Seeing past destruction: War and memory in 1960s Japanese fiction

This is a dissertation about war memory in 1960s Japan, about how the Asia-Pacific War was being remembered and represented two decades after defeat. It examines the period's contentious debate on narrating the wartime past by reading the works of several sets of writers, most importantly two authors who were part of the so-called 'Showa single-digit' generation: Oda Makoto (b. 1932), the prolific writer who led the anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan, and Kaiko Takeshi (1930--1989), the novelist and journalist best known outside Japan for his descriptions of the war in Vietnam. At a time when increasingly nationalistic and nostalgic narratives of the nation's past were creeping back into public view, their work, I suggest, dramatizes and documents the continuing traumatic effects of the war. Through several close readings, I show how their work registers this trauma, both through forms of loss, dispossession and deferred meaning, and through a palpable anxiety toward the very mechanisms of remembrance. That is to say, I read these two authors' works (and the more amnesiac accountings of the past that surrounded them in 1960s Japan such as by Ueyama Shumpei and Hayashi Fusao) through recent theories of traumatic narration, a body of thought grappling with how we register and attempt to articulate the overwhelming events of the past. These theories are particularly relevant in reading narratives from the 1960s, for, as I argue throughout this study, the overwhelming events of the war did not return merely as lingering 'memories' within postwar society, a set of experiences that could be 'remembered,' 'narrated,' and most problematically, 'put to rest.' They returned, rather, as forces disrupting the very experience of everyday life, forces shaping the very practice of remembering and writing itself. In an era eager to forget past suffering, these two writers speak of a present haunted by history, a present inextricably marked by the traumatic legacies of the war. I suggest that by unsettling the composition and coherence of remembrance, their work, particularly as seen against the backdrop of 1960s Japan, vividly illustrates the fractious nature of memory at this moment in postwar Japanese history.