Imag(in)ing War Trauma in Sakaguchi Ango's “The Idiot” and Ōe Kenzaburō's “Prize Stock”

ABSTRACT

According to trauma studies specialists such as Pierre Janet, Judith Herman, and Walter A. Davis, traumatic events and experiences cannot be known, understood, communicated, or learned from until they have been adequately constituted in language, symbol, and image. In this essay, I use Davis's concepts of “aesthetic cognition” and “vital images” to examine two scenes of extreme interpersonal violence. The first appears in “Hakuchi” (“The Idiot”), Sakaguchi Ango's 1946 story based on his personal experience of the fire-bombing attacks on Tokyo, and the second appears in “Shiiku” (“Prize Stock”), Nobel Prize-winning author Ōe Kenzaburō's debut work in which he represents integral aspects of his own overwhelming childhood experience of war and defeat. After introducing Davis's theoretical conceptions and providing background and context for the stories, I analyze and interpret the vital images showcased therein on interpersonal, nation-state, and international levels. In closing, I reflect on the valuable contributions of art to the constitution of critical knowledge and understanding of lived experiences of historical trauma and victimization.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic cognition
• history
• Japanese literature
• vital images
• war trauma

Acknowledgments

The opening theoretical section of this article and parts of the conclusion are based on material originally appearing in Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film and were reused here with the permission of my coeditor, Mark B. Williams, and Brill Publishing. This essay is an outgrowth of a footnote included in the introduction to the book in which “Hakuchi” and “Shiiku” are identified as representative examples of Japanese literary works containing vital images (Stahl and Williams 11–14).

Notes on contributor

David C. Stahl is an Associate Professor at Binghamton University. His publications include: The Burdens of Survival: Ōoka Shōhei's Writings on the Pacific War (U of Hawaii P, 2003); Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film (coedited with Mark B. Williams, Brill, 2010); and “Sins of the Fathers, Sins of the Sons: Transgenerational Transgression in Imamura Shōhei's Vengeance Is Mine” (Japan Forum 23: 4, December 2011).

Notes

1. That said, Ian Buruma's observations are informative in this regard: “Power in Japan […] rests […] on a type of social totalitarianism. […] The tension between official and popular culture is always simmering under the surface. The harder the official pressure is, the more grotesque the manifestations of popular culture become. […] Violent entertainment and grotesque erotica are still important outlets in what continues to be an oppressive social system. Thus they have a social and political significance far beyond similar fare in the West” (14, 16).

2. Also translated as “The Catch.” Ōe was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for this story in 1958.

3. For a discussion of discursive constructions of race in postwar Japanese literature in general and “Shiiku” in particular, see Molasky 70–82. Of particular relevance to the present study are his following points: “What has changed since the arrival of U.S. occupation forces is the degree to which whiteness has been ‘naturalized’ and effectively ‘deracialized,’ while blackness continues to function as an abstract (yet always corporeal) signifier of racial difference. […] Blackness serves to mediate Japanese identity in relation to whiteness. […] Whether a Japanese chooses to identify with white authority or to reject it by declaring affinity with blacks, this binary conception of race leaves the subject in ‘a liminal state—a gray area.’ Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to label this a ‘yellow area’” (74; emphasis in original).

4. In Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter, 1964), the protagonist, Bird, too, is traumatized by his father as a boy when the former punches him in the mouth for asking an innocent question about death and, three months later, commits suicide by putting a bullet through his head.