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.