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Paper short abstract:

By taking up Ōoka's Fires on the Plain, I will explore the fundamental relationship between memory, writing, and trauma. My aim is to open a dialogue with studies that focus on traumatic events, as they tend to assume a direct causal link between the original event and its subsequent expression.

Paper long abstract:

For the last several decades, literary studies have taken up “trauma” as one of the main topics of exploration. Typically, such studies examine how traumatic events—in Japan’s case, the Great Kanto Earthquake, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or the 3.11 Fukushima disaster—affected or reshaped artistic expression. As valuable as this scholarly trend has been, I wish to step back and reexamine this notion of trauma from the more fundamental perspective of memory. Memory, I contend, does not simply allow for a direct causal link to be drawn between the traumatic event and its subsequent expression.

I wish to explore this issue by focusing on the quintessentially “traumatic” work of literature, Ōoka Shōhei’s Nobi (Fires on the Plain, 1952). While previous scholarship has assumed that the narrator/protagonist Tamura is driven to insanity because of his experience in the Philipines (e.g., cannibalism, his own killing of a Filipino woman, etc.), I argue that Ōoka actively questions the causal link between the original traumatic experience and subsequent psychological trauma. The novel suggests that it is only through repetition (both of recollecting and writing the event) that the protagonist arrives at a state of madness through which trauma is expressed.

Ultimately, my objective is not to offer a rereading of Ōoka’s classic, but to more rigorously explore the fundamental relationship between memory, writing, and trauma. I wish to open a dialogue with studies that posit the traumatic event as the originary point of expression, designating memory as a simple rememberance of the event. As honorable as such gesture is, it reduces memory to the level of consciousness. Memory and hence trauma haunts and returns regardless of one’s willngness to remember. To further the study of trauma, it is vital that we unpack the complex relationship between the event and its repetition.