1st Edition
Literature After Fukushima From Marginalized Voices to Nuclear Futurity
Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Through an examination of key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature the book explores how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and its continued unfolding—reframed discourse in various areas such as trauma studies, eco-criticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and beyond. Individual chapters discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity after the triple disaster. The cultural productions explored offer a glimpse into the public imaginary and demonstrate how disasters can fundamentally redefine our individual and shared conception of both history and the present moment.
Literature after Fukushima is the first English-language book to provide an in-depth analysis of such a wide range of representative post-3.11 literature and its social ramifications. Contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the post-disaster climate of Japanese society and adding new perspectives through literary analysis, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Japanese and Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Environmental Humanities, as well as Cultural and Transcultural Studies.
Introduction
Linda Flores and Barbara Geilhorn
Part 1: Marginalized Voices
1. Real Eyes Realize Real Lies: Writing ‘Fukushima’ through the Child’s Gaze
Aidana Bolatbekkyzy
2. Animal Stories: Agency after Radiation
Doug Slaymaker
3. Voice and Voicelessness: Reading Vernaculars in Post-3.11 Literature
Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt
Part 2: Spatial Acts
4. From That Day Forward: Tōhoku, 3.11, and ‘Memory Landscapes’
Linda Flores
5. The Nuclear Home and the Alien Village: The Production of Post-3.11 Space in Sakate Yōji’s Lone War
Justine Wiesinger
6. Between Trauma Processing, Emotional Healing, and Nuclear Criticism— Documentary Theater Responding to the Fukushima Disaster
Barbara Geilhorn
Part 3: Border-Crossing
7. Lost in Narration in Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary
Dan Fujiwara
8. Spoiled Meals: Immunitary and Metabolic Imaginaries in Kawakami Mieko’s ‘Dreams of Love, Etc.’ and Murata Sayaka's Convenience Store Woman
Chiara Pavone
Part 4: Nuclear Futurity
9. Humanism and the Hikari-Event: Reading Ōe with Stengers in Catastrophic Times
Margherita Long
10. Afterword: Chernobyl’s Past and Fukushima’s Remembered Future
Rachel DiNitto
Biography
Linda Flores is an Associate Professor in Modern Japanese Literature in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and the Fellow in Japanese Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford, UK.
Barbara Geilhorn is a Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo (DIJ) and an Adjunct Researcher at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Japan.
