Organizer: Janice Brown, University of Alberta
Chair: Sharalyn Orbaugh, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Michiko N. Wilson, University of Virginia
Trauma—a painful wound inflicted upon the psychic/physical body as the result of war, catastrophe, accident, or other calamity—can and often does destroy the victim. Those who survive are profoundly altered, finding themselves forced to struggle with fear, guilt, the unbidden resurgence of the past in dream or memory as well as crippling or numbing psychological disorders. Recovery is uncertain. The survivor is often unable to even speak of the traumatic event and may seek to erase it from memory. Nonetheless, speaking or telling may be the only way to tame the experience and begin to integrate it into the present life.
This panel will examine works by contemporary Japanese female writers engaged in the telling of trauma. Our examination of female texts and the subject positions constructed therein will attend to the female voice(s) raised in such telling, noting that while traumatic events may be visited on all human beings, there are some experiences as well as attempts to answer or speak to these experiences that can and should be read in terms of gender. Papers for this panel will focus on female writers who, through narrative or through the imagery of poetry, seek to bridge the gap between history/memory and their continued existence in present reality. We will show that not only are such tellings vital to the reclaiming of experience but also that such "crying voices," to borrow the words of Cathy Caruth, compel the reader in the role of listener to act in turn as witness to the attestations of those who, by writing, have begun to construct new worlds.
Sharalyn Orbaugh, University of British Columbia
In 1910 Tamura Toshiko wrote one of her best-known short works, "Namachi" (Raw Blood). Like many of Tamura’s other works from this period, "Namachi" explores the implications of being a woman in rapidly modernizing late Meiji Japan, and does so through metaphors and themes of the body. In this case a narrative of sexual trauma implies the gendered nature of larger traumatic issues of modernity. Written during the same period as, for example, Mori Ogai’s play Shizuka, Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro and Tayama Katai’s Futon—all of which explore Japanese modernity through narratives of heterosexual relationships—"Namuchi" deals graphically with power and its articulation through the body.
Heretofore explorations of trauma have largely concentrated on wartime, and the effects of bodily experience on the male psyche. Studies of female trauma have often focused on madness, bypassing or downplaying an original physical event. In this paper I will discuss the trauma of rapid modernization as expressed in terms of male-female interdependence, and the similar interdependence of physical and psychic experience.
Faye Kleeman, College of William and Mary
The project of modernization in Japan, which began in the Meiji period, was energized and punctuated by three wars, the Sino-Japanese War (1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1898), and the Second World War (1937–1945), and reached its apex in the empire building of the first half of this century. The tragic consequences of this process, military defeat and occupation, left a traumatic wound on the collective psyche of modern Japan that resonates through post-war discourses of identity, self, and nationhood. The literary and historical discourses chronicling this drive to empire and its aftermath are voluminous, but genderized, equating the colonial experience of dominant and dominated to a simplistic schema of male desire and female subjugation that ignores the overlapping discourse of the female colonists’ subjective position. Their voice is lost in the cacophony of masculine tales of war, polity, and politics.
This paper will focus on two women writers whose expositions of the colonial experiences of their young protagonists during the war sheds light on position of women and children within the imperialist culture. Two critical sites of textual and historical contestation are represented in the narrative of Hayashi Kyoko about Shanghai and Yoshida Tomoko about Manchuria. Childhood trauma, post-traumatic stress syndrome and an uncertain healing process reverberate through the protagonists’ lives, fashioning alternative post-colonial world-views. By focusing on the peripheral viewpoints of young girls, these authors make a case for the instrumental role of women and children in shifting a colonial system of meaning from self-interest and moral/racial superiority to a more engaged dialogic reaction with the Other.
Gretchen Jones, University of California, Berkeley
This paper offers an approach to interpreting the work of Kono Taeko (b. 1926) by examining how the author uses the thematic element of trauma to structure the protagonist’s situation, identity, and, moreover, the narrative itself.
The term "trauma" now commonly denotes the effects of psychological disturbances, with or without actual bodily injury. In Kono’s short story, "Yuki" 1962 (trans. "Snow," 1996), the protagonist’s psychologically traumatic discovery that she is an illegitimate child and has been substituted in the family register for her dead half-sister "deconstructs" her identity and, at the same time, introduces a sense of guilt over her own "survival"—also a characteristic of trauma. Traumatic experiences are often followed by flashbacks and nightmares which, in this story, play an important role as devices that both develop the storyline and structure the narrative as well. Concluding ambiguously, this story ends by "traumatizing" the reader with its lack of clear closure.
Kono has been labeled by many critics as nankai, "difficult to comprehend." "Snow," Kono’s first story nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, becomes an important link in understanding her work as a whole. Unlike many of her other stories that are written from the perspective of a woman who has cruel thoughts toward children, "Snow" takes the point of view of a grown-up daughter who has been tormented by her abusive stepmother. Focalized through the eyes of the traumatized girl, this story presents an inverted view of Kono’s persistent motif: the figure of the sadomasochistic woman.
Janice Brown, University of Alberta
In psychological and historical studies dealing with massive death trauma, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are cited as one of the most extreme examples of suffering undergone by human beings. Those who survived are often unable or unwilling to give voice to their experience. One witness to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima, the Japanese writer Oba Minako, has on occasion written about the aftermath of the bombing. Although she is not known as a writer of "A-bomb literature," Oba has never ceased to respond to her experience, creating from the trauma of the past a literature that has at its core the memory of this event. Marked by an acute sense of dislocation, disconnection, and radical quest as well as by a penetrating insight into contemporary social issues, Oba’s writings may be read as an attempt to come to terms with a profound rupture in the world.
This paper will examine the early poetry of Oba Minako as the writing out of trauma that, until 6 August 1945, had no precedent in the history of humankind. My paper will argue that while events of such magnitude may defy expression or aesthetic representation and further that there can be no absolute recovery from such trauma, Oba’s first attempts at writing reflect a powerful desire to acknowledge her experience and redeem it from silence. In this regard Oba, in her struggle to reclaim memory and retrieve history, takes the first steps towards the forming of a new, post-traumatic symbolic realm, one which has at its center the image of a ghostly fire, lit by atomic inferno, its shimmering flame casting long shadows over both living and dead, present and future, male and female.