Paper short abstract:

I analyze "future bodies" in Tawada Yoko and Kawakami Hiromi's post-Fukushima fiction from a posthumanist perspective. I argue that their construction of convoluted evolutionary trajectories turns them into narratives of collapse that critique capitalist progress and question humanity's future.

Paper long abstract:

According to Aleida Assmann, the expectation of a “brighter future” peaked in the late 1960s—the heyday of nuclear power—and subsequently went into decline, becoming a thing of the past by the 1990s. Time, Assmann argues, has since not only lost its linearity but also the association with progress it acquired during modernity. Much of the fiction that emerged in response to the 2011 nuclear meltdowns reveals a similarly complicated relationship to time and the capitalist idea of progress. Set in highly contaminated environments, these stories no longer associate the future with hopeful expectation. Instead, authors imagine a “future as catastrophe” (Eva Horn), characterized by ecological breakdown, technological overstretch, economic crisis and/ or political illiberalization. My presentation looks at “future bodies” as one arena in which the convoluted relationship with time becomes palpable. Specifically, I explore how Tawada Yoko and Kawakami Hiromi map evolutionary trajectories that confound past and present. In Tawada’s Kentoshi (2014), set in the not-too-distant future, extractivist capitalism is the only element of our current time that survives into the future. Otherwise, the world is upside down, with the elderly becoming immortal and the young backtracking the original rise of life from water to land. In contrast, Ookina tori ni sarawarenai yōni (2016) by Kawakami imagines artificial intelligence taking over human bodies while the original humans go extinct. However, in this novel as well, time and evolution are ultimately circular. Perhaps inspired by Prometheus’ creation of man, the novel features two seemingly immortal—and in contrast to Greek mythology, female—survivors one of whom is worshiped as an almighty god while the other attempts to recreate humanity using mammal fossils as key ingredients. From a posthumanist perspective, I argue that despite their obvious differences, both texts can be read as narratives of collapse. Both critique capitalist models of endless progress and question the future of humanity itself.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines surrealism and symbolism in Ishizawa Mai’s Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite (2021), set in Europe after the Covid-19 lockdowns and a “return” to a pre-pandemic sense of normality. It employs post-apocalyptic theories to explore the novel’s portrayal of a post-catastrophe sense of time.

Paper long abstract:

Ishizawa Mai’s 2021 Akutagawa prize-winning novel Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite (In a place following the seashells) is set in Europe after the lifting of Covid-19 lockdown regulations, as much of the world attempts a return to a pre-pandemic sense of normality. The pandemic serves as an opportunity for reflection on memories of the 3.11 disaster and its aftermath ten years after it occurred. Moreover, it highlights the challenges—or perhaps impossibility—of such “returns” in the wake of traumatic events. A palimpsestic work of fiction characterised by the fragmentation of time and a convoluted narrative arc, Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite simultaneously engages and frustrates the reader, whose natural inclination is to weave together the disparate pieces of the story. Ishizawa’s novel employs surrealism (“ghosts”) as well as symbolism (for example, the eponymous seashells in the title). Figures from the past—including those believed to have died in the tsunami—appear, merging with the narrator’s present, such that it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle fantasy from reality. The novel’s presentation of “presence” and “absence”, and the worlds of the “real” and the “unreal” provoke discussions of how, in the wake of historical trauma, we navigate the critical spaces between traumatic events and these uneasy “returns” to the quotidian. Ishizawa’s Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite portrays the period following a catastrophe as a void that is both muddled and discontinuous, ultimately illustrating the impossibility of fully participating in “normal” life after trauma. The novel suggests, as James Berger has argued in his analysis of post-apocalyptic events, that even after the initial traumatic event, there are still profound lingering effects, so-called “aftermaths and remainders” (1999). This paper explores these representations of the surreal and the symbolic in Ishizawa’s novel as “remainders” and examines their impact on a post-catastrophe sense of time, especially given the critical distance between the narrative and the traumatic events of March 11, 2011, and its European post-Covid lockdown setting.

Paper short abstract:

I analyze the nexus between language, memory, and materiality in Ogawa Yoko’s The Memory Police. I contend that the novel’s construction of future as one of regress, loss, and deprivation not only aptly critique contemporary politics, but also draws a parallel between corporeality and censorship.

Paper long abstract:

Although initially published in 1994, Ogawa Yōko’s Hisoyakana kesshō (1994) was only translated into English in 2019. It has since garnered not only critical acclaim, but also a newfound sense of relevance to our contemporary moment, characterized by the increased assault on the freedom of speech on the global scale. The story is set in what appears to be a post-catastrophic, secluded island where social existence is pockmarked by the escalating, yet indiscriminate, number of prohibitions. On the one hand, willful participants of the regime help destroy the artefacts, obediently aiding the eponymous memory police. On the other, racialized non-conformists retain the memory of the objects and are forced into hiding to escape persecution. Paradoxically, while prohibited objects are ‘disappeared’, they still exist materially, such as birds, emphasizing the locals’ role in orchestrating the collective amnesia. Rather, the memories and feelings associated with objects lose their meaning, altering the perception of reality. Thus, the future of the society is not associated with the ideas of technological progress and optimism, but rather with regress, loss, and deprivation. In my presentation, I examine the critical nexus between language, memory, and materiality in the novel. Through intertextual interplay with transnational histories of captivity and enforced disappearances, Ogawa’s novel draws critical attention to themes prescient to our time, specifically, the politics of memory, historical revisionism, manipulation of language, and censorship. The novel’s unnamed female protagonist scrambles to retain her agency through writing novels until the novels themselves are disappeared, leading to the inevitable collapse of bodily autonomy. In this way, the story draws a critical juncture between freedom of speech and material reality, pointing to the institutional disciplining of bodies.

Paper short abstract:

The circularity of time and the loss of a future characterizes fiction by Erika Kobayashi. Her tales are of the history of radiation, of women, and of the Olympics. All prove to be imbricated in infrastructures of the nuclear. None bemoan the loss of the future; all take it as a given.

Paper long abstract:

I take two points from Jessica Hurley’s theorizing of the world that we live in to elucidate some of the forces behind literary production since the triple disasters of 2011. One, Hurley suggests that our world has shifted from the “nuclear sublime” to the “nuclear mundane.” Nuclear power, like Nature before it, was once awesome and sublime, whereas under the threat of a nuclear war and annihilation that may come at any time, it has become “mundane.” Second, in such a world our sense of time shifts, time is no longer teleogical and the world is “futureless.” Much postdisaster fiction, particularly that focused on radiation, exhibits these tendencies. I focus on Erika Kobayashi’s fiction where we find a world where time is circular and without a future, thus stuck in narrative whirlpools that cannot go forward, and where radiation is a mundane fact.

The final sentence of Kobayashi’s Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is essentially identical to the first, for example. While it signals the completion of an historical and experiential circle it also seems to confirm the confusion, the timelessness, of the characters’ lived experience. Characters seem lost in memories, but that may be explained as Alzheimer’s. But when daughters get lost in memories that are the lived experience of a grandmother, time is disrupted and “Alzheimer’s” is too simplistic of an explanation. Stones prove to be the receptacles of memory and also relate stories of radiation that interchange grandmothers for daughters and daughters for mothers. Stones and radiation: haunting that background are the triple disasters of 2011 and the circularity of a repeated Olympics. With these few examples we find a world of circles within circles, not a world that moves linearly to an endpoint, not even an apocalyptic endpoint, but a circular world. This world, and the lived experience of these women, is “futureless,” in Hurley’s sense. Hurley outlines the structures that make for “infrastructures of Apocalypse (the title of her book) and follows this to its manifestation in fiction. In this presentation I start with the structures in Kobayashi’s fiction to show their reliance on those structures.