Unruly Subjects in Shun Medoruma’s ‘Walking a Street Named Peace’ and Miri Yū’s Tokyo Ueno Station

Abstract

The article takes a comparative approach to two works of fiction, ‘Walking a Street Named Peace’ by Shun Medoruma (1986) and Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yū (2014) highlighting the parallels between the protagonists as marginalised in terms of class and ethnicity within Japanese society. The author draws on the work of Tetsuya Takahashi to show how Okinawa (the setting of Medoruma's story) and Fukushima (the home prefecture of Miri's protagonist) play a part in a ‘system of sacrifice’ which is oriented around the imperial throne in Japan. Drawing on scholarship by John W. Treat and Norma Field around a taboo of impunity and silence in relation to the Emperor, she argues that the pivotal placement of the system at the centre of each of these stories points to ongoing silences and inequities arising from unresolved wartime memories.

Keywords:

• Okinawa
• postwar
• Japanese Literature
• Fukushima
• war
• modernism

Notes

1 ‘Peace Street’ won Medoruma both the New Okinawa Literature Prize and the Kyūshū Arts Festival Literature Prize in 1986. The 2019 English translation by Morgan Giles of Yū’s novel is titled Tokyo Ueno Station. The quotations in this essay are from this translation.

2 Yamasaki (83–97) points out the untimely death of the narrator’s only son not only leaves him without a successor, it leaves him in limbo, unable to fully die.

3 Yoshiyuki Tomoda discusses these events in his article ‘Medoruma Shun no fukei hyōgen’, 153–165, 2011.

4 See Keisoku Shu’s dissertation chapter on ‘Peace Street’ for a description of the social mechanisms in Okinawa by which individuals monitor one another (51–68).

5 Tetsuya Takahashi discusses the reduction of US military bases in mainland Japan and the corresponding increase of military bases in Okinawa from the mid-1950s onward in his recent book Shisō wa ima nani wo kataru beki ka (87).

6 Tomoyuki Suzuki points out the prevalence of weakness in Medoruma’s early works in the first chapter of Me no oku ni tukitaterareta kotoba no mori (25–52).

7 For a detailed analysis of transgenerational trauma in Medoruma’s writing see Kyle Ikeda.

8 Susan Bouterey underscores the visual aspect of ‘Peace Street’ (23–24).

9 See John Whittier Treat’s article ‘Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Contemporary Japanese Literature’ and Norma Field’s chapter on Okinawa in In the Realm of a Dying Emperor for discussions of the chrysanthemum taboo.