Imagining the War in Japan ─ Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film

The central premise of this collection of 11 essays, according to editors Williams (Japanese studies, U. of Leeds, UK) and Stahl (Japanese literature and cinema, State U. of New York at Binghamton, US), is that the experiences and aftermath of World War II were collectively traumatic for the Japanese and remains so to the present day, trans-generationally, even if that trauma can be characterized by "belatedness" and "dislocation;" and that said trauma can be seen in the works of Japanese artists who are engaged in ongoing, collaborative projects seeking to reconstitute the trauma of the war in cognitive, affective, and ethical terms. The essays discuss the intergenerational experience of war trauma in Murakami Haruki's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the transformation of the trauma of wartime violence into an aesthetic of the sublime in the Yukio Mishima stories "Death in Midsummer" and "Patriotism," the evolution of the experience of trauma in the novels of Shiina Rinzo and Nosaka Akiyuki, war trauma and memory in Medoruma Shun's trilogy of the Battle of Okinawa, the ideological aesthetics of Yamahata Yosuke's photographs of Nagasaki the day after the atomic bombing, the treatment of culpability in the Japanese literature of the atomic bombings, adult and government betrayal as themes in the Oe Kenzaburo novel Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids and the Fukasaku Kinji film Battle Royale, and allegorical representations of the war in the anime films of Matsumoto Akira and Tomino Yoshiyuki. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Mark Williams, Ph.D. (1991) in Japanese Literature, University of California, Berkeley, is Professor of Japanese Studies and Chair of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds, UK. He has published extensively on Japanese literature of the immediate postwar period, including Endo Shusaku: A Literature of Reconciliation (Routledge, 1989).David C. Stahl, Ph.D. (1994) in Japanese Literature, Yale University, is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Cinema and Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). He has published on Japanese survivor representation of and response to war trauma, including Burdens of Survival: Ooka Shohei's Writings on the Pacific War (University of Hawai'i, 2003).