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Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how Japanese women in peripheries, as the subject of narrating, (re)claim their forgotten memories in the national memory discourse through postwar fictions, using the concept of “abject” body and Cixous’ “écriture feminine” that explains those women’s storytelling.

Paper long abstract:

Memories of WWII have been ever controversial in Japan, just like many other countries, being associated with the national and other collective identities within the nation. It is also important to note that the war is constantly memorialized and (re)shaped significantly through popular media—a crucial apparatus for constructing a shared past.

Many studies have criticized Japanese war-themed fictions for their gendered narratives—women manifested as victims or nurturing mothers and men as heroic soldiers—to satisfy the national masculine desire. However, these studies tend to look at representations of men and women in a dichotomous framework and fail to notice the significance of war narratives and experiences of different groups of women. This may overlook the power relation between the center and the peripheral of the country. Some fictions have revealed discrepancies in female war experiences within Japan; ones in the mainland are sacralized, and others in peripheries are not. Meanwhile, the mechanism and effect(s) of female narratives in different socio-political positions have yet to be studied sufficiently.

This paper attempts to demonstrate how storytelling of women in peripheries, as the subject of narrating through their “abject” bodies, would serve as a strategy to (re)claim their forgotten memories in the national memory discourse through postwar popular fictions. It examines the mechanism of female narratives and the role of the narrators in popular dramas about the Soviet Union’s military action on Sakhalin near the end of WWII: Karafuto 1945 Summer Hyosetsu no Mon (1974) and Fire of the Mist (2008). Using Kristeva’s “abject” (1982) and the notion of “écriture feminine” (Cixous 1975), the paper discusses the way that (women’s) bodies are manifested as a medium of communication to construct a shared memory of the war among women, destabilizing the dominant national war narrative based on masculine desire.