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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.