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.