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Paper short abstract

The paper examines how Kobayashi Erika’s “invisible visible” aesthetics offers a critique of contradictions of social reproduction, especially the relationship between unpaid care labor and the social environment in neoliberal Japan, through Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019) and “Shedding” (2020).

Paper long abstract

Japanese novelist and artist, Kobayashi Erika (b.1978) employs what she calls the “invisible visible” aesthetics in her multimodal works to visualize or verbalize something difficult to perceive, such as radiation, and to present the invisible as it is. This paper examines two works, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019; trans. 2022) and “Shedding” (DAPPI, 2020; trans. 2023, in Sunrise), which exemplify this aesthetic approach. Through these texts, Kobayashi offers a multilayered critique of Japan’s state-managed pronatalist policies and exposes the social inequalities produced in neoliberal Japan. I argue that Kobayashi’s “invisible visible” aesthetics operate through two interrelated dimensions: the resistance of the invisible and the oscillation between the visible and the invisible. The “invisible” encompasses a constellation of overlapping sites—radiation, non-(re)productive labor, unpaid care work, marginalized populations, intergenerational female relationships, cyclic bodily loss (menstruation and ova), and cyber violence on social media platforms—revealing how structural erasures are both material and affective. I further situate this aesthetics in relation to the concept of “negative capability,” defined as the capacity to remain with uncertainty, accepting a state of ‘being in midair’ without pretending to understand, while empathizing with and emotionally allying with others. In this presentation, I explore how Kobayashi’s works illuminate contradictions of social reproduction in neoliberal Japan, while briefly examining how imagination functions as a momentary practice of consolation for anxiety and as an embrace of negative capability.