Narrating the colonial past in Manchuria and Shanghai in postwar Japanese literature

This study explores how postwar Japanese literature narrates and recreates Japanese experiences in colonial Shanghai and Manchuria in the 1930s and the early 1940s. In postwar Japan, memories of the imperial and war periods have been suppressed. While postwar literature provides a discursive space for reconstructing individual experiences in the colonies, it forms a complicated relationship with the discourse of amnesia. This study thus examines the multiple ways in which narratives about Manchuria and Shanghai engage with colonial amnesia in postwar Japan. This project also demonstrates that individual identity and subjectivity are constructed through the dynamic interactions between amnesia and the counter-narrative to amnesia.; I focus on five important postwar Japanese writers, who all lived in Manchuria or Shanghai before the end of the war, and who all wrote fiction based on their lives in the colonies. These authors are Takeda Taijun, Abe Kobo, Kiyooka Takayuki, Miki Taku, and Hayashi Kyoko. Their writings on Manchuria and Shanghai span the late 1940s to the early 1980s.; The Introduction maps out the historical and conceptual framework of the study. Chapter One discusses Takeda Taijun's Shanghai narratives. His literature explores individual war guilt and responsibility in China as the reference for constructing Japanese individual subjectivity after the war. Chapter Two examines how Abe Kobo uses the image of Manchuria as an alternative way to critique the national space, identity, and ideology of postwar Japan. Chapter Three analyzes Kiyooka Takayuki's Dalian narratives and his celebration of the private space in relation to the colonial past. Chapter Four focuses on the ways in which Miki Taku's narratives remember and recreate the Manchurian past from children's perspectives. Chapter Five examines the interconnections between colonial memory and the memory of the atomic bombing in Hayashi Kyoko's writing. The epilogue evokes the question of how the colonial past has been narrated since the 1990s.