape becomes covered with snow. The transformation in the weather portends the arrival of something ominous: Far away in the east, in the direction of the ocean, there was a faint clunking sound as though some mechanism in the sky had slipped. At some point the sun had turned into a pure white mirror, and now particles of some sort seemed to be racing steadily across its face. (Miyazawa 1997, 7–8) Amidst the turbulent wind and snow, the Snow Witch (yukibango) appears with her Snow Boys and Snow Wolves (yukioino) in tow. Kenji’s Snow Witch evokes a crone-like figure from Tōhoku folklore with the power to conjure snowstorms who absconds with human children during cold winters. The Snow Witch spies the boy and asserts her claim to his life: ‘Well, well, what have we here? A funny

10 In Kenji’s Gauche the Cellist (Sero hiki no Goshu, 1934), Gauche is visited by a variety of talking animals who inspire his music. 11 Suisen can also be referred to as sechūka, with the characters for ‘snow,’ ‘middle,’ and ‘flower’; narcissus bloom in late winter or early spring, so will frequently be caught out by late winter season snow or frost. There is also a flower called Narcissus pseudonarcissus, rappa suisen, translated as either ‘Easter lily’ or ‘wild daffodil’.

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little child. Go ahead and finish him off. After all, it’s the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month; it’s only fitting we take one or two’ (14). Though invisible to the child, the Snow Boy tries to protect the child from the Snow Witch; he distracts her and covers the red-cape-shrouded child with layer upon layer of snow, whispering instructions to remain still until morning. When the blizzard has subsided and the Snow Witch taken her leave, the Snow Boy commands the Snow Wolves to dig the child out from the snow. Mistletoe talisman in hand, the child emerges safe and sound, having avoided becoming another casualty of the Snow Witch. The Tōhoku region is no stranger to natural disasters, including snowstorms, earthquakes, and tsunamis. As Hagiwara argues, the Snow Witch, or as he refers to her, the ‘Old Snow Woman,’ ‘represents the terrifying and horrible aspects of “Mother Nature,” such as death’ (Hagiwara 1993, 47). In Kenji’s story, the Snow Witch repeatedly cites ‘the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month’ (suisenzuki no yokka) as justification for her incitement of the snowstorm and her right to claim the life of the child, a deliberate and rhythmic repetition resembling an incantation of sorts. This reading of the Snow Witch resonates powerfully with the portrayal of the tsunami in Sawaguchi’s ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month.’ Just as the Snow Witch has the right to human sacrifice at certain times of the year, so too does nature demand the sacrifice of human lives in the 3.11 disaster. In both stories, the Iwate region is portrayed as a space where nature governs according to its own set of rules, prone to acts both violent and unexpected. Moreover, in Iwate, nature does not simply constitute a formidable force; it overwhelms, sweeping away not only its inhabitants but also the norms of everyday life and the veneer of safety that accompanies them. The metaphor of the child buried in the snow proves instructive for reading the protagonist in Sawaguchi’s story. First, the protagonist wants to sustain the belief that, like the child in Kenji’s story, her fiancé has somehow survived against the odds—that he is alive somewhere but has ‘suffered memory loss and forgotten’ about her. Her staunch refusal to admit to herself the possibility of her fiancé’s death allows her to cling to the hope of his return. Sheltered away from civilization in their home in the woods, a space that conjures up the magical Īhatov of Kenji’s stories, the protagonist shields herself from the reality of his demise: I didn’t believe in his death; I didn’t search for his remains either. If I were to acknowledge his dead body, I would lose him forever. But, if his body was never found, I could believe that he was alive somewhere, and that one day he would simply turn up. (Sawaguchi 2015, 323) This suspended belief evokes Schrödinger’s cat, the thought experiment where a cat is placed in an opaque chamber with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter, and some poison. As the radioactive substance decays, it triggers the Geiger counter that releases the poison, which over time will kill the cat. Provided the chamber remains unopened and in the absence of a conscious observer, this closed system simultaneously contains two possibilities: the cat is ‘both dead and alive.’

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Once the chamber is opened, however, that coexistence of realities immediately collapses, and the cat is revealed as ‘either dead or alive.’ In Kenji’s ‘On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month,’ when the child lies buried beneath the layers of snow, the reader does not know whether the child will emerge unscathed; covered by the snow, the child can be perceived as both dead and alive. It is only once the layers of snow are removed that one of those options collapses, and the singular reality of the child being alive prevails. In ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month,’ through the protagonist’s refusal to accept the death of her fiancé, like Schrödinger’s cat, the fiancé exists within a closed chamber where he can be both dead and alive. Sawaguchi’s story describes the process by which the protagonist learns to open the chamber, to lift the lid off Pandora’s box, and to finally acknowledge the reality of her fiancé’s death. As part of this process, the protagonist attempts to solve the mystery of why her fiancé was by the sea on that fateful day and learns that the answer is somehow linked to Miyazawa Kenji. Entering her fiancé’s study (another Pandora’s box) for the first time since his disappearance, she learns that when researching the ‘fourth day of the Narcissus Month’12 he had worked out that in 2011 that particular day would fall on the 12th of March. She recalls that on that fated morning of the 11th of March, he had rung her excitedly and foreshadowed his revelation by referencing Kenji’s story: Yes, it may snow. A lot. And I’ll probably see the moment when some mechanism in the sky slips out of place. It’ll be today in the sea far away in the east, you know. You should be careful too, just in case. (Sawaguchi 2015, 322) Realizing that her fiancé had ventured to the coast because of his discovery, she cursed Kenji: ‘Why did you write such a story? If you are going to write it, then do it properly! It wasn’t a blizzard, but a tsunami; it wasn’t the sky’s mechanism that was out of sync, it was the sea’s!’ (349). By establishing these overt linkages with the literary legacy of Kenji, Sawaguchi powerfully evokes Koshar’s memory landscapes as entities that are both physical (the topographical space of Iwate) and metaphorical (the literary landscape of Iwate, or more precisely, of Kenji’s mythical Īhatov). ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month’ illuminates the potential of the memory landscape of Iwate as a site for processing trauma as well as for negotiating and (re-)writing historically and culturally based shared memories, which occur not only through subtle literary elements reminiscent of Kenji’s works but also through the protagonist’s direct and anguished indictment of Kenji as she finally acknowledges her fiancé’s death in the tsunami. This use of memory landscape is akin to the role played by trauma narratives in the reconstruction of identity after a traumatic

12 According to Sawaguchi’s story, the ‘Narcissus Month’ refers to the month in which Lent falls in any given year.

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event that Michelle Balaev has explored, a process that she argues occurs through the complex interplay of language, experience, and place (Balaev 2008).

Iwate and Liminal Spaces Eternity Springs Takahashi Katsuhiko’s story ‘Eternity Springs’ explores the formation of a communal identity that transcends even metaphysical boundaries, colorfully evoking Iwate as a memory landscape through its representation of the supernatural and links to The Legends of Tōno. In Takahashi’s ghost story with an unexpected plot twist, the protagonist is a photographer who took pictures of tsunami victims after 3.11 to assist survivors in the process of identifying their deceased loved ones. While snapping photos at a reunion for bereaved survivors, he discovers that images of the dead are mysteriously appearing in the shots. The others gather around him in amazement and anticipation, desperate to spot the faces of their lost loved ones in the photos. These spectral images are received with wonder, but not incredulity; indeed, when images of the departed appear in a group shot, those present immediately take out their mobile phones and attempt to capture photos of the spirits with their own devices. But only the photographer’s camera reveals these images of the departed because ‘it was ordained by the spirits’ (Takahashi 2015, 8). The protagonist is invited on an excursion to the eponymous hot spring located deep in the mountains to look in on an old hermit who has not been seen since the tsunami. The hot spring itself is portrayed as a site linking the physical and spiritual worlds: ‘if you follow that steam, it’s a straight line to the heavens’ (22). Upon arrival, he finds a small hut near the hot spring and discovers children and others present. He locates the old hermit, the caretaker of the hot spring, clearing leaves and requests permission to photograph him. The caretaker informs the protagonist that the hot spring is a place where: ‘people cross from this world to the next’ (27). Taken aback by his statement, the protagonist places the camera into gallery mode to inspect the photos, and in every one of them the old man is surrounded by a myriad of smiling faces: A young girl in her school uniform making a V-sign with her fingers, a woman in a wedding dress beaming with pride, a smiling young boy clutching a soccer ball, an elderly couple with contented expressions standing side by side, a nurse in white scrubs, a cheerful-looking family of four dressed in their Sunday best, a sturdy old lady with a hachimaki tightly wrapped round her head, a couple around high school age holding hands, a wheelchair-bound woman with a broad grin. (28) When the protagonist locates his long-deceased mother among the smiling faces, he understands that he, his travel companions, and those gathered around the hot

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spring are all dead. He gradually begins to remember the traumatic events in his own past that led to his untimely demise, and he is gently ushered by the caretaker into the water, crossing from the physical world into the spiritual world. It is worth noting that the Japanese title of the story, ‘Saru no yu,’ contains a fundamental ambiguity: ‘saru’ connotes both the word for ‘monkey’ and the homophonic verb ‘to leave.’ By representing the word ‘saru’ in hiragana, the title embraces either or both possibilities; that is, saru no yu can refer either to a spring where monkeys come to bathe and/or a spring that functions as a place of departure. In other words, the title implies an actual physical location that is simultaneously a site of transcendence, a liminal space in which past and present mysteriously intersect. This convergence of past and present is made evident by the fact that the ‘spirits’ the protagonist encounters at the hot spring are not all tsunami victims; many, like the protagonist’s mother, are simply departed souls from the local area. Perhaps most striking about Takahashi’s ‘Eternity Springs’ is the persistent presence of the supernatural and the seamlessness with which it blends with everyday life. This bears a conspicuous similarity to the supernatural encounters portrayed in Yanagita Kunio’s The Legends of Tōno, which is populated with all manner of supernatural beings, including ghosts (yōkai), household spirits (zashiki warashi), shape-shifting animals, witches, mountain deities (yama no kami), and mythical water-dwelling creatures (kappa). There are numerous examples of such extraordinary occurrences in The Legends of Tōno. In Michimata’s afterword to the anthology, he cites Episode 99, in which a man who has lost his wife and a child in the 1896 Meiji Sanriku earthquake and tsunami encounters the ghost of his dead wife and realizes that she has rekindled a former romance with another tsunami victim in the afterlife (Michimata 2015b, 490–1). There are numerous stories of spectral sightings in The Legends of Tōno: Episodes 22 and 23 recount the story of Sasaki’s great-grandmother, who continues to visit her family weeks after her death (Yanagita 2008, 23–4); Episode 86 tells the story of a man who appears to construction workers just at the moment when he is said to have died (50–1). Crucially, representations of the supernatural in The Legends of Tōno are not counterposed to the quotidian; the supernatural is deeply embedded within the very fabric of life in Tōno. Ortabasi has described The Legends of Tōno as portraying a ‘physical and spiritual ecosystem,’ a space in which Tōno’s living inhabitants interact with supernatural beings in ‘mutually affective relationships’ (Ortabasi 2014, 45). The merging of the extraordinary with the ordinary in 3.11 narratives is particularly poignant, as on March 11, 2011, the ‘unreal’ merged with the ‘real’ when the unthinkable, the unimaginable, in the form of a massive earthquake, unprecedented tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns became reality. In ‘Eternity Springs’ and other stories in the anthology, encounters between the extraordinary and the ordinary are rooted in an actual topographical location in the disaster area. In ‘Widow’s Cape,’ a teenager reconciles his somewhat troubled relationship with his dead father through a kendo sparring match with a mysterious figure at a cliff where survivors gather to mourn the loss of their loved ones (Kashiwaba 2015a);

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in ‘The Bar Counter by the Sea,’ a journalist assigned to investigate the reported sighting at a seaside bar of the ghost of his former teacher who perished in the tsunami faces up to his own disappointment in life through a supernatural encounter with him (Kikuchi 2015). In From That Day Forward, landscapes can be described as transcendental, transactional, and transformative. Landscapes are transcendental in that they connect the world of the living and the world of the dead, operating as a bridge or portal between the two worlds. They are transactional as these topographical spaces function as temporary sites of engagement and interaction between the living and the dead. They are transformative in that the spaces fundamentally alter the mindset and life trajectory of the survivor who encounters the deceased in those spaces. This last point is important as in every supernatural encounter it is the living who are transformed and who benefit from interaction with the dead; the dead help the living, rather than the converse. As Kimura Saeko has indicated in her insightful work A Theory of Post-Disaster Literature—Thoughts towards a New Japanese Literature (Sonogo no shinsaigo bungakuron), the dead do not appear solely to voice their grievances or regrets. Instead, these spectral manifestations highlight the importance of discerning the voices of the departed and addressing issues of the past in the present (Kimura 2018). This, Kimura suggests, conveys an imperative to consider events from the past in the present day: doing so enables us to renew our links with the past but also to frame the past within a new critical perspective. Representations of Iwate as a memory landscape in From That Day Forward remind us of the powerful potential of landscapes—whether textual or topographical—to be reimagined and repurposed.

Conclusion As the Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium has been constructed as a site of memory that is both physical and symbolic, formed by collective understanding and action, and fundamentally shaped by the surrounding region, in the anthology From That Day Forward, Iwate itself emerges as a powerful memory landscape. The stories echo tensions that are characteristic of the region: how the natural landscape shaped its identity, martial and historical losses and defeats, and a sense of being somehow left behind by culture and civilization. These sentiments are arguably more pronounced after the disaster of 3.11, which further exacerbated the region’s historical sense of marginality. At the same time, the narratives chart a series of returns: to the topographical space of Iwate and to its rich literary history via traces of texts such as The Legends of Tōno and the fiction of Miyazawa Kenji, both of which have been the topic of increased attention after the catastrophe of 3.11. Kenji’s posthumously published poem ‘Strong in the Rain’ (Ame ni mo makezu) powerfully expresses the author’s fervent wish to live a life of compassion and benevolence (Miyazawa 2007). The poem depicts one who, though battered by the elements, never ceases to consider the struggles of others and constantly strives to ease their suffering. It continues to strike a chord with audiences, especially after

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the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster, as it articulates the spirit of resilience of the residents of the disaster area (Pulvers 2013); the poem speaks of strength in adversity, but also of forging communities amidst hardship. As Pulvers has noted of Kenji’s work, when he describes a location in the present in his stories and poems, he often includes in his ‘landscapes of the heart’ what existed at that place in the past and what would be there in the future. [. . .] Kenji believed that you could not faithfully express an instant of reality without considering it through time and space. (Pulvers 2013, 2) Both Kenji’s ‘Strong in the Rain’ and the 3.11 narratives in From That Day Forward share this sense of landscape as something which is both retrospective and forward-looking. Sarah De Nardi and Danielle Drozdzewski have argued in their study of landscape and memory: ‘Memory is also transmitted (or not) through/at/in landscapes with purpose, sometimes to be a social binder, sometimes to assert (or challenge) identity and/or to keep groups together’ (De Nardi and Drozdzewski 2019, 430). In From That Day Forward, landscapes reinforce and recreate community, reenveloping even those who have left it behind. Through the space of the text, the landscape of Iwate is portrayed as a critical locus that can be written and rewritten, read and reread; its meanings can be negotiated and renegotiated over time and across generations. It may be true that ‘the only way that authors can confront the reality [of the disaster of 3.11] is to write’ as Michimata asserts when describing the aims of the anthology (Michimata 2015b, 488–9). However, in that very act of writing, these stories accomplish more than simply confronting reality; they are engaging in a long-fought struggle over the regional identity of Tōhoku, and Iwate specifically, that draws upon The Legends of Tōno and Miyazawa Kenji’s works as memory landscapes but also offers a fresh, collective version of ‘Iwate as memory landscape’ for a post-3.11 world.

References Akasaka, Norio, ed. 2012. Tōnogaku. Tōno, Iwate: Tōno-shi Tōno bunka kenkyū sentā. ———. 2013. Yanagita kunio o yomu. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. ———. 2014. Tōhokugaku/mō hitotsu no Tōhoku. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Amano, Yuka. 2014. ‘Reading as Ritual: Desire for Textual Community in Works by Jeremias Gotthelf, Izumi Kyōka, Yanagita Kunio, and Annette Von Droste-Hülshoff.’ PhD diss., Penn State University. [online] https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2186/docvie w/1553782658?accountid=13042 [Accessed February 3, 2020]. Balaev, Michelle. 2008. ‘Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.’ Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41 (2): 149–66. Bull, Andy. 2019. ‘ “Someone Shouted Tsunami”: Kamaishi Set to Play Emotional Role in World Cup Story.’ Guardian, September 23. [online] www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/ sep/23/kamaishi-stadium-rugby-world-cup-tsunami [Accessed September 28, 2019].

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Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels, eds. 1988. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. De Nardi, Sarah, and Danielle Drozdzewski. 2019. ‘Landscape and Memory.’ In The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, edited by Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha, 429–39. Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge. Duineveld, Martijn, Kristof Van Assche, and Raoul Beunen. 2017. ‘Re-conceptualising Political Landscapes after the Material Turn: A Typology of Material Events.’ Landscape Research 42 (4): 375–84. Furukawa Hideo. 2011. Umatachi yo, soredemo hikari wa muku de. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. 2016. Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima. Translated by Doug Slaymaker and Akiko Takenaka. New York: Columbia University Press. Geilhorn, Barbara. 2017. ‘Challenging Reality with Fiction—Imagining Alternative Readings of Japanese Society in Post-Fukushima Theatre.’ In Negotiating Disaster: ‘Fukushima’ and the Arts, edited by Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, 162–76. London and New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hagiwara, Takao. 1993. ‘The Bodhisattva Ideal and the Idea of Innocence in Miyazawa Kenji’s Life and Literature.’ Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 27 (1): 35–56. Heholt, Ruth, and Niamh Downing. 2016. Haunted Landscapes: Super-nature and the Environment. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Hopson, Nathan. 2017. Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast: Tōhoku as Japanese Postwar Thought, 1945–2011. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard, Peter, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha, eds. 2019. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge. Ishino Akira. 2015. ‘Jun ai.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwateken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 461–86. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium. n.d. https://kamaishi-stadium.jp/ [Accessed February 17, 2020]. Kashiwaba Sachiko. 2015a. ‘Kaze machi misaki.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 97–102. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. ———. 2015b. ‘Umi kara kita ko.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 103–12. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Kikuchi Yukimi. 2015. ‘Umibe no kauntā.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 365–93. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Kimura Saeko. 2018. Sonogo no shinsaigo bungakuron. Tokyo: Seidosha. Kitakami Akihiko. 2015. ‘Jiko no shikakaku.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 39–88. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Koshar, Rudy. 2000. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870– 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Kumi Saori. 2015. ‘Nagakutsu o haita inu.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 203–50. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Long, Hoyt. 2012. On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Matsuda Jukkoku. 2015. ‘Aina no baai—Nonbei yokochō no jikenbō yori.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 113–52. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Michimata Tsutomu, ed. 2011. 12 no okurimono: Higashinihon daishinsai shien iwateken zaijū sakka jisen tanpenshu. Sendai: Araemishi. ———. ed. 2015a. Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. ———. 2015b. ‘Atogaki.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 488–91. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Miyazawa Kenji. 1956. ‘Suisenzuki no yokka.’ In Chūmon no ōi ryōriten, 63–75. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. ———. 1972. ‘The Red Blanket.’ In Winds From Afar. Translated by John Bester, 159–64. Tokyo: Kodansha International. ———. 1997. On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month. Translated by Sarah Strong, illustrated by Masao Idou. Tokyo: International Foundation for the Promotion of Languages and Culture. ———. 2007. Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems. Translated by Roger Pulvers. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. Nihon Kindai Bungakukai Tōhokushibu. 2013. Tōhoku kindai bungaku jiten. Tōkyō: Bensei Shuppan. Nora, Pierre. 1996. Realms of Memory. Vol. 1: Rethinking the French Past. Translated by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press. Ōmura Yukimi. 2015. ‘Suwingu.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 395–494. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Ortabasi, Melek. 2009. ‘Narrative Realism and the Modern Storyteller: Rereading Yanagita Kunio’s Tōno Monogatari.’ Monumenta Nipponica 64 (1): 127–65. ———. 2014. The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pulvers, Roger. 2013. ‘Miyazawa Kenji’s Prophetic Green Vision: Japan’s Great Writer/ Poet on the 80th Anniversary of His Death.’ Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 11 (44). [online] https://apjjf.org/2013/11/44/Roger-Pulvers/4021/article.html [Accessed November 28, 2019]. Sadler, A.W. 1987. ‘The Spirit-Captives of Japan’s North Country: Nineteenth Century Narratives of the “Kamikakushi.” ’ Asian Folklore Studies 46 (2): 217–26. Saitō Jun. 2015. ‘Ano hi no umi.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwateken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 153–201. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Saul, Hayley. 2019. ‘The Temporality of Post-Disaster Landscapes.’ In The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, edited by Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha, 440–50. Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge.

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Sawaguchi Tamami. 2015. ‘Suisenzuki no mikka.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 319– 63. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Sawamura, Tetsu. 2015. ‘Mō hitori no watashi e.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 425– 60. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Takahashi Katsuhiko. 2015. ‘Saru no yu.’ In Ano hi kara: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai chinkon Iwate-ken shusshin sakka tanpenshū, edited by Michimata Tsutomu, 5–38. Morioka: Iwate Nippōsha. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yanagita Kunio. [1910] 1973. ‘Tōno monogatari. Yanagita kunioshū.’ Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (NKBT) 45: 257−312. ———. 2008. The Legends of Tono: 100th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Ronald A. Morse. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

5

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village The Production of Post-3.11 Space in Sakate Yōji’s Lone War1 Justine Wiesinger

In the aftermath of 3.11, 1many political and economic implications for space that had previously been ignored or taken for granted have been made visible, concretized not just by the destruction and the ongoing threats posed to certain regions by nuclear contamination, but by the efforts of artists who have created works that stake claims on the status of 3.11 as a collective spatial trauma.2 Theater companies have staged responses to 3.11 that are both swift and sustained. Because performances unfold through speech and the body, in space and time that are at once shared with the everyday and artistically malleable, the staged performance has a particular capability for addressing the spatial anxieties and contradictions triggered by the triple disaster and for sharing with the communitas3 formed between audience and performers a narrative of spatial dislocation and a vision for spatial tactics. Many Japanese playwrights (as well as a few from outside of Japan) have addressed the problems and possibilities of post-3.11 space. Romeo Castellucci’s Festival/Tokyo 2011 production, The Phenomenon Called I (Castellucci 2011), experimented with the collective creation of space by deploying audience members with flags to ring a playing area in the reclaimed landfill known as Yumenoshima. Ameya Norimizu’s play Blue Sheet (Ameya 2014) has an intimate relationship with the Fukushima schoolyard in which it was originally performed. Satō Shigenori’s Lucky Island in the Aftermath (Are kara no rakii airando, Satō 2015a) imagines a future in which the descendants of irradiated Tōhoku people are officially discriminated against, and intranational border walls seal off a Fukushima that has been literally erased from the map of Japan.

1 Research for this chapter was made possible by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. 2 My dissertation, ‘Performing Disaster: The Response to 3.11 and the Great Kanto Earthquake in Japanese Film and Theater,’ contains a more thorough discussion of performed claims of collective trauma, as will my upcoming book on the same topic. I am referring to the theory of Jeffrey C. Alexander and others who state that events, however harmful, do not have an a priori status as traumatic but that the status of trauma must be claimed and negotiated publicly, particularly through narrative works, among which ‘trauma drama’ is of especial importance. See Alexander 2004, 231; Wiesinger 2018. 3 I use this term in the sense defined by Victor and Edith Turner as an acute state of community formed by the mutual experience of a rite or liminal state. See, for example, Turner 1969.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-8

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In this article, I will focus on Lone War (Tatta hitori no sensō) by Sakate Yōji, performed by the theater company Rinkōgun in December 2011. Constructed in Sakate’s signature style, with a large cast embodying a multitude of perspectives, Lone War employs technocratic authorities, displaced rural citizens, and activists among other figures to manifest the fluctuation of spatial understandings and determination that followed the event. These characters challenge mainstream understandings of space, including questions regarding personal land ownership, disputes about the government’s right to dictate the displacement of local people and the acceptable use of rural land, and the imagination of galactic warfare as they descend into a nuclear research facility 1,000 meters below the surface of the earth.

Setting the Stage: Empty Space and Moving Spatial Boundaries The formal arrangement of space in Lone War is idiosyncratic. To begin with, the playing space spills beyond the stage and auditorium, extending as far as the lobby. The performing begins before the audience is seated.4 First, audience members are given a survey to complete, asking about personal data as well as their experiences with extraterrestrial encounters. Audience members are also asked to estimate their exposure to radiation during the year (Sakate Yōji 2011, 1).5 Surveys are a customary part of the small Japanese theater experience. Often distributed before the performance, surveys typically ask audience members for their opinions about the performance and how they heard of the performance. These surveys are usually filled out after the show and turned in as the audience departs. In this case, however, the survey questions are unexpected, and the questions explicitly link each audience member’s experiences in- and outside the theater. This is the first extension of the sphere of the performance beyond the auditorium and into the lobby (and the space of the audience), in line with the lobby performance to follow. Actors perform in the lobby as guides from the Hinotani Research Facility. We learn in the course of the play that this facility is a source of controversy. The Hinotani Research Facility has transformed over time from an inhabited village to an evacuated site set to be flooded by a dam to a mine for low-quality uranium ore

4 Expansive performance spaces are not unusual to 3.11 drama. In addition to outdoor performances such as Ameya Norimizu’s Ground (Jimen) and Blue Sheet and plays in small spaces that make use of aisle space such as Matsugae Yoshinori’s The End of Japan (Nihon no owari, Matsugae 2011), Satō Shigenori’s play The Mysterious Twenty-faces of Looking-glass Land (Kagami no kuni no kaijin nijūmensō, Satō 2016) also brings performance into the lobby and intermediate spaces between reception and stage, featuring actors/characters from the play reading from poetry books and interacting with audience members (e.g., one actor distributes mizuame candy to audience members) before the performance on stage begins. These formal techniques are of course not unheard-of in modern performance, but 3.11 plays seem particularly apt to destabilize traditional spatial boundaries for theater. 5 Unless noted otherwise, the page numbers which follow refer to Sakate 2011.

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 93 to a research facility that likely masks plans to transform it into a dumping ground for the waste products left behind by the empty promises of a renewable nuclear fuel cycle. The facility is being fully opened to the public for tours for the first time, and the protagonists are all wanderers and disruptors, many with personal or political connections to the research facility’s history and present. Before they learn about this plot, the audience is organized as though it were a group preparing for a tour of the facility. It is common in small Japanese theaters for audience members to be organized in the order in which they arrive and seated group by group according to numbers received along with tickets. This common practice is given a fictional overlay in this play, which is unusual. Instructions regarding silencing phones and emergency exit lighting are also delivered in this double vision, where the fictional tour group preparations are overlaid on top of the preparation of the theatrical audience. The audience is divided into ‘tour groups’ of eight people, and each group is led down a hallway to an ‘elevator’ by a different actor.6 The guides lead audience members to a location, but stage directions specify that the location is not the auditorium, breaking with audience expectations that they are being led immediately to seating. Instead, the audience makes a longer journey thoroughly overlaid by performance in which they are, to a limited extent, characters themselves. Having passed by the research facility’s dancing mole mascot in the lobby, the groups of eight are now herded into the research facility’s ‘elevator,’ where they listen to voice-over explanations of the facility by spokesperson Hasegawa and his assistant, Morinaga, as they make their ‘descent’ one kilometer underground. Besides providing propaganda for the research facility, the two characters orient audience members to the magnitude of the space they are traversing and discuss the spatial problems posed by nuclear waste: it is dangerous to the human body and has an extremely long activity period, yet legal and logistic considerations make its disposal difficult.7 Through this process where unusual formal choices begin to braid with conceptual discussion of space, the audience is having their spatial expectations as theatergoers disrupted and is simultaneously being oriented to the diegetic space of the play, and partially subsumed within it. They are not watching other actors descending into the research facility but making their own descent. Finally, the elevator reaches its ultimate depth of 1,000 meters, and the audience is removed from the ‘elevator’ space to see a demonstration by Hasegawa and Morinaga in person, but they still are not seated until after the first scene in the facility (15). By this point, audience members have not only been on their feet for a significant amount of time but have been placed directly in the space of the drama. Antinuclear protester Hideko speaks 6 As an example of the mingling of fictional and real in this atypical audience guidance, stage directions instruct that tour guide actors should announce that the floor is slippery regardless of whether or not the theater floor is actually slippery (Sakate 2011, 3). 7 In a humorous exchange, they note that international treaties prevent disposal in the oceans or at the South Pole and shooting nuclear waste into space is expensive and the potential of catastrophic failure is great (5–6).

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up from among their ranks while they are watching Hasegawa and Morinaga perform on a platform, and after she climbs another platform, she is rounded up and taken ‘out of audience view’ (14) by company representatives. Although the audience is seated in a more ordinary fashion after this scene, considerable time has been spent on situating them physically in the fictional space and placing several actors physically among their ranks. Hideko’s (temporary) removal is a physical loss from among audience ranks rather than an event viewed at a distance. From the beginning, the audience is physically situated ‘on her side’ and spatially lower than the more distant facility employees. This spatial extension of the sphere of the drama to include the audience and the mingling of audience space with antinuclear characters, such as Hideko, seem calculated to induce a relationship to space and character in the audience that is different from what they would experience were the play a typical proscenium drama.8 Although in some ways the structure and style of the play hold the audience at an emotional distance, on a spatial level, the audience is primed to feel that they have traveled to an unusual space deep underground and that characters such as Hideko come from among them. The description of the sets in the script for Lone War is minimal, suggesting a largely bare formal arrangement in which walls and furniture play almost no part. The majority of the play’s action takes place in a large naturally formed cavity in the bedrock. In this open ‘cavern,’ there are no borders or edifices to divide or conceal space. The choice of a primarily empty-space form for this play is significant, particularly for some of the performative spatial actions that occur later. A bare stage is a fluid space. In the absence of visual markers of space, audience understandings of the borders and meanings of the space before them are dependent upon the speech and actions of characters within that space. This means that at a word or gesture, the configurations, meanings, settings, and ownerships of space can be changed. This mutability destabilizes centralized and legalistic definitions of space and who has the right to determine the use of spaces, a key point of contention within the play. Peter Brook has recognized the practical efficacy of bare staging as a key source of the power of Shakespeare’s plays, writing of more than one case where a ‘neutral open platform [. . .] enabled the dramatist to effortlessly whip the spectator through an unlimited succession of illusions, covering, if he chose, the entire physical world’ (Brook 1996, 86). In this play, as shall be discussed later, the making and designation of space is imbued with special significance, and therefore a staging that enables ‘effortless’ transitions—but also transitions dependent upon the speech and action of characters—is essential. Brook writes that bare staging ‘also

8 It is not the case that all the functions of the proscenium have disintegrated, though the usual relationship with the proscenium has been altered. While the threshold of the fictional world has now been moved from a boundary between actor and audience and placed instead behind (or above) the audience, the division between the surface world and the subterranean world of the facility still serves as a border between ‘real’ life and the life of the drama.

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 95 allowed [the playwright] free passage from the world of action to the world of inner impressions’ (Brook 1996, 87). In Sakate, the reverse is also true: inner impression (will, affect, and memory) flows freely into action as a function of the staging and the way the spatial rules of the drama are established. Through the formal decision to visualize space in a minimalistic manner, Sakate imbues his play with a shifting spatiality dependent upon the people who occupy the space. This adds efficacy to some of the performative acts upon space that will be discussed later. The fluidity of the empty space comes into play, for example, when the nuclear facility space is transformed by a flashback into a town hall–style meeting of the UFO Protection Society. The transformation is brought about by Yū, who comes to a large cavern in the underground research facility searching for her friend Emiko. Emiko and Yū are office coworkers and the illustrator and writer, respectively, of an erotic sci-fi electronic graphic novel. They are both fascinated by the idea of alien races and intergalactic conflict. When other characters leave the present-day scene and Yū is left by herself, her reflection alone changes the setting to the UFO Society meeting she once attended with Emiko. As part of the transition, Yū’s line emphasizes the emptiness of the space that allows it to be so mutable, at once commenting self-reflexively on the medium: ‘A big, empty place. Standing on stage, facing the darkness. That’s what it’s started to feel like’ (53). While the scene has changed, the technique of audience involvement again creates tension with stylistic choices encouraging distance and separation, especially as the preceding scene (the hot spot scene discussed later) is highly conceptual and intellectual in nature. The surveys that audience members completed in the lobby return in the UFO Society meeting, and an improvised scene ensues, with one audience member’s survey responses read aloud and discussed by characters (54). Even when the time and space of the setting are changed, the play works to expand the boundary of the dramatic sphere to include the audience while still maintaining a certain intellectual estrangement from the events of the drama. The reminder that the stage is ‘like a stage’ again fronts the medium at the same time that it works its magic to instantly change settings through imagination rather than elaborate staging. The self-reflexivity is a Brechtian move that counterbalances the inclusivity into the dramatic world by affirming an awareness of medium that compels a critical distance that could otherwise be imperiled by the weakening of the spatial boundary between audience and characters. Most importantly, empty staging enacts the opposite of what spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre refers to as ‘monumentality’: he claims that monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought. In the process, such signs and surfaces also manage to conjure away both possibility and time. (Lefebvre, 143) In Lone War, however, space is transparent and transformable, with no surface to obscure, and genuinely wrought out of collective will—both diegetically, as we

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shall see with the performative creation of space below, and extradiegetically, as playwright, actors, and audience combine their imaginative will to manifest the performed spaces and imbue them with meaning. Performance spaces can act in this way as laboratory spaces wherein to collectivize spatial tactics and understandings, an important capability that can serve as a ground on which to construct collective claims to spatial trauma. In summary, Lone War deploys various formal strategies that act to weaken spatial boundaries from the perspective of the audience: the expansion of the sphere of drama past the stage and auditorium into an intermediate space and the lobby; the dramatic/symbolic journey of the audience from the everyday space of the lobby, down in an imaginary elevator, to a space deep underground; and the sharing of the temporary audience space with Hideko, a character who vociferously protests the dangers of the nuclear facility, all before the audience is even seated, combine to disrupt the audience’s typical spatial relationship to a play and to extend the reach of the dramatic beyond its usual boundaries. Techniques of audience involvement do not end with the play’s introductory scenes, as the UFO Society flashback scene mentioned earlier also calls for reference to a specific audience member and survey responses she has provided. The flexible staging continues the process of physical boundary disruption by removing durable or visually legible markers of space and by making place and space dependent solely upon performance, and therefore easily altered by actions of actors and characters in the play. The work of these formal strategies compounds when placed in tandem with the performative strategies discussed later.

Outer Space and the Speaking Earth: Troubling the Border Between Benign-National and Threatening-Foreign This play asks the audience to think about how people define spaces, how places belong to people, and how people belong to places. Through the sci-fi storyteller characters of Emiko and Yū, the audience is invited to consider the terrestrial as opposed to the extraterrestrial, which is of particular importance in this work.9 For these two characters, it is difficult to tell where the line is that separates their everyday personalities and the semi-autobiographical characters they are writing for their story, as they hash out fantastical narratives in the first person. Emiko insists to Yū that she is Yū’s clone, manufactured by a superior alien race in order that the conflict between their two civilizations can be settled fairly, according to galactic law: by a one-on-one fight between equals. The women imagine—or believe—that they have descended into the nuclear facility in search of an alien spaceship concealed deep within the earth, which they want to find before beginning their battle to determine the future of humankind.

9 The subject of space aliens appears not only in this play but in other 3.11 works as well, such as Satō Shigenori’s How About a Candle for the Yellow Cake?: The Tale of the Neighborhood Association vs. the Aliens (Ierō kēki ni kyandoru wa ikaga?: chōnaikai vs. uchūjin fukurotōji, Satō 2015b).

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 97 Emiko and Yū make the connection between the alien and the radioactive explicit when Emiko brings up the idea of an alien ship buried beneath the earth for millennia and Yū points out a few lines later that the sci-fi genre has become less popular lately because, ‘ “Life in a Radioactive World” isn’t sci-fi anymore, you know’ (32). What is really buried deep beneath the earth is not a spaceship, but radioactive materials: uranium ore and spent fuel waste. And while these materials (and radioactivity itself) seem alien in their capacity to damage and destroy life with an invisible force that can last for thousands or even millions of years,10 they are in fact the opposite of alien: they are implicitly of the earth. They come out of the very ground defined as terra and as Japanese. Radioactive materials are in this sense the uncanny clone of earth: of dirt and rock and minerals, like what people trust as the substrate of daily lived spatial experience and yet unlike it; promising advanced technology and wealth and yet threatening death to the living beings that come in contact with them. The irony of the false dichotomy is brought home at the end of the play when Emiko, presented as an alien clone throughout, reveals to Yū that they are really the same person, and Emiko is merely the pen name Yū uses when illustrating her writing (109–10). Later in the play, places—nuclear sites and hot spots—are personified by four characters: Cher (for Chernobyl), Rokka (for Rokkasho),11 Tama,12 and Seta,13 whose job in part is to tend to mysterious moving spheres (also referred to like people by the pronoun karera, or ‘they’) that antinuclear activist Hideko worries may contain uranium. The four are costumed in a manner that foregrounds Japaneseness, labor, and history: in working clothes originated by Buddhist monks (samue) with split-toed worker’s boots (jikatabi) on their feet. They take turns relating the nuclear history of Japan, then join together to sing in praise of nuclear riches:

10 Hideko points out the extremely long half-life of some radioactive substances: ‘Zirconium is 1.53 million years, Neptunium is 2.14 million. The half-life of uranium ore is calculated on average at a hundred thousand years’ (13). 11 The Rokkasho Reprocessing Facility in Aomori has been dogged by protest (such as Stop Rokkasho, led by musician Sakamoto Ryūichi), and Rokkasho experienced power outages and fuel spillover as a result of the 3.11 earthquake (Bradsher and Tabuchi 2011). 12 According to aerial measurements of cesium-137 contamination taken by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in October of 2011, parts of Okutama (the westernmost part of greater Tokyo and home to Tokyo’s largest lake, which provides drinking water to Tokyo) were contaminated with cesium particles measured at 60,000−100,000 becquerels per square meter, significantly greater than measurements elsewhere in the city (Yomiuri Shimbun 2011). Fears about the impact of this radiation on Tokyo’s drinking water were debated in the media (see Wein 2011). It was announced late in 2011 that Tama City, among other places in Tokyo, also agreed to accept and incinerate tons of debris from Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture. Despite concerns from citizens about contamination, the debris was found to have radiation levels below acceptable government limits (Aoki 2011). 13 Seta appears to refer to a radioactive hot spot recorded in Setagaya City, Tokyo, in October 2011. The hot spot turned out to be caused by radium that had been stored in lead bottles under the floor of a private residence. The materials were of unknown origin and the radiation spike was believed to be unrelated to the Fukushima plant meltdown (Nihon Keizai Shimbun 2014).

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[. . .] Ningyō Tōge is the birthplace of nuclear power development in Japan. SETA: In 1954, our country set up a budget for nuclear power. TAMA: Uranium was discovered right away and began to be mined. CHER: The quiet mountain village at the northernmost point of Okayama Prefecture became lively. ROKKA: Uranium was mined diligently. KAJIMOTO: Coal mines were built in Chikuhō, uranium mines in Ningyō Tōge. CHER, ROKKA, SETA, TAMA: (Singing) This mountain, you know/Is a uranium mountain/The more you dig,/The more that treasure, uranium/Spills forth/ Come on, uranium, oh!/Come on, uranium, ohh! (41) KAJIMOTO:14

Facility worker Higashio compares the repurposed nuclear waste from facilities around the world, like Ningyō Tōge, that is being formed into bricks and resold to ‘illegal immigrant workers who snuck in some time when we weren’t paying attention,’ (43) but it is clear that much of this waste is from within Japan, permitted to be mixed with building materials due to a legal loophole. As much as Higashio would like to deny them by seeing them as foreign, these four characters are the embodiment of the repressed consequences of the nuclear, inextricably tied to geographical location (three out of their four locations being within Japan) and, in the aftermath of 3.11, more visible than ever. Attempts have been made to deny, suppress, or skirt the inconvenient facts about nuclear waste throughout the history of nuclear power. This pattern of repression is emphasized by Hasegawa when he observes to the four nuclear figures after they tell a riddle-like version of the bricklayer parable that, ‘You’re here, but you’re not here,’ prompting each of them to repeat, ‘I’m here, but I’m not here’ (49). Sakate makes the dark side of nuclear power visible in the aftermath of 3.11 not only through dialogue enumerating its many faults but by making those faults flesh and blood. They occupy not just one body but four bodies, a multiplicity of sites where things have gone wrong. They are solid and share the space with the other actors and the audience on the same human scale, more graspable and less imposing than a remote, sterile nuclear facility. In human form, these hot spots are mysterious and complex but undeniably present and a part of the socio-spatial world of the other characters. Even if they are ‘not there’ in the sense that they are the personification of abstract anxieties and global processes, in performance they are, in fact, in body, there. Soon, these four characters speak ‘the memories of the earth,’ each narrating a story about the localized cause and impact of radiation, tied in closely with the soil itself. Rokka talks mournfully about containers of radioactive waste dug up from 14 Kajimoto suddenly appears halfway through the play without explanation, accompanying the four hot spot characters and serving in some senses as a spokesperson or leader on behalf of repurposed radioactive waste. He appears pushing a cart heaped with bricks made from recycled radioactive materials and provides information about the repurposing of radioactive materials. A strange, nonnaturalistic character, he describes himself as representing ‘the nameless brick gymnasium’ (na mo naki ‘renga dōjō’ no Kajimoto desu).

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 99 the Rokkasho facility and set to be delivered to Hinotani. Seta relates the experience of an out-of-the-way supermarket parking lot feeling sexy and important in the glow of momentary fame as a nuclear hot spot, let down by its ultimate lack of connection with 3.11. Tama traces the movement of nuclear sludge into and out of Tama City, which ends up as a seawall in Tokyo harbor. And Cher talks of rape blossoms planted to help remove contamination, never to be harvested (47). Radiation, then, is far from an alien force held at a distance. It is not only homegrown, extracted from the earth underfoot, but one with that earth, however harmful its impact may be. Radioactive or not, earth cannot be separated from earth. In the same way that the disaster—and the play—has revealed the foreignyet-nativeness of radioactive materials, it points to the hands of government and capital in plans and projects that have victimized Japanese people geographically, placing a burden of risk and displacement on rural people who have subsequently been treated with suspicion and discrimination under the cloud of ‘contamination,’ while urban people are able to return to business as usual despite the fact that Tokyoites—and not people from Fukushima—were the consumers who benefited from the nuclear power whose effects now displace and imperil their rural neighbors. The toxicity of capitalistic spatial creation critiqued by Henri Lefebvre (1991) is made more blatant than ever in the aftermath of 3.11, and by Sakate’s play. In following the movements of bricks manufactured with radioactive waste, it becomes clear that state and corporate interests, in creating space, do not stop at the control of citizens and their funneling toward consumption. They also pursue the profits to be made in disappearing nuclear waste by redefining it and hiding it in plain sight. Dialogue states that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is a dual beneficiary of this scheme: TEPCO is not only relieved of its inconvenient and expensive waste but also paid for the building materials necessary in the reconstruction following a disaster they were complicit in exacerbating (50). Buildings made with these bricks are a symbol of government and corporate malfeasance as well as a health risk—they reify the idea of ordinary people being slowly poisoned by the forces of government and capital that structure their spatial lives. The association between the alien and the state/corporate powers that put certain (usually rural) areas at risk in building nuclear facilities surfaces in the play’s dialogue from time to time. Characters describe plans that have been made (without local consent, because the locals have all already been displaced) for the Hinotani facility’s afterlife, somewhat reminiscent of the nuclear tourist site suggested by Azuma Hiroki and others to be built in Fukushima:15 It was in the plans for what to do with the facility after they’re done with it. To make a glass elevator shaft to explore deep into the earth and call it ‘Geotopia World.’ It’s like a theme park.

HIDEKO:

YŪ:

15 The controversial plan to create a tourism/memorial site in Fukushima was proposed by Azuma Hiroki, Ide Akira, Kainuma Hiroshi, Tsuda Daisuke, Hayamizu Kenrō, and Fujimura Ryūji in Azuma 2013. This volume even has a piece suggesting the creation of a space port. See Azuma Hiroki 2013.

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HASEGAWA: You could soak in a radon hot spring, too. NANAKO: And there’s so much space, you could make a planetarium. YŪ: The Alien Village. HASEGAWA: Alien? YŪ: The aliens were making a second outer space underground. HASEGAWA: Oh, that’s nice, I used to think so too when I was a child. Aliens

come because there’s uranium here. FUMIE: Because there’s uranium . . . NANAKO: We are made/Of fragments/Of stars.

NANAKO, FUMIE, HIDEKO, YŪ, HASEGAWA, ZENJIRŌ:

Of stars.

will

We are made/Of fragments/ (67–8)

Here, the owners of the Hinotani facility are brought into direct parallel with aliens, as it was they who dug down to this ‘second outer space underground,’ rather than extraterrestrials, and they who came to Hinotani because there was uranium present. A tour of the Alien Village would also be a tour of the nuclear village, in essence a sham that papers over the fact that the real village that once stood on the surface of the Hinotani valley was eliminated and its people displaced. The nuclear village and the alien village will have no residents because the nuclear village and its participating entities function by suppressing social capital, not by building it. These powers of government and capital, in their spatial intrusions, seem to eclipse the threat of the alien in radioactive materials. As much as uranium, the underground spaces carved out by the might of these powers are pregnant with a logic of spatiality more foreign to the ordinary people represented by the play’s characters than radioactive materials themselves. The government’s legalistic understandings of spaces are unintelligible to residents for whom places radiate an emotional power that can overflow legal boundaries, as is evident in the next section. The war that Emiko and Yū see coming between two planets is doubled by the war that the characters native to Hinotani are described as fighting against the government’s planned destruction of their community. While the play acts against the grain of the notion that the nuclear is distant and foreign by giving nuclear sites human form, speech, and emotional relationships to space, it moves in the opposite direction with the state and corporate entities like TEPCO: there is no character who provides the direct personification for these powers, who remain invisible, 1,000 meters above where the action of the play takes place, looking down as if from one of the play’s oft-mentioned flying saucers. There is one other important instance in the play in which the matter of alien identity is raised. A bus driver named Fukuda—who appears only for the sake of this monologue and is not seen again—makes a report before the UFO Society in the meeting attended by Emiko and Yū, mentioned earlier. He relates that he drives a route to the J-Village site that housed cleanup workers in Fukushima and describes how he himself is ostracized by other bus drivers of azalea sightseeing tours to other locations in Fukushima, who associate his route and his bus with radioactive

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 101 contamination. Then, he describes various types of passengers. First, he illustrates azalea sightseers, mostly young people and middle-aged housewives with light baggage, and then he goes on to recount a school field trip group from Fukushima, saying, ‘You wouldn’t have known they were kids from Fukushima unless somebody told you; they were grinning at each other.’ In other words, they are not visibly marked by the disaster as Fukuda seems to expect but appear like perfectly normal young people. Next, he describes volunteer groups organized by corporations: And there were buses that were chartered by companies or buses that were donated, and employees would go to the bus stop by taxi, they’d get receipts and set out like it was a company retreat, everybody having a ball. Women would be wearing skirts and heels; men would be coordinated head-to-toe in fancy outdoor gear. The other day, a pretty major electric company had come, and I guess their people got drunk at some nearby bar before the 10 p.m. bus, and they left puke or something behind in the parking lot. They’d go volunteer for a half day, stay overnight at an inn, go sightseeing the next day, and then go home. (55–6) While the Fukushima students presented a picture of wholesome, cheerful normality, Fukuda emphasizes the insincerity and insensitivity of company workers about to make a fully funded trip to do volunteer work for a mere half day in Fukushima for PR purposes, who treat the occasion as a festive outing, an opportunity to get drunk, and a chance to show off their consumption of designer gear. However, as Fukuda continues his report, his alienation from these voluntourists becomes more literal: What I want to report on is one super-organized charter among them. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but they were somehow wearing really similar clothes, almost emotionless, and the men all looked like . . . Keanu Reeves? And the women . . . is it . . . Angelina? Julie? Jolina? Like her. They were all Japanese. Or Asian, anyway. They gathered all together really quickly and got going really quickly. I mean, do you get it? It felt really weird . . . Like they were from somewhere out of this world. And they were all enveloped in this blue light. I thought, oh, it’s because of the lighting on the bus . . . but it wasn’t that. Or was it? It wasn’t just that, I thought. (56) These corporate volunteers have become questionable not only on ethical grounds but also on the grounds of terrestrial identity. They appear to the driver at once as being Japanese, or Asian, and as resembling American movie stars. His description of their uncanny familiarity once again resonates with the other uncanny clone relationships discussed earlier. The tour group’s juxtaposition with the Fukushima school group is of great importance: though people from Fukushima have suffered discrimination in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster

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due to an othering association with ‘contamination,’ to the bus driver Fukuda, the Fukushima students are perfectly normal, while the urban corporate volunteers are eerily estranged. This perception inverts a pattern wherein rural people and 3.11 victims are discriminated against, while cities, in particular Tokyo, are protected from risk and valorized as the nation’s economic and cultural powerhouses. Instead of Tōhoku people flowing into the capital for work, as has been the stereotype since the 20th century, in this bus driver’s view, it is the city’s corporate volunteers who are the otherworldly invaders. Once again, Sakate’s satirical juxtaposition claims those associated with nuclear contamination through no choice of their own as more familiar than first realized, while estranging the centers of power who created the conditions for displacement and environmental disaster.

Staging Spatial Acts: Possibilities for Political Acts on Space by Individuals Having staged these problems of space, the play turns from spatial fantasy and contemplation to action. There are multiple instances in which characters act upon and redefine the cavernous space of the research facility. One of the most powerful spatial actors is Fumie, a character we learn has been displaced from her home by the original transformation of the Hinotani valley and village into a uranium mine. A member of the nuclear research facility tour group, she comes to a specific spot in the large underground chamber and declares, ‘This is my house’ (18). Using a compass, she plots out the floor plan of her former home on the ground: ‘This was the foyer. The garden was over there. The doghouse. Kitchen, living room, Grandpa Kamenosuke’s room [. . .]’ (18). Fumie refuses to distinguish between the land on the surface and the space 1,000 meters below that spot. While Hideko affirms her with phrases like ‘your land,’ Higashio, one of the Hinotani facility tour guides, repeatedly denies the claim, saying ‘You’re talking about 1000 meters above us,’ and ‘But this is underground’ (18–9). Fumie continues to press her claim that the distinction between aboveground and underground rules is arbitrary given the fact of her displacement and the total restriction of the aboveground site of her former home: ‘The facility aboveground is completely off-limits. Is there any logic to the fact that you can tour it only underground?’ (19). Higashio has no answer to that and soon departs to chase down the scattering members of his tour group, instructing Fumie to stay put. But that’s what I’m saying. I never wanted to leave. removes her shoes. Following an imaginary floorplan, she goes into rooms, sits down here and there, stands in the kitchen, sits at the dining table . . . FUMIE: We’ve been told for such a long time. That one way or another, people wouldn’t be able to live here. . . . Right. At least, not living people. (19–20) FUMIE: FUMIE

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 103 Fumie’s understanding of space differs from the logic of space that Higashio has been handed by his employers. To Fumie, one’s rights to a portion of land as ‘home’ extend infinitely downward through the earth—at least when her right to occupy the space on the surface has been violated. However, the legalistic understanding is that property rights extend only 60 meters below the surface and that space below that is free for exploitation with the permission of the Japanese government, even if the subsequent use of that subterranean land makes the surface uninhabitable by those who have their homes there. This stratified logic of space makes for some of the same problems revealed by the top-down conception of space in other post-3.11 works: the government regulation of land does not ultimately protect the rights of individual landowners. People have no recourse to redress their displacement from home because of the spatial definitions put forth by the law. Nevertheless, Fumie takes action to lay claim to what she considers ‘her’ land by occupying the space 1,000 meters below the space she was forced to evacuate by the dam and subsequent uranium mining project that ousted her. Fumie’s claims on and about this space do not stop there. In a scene following the UFO Society flashback mentioned earlier, Fumie enters carrying fence posts and proceeds to set them up according to the floorplan she paced out earlier (59). These fence posts are a nonrealistic device: it is never explained how Fumie, who entered the facility by means of the elevator in a supervised group, came to have these posts. While they fulfill a largely symbolic function as the walls of the space she is insisting is her home, other characters appear to be able to see them or at least to recognize the new demarcation of space they affect. It is possible to read the fence posts as manifestations of Fumie’s individual will to reclaim misappropriated space, much as the mysterious character called He (Kare) may or may not be a manifestation of the many individual quests to restore land from which people have been displaced. Fumie demarcates each room carefully as before: ‘The garden, the foyer with the cement floor that led into the kitchen, the living room, Grandpa Kamenosuke’s room, and then. . . . The closet that man was hiding in’ (60). Furthermore, she begins to imaginatively recreate the space beyond the confines of the house: ‘If you went out the front, there was a little alley. The end of it curved like this, and there was a variety store’ (60), and invites Yū and Zenjirō to join her, completing the space through their presence as family members within it. Fumie is, in a sense, staging her own play-within-a-play. She marks out the space with only the suggestion of scenery and casts actors to occupy that space in the roles appropriate to the people who would have inhabited the home-space it represents. She demands the imagination of the house from both ‘actors’ and spectators (within the play and in the general audience). In establishing and directing this space and the people in it, Fumie is able to invert the narrative. She describes the experience, years ago, of watching the construction going up on the high ground around her hometown in advance of its destruction as akin to seeing ‘audience seating’ (kankyakuseki) installed from which the sinking of her village would be watched (62), but now Fumie is a director/author taking control of the spatial dynamic from below rather than a powerless spectator or conscripted performer of a script imposed from earlier.

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Fumie’s strong-willed reappropriation of space will make similar actions in that same space available to other characters, like Nanako, later in the play. Nanako, who has brought her grandfather, Zenjirō, on the tour to alleviate their fears about moving into an area with a nuclear research facility after they have been displaced from Fukushima by the nuclear meltdown, recognizes Fumie’s fence-posted boundaries immediately as a house when she enters the stage, even though she missed Fumie’s initial explanation (66). She further identifies it with her own house and joins in on playing house without being instructed. Fumie’s (re)construction of a house is thus far successful: it is recognizable to other individuals, and it is fostering the social connections that a real home might—Fumie, Yū, Zenjirō, and Nanako are sitting down to an imaginary meal. Fumie’s spatial experiment has succeeded momentarily, on the scale of individual-to-individual, at reclaiming the space she was forced to give up (without consent) to physical transformation and potential nuclear contamination. The entrance of the facility spokesperson, Hasegawa,16 however, imperils the performative reappropriation. Hasegawa asserts control over the space through a legalistic argument, pushing against Fumie’s private definition of the space by referring to it as a ‘public area’ (66) and citing Japanese property law: ‘Under Japanese law, the land rights recognized as belonging to citizens extend only to the surface of the ground. You have no right to anything more than 60 meters below the surface’ (66). The only response Fumie makes is grounded on moral rather than legal rights: ‘This is my land’ (66). Hasegawa does not dismantle the fencepost borders, but he breaks the convention of the individually created boundary as a space representing a house, and the illusion of home life dissipates as Hasegawa and the group discuss the problems facing the underground facility through the imaginary walls of the home. Only when Hasegawa leaves does the housespace as defined by Fumie begin to function again, exerting power over time and space (similar to Fumie’s casting of Zenjirō as Grandpa Kamenosuke, who the play reveals has died), when the character called He embraces Fumie from behind and she warns that ‘Grandpa Kamenosuke will wake up’ (66). Now that the representative of legalism, capital, and central authority is gone, the house is once again her house, whole and projected back into the past, before its disruption, and up onto the surface where it once belonged. While Fumie’s act summons an impressive power to create space in accordance with her individual will, it is revealed to be fragile in the face of the state power that manages nuclear concerns: ultimately a successful temporary tactic as Michel de Certeau (1984) sees spatial improvisations by urban pedestrians, but not yet rising to the level of the stably resistant, individualized creation of space that Lefebvre (1991) envisions. The reorganization of space and time gains power, however, as the next scene begins with a flashback in which Nanako’s family, having been ousted from Fukushima, has been granted a brief return to their home in the exclusion zone to

16 Incidentally, Hasegawa is later revealed to have been a former resident of Hinotani and a traitor to his local community in selecting the area for its present transformation.

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 105 collect essential belongings. They move through the house, which has become the model past-home for displaced rural people, entirely as if it is a real space, which, by the logic of theatrical convention, means that it is a real space. Already the half-real playing house (omamagoto) of the previous scene has been replaced by the serious playing (as in performing rather than pure ludic play) of a house. There is no longer an outside staged by actors from which the successfulness of the house-act can be judged, and there are no characters present to voice dissent or uncertainty about the status of this home, though otherwise it is staged indistinguishably from Fumie’s. On stage, the home has been represented only by fence posts, with actors miming all interactions with this space. Further overlapping with Fumie’s pretend home threatening the definition of the space as their real, individual home, the family discovers an unknown man (the same He who once hid in Fumie’s house and who inhabited Fumie’s imaginary underground house) hiding inside. The discovery of He, along with the identical layouts and impermanent boundaries, begins to collapse the identity of one house with another. They threaten to become the same house, the house of rural people displaced by central interventions that are both ultimately nuclear. Just after the family cedes the house to He and Zenjirō (who we must remember was also cast as the grandpa in Fumie’s house-play and is therefore another body that belongs to both houses), they take up the fence posts and carry them with them as they depart, leaving no trace of the space that had been created. What should we make of the identity of the two houses in one space? Do the congruities between the rural home-spaces in peril open the initially individually centered attempt to reclaim control of space to potential community action on the part of many who have suffered the same process? Or do they represent a collapse of the individual’s (or individual family’s) ability to control and define their own spaces? The uncertainty is reflected by the transition of this treatment of space from a performative to a formal mode: The home-space is originally an action taken by Fumie, but as a function of the way the play is staged (and perhaps the lingering power of Fumie’s performative action), the space takes on ‘real’ weight in the next scene as it flows into formal, not just performative, space. The space of the play-within-a-play has fluidly become the space of the play, and the characters in Nanako’s group inherit the space ready-made by Fumie’s act. The questions raised by this transition, and by the liminal status of the space (both real and not real, uncertainly located in time), are not resolved by the drama. On the one hand, a clue may come from the play’s title, which could also be translated as ‘One-Man War’ or alternatively ‘War All Alone.’ I’ve chosen the translation Lone War because I believe that one of the key points of the text is that a series of separate battles waged against centralized powers of government and capital have been unsuccessful, but this play creates a space in which the atomization of individual struggles can be overcome through mutual recognition of the similarity in these disparate battles. The historical consciousness characters develop in the course of this play suggests the potential to unlock political effectiveness through solidarity, whether or not that potential is fully realized in the play. Ultimately, the two groups of refugees, though their situations are extremely similar, do not yet

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effectively band together to regain their home-spaces or stop the displacement of others. Perhaps this reflects the failure to establish collective tactics of post-3.11 space that could connect with a larger Japanese and global history of displacement at the hands of corporations and the state, thereby allowing only fleeting attempts to control space on an individual/private basis when squaring off against the legal authority of centralized power and capital. On the other hand, Fumie’s performative assertion of her will over the definition of the space has, at least in the dramatic sense, crystallized into realization. Even if the authorities do not entirely recognize Fumie’s action, the drama does. Furthermore, when Fumie stabs the research facility’s representative Hasegawa (revealed to be a former Hinotani anti-dam activist), the latter’s death is immediately rewritten by Morinaga (originally his assistant) as having been the result of a fall in a dangerous area, and (whatever Morinaga’s motivation) there appear to be no repercussions against Fumie for the violence, none of the other tour group members who witnessed the event raising any objections. While He is the lonely figure of separate but related resistances to spatial oppression that fail to coalesce, by the end of the play, He has disappeared, and a community is left behind of people who have at last come together to understand that their spatial (and mostly antinuclear) struggles are connected. A model is thus suggested by this conclusion (and by the spatial acts that characters have undertaken) of an unstable, but in some senses successful, community redefinition of space against national law and technocratic interests. Furthermore, it could be argued that Sakate’s refusal of complete catharsis leaves remaining work for the audience themselves to do. Both of these readings are valid and in tension with one another in the aftermath of 3.11. Activists and dramatists concerned with the disasters have created works as ambivalent about the performance of space as they are emotionally conflicted. The ultimate status of 3.11 as national trauma is yet to be defined: there is still a great deal of conflict surrounding many subjects, including spatial subjects such as how and by which authorities contaminated areas should be managed, whether the cancelation of evacuation orders is a benefit or a blow to evacuees, and what spatial modes of memorialization are appropriate.17 These matters are a question for Japan at large and for the people of affected areas, many of whom have experienced cycles of hopefulness and disgust within postdisaster activism and politics. Rather than settling the relationship of the individual or the collective to space and the spatial implications of 3.11, this play provides a window on a process in which the traumatic claims being made are still half-solidified, liminal. I would further like to argue that the spatial acts undertaken willfully by characters like Fumie as the play progresses are essential to the political and social function of this play in the aftermath of disaster. Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso (2010, 8) have criticized dominant understandings of trauma theory as overly emphatic about the passive experience of victimhood to the exclusion of other postdisaster possibilities for agency and resilience in daily lived experience 17 See the project from Azuma 2013 referenced in footnote 16.

The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village 107 and in expressive media, and I agree that this is a weakness in many understandings of trauma. I have found the conceptualization of cultural trauma by Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004) and others useful in distinguishing collective trauma from individual psychological trauma, but that theory falls short of delineating why it declares that expressive work, particularly ‘drama,’ is so crucial for establishing traumatic claims. As I have recounted, Sakate Yōji’s play Lone War stakes a claim to spatial traumatization for a variety of Japanese people at the hands of the state and corporate machinery of nuclear power. This claim is made more powerful by its theatrical medium, which not only puts multiple positions into dialogue but also makes the invisible and the systemic concrete and available to action by giving it human form and placing it in a shared time and space with the audience. The play goes beyond a depiction of powerless suffering, staging acts on space that function both narratively, by impacting what characters do and say about space, and formally, by impacting the way characters and audiences must read and interact with a space that is in the process of being constructed, as temporary ‘pretend’ spaces solidify into ‘real,’ even if that ‘reality’ remains fragile. Performance that stages political spatial resistance extends the narrative of trauma beyond passive victimization and even evades the psychological ideal of ‘healing.’ In this play’s engagement with collective trauma, the goal is not to put dislocations and disturbance to rest just yet but rather to make them visible and actionable. As Lefebvre writes, ‘A spatial action overcomes conflicts, at least momentarily, even though it does not resolve them; it opens a way from everyday concerns to collective joy’ (1991, 222). Sakate’s foregrounding of space in Lone War opens a way to joy and to political action by reifying the spatial implications of the 3.11 disasters and demonstrating the possibility of individuals and groups to make spatial acts into political acts.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama.’ In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, et al., 196–263. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ameya Norimizu. 2014. Burū Shīto. Tokyo: Risōsha. Aoki Mizuho. 2011. ‘Miyagi Debris from Tsunami Tokyo-bound.’ Japan Times, November 25. [online] www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/11/25/national/miyagi-debris-fromtsunami-tokyo-bound/#.XqcANS_MxN0 [Accessed April 27, 2020]. Azuma Hiroki, ed. 2013. “Fukushima daiichi genpatsu kankōchika keikaku.” Shisō chizu beta 4 (2). Bradsher, Keith, and Hiroko Tabuchi. 2011. ‘Greater Danger Lies in Spent Fuel Than in Reactors.’ New York Times, March 17. [online] www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/ asia/18spent.html [Accessed April 22, 2020]. Broderick, Mick, and Antonio Traverso. 2010. ‘Interrogating Trauma: Towards a Critical Trauma Studies.’ Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24: 3−15. Brook, Peter. 1996. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone. Castellucci, Romeo. 2011. The Phenomenon Called I. Tokyo: Festival/Tokyo.

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de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Matsugae Yoshinori. 2011. Nihon no owari. Tokyo: Nihon no mondai. Nihon Keizai Shimbun. 2014. ‘Setagaya no hōshasen, yukashita no rajiumu kara, genpatsu wa mukankei.’ October 11. [online] www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASDG13053_ T11C11A0CC1000 [Accessed April 22, 2020]. Sakate Yōji. 2011. ‘Tatta hitori no sensō.’ Unpublished manuscript. Satō Shigenori. 2015a. ‘Are kara no rakii airando.’ Unpublished manuscript. ———. 2015b. ‘Ierō kēki ni kyandoru wa ikaga? Chōnaikai vs. uchūjin fukurotōji.’ Unpublished manuscript. ———. 2016. ‘Kagami no kuni no kaijin nijūmensō.’ Unpublished manuscript. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing. Wein, Joseph. 2011.‘Okutama Is No Chernobyl.’ Japan Times, October 20. [online] www. japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2011/10/20/reader-mail/okutama-is-no-chernobyl/#.XqCpGi_ MxN0 [Accessed April 22, 2020]. Wiesinger, Justine. 2018. ‘Performing Disaster: The Response to 3.11 and the Great Kanto Earthquake in Japanese Film and Theater.’ PhD diss., Yale University. Yomiuri Shimbun. 2011. ‘Higashi Nihon Daishinai: asu e no keijiban.’ Tokyo Morning Edition, October 7.

6

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism—Documentary Theater Responding to the Fukushima Disaster Barbara Geilhorn

Introduction This article will provide a close reading of Kiruannya and U-ko (Kiruannya to U-ko-san, 2011), a documentary play by the playwright and director Ōnobu Pelican (b. 1975) (Ōnobu 2011a; Performing Arts Network 2012) that has won critical acclaim in Japan.1 In 2011, Ōnobu lived in Minamisōma, a city heavily affected by the earthquake and ensuing tsunami and located 25 km north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Parts of the city were evacuated because of radiation, and many of the evacuees have still not returned to their homes. In the meantime, authorities have successively lifted evacuation orders (excluding the ‘difficult-to-return’ zones, kikan konnan kuiki) to implement the so-called return to normal in the disaster zone.2 In the first months after the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear catastrophe, Ōnobu felt an urgent need to address the painful experiences of people affected and decided to make this the topic of his new play, which he was just beginning to develop (Sakate et al. 2012, 5–6). My article will examine the potentialities of documentary theater as a medium for processing trauma in postdisaster Tōhoku and analyze how Kiruannya and U-ko engages in the cultural work of transforming individual suffering into collective memory.3 Documentary plays enact negotiations between reality, its image, and its interpretation and can thereby open new approaches to one’s own reality, as Janelle Reinelt (2009, 9–11 and 22–3) has argued. In her study on documentary theater, Carol Martin created a list of the functions of documentary plays. The following are particularly relevant in the context of this article: ‘1. To create additional historical accounts;

1 This chapter is a slightly revised version of Geilhorn 2019. Permission for reprint has been granted by the Asia-Pacific Journal. I would like to thank Ōnobu Pelican and Akai Yasuhiro for providing me with unpublished DVD material (Ōnobu 2011b, 2013b) and photos. I am much obliged to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for providing me with the funding to conduct research in Japan. 2 Fukushima Prefecture provides up-to-date information on the transition process. See Fukushima Prefectural Government 2014. 3 See DiNitto 2014 for a revealing study of these issues in the context of literature.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-9

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2. To reconstruct an event; 3. To intermingle autobiography with history’ (Martin 2006, 12–3). In other words, in addition to helping people overcome trauma, documentaries are often politically engaged and have the potential to trigger critical engagement and activism.4 I will return to this later. In this article, I will argue that the playwright has constructed a narrative that goes against images of ‘Fukushima’ as a region of destruction and despair that can only be characterized by the disaster and its aftermath. Ōnobu does this without neglecting contentious issues of the nuclear catastrophe or uncritically supporting slogans of quick recovery. While a critical stance is not rare for theater responding to the Fukushima calamity, Kiruannya and U-ko is unusual in addressing so many conflicting dimensions in response to the disaster. As I will argue in more detail later, Ōnobu’s play allows those immediately affected to construct and reexperience trauma as a first step in assimilating these stressful events. At the same time, the narration is directed at those living far away and invites them to relate emotionally to the traumatic experiences addressed. Although Kiruannya and U-ko criticizes the promotion of economic growth at the expense of the livelihoods of the local population, the play leaves sufficient scope for them to mourn what is lost.

A Multifaceted Fukushima—Conflicting Images of the  Beloved Homeland Kiruannya and U-ko premiered at the Subterranean Theater in Tokyo in June 20115 under the direction of the author and was performed by his troupe Manrui Toriking Ichiza (Loaded Bases Bird King Troupe),6 which shifted its base of activities from Minamisōma to Fukushima City due to the 3.11 calamity. After the Tokyo premiere, the play was presented in other Japanese cities as well.7 Kiruannya and U-ko was discussed positively in national theater journals and nominated as ‘play of the month’ by the renowned Performing Arts Network (2012). Subsequently, Ōnobu gained increasing visibility on the Tokyo theater scene, be it as a frequent guest in panel discussions on Japanese theater after 3.11 or as a participant in roundtable discussions addressing the Fukushima calamity.

4 In some cases, the political dimension of documentaries becomes more explicit in documentary films, such as in the work of Kamanaka Hitomi. In a recent interview with Hirano Katsuya, she raises similar issues to the ones I will discuss here. However, the scope of her work goes far beyond the realm of the risks of nuclear power. See Kamanaka and Hirano 2018. See also the accompanying essay by Margherita Long 2018. 5 On June 25 and 26, as part of SENTIVAL!, The Performing Arts Festival at atelier SENTIO, Tokyo, Japan. See the trailer here: Youtube 2013. 6 Ōnobu founded the troupe in 1996 when he was a student at Fukushima University. In January 2015 Manrui Toriking Ichiza was renamed THEA TRiE (Shia Torie). See THEA TriE 2002. 7 Kiruannya and U-ko was then performed in Sendai (September 17 and 18, 2011) and Yokohama (September 24 and 25, 2011), followed by readings in Aomori (January 21, 2012), Kitakyūshū (March 10, 2012) and Fukushima City (November 17 and 18, 2012).

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 111 Kiruannya and U-ko centers on the ambivalent emotions of people living in the areas affected by the tsunami and/or the nuclear exclusion zone in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and provides a reverse chronological account of the history of Fukushima Prefecture, beginning in 2011 and going back to the start-up of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 1970. The play is a collage of newspaper article readings and quotes from literary texts bound together by a fictive narrative of two women and a man searching for a woman called U-ko. However, each of the three figures in the play, called Man, Woman 1, and Woman 2, seem to be looking for a different person: a childhood friend, an acquaintance met on the World Wide Web, or the chef of a bistro, respectively. Her name is written with the U in romanization and the latter half in a Chinese character but is pronounced ‘yūko.’ U-ko lives in the town where the newspaper deliveryman called Kiruannya scatters clippings from old newspapers all over town. This nickname, a combination of kiru (cut, kill) and annya (older brother, Fukushima dialectal word for a friendly male who is older than the speaker), refers to this very activity. I will come back to the relevance of both names later. The highly repetitive character of these episodes evokes flashbacks experienced by individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.8 The play illustrates the return of a repressed trauma experienced by those who were searching for family members, friends, and acquaintances in the aftermath of the disaster and who often did not succeed. The term ‘trauma’ refers to an experience of extreme intensity that overstrains a person’s coping capabilities and causes lasting damage to an individual’s self-conception. However, what is perceived as a traumatic experience is not the event itself, but rather the persistent re-experiencing of it (Nünning 2008, 728). A traumatic experience is thus temporally and spatially separated from the triggering event (latency). The ‘embodied’ memory is not directly accessible and cannot be narrativized. In her influential rereading of Freud, Caruth describes this paradoxical nature of traumatic experience as follows: Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on. (Caruth 1995, 3–4) Narrativizing the dreadful events and allowing viewers to re-experience and construct their trauma is a major task of the play. Ōnobu’s stage design and effects are minimalist. The stage is completely covered with newspaper clippings and is dominated by the model of a village hanging at its center, symbolizing the town where the newspaper deliveryman Kiruannya and U-ko, the person searched for in the play, live. Although the two figures are

8 This is also a characteristic of other documentary plays—such as Ameya Norimizu’s Blue Sheet (Burū Shīto, Ameya 2013)—created in the immediate aftermath of the March 11 disaster.

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central to the play, they do not appear on stage. Classical music, including famous pieces such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Tchaikovsky’s Dying Swan, sets the contemplative tone of the play. Although Kiruannya and U-ko largely consists of characters quoting newspapers and literary material, it is not a static performance. As the man and two women move around the village model at center stage, the tempo of the figures’ movements and speech increases with their growing despair and desperation, lending a spiral of dynamism to the play. The actors are moving around at a frantic pace and calling out U-ko’s name and the dates and places where she was last seen or lost. The affective dimension of the calamity becomes tangible even to audience members who lack firsthand experience of the dreadful events. The play invites the audience to actively connect with the emotions triggered by the disaster and hence stimulates them to engage with the trauma on a more conscious level. In some audience members, this might be the starting point to rethink their own stance on the use of nuclear power or their private energy consumption. The actors alternate reading newspaper clippings about a person named U-ko that are scattered across the stage. The articles start in January 2011 and proceed in chronological order. When the man calls out the date of March 11, the review of everyday local events is suddenly interrupted by an Earthquake Early Warning siren, evoking haunting memories of the calamity in actors and audiences alike, including the unbearable anxiety and uncertainty caused by the numerous aftershocks that lasted for weeks (Fig. 1). In his critique of the play, Masaki Hiroyuki (b. 1964), the Tokyo-based former editor-in-chief of the journal Theatre Arts (Shiatā Atsu), writes about his involuntary reactions to the sound of the Earthquake Early Warning and the shock that took hold of his body when he saw the play about six months after the catastrophe (Masaki 2014). When the three actors resume reading the newspaper clippings, the clippings refer to the disaster. Again, it is U-ko who is the protagonist of the texts and represents various reactions and behaviors of local people, such as an evacuee taking neighbors out of the radiation zone in her bus, a mayor encouraging villagers to return and get involved in reconstruction, and a woman complaining to the visiting prime minister about living conditions in temporary shelters.9 When the actors finally read out the Fukushima Police Department’s list of missing people whose bodies were identified, again, all of them are named U-ko. It becomes ever more uncertain who U-ko is and if she ever existed at all. The quest to find U-ko invites the audience to relive the fraught days after 3.11, as people desperately searched for missing relatives and friends in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. By making the dominant color of the stage, including the performers’ clothing, white, Ōnobu opens up a wide space for imagination. What is presented on stage is not limited to a specific historical time or geographic place such as ‘Fukushima.’ Audiences are encouraged to imagine themselves in

9 Comparable scenes also appear in other documentaries about the triple disaster, such as Funahashi Atsushi’s Nuclear Nation (2012).

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 113 the position of the two women and the man in their search for U-ko. Her name is telling: while U can be read as referring to the unknown, the name’s Japanese pronunciation also suggests the English personal pronoun ‘you.’ Moreover, Yūko is a very common Japanese female name that can be written with a number of different Chinese characters. U-ko represents the countless people who are still missing to this day and gives the nameless victims an identity. At the same time, U-ko stands for the everywoman: she reminds us that everyone could find themselves in her situation. Thus, in Kiruannya and U-ko, which was first conceived to be performed in front of a Tokyo audience, Ōnobu is invested in the cultural work of creating an imagined community affected by the calamity that is not limited to those living in the immediate disaster zones. Differentiating between individual and collective trauma, Alexander and Breese argue that for collectivities [. . .] it is a matter of symbolic construction and framing, of creating a narrative and moving along from there. A ‘we’ must be constructed via narrative and coding, and it is this collective identity that experiences and confronts the danger. (Alexander and Breese 2011, xii–xiii) Events have to be expressed and constructed as trauma to be perceived as such by a group of people. By actively inviting audiences far removed from Tōhoku to imagine themselves in the position of those directly affected, Ōnobu counters national narratives of 3.11 as a geographically limited disaster and a short-term recovery. A number of times, the quest to find U-ko is interrupted by readings of citations from local literature that are evenly distributed among the three actors and establish a new level of involvement with issues related to March 11. The first reading cites the entire Episode 99 of The Legends of Tōno (Tōno monogatari) (Yanagita 1973 [1910], 299–300),10 a record of folk legends that were orally transmitted through the generations in the Tōno region, which is located near the Pacific coast of Iwate Prefecture, one of the areas most severely affected by the triple disaster. Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), the founder of Japanese folklore studies, collected these legends based on the memory of the Tōno native Sasaki Kizen (or Kyōseki, 1886–1933). The resulting book is a rewriting of local oral history into a literary work that addresses a national audience and engages with the problems of Japanese collective identity in the modern world. Subsequently, Tōno as described in the legends became the canonical representative of the Japanese hometown (furusato) in the collective imagination (Ivy 1995, 100). Episode 99 relates the story of Kitagawa Fukuji, who lost his wife and one of his children in the devastating tsunami of 1896. Living in a temporary shelter with

10 For an English translation, see Yanagita 1975. References to the Tōno monogatari are not rare in literary works on the Fukushima calamity as well. See Flores’ chapter in this volume. DiNitto 2019, 84−7, analyzes the use of monogatari in the context of disaster fiction.

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his surviving children, he got up one moonlit night and encountered the ghost of his dead wife. While crying about the loss of her children, Kitagawa’s wife also divulges that she has found a new partner. Although The Legends of Tōno relates the very basic facts of the event fleetingly, it nevertheless succeeds in conveying the emotional vividness of the protagonist’s feelings. This is even more the case if one reads Episode 99 in the context of the Fukushima calamity. Mirroring the situation of recent disaster victims who lost close family members, the text conjures up accounts of the wandering spirits of people who died in the tsunami (Parry 2014). Describing the encounter between the living and the dead, and at the same time hinting at the possibility of finding peace in the afterlife, the scene reveals what survivors of the triple disaster might long for. For those not directly affected, the episode is also deeply disturbing, thereby emotionally drawing spectators far removed from Tōhoku into the play and inviting them to imagine the ceaseless process of mourning experienced by survivors. Moreover, by adding a passage pertaining to a local disaster from an account from over a hundred years ago, Ōnobu links 3.11 to the past, emphasizing the fact that northern Japan has a long and tragic history of devastating tsunami disasters and questioning the frequently claimed unpredictability (sōteigai)11 of the nuclear disaster, a claim that obscures the human responsibility for the Fukushima meltdowns. Tōno, as the epitome of the Japanese hometown, again highlights the relevance of the tragic events beyond the spatially limited confines of the disaster area. Kiruannya and U-ko draws a multifaceted picture of Fukushima Prefecture before and after the devastating events via the reading of extracts, not all of which mention the topic of disaster, from various sources—quoting well-known literary works as well as local newspaper reports.12 The information mined for the performance mainly deals with local events and politics: agricultural reports, coverage of local sports and cultural happenings, and crime reports. A broad variety of topics is needed not only to paint a full picture of the locale before the disaster but also to contrast with the chronological record of significant occurrences in the history of the nuclear power industry in the region that is intertwined in the local reportage. For a post-3.11 audience, the latter stand out against the majority of rather trivial local events. The play traces the prefecture’s development into one of the country’s major energy suppliers without omitting the attempts of Japan’s most powerful utility and the operator of Fukushima Daiichi, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), to cover up problems in Fukushima’s nuclear reactors. Ōnobu also provides information on the region’s overall development, such as the opening of new train routes or school buildings, highlighting the fact that the high-risk technology of the nuclear industry was established in the region to trigger economic growth in a rural, less developed, and sparsely populated area.

11 For a critical discussion of the alleged unpredictability of the Fukushima disaster, see Samuels 2013, 35–39. 12 Sources are the Fukushima Minpō Shimbun and Fukushima Min’yū Shimbun.

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 115 This also implies that locals might have willingly accepted the dangers of nuclear power in favor of jobs and socioeconomic development, which became a source of ambivalence and tension after the disaster. Locals may still be reluctant to criticize the nuclear industry for causing the calamity since their livelihoods depended on the nuclear plant. What is more, criticizing the use of nuclear power would entail a reevaluation of their own involvement. Kiruannya and U-ko addresses the whole complexity of problems that led to the Fukushima calamity. The play can be interpreted, as the theater critic Masaki (2014) has done, as showing the author’s embitterment, perhaps even tendering an accusation, toward the inhabitants of Tokyo for heaping the risks associated with meeting the energy needs of the capital onto the people of Fukushima Prefecture. Certainly, Ōnobu criticizes what has been called a ‘sacrificial system’ (gisei no shisutemu): companies and policyholders assigning the tremendous risks of nuclear energy to peripheral regions such as northern Japan, whose safety and future are jeopardized for the benefit of the metropolitan center (Takahashi 2012).13 However, I would suggest a more complex reading of the narrative. Besides taking a critical stance toward the parties responsible for the development of the nuclear energy industry in Tokyo and Fukushima Prefecture, Ōnobu’s play draws a positive, even affectionate, image of his home province, with its abundant natural and attractive cultural heritage. For example, the performance touches on the 2007 establishment of Oze National Park, which stretches across Fukushima, Gunma, Niigata, and Tochigi Prefectures, and the Sōma Nōmaoi, a designated cultural treasure of Japan, where riders wearing historical costumes participate in an annual horse race organized by three shrines in Fukushima Prefecture. Ōnobu joins other local artists and cultural initiatives such as Wagō Ryōichi and Project Fukushima! (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015; Project Fukushima! n.d.) to counterbalance postdisaster images of Northeastern Japan that reduced the afflicted areas to mere disaster zones. These projects both aim at countering the stigmatization that reinforces the already existing marginalization of the aging, rural prefecture of Fukushima. However, Ōnobu goes one step further. Via commentary on local politics, festivals, and landscape, Ōnobu provides insights into the complex emotional state of the local people: traumatized by loss and bereavement, affected residents are torn between charges against those responsible in the capital, selfaccusations, and the love of and pride in their homeland. While the Japanese government and the nuclear power industry have targeted such remote, less developed areas that depend on the jobs and subsidies brought by hosting nuclear facilities, local people assented and accepted the dangers of nuclear energy in exchange for jobs and modest prosperity (Aldrich 2012, 127– 39). Although national stakeholders pushed nuclear power, stressing its safety (anzen shinwa), it must be assumed that there was a certain level of willing ignorance on the part of the local community. Having said that, we also have to consider that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a strong antinuclear movement 13 For an in-depth analysis of another play invested in this issue, see Geilhorn 2017b.

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to mobilize citizens did not exist in rural Japan.14 Now, as a consequence of the nuclear disaster, the homes and livelihoods of numerous people as well as many of the region’s natural and cultural assets, which were important components of local identity, are lost and might never be regained. The readings of newspaper excerpts intertwined in the play provide local reportage highlighting all these aspects. Kiruannya can be read as the very embodiment of the calamity: kiru, written in the katakana syllabary, hints at two possible Chinese characters meaning ‘cut’ or ‘kill,’ thereby evoking associations comparable for a Western audience to the Grim Reaper wandering about town to collect the dead.15 Spreading the clippings all over town, he also symbolizes the ceaseless process of coming to terms with the complex emotional state of affected residents as well as the flashbacks related to the experience of trauma. Ōnobu highlights the beauty and value of what has been lost by using the following two poems, which are emotionally charged representations of Fukushima Prefecture, in his play. Kawauchi Village in Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture (Fukushima-ken Futaba-gun Kawauchi-mura),16 by the Fukushima-born poet Kusano Shinpei (1903–1988),17 presents an idyllic picture of life in the countryside, with rich wildlife and a vibrant community, and also emphasizes the uniqueness of the village. By making the poet’s reed hut and second home a place of exile and retreat from the noisy life of the city, Kawauchi-mura is imagined as an alternative to living in the city. When the poet imagines himself back there one day after temporarily leaving for Tokyo, theater audiences are painfully reminded that returning home will no longer be possible for many people displaced by the Fukushima calamity. The second poem quoted in Ōnobu’s play, Two People under a Tree (Juka no Futari), by the well-known poet, sculptor, and painter Takamura Kōtarō (1883– 1956) (Takamura 1967, 65–7),18 strikes a similar chord to Kusano Shinpei’s text. Two People under a Tree is a paean to Fukushima’s natural beauty. The beauty

14 However, the Japanese antinuclear movement can be traced back to the early postwar years (Sugai 2009). 15 This is why Otone Sato chose Kiruannya and U-ko—Brother Scythe and Mrs. U (Kiruannya to U-ko-san—Bruder Sense und Frau U) as the title for the German version of the play, which I will briefly touch upon later. 16 Kawauchi-mura is situated in the 20–30 km zone around the Fukushima nuclear plant. While the town was initially impacted by mandatory evacuation, it is part of the area that was successively opened up by authorities. These details are not made explicit to the audience, but will be known to locals. 17 Kusano Shinpei, born in Kamiogawa (Fukushima Prefecture) is one of the major Japanese poets of the 20th century and particularly known for his lyric poems about nature. 18 Takamura Kōtarō was an outstanding poet of his time, and he, along with others, was crucial to the establishment of shintaishi (a new style of poetry that was no longer limited to the combination of verse of five or seven syllables common in traditional poetry) in the vernacular language. Two People under a Tree is part of his most prominent collection of poems, Chieko shō (a selection of writings on Chieko, first published in 1941), which comprises works from the very beginning of their relationship until well after Chieko’s death. For an English translation, see Takamura n.d.

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 117 of Mount Atatara and the glistening of the river Abukuma are invoked together several times through the poem, acting like a refrain and setting the scene. Takamura links his praise of the region with the treasured memories of his late wife, Chieko (1886–1938), a Fukushima-born painter and poet herself, who died from tuberculosis after a long struggle with mental illness. In the context of Kiruannya and U-ko, the poem, written on March 11, 1923, gains a new meaning. In addition to referring to the calamity by the very date of its composition, the inclusion of the poem in the performance triggers associations of the emotional distress of survivors who outlived dear family members and/or friends lost in the disaster. At the same time, the poem mourns the reality that places that are deeply linked to the private memories of people living in the afflicted areas are now polluted by radiation for the foreseeable future.19 Kiruannya and U-ko was not performed in Fukushima City until November 2012, nearly a year and a half after its premiere in Tokyo. At a symposium called the Earthquake Disaster and Theatre: Asking for a New Paradigm for Theatre, held on October 8, 2012, by the Za Kōenji Theater in Tokyo (Sakate et al. 2012). Ōnobu talked about his hesitation to stage the play in his home province and stated his concerns about finding a differentiated approach to the disaster that takes into account the emotional distress of affected people without glossing over contentious issues (Sakate et al. 2012, 18). He voiced his doubts as to whether the play contributed to fūhyō higai,20 harmful unfounded rumors allegedly spread about affected areas in the aftermath of the disaster. Fūhyō higai is a highly controversial issue persistent in public discourse on the Fukushima calamity. On the one hand, rumors arise when reliable information is missing in the event of a disaster and reports on wide areas made virtually uninhabitable by radiation constitute a substantially pragmatic yet emotional burden for locals. However, allegations of fūhyō higai are an effective tool in the hands of pronuclear pressure groups, as they were too for the Abe government, to silence critical voices. In this kind of environment, the danger of selfcensorship in the arts is very real. However, experiences in the course of rehearsals made Ōnobu change his mind about staging the play in Fukushima. What initially proved to be emotionally challenging for the troupe, since many people from their immediate environment had died or were forced to live in contaminated places, evolved into a way to overcome emotional distress. This experience of emotional healing (iyashi) for the troupe was the impetus for the performances, with the aim of inducing a similar process in local audiences (Sakate et al. 2012, 22). Shows were well received, garnering a strong emotional response from audiences (Ōnobu 2015). Ōnobu was confronted with hardly any of the reproaches of fūhyō higai that were voiced so readily in the aftermath of the disaster. A major reason might have been that his play does not overlook the locals’ strong bond to their native land.

19 The area referred to in this poem is situated outside the mandatory evacuation zones. However, it remains to be seen what long-term effects the radiation exposure will have on residents. 20 For a close reading of Okada Toshiki’s play Current Location (Genzaichi), which addresses the problem of fūhyō higai in a fictionalized form, see Geilhorn 2017a.

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‘Fukushima’: Progress and Disaster In winter 2013, about two and a half years after its Tokyo debut, Kiruannya and U-ko was restaged in Tokyo and Shizuoka in a slightly revised version under the direction of Akai Yasuhiro (b. 1972) (Fig. 2).21 The Fukushima City native was the director and head of the Tokyo-based theater Subterranean, where the original and revised versions of the play premiered. In the new version, the original text remains largely unchanged. The only difference is the inclusion of a ‘woman from 1970,’ who makes her appearance in an exaggeratedly happy march to the tune of Minami Haruo’s Hello From the Nations of the World (Sekai no kuni kara konnichiwa), the official theme song of the Osaka Expo of the same year. The song sets the naively positive atmosphere of the short scene. The design of the woman’s dress (a white T-shirt with red vertical patterns down both sides of the front and a golden party hat) is reminiscent of Okamoto Tarō’s (1911–1996) Tower of the Sun (Taiyō no tō), one of the most famous works by the avant-garde painter and sculptor. Part of the Osaka Expo’s central festival plaza, the Tower of the Sun was a representation of the past (lower part), present (middle part), and future (the face) of humankind.22 Consequently, her dress identifies the ‘woman from 1970’ as a personification of the year of the first World’s Fair held in an Asian country and hints at her being a link between past, present, and future in the play. I will return to the latter aspect shortly. Besides Okamoto, numerous other writers, artists, and architects participated in shaping the image of the Expo, which was a ‘locus of both collaborative and contending ideas about the future’ (Gardner 2011, 28). ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind’ (Jinrui no shinpo to chōwa), the theme of the exposition, implicitly included praise for nuclear power as a new technology that was supposed to bring about a bright future for the whole world.23 Marching in time to Minami Haruo’s song and drawing a cheerful picture of the Expo’s opening ceremony, the woman in search of the future arrives in the town where U-ko and Kiruannya live. However, she does not interact with the characters searching for U-ko, preferring instead to observe the events that unfold on stage. The ‘woman from 1970’ reads excerpts from the official record of the two Osaka Expo time capsules buried adjacent to Osaka Castle, containing 2,098 objects ‘representing the achievements of our civilization and the everyday experience of the Japanese people’ (Panasonic 2010),24 which are to be excavated

21 Performed from November 29 to December 3 at Subterranean in Tokyo and on December 5 and 6 at Atorie Mirume in Shizuoka. For further information, see Subterranean 2015. I would like to thank Ōnobu Pelican for providing me with the unpublished manuscript (Ōnobu 2013a). 22 See Expo’70 Commemorative Park 2014 for an image and further details. 23 To be sure, organizers were absolutely aware of the numerous problems around the globe, and the Expo’s exaggeratedly positive mode did not escape criticism and ridicule from contemporaries, as Gardner has shown. But critical voices were mitigated and pushed to the margins (see Gardner 2011, 38). 24 In the list of contents you can find a plutonium timekeeper, radioactive isotopes of carbon (C-14) and plutonium (Pu-239), which are used for the production of nuclear weapons, and scientific reports for the future, including one on atomic science, but also records of the atomic bombings.

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 119 in 5,000 years. What was once a proud symbol of the cultural and technological advancement of humankind has turned into an icon of the long-term nuclear legacy after March 11. The woman in the Osaka Expo’s dress quotes at length from a letter by a schoolboy addressed to people 5,000 years in the future. To contemporary ears post-2011, the letter reads like a science fiction fantasy, an idealistic enthusiasm for future potentialities carried to the extreme. Short episodes featuring the ‘woman from 1970’ are repeatedly interspersed throughout the play. She seems to pop up like an unpleasant memory of the careless acceptance of the risks of nuclear power that cannot be suppressed. Akai emphasized her role as a startling intruder through lighting. She sits on a little platform in the corner of the stage, occupying the spotlight when quoting from the Expo’s official records. Her naive cheerfulness is in sharp contrast to the growing despair of the characters in their quest to find U-ko, which underlines the absurdity of her lines. Thus, the ‘woman from 1970’ embodies a naive faith in science and technology and is a spirit that haunts the future that had been so bright in the imagination of her generation.25 Furthermore, by handing over the three literary texts examined earlier for her fellow actors to quote, she visibly acts as a mediator between different periods of time and hints at how Kiruannya and U-ko integrates the Fukushima disaster into a wider historical frame. However, the play casts doubt on whether humankind will be able to learn the lessons of the past. In 1970, man-made disasters such as Minamata disease were common knowledge. Yet Japanese attitudes toward science and technology as having the answers to all of life’s challenges have changed little over the last four decades. Moreover, the problems and dangers of nuclear power are not yet resolved. It is only a matter of time until the next nuclear disaster occurs in some part of the world. Akai intended to highlight this universal aspect of Kiruannya and U-ko. Unlike the original, the revised play was performed by a cast of Tokyo actors and a Korean actress, whose role was to provide Korean language; she read the history of four decades of Fukushima Prefecture mentioned earlier, and Japanese subtitles were provided. By employing the Korean actress, Akai aimed to move further away from the local focus of the play and to objectify and universalize its subject (Masaki 2014). The problems and risks connected with the use of nuclear power do not end with the Fukushima calamity. Akai wanted to allude that a similar calamity is not unlikely to happen in one of Japan’s neighboring countries using atomic energy. Thus, through the combined efforts of the playwright and the new director, the global dimension of the play and the criticism of humankind’s blind faith that the material world can be tamed by technology and science become more explicit. Obviously, the people responsible did not realize the conflict between the remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the promotion of nuclear technology for energy supply. 25 Interestingly, Okada Toshiki’s Unable to See, which was shown at The World is Not Fair—The Great World’s Fair 2012 festival in Berlin, also employs references to the Osaka Expo, in what was one of his first attempts to address the Fukushima calamity on stage. However, as a satirical piece displaying strong irony and sarcasm, it is very different in character. For more details, see Geilhorn 2017a.

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On the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Fukushima calamity, the new version of the play was performed in translation in Munich by the German-Japanese theater collective EnGawa, under the directorship of Otone Sato (EnGawa 2015).26 Although an original production in its own right, Kiruannya and U-ko—Brother Scythe and Mrs. U (Kiruannya to U-ko-san—Bruder Sense und Frau U) (Ōnobu 2014)27 owes many staging details to the Japanese version. Performed in German with only a few Japanese insertions, it likewise highlighted the global dimension of the issues touched upon in the play. The troupe’s crosscultural performance is also reflected in the title of the play, which keeps the Japanese original with the German translation. As the Munich performance demonstrates, Kiruannya and U-ko has the potential to be shown internationally.

Conclusion Weaving a dense fabric of fictitious material, newspaper clippings, and reality, Kiruannya and U-ko provides a rich tapestry of the multiple and often contradictory features of Fukushima Prefecture in the aftermath of the triple disaster. Ōnobu’s play offers keen insights into the highly ambivalent emotional landscape of those residents of Northeastern Japan whose homeland was turned into a disaster zone and radioactive wasteland after March 11. While many cultural cues that frame the play only register with Fukushima natives, the universality of the themes presented in the performance speak to all Japanese, regardless of region, age, or gender. This is a prerequisite to achieve the play’s aim of constructing a ‘we’ and enabling the development of a collective memory. The articulation of U-ko’s identity with a Fukushima poet posting Twitter feeds, for example, is easily associated by the audience with Wagō Ryōichi (Ōnobu 2011a, 137), whose work gained nationwide attention immediately after March 11. In contrast, the shifting role of J-Village, which is part of the Fukushima chronology presented in the play (Ōnobu 2011a, 124), is harder to place for a national audience. Built by TEPCO in 1997 as a training camp for the Japanese national soccer team, J-Village was used as a site to coordinate the rescue operations and cleanup efforts after the calamity, thus symbolizing the ambivalent role of TEPCO and the nuclear power industry, which provided jobs and modest prosperity at the risk of harming livelihoods in the region in general. Although the numerous cross-references to local issues or literary quotes make the play rewarding for a local, or at least for a Japanese audience, it can nevertheless be appreciated by international spectators, as the Munich performance has shown.

26 The theater collective was formed on the occasion of the Fukushima calamity and has presented related performances on its anniversary since 2012. 27 The play was staged between March 13 and 15, 2015, and included a talk after the performance (on March 14) with the director and the following Japanese guests: Nishidō Kōjin (renowned Japanese theater researcher and critic), Takahashi Shinya (theater specialist and professor of German studies at Chūō University, Tokyo) and Akai Yasuhiro. The performance was part of a cultural event lasting several days. For further details, see Leucht 2015 and Sato n.d. See the trailer here: Youtube 2015.

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 121 Kiruannya and U-ko works at two overlapping symbolic levels: one level offers local audiences a temporary space to process individual trauma and experience emotional healing. Interweaving autobiography with history, the play encourages audiences to reconstruct the terrible events, a major function of documentary theater, as Carol Martin (2006) has outlined. The other level creates an alternative reading of the calamity and constructs a narrative that resists the dominant image of Fukushima as a nuclear wasteland and a geographically limited disaster. Kiruannya and U-ko integrates the March 11 disaster into the larger historical context of Northeastern Japan as a region known for devastating tsunami disasters and the establishment of the nuclear industry in Japan and does not deny the shared responsibility of national and local stakeholders. The play moves viewers beyond the temporally and spatially limited confines of the disaster to integrate audiences into an imagined collective of people traumatized by this calamity that has its origins far beyond the borders of those areas immediately affected. Opposing national discourses of a disaster limited to a particular area, Ōnobu engages in transforming individual trauma into collective memory, thereby involving the diverse perspectives of Fukushima residents.

References Aldrich, Daniel P. 2012. ‘Networks of Power: Institutions and Local Residents in PostTōhoku Japan.’ In Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan. Response and Recovery After Japan’s 3/11, edited by Jeff Kingston, 127–39. London and New York: Routledge. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Elizabeth B. Breese. 2011. ‘On Social Suffering and Its Cultural Construction.’ In Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, edited by Ron Eyermen, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Elizabeth B. Breese, xi–xxxv. Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers. Ameya Norimizu. 2013. ‘Burū Shīto.’ Shiatā Atsu 54: 259−83. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DiNitto, Rachel. 2014. ‘Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3.11: The Debris of PostFukushima Literature and Film.’ Japan Forum 26 (3): 340–60. ———. 2019. Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. EnGawa. 2015. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san—Bruder Sense und Frau U.’ Program Leaflet. Expo’70 Commemorative Park. 2014. [online] www.expo70-park.jp/cause/expo/tower-ofsun [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Fukushima Prefectural Government. 2014. ‘Transition of Evacuation Designated Zones.’ [online] www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en03-08.html [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Funahashi Atsushi. 2012. Nuclear Nation. Documentary. Japan and Big River Films. Gardner, William O. 2011. ‘The 1970 Osaka Expo and/as Science Fiction.’ Review of Japanese Culture and Society 28: 26–43. [online] https://works.swarthmore.edu/facjapanese/16 [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Geilhorn, Barbara. 2017a. ‘Challenging Reality with Fiction—Imagining Alternative Readings of Japanese Society in Post-Fukushima Theatre.’ In Negotiating Disaster: ‘Fukushima’ and the Arts, edited by Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, 162–76. London and New York: Routledge.

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———. 2017b. ‘Local Theatre Responding to a Global Issue—3/11 Seen from Japan’s Periphery.’ Japan Review 31: 123–39. [online] https://nichibun.repo.nii. ac.jp/?action=pages_view_main&active_action=repository_view_main_item_ detail&item_id=6860&item_no=1&page_id=41&block_id=63 [Accessed March 26, 2020]. ———. 2019. ‘A Multifaceted Fukushima—Trauma and Memory in Ōnobu Pelican’s Kiruannya and U-ko.’ Asia-Pacific Journal 17 (1.1). [online] https://apjjf.org/2019/01/ Geilhorn.html [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iwata-Weickgenannt, Kristina. 2015. ‘Precarity Beyond 3/11 or “Living Fukushima”: Power, Politics, and Space in Wagō Ryōichi’s Poetry of Disaster.’ In Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature, edited by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Roman Rosenbaum, 187–211. London and New York: Routledge. Kamanaka Hitomi and Hirano Katsuya. 2018. ‘Fukushima, Media, Democracy: The Promise of Documentary Film.’ Asia-Pacific Journal 16 (16.3). [online] https://apjjf. org/2018/16/Kamanaka.html [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Leucht, Sabine. 2015. ‘Neuanfang unter Kirschblüten. Vor vier Jahren havarierte im japanischen Fukushima das Kernkraftwerk. Zwei Veranstaltungen erinnern im I-Camp an die Katastrophe und weisen in die Zukunft.’ Süddeutsche Zeitung (Bayern–Kultur), March 11. Long, Margherita. 2018. ‘Japan’s 3.11 Nuclear Disaster and the State of Exception: Notes on Kamanaka’s Interview and Two Recent Films.’ Asia-Pacific Journal 16 (16.4). [online] https://apjjf.org/2018/16/Long.html [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Martin, Carol. 2006. ‘Bodies of Evidence.’ TDR (The Drama Review) 50 (3) (T 191): 8–15. Masaki Hiroyuki. 2014. ‘Sabuterenian purodyūsu “Kiruannya to U-ko-san.” ’ Wonderland. [online] www.wonderlands.jp/archives/25068 [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Nünning, Ansgar, ed. 2008. Metzler-Lexikon Literatur-und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze, Personen, Grundbegriffe. Stuttgart: Metzler. Ōnobu Pelican. 2011a. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san.’ Shiata Atsu 48: 121–38. ———. 2011b. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san’ [unpublished DVD of the performance on June 26, 2011, at Subterranean, Tokyo]. ———. 2013a. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san.’ Saienban [unpublished text]. ———. 2013b. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san.’ Saienban [DVD of a performance of the revised version in 2013 at Subterranean, Tokyo]. ———. 2014. Bruder Sense und Frau U. Translated by Otone Sato. Munich: Theatralize.company, Thirkettle & Voigt. [online] www.theatralize.com. [Accessed March 26, 2020]. ———. 2015. E-mail correspondence with the author, November 20. Panasonic. 2010. ‘Time Capsule Expo’70. A Gift to the People of the Future from the People of the Present Day . . .. ’ [online] http://panasonic.net/history/timecapsule [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Parry, Richard L. 2014. ‘Ghosts of the Tsunami.’ London Review of Books 36 (3): 1–11. www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n03/richard-lloydparry/ghosts-of-the-tsunami [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Performing Arts Network (The Japan Foundation). 2012. ‘Play of the Month. Kiruannya and U-ko.’ Pelican Onobu, March 30. [online] www.performingarts.jp/E/play/1203/1. html [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Project Fukushima! n.d. [online] www.pj-fukushima.jp [Accessed March 26, 2020].

Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism 123 Reinelt, Janelle. 2009. ‘The Promise of Documentary.’ In Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, 6–23. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sakate Yōji, et al. 2012. ‘Shinpojiumu shinsai to engeki: Atarashii engeki paradaimu o motomete (Tokushū shinsai to engeki).’ Shiatā Atsu 53: 4–23. Samuels, Richard. 2013. 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sato, Otone. n.d. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san—Bruder Sense und Frau U.’ [online] www. otonesato.de/theaterregie/%E3%82%AD%E3%83%AB%E5%85%84%E3%81%AB%E3%82%83%E3%81%A8u%E5%AD%90%E3%81%95%E3%82%93-bruder-senseund-frau-u [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Subterranean. 2015. [online] www.subterranean.jp [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Sugai Masuro. 2009. ‘Anti-nuclear Movement, Japan.’ In The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness, 191–3. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Takahashi Tetsuya. 2012. Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima, Okinawa. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Takamura Kōtarō. 1967. Chieko shō. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. ———. n. d. ‘Two People Under A Tree.’ Translated by Paul Archer. [online] www. paularcher.net/translations/kotaro_takamura/the_chieko_poems/two_people_under_a_ tree.html [Accessed March 26, 2020]. THEA TRiE. 2002. ‘Web: torinews.’ [online] www.toriking.net [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Yanagita Kunio. 1973 [1910]. ‘Tōno monogatari. Yanagita kunioshū.’ Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (NKBT) 45: 257−312. ———. 1975. The Legends of Tōno. Translated, with an introduction by Ronald A. Morse (Japan Foundation translation series). Tokyo: Japan Foundation. Youtube. 2013. ‘F/T Saimaru engekidan “Kiruannya to U-ko-san.” ’ January 30. [online] www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOWLQ81xI-s&t=25s [Accessed March 26, 2020]. Youtube. 2015. ‘Kiruannya to U-ko-san—Bruder Sense und Frau U.’ June 22. [online] www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XDfQgwOmy0 [Accessed March 26, 2020].

Part 3

Border-Crossing

7

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary Dan Fujiwara

Tawada Yōko and the Issue of Radioactive Contamination The work of Tawada Yōko (b. 1960) is commonly described by critics as ‘bordercrossing literature’ (ekkyō bungaku). Writing in both Japanese and German, she produces original and highly experimental narratives that feature various ‘boundaries’ (kyōkai), between countries, cultures, and identities. However, she herself clearly fears the term ‘border-crossing’ and its military connotations, as she emphasized in her acceptance speech for the 2016 Kleist Prize. She argues instead that borders, particularly those between languages, should be regarded as a space for literary creation (Tawada 2017, 159−60). Tawada tackled the topic of 3.11 in her writing quite early on via her preferred literary forms of novels, plays, diaries, and essays. Among these, her book The Emissary (Kentōshi, Tawada 2014)1 is distinctive for making repeated, although implicit, references to the radioactive contamination caused by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, rather than focusing on the magnitude 9.0 earthquake or the devastating tsunami that reached heights of up to 40 meters. Tawada’s focus on radioactive contamination is no doubt influenced by her residing in Germany, a country so sensitive to the issue that it announced its decision to abolish all its nuclear power plants just four months after the Fukushima disaster. She frequently mentions the danger of radioactive contamination in

1 The book consists of five chapters: one novel, ‘The Emissary’ (Kentōshi), three short stories— ‘Skanda, Endlessly’ (Idaten dokomademo), ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Fushi no shima), and ‘The Far Shore’ (Higan)—and one drama, ‘Mammalia in Babel’ (Dōbutsutachi no baberu). Each chapter was originally published separately as a stand-alone work in different literary magazines and a book. Not all them have been translated into English, and those that have do not appear in the same publication. The first chapter in Kentōshi is also titled ‘Kentōshi’ and was translated by Margaret Mitsutani as The Emissary (Tawada 2018), a stand-alone publication; Margaret Mitsutani also translated ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Tawada 2012) and Jeffrey Angles is the translator of ‘The Far Shore’ (Tawada 2015). For the comfort of English-speaking readers, when I refer to the Japanese book Kentōshi, I will use its English title The Emissary. When I talk specifically about the chapter ‘Kentōshi,’ the title will appear between single quotation marks, ‘The Emissary.’ However, please note that in all cases my analysis is based on the Japanese original text, and translations are given for information purposes only. The same applies for all other chapters of the book.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-11

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interviews with journalists and in conversations with other writers.2 However, her interest in radioactivity also seems to be related to the peculiar nature of the phenomenon. Radioactive substances are known to pass through air and penetrate soil and water, thereby affecting the environment and living creatures. Yet it is impossible to know precisely how far the contamination has spread, how long it will remain, and when it will end. By its very nature, it is an invisible and borderless danger. The irony is that this invisible and borderless radioactivity erects borders in the form of discrimination against people and things from Fukushima, which appeared quite early on after 3.11. The dominant discourse—as frequently reported in the media and discussed in books—seals Fukushima off as a radioactively contaminated space. Although invisible and borderless itself, radioactivity therefore generates unexpected and undesirable borders. This paradox must be taken into account when dealing with the issue of Fukushima, and indeed the notion of borders is a key topic in The Emissary and a familiar trope within the author’s writing. When reading The Emissary, one cannot help but feel that each of the five chapters is far from complete. Their endings are ambiguous, despite the texts having originally been published separately as stand-alone works. In his discussion of The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Kawabata Ryūtarō argues that, generally speaking, when we produce a narrative—or ‘fiction’ (kyokō)—that recounts an event as something specific and meaningful, it is possible because we know how that event unfolds and concludes (Kawabata 1978, 17–49). In other words, a narrative reads as complete because it describes how the event comes to an end. Yet none of the five chapters of The Emissary seems to follow this common narrative strategy. As I will show over the following sections, each chapter tells a story set in an isolated post-3.11 Japan. However, although each text comes to a physical conclusion, the ending leaves readers with a feeling of unease, or to borrow Kimura Saeko’s expression, an ‘uncanny anxiety’ (Kimura 2016). The cause of this unease is not explicitly articulated in the text but seems to result from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. In other words, there is a kind of disparity—or discord—separating the narrative from the text. My interest here is to explore this disparity between narrative and text and its connection to the paradox of radioactive contamination.

The Difficulty of Writing in Post-3.11 Japan The first chapter, entitled ‘The Emissary,’3 covers several hours of ‘a Tuesday morning’ as experienced by Mumei, an eight-year-old boy who lives in ‘temporary housing blocks’ (kasetsu jūtaku) (Tawada 2018, 51) with his great-grandfather,

2 See for example Tawada 2011, 2013, 2019. 3 This text was translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani (Tawada 2018). The translation won the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The same translation was also published by London-based Granta Books in 2018 under a different title: The Last Children of Tokyo.

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 129 Yoshirō. Like all elderly people, Yoshirō must endure the pain of ‘not being able to die’ (55). In this story Mumei wakes up, eats his breakfast, changes his clothes, and goes to school, where he loses consciousness. The narrative then fast-forwards to eight years later. Mumei is now 15 years old and has been selected to travel to India as an ‘emissary’ (kentōshi). Then, one day he is reunited with Suiren, a girl who used to be his neighbor in the temporary housing blocks. The two young people go to the beach, where Mumei feels his heart suddenly stop beating. This event is recounted on the last pages of the text. Like most of Tawada’s work exploring post-3.11, ‘The Emissary’ contains no explicit mention of radioactive contamination.4 Nevertheless, the narrative is undoubtedly set in a period after 2011. This is made evident by the narrator, who refers to the Heisei era in the past (Tawada 2014, 129). The Heisei era had not yet ended when the text was originally published in 2014.5 However, the story should be read not as a simple piece of science fiction but rather as a post-3.11 novel. The text contains a number of expressions, narrative motifs, and events that allude to the nuclear accident at Fukushima and the issue of radioactive contamination. Examples include the term ‘temporary housing blocks’—frequently found in writings on the lives of 3.11 victims—as well as references to the mutations affecting the ecosystem and environment, and the word ‘contamination’ (osen) itself. Such allusions suggest that Japan, or even the entire planet, is suffering from abnormalities of undisclosed origin. The post-3.11 Japan portrayed in the narrative is closed off from the outside world, and this heavily influences language use within the country. There is a ban on studying English and other foreign languages, and foreign novels may not be translated or published (59−60). People create alternative words and expressions in order to avoid foreign ones, leading to neologisms that sound odd and unexpected compared to standard Japanese. These neologisms reflect the author’s habitual use of word play, often mixing different languages. Some critics have commented positively on this aspect of ‘The Emissary’ (Nozaki 2014; Kounosu 2014). However, Ishihara Chiaki has argued that in this instance the word play is not up to Tawada’s usual standard (Tawada Yōko ni shite wa hyōgen no kufū ga hotondo korasarete inai). He suggests reading this as a reflection of the difficulty of writing narratives in post-3.11 Japan (Ishihara 2014). Indeed, these neologisms can be seen as sarcastic, dark comments on post-3.11 Japan despite their striking construction and surprising effects. As Numano Mitsuyoshi has written, Tawada’s writing style reveals the ‘absurd’ (fujōri) circumstances of everyday life experienced by the main characters (Numano 2014). As is well known, Japanese is a hybrid language with a writing system developed from Chinese. A great number of Chinese words were adopted with a simplified pronunciation. A similar process

4 For more information on this feature of Tawada’s post-3.11 works, see Fujiwara 2021. 5 The year 2014 is the 26th year of the Heisei era. Japan, a constitutional monarchy, has its own era names that change each time the imperial throne (kōi) passes to the next emperor (tennō). The Heisei era ended in April 2019—five years after the publication of The Emissary.

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has occurred since Japan encountered Western culture. Herein lies a dilemma: in the fictional world of ‘The Emissary,’ the narration has to use the Japanese language, the essential hybridity of which, however, is suppressed by an isolation policy that bans foreign languages. In this respect, it should be noted that Mumei’s death—the final event to occur in the story—is not described as a simple biological one, as evidenced in the following quote from the last paragraph of the text: Suiren was already in a sitting position, her back straight. Her face blotted out Mumei’s sky. There was a space between her eyes. Her right eye, her left eye. They blurred, spreading out into blotches. The two big spots side by side weren’t eyes but a pair of lungs. No, not lungs, they were two huge broad beans. No, not beans, but human faces. The one on the left was Mr. Yonatani; Great-grandpa was on the right. Both faces were twisted with worry. He wanted to say, ‘I’m all right. I just had a really nice dream,’ but his tongue wouldn’t move. If only he could smile at least, to reassure them. That’s what he was thinking when darkness, wearing a glove, reached for the back of his head to take hold of his brains, and Mumei fell into the pitch-black depths of the strait. (Tawada 2018, 137−8) As suggested in the sentence ‘his tongue wouldn’t move’ (shita ga ugokanakatta), Mumei’s death is represented by that of his tongue, metaphorically evoking the death of voice, the loss of speech. This is why Mumei sees in Suiren’s eyes the faces of two characters—his teacher Yonatani and his great-grandfather Yoshirō— both deeply linked to the issue of a language damaged by isolation policy. Indeed, Yonatani is described in the text as being convinced that ‘all he could teach them [the children] was how to cultivate language’ (121), while Yoshirō is described as a writer struggling to write. What Mumei has in mind as he is dying is the issue of linguistic life in a post-3.11 Japan cut off from the world. Since Mumei belongs to a future generation, his loss of voice could also mean that the Japanese language is losing its future speakers. Thus, what the narrative seems to show is bound up with the question of whether the Japanese language will be able to survive as a language of narration in post-3.11 Japan. Here, it is interesting to note that the construction of the text itself is based on a similar idea. While the narrative follows a simple storyline involving Mumei’s death, the text does not read so smoothly. It is composed of 21 vignettes of varying lengths, each separated by a blank line. The narrator focuses at length on Yoshirō’s thoughts and recollections, to the extent of relegating the main narrative event—Yoshirō and Mumei’s everyday life—behind Yoshirō’s inner world. The text develops intermittently and suddenly ends with Mumei’s death, without giving any understandable reason for it. The intermittent textual construction is not unconnected to the narrator’s focus on the character of Yoshirō, who is described as a writer experiencing difficulty with writing. Indeed, the narrator reveals that Yoshirō has failed to finish several books, one a children’s story (Tawada 2014, 24) and one a novel describing the

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 131 current state of Narita Airport, which Yoshirō was unable to publish for fear of being arrested for revealing a state secret (37).6 As the narrator says, ‘[w]ith no effort on his part, these images [of the current state of Narita Airport] just came to him, begging to be written into a novel’ (37). The narrator also recounts Yoshirō’s failed attempt to write a historical novel on the Japanese missions to Tang China, entitled Kentōshi (46).7 Yoshirō’s self-censorship in his writing can also be linked to the narrator’s reluctance to talk about the titular ‘emissary’ of the story. Contrary to readers’ expectations, the narrator barely uses this key expression in the narrative. It is not until the 18th of 21 vignettes that the word appears in the text, when the narrator describes Yonatani’s classroom: With eyes like grapes moist with dew, the children stared up at the map of the world, never tiring of Yonatani’s stories about countries beyond the sea. From among these kids he would have to find the one most suitable to be an emissary. Because his work involved constant observation of lots of elementary school pupils, Yonatani considered this to be his mission. (Tawada 2018, 121) We have to wait until the 19th vignette—very close to the end of the story—to read the narrator’s vague explanation of ‘the one most suitable to be an emissary’ as ‘an emissary [. . .] to stow away on a ship bound for Madras, India,’ where ‘[d] ata about his health would be used for medical research that would help people the world over as well as, perhaps, making it possible for Mumei to live longer’ (129). Following these details, the narrator reveals that, as a member of ‘The Emissary Association,’ Yonatani selected Mumei as ‘emissary’ and performed a ritual to reaffirm his sense of membership [of the association]. The narrator describes this ritual in the following words: They all got up before dawn to light a candle which they took with them when they entered the darkness before beginning their day’s work. The candle had to be exactly two inches in diameter and four inches tall. (131) 6 Kimura Saeko suggests reading in this episode the promulgation of the State Secrecy Law (Tokutei himitsu hogohō) in December 2013 (Kimura 2019). This law allows the government to designate ‘special secrets,’ meaning sensitive information related to defense, diplomacy, public safety, and counterterrorism, and to severely punish anyone leaking these secrets. The Japanese population broadly contested the draft law presented by the second Abe Shinzō cabinet on the grounds that it might violate the democratic freedom of expression and return the country to pre-World War II militarism. 7 Here the narrator refers to the emissaries who traveled from Japan to China between the seventh and ninth centuries to study Chinese culture and civilization. These emissaries were known as kentōshi, literally ‘emissary to Tang China’ (遣唐使). The original Japanese title of ‘The Emissary’ (‘Kentōshi’) is a homonymic expression written with different Chinese characters and literally meaning ‘ambassador of light’ (献灯使).

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It is only at this point in the text that readers clearly understand how other minor characters—‘the baker,’ ‘the master cutter,’ and Yoshirō’s wife, Marika—are involved in the narrative plot. This is because they perform exactly the same ritual as Yonatani, with a candle measuring ‘two inches in diameter and four inches tall’ (11, 31, and 81). Just like Yoshirō, who has difficulty writing, the narrator struggles to tell a story, in particular the story about the emissary, which should be the primary focus of the narrative. In this sense, in addition to being a story about the Japanese language losing its future speakers, ‘The Emissary’ is also about the difficulty of telling a story within the context of post-3.11 Japan.

A Deceased Husband The second chapter, ‘Skanda, Endlessly,’8 is a short story describing the life of young Tōda Ichiko after losing her husband to stomach cancer. Ichiko joins an ikebana class to conceal her loneliness. There she meets a woman named Tsukada Tōko, also known in the text as Ten-chan. Ichiko is attracted to Tōko and invites her to tea one day. However, a strong earthquake hits as they are chatting, and the two women travel to an emergency evacuation center by bus, passionately making love on the way. Then, one-day Tōko is taken away by her family, and Ichiko returns to her lonely life. It is well known that Tawada uses wordplay in her writing that causes shifts in meaning. In ‘Skanda, Endlessly’ the author crafts striking sentences by breaking down Chinese characters into their separate components, creating a surprising reading experience. Read alongside ‘The Emissary,’ however, we can see that behind Ichiko’s love affair with Tōko, described in a highly original writing style, is another story the narrator has difficulty telling. Demonstrating this requires a close reading of the last paragraph of the text, which describes Ichiko’s earnest wish to meet Tōko again after Tōko suddenly left the evacuation center, and thereby left Ichiko: One night during a full moon Ichiko woke up with a tight feeling in her chest, as if a cat was sitting on her. Unable to lie still, she sat up and pulled her trainers on, went out into the frozen schoolyard, and looked up at the sky. A Camembert-like moon was out. This isn’t The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter [Taketori monogatari]; this isn’t about a celestial nymph returning to heaven, thought Ichiko. Feeling cold from lack of movement, she began to run. Her previous refusal to wait no longer seemed important. Waiting isn’t bad; one day I’ll certainly be able to meet [her/him] again [on Earth/making passionate love], she said to herself. Ichiko kept running. She had no idea which axis she was turning on. Under the light of the moon, she continued to puff along even after doing several laps of the schoolyard. (Tawada 2014, 184−5) 8 The text was originally published in the February 2014 issue of Gunzō, in a collection of 12 short novels edited by Kishimoto Sachiko entitled Collection of Strange Love Stories (Hen’ai shōsetsu shū). This collection was published in book form by Kōdansha in September 2014 (Hen’ai shōsetsu shū. Nihon sakka hen).

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 133 Ichiko’s running around the schoolyard is linked to the story’s original title in Japanese: Idaten dokomademo. Idaten (also known as Skanda in English) is one of the devoted guardians in Buddhism and is popularly believed to protect against theft. The word is also used metaphorically to refer to a person running fast. These connotations arose because, according to popular belief in Japan, when Gautama Buddha’s ashes (busshari) were stolen by a demon (shōshiki), it was Idaten who ran after the thief to retrieve the ashes. Dokomademo, on the other hand, means ‘endlessly’ and therefore the story’s title can be read as ‘running endlessly to get back something lost.’ It can also be seen as a metaphor for Ichiko’s ‘puffing along,’ described in the quote. In short, the story ends with Ichiko’s endless running to get back what she lost. It is not explicit in the original Japanese who Ichiko hopes ‘to meet again,’ and I have left the two possible interpretations in my translation to highlight this ambiguity. On the other hand, the expression ‘on Earth/making passionate love’ (chijō), in square brackets, is actually written with hiragana in the original Japanese text. Two homonymic words written with different Chinese characters but with different meanings exist in Japanese. By using hiragana, Tawada leaves both meanings intact. If we follow the narrative progression, it is naturally Tōko that Ichiko hopes to meet again. However, it should also be remembered that Ichiko has lost not only Tōko but also her husband, the only character already dead in the narrative, the only person she has lost for the rest of her life. Thus, ‘Skanda, Endlessly’ is a story about Ichiko’s love affair with Tōko, behind which we can read another story about Ichiko’s deceased husband. This is even more evident if we focus on the words ‘full moon,’ or to be more precise, ‘a Camembert-like moon’ (kamanbēru no yō na tsuki). This striking image is used more than once by the narrator. It appears quite early in the narrative, in a short flashback in which the narrator recalls Ichiko’s traveling to the ‘north’ (kita) with her husband, who is already suffering from stomach cancer. After visiting the abandoned home of the husband’s parents, the couple goes back to the hotel and has dinner on the terrace. The narrator describes this scene in the following words: Soon night fell; a Camembert-like moon appeared from behind the clouds and shined on a pale rice field. How many years could they remain patient, growing rice that is inedible? Even in the contaminated environment, weeds were growing quickly since the ban on herbicide and catching rice plants with their spiky seedlings. Although someone took care of it, the rice fields would be covered with a sea of weeds. For how many thousands of years had people been growing rice in this area? The moon existed long before rice fields but keeps enough distance from human beings to not be destroyed. Ichiko’s husband said, ‘the Chinese character for stomach is written with a character meaning rice fields and another one meaning moon, isn’t it?’ He chuckled. (Tawada 2014, 167−8) The ‘Camembert-like moon’ shining above Ichiko as she runs around the schoolyard reflects her feelings at that moment but also draws our attention to the

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memory of her dead husband. More importantly, the flashback of Ichiko’s trip to the north with her husband recalls the memory of 3.11, especially the issue of radioactive contamination. Expressions like ‘rice that is inedible’ or ‘contaminated environment’ allude to the fact that the area visited by the couple is highly polluted, although the cause is not specified. The phrase ‘enough distance from human beings to not be destroyed’ suggests that earth contains a dangerous and hugely destructive power in itself. A few paragraphs before the quote, the narrator also says that Ichiko’s husband suffers from stomach cancer and is scheduled to undergo radiation therapy (hōshasen chiryō) (167). Although the narrator does not say it explicitly, the text is constructed so that readers suspect Ichiko’s husband’s stomach cancer is caused by radioactive contamination resulting from the Fukushima nuclear accident. These elements explain why there are two possible interpretations regarding the identity of the person Ichiko hopes to meet again: it is not only Tōko but also Ichiko’s dead husband. Here, it is worth highlighting a striking paradox in the narrative: Ichiko and Tōko’s relationship, while seemingly intimate, is not perceived in the same way by the two women. I would like to demonstrate this by analyzing two curious scenes. The first appears near the beginning of the text and describes Ichiko’s physical attraction to Tōko: Once, Ichiko noticed Ten-chan walking ahead of her when she left the classroom to go to the toilet. Ten-chan turned at the corner of the corridor. When Ichiko turned to follow her, she found that she was no longer there. The corridor came to a dead-end and there was a toilet to the right, so Ichiko naturally thought Ten-chan had gone inside. But all the stalls were empty. When Ichiko came back to the classroom Ten-chan was there, calmly cutting flower stems. (171) The situation described here is strange, not because Ichiko does not find Tōko in the toilet but because despite her seeing Tōko walking ahead of her in the corridor, Tōko seems to have never left the classroom. As the narrator details in the paragraph immediately preceding the earlier passage, Ichiko is strongly attracted to Tōko, to the extent that during the ikebana class she closely observes her physical appearance and makes eye contact with her. So logically she would know in leaving the classroom that Tōko is still there. In other words, this scene is written so that readers believe Ichiko sees Tōko in the corridor, whereas the latter actually never left the classroom. What exactly does this mean? My assumption is that Ichiko saw Tōko not in the corridor but only in her mind. This becomes even more evident when reading a second scene that appears close to the end of the text and depicts the attitude of Tōko and her sister toward Ichiko when they—Tōko and her sister—leave the evacuation center. The narrator describes the event in the following words: One after another, refugees had been taken away by their family and the gym was growing desolate. But one sunny day at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon,

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 135 Ten-chan’s sister, accompanied by a boy and two men wearing suits, showed up in a Mercedes. Although they had already met each other at ikebana class, Ten-chan’s sister didn’t greet Ichiko, even face-to-face, as if she couldn’t or didn’t want to recall her. Having recognized her sister, Ten-chan burst into tears, got into the car as if being held by three people, and was taken away. She never looked back. (183−4) What is striking in this scene describing the sudden end of Ichiko and Tōko’s relationship is that Tōko never looks at Ichiko and that Tōko’s sister does not recognize her at all. Why do Tōko and her sister ignore Ichiko despite this being a crucial moment for the two supposedly in love female characters? I posit it is because Tōko is visible to Ichiko but not the reverse. The narrative structure of the story is also revealing on this point. Indeed, although the narrator frequently enters Ichiko’s mind using free indirect discourse, the narrator provides no description of Tōko’s inner world. Readers know nothing of Tōko’s feelings and thoughts on Ichiko apart from those reproduced in the direct speech that Ichiko supposedly hears. Furthermore, the scene in which Ichiko and Tōko make love in the bus on the way to the evacuation center is described in an unrealistic manner, as it is said to have happened under ‘two moons rising in the sky’ (179). In this sense, the intimate relationship between Ichiko and Tōko is hardly seen as having truly happened and therefore developed solely in Ichiko’s mind. Ichiko can control her relationship with Tōko in her mind—which enables her to see Tōko in the corridor9—but she can do nothing about the events happening outside her mind. The final scene describing Tōko’s sudden departure is revealing: when Tōko’s family shows up in the evacuation center, Ichiko can do nothing about Tōko’s careless attitude since it is the real world outside Ichiko’s mind. Who, then, is Tōko? What exactly does this female character represent in the narrative? It can only be what is the most uncontrollable, the most real, for Ichiko, that is, the death of her husband. Indeed, there are strong links between Ichiko’s dead husband and Tōko, since Ichiko meets Tōko in the ikebana class she joined hoping to conceal ‘a pile of loneliness’ (hitoyama no kodoku) (168) after her husband’s death. Accordingly, if Ichiko’s husband were the victim of radioactive contamination, it would seem possible to assume that the character of Tōko is allusively linked to the issue of radioactive contamination that definitively separated Ichiko from her husband and against which she is helpless. And if Ichiko is ‘endlessly’ running, just like Idaten in the schoolyard, it is an attempt to go beyond this separation to meet her dead husband again. Ichiko’s fantasizing about Tōko represents her indescribable struggle with the issue of radioactive contamination that the narrator seemingly links to her husband’s death.

9 Significantly, the paragraph following this corridor episode describes Ichiko having an erotic dream about Tōko that night (Tawada 2014, 171).

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Lost Narrator Contrary to the two previous chapters, the third, entitled ‘The Island of Eternal Life,’10 describes post-3.11 Japan from an external point of view. This is intentional, since the exteriority of the narration is linked to the main narrative feature, which is to describe post-3.11 Japan as an impenetrable space following ‘the disaster in Fukushima’ (Tawada 2012, 5). The narrative, while short, reveals how post-3.11 Japan has been closed off to the outside world, turning it into a space that is paradoxically strange for the narrator, a Japanese resident of Germany for 30 years, known only as ‘I’ in the text. ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ is the only chapter in The Emissary to specify dates—2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. It is also the only one to explicitly mention the nuclear accident of 3.11. This realism naturally encourages readers to interpret the events mentioned according to a chronological order and, furthermore, to establish a causality between them. Indeed, the narrative begins with a short flashback to a moment when the narrator, going through passport control at an airport in Berlin, fears that his/her Japanese passport is suspected of being contaminated by radioactivity. The subsequent pages of the text can be read as a clarification of this feeling of inferiority the narrator has faced since 2011. The narrator expresses regret that Japan did not close down ‘all the nuclear power plants the year of the disaster in Fukushima’ (4−5) and mentions ‘the Great Pacific Earthquake that occurred in 2017’ (7), leading us to understand that post-3.11 Japan suffered another nuclear accident in 2017 that worsened discrimination against the country (Tawada 2014, 190−1). The narrative also refers to other surprising events after 3.11 and appears to be a kind of chronicle of post-3.11 Japan, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in particular. However, reading this short story merely as a chronicle of post-3.11 Japan is too simplistic since the narrator describes specifically dated events that are blended with ‘rumors and myths’ (Tawada 2012, 4). The narrator’s discourse is particularly reticent about the period beginning in 2015, when ‘direct information from Japan was cut off’ (4), and more particularly the period from 2017 to 2023, the present time of the narrator. The narrator’s description of post-3.11 Japan mainly draws on a book entitled The Strange Journey of the Grandson of Fernão Mendes Pinto (8), whose author claims to be the ‘grandson of Fernão Mendes Pinto.’ Although Pinto’s so-called grandson pretends to have ‘sneaked into’ (8) post-3.11 Japan, this is evidently impossible since his grandfather, Fernão Mendes Pinto, was a Portuguese explorer from the 16th century and therefore could not possibly be alive at the beginning of the 21st century. The narrator has no other option but to refer to ‘rumors and myths’ and this unreliable book—a discourse disconnected from reality—to find out about events that have supposedly happened in Japan since 2011.11 10 The story was originally published simultaneously in Japanese and in an English translation by Margaret Mitsutani to commemorate the first anniversary of 3.11. Translations of all quotes from ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ are Mitsutani’s (Tawada 2012). 11 This gap between reality and the discourse purporting to describe it echoes a number of misleading discourses; for example, a speech given by Abe Shinzō, then Prime Minister of Japan, to

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 137 Furthermore, the second half of the story reveals textually how the narrator’s discourse becomes confused by the intriguing book by Pinto’s grandson and loses the storyline. When first presenting Pinto’s grandson’s book, the narrator says, ‘This is the situation as he describes it’ (8) and uses different modal expressions (rashii, sō da, etc.) to create the impression that the narrator is distancing him or herself from the contents of the book. However, if we read the subsequent paragraphs more carefully, we become aware that this distance is shrinking; the narrator begins to tell the story as if he/she were Pinto’s grandson himself. In the last five paragraphs, the narrator no longer uses any modal expressions indicating distance. Instead, the whole text of these paragraphs is written in assertive sentences (Tawada 2014, 197−9). If the narrator wanted to distance him or herself from the source information, he/she might recount the story in such a way as to make that obvious. However, the narrator’s discourse blends seamlessly with Pinto’s grandson’s, to the extent that by the end of the text we are no longer sure who is making the statements on post-3.11 Japan. The narrator suddenly ends the narration mid-presentation of Pinto’s book and its dubious contents, leaving us with the impression that he/ she has lost the thread of the narration, which although presented as historically accurate, has actually been contaminated by the lying Pinto’s grandson as ‘writeradventurers have to cultivate’ (Tawada 2012, 8; 2014, 196). Thus, despite the narrator’s initial concern being to describe the consequences of the nuclear accident in Fukushima, the narration paradoxically reveals the difficulty, or even impossibility, of narrating this event.

An Unknown Power Japan is one of a number of countries that continue to use nuclear energy even though its safety is highly disputed. Despite the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has chosen to place itself under the American nuclear umbrella within the context of the security alliances of the US. Even after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Japan did not completely renounce the use of nuclear energy. On the contrary, several reactors have already been restarted and others look set to follow. How and why is Japan relying on nuclear energy despite the disasters that have befallen it? We know that the political balance of power and the prospect of huge economic returns often predominate in the realm of nuclear energy policy. The fourth chapter of The Emissary, ‘The Far Shore,’12 provides further insight into Japan’s unfathomable nuclear energy policy using a plot made possible by fiction.

support Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics Games, in which he minimized the issue of radioactive contamination from the 2011 Fukushima disaster. At the 125th IOC Session, held in Buenos Aires on September 7, 2013, he said ‘Some may have concerns about Fukushima. Let me assure you, the situation is under control,’ which aroused much controversy. 12 The text was originally published in the Autumn 2014 issue of Waseda bungaku and translated by Jeffrey Angles (Tawada 2015). Translations of all quotes from this story are Angles’s.

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The narrative can be divided into two parts. In the first, the narrator describes an American military plane crashing into a recently restarted nuclear power plant, which can be seen as an ironic metaphor for the security alliances signed by the US and Japan. The magnitude of the explosion and the risk of contamination from highly dangerous radioactive material have led Japanese citizens to take refuge overseas. The second part follows the character of Sede Ikuo, ‘a former member of the House of Councillors’ (Tawada 2015, para. 22), as he arrives in China with other refugees on a ship named Yukiwakamaru. The title ‘The Far Shore’ is a translation of the Buddhist term higan, which refers to the ‘afterlife’ or even ‘Pure Land’ (jōdo) supposedly situated in the West. Accordingly, the ‘far shore’ can be seen as a metaphor for China, where the Japanese refugees hope to lead a peaceful life after the nuclear power plant explosion. However, it is interesting to note that China does not appear to be the far shore for Sede Ikuo, in comparison with other refugees on the same ship: For some time after the ship left port in Niigata, Sede sat next to the refreshment vendor inside the ship. He didn’t know what to think. Several hours later, there was an announcement over the boat’s loudspeakers that the Chinese government had announced that they would accept the Japanese refugees, regardless of whether they had passports or not. The news brought a smile of relief to all of the exhausted faces onboard. Sede was the only one whose breath caught in his throat. He grew pale, leaped up, and rushed onto deck. (Tawada 2015, para. 23) As the narrator depicts in the second part of the narrative, Sede’s unease following the announcement from the Chinese government is certainly linked to his having repeatedly made ‘disparaging and rude remarks about China’ (Tawada 2015, para. 24) to gain popularity as a politician. Arriving at the Chinese immigration office, he suspects the Chinese government knows about his anti-Chinese position and might ‘give [him] the death penalty’ (Tawada 2015, para. 37). He hesitates when a female official asks him whether he would like to emigrate to Korea or not. If the narrative ended with Sede’s arrest and execution by the Chinese government, this short story could simply be read as an allegory and warning to Japanese politicians today, in particular members of the LDP-dominated government, some of whom (including ex-Prime Minister Abe Shinzō) have made obviously nationalistic—and even revisionist—comments provoking conflict with neighboring Asian countries. Nevertheless, the narrative is more complex than that, as its final lines suggest: Sede snapped back to attention. The young woman had seen that he didn’t have any questions and had started moving on to the next step. Sede turned the form over and started stringing together characters to write, 朝鮮移住可 能?—‘Korea go live possible?’ Until this point, her graceful, pretty face had only shown a calm expression, but his question made her laugh out loud. Her voice was like a bell. He had no idea what was going on. She took a new piece of paper and wrote in big, powerful strokes, 不可—‘Not possible.’

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 139 She knows something. She must be playing with me. Goose bumps appeared on his flesh. He felt his midsection constrict, growing tighter around his navel. Feeling his forehead break out in sweat. He continued to look down, unable to raise his head. (Tawada 2015, para. 38–9) The narrative does not provide any detail about Sede’s fate; he only appears confused and hopeless due to the negative response from the female official—the ‘young woman’—to his request to emigrate to Korea. Yet, as Sede suspects that the official ‘knows something’ and ‘must be playing with [him],’ one thing is quite clear: this anti-Chinese politician seems to realize that whether he can go to China or Korea depends not on him but on an unknown power he cannot control. He is thus entangled in an uncertain situation full of fear and anxiety. This ‘unknown power’ seems to reflect the borderless and invisible nature of radioactive contamination. This interpretation is supported by the first part of the narrative where the narrator describes the explosion provoked by an American military plane crashing into the nuclear power plant. According to the narrator’s description of the pilot’s experience just before the crash, the accident seems to have resulted from a sparrow’s flying into the engine (Tawada 2014, 203); however, the narrator is not completely convinced, questioning, ‘Was the reason for the crash really a sparrow caught in the motor? Perhaps there had been some other cause?’ (Tawada 2015, para. 6). What is important here is not the cause of the crash but the magnitude and nature of the explosion it generated, since the real reason people start leaving Japan in search of the ‘far shore’ is the fact that the explosion happened in a ‘nuclear reactor that had just been reactivated a month ago’ (Tawada 2015, para. 4). In this respect, it is important to draw attention to the circumstances in which the reactors were restarted: Three months ago, an international conference was hastily convened in Paris to discuss the safety of restarting the Japanese reactor. Their conclusion: ‘It is absolutely safe to restart the reactor as long as nothing unforeseen happens.’ The participants were all experts who had gathered from twenty-two nations. They were known to have divergent views on the project, so it was hard to imagine that someone had bought them all off. Even so, their conclusion hardly seemed objective or scientific. Anymore, political decisions seemed to happen of their own accord without any regard for individual will. [. . .] A new form of global economics had taken root. Invisible signals flew from brain to brain, and before anyone knew what was happening, people began to assume identical opinions. Once they had, a certain amount of money was automatically deposited into their bank accounts. To this day, biologists and economists have not been able to offer positive proof of this new mechanism of corruption, but there are many people, especially among poets, who cannot help suspecting that is how things work. (Tawada 2015, para. 5)

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Considering that the temporality of the events happening in the narrative is obviously post-2011, the restarting of the reactor must have happened after 2011, in other words, in a future world where radioactive contamination from Fukushima has begun its borderless and invisible impact, which can be read in the narrator’s intriguing description: ‘Invisible signals flew from brain to brain, and before anyone knew what was happening, people began to assume identical opinions.’ Furthermore, in sentences not quoted here, the narrator also explains that ‘there simply was no longer any more expensive seafood to be had.’ This can be linked to environmental damage of the sea, which is often used by Tawada as an allusion to radioactive contamination (Fujiwara 2021, 91−9). We know that radioactive contamination resulting from a nuclear accident cannot happen if we are no longer dependent on nuclear energy. We also know that we can decide for ourselves whether or not to continue using nuclear energy. Furthermore, if we use nuclear energy and an accident occurs that causes radioactive contamination outside the power plant, this cannot be controlled. However, ‘The Far Shore’ seems to go further, as described metaphorically and cynically in the quote: ‘political decisions seemed to happen of their own accord without any regard for individual will’ (Tawada 2015, para. 5). In a post-3.11 world, no one makes independent decisions about the question of restarting nuclear reactors. The ‘unknown power’ I emphasized in my analysis of Sede’s feelings at the Chinese immigration office is precisely these ‘invisible signals’ that influence Japanese policy on nuclear energy in the post-3.11 world of the narrative. The irony is that Sede, a popular anti-Chinese politician, realizes that he is completely lost on the border between Japan and China, which he believed to be under his control. And this paradoxical and invisible reality highlights the very issue of radioactive contamination.

The Possibility of Narration One striking feature shared more or less by each of the four stories is that the main characters find themselves in uncertain situations without being aware of what exactly led them there. The narrator of each story describes how these characters are intrigued by—and struggling with—respectively, the ban on foreign languages, the death of a husband, an unreliable book, and the restarting of a nuclear reactor, all situations they are powerless to do anything about. The following excerpt of Yoshirō’s inner monologue expresses the frustration commonly felt by these unfortunate characters: ‘My great-grandson wants to have a picnic, in a field. Whose fault is it that I can’t make even a little dream like that come true, why are all the fields contaminated?’ (Tawada 2018, 134) It is with this in mind that I would like to conclude my reading of The Emissary by tackling its final chapter, a drama in three acts that can be read as a meta-narrative of the other four stories. As its title suggests, ‘Mammalia in Babel’13 is set in a world

13 The original text was published in the August 2013 issue of Subaru. Tawada Yōko wrote another drama dealing with the issue of Fukushima, Yūhi no noboru toki—STILL FUKUSHIMA (When the

Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary 141 after a ‘massive flood’ (daikōzui) (Tawada 2014, 222), where human beings have disappeared and six animals who survived the flood (dog, cat, squirrel, fox, rabbit, and bear) hold discussions about what they call the ‘Babel Project.’ Unlike the famous narrative of the book of Genesis that seems to be the inspiration for Tawada’s writing of this text, the conflicts between God and human beings have been replaced by those between human beings and animals. While the animals’ discussion happens in an unspecified location, several textual references set the narrative in a period following a massive explosion of a nuclear power plant and deadly radioactive contamination that has caused humans to become extinct (see e.g., Tawada 2014, 213, 235, and 259). The drama thus recounts events subsequent to the other four stories, where human beings were still alive even after the Fukushima disaster. It is no coincidence that this drama appears as the final chapter of the book, despite having originally been published before the first chapter, ‘The Emissary.’ What I would like to stress in this drama, in comparison with the book of Genesis, is the issue of language. Indeed, all the characters—six animals—agree that to carry out the ‘Babel Project’ they do not need a boss but translators (Tawada 2014, 257). This can be seen as a critical narrative development referring to the Tower of Babel, a story in which human beings begin speaking different languages and can no longer understand each other. Furthermore, in the final scene, the characters notice some human beings still alive in the audience and address them. In the following stage directions, which appear in the final lines of the text, the narrative comes to an end, with human beings invited to understand each other through different languages: Recorded voices of people interviewed in the town before the performance began to sound one after another. In the theater, the voices of actors talking to each other progressively overlap with these. After a while, dictionaries donated or bought at secondhand bookstores start to fall on stage like summer scattered rains. After the performance each of the spectators gets one of the dictionaries. (Tawada 2014, 265) The common understanding of the Tower of Babel is that speaking different languages is a negative legacy from the human race’s defiance of God. However, in Tawada’s drama, spectators (i.e., human beings) get a dictionary—that is, a language. Generally speaking, the spectators are assumed to be like bystanders, without any possibility of speech as they watch the actions and dialogues performed on stage. In this respect, the final scene and stage directions that conclude the drama suggest that the spectators regain the possibility of speech that was temporarily lost during the performance. Thus, whereas the narrators and characters

Sunset Rises—STILL FUKUSHIMA). As Taniguchi Sachiyo pointed out in her paper (Taniguchi 2015), this drama was initially written in Japanese in 2013 for the Lasenkan Theater and translated into German in 2014 as STILL FUKUSHIMA: Wenn die Absendsonne aufgeht.

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in the other four stories experienced difficulty narrating, the six animal characters featured in ‘Mammalia in Babel’ return languages—the chance of speech—to readers of The Emissary. In doing so, they invite us to tackle the narrative incompleteness discussed here by linking it to the invisible and borderless nature of radioactive contamination from the Fukushima disaster. This drama teaches readers of these four stories, which illustrate the struggle with narration, that what we need in our post-3.11 world is the possibility of narration.

References Fujiwara Dan. 2021. ‘Tawada Yōko no shinsaigo shōsetsu ni okeru anji to shite no shinsai: shinsaigo bungaku no dokusharon no tame ni.’ In Sekai bungaku to shite no ‘shinsaigo bungaku,’ edited by Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai, 77–103. Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Ishihara Chiaki. 2014. ‘Bungei jihyō.’ Sankei nyūsu, July 27. [online] www.sankei.com/ life/news/140727/lif1407270004-n2.html [Accessed September 22, 2020]. Kawabata Ryūtarō. 1978. Shōsetsu to jikan. Tokyo: Asahi Sensho. Kimura Saeko. 2016. ‘Uncanny Anxiety. Literature after Fukushima.’ In Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster, edited by Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina IwataWeickgenannt, 74−89. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2019. ‘Hōshanōsai no sōzōryoku – Tawada Yōko “Kentōshi” no kataru koto.’ Ferisu jogakuin daigaku gakunai kyōdō kenkyū: Popurisumu to āto 103−8. Kounosu Yukiko. 2014. ‘Kentōshi.’ Mainichi Shimbun, November 9. Nozaki Kan. 2014. ‘Disutopia o yorokobashiku ikiru.’ Gunzō 306–7. [online] http://gunzo. kodansha.co.jp/27916/38718.html [Accessed September 15, 2020]. Numano Mitsuyoshi. 2014. ‘Bungei jihyō.’ Tokyo Shimbun, July 29. Taniguchi Sachiyo. 2015. ‘Tawada Yōko no bungaku ni okeru kyōkai. Yūhi no noboru toki – STILL FUKUSHIMA o chūshin ni.’ Hikaku nihongaku kyōiku kenkyū sentā kenkyū nenpō 11: 55−64. Tawada Yōko. 2011. (conversation with Enjō Tō) ‘Tabi to sōsaku.’ Gunzō 221−35. ———. 2012. ‘The Island of Eternal Life.’ In March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, edited by Elmer Luke and David Karashima. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani, 3−11. London: Harvill Secker. ———. 2013. ‘Doitsu de Fukushima.’ In Ibunka no naka no nihon bungaku, edited by Ebine Ryūsuke and Fukuda Kōsuke, 9−15. Tokyo: Kōgakusha. ———. 2014. Kentōshi. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. 2015. ‘The Far Shore.’ Translated by Jeffrey Angles. WORDS without BORDERS, March. [online] www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-far-shore [Accessed September 28, 2017]. ———. 2017. ‘Kuraisuto-shō jyushō enzetsu (2016).’ Waseda bungaku 10−18: 158−64. ———. 2018. The Emissary. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. New York: New Directions. ———. 2019. ‘Chinmoku no hokorobiru toki.’ Shinchō 107−16.

8

Spoiled Meals Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman Chiara Pavone

Introduction1 This chapter deals with a series of theoretical problems emerging at the juncture between representations of food and gender in works written and published after the March 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. I will focus on two works in particular, both written by prominent women writers: Kawakami Mieko’s short story ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ (Ai no yume to ka 2016) and Murata Sayaka’s award-winning novel, Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen 2016). My aim is to show, through the analysis of a selection of scenes from the two works depicting unenjoyable meals, the way in which traditional notions of gender roles and gendered eating are reproduced around the table, and, simultaneously, the prominent function that figures of immunity play in reinforcing the boundaries between (differently gendered) bodies—particularly through the abjection of the bodies of those who attempt to find survival beyond such difference. Building on the above observations, I will propose here a possible—if still flawed—alternative to what I will call an ‘immunitary’ imagination of the disaster. There is an intrinsic nostalgia bound up in the remembrance, recounting, and imagination of shared meals. Sharing food with others is often considered an occasion for bonding and celebrating. Widespread representations of fictional or factual family receptions are fitting examples of this wistful sense of conviviality. They evoke a readily accessible, harmonious sensorium: the image of one’s loved ones passing dishes around the dinner table while the sounds of conversation mingle with the clattering of utensils as thick smells waft through the air, hands cradling cups, tastes melting in one’s mouth—rich or bland, pungent or sweet, but always familiar and reassuring. Nevertheless, not every shared meal— whether it takes place at the family table or not—is altogether happy or convivial. Sara Ahmed offers poignant examples of this across many of her works, attempting to fulfill the objective of compiling a feminist archive of negative emotions 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are by the author.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-12

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that catalogs, among other things, her own alienating memories of several family dinners. It is in this context that she introduces the now well-known figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’: the individual at the table who, unable to bite her tongue after an inappropriate comment from a dining companion, refuses to adjust to the presumed cordial atmosphere stemming from breaking bread together.2 While I do not intend to strictly deal with feminist killjoys in this chapter, the possibilities revealed by their critical discontent is what guided my interest to the occasion of their unhappiness—the ‘unhappy meal’—and, relatedly, to the different shades and degrees that discontent might take when it is not voiced. Not everyone is a feminist killjoy, and the opposite is also true: not every meal is as wholesome or harmonious as the description conjured above implies. Sometimes the reaction of rejection to such harmony is, however, more bodily than vocal. In this essay, I will offer a close reading of ‘unhappy meals’ featured in Kawakami’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. Both texts present interactions with food correlated with a particular kind of negative affect: disgust, often directed toward the food itself. However, this at first glance uncomplicated visceral reaction experienced by the protagonists of both texts also tangles with other more systemic forms of discontent, such as the restrictions and expectations of one’s gender. Moreover, this disgust is coded as a form of excess since it overturns the expectation that imagines any exchange of food as a smooth physical and social transaction—an unhindered bonding of bodies. The disruption engendered by disgust thus puts the bodies involved into stark contrast and sheds light on an issue crucial to food and eating: physical boundaries that are pressured, questioned, and remolded ‘as substances pass into and out of [them]’ (Sceats 2000, 1). Bodies and their borders figure inevitably in the works analyzed here, and, as I hope to show, their limits are prodded and threatened by a double poisonous pressure. If dysphoric affect lends itself to be interpreted as a kind of toxicity threatening the social order (within and outside the setting of the shared meal), simultaneously, the depiction of these fictional repasts indirectly deals with another, if less palpable, kind of threat—that of nuclear radiation.3 I argue that in raising questions about the different forms of toxicity evoked earlier, the two works also engage with a broader discourse influencing a variety of representations of the catastrophe, a discourse shaped by a recurring preoccupation with immunity and its conservative imagination. Two correlated objectives chiefly animate the writing of this chapter. The first is to highlight the influence exerted by a ‘complex culture [. . .] of immunity thinking’ (Chen 2012, 190) on media discourse and works of literature 2 For more on the ‘feminist killjoy,’ see in particular Chapter 2 of Ahmed 2010, 50–87. 3 The issue of food contaminated in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster sparked much controversy, as it ushered in the necessity to interrogate the origin and level of exposure to radiation of the food that reaches the table every day both in Japan and in several neighboring countries. While the topic was not of public interest in Japan, the South Korean government returned to the issue of contaminated food, emphasizing the risk of Olympic representatives being fed food from Fukushima. See Denyer 2019.

Spoiled Meals 145 representing—directly or indirectly—the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. The second is to present a tentative model that will supplement the limitations of this ‘immunitary’ imaginary. The chapter will be structured as follows. In the first section, I will touch on some of the theoretical problems presented both by immunity—and more precisely, ‘threatened immunity’—and its ‘coextant figure,’ toxicity (Chen 2012, 194), first broadly and then in the more cogent context of post-3.11 cultural production. The aim of this digression is to present a discursive background for the examined texts that brings into stark relief a general interest in bodies and their integrity in cultural production in the wake of the disaster—whatever the scale and nature of these bodies might be (governmental or cellular, animal or human). The matrix at the center of the postdisaster discourse is a ‘culture of immunity’ that encompasses a rhetoric of crisis containment more invested in othering threats to the national health—in this case, radiation and its effects—than in taking responsible measures to prevent them or caring for the victims. The subsequent section will provide a close reading of Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and will examine the ways in which the short story explores immunitary themes in both temporal and, in particular, spatial terms. The story carefully crops intimate domestic scenes out of the lives of its two main characters—both women—drawing a stark division between a toxic outside and the space of the home, described as an even more venomous and threatening inside. I aim to demonstrate how the short story, while commendably attempting to wage a symbolic struggle against ‘immunity culture,’ is regrettably not always successful in its endeavor to oppose immunity’s all-encompassing narrative grasp. Murata Sayaka’s Akutagawa Prize–winning book, Convenience Store Woman, will be the subject of the last section. There I will introduce the novel as an example of a more fruitful effort to resist the pull of the immunity paradigm. In fact, by shining its light on the fluid exchanges and discharges of bodily nutrients rather than on the physical and theoretical limitations of the immune system, the text focuses simultaneously on the porosity of a body’s metabolism and on the synergic and far-reaching relationships existing between bodies. It thus, I will argue, establishes ‘metabolism’ as a contrastive paradigm to that proposed by immunitary functions; a paradigm that relies on a theoretical perspective emphasizing the perviousness rather than the impermeability of boundaries, and interdependence rather than antagonism in view of survival. In deploying metabolism as a pivotal concept, I also aim to revisit the possibility of a less traumatic temporality for the disaster than that which has often become a trope of many celebrated post-3.11 works: one further from the sensationalism of the televised images of the earthquake and tsunami and closer both to the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) of nuclear radiation and to the silent, belaboring process of the excretion of toxins occurring within living bodies.

Toxicity, Immunity, and Beyond How and why is immunity relevant to a discussion of food and gender in literature written after 3.11? This section will attempt to answer this question by offering an

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overview of the term and its treatment in recent scholarship. Immunity is at the center of a debate and continuing investigation that spans a variety of fields, most notably political philosophy and medical history. This interdisciplinary probation is also a symptom of its ubiquity. Immunitary language and metaphors are, in fact, found at all levels of discourse: from clinical evaluations of a body’s resistance to a certain antigen to exemptions from legal proceedings, from descriptions of migratory fluxes in epidemic terms to daily interactions about tolerance in interpersonal relationships.4 Albeit varying in scale and intensity, what the above examples have in common is a palpable tension between an (otherwise healthy and whole) inside and a (threatening, toxic) outside, or, to put it in different terms, a self and an other. This narrative of binaries has been endorsed by modern medicine through the construction of the field of immunology and has popularized a view of the human body both as a centralized, efficient machine, and as vulnerable to external attacks. However, as (most notably) the work of Roberto Esposito (2011) and Ed Cohen (2009) has shown, the origins of this immunitary paradigm are, rather than biomedical, political.5 Their genealogical investigation of the term and its valence explicitly unveils immunity as a concept integrally constitutive of the ideology of the body politic, united against a real or imaginary threat to the health of the community. This is hardly the place to offer an overview of the many immunitarian features of the modern state; yet such a discussion might not even be necessary, as the influence of the vision of the national space as pervious to external threats continues to be both powerful and self-evident. Discussions of the disaster, especially in the political sense, are also not exempt from this reliance on figures of immunity. While the menace of the radiation spilling from the reactors in Fukushima Prefecture can hardly be characterized as foreign, its media and political treatment have obsessively veered on its spatial and temporal containment. The most palpable illustration of this tendency for delimitation is the official designation of a 20-kilometer radius evacuation zone around Futaba, the site of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and its origination of an arbitrary boundary between those areas deemed inhabitable and those unaffected by radiation. The zone itself has witnessed a slow process of erosion since 2011, as the national government has been redefining many of the areas in the municipalities around the reactors safe to return to, and has, in addition, pushed for their repopulation by gradually withdrawing support for the refugees who had relocated elsewhere.6 This process of redefinition of vulnerable areas—and the general

4 In this last case, the meaning of the term ‘immune’ is closest to the second definition offered by the New Oxford American Dictionary: ‘Not affected or influenced by something.’ 5 Esposito, in particular, believes the term ‘immune’ to have its roots in Ancient Rome: immunis designated an individual either performing no office or exempt from paying tributes (munus). See Esposito 2011, 5. Medical immunity owes its birth to biopolitical developments in power and governance in the 19th century, together with parallel developments in the field of modern medicine. 6 See McCurry 2017. For a list of maps detailing the partial redesignation of the evacuation zone, see Fukushima Minyū Shimbun n.d.

Spoiled Meals 147 reconfiguration of space that accompanies it—has followed a strenuous timeline, with the final objective of showcasing a completely recovered Fukushima Prefecture in time for the planned 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Although the mega-event was held one year later than anticipated, both the government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) were in fact ready to declare the process of reconstruction and the ‘mental recovery of the people’ of the area already satisfactory during an official survey of the prefecture’s stadiums in 2018.7 Such political logic of spatial and temporal containment struggles fatally, however, against that which it strives to harness: radioactivity, and its correlate figure—contamination. Nuclear radiation, in fact, challenges the principles of proximity and contact that containment espouses. As Christine Marran aptly observes in her work on the topic, ‘[n]ature moves. It moves around and through us’ (2011, 6). Radioactivity, it is implied, replicates this movement, and it affects humans and other living beings either atmospherically—transported by wind currents through the environment (thus, ‘around us’)—or, in the case of the internal contamination pertinent to our examination of food practices and their representation, climbing the food chain through the process of biomagnification (‘through us’).8 Once again, it is worth emphasizing that ‘nature moves,’ and it does so beyond political boundaries. Nature reaches beyond officially established expiration dates as well. The time of recovery (fukkō) from the disaster might have been scheduled to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics, barely nine years from the catastrophe, nonetheless, the 30-year half-life of cesium-137 and the slow violence that radioactivity exerts on living bodies seem to require a different way of approaching the effects of the nuclear explosion, rather than the scrap-and-build, cyclically restorative one that has been implemented within the prevalent political narrative. Contamination and containment, slow violence, and recovery work broadly as obverse concepts within a ‘complex culture [. . .] of immunity thinking’ (Chen 2012, 190) that has shaped the political imagination of the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster both spatially and temporally. I argue that the Kawakami and Murata works analyzed here place themselves within the same discursive field, both through their invocation of compromised or intoxicating food and because of their particular interest in matters of gender, gender norms and expectations, and their immunitary trappings. The spaces of the home and shared table are under close scrutiny in the texts and so are the movement of and exchanges between bodies within and

7 Softball and baseball events were originally scheduled to take place in Fukushima City’s Azuma Stadium in an attempt to bring domestic and foreign tourists to the area and show its reestablished safety. For the declaration, see Tokyo 2020. Even with the COVID-19 forced rescheduling of all Olympics-related events, Abe seemed reluctant to let go of the ‘recovery Olympics’ moniker and declared his wish for Tokyo 2021 to be a celebration for the ‘recovery of humanity from the Coronavirus’ as well. 8 Radioactive contamination is in fact found to be higher in the fatty tissue of mammals (humans included) that regularly ingest plants and animals that have themselves ingested high quantities of cesium. For more on the topic, see Marran 2011, 1.

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without them. This focus on space lays bare the ways in which toxicity circulates, in a form of biomagnification, from food to bodies, and how it sticks to certain vulnerable bodies rather than others. This contamination process, veering between the material and the metaphorical, traces patterns of othering and abjection that are often marked by the manifestation of negative affects—such as frustration, and most markedly in the works examined here, disgust. The critical and political potential of negative emotions is widely treated in Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005). Disgust is among these affects, and, Ngai notes, it has often been disregarded as an object of analysis within critical and literary theory because of its ‘spectacular appropriation by the political right throughout history, as a means of reinforcing the boundaries between the self and “contaminating” others that has perpetuated racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny’ (338–9). While dealing with this historical bias, the author nonetheless highlights disgust’s possibilities: if the feeling of repulsion in and of itself bestows hardly any political agency on the subject, its detection may at least be effective in diagnosing social impotence. In both cases treated, disgust does briefly grant leeway for agency to the characters, but its impact is regrettably short-lived, as their attempts to change their circumstances are destined to fail. Nonetheless, the surfacing of dysphoric affect in the texts is functional, whether in its engendering a realization of the women’s obstructed circumstances, or in its uncovering diverging constructions of space and time at work within them. In ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.,’ the space inhabited by the narrator is rigidly shaped by immunitary binaries and imagined as isolating and suffocating, impossible to escape from, if not through, an ephemeral fantasy of solidarity. The fantasy itself is born out of the feeling, and overcoming, of repulsion for the macarons the character shares with her new neighbor and friend. Conversely, in Convenience Store Woman, the protagonist’s refusal to eat the meat consumed by her friends at a barbecue becomes an occasion for her and the reader to realize the web of material interrelations her existence depends on. This particular scene, I will argue, shines light on the metabolic features of the work by baring the character’s conception of both herself and her surroundings as porous, organic and, in a way, always vulnerable to each other’s influence (through ingestion and digestion, in particular).

Immunitary Trappings: Dreams of Love and Such The plot of ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ can be roughly summarized as follows: two (very different) women share an unlikely, if precarious, alliance bonding over food. The nameless narrator is a housewife in her 40s who has recently moved with her husband to a new neighborhood. The first few pages of the story portray her entertaining herself through long stretches of housework and solitude, and her only hobby: gardening. One afternoon, while she is tending to the potted plants on her porch, she serendipitously bumps into her neighbor, an older, elegant woman who invites her over for tea. What starts off as a simple courtesy visit evolves into a unique (if conditional) kinship when the protagonist agrees to serve as an audience to her neighbor’s

Spoiled Meals 149 obsessive practicing of Liszt’s Dreams of Love on the piano—a piece that seems to hold a particular, if untold, significance for the woman. The two women will thereafter meet twice a week, barely exchanging any pleasantries before moving to the piano room. This relationship, compared in the text to the ephemeral blooming of the roses that spawn the narrator’s interest in flowers, will last only through the summer, ending with a flawless execution of Liszt and the wilting of said roses. The two women will wordlessly part after having shared a passionate kiss, never to see each other again. This sleepy suburban setting, centered around the claustrophobic environment of the family house, seems at a glance far removed from any kind of external threat or interest in events outside of its orbit. Nonetheless, the Fukushima Daiichi incident looms in the background of the story, influencing its structure and pace (not to mention, the lives of the characters) in some perhaps unexpected ways. The accident is mentioned for the first time a few pages in, during a conversation between the narrator and her disinterested husband: Oh, that reminds me of a story I heard—or maybe read somewhere. You know some mixed married couples, they apparently fight over whether to leave Japan or not. The Japanese ethics (nihonjin no rinri) of not leaving no matter what, and the foreign partner’s common sense (gaikokujin no jōshiki) arguing they’d be crazy not to leave in such an emergency, inevitably clash. They have so much trouble putting those feelings into words, a lot of them end up divorcing. That’s what I read. [. . .] But I had been hoping to say more [to my husband]. At the very least we’re both Japanese, you and me. [. . .] [W]e’re inherently the same, even if that means we’re just resigned to our fate. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing? (Kawakami 2018, 279)9 This passage is notable for multiple reasons. The first is that it separates both space and the people who occupy it into two distinct categories: Japan and everywhere else, and Japanese and foreigners. Nationality is thus related to mobility, determining those who are able and willing to leave, and those who are forced to stay. Being Japanese and staying behind are characterized as a form of ethics (rinri) and as an ‘intrinsic sameness’ (sententeki na icchi no bubun; Kawakami 2016, 21), a turn of phrase that inevitably evokes the many calls for national unity made through the invocation of kizuna (affective bonds) in the wake of the triple disaster. Second, as has been the case with the use of the kizuna catchphrase after 3.11, the quote openly marks nation and family—or more precisely marriage—as coextensive.10 The implication is clear: staying behind (or inside) is a commitment to one’s catastrophe-stricken country and its project of reconstruction, but also, more cogently, to the failing marriage our protagonist is trapped in. 9 The translation of this paragraph, originally Yoshio Hitomi’s, has been partially edited for my purposes. 10 For more on kizuna and its ubiquity in postdisaster discourse, see Samuels 2013, 42f.

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This layered conception of space is also reproduced elsewhere in the story, most prominently in the pages depicting the first teatime between the two neighbors. The food and beverages, shared in the intimacy of the neighbor’s home, prove instrumental in two salient ways. On the one hand, the selection of refreshments brings to the fore the issues of the food’s origin and of its safety under the threat of nuclear contamination. On the other hand, however, the two edible options presented offer a symbolic anchorage for the spatial tension traversing the text by reproposing the dialectic of inside/outside first introduced earlier, together with the ‘moral’ imperative to choose between them. The question of contaminated food is not explicitly treated within ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.,’ and yet the simple act of eating together multiplies the narrative space. The enclosed environment of the living room is in fact encroached by the different communicating spaces of the food’s production and of its distribution, as the protagonist brings with her, as is customary, a selection of edibles to share: a box of macarons from a famous bakery in the neighborhood and ‘the second most expensive’ box of cherries available at the local department store (28). While not expressly mentioned here, cherries exchanged as household gifts are generally domestically produced, and as is the case for many vegetables and fruits, their place of origin is usually the vastly agricultural Hokkaido and (especially) Tōhoku regions.11 This undisclosed provenance might be the reason that no other mention of the fruit is made after the host swiftly removes it to the kitchen and for the absence of references to its potential threat. Yet, the cherries’ disappearance from the coffee table leaves a lingering afterimage, a visual echo of the disaster that the two characters seem eager to move on from in their conversation as well.12 The triple disaster might remain just enough outside the focus of the narration; however, this externality to the story is, I want to suggest, arbitrary. It purposefully underlines, in other words, how the existence of an ‘outside’ to the monotonous lives of the two housewives threatens their ostensible stability and containment and pushes them to their breaking point. The choice of macarons to accompany the coffee seems almost like a given in this context: I sipped the coffee and took a tiny bit of a macaron. It’s such a peculiar feeling, buying macarons. You feel like a complete idiot, and yet that very absurdity makes it somehow satisfying. They’re unbearably sweet, and the outer shell never fails to stick to the roof of your mouth, and besides the name

11 There is a large market in Japan for luxury seasonal and domestic fruit, which is considered too expensive for household use and thus exchanged as favors or gifts. 12 The narrator pointedly wonders whether she should bring up the disaster, before giving up: ‘I wanted to pass the time talking about some inconsequential but appropriate topics of conversation, like: what did her husband do for a living, what did her family look like, who in the neighborhood did such and such, and I heard that because of the earthquake the price of the land in this area has gone down—is it true? But she did not seem to have any interest in those matters, so I avoided all questions of the kind.’ (30)

Spoiled Meals 151 is so silly. It’s infuriating how overpriced they are, only because people think they’re something special. They only remind you that you’ve never thought once they tasted good. I’ll have the pink one, if you don’t mind. Please. This yellow one is quite exquisite too. (Kawakami 2018, 283)13 There is a comical gap here in the depicted enjoyment of the baked good: the flavor is too sweet and their mastication never goes smoothly (‘the outer shell [sticks] to the roof of your mouth’); yet none of these unpleasant characteristics appear to influence the interaction between the two women. In fact, neither the macarons’ taste nor the narrator’s patent aversion to them seems to have any bearing on the conversation, as the only factor that ends up determining the choice of the confection is color (‘the pink one,’ ‘[t]his yellow one’). The conversation exchanged between the two women is, as Yoshio Hitomi has observed in her reading of the text, very performative (2019, 13–5). The disparity between the narrator’s critical inner voice and her behavior at the table may be read as offering a reflection both on social mores and on legibility. The two women slide in a restrained, superficial interaction, carefully avoiding topics of conversation that might reveal anything of substance about themselves—to the point of settling on the use of two aliases, ‘Bianca’ (for the protagonist) and ‘Terry’ (for the older neighbor). This exchange engages with an almost overbearing performance of femininity, relying on an imaginary of objects (including the flowers grown by the protagonist and the piano that the older neighbor obsesses over) and language that plainly recalls the world of canonical works of girl’s manga (shōjo manga) from the 1970s (Yoshio 2021).14 The generically European or Western attributes of the macarons characterize them thus as the reverse of the cherries, marking them as signifiers for a fantastic space offering an escape both from disaster-stricken Japan and the protagonist’s unsatisfactory marriage with her taciturn, uninvolved husband. The sweets evoke a symbolic, nonthreatening, and nostalgic outside that brings the two women together in an unforeseen intimacy. This outside is, in contrast to that irradiated by Fukushima Daiichi’s leakage, safe from nuclear harm, and, moreover, miraculously abstracted from Bianca’s suffocating marriage. The story appears to attempt to circumvent the figurative restrictions of immunity culture by reimagining the relationship between inside and outside that such culture proposes. The inside described in ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ is, in fact, a poisoned enclosure, whose harmonious appearance (much like the garden in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’) belies a noxious truth: the

13 This passage is quoted from Yoshio Hitomi’s translation as well. 14 I thank Yoshio Hitomi for her willingness to share her (at the time) forthcoming work with me and for first introducing me to a possible reading of Kawakami’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ as a work of post-3.11 literature.

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only threat to the apparent peace and unity of this Eden was actually bred by the toxic plants harbored within its walls.15 Similarly, the disaster enters the story not as an external, distant menace but through the news coverage trickling in through the muffled TV speakers, invading the mundane soundscape of daily conversations and housekeeping chores. The circumscribed space of the home overlaps once again with that of the nation, as the initial illusion of safety collapses in a too real phantasmagoria of auto-immunitarian failure since, as the text suggests, the toxic-waste-spewing exploded nuclear plant is well within Japan’s borders. Bianca, however, does not hesitate to turn off the screen and drown these sounds and signs of internal crisis with those of Terry’s piano seeping in through the walls. The intimacy between the two women is always described indirectly, mediated through different materialities and textures: that of the food first, and of the music later. Bianca’s reaction to Liszt’s piece retraces her first approach to the macarons. At the beginning, she cannot help but reject its voluptuous sentimentality; right before the story’s climax, however, her senses are enraptured by Terry’s performance, her miraculous playing becoming one with the piece. The fleeting disgust that Bianca feels at her first contact both with the macarons and with the sickeningly sentimental peaks and falls of Dreams of Love appears to signal a mute dissatisfaction both for traditional conceptions of femininity and for the conventional ideal of romantic love evoked by the musical piece; however, it is exactly these objects, initially construed as repellent, which function as bridges between the two women. A temporary intimacy with the inanimate allows for the two characters to briefly feel desire for each other. The kiss comes naturally after the intoxicated sharing of elation for Terry’s successful execution, but the dryness of its description ultimately lacks any of the sensuality that the two women’s investment in the music, and more broadly in their shōjo-esque escape, had displayed. Their queer fantasy ends, abruptly, here. After this brief moment of physical entanglement, the two go back to their separate daily lives, their alliance as momentary as the blooming of roses on Bianca’s porch. If, from a spatial perspective, the push of ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ against immunity thinking seems unequivocal, the juxtaposition of the ephemerality of the flowers together with the characters’ short-lived relationship makes the text’s allegiance more fraught and problematic. From a temporal point of view, narratives of immunity rely heavily on figures of regeneration. In similar fashion, and as noted in the previous section, post-3.11 political discourse has put strong emphasis on accounts of recovery, positing the triple disaster as yet another obstacle (such as the Great Kantō Earthquake, the economic recession during and after the Pacific War, and now the COVID-19 pandemic)16 to be overcome on the way to neverending national progress. The last scene of the novel, depicting Bianca wistfully picking up from the ground the last petals left by her now verdant rose bushes, 15 For a reading of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844) in connection with ecocriticism and ‘toxic discourse,’ see Lawrence Buell’s influential 1998 article. 16 For more on the emphasis on renewal in the narrative adopted by the Japanese government after the 1923 earthquake, see Weisenfeld 2012.

Spoiled Meals 153 seems to hint exactly at this unavoidable prospect of cyclicality and rebirth. Roses wither, but they will undoubtedly bloom once more with the warm season.17 The story ends thus on a hopeful note, hinting at Terry’s conquering of her unexplained trauma and at Bianca’s own faint hope for transformation. Nonetheless, this same expectation of natural resilience and renovation ends up, rather than leaving to the two characters the possibility of queer resistance (or simple flight) against their daily constrictions, unwittingly reproducing the language of rehabilitation promoted within discourses of immunity. Summer and the rainy season will return; however, we are left to imagine that Bianca and Terry’s short-lived (d)alliance is fated to never occur again. The immune temporality devised by ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ is not, however, the only element contradicting the text’s attempt at spatial transcendence presented in the earlier pages. In fact, the fantastical shōjo-esque world that the two women devise and explore never seems to challenge, ultimately, the stark distinction of inside and outside in the story. Nor does it question the fashioning of physical and political boundaries between self and other, upheld by a ‘Japanese ethics’ of immobility that the two characters never linger to question. The binary stays in place, and so do Bianca and Terry. The fantasy was, in conclusion, but a brief respite; after its timely resolution, Kawakami’s short story ends up where it started, with a contaminated world encroaching on the sanctity and integrity of the characters’ and our bodies—our homes, and unperturbed daily lives.

Metabolic Imaginaries: Convenience Store Woman The last portion of this chapter will focus on Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman. While the novel cannot strictly be considered a post-3.11 work, its engagement with issues of social consensus and stability—at times reproducing in detail the language of kizuna discussed earlier—suggests its potential to be read as an allegory for a postdisaster Japan.18 However, and more importantly here, it is the text’s investment in issues of gender expectations and discrimination and its interest in food consumption and commercial distribution that are relevant to the trajectory of this chapter. As anticipated in the introduction and elsewhere, Convenience Store Woman might in fact offer a model for representations of the body and its environment that functions in ways divergent from those instated by immunitary thinking. The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Furukura Keiko, is a university graduate who has been working part-time at a convenience store for 18 years. Keiko has, since childhood, found herself impossibly puzzled by the social cues that her family and acquaintances seem to be able to effortlessly respond to, and by their 17 For more on how natural metaphors and images are deployed in narratives complicit with nationalist and ethnocentrist discourse, see Christine Marran’s concept of ‘biotropes’ in Marran 2017. 18 There is no direct mention of 3.11 or its consequences in the text. The novel, in fact, eschews any designations of time and space whatsoever (even the area in which the convenience store is set is fictional).

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demands that she do so as well. In her role as a convenience store employee, and in the detailed manual she is furnished with, she ultimately finds a guide to replicate the difficult art of behaving like a ‘human being.’19 At 36, the formerly maladjusted Keiko finally looks and talks as is expected of a woman her age. She achieves this result through a painstaking work of mimesis. If, in fact, her expressions and behavior during work hours are determined by her training and the store manual’s instructions (Murata 2016, 15), the language and clothes she adopts during her time off are influenced by the observation of the people she works with.20 However, this metamorphosis goes beyond the simple imitation of the models offered by her surroundings. The way she conceives of her (part-time) employment is particularly telling in this respect: it amounts to her promotion from defective and unfit product of society to the status of ‘functional, standardized component of the world’ (20). Counter to what the quote suggests, her vision is not always this strictly mechanical. In fact, as the novel progresses, this initial glimpse of human society as an implacable neoliberal apparatus—such as the one literally engulfing Chaplin in the iconic scene in Modern Times (1936)—slowly evolves in a more expansive, organic (if competitive) ecosystem. If the store is a machine, it is one that Keiko is finely and effortlessly attuned to. Just by straining her ears, she is able to tell from the movements of an indecisive customer whether or not they are ready to request her presence at the register (3). The outside temperature alerts her to which kind of beverages will be more likely to sell on a determinate day, and thus are more likely to require restocking (44). The konbini has a ‘voice’ (147), one that Keiko can clearly hear and respond to. What looks, at first glance, like an aseptic urban space, gradually evolves through the narration into a humongous living being that the workers and customers depend on for survival in an almost symbiotic relationship. This organic metaphor is reinforced at multiple points throughout the novel, pointing to the existence of different scales and interdependencies, which become particularly visible around images of food. On one level, the employees and the products are represented as the store’s cells (51, 69), always moving and changing, contributing to its continuing existence. On another, the konbini itself is but a small organism that depends on its surrounding environment and its needs and demands. Keiko’s body too is made entirely out of the convenience store (that’s where all of her meals come from, 23). She is made for the store as well: her job is the only reason she is able to keep regular sleeping and eating times, since taking care of oneself to maintain one’s productivity is clearly spelled out in the manual as a crucial employee duty (72, 138). One feature of the spatial imagination thus emerging from Convenience Store Woman is its lack of reliance on binaries. There is no inside or outside the store for the protagonist: she and it ‘are always

19 Hence the original title of the work, Konbini ningen, which translates literally as Convenience Store Human. 20 In particular Izumi-san, the manager of part-timers and the only other woman in her 30s working at the store (26).

Spoiled Meals 155 connected’ (38)—almost indistinguishably enmeshed with each other through an osmotic exchange of labor and nutrients. Such a conception of the environment, and of human and nonhuman relationships, clearly appears very removed from the one conceived by the immunitary imagination that has heretofore been the subject of this chapter. On the contrary, its features seem to point to a different set of exchanges and modes of subsistence, typical of a more porous model of the interactions within a body and its environment, which has elsewhere been labeled as ‘trans-corporeal.’21 Here, while embracing this notion, I would like to call attention to another feature of such a model: its ‘metabolic’ nature.22 An important difference thus emerges between the two models. Immunity and its representations foster an—imagined—enmity between a self and the other, envisioning contacts that are often described in belligerent terms (‘foreign invasion,’ ‘external attacks,’ ‘immunitary defense,’ and so forth).23 Thinking about space in metabolic terms, on the other hand, typically relies on a language of fluidity and continuity, showing the coexistence of bodies. Metabolism as a theoretical model thus privileges—or so I aim to suggest—the exchange and synergy that have been deemed problematically absent in those contemporary representations of space and of geopolitical relationships that have relied on immunitary imaginings.24 Of course, metabolic representations are not completely devoid of the conflicts entertained by immunity, nor do they focus exclusively on harmonic and symbiotic connections. On the contrary, the convenience store portrayed by Murata in her novel is essentially a harsh environment.25 It grants Keiko a chance to belong within society through the contribution of labor; however, the chance itself is conditional upon such contribution. The moment she is deemed unsuitable, or no 21 ‘Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.” [. . .] By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures.’ (Alaimo 2010, 2). 22 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, metabolism is: ‘b. The chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life; the interconnected sequences of mostly enzymecatalysed chemical reactions by which a cell, tissue, organ, etc., sustains energy production, and synthesizes and breaks down complex molecules; anabolism and catabolism considered together; the overall rate at which these processes occur. Also: the chemical changes undergone in an organism by any particular substance.’ Most definitions by other dictionaries, however, show more concision and reliance on everyday parlance—and rather than anabolism and catabolism, insist (as I will) on the centrality of food for activity. For example, the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary defines metabolism as ‘the chemical and physical processes by which a living thing uses food for energy and growth.’ 23 For more on this issue, see Esposito 2011, 153–4 and Nik Brown 2019, 1–2. 24 While no space is available here to discuss this point further, I think metabolism, and the strict interdependence that it envisions between bodies and environment, additionally shows a certain affinity with a scholarly current that has been strenuously fighting against the limitations of the immunity paradigm: that of ecocriticism. Compare, for example, with the work by Christine Marran and Rob Nixon cited earlier in this chapter; or Anna Tsing’s work (esp. 2015). 25 ‘This is a forcibly standardized place. All extraneous matter is immediately expelled.’ (Murata, 58)

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longer productive, will also be the one when she is excreted in the inevitable process of cell renewal that regulates the existence of the flexible workplace. Keiko, who keeps holding onto her part-time job even after 18 years of employment and makes it the defining aspect of her existence, is an anomaly within the system. The convenience store, far from being the sanitized utopia that we are initially led to believe, ends up being nothing more than a scaled-back version of society, one whose purpose is to label and expel the dissonant and unfit—much like what occurs to metabolic waste during the energy-producing processes of a cell or larger organism. While an excellent employee, Keiko is in the end compelled to leave her post. As she is informed by different acquaintances in the course of the novel, she cannot afford to be wasting her time on a temporary job: at her age, she is expected to either find permanent employment or get married and have kids. Desperately wanting to belong while feeling no impulse to do either, she ends up faking a cohabitation with another misfit and former coworker, Shiraha. The two meet before Shiraha gets himself fired from the convenience store for stalking a customer and strike an agreement for survival: they will use their fictional relationship to avoid the meddling of their families, who are pressing them to settle down. What starts off as a balanced (if business-like) relationship aiming for mutual endurance, slowly evolves into Shiraha’s seizure of complete control over Keiko’s life and into him manhandling her into finding a stable job so that she can support them both. Whereas the first half of the novel depicts the protagonist’s world in terms of relative homeostasis, the second half describes her enduring—and finally, explosive—response to the different kinds of social and interpersonal pressure she is subjected to. Keiko’s life without her job quickly unravels in a succession of unstructured days during which she barely eats, and she sleeps endlessly, deprived of the duty to health and self-care required of her as a store employee. In the climactic ending to the story, she runs away from the first job interview that Shiraha sets up for her and finds refuge in a convenience store in the neighborhood, where she automatically reverts to her habits as a clerk—ultimately finding herself and her place in the world by once again re-attuning her body to the voice of the konbini and of its needs. Fittingly enough, the passage that introduces this second half of the novel, and that gives Keiko the motivation to proposition Shiraha into faking a cohabitation and a relationship, revolves around a shared meal. Keiko’s high school friends organize a big barbecue, inviting all their former classmates and their families. Keiko is, however, immediately singled out by the others, her unmarried status and part-time employment becoming both a topic of conversation and a source of general curiosity. At my explanation, Yukari’s husband looked at me as if he had just seen an apparition. ‘What, you’ve never . . . ? I mean, even if it’s hard finding a job, you’d better at least get married. Nowadays there’s all sorts of marriagehunting sites too!’

Spoiled Meals 157 I just watched while, at the strength of his words, Yukari’s husband’s saliva sprayed all over the barbecue meat. As I mulled over that perhaps it would have been better to avoid speaking while leaning over the food, Miho’s husband started nodding vehemently as well. Yeah, yeah! Why don’t you find a partner? Anyone will do. Women have that easy, after all. If you were a man, you’d be screwed. At Satsuki’s ‘Why don’t you introduce someone to her? You know a lot of people, Yōji.’ Shiho and the others started getting excited. ‘That’s great!’ ‘Do you know someone that would work?’ Are you saying that if I keep things like this . . . that I cannot go on living the way I do? Why is that? I asked, genuinely curious, but I could hear Miho’s husband whisper ‘weirdo’ in reply. [. . .] ‘Ah, the meat is ready, the meat!’ Miho exclaimed to assuage the atmosphere. Everyone went to fill their plates, suddenly more relaxed—everybody biting into the food bathed in Yukari’s husband’s saliva. I noticed that, exactly like that time in primary school, everybody started distancing themselves and facing away from me. At the same time, only their eyes glanced in my direction with a tint of curiosity, as if watching an unsettling creature. (Murata 2016, 74–7; my emphasis) The italicized sentence of this passage recalls an earlier portion of the novel that offered a series of episodes about the narrator’s childhood and the way her responses are perceived as peculiar by the people around her. One of these anecdotes is particularly memorable as it also concerns food. One day, playing in the park, young Keiko finds a dead bird, picks it up to show her mother, and suggests that they bring it home to cook and share with her father, who loves chicken skewers (yakitori).26 The reaction of the adults and children present is one of dismay, and Keiko learns through their distress that not all animals can be eaten (8–9). In comparing the two scenes, some elements are immediately notable. If in Kawakami’s short story food is, however coded, a cause for bonding between characters (as it most commonly is), in these two passages of Convenience Store Woman, it is a source of division. As a child, Keiko is labeled as an oddball by the people around her because she is unable to differentiate between what is considered edible and what is not. While everybody is both distressed and repulsed by the sight of the small lifeless bird, Keiko feels no revulsion toward it: for her it is a resource to be shared. In a foreshadowing of the metabolic fantasy of the konbini as all-encompassing life form, the dead pet is included in the reproductive cycle of energy that Keiko perceives around her and wishes to be a part of.

26 It is notable that the bird, sporting blue feathers, is unmistakably characterized as a former pet, rather than the kind of wild bird that might be hunted and consumed in certain (less squeamish and urban) settings.

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However, what the barbecue makes clear is that not everything or everyone is naturally considered part of such cycle. Not much space for introspection is left in this scene, at least until its end, as the discussion of Keiko’s life and the prospect of her marriage is developed through Murata’s sparse writing style by focusing on dialogue. The advice she receives about marriage from her friend’s husband—and his opinion on the matter—spreads with the momentum of a small wildfire, followed by a flood of enthusiastic agreement. This contagious diffusing of consensus is mirrored by the sharing of food—the barbecued meat Yukari’s husband inadvertently spits on and all the invitees except Keiko happily partake of. Although throughout the entire novel our protagonist hardly ever expresses any negative feelings and is characterized, from that first childhood recollection, as anything but a picky eater, here her reaction to her friend’s husband’s saliva and her quiet refusal to eat with the other guests are easily readable as akin to disgust. As Ngai (2005) has emphasized, much as is the case with immunity, disgust has been historically deployed as a means to draw boundaries between the self and its object; yet, in this case, the directionality of the feeling is much more tangled.27 Keiko, in fact, becomes here both the subject and the object of it—or so she is defined by her resistance to the flow of the conversation and to the conviviality of the atmosphere. Her repulsion to the meat (and marriage, since in the scene they go hand in hand) is also what makes the other guests repel her, marking her as the ‘foreign object’ (ibutsu; Murata 2016, 77) in the body of consensus. Disgust, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, ‘does not so much solve the dilemma of social powerlessness as diagnose it powerfully’ (Ngai 2005, 353). Here it does so by effectively designating, rather than Keiko’s own dissonance with her surroundings, the process through which she is labeled as a ‘weirdo’ in and of itself. Murata’s reliance on representations of food and eating to confront Keiko’s marginality and lack of social capital help her achieve a significant final result that underlines the mundanity of any and all processes of abjection. If narratives of immunity often describe discrimination in terms of dramatic bodily events (e.g., immune failures, such as transplant rejections or autoimmune disorders), the metabolic figures prevalent in Convenience Store Woman privilege an account of it that is gradual and systematic—much like the physiological ejection of cellular waste. Readings that focus on the metabolic rather than on the immune aspects of cultural production and discourse show an affinity with the theoretical impetus of Rob Nixon’s conception of ‘slow violence,’ and thus similarly strive to ‘complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound’ (2011, 3). Not all violence is explosive and extraordinary—on the contrary, most abusive acts are quietly reproduced in the undocumented, shrouded territories of daily and 27 See the second section of this chapter. For more on immunity as an apparatus of discrimination, see Haraway 1991, 204: ‘Pre-eminently a twentieth-century object, the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics. That is, the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological.’

Spoiled Meals 159 intimate life. Shifting our attention from the ostensible exceptionality of an event to its longue-durée roots might be a helpful strategy to find long-term solutions to long-standing problems, assigning and taking responsibility for the damages, and—finally—working toward prevention. Whereas the above indulgence in images of metabolic excretions appears to have an eminently diagnostic purpose, Murata’s willingness to let her characters find purchase where they are, under the material, unceasing pressure of their own surroundings, seems instead to show investment in, and return us to, the meaning of metabolism originally emphasized in this chapter: that of synergic subsistence. In ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.,’ Bianca’s escape is characterized, for its transiency and flightiness, as an emergency measure and an echo of the postdisaster political climate. Keiko’s return to the life of a store clerk is, in contrast, a flight in and of itself—but one not out of but rather back to an environment whose noxious workings she understands and is aware her existence is inextricably entangled with. ‘Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent,’ writes Anna Tsing in her book about mushroom picking ecologies (2015, 29; my emphasis). Survival is thus feasible in the compromised world that we share, but only through a knowledge of mutual dependence and reciprocal, potential harm. This knowledge, Murata suggests, comes from knowing what kind of humans we are—‘convenience store humans,’ or otherwise.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Brown, Nik. 2019. Immunitary Life: A Biopolitics of Immunity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buell, Lawrence. 1998. ‘Toxic Discourse.’ Critical Inquiry 24 (3): 639–65. Chaplin, Charles. 1936. Modern Times. United States: United Artists Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press. Cohen, Ed. 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press. Denyer, Simon. 2019. ‘Radioactive Sushi: Japan-South Korea Spat Extends to Olympic Cuisine.’ Washington Post, August 23. [online] www.washingtonpost.com/ world/asia_pacific/radioactive-sushi-japan-south-korea-spat-extends-to-olympiccuisine/2019/08/23/3b4882d0-c483 - 11e9 - 8bf7-cde2d9e09055_story.html [Accessed January 5, 2020]. Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fukushima Minyū Shimbun. n.d. [online] www.minyu-net.com/news/sinsai/saihen.php [Accessed April 18, 2020]. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse.’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 203–30. New York: Routledge. Kawakami Mieko. 2016. Ai no yume to ka. Tokyo: Kōdansha.

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———. 2018. ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ In Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Jay Rubin. Translated by Yoshio Hitomi, 278–89. London: Penguin. Marran, Christine L. 2011. ‘Contamination: From Minamata to Fukushima.’ Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (1). ———. 2017. Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCurry, Justin. 2017. ‘Fukushima Evacuees Face “forced” Return as Subsidies Withdrawn.’ Guardian, March 10. [online] www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/10/ japan-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-evacuees-forced-return-home-radiation [Accessed February 28, 2019]. Murata Sayaka. 2016. Konbini ningen. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Samuels, Richard. 2013. 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sceats, Sarah. 2000. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tokyo. 2020. [online] https://tokyo2020.org/en/news/president-bach-fukushima-azuma [Accessed December 20, 2019]. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2012. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yoshio, Hitomi. 2019. ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.: The Imagined Community of Women in Kawakami Mieko’s Fiction.’ UCLA-Waseda International Symposium: ‘The Woman in the Story: Female Protagonists in Japanese Narratives,’ UCLA, Los Angeles, March 13–15. ———. 2021. ‘Saiyaku to nichijō: Shinsaigo bungaku to shite no Kawakami Mieko sakuhin.’ In 3.11 ikō no bungaku hihyō: Sekaiteki shiya o motomete, edited by Kimura Saeko and Anne Bayard-Sakai, 104–33. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten.

Part 4

Nuclear Futurity

9

Humanism and the Hikari-Event Reading Ōe with Stengers in Catastrophic Times Margherita Long

This essay tells the story of one reader’s search for an environmental humanities approach to Ōe Kenzaburō’s post-3.11 antinuclear writings.1 If we care about playing what Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers once called a ‘twopartner game’ with nature,’ it is probably not enough, as I will argue, to remain within Ōe’s own staunch humanist framework (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 5). But what if what Ōe has been saying for decades implicitly about his disabled son’s musical sensibility were more interesting for an ecological politics than what he repeated explicitly after the Fukushima disaster? Granted, it was reassuring to see Ōe at the forefront of the antinuclear protests that erupted after the triple meltdown. In those scary early days, we knew we could count on him to articulate clear opposition to the logic of what Stengers calls ‘worldwide competition [with] economic growth as its arrow of time’ (Stengers 2015, 16). On this point, he delivered. Ōe blasted former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1918−2019) for calling the triple meltdown a ‘learning experience’ and advocating the continued sacrifice of the Tōhoku region to the economic prosperity of ‘Hang in There, Japan!’ (ganbare nippon!) (Ōe 2011a, 58−9). He excoriated Japan Business Federation Chair Yonekura Hiromasa for telephoning Prime Minister Noda Yasuhiko and demanding an end to Noda’s ‘No Nukes by 2040’ initiative because it was bad for the economy (Ōe 2013b, 14). He quoted activist physician Hida Shuntarō on the dangers of internal radiation, encouraged already-exposed Fukushimans to be kind to their immune systems, and, borrowing language from Marxist poet Nakano Shigeharu, said that living with the government’s blind eye to both felt like ‘living amidst contempt’ (bujoku no naka ni ikite iru).2

1 I am grateful to Linda Flores and the participants at the Tanaka Symposium in Japanese Literature for the intellectual stimulation and camaraderie of ‘Literature after 3.11’ at Pembroke College in June 2017. This essay first appeared in positions: asia critique Vol. 29 No. 2 (May 2020) 421−45. I thank Tani Barlow and Juliet Robson at positions for their generous help with permissions. 2 I discuss his references to Eliot, Said, and the 1947 constitution later in the essay. Ōe mentions Fukushima immune systems and Dr. Hida Shuntarō in a program of lectures hosted by Sayonara Genpatsu Ten Million Strong (Sayonara genpatsu senman’nin akkushon), a citizen’s movement and signature campaign that Ōe co-convened. The program of lectures on September 8, 2011, was in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-14

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All this was highly welcome. The problem was that Ōe tended to position the demands of capitalism as subordinate to those of domestic right-wing nationalism and US imperialism. In this vein, he used the triple meltdown to reemphasize that Japan would never have implemented a nuclear energy program had the CIA’s 1950s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative not overpowered the massive antinuclear movement galvanized by the Lucky Dragon Incident and propped itself up over the decades with continued support from the right.3 Nowhere did he allow for the possibility that, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, we may well have shifted to a world order in which it is capitalism that has our governments in its clutches, not the other way around. Reading his post-3.11 speeches and newspaper columns, we sense that his response to the triple meltdown is a fairly straightforward reiteration of his lifelong Left-pacifist response to Hiroshima. Calling once more for democratic protest against restarting idled plants and for protective legislation against all nuclear applications, ‘peaceful’ and otherwise, he staked his claims on the power of language and drew energy from the same writers that had been fueling his literature and activism for 50 years: Dante Alighieri, T. S. Eliot, Watanabe Kazuo, Edward Said, and above all, the framers of Japan’s 1947 ‘Peace Constitution.’4 In this way, Ōe’s humanism strikes a starkly different chord from that of a book like Stengers’s 2009 eco-manifesto In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Stengers’s book characterizes our current moment as one suspended between two histories, both of which see development-as-usual as unsustainable—as sending us ‘straight to the wall’ (Stengers 2015, 19). The first maintains that global growth is nevertheless the ‘only conceivable horizon’; that capitalism will become capable of repairing the planet that it ruins. The second, to which she herself subscribes, affords power rather to the planet. ‘We are no longer dealing,’ she writes, ‘with a nature to be protected from the damage caused by humans, but also a nature capable of threatening our modes of thinking and of living’ (Stengers 2015, 20). The appeal of Stengers’s book is that it insists this threat can be productive: it can suspend our histories by forcing us to ‘think with’ the material world. Although such thinking is rare and difficult, Stengers built her career arguing that scientific discoveries only happen when science gives nature the power to gather human minds and to cause them to think in ways that were previously unthinkable (Stengers 1997, 2000). If we are to respond to ecological catastrophe without falling into barbarism, she says, this skill will be essential. I think it is precisely this skill that the Hikari-figure’s musical sensibility can be said both to embody and to teach.

preparation for a September 19 rally that gathered 60,000 protesters at Meiji Park. See Ōe 2011d, 19−20. He mentions Nakano Shigeharu in a Yoyogi Park speech at another Sayonara Genpatsu event on July 16, 2012, this one attended by 170,000. See Ōe 2012c. 3 I have written elsewhere on Ōe’s account of the collusion between the LDP and the US in shaping Japan’s nuclear energy program. See Long 2017. 4 Ōe quotes The Divine Comedy in a June 2011 speech at Mitō Culture Hall and in an interview with Phillippe Pons for Le Monde; see Ōe 2011e, 245, 2011c. He quotes his university mentor, Watanabe Kazuo, in an April 2011 column for the Asahi Shimbun; see Ōe 2012b, 255.

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 165 To read it, my essay takes up key moments from two texts: a short story called ‘Light-Circling Bird’ (Hi o megurasu tori, Ōe 1992) and a novel called Death by Water (Suishi, Ōe 2015).5 Ōe cites both works after 3.11 to evoke the promise of soulful transcendence over catastrophe. In ‘Light-Circling Bird,’ it is the catastrophe of the son’s disability. How will his young father communicate with a boy who speaks with birds but not his parents? In Death by Water, it is the catastrophe of the old father’s stubbornness. Will he have the patience to value his son’s creative process as a composer as much as he values his own as an international public intellectual? Every undergraduate who has read Ōe’s fiction knows it is the job of the father-narrator to prove that the answer is ‘yes.’ But I propose that Stengers, following Deleuze, would call this ‘yes’ an illusion—propaganda, even—and that she would focus rather on the way the Hikari-figure is spurred to musicality through direct encounter not with his father but with his sonic world. These encounters are what Deleuze would call ‘events’—creative, constitutive relationships that take place outside intersubjective understanding. Can we make Ōe environmental by reading the Hikari-figure in terms of events?

The Nonevent of Boku’s Uguisu at Eighteen Ōe quotes at length from his 1991 story ‘Light-Circling Bird’ in a lecture he delivered in June 2011 at Mitō Culture Hall in Ibaraki Prefecture.6 The text centers on a 1935 poem called Warbler (Uguisu) by Japan Romantic School poet Itō Shizuo (1906−1953, Itō 2007), which the story’s narrator, Boku, describes having read with great intensity at three different moments in his life. In the first, he is 18 and newly enamored with the difficulty of Itō’s language. The poem seems to imply that close friends can summon one another’s watashi no tamashii (souls) even after decades apart, so long as they share formative experiences. In free verse, it narrates the memory of a childhood at the foot of mountains, a friend who could whistle forth a single warbler, and the beautiful singing voice of the warbler itself. When in adulthood the friend forgets this memory, the narrator responds with the poem’s closing lines: Nevertheless, I remember ‘watashi no tamashii’ And so, a single poem, which even I do not believe rises to my lips and I have written it down for you in your old age (Ōe 1992, 8)7 5 ‘Light-Circling Bird’ originally appeared in the July 1991 issue of Switch. Here I quote from the version anthologized in Ōe’s 1992 story collection When I was Truly Young (Boku ga hontō ni wakakatta koro). 6 The Mitō Culture Hall speech became the last chapter in the paperback version of a previously published hardback anthology of the same name, The Reading Human (Yomu ningen); see Ōe 2011e. 7 Unless noted otherwise, page numbers refer to Ōe 1992.

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At 18, Boku is captivated by this confident gesture of restoring other people’s memories. Eager to emulate it, he resolves to reach a more enlightened stage of understanding and looks up the character for ‘warbler’ in ‘the dictionary [his] father had kept at his bedside until just before his death’ (10). When that definition proves unhelpful, he recalls the similarity of the character for firefly. The dictionary explains that the character for firefly (hotaru, 螢), by virtue of its radical meaning ‘flame-encircling,’ means ‘insect that flies around light, emitting light.’ Boku reasons that the character for warbler (uguisu, 鶯), by virtue of the same radical, must mean ‘bird that flies around luminous sound, emitting luminous sound’ (10). It is a complicated bit of orthographic thinking, and one wonders how much sense it made out loud to Ōe’s June 2011 audience. Nevertheless, he reads them long segments from the 1991 text, including 18-year-old Boku’s dense conclusion: Facing the cluster of light emitted by a ‘my soul’ (watashi no tamashii) that both transcends individuality and subsumes it is a single firefly, the firefly of the self, also emitting light as it flies along. It’s for this purpose that life extends into the future. The self connected to this ‘soul’ (watashi no tamashii) has always known it. Yet to the degree that the self exists as an individual distinct from ‘my soul’ (watashi no tamashii), it remains forever ignorant. (11) Boku’s reading of Itō’s poem feels existential. If my friend forgets our past, does that negate me? Does he rob me of my freedom with his gesture of erasure?8 No, not at all! Such worries are unfounded if we are ‘fireflies’—if we form a mutually illuminating collective soul of human light, diminishable only by an overemphasis on component individuals. Boku’s reading also strikes us as deconstructive, thanks to his mini-treatise on how meaning inheres in signifiers and signifieds, not referents. He marvels: How gratifying to have this explanation of the kanji’s form and pronunciation from several thousand years ago—and indeed, from China!—to bring the voice of the warbler back to my ears as if it had only now this instant echoed forth, and then gone silent. (10) For Boku, the essence of the warbler’s voice is not aural but graphic, and etymological. It issues more vividly from a kanji dictionary than from a warbler’s 8 My reading is indebted to John Treat’s chapter on Hiroshima Notes (Treat 1995), which argues that Ōe’s investment in Sartre both informs his antinuclear thinking and is betrayed by it: ‘The issue for Ōe in Hiroshima Notes as elsewhere in his writing, is always humanism—existentialism seems simply a way to preserve it intact’ (247). Though 18-year-old Boku in ‘Light-Circling Bird’ is still in high school, and not yet reading Sartre (as the historical Ōe would, for his Tokyo University graduation thesis), he is already centrally concerned with how much power to threaten his own mode of thinking and living he can afford to cede to his Other.

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 167 beak! And it is meaningful on account of an entirely anthropocentric dichotomy, between the double-fire radical, on the one hand, and the darkness of the human soul, on the other hand. There is little at work here of the distributed sentience that cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram (2010, 189) admires in nonhuman animals, who, ‘in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.’ Despite their visual appeal, both ‘firefly’ and ‘warbler’ are for Boku primarily verbal phenomena, born from the brains and brushes of men. And although he seems delighted with this intracranial encounter, what fascinates me about ‘Light-Circling Bird’ is the way he also strains against its limits. Let us see what happens when he bumps into those limits again, in two other readings of the same poem, after the birth of his intellectually disabled son, Eeyore.

Naming Uguisu, Naming Gaia We read that Eeyore remained aloof from language for six full years after he was born. He spoke his first words only after his parents noticed his sensitivity to birdsong on television and radio and began playing him an educational recording of bird voices in lieu of a lullaby tape. Having listened hundreds of times, Eeyore was at his summer house in Kita Karuizawa one evening, strolling through a mountain meadow on his father’s shoulders, when he heard the song of a water rail and announced, in the same crisp NHK diction as his tape, ‘kuina, desu yo’ (It is, a water rail) (12). Boku writes with joy of how Eeyore had memorized not only water rail but dozens of other bird voices, and this opened him for the first time to human communication. Now the parents could stop the tape just before the announcer and have Eeyore tell them the name of the bird. They could also set out into nature and have their son identify the voices of real birds. ‘Until then my ears thought all birds sounded the same,’ Boku confesses, ‘but now I had to contain my excitement over recognizing the voice of a warbler before my son did−I had to wait for him and say it in unison, “uguisu, desu yo” (It is, a warbler)’ (12). Speaking the same words at the same time as his son, Boku feels his appreciation of Itō’s poem intensify. Indeed, he says, the bird-naming ritual allows them to ‘remember’ a spirit they share not only with each other but also with one of Boku’s dear friends. When he was 18, Itō’s poem was attractive because Boku too had a childhood mate who could summon warblers from the woods. Now he feels that ‘the soul of my friend, who had died by then, was emitting light like a warbler’s voice over a wide expanse of fields and mountains, joining the souls of myself and my son in perfect harmony’ (13). With this line the scene seems to grow increasingly crowded, as Boku substitutes humanism for a constitutive encounter a second time. Why must Eeyore’s intimacy with the voices of the birds expand so quickly to include not only his father (and his father’s father, by means of the kanji dictionary), but his father’s dead friend, and the two men from Itō’s poem? Does Eeyore himself care about harmony with all these people? When he names the birds, does he care about human communication? About souls?

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In this context, it is interesting to consider what Stengers says about why scientists name things. At the center of In Catastrophic Times is the gesture of borrowing the term ‘Gaia’ to refer to the ‘ticklish assemblage of forces’ that form our living planet (Stengers 2015, 47). Originally a figure from Greek mythology,9 ‘Gaia’ was first used in modern science by chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s to propose that the earth is not a given from which our histories get their stable context, but rather something with its own history, the ‘authors of which [are] innumerable populations of microorganisms’ (44). Naming Gaia again in 2009, Stengers emphasizes that these microorganisms, and indeed, the vast majority of the planet’s component processes, will live on long after we have made the planet uninhabitable for ourselves. They are in this sense transcendent—‘Gaia’ is transcendent—in a way that capitalism and humanity are not. Stengers maintains that scientists who are worthy of that name are inherently materialist thinkers whose discipline has always depended on exactly this transcendence. She writes, to name Gaia—that is to say, to associate an assemblage of material processes that demand neither to be protected nor to be loved [. . .] with the intrusion of a form of transcendence into our history ought not to especially shock most scientists. They themselves are in the habit of giving names to what they recognize has the power to make them think and imagine—and this is the very sense of the transcendence that I associate with Gaia. Those who have set up camp in the position of the guardians of reason and progress will certainly scream about irrationality. They will denounce a panicky regression that would make us forget ‘the heritage of the Enlightenment,’ [. . . and . . .] remind an always credulous public opinion that [. . .] it must believe in the destiny of Man and in his capacity to triumph in the face of every challenge. (48) Here Stengers draws on a distinction she makes between ‘small-s scientists,’ who credit their results to ‘thinking hand in hand with the question,’ and ‘capital-s Scientists,’ who credit Enlightenment protocols of reason and repeatability (33). Her point is that the scientific method on its own is powerless in the face of ecological crisis. Indeed, she calls the scientific method ‘one of the most successful propaganda operations in human history,’ and traces it all the way back to Galileo’s having regarded the discovery of heliocentrism as ‘the reward of an at last rational method,’ rather than, as she would have it, the reward of an event (70). In other words, Galileo (1564−1642) acted as a small-s scientist when he experienced the event of an intrusion into his world, into his history of science, by material (solar) 9 McKenzie Wark glosses the mythology in question in his review of Stengers’s book: ‘In Hesiod’s Theogony, Gaia is the first mother who brought forth Uranus, the sky, and with him bore the Titans, including Chronos, their leader. Chronos overthrew Uranus and ruled over the Golden Age, before being defeated in turn by his own son, Zeus. For Stengers, Gaia is a blind and indifferent God, a figure from a time before Greek Gods had scruples.’ See Wark 2015.

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 169 processes that were utterly unassimilable to it. The event ushered both of them, both the solar system and Galileo, into a different relation, a new assemblage. But Galileo acted as a capital-s Scientist when he called this discovery a triumph of Man only, of Man’s Rational Method, ignoring the role played by the solar system. These two different relations to the event, and to naming, are also what we see with Eeyore and his father.

He Orients Himself With His Little Song as Best He Can When Eeyore says ‘It is, a water rail’ and ‘It is, a warbler’ is he naming his own ability to triumph over disability and silence, as his father would have it? Or is he rather naming the birds’ ability, in Stengers’s words, to make him think and imagine? Indifferent to Itō Shizuo, he is attuned to a set of more-than-human frequencies, intensities, and rhythms that appeal directly to his ears and his skin. Demanding neither love nor protection, these intensities present themselves as the stuff from which perhaps we can say Eeyore himself makes a home—his only home, his first home. That is, when suburban Tokyo intrudes on him and he responds by tuning his body to snatches of birdsong on radio and television, he reminds us of a boy from Thousand Plateaus whom Deleuze and Guattari introduce to talk about the relationship between territory and musical refrains: ‘A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath [. . .] Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 311). Like Stengers’s small-s scientist, Deleuze and Guattari’s (small-m) musician uses the event of the encounter with materiality, here sonority, both to confront chaos and to filter it. Might this also be what Eeyore is doing during repeated stretches of bedtime listening? From the undifferentiated din of his world, he selects vibrations and rhythms his body feels uniquely capable of engaging, using them to mark a territory.10 Then, on the day in question, from his father’s shoulders in Kita Karuizawa, perhaps he imitates the voice of the announcer for the first time not because he wants to communicate with his father but because he wants to provide a cue from the missing tape, and make the next bird sing. Perhaps he wants to recreate his own personal shelter. If so, the scene Boku recounts so pleasurably—the gathering dusk, the birch grove, the man-made lake engineered by Hōsei University—may be exactly what Eeyore aims to filter down by means of a more manageable succession of mini-concerts. To clarify, we are talking about two distinctions here. First is the distinction between intrusion and shelter, between being forced to think and using that force

10 The scene recalls David Abram’s point that avian songs, companion calls, begging calls, aggression calls, and especially alarm calls are keenly monitored by most every animal in the forest, who listen for ‘the news’ as only birds in flight can know and tell it. On the topic of safety and shelter, Abram adds, ‘[p]erhaps for this reason, the sacred language regularly attributed by tribal peoples to their most powerful shamans is often referred to as “the language of the birds.” A keen attunement to the vocal discourse of the feathered folk has been a necessary survival skill for almost every indigenous community’ (2010, 196).

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to create a frame or sieve within which to engage chaos in a limited way, be it scientific or artistic.11 Stengers’s approach to ecological catastrophe is Deleuzean in the sense that this distinction is Deleuzean. In any given event, because at least one partner is always more-than-human, always ‘chaos,’ we have to be humble and aim not for mastery but rather for some small co-assemblage or co-territory, which is by definition both imperiling and sheltering at once. If we achieve it, we give it a name: ‘heliocentrism,’ ‘Gaia,’ ‘warbler.’ The second distinction is between this way of thinking, with and in events, and an Enlightenment way of thinking, which is neither humble nor environmental, and which tends not to end but to begin with naming: Galileo’s ‘rational method,’ chanted in unison with other guardians of reason and progress; Boku’s ‘It is, a warbler,’ chanted in unison (supposedly) with his dead friend, with Itō Shizuo, and with Eeyore. This sense of unison is exactly what Boku amplifies in his third and final scene of bumping up against the limits of his humanism. It is the story’s culminating scene, and it takes place on a spring morning when Eeyore is 28 and commuting with his father to the welfare center where he works. We read that Eeyore now suffers from epilepsy. Boku is lost in thought on the train platform, admiring the blossoms of a flower whose name he learned from his dead friend. He does not notice the onset of an epileptic seizure until Eeyore is falling toward an oncoming train. Lurching forward to intervene, Boku injures his skull and wakes, bleeding, on the platform. He tries to comfort his son by complaining about the accident. ‘Eeyore, Eeyore, What a mess!’ he says. ‘What in the world is this?’ (Ōe 1992, 21). Just then Eeyore catches the song of a warbler trilling down from a grove above the station and replies in a crisp, neutral voice, ‘It is, a warbler’ (22). The reply transports his father from the darkness of cranial injury to the light of soulful communion, inverting the roles of hurt and healthy, child and parent. Readers can’t help admiring how seamlessly the story has put Itō Shizuo’s poetry in Eeyore’s mouth: ‘Nevertheless, I remember “watashi no tamashii” [our collective soul]/And so, a single poem, which even I do not believe/rises to my lips (8).’ Just like the narrator in Itō’s poem, Eeyore believes nothing of the poetry of Enlightenment. Regardless, it ‘rises to his lips’ and convinces his father that it is indeed the destiny of Man to triumph in the face of head injuries of every sort. Beginning with Itō’s poem, Boku ends there too. Literary humanism is like his own personal scientific method, repeatable and reliable.

Sugimoto Hidetarō as Ecocritic If Ōe returns to ‘Light-Circling Bird’ after 3.11, and if that return feels forced, I think it is because he uses the text to evoke this same lack of humility, this

11 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari give three names to these frames or ‘planes’ that humans have devised to limit some of chaos’s fragments and make them useful: ‘the plane of immanence of philosophy, the plane of composition of art, and the plane of reference of science’ (1994, 216). These parallels between philosophy, art, and science are what I have in mind when I use Stengers’s remarks on science to think about the Hikari-figure’s relation to music. Stengers discusses the three planes in Stengers 2005.

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 171 same overconfident repetition, vis-à-vis the triple disaster. In his Mitō Culture Hall speech from June 2011, Ōe speaks of recovery as the ‘destiny of Man.’ His closing remarks emphasize that if we make good on our duty to transmit what we know about the terror of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and if we make ourselves vessels for ‘the communication of the dead’—he borrows the phrase from T. S. Eliot and includes Nishiwaki Junzaburō’s translation—then we will have overcome panic and met the challenge of 3.11 (Ōe 2011e, 269). It is the same argument we find in most of his post-Fukushima speeches. His steadfast conviction is that, in the same way that the language of Japan’s 1947 ‘peace constitution’ both marked and outlawed the suffering of World War II aggression, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in particular, so too must antinuclear legislation both commemorate and eradicate the suffering of 3.11. What Ōe hails as transcendent is thus less the event of the triple meltdown than the political idealism of postwar democracy as articulated in the postwar constitution’s preamble and Article Nine. Repeatedly invoking his love for specific words—the Preamble’s ‘resolve’ (ketsui) to renounce violence and Article Nine’s ‘aspiration’ (kikyū) to international peace—he is naming a particular personally cherished history of postwar Japanese reason and progress and implying that if antinuclear legislation does not prevail, it is this history, more than any specific irradiated bodies, that will suffer.12 We see this clearly in a Sayonara Genpatsu speech from September 2011 where he demands whether, if nuclear power is not outlawed, ‘[Will] Fukushima not have render[ed] completely meaningless the decision (ketsui) we made directly after the war? [. . .] It certainly seems that what began with Hiroshima and Nagasaki will have ended with Fukushima’ (2011d, 19). Yet if Eeyore is not playing this game, if he is not interested, like both Boku in 1991 and Ōe in 2011, in naming ‘a special luminosity that transcends everyday life’ (Ōe 1992, 15), what might he be naming with his train-platform invocation of the line ‘It is, a warbler’? What is remarkable about ‘Light-Circling Bird’ is that the father-narrator Boku himself offers an answer, if only fleetingly. In a scene just prior to the platform scene, he confesses that his history of reading Itō’s poem contains a rogue chapter in which he discovers an interpretation far superior to his own by literature scholar Sugimoto Hidetarō (1931−2015). In an afterword to Iwanami Bunko’s 1989 Collected Poems of Itō Shizuo, Sugimoto argues that the key to understanding Warbler is to read it as a response to the poem that comes just prior in Itō’s original 1935 anthology (Sugimoto 2007). This prior poem, titled If Anything, They Are the Ones Who Sing My Today (Mushiro karera ga watashi no kyō o utau) makes fun of poets who credit themselves with the romantic accomplishment of ‘singing bright short days.’ If anything, says the narrator of the earlier poem, ‘It’s the days themselves that cunningly have chosen/the good times, the good places’ (Ōe 1992, 17).13 He continues: ‘I do not sing such days./ 12 He discusses the verbs ketsui suru and kikyū suru in numerous speeches; see for instance Ōe 2011a, 51, 2011b, 47, 2011d, 18. 13 For Itō’s If Anything poem, originally number 26 in a 28-poem sequence from 1935 titled Song of sorrow I address to someone (Waga hito ni atafuru aika), see Itō 2007, 67. Warbler is number 27.

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As for days that were short and bright,/If anything, they are the ones who sing my today’ (17). Both ‘Light-Circling Bird’ and Ōe’s June 2011 retelling at Mitō take time to unpack Boku’s exegesis of the Sugimoto afterword in which Boku connects the agency of the bright days in the first poem with the agency of the warbler in the second to reveal a strikingly event-centered way of thinking about poetry, and art in general: According to Sugimoto, Itō’s narrator believes not in the self-generativity of a soul, but rather in what visits the soul from without and causes it to sing, like an instrument. [. . .] There is no such thing as a ‘my soul’ that sings out spontaneously of its own accord, as a manifestation of internal strength. (Ōe 1992, 18, 2011e, 258) Here Boku acknowledges the possibility that a self can be nothing until plucked from without like an instrument. He recognizes that to compose a poem can be not to represent a subject or to speak a soul but to name a musical assemblage, to frame a strumming. This works well as an aesthetic theory of the platform scene itself from ‘Light-Circling Bird,’ which is framing a vivid musical assemblage of dizziness, convulsion, train wind, paternal embrace, cement, blood, gasps, crowds, and stationmaster instructions. When Eeyore draws the warbler into the mix, perhaps it is another effort both to confront and to filter: to attune himself to a more limited refrain within the greater epileptic cacophony that is causing him to sing, like an instrument. Eeyore’s gesture underscores the difference between inventing a luminosity that transcends everyday life and orienting oneself by means of a resonance immanent to it. Unfortunately, by the time we arrive at the actual platform scene, Boku has disinherited this distinction. ‘Too depressing!’ he says, rejecting Sugimoto and returning to his original interpretation of Itō’s poem.

Reading Edward Said’s Sheet Music after 3.11 Let us turn now to a scene from our second text, Ōe’s 2009 novel Death by Water, where we find a similar pattern of implicit ecocriticism beneath the explicit humanism that would override it. Ōe mentions Death by Water in one of his first lectures after 3.11, at an April 9, 2011 gathering of the Kamakura Article Nine Association.14 Originally planned to observe the one-year anniversary of the death of Association co-convener Inoue Hisashi (1934−2010), the gathering became an opportunity ‘to think deeply about how to live after the calamity, and use the words and phrases bequeathed by Inoue, about the spirit of the constitution’ (Ōe 2011b, 2). Ōe rises to the occasion with a 14 Ōe co-convened the Article Nine Association (Kyūjō no kai) with eight other public intellectuals in 2004 to counter LDP attacks on the peace clause in the postwar constitution. It boasts more than 5,000 chapters throughout Japan and sponsors regular national and local lectures, maintaining an active website in five languages. See Kyūjō no kai ofuishiaru saito 2017.

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 173 close reading of Inoue’s 1994 play The Face of Jizō (Chichi to kuraseba) (Inoue 2004). Set in Hiroshima in 1945, the play evokes for Ōe the love, through language and storytelling, by which parents and children can take care of each other, even amid the impossible ethics of nuclear catastrophe. Despite Inoue’s example, Ōe worries out loud about whether he and his wife will be able to take care of their disabled adult son, Hikari, after they are dead, especially given the nuclear accident. This is the context in which he mentions Death by Water, which features an argument and reconciliation between a father-narrator, here called Kogito, and an intellectually disabled music-composer son, here called Akari.15 Ōe explains that Inoue had read Death by Water on his deathbed in 2010 and written in the margin that he found the reconciliation unconvincing. Conceding that Inoue is probably right, Ōe vows before his comrades in the Article Nine Association to write one last novel that finally expresses his love properly, by means of a ‘comprehensive revision of [the] Akari’ figure (Ōe 2011b, 43). Is this really necessary? What if a key to negotiating impossible nuclear ethics were already here in the original novel? Death by Water tells the story of son Kogito’s search for the political identity of a father whom readers partially recognize from Ōe’s 1972 story The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (Mizukara waga namida o nugitamau hi, Ōe 1991). Was the father’s death in summer 1945 a far-right gesture of allegiance to the defeated Shōwa Emperor? Kogito’s mother’s will has promised access to a red leather trunk full of family documents that might finally solve the mystery. But in the scene in question, 72-year-old Kogito has just returned to Tokyo from opening the trunk in Shikoku, and he is empty-handed save for an obscure 19th-century text given to his father by a provincial mentor. As Article Nine Association General Secretary and modern Japanese literature scholar Komori Yōichi points out in an essay on this novel, what we have so far is an allegory of Ōe’s own generation, committed to postwar democracy yet haunted by the paternal specter of a selfsacrificial military fanaticism that must be addressed if it is ever to be disinherited (Komori 2010, 215). As if to symbolize Kogito’s commitment to that direct address, a handwritten note from his friend Edward Said (who goes here by his real name) arrives in the mail on the day of his return from Shikoku. At a New Year’s Eve party a decade earlier at the home of Susan Sontag (here called Jean S.), Said had learned of the suicide of Kogito’s brother-in-law Itami Jūzō (here called Hanawa Gorō) and written a condolence note on the back of the piano music he had just been playing, Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Opus 2 Numbers 1−3.16 At the time, the note had been

15 The historical Hikari was 48 years old at the time of the triple disaster. In what was by then a long career as a composer, he had helped score a number of documentaries and films and written the music for four commercially successful CDs: Ōe Hikari 1992, 1994, 1998, 2005. 16 Readers would recognize Said and Sontag as Kogito’s intellectual friends from among other places Ōe 2006, a collection of Asahi Newspaper columns featuring correspondence between Ōe and Said, Sontag, Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Amos Oz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tetsuo Najita, Zheng Yi, Amartya Sen, Noam Chomsky, and Jonathan Schell.

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transcribed by Jean and faxed to Tokyo, where it was tacked above Kogito’s writing desk, memorized, and read aloud in honor of its author at a memorial service upon Said’s death from leukemia six years later. Now the original has arrived by post. The familiar lines read: ‘I’ve just heard from Jean about the difficulties you’ve been having, and therefore thought I’d write and express my solidarity and affection. You are a very strong man and a sensitive one, so the coping will occur, I am sure’ (Ōe 2012a, 188, 2015, 145). Interestingly, Said’s adjective ‘sensitive’ in Kogito’s translation is ‘kanjūsei no aru,’ the same word Boku uses in ‘LightCircling Bird’ to describe Eeyore’s ‘receptivity’ (kanjūsei) to birdsong. Are the two sensitivities similar? The scene proceeds to beg the question as Kogito heads off to a medical appointment for his son where they get stuck for a long time in a waiting room. Eager to turn his attention to the text from the red leather trunk, he purchases Akari’s silence by letting him hold Said’s copy of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Opus 2 Numbers 1−3. We read, Whenever Akari was reading sheet music he would always draw light circles around certain bars or measures with a pencil, exerting barely any force, and add marginalia, the latter being marks whose intent I did not particularly understand. My plan was to transcribe all his markings onto the collection of Beethoven Sonatas I knew we had at home. I thought if I wielded the eraser with particular care, no visible marks would remain on the originals. (Ōe 2015, 141; translation modified using 2012a, 183−4) Readers sense a self-reflexive joke at the father’s expense in the contrast between Akari’s ‘faint penciled notations’ (chikara o irenai enpitsugaki) which Kogito will be eager to erase, and what a page earlier we encounter as Said’s ‘penciled annotations’ (kare no enpitsugaki) on the same score, which are the first things Kogito looks for when he opens the package from New York. Especially if Kogito plans to transcribe Akari’s symbols, how can he dismiss them so lightly as ‘marks whose intent I did not particularly understand?’ The subtle humor quickly evaporates as Kogito returns from the cashier’s window to find that a fellow patient has lent Akari a ballpoint pen with which he has scrawled ‘K. 550’ across Said’s score. Kogito shouts ‘You’re an idiot!’ (Kima wa, baka da!). And he shouts it again a week later at home when Akari blasts the stereo in a futile effort to remake his point that the second sonata in Beethoven’s Opus 2 Numbers 1−3 resembles Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550. In his reading of the novel, Komori Yōichi argues that what Death by Water performs here is a recitation of two moments in Natsume Sōseki’s 1914 novel Kokoro, when K tells Sensei that he too is baka (an idiot). According to Komori, the question of whether Kogito and Akari will be able to reconcile is linked to the question of how well both relate to the members of an experimental drama troupe. The troupe, which had originally grown famous for its production of Kogito’s 1972 story The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (the same title as Ōe’s 1972 text), is now developing an innovative dramaturgy for Sōseki’s Kokoro

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 175 involving audience participation and voting. Komori maintains that this celebration of democratic dramaturgy makes Death by Water an important departure from earlier Ōe novels that ‘revolve around life with a disabled son and how to recover, as humans, from the family crises that arise’ (Komori 2010, 216). Using Said’s definition of ‘late style,’ which serves as an explicit touchstone for the drama troupe as well, Komori proposes that Ōe’s achievement in creating both the drama troupe and Death by Water is not recovery and reconciliation but irresolution and contradiction.17 If, in Kokoro, the one who commits suicide to follow the emperor in death is called ‘baka,’ then the one leveling the charge is not wrong. Similarly, in Death by Water, if Kogito is allowed to call Akari ‘baka’ without apologizing, he is also not wrong, not because Akari is actually an idiot, but because the point of a novel ‘in late style’ is to harness the energy of unsynthesized, irreconcilable conflict. Komori’s point is that whereas the Japanese Right is perennially intent on silencing this sort of debate, Ōe aims to open it as boisterously as possible.

Speaking Truth to Power in an Age of Three Thieves It is a tenuous argument to the extent that the anti-fascist politics of Komori, Said, and Ōe seem themselves tightly synthesized and reconciled. We sense this in the novel’s portrait of the leader of the experimental drama troupe, a woman named Unaiko. Like Kogito, Unaiko is trying to disinherit a fascist father figure. Hers is the uncle who raped and impregnated her when she was a teen, then silenced her lest she derails his career in the Ministry of Education, where he was a high-ranking textbook scrubber and comfort-woman denier. Unaiko’s innovative stagecraft, which performs a democratic indictment of Sōseki’s Sensei, is thus very much in the tradition of ‘speaking truth to power’ elaborated by Said in his 2004 book Humanism and Democratic Criticism.18 Ōe invokes this tradition in a June 2011 Article Nine Association speech when he remembers how he and Said loved the verb ‘to articulate,’ having both been born in 1935, the year The Oxford English Dictionary says it came into wide use. Livid about the government’s failure to take responsibility for the nuclear disaster, Ōe channels Said to promise his audience, ‘although we are weak humans, we say things clearly, and we resist!’ (Ōe 2011a, 46). No doubt this is what Komori has in mind as well in his reading of Death by Water and what Kogito has in mind when he invokes ‘solidarity’ and ‘affection’ at Said’s memorial service: political participation through clarity and conviction of language. Yet what we notice when we arrive at this solidarity by way of the waiting room scene is its tone deafness to an incommensurable but environmentally much more relevant set of questions. 17 For Said’s concept of ‘late style’ see Said 2006. Ōe alludes to this book with the title of the novel he wrote after Death by Water, In Late Style (In reito sutairu). See Ōe 2013a. 18 Humanism and Democratic Criticism identifies the role of writers who are also public intellectuals to be one of ‘speaking the truth to power, being a witness to persecution and suffering, and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority’ (Said 2004, 128). Said praises Ōe by positioning him in a lineage of Nobel Literature laureates who do this (20).

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How exactly do musical scores absorb Akari’s attention for long periods when written texts do not? What is he doing when he writes on Said’s score, not ‘K.550,’ which seems obvious, but ‘numerous small circles and annotations in faint pencil’ (Ōe 2015, 141)? What is he hearing? How do these acts of notation and aural imagination relate to his process of composition? What small-s science and small-m music have in common is a Deleuzean distinction between sensation and opinion, intensity and signification, vibration and narration. In each pair of terms, only the former concerns itself with what Stengers would call a ‘properly materialist’ mode of engagement (Stengers 2015, 52). This is why her book In Catastrophic Times underscores the environmental imperative of achieving such modes now that the Earth’s developed economies have come to be ruled by a triumvirate, the ‘Three Thieves’ she calls them, of Entrepreneur, State and capital-s ‘Science.’ When Science is in the service of Entrepreneurs, as the disappearance of the line between public and private research increasingly demands, and when the State allows those same Entrepreneurs to appropriate our other resources as well (nonirradiated soil, air, water), we lose our ability to question the claim that capitalism is ‘the only system proven to work’ (31). We lose our ability because we lose our ‘commons,’ our source since before capitalism of any and all ‘concrete collective intelligence’ (84). Stengers rejects Hardt and Negri’s idea that in a knowledge economy we are all ‘workers of the immaterial’ (83). Her central claim is that if we are going to respond to the intrusion of Gaia in a way that is not barbaric, we need more than language, more than immateriality. We need the spirit that small-s science adopts when it attributes every last one of its insights to ‘facts that [themselves] have the power to testify to the manner in which they must be interpreted’ (70). Do ‘facts’ like these present themselves in the case of Akari? Here it is interesting to note that although Kogito and Komori do not ask such questions vis-àvis the fictional Akari, journalist Lindsley Cameron has devoted an entire book to them vis-à-vis the historical Hikari. In The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe, Cameron offers a detailed review of literature on ‘musical savantism,’ the phenomenon in which people with serious mental handicaps have ‘islands of ability or brilliance.’ According to Cameron, what Stengers would call ‘facts that have the power to testify’ make definitive intrusions in the lives of the vast majority (Cameron 1998, 132). She notes for instance how neuroscience and psychology have observed many musical savants to be both autistic and visually impaired (Hikari is both), such that their abilities rely on a ‘deep but narrow’ musical memory that is ‘automatic, emotion-free, and based on habit and intuition rather than symbolic connections or associations’ (135). The automaticity of this memory accounts not only for the absolute pitch shared by all musical savants but also for the intensity of focus we see fictional Akari exhibit in the doctor’s office. Cameron writes that we should imagine the musical savant’s relation to a Beethoven sonata or a Mozart symphony less as an ability to remember than as an ‘inability to forget’ (158). Yet while most musical savants use their memories for virtuoso piano performances, Hikari is to date the only documented composer. And although he can play the piano haltingly, he generally composes entirely in his head, writing his scores out longhand in silence,

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 177 then waiting for hired flutists, pianists, and violinists to make them formally audible.19 This suggests a synesthetic element to his artistic process, evidence that the raw force of the music—its sensation and intensity—exists prior to the form it takes, be it visual, tactile, or aural. Indeed, Cameron speaks of his ability to ‘see’ people’s voices (Cameron 1998, 138). For Hikari’s parents, siblings, caretakers, music teachers, doctors, and biographers, the very ability to discern these facts is like what in small-s science Stengers calls ‘a rare achievement that opens up a new field of questions and possibilities to those whom it concerns’ (Stengers 2015, 69). It is what, in small-s science, puts researchers into tension and forces them to ‘imagine, bustle about [and] object’ (79). In other words, Hikari’s musical sensibility is itself what Stengers would call a ‘commons’—a source of ‘concrete collective intelligence’ that causes his extended circle to think and create. Of course, it is cheating to substitute Cameron’s reading of the historical Hikari for a reading of the fictional Akari in Death by Water. So let us end with a glimpse of Akari-as-commons that may also serve to give ecocritical credit to Kogito as caregiver. It comes in the final scene of the argument chapter, in which Kogito, upset but still refusing to apologize, retreats to his room to seek solace in a book. There he is overcome by a dizzy spell. As he watches the columns of his text and their white page edges fall sideways in his fingers, he remembers the English word ‘marginalia,’ and a party years earlier where he discussed it with an architect and an anthropologist, both of whom, like him, had often addressed the problem of marginality in their work. He also remembers a third friend, the composer Takamura, who resolutely ignored this conversation only to unveil shortly afterward a ‘deeply beautiful’ new composition called Marginalia (the title of an actual 1976 orchestra piece by Ōe’s friend Takemitsu Tōru) (Ōe 2012a, 197, 2015, 152). It is as if Takamura is telling Kogito’s unconscious to make room for a different definition of marginalia. It is as if, in this moment of dizzy chaos, Kogito finally acknowledges that he should care about Akari’s ‘numerous small circles and annotations in faint pencil,’ that perhaps some sensibilities can only be appreciated by ignoring what Kogito and his humanist friends are saying among themselves. Materially, it seems fitting that he is forced to imagine this only after an intense week of fraught parenting in the close confines of a suburban Tokyo house. Akari has become his ‘commons’ after all. If Death by Water were a film, the scene might well be scored with the experimental strains of Takemitsu’s Marginalia, which evoke a line from Deleuze: ‘Music attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous’ (Deleuze 2003, 48; Takemitsu 1976).

References Abram, David. 2010. Becoming Animal: And Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books. Cameron, Lindsley. 1998. The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe. New York: Free Press.

19 Ōe also discusses Hikari’s largely silent compositional process, for instance in Ōe 1995, 35−56.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Inoue Hisashi. 2004. The Face of Jizō (Chichi to kuraseba). Translated by Roger Pulvers. Tokyo: Komatsuza. Itō Shizuo. 2007. Itō Shizuo shishū, edited by Sugimoto Hidetarō. Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko. Komori Yōichi. 2010. ‘Teikō suru kotoba no chikara: Ōe Kenzaburō Suishi o yomu.’ Sekai 803: 210−7. Kyūjō no kai ofuishiaru saito. 2017. [online] www.9-jo.jp/ [Accessed January 10, 2019]. Long, Margherita. 2017. ‘Ecopolitics and Affect Theory in Ōe’s Post-Fukushima Activism: On Shame, Contempt and Care.’ In Ecocriticism and Japan, edited by Hisaaki Wake, Keijirō Suga, and Masami Yūki, 121–138. New York: Lexington Books. Ōe Hikari. 1992. Ōe Hikari no ongaku. Tokyo: Nippon Columbia, Co., Ltd. ———. 1994. Ōe Hikari futatabi. Tokyo: Nippon Columbia, Co., Ltd. ———. 1998. Atarashii Ōe Hikari. Tokyo: Nippon Columbia, Co., Ltd. ———. 2005. Mō ichidō Ōe Hikari. Tokyo: Nippon Columbia, Co., Ltd. Ōe Kenzaburō. 1991. Mizukara waga namida o nugitamau hi. Tokyo: Kōdansha Bungei Bunko. ———. 1992. ‘Hi o megurasu tori.’ In Boku ga hontō ni wakakatta koro, 7−22. Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. 1995. ‘Atarashii Hikari no ongaku to fukumari ni tsuite.’ In Aimai na Nihon no watashi, 35−56. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 2006. Bōryoku ni sakuratte kaku: Ōe Kenzaburō ōfuku shokan. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha. ———. 2011a. ‘Heiwa o tsukuridasu ketsui.’ In Genpatsu e no hifukujū: Watashitachi ga ketsui shita koto, edited by Tsurumi Shunsuke et al., 46−60. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 2011b. ‘Kyūjō o bungaku to shite yomu.’ In Torikaeshi no tsukanai mono o, torikaesu tame ni: Daishinsai to Inoue Hisashi, edited by Komori Yōichi et al., 38−58. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 2011c. ‘Nous Sommes Sous Le Regard Des Victimes.’ Interview by Philippe Pons. Le Monde, March 17. [online] lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/2011/03/20/ kenzaburo-oe-nous-sommes-sous-le-regard-des-victimes-via-tout-sur-la-chine/ [Accessed March 7, 2012]. ———. 2011d. ‘ “Sayonara Genpatsu” no rarī ni kuwawaru.’ In Sayōnara genpatsu, edited by Kamata Satoshi, 16−22. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 2011e. ‘Yomu koto, manabu koto, soshite keiken—shikamo (watashi no tamashii) wa kioku suru.’ In Yomu ningen, 244−70. Tokyo: Shūeisha Bunko. ———. 2012a. Suishi. Tokyo: Kōdansha Bunko. ———. 2012b. Teigishū. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Shuppan. ———. 2012c. ‘Watashitachi wa “bujoku” no naka de ikete iru.’ Hatsugenroku: Sayonara genpatsu jūman’nin shūkai. Sayonara Genpatsu, July 16. [online] www.sayonara-nukes. org/2012/07/120716hatugen/ [Accessed June 11, 2017]. ———. 2013a. Ban’nen yōshiki shū: in reito sutairu (In Late Style). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. 2013b. ‘Kono kuni wa minshūshugi no kuni ka.’ In Ima, kenpō no tamashii o erabitoru, edited by Ōe et al., 8−20. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Humanism and the Hikari-Event 179 ———. 2015. Death by Water. Translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm. New York: Grove Press. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature. New York: Bantam Books. Said, Edward. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. On Late Style. New York: Vintage. Stengers, Isabelle. 1997. Power and Invention: Situating Science. Translated by Paul Bains. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message.’ Angelaki 10 (2): 151−67. ———. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press. Sugimoto Hidetarō. 2007. ‘Atogaki.’ In Itō Shizuo shishū. Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko. Takemitsu Tōru. 1976. ‘Marginalia.’ Recorded October 1976. YouTube video, 13:50. Posted March 2013. [online] www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJmb0kPWY_M [Accessed January 10, 2018]. Treat, John Whittier. 1995. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2015. ‘Barbarism or Barbarism?’ Public Seminar (blog), December 28. [online] www.publicseminar.org/2015/12/stengers/#.WLjDmBCAQwgon [Accessed January 10, 2018].

10 Afterword Chernobyl’s Past and Fukushima’s Remembered Future Rachel DiNitto

Writing this afterword in the spring of 2020, a little less than a year away from the 10th anniversary of the 3.11 disaster, I am ever cognizant of the idea of commemoration, but I am also conscious of futurity. The concept of the future struck me as I observed remembrances of the Chernobyl accident in American popular culture in 2019, now over 30 years after that accident, specifically the HBO/Sky UK television five-part miniseries Chernobyl (Renck 2019) and the Netflix German television show Dark (Odar 2017).1 These led me to wonder how the Fukushima accident will be remembered in another 20 years, and how Japanese fiction writers have already been trying to imagine that very future. In this afterword, I put these remembrances of Chernobyl in dialogue with the visions of the future that appear in Japanese fiction (stories and novels by writers including Tsushima Yūko, Tawada Yōko, Yoshimura Man’ichi, and Kirino Natsuo) as a means to collectively imagine Fukushima’s afterlife. I structure my essay around three binaries—fact/fiction, rupture/cyclical futurity, and spectacle/slow violence—realizing the problematic nature of binaries but also the potential for dialogue across the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters. Representations of these two disasters engage with a discourse of fact, authenticity, and truth, but these representations are fictional, and in many ways, we are living in a post-truth or postfact world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction or to verify facts.2 My second binary refers to the temporal rupture that often accompanies major disasters and tragedies, producing a sense of life before and after. But rather than rupture, I consider the opposite, namely the cyclical nature of returning to the past as a means to imagine the future. My last binary opposes the spectacle of the nuclear accident with the less visible and dramatic effects of radiation. Reviews of Chernobyl commented on the ‘gorgeously eerie visuals’ of HBO’s ‘disaster movie’ (Press 2019; Hale 2019). These visuals grab the audience in a way that stories about the long-term effects of the invisible, slow violence of radiation contamination and internal exposure cannot.

1 Chernobyl premiered in the US on June 6, 2019, and Dark in December 2017. The second season of Dark premiered in June 2019, and the show is currently in production for its third and final season. 2 Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2018 discusses these issues as they relate to food safety post-Fukushima.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003285328-15

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Why use TV shows about Chernobyl to talk about cultural production in the wake of the Fukushima accident? Rather than evaluate the limitations and advantages of these different media, the dialogue across binaries—and their respective events, temporalities, and national discourses—reveals key issues about the process of remembering nuclear disasters. The discussions generated by HBO’s Chernobyl raise questions that Japanese artists and writers are currently wrestling with: How do we use fiction to investigate fact? What is at stake in fictional representations? What is the relationship between visibility and an accurate historical record? Can a fictional representation of a nuclear accident impact public perceptions of nuclear power? How does fiction intervene in the public memory of such disasters? Over a quarter of a century after a major nuclear accident, we can see how representations of it engage with the current discourse on nuclear power and disasters and reveal what we choose to remember and forget. These cultural productions allow us to gaze into the public imaginary and into our own future.

Remembering Chernobyl We are in an era of heightened visibility for the Chernobyl accident. In ‘An Illustrated Guide to the Post-Catastrophe Future,’ Phillips and Ostaszewski (2012) consider plans for various projects (hypothetical and real) to revitalize the 30 km zone of alienation around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), and how those narratives imagine Chernobyl’s future. These include visions of it as a site of extreme, toxic, dark tourism; a place of video game-inspired horror and zombies; a wildlife sanctuary; a park; a farming zone; a historic landmark; a museum; an art colony; and a nuclear waste facility. Chernobyl is also a site for tales of heroism and a metaphor for other disasters, be they political or environmental. Judging by the plethora of narratives about Chernobyl, there are any number of possible ‘remembered futures’ for the Fukushima accident. By ‘remembered futures’ I refer to the relationship between the past and future, and the way that the present and past figure into visions of that future. Although I will not produce a list for the Fukushima accident, a number of these Chernobyl narratives could easily take root in discussions about the Fukushima accident site.

Fact Versus Fiction I begin with my first binary: fact versus fiction. We may be in an era of heightened visibility for Chernobyl, but visibility is not necessarily reflective of clarity or consensus regarding fact, accuracy, or truth. Rather, as Olga Kuchinskaya argues, visibility ‘depends on how the problem is identified and framed’ (Kuchinskaya 2014, 7). With that in mind, I want to investigate HBO’s Chernobyl for the ways it identifies and frames the accident and the discourse on fact. This miniseries began airing in the US in May 2019. Over the course of five episodes, it tells the story of the accident, taking viewers inside the plant as it is exploding. It follows the cleanup efforts on the ground as well as the Soviet government’s deliberations and attempts at a cover-up. The final episode centers

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on a closed trial of plant directors and engineers, as the ‘truth’ of the cause of the accident is revealed by investigation commission chief and chemist Valery Legasov’s dramatic testimony. The miniseries draws from the recollections of locals in the town of Pripyat and members of the cleanup crew as told to Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in her book Voices from Chernobyl (2005).3 The show received critical acclaim in America but also engendered debate over the accuracy of its retelling.4 The official website describes it as a ‘faithful reimagining,’ but critics, popular scientists, nuclear activists (pro and anti), and Russian citizens argued over the veracity of small and large historical details—from fictional plot interventions to aspects of set design.5 But some critics assert these discussions about accuracy miss the point (Nicholson 2019). A similar criticism has been made about Tatsuta Kazuto’s manga Ichi-F: A Record of Working at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant (Ichiefu: Fukushima Daiichi genshiryoku hatsudensho rōdōki 2017).6 The manga is based on Tatsuta’s experience as a cleanup and construction worker during 2012 and 2014 at the ‘1F,’ as the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) is called by insiders. But, as Ryan Holmberg argues, Tatsuta’s emphasis on what Holmberg calls trivial information—details about the commute to the plant and different types of protective clothing—overloads readers who ‘lose sight of the real issues, namely how to counteract nuclear disaster and how to ensure tolerably safe conditions for the clean-up crews’ (Holmberg 2015, 119). In other words, the inclusion of such details or facts in the miniseries or manga does not always lead to the truth or to matters of essential importance. Countering the focus on the accuracy of details in HBO’s Chernobyl, a New York Times critic argued that a lot of things were made up, but ‘[i]n the end, though, none of this really matters. For the miniseries gets a basic truth right—that the Chernobyl disaster was more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than it was about bad engineering or abysmal management and training’ (Fountain 2019).7 Japanese fictional representations of the Fukushima accident also emphasize the ‘lies, deceit and a rotting political system.’ Mystery writer Kirino Natsuo’s novel Baraka (2016) depicts the corrupt alliance between the Japanese government and nuclear industry as they seek to ‘disappear’ antinuclear activists and convince the public that nuclear power is safe in the wake of a massive nuclear power plant accident that turned all of eastern Japan into an evacuation zone. Other fictional works also depict a government that controls the post-accident population through misinformation campaigns, as seen in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary (Kentōshi 2018 [2014]), Yoshimura Man’ichi’s Bollard Disease (Borārobyō 2014), and Tsushima Yūko’s ‘Celebrating Half-Life’ (Hangenki o iwatte 2016).8 3 4 5 6 7

Alexievich’s book was originally published in Russian in 1997. The show won two Golden Globes and ten Emmys. See the official website: www.hbo.com/chernobyl Tatsuta’s manga was originally published in Japanese between 2013 and 2015. Fountain’s byline says he is a science writer for the New York Times who toured the Chernobyl NPP and exclusion zone in 2014. 8 Tawada’s novel was originally published in Japanese in 2014.

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I want to return to the previous New York Times quotation and to an argument at the end that I purposely left off: In the end, though, none of this really matters. For the mini-series gets a basic truth right—that the Chernobyl disaster was more about lies, deceit, and a rotting political system than it was about bad engineering or abysmal management and training or, for that matter, about whether nuclear power is inherently good or bad. [Italics are my own] It is hard to imagine that HBO’s Chernobyl is not a condemnation of, or at a minimum, a warning about nuclear power. It incited debate on the safety of nuclear power, including an editorial by a former US Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair with the title ‘I oversaw the U.S. nuclear power industry. Now I think it should be banned,’ and prompted the Nuclear Energy Institute to run pronuclear ads on Google (Jaczko 2019; Saraiya 2019).9 However, the argument that HBO’s Chernobyl is not about nuclear power is repeated by a number of critics as well as the show’s writer, Craig Mazin, who argued: ‘The lesson of Chernobyl isn’t that modern nuclear power is dangerous. The lesson is that lying, arrogance, and suppression of criticism are dangerous’ (Shellenberger 2019b). Pronuclear lobbyist Michael Shellenberger quotes Mazin here in an attempt to convince viewers of HBO’s miniseries that nuclear power is safe, or at least not something they need to worry about.10 Shellenberger arrives at his conclusions about the safety of nuclear power through selective, and some would say irresponsible, use of energy statistics and depictions of antinuclear activists as ‘fear monger[ing]’ and citizen concern as ‘panicked overreaction’ (Shellenberger 2019a). Arguments about the safety of nuclear power were aggressively promoted in Japan by the nuclear village and their myth of safety (anzen shinwa).11 Tatsuta in Ichi-F also downplays the dangers of nuclear power and suggests that antinuclear movements exaggerate the threat of contamination. Holmberg asserts that Tatsuta’s main message in Ichi-F is the ‘unassailable dignity of hard work,’ and ‘[p]ost meltdown, his manga is the kindest response the nuclear industry can hope for’ (Holmberg 2015, 119). Despite assertions of safety from the nuclear industry, the future imagined in Japanese fiction is anything but safe, nor have the depicted cleanup efforts

9 Jaczko was Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair from 2009 to 2012. For more on nuclear power ads, see Adams 2017. 10 Shellenberger writes articles with titles like ‘It Sounds Crazy, But Fukushima, Chernobyl, And Three Mile Island Show Why Nuclear Is Inherently Safe’ (2019a). For a refutation of Shellenberger see Green 2017, 2018. 11 The nuclear village (genshiryoku mura) refers to the exclusionary political and industrial network that wields power over nuclear policy in Japan, including electric power companies with nuclear power plants, large conglomerates that supply equipment to these plants, central government bureaucracies, and members of the Diet.

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successfully ‘decontaminated’ all the affected areas. In Tawada’s short story ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Fushi no shima 2012), the youths are sick and in need of constant care. She describes them as ‘too feeble to walk or even stand up, with eyes that can barely see, and mouths that can barely swallow or speak’ (Tawada 2012, 9–10). In her sequel, The Emissary, Japan suffers environmental and human crises; it has been many years since children have been able to play outside in nature, and wild animals have virtually disappeared. The climate has become fickle, leading to snow in August and sandstorms in February. Ninety percent of children are physically debilitated, plagued by a constant fever, and have brittle teeth that are too weak to chew most food. The act of eating is painful and the food itself is dangerous. The vision of a contaminated environment also permeates Yoshimura Man’ichi’s Bollard Disease about a community of returnees who rebuild their town after eight years in shelters and temporary housing. They return to a town that is touted as safe, but the children are sick and unexpectedly dying, and the local food is contaminated. Most of the returnees are willing to believe this myth of safety, and those who are not are conveniently disappeared by the authorities.12 Returning to the debates over accuracy, one critic argued that the creators of HBO’s Chernobyl, in an attempt to craft a more confrontational and hence dynamic storyline, ‘cross the line from conjuring a fiction to creating a lie’ (Gessen 2019). Such a comment raises questions about the line between fiction and a lie, but more specifically about the role of fiction, and by extension literature, in such remembrances. It is important to note that HBO’s Chernobyl is not a documentary, and even if it were, documentaries are not free of the influence of fiction. We can ask: What does fiction add to our understanding of these disasters? Why do we read or watch fictional representations about the Fukushima disaster? Writing on atomic bomb fiction, John Treat argued for the value of literature: We read these subjective forms [. . .] because it is there, in the workings of the creative imagination [. . .] that we can discern not how the ‘facts’ of the bombings will be transmitted [. . .] but how the individual and collective imagining of the events circumscribed within those facts will give them their credibility, and necessary terror. (Treat 1995, xv) Treat draws a contrast between the ‘facts’ and our ‘collective imagining’ of them. Certainly, Chernobyl and postdisaster Japanese fiction function as ‘collective imaginings’ that not only recall the specific disaster events but also give voice to the concerns and anxieties in the public imagination. Fictional representations can bring attention to aspects of the disaster overlooked or underrepresented by facts, which can be statistically reductive or misleading. We read fiction for more than its attempts at verisimilitude, in other words, its attempts to capture what 12 For more on this story, see DiNitto 2019, 154–8.

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really happened, even if we experienced the disaster firsthand. This is even more important for disasters where the threat is invisible. As Kuchinskaya argues, ‘the imperceptibility of Chernobyl radiation by the human senses means that individuals’ experience of it is always highly mediated [. . .] by measuring equipment, maps, and other ways to visualize it, but also with narratives’ (Kuchinskaya 2014, 2). Fictional representations of the Fukushima accident qualify as mediating narratives that are critical to our understanding of the disaster. They comment on the presentness of the future and the contingency of the historical moment. Rather than look at stories that attempt to recreate the events of March 2011 in order to evaluate their accuracy, I turn to stories that look into or visualize Japan’s future. Many of these stories provide a warning bell for what that future holds.

Imagining Japan’s Future Japan’s future has been imagined over and over for many decades now. Japan served as a bellwether that warned of America’s possible future after the economic real estate crash in the 1990s and that promised a hopeful future for occupied Iraq in 2004.13 Apocalyptic visions of a dark future drove Komatsu Sakyō’s fictional destruction of the Japanese islands in his novel Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu 1973), anime like Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s Akira (1988), and William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer (1984). Counter to the many world-ending narratives in Japan were stories of Cold War-era fiction that depicted worlds filled with anxiety but ultimately spared nuclear annihilation. By contrast, in the literature about the Fukushima disaster, or what I call in my book ‘Fukushima fiction,’ radioactive contamination is a lived reality that has seeped into and defined daily life (DiNitto 2019). What does that future look like and who lives there? Much like Chernobyl, the areas of Fukushima Prefecture affected by the accident are not empty of people or narratives in either real-life or postdisaster fiction.14 In fictional representations of the disaster area, the space is filled with disaster returnees, nuclear power plant workers, robots, androids, human hybrids, and the disposable (kimin).15 In Gen’yū Sōkyū’s short story ‘Mountain of Light’ (Hikari no yama 2013), Fukushima becomes a booming population center. Tawada imagines the emptying out of Tokyo and the repopulation of Tōhoku, Hokkaido, and Okinawa in The Emissary. In Baraka, the irradiated zone is full of disaster victims (some are irradiated nuclear victims or hibakusha), antinuclear power activists, and immigrant labor, who, among other jobs, do the dirty work of decontamination

13 See articles such as Lehmann 2004. John Dower and Charles Maier debunked this theory. See Wright 2005. 14 According to Phillips and Ostaszewski (2012, 127), a ‘crew of 3,500 Chernobyl NPP staff and zone administrators live and work in the town of Chernobyl.’ 15 For robots, see Fukada Kōji’s film Sayonara (2015) in which a disabled South African emigrant to Japan, Tanya, is left behind in the nuclear zone with her android companion. See Kawakami Hiromi’s Don’t Get Carried Away By A Big Bird (Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō 2016) for human hybrids.

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and decommissioning the NPP. But this does not necessarily mean the area is safe. In Baraka, many of the residents are there out of economic necessity or because they have been misinformed about the dangers by pronuclear campaigns.

Rupture Versus Cyclical Futurity As mentioned earlier, we often associate disaster with rupture. Critics writing on 9/11 assert that disasters mark time in irrevocable, indelible ways, creating predisaster and postdisaster temporalities and spaces (Smelser 2004, 265–6). This sense of rupture is common in postdisaster fiction, and we can talk about the creation of a pre-Chernobyl/Fukushima and post-Chernobyl/Fukushima temporality.16 In my book, I discuss this with respect to fictional stories that describe the sense of a break with the land and its past, when characters are forcibly evacuated and must leave behind their present-day lives, the history of their ancestors, and any hope for a future in their town.17 The discourse of rupture appeared in the early postdisaster climate; the 2011 disaster was initially seen as an opportunity for a break with Japan’s historical support for nuclear power. It seemed the disaster had finally put an end to Japan’s long postwar, ushering in a new era. Postdisaster polls showed a huge reversal in public support for nuclear power from 60 percent in favor in 2009 to 74 percent desiring denuclearization in June 2011, a sentiment evident in widespread antinuclear demonstrations (Hindmarsh 2014, 56). Critics such as Azuma Hiroki, Oguma Eiji, and Akasaka Norio drew attention to the ruptures in the postwar vision of social harmony and the shared sense of economic and national identity (Azuma 2011; Oguma 2011; Akasaka et al. 2011). However, we can also talk about the opposite movement, namely a suturing of temporalities to create a cyclical motion where the present connects to the past, or the past connects to the future. This is the case in the Netflix show Dark, about a small town in Germany with a nuclear power plant that is set to be decommissioned, a reference to the moratorium on nuclear power in Germany inspired by the Fukushima accident. But unlike the ‘rupture in historic time’ (Petryna 1995, 197) attributed to the Chernobyl accident, in Dark an accident at the nuclear power plant (in 1986) creates a wormhole, allowing for historical continuities between present, past, and future. The characters in the show time travel from the postwar construction of the nuclear power plant in 1953, to a post-Chernobyl 1986, to present day 2019 as the decommissioning approaches, and finally to a postapocalyptic future in 2052. Events from the future effect change in the past. The Japanese fictional works do not feature such time travel, but the accidents at the Chernobyl and Fukushima NPPs have created cyclical temporalities. Chernobyl was approaching its 25-year anniversary when the Fukushima 16 This is also seen in works like Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People about the Bhopal disaster: ‘When something big like that night happens, time divides into before and after’ (Sinha 2008, 14). 17 See my discussion of Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s short story ‘To the Next Spring—Obon’ (Mata tsugi no haru e—urabon’e, 2011) (DiNitto 2019, 49–52).

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accident happened, and in many ways, the disaster and mismanagement of Japan’s nuclear accident was a return to the mistakes of Chernobyl and our shared global nuclear past. Sarah Phillips (2013) demonstrates how the Japanese government and nuclear industry, despite their high-tech reputation for safety, repeated many of the mistakes of the former Soviet government when dealing with the nuclear disaster. For Germans, Fukushima breathed life into the memory of Chernobyl and forced a rethinking of its status as a singular event from the past. In 2014, Germany’s foremost mystery writer Mechtild Borrmann published The Other Half of Hope (Die andere Hälfte der Hoffnung), a novel based on material she collected in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. In an afterword to the Japanese translation of her book, Borrmann said the novel was ‘born of the Fukushima nuclear accident.’ ‘It is beyond tragic to think that if “Fukushima” had not happened, we might have forgotten about the catastrophe of Chernobyl.’18 The Fukushima accident may have acted as a catalyst urging the Nobel Committee to award the prize to Svetlana Alexievich in 2015. For Japanese fiction, the most common cycle is a return to wartime Japan. The year 2015 witnessed a flood of prize-winning Japanese fictional works on the Second World War.19 The 2011 disaster and its aftermath stirred up memories of the war, as writers employed the analogy of war to bring home the destructive toll 2011 took on the Japanese public and their trust in the government.20 Writer Setouchi Jakuchō compared the Fukushima accident to the war as yet another ‘man-made disaster’ (jinsai), countering claims by TEPCO (the operator of the Fukushima NPP) that the blame lay squarely with the shinsai or natural disasters of earthquake and tsunami (Setouchi 2012, 435). Writer Satō Yūya sensed the memory of the war lurking everywhere in postdisaster Japan, specifically in the return of wartime terminology, and novelist and critic Takahashi Gen’ichirō also found himself besieged by war memories (Satō 2013, 87). For Takahashi, the empty store shelves, long gas lines, and images of refugees freezing in dark gymnasiums were none other than ‘scenes from war (senjika)’ (Takahashi et al. 2011). But for Takahashi, the comparison moves into the realm of condemnation when he recalls the iconic image of World War II, which was recreated in 2011. The footage of the mushroom cloud that escaped the explosion of reactor 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP was, in Takahashi’s words, an image that caused the ‘resurfacing of memories long since sealed off, memories of another enormous nuclear cloud that brought an end to the war 66 years ago.’21 Before discussing the cyclical futurity of postdisaster Japanese fiction, it is necessary to mention a different yet prevalent recurring postdisaster discourse,

18 Borrmann is quoted in Kimura, who is quoting from the Japanese translation of The Other Half of Hope (Kimura 2018, 104–5). 19 Kimura 2018 (139–64) discusses these prize-winning works. 20 See Henmi 2012 (81, 85–6) for more on references to the war and to wartime-like fascism. 21 My translation is a combination of Takahashi et al.’s 2011 New York Times editorial and the original Japanese as quoted in Komori 2014 (78).

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namely that of postdisaster recovery (fukkō). The rhetoric of postdisaster recovery seeks a return to the normalcy of the past, or as Kristina Iwata-Weickgennant puts it, ‘the restoration of the pre-disaster state,’ disregarding the predisaster problems and assuming that areas can all fully recover, when many have not or will not (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015, 200).22 This discourse papers over the multitude of issues plaguing reconstruction and abets the government campaigns for recovery that were artificially pegged to the original Olympic timeline of summer 2020. The implications of these recovery campaigns are very real for those in former evacuation zones who will lose disaster compensation payments as evacuation orders are lifted (Field 2016). The cyclical futurity in the Japanese fiction I describe later serves to critique these very recovery campaigns and to warn of possible repercussions in the future. As in the TV show Dark, this return to the past opens up a vision of the future. In Tsushima Yūko’s posthumously published short story ‘Celebrating Half-Life,’ disaster evacuees celebrate the half-life of radioactive cesium 137 on the 100year anniversary of World War II.23 This story was originally published in the literary journal Gunzō in 2016 in a section themed ‘The World Thirty Years Later: The Literary Imagination,’ and Tsushima’s dark vision echoes with other fictional stories that imagine a futuristic Japan returning to its wartime past replete with a military dictatorship, harsh surveillance systems, and the rhetoric of racial/ethnic hierarchies that justifies discrimination and worse. In ‘Celebrating Half-Life,’ Tsushima’s critique of the continued disaster mismanagement is evident in depictions of the disaster area that challenge standard narratives of recovery. In her story, former residents of the disaster area use the half-life celebrations as an opportunity to visit their homes, only to find that nothing has changed, meaning the area and its residents have not recovered (Tsushima 2016, 80–1).24 Political scientist Daniel Aldrich (2020) has noted that nine years later, 30,000 residents are still unable to return to their homes near the Fukushima Daiichi NPP complex. Tsushima’s fictional Japan, set 30 years in the future, has suffered from another earthquake and nuclear accident. The narrator in the story warns against optimism because not only were even more dangerous radioactive particles, like plutonium, released in the most recent accident five years prior, the nuclear power plant has yet to be cleaned up, and such disasters will likely continue to happen (Tsushima 2016, 79–80). Given the track record for safety at Japan’s nuclear facilities and the nation’s seismicity, this prediction is anything but far-fetched. Despite this danger, the narrator speculates that there will likely be a rush to develop the disaster area as an appealing resort town with luxury hotels and golf courses (84). The public is told it will be especially safe because of the radiation monitoring. But the narrator knows that the area will never be entirely safe.

22 Kirby 2019 mentions that in communities like Naraha, only 15 percent of the predisaster population has returned to resettle. 23 Tsushima died in 2016. In the story, the half-life of the cesium passed four years prior, but celebrations are delayed in order to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the war. 24 Unless noted otherwise, the page numbers which follow refer to Tsushima 2016.

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The old women in the story remember the accidents, even if the government and industry are pretending to forget (84). This is a clear commentary on Japanese government and nuclear industry assurances that radiation monitoring will guarantee safety. The government was so confident in decontamination efforts that the Olympic committee had been scheduling events (baseball, football, rowing, and canoeing) in Northeastern Japan for summer 2020, but none in areas that experienced evacuations (Berkman 2017). The committee claims they want to showcase a rebuilt Tōhoku, but in order to do that, the continued menace of radiation must be removed from view (McCurry 2017). Despite the fact that there is no solution for the contaminated debris and biomass in Fukushima Prefecture, the government declared areas decontaminated and ‘clear’ in March 2017 (Kirby 2019). But the critique in Tsushima’s story moves beyond the current discussion of recovery to problems that are equally, if not more, troubling. In the story, Japan’s declining population has led to a loss of international political power, and the nation has fallen prey to a military dictatorship and isolationism (a return to the sakoku or closed-door policies of the premodern past). The military government keeps the populace in line with policies that enforce racial superiority and incite xenophobia in order to silence dissent. After the 2011 disaster, the mood of selfrestraint that descended on Japan can be aptly described as a case of ‘trauma instrumentalized as an alibi for censorship’ (Hirsch 2004, 1211). This self-restraint or ‘self-censorship’ kept the Japanese public from discussing the disaster dead and debating the nuclear disaster, a silence that aided in the government’s efforts to downplay the danger (Knighton 2013). Now, over nine years later, the public forgetting is in many ways doing that job for them. In this new society, the undesirables are eliminated, or as it is euphemistically termed, they are sent to the ‘hospital.’ This includes the antisocial (hanshakaiteki ningen)—couples not officially married, same-sex couples, those proficient in foreign languages, the mentally unstable, religious adherents, and all artists (writers, poets, actors, film directors, and musicians)—as well as newspaper writers, editors, and lawyers (Tsushima 2016, 92–3). Tsushima is referencing the role artists have played in real Japan as vocal critics of the mismanagement and orchestrated amnesia of the 2011 disaster. Additionally, the dictatorship in Tsushima’s story creates a patriotic youth group, known by their abbreviation aikoku shōnen/shōjo dan (ASD), which is meant to confirm the racial superiority of the Yamato, the clan that emerged victorious in Japan’s prehistory and went on to claim the ancient imperial throne. The ASD has strict rules about race: only pure Yamato are allowed to join, and excluded are Ainu, Okinawan, Koreans (Chōsen-kei), and especially people from Tōhoku (Tōhokujin), the areas of Northeastern Japan that were most heavily affected by the disaster. Tsushima adds Tōhoku residents to the list of those discriminated against in contemporary Japan, a recognition of the ‘secondary victimization’ of disaster victims who are shunned by society.25 25 Murakami Haruki 2001 (4) uses this term in his interviews with victims of the Aum Shinrikyō cult’s sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subways in 1995.

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In addition to the discrimination in the plot, Tsushima makes the contamination and the status of these minorities visible at the word level of her story by writing the names of people and places in katakana, a Japanese syllabary often used for foreign words or emphasis.26 This recalls the use of katakana for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and post-2011 for Fukushima, linking the three locations despite government and industry efforts to separate the threat of nuclear weapons from the ‘safety’ of nuclear power. Tsushima is not the only author or critic to use katakana in this controversial way but also she extends it beyond Fukushima to encompass Tōhoku and all of Japan. The taint of radioactive contamination that comes with this linguistic choice signals to the reader that nuclear victims are also among the minorities in her story. The Yamato consider the Tōhoku people to be a plague on society (Tsushima 2016, 89). Tōhoku people are discriminated against just as Koreans were and continue to be through language. In the story, some complain that they cannot understand Tōhoku people because of their accents, even though the narrator tells us that is not true (96). This is reminiscent of the linguistic tests meant to root out Koreans in the vigilante massacres that followed the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake (Komori 1998, 288). Tōhoku people risk arrest at any time, but the nation has a problem because those from Tōhoku far outnumber the Yamato. The dictatorship is running out of space in the ‘hospitals’ and the Tōhoku people are being arrested and sent to special ‘shower rooms’ (shawā shitsu). The narrator exclaims, ‘This is so outrageous it is hard to believe, but maybe it is true’ (Tsushima 2016, 96). This comment is a clear referent to the Nazi’s shower rooms at concentration camps, where they exterminated Jewish prisoners. However, the Fukushima accident provides a more convenient way for the government to eliminate the unwanted, namely by sending them to live and work in the contaminated area. Ironically, the only safe place for Tōhoku people is the disaster zone. The nuclear power plant was built on the Tōhoku people’s land, and the government allows Tōhoku, Okinawan, and Ainu people to live and work at the site. Yamato do not want to work at the site because they are afraid of high radiation levels. In real-life Japan, there continue to be problems with decontamination and repatriation, as residents seeking to return home are unsure if they can trust government and industry assurances of safety. The end of the story rejects the notion that radioactive contamination can be contained. The old woman protagonist looks onto Tokyo Bay, the site of the future Olympics, and comments on how it too is contaminated, since water from the irradiated mountains flows into the rivers, eventually reaching the bay itself (Tsushima 2016, 103). Tsushima was one of the earliest authors to vociferously respond to the 2011 nuclear meltdowns and ensuing radioactive contamination. Her vision of the future could be dismissed as overly dark and extreme, such as the idea of the systematic genocide of Tōhoku residents, but it is not completely unfounded given

26 These proper nouns would normally be written in Sino-Japanese characters or the more standard syllabary of hiragana. Tsushima writes the following in katakana: Japan (Nihon), Tokyo, Ainu, Okinawa, Tōhoku, Yamato, and Chōsen.

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events from the past and present. Certainly, the upcoming centennial for World War II in 2045 will bring back memories of the past, but Tsushima’s vision of a return to militarism is also likely inspired by the 2015 military legislation that circumvents Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution, prohibiting the nation from having a standing offensive military.27 The 2011 disaster seemed to augur a new era of political activism, but it has not dramatically reshaped Japanese life or politics. The Olympic games in Tsushima’s story are simultaneously tinged with the anticipation of the originally scheduled 2020 Olympics and the memory of the 1940 fascist Japanese games canceled because of the war. Although in Tsushima’s story, there are no immediate ill effects from attending Olympic games that are held on contaminated land, the ASD are born of Olympic fever, and the narrator laments that once society has embarked on this path, there is no turning back (Tsushima 2016, 104). Tsushima’s story captures the dangerous cycling of Japan’s dark and violent past amid the fervor and amnesia of Olympic glory. Toward the end of the story, the elderly female protagonist reflects on her life since the disaster. Have these thirty years been long or short? It seems nothing has changed, but the old woman thinks in fact everything has changed. Thirty years ago she was not an old woman, and neither did she consider herself to be a Tōhoku person. She didn’t know the name of radioactive substances like cesium 137, or anything about their half-lives. It was better not to have known, for with that knowledge everything began to warp. (Tsushima 2016, 103) The quotation captures the backward and forward motion of rupture and cyclicity. Looking back, the old woman now knows the names of the radioactive substances released in the disaster 30 years ago. That does not change their harmful nature, but she speculates that the ignorance of the past is better than the knowledge of the future, although the two cannot be delinked. Her awareness of herself and the world around her has changed, but in many ways that world is no different than it was 30 years ago. A similar dynamic is at play in the Chernobyl disaster. In discussing Chernobyl art, Sarah Phillips highlights the association between Chernobyl and a ‘ringing’ or bells. In 1988, Chernobyl was labeled a ‘warning from the twenty-first century,’ that ‘instigated political and social changes in response to fears about the future.’ One chronicler of Chernobyl discusses the ‘fundamental restructuring of our thought’ brought on by the disaster (Phillips 2004, 174). Tsushima’s old woman is aware of this strange cyclicity, and she resents the restructuring forced upon her. While the Fukushima accident has also given rise to fears about the future, it is not clear that it has or will instigate political or social change. But how do we

27 In 2015 Japan passed legislation to allow the country’s military to participate in foreign conflicts. The legislation reinterpreted Article 9 to allow the military to fight abroad for ‘collective selfdefence’ for their allies (BBC News 2015).

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measure such change and evaluate its effects on society? The vision in Japanese fiction is decidedly dystopian, with few stories offering an escape from the pessimistic future. Is this a failure to imagine radical change, or is it a warning about the resurgence of toxic nationalism? Is there something in the contingency of the current historic moment that acts like a blind spot to block our vision of the future?28 This limited vision is often a function of national disasters. In the context of 9/11, Marianne Hirsch argued that it is this ‘limited, obstructed vision that characterizes a historical moment ruled by trauma and censorship’ (Hirsch 2004, 1213). Although 2011 was not completely analogous to 9/11 or Chernobyl, they shared a similar period of initial censorship that silenced dissent, a period that was much longer for Chernobyl. In Japan’s case, this return to the past is a form of dissent. It is also a commentary on the bleakness of the present moment, in that literature is unable or unwilling to find a way forward other than in the repetition of a tragic past.

Spectacle Versus Slow Violence Despite this dramatic return of the wartime past, in many Japanese stories, the citizens are unaware of the dangers or are willing to overlook them. This is a function of the invisibility of the lingering effects of radiological contamination and its victims. Unlike the dramatic explosions and heroic events in HBO’s Chernobyl, the violence of prolonged exposure to radiation is difficult to depict in a way that can hold the audience’s attention. Many Japanese stories predict additional disasters, both natural and nuclear, but do not depict those sensational events. Chernobyl capitalizes on scenes of high drama, such as workers entering areas of deadly toxicity like the rooftop overlooking the exposed reactor core or the flooded reactor basement. By contrast, even in cases where the effects of contamination are in full view, as in Tawada’s and Yoshimura’s novels, the citizens in these Japanese novels are either forbidden to speak of them or deluded into accepting them as normal. A key difference between Chernobyl and Japanese fiction is that the former does not trade in images of the everyday, choosing to focus on the hyperreality and immediacy of the accident, leaving the long-term effects literally unseen. This may be a function of attitudes toward the Chernobyl accident and aftermath that are not captured by the miniseries. One critic commented: ‘Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life. But resignation is a depressing and untelegenic spectacle’ (Gessen 2019). We could argue that resignation is also a condition of life in Japanese disaster zones. Japanese fiction depicts these residents as resigned to a fate where the government has decided to sacrifice them for the sake of politics, progress, and Olympic glory. This lack of spectacle, and by extension failure to gain our attention, is exactly what Rob Nixon (2013) laments in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. He defines slow violence as ‘a violence that is neither spectacular

28 See Frederic Jameson on the failure of utopian visions and the ‘blind spots’ that can block out ‘visions of genuinely radical change’ (Wegner and Jameson 1998, 76).

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nor instantaneous, but instead incremental, whose calamitous repercussions are postponed for years or decades or centuries.’ ‘It’s a type of violence that is often bloodless and sufficiently displaced’ (Dawson 2011). And Nixon argues that literature can play an important role in bringing that violence to life. ‘In a world permeated by insidious, unspectacular violence, imaginative writing can make the unapparent appear, rendering it tangible by humanizing drawn-out calamities inaccessible to the immediate senses’ (Nixon 2011). Fiction on 3.11 renders tangible the unspectacular violence of the radiological contamination in Japan. Writers like Tawada, Tsushima, and Kirino reach into the future to allow the reader to think about Nixon’s ‘long dyings’ even if we would rather not (Nixon 2011).

Conclusion Returning to my three binaries, we can ponder how Japanese cultural productions negotiate the challenges of fiction, cyclical futurity, and slow violence in their representations of the disaster. These problems are particularly acute in our postfact world where danger accompanies cyclicity, as the past resurfaces, and mistakes are repeated in the haze of historical amnesia. In such a world, fiction is hard-pressed to compete with the media blitz and fake news for the reader’s attention. But rather than think of postdisaster Japanese cultural production as a site of failure or silence, we can see it as an active space of contested narratives. Phillips and Ostaszewski (2012, 131) assert that ‘the Chernobyl zone of alienation is a profoundly multivocal space, ripe for the negotiation of myriad “little histories” and rememberings.’ They go on to ask critical questions: Who stands to benefit from the ‘rejuvenation,’ or ‘revival,’ or ‘renewed exploitation,’ of the highly symbolic zone of alienation, the ‘circle of shame’ surrounding the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident? Who has the power to decide what is ‘safe,’ what is feasible, and what is not? How much space is there to accommodate competing interests and competing narratives about what has happened here and what must happen next? Life-and-death questions of value (of life), responsibility, and power are at stake here. (Phillips and Ostaszewski 2012, 138) We could ask the same questions about the Fukushima accident zone. Twenty years from now will there be a television spectacle about the Fukushima accident akin to HBO’s Chernobyl that claims to be a ‘faithful reimagining’? Will that increased visibility bring us any closer to answering vital questions? Or do the answers lie beyond such telegenic spectacles? This volume shows how Japanese artists are already asking and trying to answer those questions.

Postscript As I finalize this afterword in the fall of 2021, it is impossible to speak of the Fukushima disaster without also speaking of the global coronavirus pandemic. In

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this afterword, I speculate about how the Fukushima accident might be remembered 20 years from now, but the 2011 disaster is already being recalled in Japan through the experience of the coronavirus. The pandemic reminds us of the nuclear disaster in terms of the now ubiquitous presence of PPE to protect against an invisible threat that knows no boundaries. While there are many common points of analysis, the coronavirus can also be viewed through my three binaries. The misinformation-generated crises of COVID feed the ongoing war over facts and truth. The pandemic so radically changed daily life that we will collectively remember it as a before and, hopefully someday, an after. Yet, there is also a cyclical return in Japan when we consider how the discrimination against those with COVID (korona sabetsu) echoes the mistreatment of people exposed to radiation from the Fukushima accident and the atomic bombs.29 Finally, the spectacle of shutdowns and mass vaccinations can blind us to the slow violence of isolation and lost community that risk harming all, but especially society’s most vulnerable. The literary community is responding to the pandemic, and the Fukushima accident has become a touchstone for new corona literature (korona bungaku) that has taken up many of these themes. Tawada Yōko contributed to a special section on corona diaries in the literary journal Shinchō in March 2021. Her diary entry on crossing national borders during COVID reverberates with the fear of discrimination against nuclear victims in her story ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Tawada 2012). Writing in the same issue, Yū Miri begins with a meeting with an old friend at the remnants of his home in the ‘hard to return’ zone, four kilometers from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant. By opening with the nuclear accident, Yū grounds her diary in the ongoing sense of loss that continues to haunt Japan, as does the legacy of nuclear waste. For Yū’s friend, age 55, the disaster is his future—his hometown is slated as a 30-year temporary nuclear waste storage site (Yū 2021).30 This episode cannot help but color the rest of Yū’s daily entries, some of which discuss the impact of coronavirus cancelations on artistic activities. The loss and painful memories and realities of 2011 will continue to animate Japanese fiction about the global pandemic. We are undoubtably already living Fukushima’s afterlife.

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29 This discrimination has been aimed at Japanese and foreigners in Japan, as well as at members of the medical community. See, for example, Kyodo News 2020 and Yamaguchi 2020. 30 For more on Tawada and the pandemic, see Thouny 2020. Kanehara Hitomi’s “Unsocial distance” (Ansōsharu disutansu 2020) is the subject of some forthcoming articles. See, for example, Qiao 2021.

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Tawada Yōko. 2012. ‘The Island of Eternal Life.’ In March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, edited by Elmer Luke and David Karashima. Translated by Margaret Mizutani, 3–11. New York: Vintage. ———. 2018 [2014]. The Emissary. Translated by Margaret Mizutani. New York: New Directions. ———. 2021. ‘ “2020 Koronaka” nikki rirē.’ Shinchō 3: 68–70. Thouny, Christophe. 2020. ‘When Carps Can’t Breathe in Water: On Tawada Yōko’s Planetary Musings in Corona Times.’ Critical Asia Archives (blog), December 31. [online] https://caarchives.org/when-carps-cant-breathe-in-water/ [Accessed November 1, 2021]. Treat, John Whittier. 1995. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tsushima Yūko. 2016. ‘Hangenki o iwatte.’ In Hangenki o iwatte, 73–105. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Wegner, Phillip E., and Frederic Jameson. 1998. ‘Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of Utopia in the Work of Frederic Jameson [with Comments].’ Utopian Studies 9 (2): 58–77. Wright, Sarah H. 2005. ‘Comparisons of Iraq to post-war Japan fail, historian asserts.’ MIT News, March 16. [online] http://news.mit.edu/2005/rebuilding-iraq-0316 [Accessed January 20, 2020]. Yamaguchi Mari. 2020. ‘In Japan, Pandemic Brings Outbreaks of Bullying, Ostracism.’ ABC News, May 9. [online] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/japan-pandemicbrings-outbreaks-bullying-ostracism-70601233 [Accessed November 10, 2021]. Yoshimura Man’ichi. 2014. Borārobyō. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū. Yū Miri. 2021. ‘ “2020 Koronaka” nikki rirē.’ Shinchō 3: 82–6.

Index

3.11: transformation of the topographical space of Fukushima 5; triple disaster events of 1, 47; Yū Miri’s interviewing of locals about their experience of 56; see also harmful unfounded rumors (fūhyō higai); tsunami disasters–3.11 tsunami 3.11–recovery (fukkō): 12 Gifts published in support of 73, 73n2; disaster mismanagement critiqued in Tsushima’s ‘Celebrating Half-Life’ 182, 188–91; From That Day Forward published in support of 73–4; Great Eastern Japan Reconstruction Plan Council (Higashi Nihon daishinsai fukkō kōsō kaigi) 73; nuclear tourist site in Fukushima proposed by Azuma Hiroki and others 99, 99n15; railway lines named in Kenji’s honor 69, 76; reconstruction nationalism 49, 186; return to the normalcy of the past in the rhetoric of 109, 188; Tokyo Olympics as a celebration of 1–2, 147; see also bonds (kizuna) 9/11: rupture of 186; trauma and censorship associated with 189, 192 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake: banishment of Koreans following 190; children’s essays detailing their experience of 15 2011 tsunami see tsunami disasters–3.11 tsunami Abe Shinzō 131n6, 138, 147n7; silencing of critical voices about the disaster 32, 117, 136–7n11 Abram, David 167, 169n10 Agamben, Giorgio 24 Ahmed, Sara, on feminist killjoys 143–4

Ainu people: mythic lives of bears in traditions of 34; post-accident population of contaminated Northeastern Japan imagined by Tsushima Yūko 189–90 Akasaka Norio: on Japanese identity and the Tōhoku region 72–3, 186; on Tōno 77n6 Alaimo, Stacy 6, 155n21 Aldrich, Daniel P. 188 Alexander, Jeffrey C.: cultural trauma conceptualized by 107; on ‘trauma drama’ 91n2 Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Elizabeth B. Breese, individual and collective trauma differentiated by 113 Alexievich, Svetlana 182, 187 aliens: state/corporate powers that put local people at risk of contamination associated with 99–102, 109; see also robots and cyborgs Amano Yuka 85 Ameya Norimizu: Blue Sheet (Burū Shīto) 91, 92n4, 111n8; Ground (Jimen) 92n4 Angles, Jeffrey: on Arai Takako 58; translation of ‘The Far Shore’ 137n12 animals and animal stories: in 3.11 fiction 4, 29, 34, 44–5; literature as a bridge between the human and nonhuman 30–1, 33, 38; Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Animal Diary (Dōbutsuki) 29, 29n3; talking animals in Miyazawa Kenji’s Gauche the Cellist 81, 81n10; see also Furukawa Hideo–Horses, Horses Ano hi kara see Michimata Tsutomu–From That Day Forward (Ano hi kara) antinuclear movements: in Japan in the early post war years 116n14; mass protests after 3.11 20; nonexistence in

200

Index

rural Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s 116–17; women discriminated against for raising concerns about radioactive contamination 18; see also Ōe Kenzaburō–post-3.11 anti-nuclear activism Aomori Prefecture: Kimura Yūsuke’s birth in 47, 50; in Kimura Yūsuke’s Isa’s Deluge 51, 53; Kiruannya and U-ko performed in 110n7; Rokkasho Reprocessing Facility in 97n11 Arai Takako: on the lives of workingclass women in Kiryū 58; poetry events organized in Ōfunato by 58 Arai Takako–Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation of Ishikawa Takuboku’s Poems (Tōhoku onbayaku Ishikawa Takuboku no uta) 4, 50; Tōhoku dialect of Ōfunato speakers used in 4, 50, 59, 61–2, 63 Article Nine of Japan’s constitution: ‘aspiration’ (kikyū) to international peace 171; Japan’s right to wage war renounced in 6; Komori Yōichi as Article Nine Association General Secretary 173 atomic bombings: discrimination against people exposed to radiation from 194, 194n29; Hiroshima and Nagasaki 2, 3, 6, 31, 40–1, 119n24, 137, 171, 190; records of atomic bombings buried in Osaka Expo time capsules 118–19n24; see also radioactive contamination Ayase Maru, Eventually Reaching the Sea (Yagate umi ni todoku) 47 Azuma Hiroki 186; nuclear tourist site in Fukushima proposed by 99, 99n15 Balaev, Michelle 84 Balanzategui, Jessica 11 Beethoven’s music: in Kiruannya to U-kosan 112; Piano Sonatas Opus 2 Number 1–3 173–4 Berger, John 16 bonds (kizuna): of the fictional characters in Bollard Disease 12, 20, 21, 23; post3.11 promotion of 20, 50, 149, 153 borders and border-crossing: of bodies 144; boundaries between the self and objects of disgust 144, 148, 158; during COVID 194; between the human and the animal 33, 38; moving spatial boundaries of Sakate Yōji’s Lone War (Tatta hitori no sensō) 92–6, 107;

nonhumans at the border of this world and the next 36–7; as spaces for literary creation 127–8; Tawada Yōko’s work as border-crossing literature (ekkyō bungaku) 6, 127 Borrmann, Mechtild 187 Broderick, Mick, and Antonio Traverso 106–7 Brook, Peter 94–5 Bullock, Julia C. 13 Cameron, Lindsley 176–7 Caruth, Cathy 111 Castellucci, Romeo 91 Chaplin, Charles, Modern Times 154 Chen, Mel 144, 145, 147 Chernobyl: personification as Cher in Lone War 97–8, 99; as a remembered future of the Fukushima accident 181, 187; as a warning from the twenty-first century 191 Chernobyl (HBO/Sky UK miniseries) directed by Renck 180–4, 192; Craig Mazin on its lesson 183; criticism of 182–3; portrayals of post-Fukushima futures contrasted with 7; production schedule of 180n1 Chernobyl, fact/fiction binary associated with 181–5 children and childhood: child buried in the snow in Sawaguchi’s ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month’ 82–3; children’s essays detailing their experience of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake 15; child-seers 11n6, 16; indifference to children’s lives 24, 24n11; Miyazawa Kenji’s ‘Snow Boy’ (yukiwarasu) 81; suffering of 17 Cohen, Ed 146 Cold War, the CIA’s 1950s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative 164 contamination: mercury poisoning by the Chisso Corporation 50, 50n5; see also radioactive contamination Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels 78 COVID-19 pandemic: 3.11 disaster recalled through the experience of 193–4; corona literature (korona bungaku) 194; discrimination against people exposed to COVID 194, 194n29; political discourse on accounts of recovery 152; Tokyo Olympics delayed by 1, 147n7 cyborgs see robots and cyborgs

Index Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 164, 164n4 Dark (Netflix German television show) directed by Odar: portrayals of postFukushima futures contrasted with 7; production schedule of 180n1; vision of the future open by a time travel to the past in 186 de Certeau, Michel 30, 104 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 165, 176, 177 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 169–70, 170n11 De Nardi, Sarah, and Danielle Drozdzewski 87 disasters: as critical moments for the negotiation of identity 73; fact/ fiction binary 7, 180, 181–5; as limitexperience 32; resignation as a condition of life in 192; rupture/cyclical futurity binary 7, 180, 186–92; Shōwa Sanriku earthquake (1896) 76, 85; spectacle/ slow violence binary 7, 180, 192–3; see also 3.11; atomic bombings; Chernobyl; COVID-19 pandemic; 9/11; radioactive contamination; trauma; tsunami disasters documentaries and documentary theater: A2-B-C on the rise of thyroid cysts in Fukushima children 24n11; Ameya Norimizu, Blue Sheet (Burū Shīto) 91, 92n4, 111n8; children’s perspective mobilized in 17; Funahashi Atsushi, Nuclear Nation 112n9; function in trauma recovery 63–4, 109–13, 121; Furusato (2016) 23n10; influence of fiction on 184; political engagement and activism of 110, 110n4; Suzuki Yoi, Tōhoku onba no uta: tsunami no hamabe de (Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores) 63; Tōhoku onba no uta: tsunami no hamabe de, dir. Suzuki Yoi 63; see also Ōnobu Pelican– Kiruannya to U-ko-san Duineveld, Martijn, Kristof Van Assche, and Raoul Beunen 78, 79 Eliot, T. S. 164, 171 Elsaesser, Thomas 17 Emissary see Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi) emotional healing (iyashi) 117 Esposito, Roberto 146, 146n4 Expo’70 see Osaka Expo

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Foucault, Michel 13 Fountain, Henry, HBO’s Chernobyl criticized in the New York Times 182, 183 From That Day Forward see Michimata Tsutomu–From That Day Forward (Ano hi kara) Fujiki Hideaki 24n11 Fukada Koji, Sayonara 185n15 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Fukushima NPP): evacuation zone around Futaba 146–7; the exclusion zone around it as the setting of Kimura’s Sacred Cesium Ground 51; explosion of reactor 3 at 31–2, 187; in Kiruannya and U-ko 111, 114; TEPCO’s operation of 114, 187 Fukushima Prefecture: exploitation by the nuclear power industry 48, 48n1, 114–15; historical references linking Ueno Park to detailed in Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station 57; Kawauchimura 116, 116n16; in Kawauchi Village in Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture by Kusana Shinpei 116; lifting of evacuation orders in 109, 109n2; multifaceted picture portrayed in Kiruannya and U-ko 110, 114–15; natural beauty of 115; in Two People under a Tree by Takamura Kōtarō 116–17; see also Minamisōma; Sōma Furukawa Hideo: indebtedness to Miyazawa Kenji 34, 34n8, 36, 75; interview with Hatooka Keita 42–3; interview with Shigematsu Kiyoshi 35n10, 41, 43–4; One Billion Years a Soldier (Arui wa jūrokunen no shura) 36, 43; on why features animals in his work 35–6 Furukawa Hideo–Horses, Horses: animal voices and animal thoughts in 36–7, 42–4; empathetic imagination of 35–7, 41, 44; invisibility of radiation captured in 43; location in Sōma 35; the marginality of Tōhoku articulated in 71–2; as a work of disoriented genre 41 Gardner, William O. 118, 118n23 Geilhorn, Barbara, and Kristina IwataWeickgenannt, Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (2017) 2 Gen’yū Sōkyū, ‘Mountain of Light’ (Hikari no yama) 185

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Index

Gessen, Masha 184, 192 Gibson, William 185 Great East Japan Earthquake see 3.11 Gunma Prefecture: Arai on the lives of working-class women in Kiryū 58; Oze National Park in 115 Hachinohe, damage suffered from the 2011 tsunami 50 Hagiwara, Takao 80, 82 Haraway, Donna J. 43, 158n27 harmful unfounded rumors (fūhyō higai) 117, 117n20 Hatooka Keita, Furukawa interviewed by 42–3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ 151–2 Heholt, Ruth, and Niamh Downing 78–9 Henmi Yō 31, 187n20 Hester, Helen 11 Hida Shuntarō 163 Hirsch, Marianne 189, 192 Hoffman, Susannah M., and Anthony Oliver-Smith 33 Hokkaido: agricultural products from 150; Ainu traditions of 34; in Riku and the Kingdom of White 17, 20, 24, 25; in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary (Kentōshi) 185 Holmberg, Ryan 182, 183 Hopson, Nathan 47, 72 Howard, Peter et al. 78 human life and physicality: catastrophe and disaster as limit-experience 32; disgust and repulsion 144, 148, 150–1, 158; immune systems of exposed Fukushimans 163; metabolism 155, 155n22, 155n24; trans-corporeality 6, 155, 155n21; see also immunity and the immunitary imaginary; trauma Ikezawa Natsuki 4, 29, 38, 45 immunity and the immunitary imaginary: accounts of recovery emphasized in political discourse 6, 49, 146, 152–3; as an apparatus of discrimination 158, 158n27; discrimination against disaster victims 189–90; influence on 3.11 narratives 6; metabolism as a contrastive paradigm 145, 155–9; origins of immunitary language and metaphors 146; in the political imagination of the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster 144–5, 147–8

Inoue Hisashi, The Face of Jizō (Chichi to kuraseba) 173 Ishihara Chiaki 129 Ishii Masato 57 Ishikawa Takuboku: biographical details 59; translation of his work into Tōhoku vernacular by Arai Takako 4, 50, 59, 61–2 Ishimure Michiko 50, 50n5 Ishino Akira, ‘Pure Love’ (‘Jun ai’) 76 Itō Seikō, Imagination Radio (Sōzō rajio) 47 Itō Shizuo: poem If Anything (Mushiro karera ga watashi no kyō o utau) 171, 171n13; poem Warbler (Uguisu) 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172 Iwanami Bunko 171 Iwate Prefecture: Īhatov as Miyazawa Kenji’s term for fictionalized Iwate 77, 83; Iwate Galaxy Railway (Iwate Ginga Tetsudō-sen) 76; Kamaishi Unosumai Memorial Stadium 69, 70, 86; as a memory landscape 70, 86–7; Miyazawa Kenji’s birth in Hanamaki 76; toll from the 3.11 disaster 71; see also Michimata Tsutomu–From That Day Forward (Ano hi kara) Iwate Prefecture–Ōfunato: poetry events organized by Arai in 58; vernacular of 60–1; see also Arai Takako–Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation of Ishikawa Takuboku’s Poems (Tōhoku onbayaku Ishikawa Takuboku no uta) Iwate Prefecture–Tōno: disaster relief coordination located in 77n6; memory landscapes of 5; see also Legends of Tōno (Tōno Monogatari) collected by Yanagita Kunio Jameson, Frederic 192n28 Kamanaka Hitomi and Hirano Katsuya 110n4 Kashiwaba Sachiko: ‘The Child Who Came from the Sea’ (‘Umi kara kita ko’) 76; ‘Widow’s Cape’ (‘Kaze machi misaki’) 88 Kawabata Ryūtarō 128 Kawakami Hiromi: incorporation of the mythic lives of bears 34n7; Kamisama (‘God Bless You’) 11, 29, 59; Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō (Don’t Get Carried Away by a Big Bird) 185n15

Index Kawakami Mieko–‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ (Ai no yume to ka): Bianca’s escape in 151–3, 159; disgust and repulsion addressed in 144, 148, 150–1; immunitary themes explored in 6, 143, 145, 148, 151–3; plot of 148–9; triple disaster posed outside the focus of the narration 150, 150n12, 151–2 Kenji see Miyazawa Kenji Kikuchi Yukimi, ‘The Bar Counter by the Sea’ (‘Umibe no kauntā’) 79n8, 86 Kimura, Aya Hirata 19 Kimura Saeko: on the experience of disasters by women in Tōhoku 63; on interaction with the dead 86; shinsaigo (‘post-earthquake disaster’) designated by 2; on ‘uncanny anxiety’ 128 Kimura Yūsuke 4, 29, 34, 38–9, 43, 45; on writing in his native language 4, 46–7 Kimura Yūsuke–Isa’s Deluge (Isa no hanran): Kimura’s animated reading voicing the rage of the last line of 62; magical realism of 53–5; Tōhoku dialect used in 50, 51 Kimura Yūsuke–Sacred Cesium Ground (Seichi Cs): human-animal relationships explored in 38–9; radioactive contamination of Fukushima meltdowns addressed in 39, 51 Kirby, Peter Wynn 189n22 Kirino Natsuo: Baraka 182; future for post-3.11 Japan imagined by 7, 180, 193 Kiruannya to U-ko-san see Ōnobu Pelican–Kiruannya to U-ko-san Kitakami Akihiko: ‘Accident Blind Spot’ (Jiko no shikakaku) 75–6; plan for 12 Gifts developed by 73n2 Kobayashi Erika, Breakfast with Madame Curie (Madamu Kyurī to chōshoku wo) 29, 31 Komatsu, Sakyō 185 Komori Yōichi: as Article Nine Association General Secretary 173; on Death by Water 173, 174–5 Korea and Koreans: banishment following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake 190; contaminated food from Fukushima a concern of the South Korean government 144n3; discrimination against Chōsen-kei 189; ethnic difference inscribed in Japanese literary texts 50; Korean actress employed in the cast of Kiruannya and U-ko 119

203

Korea and Koreans–Zainichi literature: notations used to express the sound in Japanese texts 61; see also Yū Miri Kosaka, Kris, Furukawa Hideo interviewed 35 Koshar, Rudy, on memory landscapes 5, 71, 75, 79, 83 Kuchinskaya, Olga 181, 185 Kumi Saori, ‘The Dog with Long Boots’ (‘Nagakutsu o haita inu’) 76 Kusano Shinpei: about 116n17; Kawauchi Village in Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture (Fukushima-ken Futaba-gun Kawauchi-mura) 116 landscapes and memory: the importance of positionality to 2, 73, 78; Tōhoku as a memory landscape 5, 70 Lefebvre, Henri: on individualized creation of space 104, 107; on monumentality 95; on the toxicity of capitalist spatial creation 99 Legends of Tōno (Tōno Monogatari) collected by Yanagita Kunio: Episodes 22 and 23 85; Episode 86 85; Episode 99 from 85, 113–14; From That Day Forward viewed as a modern-day version of 77, 80, 84, 85; Ortabasi on their social role 77–8, 85; popularity following the Fukushima calamity 70, 113n10; read as a ritual text with a social function by Amano 85; the supernatural blended with everyday life in 85; as a work of memory landscape 5, 75, 79, 84–7 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 138, 164n3, 172n14; see also Abe Shinzō Long, Hoyt 72 magic and magical realism: of Furukawa’s Horses, Horses 39, 41; of Japanese storytelling tradition about animals 34; of Kimura Yūsuke’s Isa’s Deluge 53–5; of Latin American masters admired by Kakujirō 53; of Miyazawa Kenji’s Īhatov 80, 82 Mainichi Shimbun, on Arai’s workshops 63 Malamud, Randy 35, 38 marginality: Akari’s inscription of marginalia on sheet music 174, 177; sense of marginality inscribed by Tōhoku vernacular 4; of Tōhoku in Northeastern Japan 47, 48, 60, 72

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Index

Marran, Christine L. 3n29, 147, 154n17, 155n24 Martin, Carol 109–10, 121 Martin-Jones, David 16 Martin, Thomas 64 Masaki Hiroyuki 112, 115 Matsuda Jukkoku, ‘The Case of Aina’ (Aina no baai) 75 Matsugae Yoshinori, The End of Japan (Nihon no owari) 92n4 Matsumoto Shin 74 metaphors and metaphorical meaning: the animal/Other in postdisaster fiction 35–8; Chernobyl as a metaphor for other disasters 181; of the ‘far shore’ 138; the Japanese public represented as a child in Yoshimura’s Bollard Disease 17; nature metaphors and images used in nationalist and ethnocentrist discourse 154n17; in postdisaster fiction 4 Michimata Tsutomu: 12 Gifts—Aid for the Great East Japan Earthquake 73; regional perspective of catastrophe in Tōhoku articulated by 70, 71, 75–6; on the role of literature in times of crisis 74 Michimata Tsutomu–From That Day Forward (Ano hi kara): 3.11 recovery supported with royalties from 73–4; content of 74, 85–6; Iwate region described in narratives in 75–6; as a lieux de mémoire 70, 86–7; photographs in 74 Minami Haruo, Hello From the Nations of the World (Sekai no kuni kara konnichiwa) 118 Minamisōma: location north of Fukushima NPP 109; as Ōnobu Pelican’s base 109; Taguchi Randy’s Riku and the Kingdom of White set in 3–4, 12, 18, 25; Yū Miri’s relocation to 56 Miyazawa Hayao: ‘Spirited Away’ 36 Miyazawa Kenji: Furukawa Hideo’s indebtedness to 34, 34n8, 75, 76; Gauche the Cellist (Sero hiki no Goshu) 81, 81n10; identification with the Tōhoku region 34, 72; impact on post-3.11 fiction 5, 70–1; Night on the Galactic Railway Train (SL Ginga Tetsudō) 69, 75, 76; ‘On the Fourth Day of the Narcissus Month’ (Suisenzuki no yokka) 80n9, 80–1, 81n11, 83; railways named in Kenji’s honor 69, 76; ‘The Red Blanket’ 80n9; The Restaurant of Many Orders (Chūmon no ōi ryōriten)

80, 80n9; ‘Snow Boy’ (yukiwarasu) 81; ‘Strong in the Rain’ (Ame ni mo makezu) 86–7 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 20 Murakami, Haruki 189n25 Murata Sayaka–Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen): as a counternarrative to nationalistic immunological rhetoric 6, 143; disgust and repulsion addressed in 144, 157–8; metabolism as a contrastive paradigm to immunitary functions 153–9 music: birdsong and voices of birds 166–7, 169, 169n10, 172, 174; Liszt’s Dreams of Love in 149, 152; Ōe Hikari’s musical sensibility 163, 164, 176–7; Takemitsu Tōru, Marginalia 177; see also Beethoven’s music Nakano Shigeharu 163, 164n2 narratives and narrative devices: accounts of recovery emphasized in political discourse 6, 49, 146, 152; contested narratives of postdisaster Japanese cultural production 193; corona literature (korona bungaku) 192–4; impact of 3.11 on Japanese fiction 185–92, 194; merging of the extraordinary with the ordinary in 3.11 narratives 85–6; the power of stories (monogatari) to unravel complex emotions 74; sense of an ending 128; trauma recovery facilitated by 109–13, 121; Yū Miri’s attention to inconvenient narratives and painful testimonies 56–8; see also Chernobyl (HBO/Sky UK miniseries) directed by Renck; Dark (Netflix German television show) directed by Odar; documentaries and documentary theater; immunity and the immunitary imaginary; Ōnobu Pelican– Kiruannya to U-ko-san Ngai, Sianne 148, 158 Nixon, Rob—conception of slow violence 33n6, 145, 158, 192–3; defined as a lack of spectacle 192–3; metabolism as a concept compared with 145, 155n24 Nora, Pierre 70 nuclear power industry: criticized in Kiruannya to U-ko-san 114, 115–16, 119, 120; exploitation of rural, less developed areas 48, 48n1, 114–15; the future imagined in Japanese fiction contrasted with its assertions of safety

Index 183–4; nuclear waste disposal 93, 93n7, 97n12, 98, 99, 194; policy in Japan wielded by the nuclear village (genshiryoku mura) 183, 183n11; see also Chernobyl; Chernobyl (HBO/Sky UK miniseries) directed by Renck Numano Mitsuyoshi 129 Ōe Hikari: as a composer 173n15, 176–7; as the model for Eeyore in ‘Light-Circling Bird’ 167, 169–72, 174; as the model for the Akari figure in Death by Water (Suishi) 173, 174–5, 176–7; musical sensibility of 163, 164, 176–7 Ōe Kenzaburō: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (Mizukara waga namida o nugitamau hi) 173, 174; Death by Water (Suishi) 6–7, 165, 172–5, 177; In Late Style (In reito sutairu) 175n17; ‘Light-Circling Bird’ (Hi o megurasu tori) 6, 165–7, 170–2, 174; valuing of his disabled son Hikari 6–7, 165, 172–3, 176–7 Ōe Kenzaburō–post-3.11 anti-nuclear activism 6; Article Nine Association (Kyūjō no kai) convened by 172n14; Article Nine Association speech (April 2011) 172–3; Article Nine Association speech (June 2011) 175; Mitō Culture Hall lecture 165, 165n6, 171; positioning of the demands of capitalism 163–4; Sayonara Genpatsu Ten Million Strong (Sayonara genpatsu senman’nin akkushon) convened by 163–4n2 Ōfunato see Iwate Prefecture–Ōfunato Oguma Eiji 49, 186 Okada Toshiki: on the 3.11 disaster 74n3; Current Location (Genzaichi) 117n20; Unable to See 119n25 Okamoto Tarō, Tower of the Sun 118 Okinawa and Okinawans: old women and shamans 60; postaccident population of contaminated Northeastern Japan imagined by Tsushima Yūko 189–90 Olympics see Tokyo Olympics Ōmura Yukimi, ‘Swing’ (‘Suwingu’) 75n4, 79n8 Onitsuka, Hiroshi 48n1 Ōnobu Pelican: on his decision to stage Kiruannya to U-ko-san in Fukushima 117; Manrui Toriking Ichiza (Loaded Bases Bird King Troupe) of 110, 110n5; Minamisōma as his base 109,

205

110; visibility as a discussant of the Fukushima calamity 110 Ōnobu Pelican–Kiruannya to U-ko-san: emotional healing (iyashi) provided by 117; emotional landscape of residents of Fukushima Prefecture presented in 5, 111, 115, 120; Episode 99 of The Legends of Tōno read in 113–14; figure of Kiruannya 111, 116; figure of the woman from 1970 118–19; figure of U-ko 111, 112–13; history of the nuclear power industry intertwined in local reportage 114, 115–16, 120; individual trauma transformed into collective memory 109–14, 121 Ōnobu Pelican–Kiruannya to U-ko-san— staging and reception of: critical acclaim 109, 110; Fukushima City performance of 117; German version of 116n15, 120, 120n27; international appeal of 110, 119–20; performances in Japanese cities 110n7, 118n21; restaging of 118n21, 118–19; stage design and effects 111–12 Ortabasi, Melek 77–8, 85 Osaka Expo: criticism of 118, 118n23; Hello From the Nations of the World as the official theme song of 118; in Okada Toshiki’s Unable to See 119n25; time capsules buried at 118–19, 118–19n24; Tower of the Sun 118 Osaka Prefecture, Kaizuka located in 12 Otomo Katsuhiro 185 Phillips, Sarah 187, 191 Phillips, Sarah, and Sarah Ostaszewski 185n14; on contested narratives of postdisaster Japanese cultural production 181, 193 post-3.11: as praxis 3; reframing of social reality and discourse 3; shinsaigo (‘postearthquake disaster’) designated as a term 2 post-3.11–fiction, animals featured in 4, 29, 34, 44–5 Project Fukushima! 115 Pulvers, Roger 87 radioactive contamination: accounts of recovery emphasized in political discourse 6, 49, 146, 152; biomagnification of 147, 147n8; dangers explored in Riku and the Kingdom of White 14–15, 25; as a focus of Tsushima

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Index

Yūko–‘Celebrating Half-Life’ 189–90; invisible nature of 31, 37, 43, 97, 128, 139–40, 142, 180, 185; in Kimura Yūsuke–Sacred Cesium Ground (Seichi Cs) 39, 51; as an ongoing problem 32, 183, 190; Tawada Yōko’s stories about 6, 129; of Tōhoku foodstuffs 49, 49n3, 144n3; women discriminated against for raising concerns about 18 reconstruction nationalism see 3.11– recovery (fukkō) recovery (fukkō) see post-3.11; 3.11– recovery (fukkō) Reinelt, Janelle 109 Riku and the Kingdom of White see Taguchi Randy–Riku and the Kingdom of White robots and cyborgs: disaster areas populated by 185; in Fukada Koji, Sayonara 185n15; in Furukawa Hideo’s One Billion Years a Soldier 36, 43; nonhumans at the border of this world and the next 36–7 Rokkasho Reprocessing Facility: personification as Rokka in Lone War 97–9; protests staged at 97n11 Sadler, A. W. 77 Said, Edward: copy of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas 173–4, 176; definition of ‘late style’ 175, 175n17; as Ōe Kenzaburō’s intellectual friend 164, 173n16; on speaking truth to power 175, 175n17 Saitō Jun, ‘The Sea that Day’ (Ano hi no umi) 76 Saitō Tamaki 20–1 Sakate Yōji–Lone War (Tatta hitori no sensō): mainstream understanding of space challenged by 92–6, 107; spatial acts as political acts 102–6; the terrestrial opposed to the extraterrestrial in 96–102 Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 166n8 Sato, Otone, German version of Kiruannya to U-ko translated and directed by 116n15, 120, 120n27 Satō Shigenori: How About a Candle for the Yellow Cake? (Ierō kēki ni kyandoru wa ikaga?) 96n9; Lucky Island in the Aftermath (Are kara no rakii airando) 91; The Mysterious Twenty-faces of Looking-glass Land (Kagami no kuni no kaijin nijūmensō) 92n4 Satō Yūya 187; ‘Same as Always’ 25n12

Saul, Hayley 73 Sawaguchi Tamami, ‘On the Third Day of the Narcissus Month’ (Suisenzuki no mikka) 79n8, 80–4, 83n12 Sawamura, Tetsu, ‘Towards Another Me’ (‘Mō hitori no watashi e’) 75, 80n8 Setagaya City: personification as Seta in Lone War 97–8, 99; as a radioactive hot spot 97n13 Setouchi Jakuchō 187 Shellenberger, Michael 183 Shigematsu Kiyoshi: Furukawa Hideo interviewed by 35n10, 41, 43–4; ‘To the Next Spring–Obon’ 186n17 shinsaigo (‘post-earthquake disaster’) see post-3.11 Sinha, Indra 186n16 Slemon, Stephen 53 Sōma: Horses, Horses by Furukawa Hideo located in 35; Nōmaoi horse festival held in 115 Sontag, Susan 173, 173n16 Stengers, Isabelle: on Gaia 168, 168n9, 170, 176; on the spirit of small-s science 168–9, 176–7; ‘two-partner game’ with nature identified by 7, 163, 164, 168; on the unsustainability of development-asusual 163, 164 Subterranean Theater, Kiruannya and U-ko performed at 110, 118, 118n21 Sugimoto Hidetarō 171–2 Suzuki Yoi, Tōhoku onba no uta: tsunami no hamabe de 63 Taguchi Randy: In the Zone (Zōn ni te) 29; on radioactive contamination 37 Taguchi Randy–Riku and the Kingdom of White: dangers of radioactive contamination explored in 14–15, 25; setting in northern Japan 3–4, 7n7, 12, 18, 25 Takahashi Gen’ichirō, on war memories 187 Takahashi Katsuhiko, ‘Eternity Springs’ (‘Saru no yu’) 77, 79n8, 80, 84–5 Takahashi Tetsuya, system of sacrifice identified by 48–9 Takamura Kōtarō: new style of poetry (shintaishi) established by 116n18; Two People under a Tree (Juka no Futari) 116–17 Takemitsu Tōru, Marginalia 177 Tama City: and fears of radioactive contamination of Tokyo’s drinking water

Index 97n12; personification as Tama in Lone War 97–8, 99 Tamura Miyuki 21, 23, 26 Taniguchi Sachiyo 142n13 Tatsuta Kazuto, Ichi-F (Ichiefu) 182, 183 Tawada Yōko: corona diary featured in Shinchō 194; future for post-3.11 Japan imagined by 7, 180, 193; interest in radioactivity 127–8; writing about animals 29; Yūhi no noboru toki—STILL FUKUSHIMA 140–1n13 Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi): contaminated environment described in 127, 129, 184; feeling of unease conveyed by 128; misinformation campaigns depicted in 182; as a post3.11 novel 128–9, 142; repopulation of disaster affected areas in 185 Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi)– ‘Mammamalia in Babel’ (Dōbutsutachi no baberu): as the final chapter of The Emissary 127n1, 140; the flood narrative from book of Genesis compared with 141; on the need for the possibility of narration 141–2 Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi)–‘Skanda, Endlessly’ (Idaten dokomademo): indescribable struggle with radioactive contamination the focus of 135; as the second chapter of The Emissary 127n1, 132; wordplay in 132–4 Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi)– ‘The Emissary’ (chapter titled ‘Kentōshi’): on the difficulty of telling a story in the context of post-3.11 Japan 129–31; as the first chapter of The Emissary 127n1, 128; literal meaning of 131n7; radioactive contamination not explicitly mentioned in 129 Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi)– ‘The Far Shore’ (Higan): as the fourth chapter of The Emissary 127n1, 137; Japan’s nuclear energy policy explored in 138–40 Tawada Yōko–The Emissary (Kentōshi)– ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Fushi no shima): fear of discrimination against nuclear victims expressed in 194; modal expressions indicating distance and externality 136–7; as the third chapter of The Emissary 127n1, 136 Thomas, Martin 64 Thouny, Christophe 32

207

Tilley, Christopher 78 Tōhoku earthquake March 11, 2011 see 3.11 Tōhoku region: Eat and Support (tabete oen shiyo) campaign 49, 49n3; identity formulation following 3.11 71–3; magical realism of animal storytelling in 34; marginalization of its location in Northeastern Japan 47, 48, 60, 71–2; as a memory landscape 5, 69–70; postaccident population of contaminated Northeastern Japan imagined by Tsushima 189–90; in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary (Kentōshi) 185; Yamato clan discrimination against Tōhoku residents 189–90; see also Aomori Prefecture; Fukushima Prefecture; Iwate Prefecture Tōhoku vernacular: in Arai Takako– Tōhoku Grannies’ Translation of Ishikawa Takuboku’s Poems 4, 50, 59, 61–2, 63; of Ishikawa Takuboku’s poems into 4, 50, 59, 61–2; political nature of its use in post-3.11 literature 49–50, 190; sense of marginality inscribed by 4; in Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station 50, 57, 58 Tokyo, drinking water contamination 97n12 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Fukushima NPP) operated by 114, 187; J-Village built by 100, 120; problems in Fukushima’s nuclear reactors covered up by 99–100, 114 Tokyo Olympics: Abe Shinzō’s support of Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Games 136–7n11; decontamination efforts in Northeastern Japan 189; memory of the canceled 1940 fascist Japanese games 191; as the ‘Recovery and Reconstruction Games’ 1–2, 147; in Tsushima Yūko’s ‘Celebrating HalfLife’ 189, 191 Tōno see Iwate Prefecture–Tōno trauma: 3.11 as a collective spatial trauma 91; individual and collective trauma differentiated 113; self-censorship imposed following the 3.11 disaster 189; spatial trauma claimed by Sakate Yōji’s Lone War 95–6, 107; see also disasters trauma recovery: the collective activity of reading, writing, and presenting poetry 64; identity formulation following 3.11

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73; individual trauma transformed into collective memory in Kiruannya and U-ko 109–13, 121; see also 3. 11–recovery (fukkō) Treat, John Whittier: on atomic bomb literature 32; on Ōe Kenzaburō’s ‘LightCircling Bird’ 166n8; on Takahashi Gen’ichirō’s Animal Diary 29n3 Tsing, Anna 155n24, 159 tsunami disasters, the Tōhoku region’s vulnerability to 63, 114, 182 tsunami disasters–3.11 tsunami: as the focus of From That Day Forward 75–6; poetry events held for survivors of 58, 64, 109; reconstruction of coastal area damaged by 1; sea walls constructed to prevent future tsunamis 5–6; Suzuki Yoi, Tōhoku onba no uta: tsunami no hamabe de (Songs Still Sung: Voices from the Tsunami Shores) 63 Tsushima Yūko: death in 2016 of 188n23; future for post-3.11 Japan imagined by 7, 180, 188, 190–1, 193; katakana used by 190 Tsushima Yūko–‘Celebrating Half-Life’ (‘Hangenki o iwatte’): government misinformation campaigns featured in 182, 188–9; publication of 188; victimization of disaster victims 189–90 Turner, Victor 91n3 United States: the CIA’s 1950s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative 164; criticism of the U.S. nuclear power industry 183; occupation of Iraq (2004) 185; security alliances signed by the US and Japan 137–8 vernacular language: Ishikawa Tabuboku’s struggles to learn Tokyo dialect 59; new

style of poetry (shintaishi) written in 116n18; see also Tōhoku vernacular Wagō Ryōichi 115, 120 Wakamatsu Eisuke 17, 22 Wark, McKenzie 168n9 Watanabe Kazuo 164, 164n4 White, Hayden 30 Whitehead, Anne 73 Yamashita Shunichi 14, 14n5 Yamato clan 189–90 Yanagita Kunio: the identity of Tōhoku shaped by 5, 72; and Japanese animal stories in the lineage of magical realism 34, 36; Legends of Tōno collected by 113; see also Legends of Tōno (Tōno Monogatari) collected by Yanagita Kunio Yasar, Kerim 22 Yoshimura Man’ichi: future for post-3.11 Japan imagined by 7, 180; residence in Kaizuka in Osaka Prefecture 12 Yoshimura Man’ichi’s Bollard Disease (Borādobyō): contaminated environment featured 184, 192; fictional town of Umizuka 3–4; government misinformation campaigns featured in 182 Yoshio, Hitomi 151 Yoshizawa Masami, ‘Ranch of Hope’ (Kibō no boujō) 34, 38 Yū Miri: corona diary featured in Shinchō 194; The End of August (Hachigatsu no hate) 63; interviewing of locals about their experience of the 3.11 disaster 56; relocation to Minamisōma 56; Still Life (Seibutsuga) 56; Tokyo Ueno Station (JR Uenoeki kōenguchi) 56–8; Zainichi Korean identity of 56