Indeterminate Crises, a Nuclear Continuum: Abe Kōbō’s The Ark Sakura and the Structures of Technological Discourse in the Nuclear Age

Abstract

Be it the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the escalations of the Cold War, or the triple disaster at Fukushima, the problem of representing disaster remains an exigent yet precarious one. Published amid rising global tensions, Abe Kōbō’s The Ark Sakura (Abe, 1984) questions the limits of representation within this perplexing discursive landscape. In this article, I will examine the text’s engagement with the concepts of governmentality, time, and representation, with special consideration towards an overarching structural critique of the role of information – more specifically, the flow and distribution of information – within Cold War nuclear discourse. Just as the tunnels of the quarry in the novel amplify and distort every sound and utterance into confusing, often duplicitous signals, the discourses surrounding nuclear disaster have always had to traverse complex topologies of frequently conflicting signs and signifiers, including but not limited to corporate, geopolitical, and ideological interests. To that end, I propose a reading of the novel alongside a reconceptualization of nuclear discourse as belonging to a larger genealogy of technological narratives, media compositing, and networked power, and in so doing, attempt to situate it within ongoing modalities of how techno-ecological disaster is imagined and discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Christopher Bolton points out the double meaning behind the use of the word sakura, which can mean both ‘commercial shill’ as well as ‘cherry blossom’, the latter of course being closely associated with the image of ‘traditional Japan’. He notes how this wordplay forms a broader commentary by Abe on the emotive power of such images and the kinds of deception that occur behind these forms of nationalist significations (Bolton, 2009: 257–8).

² Unless otherwise noted, I will be using the existing English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

³ Many critics attempted to draw connections between the novel and Abe’s own writing process, or his supposedly waning productivity and poor health at this stage of his career. There has been, however, relatively little by way of critical scholarship on this text. See Bolton, 2009: 249–252 and Tatsumi, 1993: 71–75.

⁴ Azuma Hiroki, for example, has written about the decline in ‘grand narratives’ and the subsequent rise in ‘animalistic’ consumption in the postmodern economy. The postmodern human, being no longer able to fulfill his desire for meaning through sociality, satisfies it via solitary, need-based (as opposed to intersubjective, desire-based) consumption. While such humans still participate in social acts, Azuma sees these acts as being sustained by the exchange of information and not the inherent desire for relationships with the other. See Azuma (2009 [2001].

⁵ Translation is author’s own. Italics added for emphasis.

⁶ Translation is author’s own.

⁷ Translation is author’s own.

⁸ See also Abe, 2000b [2000b [1984]: 23–27. In this speech, entitled ‘The Ark in the Nuclear Age (Kakujidai no hakobune),’ Abe expands on what he sees as the central role of the nation and the ideologies of ‘national defense’ in hindering any kind of global denuclearization.

⁹ Andrew S. Gross goes further to assert, using arguments by Fredric Jameson and Michael Rothberg, that the concept of the ‘crisis of representation’ is in fact based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Adorno’s statement, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, where Adorno, rather than proposing the ‘aesthetic discontinuity between representation and its object’, was actually focusing on the ‘historical continuity between totalitarianism and the “total society” of consumer culture’ (Gross, 2006: 92).