Crisis and Literature in Contemporary Japan: From 3-11 to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kanehara Hitomi’s Fiction

ABSTRACT

It has been observed that ‘3–11’ marked an inflection point in Japanese cultural discourse, after which there prevailed a broad malaise about the social faults and systemic inequities that the natural and nuclear disasters had exposed in their aftermath. Kanehara Hitomi’s novel Motazaru Mono (Those without, 2015) explores this affective shift through her characters’ struggles to contend with the upending of their worldviews and values since 2011. In turn, Kanehara’s stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic’s peak of 2020–2021 show characters responding to the global crisis through the lens of a generalized state of precarity that, I argue, harkens back to 3–11 and earlier. With reference to Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘crisis ordinary’ mentality, I analyze ‘Unsocial Distance’ (June 2020), a love story between two youths who regard COVID-19 as an inconvenience rather than a true emergency. I then examine ‘Techno-break’ (January 2021) which ends with the protagonist’s mental and moral devolution in the socially distanced solitude she first enters as an anti-COVID measure. ‘Techno-break’ advocates for confronting the tolls of the prolonged pandemic, and for addressing the deeper-seeded fault-lines of Japanese society that contribute to more recent challenges.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See for example: https://vdata.nikkei.com/newsgraphics/coronavirus-japan-chart/for a daily update on case numbers.

² There is some controversy about what to call the Fukushima disaster, in particular regarding the now wide-spread term ‘3–11’. Christophe Thouny writes: ‘The commonly accepted denomination “3.11” precisely aims to cancel the eventfulness of the catastrophe, its possibilities for change and opening, by reinscribing it inside a well-known postwar narrative of reconstruction and development and circumscribing its effects to a limited and closed time and place. “3.11” is indexed on the world timeline, nicely finding its place in an American-led neoliberal order, “3.11” beside “9.11”, side by side, each its own trauma’ (Thouny, 2017: 2). Rachel DiNitto also acknowledges that the term ‘3/11’ has become commonly accepted, but she uses ‘Fukushima’ to specifically describe the works of literary fiction that she analyzes in her study, since her main focus is literary fiction about the nuclear aspect of the triple disaster (DiNitto, 2019: 6–7).

³ Writing in 2013, Aldrich described the anti-nuclear protests following 3–11, which have been amongst the largest public protests in Japan in the postwar era, as evincing a ‘renaissance in civil society’ (264).

⁴ See Takahashi, (2012) ‘Ano hi’ kara boku ga kangaeteiru ‘tadashisa’ ni tsuite (On what I have been thinking as ‘right’ since ‘that day’), and Murakami, (2012) Sakura no ki no shita ni wa gareki ga umatteiru (There is wreckage buried beneath the cherry tree).

⁵ Roman Rosenbaum discusses three such anthologies in ‘Post-3/11 Literature in Japan’ (Rosenbaum, 2014: 103–108).

⁶ The list was included as an appendix to the group’s 2017 volume of critical essays about 3–11 published on the sixth anniversary of the disaster.

⁷ Kanehara herself relocated to Okayama prefecture following 3–11, after which she moved to France with her family which includes two daughters. The family stayed in Paris for six years before returning to Japan in 2019.

⁸ The story was published in the June 2020 edition of the Gunzō literary magazine.

⁹ See for example Kōnoike, 2020. Kōnoike Rui’s story, ‘Saigo no jushuku’ (The last self restraint) was published in the June 2010 Shinchō, alongside Kanehara’s ‘Unsocial Distance’. The story uses absurdism to examine a group of high school students who become anarchic and violent against what they see as the government’s attempts to curb their individual rights with its entreaties that citizens ‘voluntarily restrain’ from participating in social activities.

¹⁰ The term ‘IRL’ (‘in real life’) in contemporary English parlance has similar connotations.

¹¹ I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article who pointed out this connection.

¹² The novel has been translated into English. Kanehara, (1983). Snakes and Earrings. (David Karashima, Trans.). New York: Dutton.