Paper short abstract:

In my paper, I will present the results of my doctoral research on Japanese wartime literature as a genre positioned between the poles of propagandistic and autobiographical writing on the case study of Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951), one of the most prolific wartime writers in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

As one of the most prominent writers of the early Shōwa era (1926-1989), Hayashi Fumiko’s (1903-1951) writing during the wartime years of 1937-1945 can be seen as one of the most representative examples of Japan’s war propaganda both due to her popularity and her prolific output during this time. In my paper, I will present the results of my doctoral research focusing on Hayashi Fumiko’s wartime texts as a case study for an analytical framework of wartime literature as a genre combining elements of state propaganda with autobiographical writing. I will show how Hayashi’s wartime writing reflected the contemporary media and broader trends in Japanese wartime literature, while also maintaining stylistic and thematic continuities with her pre-war texts, which might at first glance appear radically different in their worldview and ideology. Hayashi had traveled to China twice in 1938, with particularly the second trip bringing her a large amount of publicity; later, she would also travel to Manchuria (1940) and Southeast Asia (1942-1943), each time in a different context, which also resulted in texts with different focal points and attitudes towards the respective ‘other’.

In this way, Hayashi’s wartime texts display different facets of Japanese imperial ideology, and through establishing their connections to the wider literary and media discourses on war, as well as elements familiar from her earlier writing, the mechanisms of Hayashi’s own construction of propagandistic narratives as well as those providing them with a perceived authenticity can be clearly revealed. Especially important in this regard is to examine Hayashi’s texts between the stylistic poles of bidan (military propaganda) reportage and shishōsetsu (‘I-novel’), linking it to other prominent texts of wartime literature. By providing an analytical framework for wartime literature and a comprehensive case study of Hayashi Fumiko’s texts under consideration of contemporary media and literary discourses, my aim is to show the importance of wartime literary texts as artifacts of collective memory and historical documents contributing to the construction of narratives of war, both significant at a time of historical revisionism and rising nationalist sentiment in Japan.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Ōe Kenzaburō's semi-autobiographical novel Natsukashii toshi he no tegami (1987) to show how modern Japanese literature writes the past, from the personal to the national one, but also engages with world literature, seen through the reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages in the discussion on how modern Japanese literature positions itself vis-à-vis history and the world by focusing on the novel Natsukashii toshi he no tegami (Letters to My Nostalgic Years, 1987) by Ōe Kenzaburō. This long work by the Nobel-prize laureate responds to historical vicissitudes at multiple levels. First, as a semi-autobiographical work it inscribes the author’s own history within that of modern Japan, ranging from the American occupation to the Anpo protests in front of the National Diet Building in Tokyo. Second, it engages with Japanese literary history through apparently appropriating the autobiographical narrative mode of the I-novel, a staple of naturalist-inspired writing in the early XX century, but actually turning it upside down through downplaying the strictly autobiographical aspects in the author’s history, and dividing them across two characters, the narrator K and his friend Gii, who both represent different sides of Ōe. Third, the frequent readings and interactions with passages from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy demonstrate the novel’s concern with its relationship with the world outside of Japan. This happens at the individual level, expressed by the characters’ preoccupation with life, death, and salvation, debated against the framework of Dante’s treatment of similar global concerns. However, at a wider level, the novel is a prime example of how modern Japanese literature shapes itself in relation to various histories, both in the local domain of K and Gii’s own life, informed by the countless myths of their native forests, and on the international stage, by forging a new reading of Dante in Ōe, and Ōe in Dante. This tight combination of Japanese and ‘Western’ literature, so rare to find in contemporary writings, offers a powerful reflection on the possibilities and identities of Japan’s literary medium negotiating both its history and the world’s.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses diaries relating to the early years of AIDS in Japan. I argue that these together constitute an antifiction that, in responding to the foreclosure of futurity in the pre-antiretroviral moment, nonetheless contain glimmers of hope.

Paper long abstract:

Prior to the 1996 development of combination antiretroviral therapy that made HIV a manageable condition, the future for positive people and those that loved them appeared bleak. Small-scale acts of documentation, like diary writing, became a means of enabling the “weight of image and sensation” of their historical moment and lived experiences to come out, as the NYC-based artist David Wojnarowicz wrote in 1991’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration.

While Japan is not often understood as a significant location in the global AIDS epidemic or its response, the virus nonetheless shaped Japanese discourse and the impact on those living with HIV and their loved ones was profound. As part of a larger project on the Japanese response to HIV/AIDS before 1996, I have begun to look at various forms of such documentation, including diaries. Philipe Lejeune describes diaries as ‘antifiction’ in contrast to more formally structured narrative forms like autobiographies and histories, which are ‘contaminated… [with] fiction in their blood.’ Diaries instead play with ‘fragmentation and the tangential in an aesthetics of repetition and vertigo.’

In this paper I discuss several ‘diaries’ – both published and private – that engage with the story of AIDS in Japan through fragmentation, repetition, and contamination. Akira the Hustler and Bubu de la Madeleine both published texts entitled “A Whore Diary,” which explore in part their friendship with and care for the artist Furuhashi Teiji until he died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1996. I will read these alongside the writings of Furuhashi himself, which disrupt the ‘diaries’ of his friends, and the diaries of Stephan D. Michael, an American man who grew up in Japan and died in 1994 in Seattle. Written primarily in English, Michael’s diaries as he struggled with AIDS feature disruptive kanji and words and phrases in Japanese, as well as increasingly disintegrating style and language as his condition worsens.

I argue that the antifiction of disintegration of these texts is not only a response to the foreclosure of futurity in the pre-antiretroviral moment but, as in Wojnarowicz’s work, contain in their fragmentation glimmers of hope.