© Copyright (2005)  Southeast Conference of the Association of the Association of Asian Studies.  SEC/AAS

Return to Contents, Volume XXVII, Southeast Review of Asian Studies

IMPLICATING COLONIAL MEMORY AND THE ATOMIC BOMBING:  HAYASHI KYOKO’S THREE SHORT STORIES

LIANYING SHAN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Introduction

In the official political discourse about the atomic bombings in Japan, the bombings are a collective national experience of victimization for all the Japanese.[1]  Such a view of the atomic bombings creates a myth of Japanese wartime victimhood and also leaves out Japan's colonial history and military aggression in Asia prior to Japan’s defeat in World War II.[2]  Instead of situating the atomic bombings within the larger context of Japan's modern history, the official discourse of the atomic bombings treats the bombings as “uniquely traumatizing events,” isolated from the events before and after them.[3]  The act of obscuring Japan's imperialist past manifests the nationalist agenda and conservative politics of postwar Japan. 

Such a nationalist perspective of commemorating the atomic bombings represented by the Hiroshima Memorial Park has been challenged since the 1960s by many Japanese writers, critics, historians and artists, who perceive the atomic bombings in the contexts of Japanese colonialism, military aggression, and Japan's postwar political system under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.  For example, the tanka poet Kurihara Sadako and the novelist Hotta Yoshi’e in their works describe the atomic bombings in relation to other atrocities in Asia as the result of Japan’s imperialism.  The Japanese artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi started to create murals about the Hiroshima bombing in the 1950s and they have incorporated the themes of “the Rape of Nanking,” “the Battle of Okinawa,” and “Auschwitz” since 1975.[4]  The writer Oda Makoto in his novel Hiroshima treats the Hiroshima atomic bombing not as a unique Japanese experience but an international event.  The scholar of French literature Kamata Sadao more explicitly reveals Japan’s double identities as both victim and victimizer through connecting the two atomic bombings with a chain of events such as Japanese atrocities in China during the Fifteen-Year War.”[5]  The literary critic Naga’oka Hiroyoshi in one essay cites recent novels, which use Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the settings for the treatment of such topics as wartime responsibility and social discrimination.[6]  These artists and writers show their awareness that the atomic trauma in Japan and other historical events and traumas of the twentieth-century in Asia and the world are interrelated.  Their artistic expressions not only disrupt official narratives about the atomic bombings as nothing but a victimization experience, but also transcend nationalist thinking by emphasizing the aspect of universal human trauma. 

The writing of the Japanese writer Hayashi Kyōko (1930-- ) can be situated within the discursive context delineated above—the synthesizing view (memory) of the atomic bombings and other historical circumstances.[7]  Hayashi lived in Shanghai from 1931 to March, 1945.[8]  A few months after going back to Japan in 1945, Hayashi experienced the atomic bombing in Nagasaki.[9]  Since the late 1960s, Hayashi has gradually established herself as a representative genbaku sakka (atomic bombing writer) and she is still writing about the themes of the bombing and nuclear weapons today.[10]  She has also incorporated her memory of living in Shanghai as a child into her writing of the Nagasaki bombing.  However, literary critics and scholars often ignore this aspect of her writing. 

 

This paper emphasizes the motif of colonial memory in Hayashi’s literature.  Such a critical endeavor will not only correct the oversimplified reception of Hayashi’s writing inside and outside Japan, but also enrich our understanding of the complexity of the atomic bombing discourse in general.  This chapter uses Hayashi’s works as a vehicle for thinking how colonial memory is always mediated by various social, historical and political events and factors in postwar Japan and how the writing of colonial memory is intertwined with other discourses.  (It should be emphasized here that there is no such an entity called colonial memory that can exist outside of language, narrative and writing.)

 

I will analyze three of Hayashi’s stories to illustrate how the element of colonial memory is presented in her discourse of the atomic bombing.  In the first story, “Hibiki (Echo),” the act of reflecting upon the atomic bombing experience also uncovers Japan’s colonial violence in Shanghai that has been obscure in postwar Japanese consciousness.  The victim consciousness often associated with atomic bombing narratives is thus contextualized.  The second story, “Kōsa (Yellow Sand),” evokes not only the life of the racial other of the Japanese empire—the poor Chinese residents in Shanghai—but also, more importantly, the life of a Japanese prostitute Okiyo—the other within the Japanese self.  Okiyo and the atomic bombing victims –the other within the self of postwar Japan— have much in common because of their forgotten, marginalized and stigmatized experiences in relation to mainstream society of imperial and postwar Japan.  The third story, “Eishamaku (The Movie Screen),” thematizes how Japan’s colonial past and the atomic bombings are evoked in the early years of postwar Japan under the American occupation. 

 

Hibiki (Echo)

 

Hayashi’s atomic bombing narratives describe the physical, psychological and emotional damage on people that the atomic catastrophe has inflicted.  Such emphasis on human suffering enables her to transcend narrow national differences and to connect Japanese people’s suffering in the bombing to the suffering of the Chinese under Japan’s colonial and military control.  In the short story “Hibiki,” which is set in the 1970s, the narrator reflects upon her experience four days after the Nagasaki bombing.  Her mother goes to her boarding dorm in the city from Isahaya to search for her and they together walk through the debris of the city to go back to Isahaya where the family has been evacuated.  The story describes what the narrator saw and thought about during the ten-hour trip by foot.  Her thought naturally moves to her memory of Shanghai because she and her family only had repatriated from Shanghai five months before and her mother had not recovered from pleurisy, which resulted from the stress and hardship of the repatriation journey.   

The aftermath of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki seen through the narrator’s eyes and her reminiscences of her Shanghai experience are therefore two intertwining narrative lines in the story.  They are connected through the narrator’s thoughts that travel back and forth between her experience after the bombing and her Shanghai experience in the past.  The salient image that connects both circumstances is that of the miserable refugees.  The narrator describes the scene of people fleeing the totally devastated city Nagasaki through a tunnel:

 

It seemed that when smelling the blood of others and the odor of the sea, the pain became worse. The groans of the wounded grew louder. The sound of the carts and the sound of pans and pots touching each other reached the dome of the tunnel and echoed back. The tunnel became extremely noisy like people throwing stones into empty cans. The silent ones were only those without wounds.[11]

 

There is no description of the words and language being spoken by the fleeing people, but only the portrayal of primitive sounds and echoes as well as ominous smell of blood and the sea, which capture the unspeakable horrific experience of the people.  The enclosed space of the tunnel increases people’s pain and fear.   

 

The sounds of pots and pans of the fleeing Japanese remind the narrator and her mother of the scene a few years earlier, in which the Chinese fled Shanghai before the Japanese army invaded the city.  They know from their experience that in Shanghai “when battle began the fleeing people with pots and pans on their back were always the Chinese, not foreign Japanese.”[12]  The misery of the fleeing Japanese including themselves forms a stark contrast with their superior status as victors in Shanghai.  The following passage shows that in wartime the mother and daughter could not imagine themselves to be refugees like the Chinese, but during the bombing, they experience what the Chinese experienced before:

 

 “[We are] the same as the Chinese, like refugees,” my mother said. . .  My mother had watched her compatriots fleeing and recalled the sight of Chinese who had once been driven from Shanghai by the war. But we were not ‘like refugees,’ we were refugees. My mother could not believe the fact that Japanese, herself included, could be fleeing with our own pots and pans. She had lived in Shanghai as the citizen of the victor nation… While living in someone else’s country, Japanese mothers—citizens of the victor nation—could watch the Chinese flee from the sidelines. That is why “Chinese” and “refugees” were the same thing for my mother.[13]

 

In this passage, the experience of the Chinese before the incoming battle in Shanghai and the Japanese after the bombing in Nagasaki are aligned together.  The narrator identifies with the plight of the victimized Shanghai residents.  Through the lens of the atomic catastrophe the mother finally opens her mind to rethink about the experience of the Chinese in Shanghai.  Through the intersection between these two historical experiences, the story evokes a historical trauma other than Japan’s own.  Through the narrator’s reflection on the common traumatic experience of people in Nagasaki and Shanghai, Hayashi invites a comparison of the dropping of the atomic bombing and Japan’s colonial history.

 

The resonance between the experiences of the Japanese in Nagasaki and the Chinese in Shanghai exemplifies how one’s trauma and history are often in a comparative context.  In her study on trauma Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, the critic Cathy Caruth argues that the working of personal trauma significantly reflects upon the mechanism of history.  According to Caruth, different traumatic experiences are communicable with each other; “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another.”[14]  Similarly, history is not one’s own singular, isolated history, but always is the history of one’s relationship with another.  Caruth asserts, “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”[15]  By history, Caruth refers to the larger historical context, in which trauma is situated.  She uses Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour (“Hiroshima my love”) as an example to analyze the nature of trauma and history.  In the film, a French woman and a Japanese man are attached together by their respective catastrophic experiences.  The woman once becomes crazy after losing her German lover during World War II.  The man, whose family was decimated in the Hiroshima atomic bombing, is the only one who can listen to and receive the woman’s story of a traumatic past.  In her analysis, Caruth emphasizes the idea that trauma is not only one’s haunting relationship with the catastrophic past, but is also a possible encounter with another’s trauma.  She also implies that through the communication of the two characters, the histories of the atomic bombing and the German occupation of France in World War II are implicated together. 

 

In a similar fashion, in “Hibiki,” the history of the atomic bombing is connected to Japan’s colonial history in China based on the similar traumatic experiences of the people involved in these historical events.  The connection of the two historical moments is made through the narrator’s reminiscences of her experiences in these two contexts, i.e., through her equating her own trauma with the trauma of the Chinese that she witnessed.  In this sense, the narrative of personal trauma makes possible the intersection of two separate national histories of Japan and China within the textual space.   

 

“Hibiki” is permeated with sounds representing different historical moments.  The narrator’s memory of December 8th, 1941, the first day of “the Great East Asia War,” consists of various sounds in Shanghai, which symbolize the power of the Japanese empire.  The bombing sound of the Japanese warship Izumo, which attacked and sunk the British navy battleship on the Huangpu River, startled the whole city of Shanghai.  The sound of Japanese military patrols’ boots endlessly echoed in the streets.  The schoolmaster of the Japanese elementary school, where the narrator studied, asked the students to raise their hands in the air and recite banzai to the glory of the Japanese empire.  These triumphant sounds constitute the narrator’s memory of December 8th, 1941.  They come back and haunt the narrator on the day when she flees the debris of Nagasaki:  

 

The footsteps of these fleeing people became heavy.  The sound of dragging oneself in wood logs and straw sandals spread like the noise of worms gnawing the roots of grass and trees.  The cargo carts sounded sluggishly.  The sound crossed the road and reached the farmer’s yard [where I was resting].  It also reached my body.  Meanwhile, the bombing sound of the warship [Izumo] that had been accumulating inside me since my childhood began to oscillate slowly and regularly.[16]

 

Here, two historical moments and two geographies are juxtaposed again.  In contrast to the victorious December 8th, 1941, the day of August 9th, 1945 is remembered by the narrator in terms of the suffering of the fleeing people made visible through the sounds of wood logs, straw sandals and cargo carts.  Contrasting the two scenes from the two days, the narrator situates the postwar bombing on the extension of wartime Japanese imperialism.  Her inner thought connects the miserable sounds that made by the Nagasaki refugees with the victorious sounds of Izumo in the Pacific War.  Like the first juxtaposition between the Chinese in Shanghai and the Japanese in Nagasaki because of the same sound of their pots and pans, here the historical connection is also made through the sound. 

 

Another image in the story that ties the two days together is that of the rain: “Is it true that after bombing and firing in the battle, small rain will fall.  On the night of August 9th, small rain fell in Nagasaki.  It was fine rain like blowing the fog.  The rain soaked the core of my body when I escaped into the hill… On the day of December 8th, small rain also fell.”[17]  The narrator seeks to identify the commonality between the two days through the natural image of the rain.  Namely, like the echo, the memorable rain witnesses the common suffering of the ordinary people in two historical moments and thus reveals the underlying connection between these two historical events.  The difference is that in the first historical moment, Japan is the perpetrator whereas in the atomic bombing, Japan in the victim.   

 

Through three textual juxtapositions of the narrator’s Shanghai experience and her experience after the atomic bombing, the text repetitively evokes the connection of two historical moments.  Moreover, the juxtapositions have variations among them: the first one evokes the common traumatic experience of both the Chinese and the Japanese; the second one highlights the contrast between the defeated and devastated sound of the bombing victims and the triumphant sound of the Japanese occupation force in Shanghai; the third juxtaposition suggests that Japan is both the victimizer and victim in its recent history.  Through these different textual alignments of the two historical moments, the story shows that the act of narrating personal experience could tie historical events together—the Pacific War, the colonial occupation, and the bomb— in a subtle way that nationalist discourse cannot.  

 

The official discourse of the atomic bomb seldom touches on Japan’s role in victimizing Asia as the historian James Orr asserts: “Japanese consciousness as victimizer played little role in anti-nuclear pacifism.”[18]  The story “Hibiki” embodies a broader historical consciousness through simultaneously reflecting on Japan’s colonial history and describing the atomic catastrophe.  The story’s title, “Hibiki” not only literally means physical sounds echoing each other in the narrator’s mind, but also symbolically represents different historical events resonating with each other on the textual level.  Whereas conservative nationalists and politicians in Japan suffocate such an echo between Japan’s colonial history and the atomic bombings, Hayashi’s writing reestablishes the link between them and therefore reflects her anti-nationalist stance and postcolonial consciousness of understanding one’s experience through that of the other.

 

In summary, the image of “hibiki” is utilized as a form of recollection that does not highlight one single experience, but to echo two historical experiences.  “Hibiki” functions as a rhetorical device producing the textual connection of two historical moments through juxtaposing similar details that the narrator remembers about them.   

 

Kōsa (Yellow Sand)

 

Another story of Hayashi, “Kōsa (Yellow Sand),”  also demonstrates that the motif of colonial memory is an integral part of Hayashi’s atomic bombing discourse.  The story appears in Giyaman biidoro (Cut Glass, Brown Glass 1975,) a collection of twelve short stories thematizing the continual physical and psychological suffering of the Nagasaki bombing victims in the present.[19]  These twelve stories were first serialized in the journal Gunzō from March 1977 to February 1978 and then were published in book form by Kōdansha in May 1978.[20]  Although these stories are independent from each other, they are connected by the same thematic concern of the Nagasaki atomic bombing except the story “Yellow Sand,” which thematizes the narrator’s memory of her Shanghai experience as a child.  The author’s own explanation of her decision of inserting “Yellow Sand” into the collection indicates that she considers her pre-war experience in colonial Shanghai and her atomic bomb experience in Nagasaki as being continual: 

 

The reason that I bring the story “Yellow Sand” into this collection [of short stories] is because I want to make Shanghai period and my post-August 9th life echo with each other, and make the war at the bottom of my life and the present echo with each other.  I want to tie them into a ring.  It is also because the Shanghai period, which has been the positive part of my life, now has a dark shadow, which transforms it into the negative aspect.[21]

 

The comment above suggests that Hayashi aims to have her Shanghai experience and Nagasaki experience to reflect upon each other.  It also shows that her Nagasaki experience affects the way she conceptualizes and writes about the colonial past in Shanghai. 

 

The story features the first person narrator’s reminiscence of a Japanese prostitute Okiyo in colonial Shanghai.  The narrative present is set in contemporary Japan.  One day, the place where the narrator lives is covered with fine yellow sand, which has traveled all the way from the Chinese continent.  Yellow sand is a common weather phemnomenon in Japan during the spring season when dust is blown from North China across the sea to Japan.  The yellow sand from China reminds the narrator of her childhood in Shanghai and her encounter with Okiyo.  “The wind, slightly trembling as it passed my ears, brought back to me the hush of the rape flower field which I entered with Okiyo-san when I was young.”[22]  The narrator’s reminiscence takes the reader to Shanghai around the year of 1937.  The narrator and Okiyo live in the same neighborhood called Hongkou, which is a district in Shanghai controlled by Japan.  Okiyo is a street prostitute and she lives with a few White Russian prostitutes.  According to the narrator, although there were Japanese women working in expansive Japanese restaurants (ryōtei) and were supported exclusively by high-ranking officials in the Japanese military, Japanese prostitutes working on the street were rare at that time.  The narrator then describes her two encounters with Okiyo and her subsequent suicide in the summer of 1937. 

 

Okiyo is described as bearing Chinese features in the narrator’s encounters with her.  In their first encounter, the narrator, still a little girl, “witnesses” the “union” of Okiyo and a Chinese man: 

 

That day, after lunch, I sat on the bench watching the boats. People had gathered in front of Okiyo-san’s house, which has usually quiet during the day. As I turned back attracted by the noise, I saw that they were coolies. … The men seemed to be betting. …The coolies kept calling, trying to entice her to come down from that window. The man in silk raised both hands to quiet the coolies. …The door with a stained glass decoration opened slightly, and Okiyo-san came out as lightly as a small silver carp swimming in and out of river weeds. …The moment he sat, he drew her toward him, embracing her waist. He held her with his left arm and pushed her down on the couch. …After depriving her of the freedom of her hands, he held her legs between his. Okiyo-san became still. The man also became still. Wei, wei, the coolies shouted.[23]

 

In the passage above, Okiyo is described as the object of a bet among the Chinese coolies and as an entertainment for them.  In this scene, it is suggestive that Okiyo is wearing a Chinese dress and  physically intermingles with the Chinese coolies.  The narrator makes the connection between Okiyo and the Chinese through the Chinese dress that she wears: “I saw her in a Chinese dress for the first time.  Her hair, too, had a big bulge in front like a visor.  She was naked beneath the Chinese dress with a thigh length slit on the sides.  She wore satin Chinese shoes on her bare feet.”[24] 

 

The narrator’s mother finds out that her daughter has seen what Okiyo did with the Chinese man and she is very angry about it.  “‘Shame on her,’ she [my mother] said angrily, ‘Isn’t she a Japanese?—exposing herself in front of people [人前に曝すなんて;] she is a disgrace to our nation.’ Then she told me that this kind of woman should be forcibly sent home.”[25]  Okiyo is criticized to be “a disgrace” to the Japanese nation because of her profession and because of the fact that her customers are poor Chinese.  In the mother’s eyes, the behavior of individual Japanese is closely tied up with the national image of Japan.  This is the common mentality among the oversea Japanese in Shanghai. 

 

The narrator then takes on her mother’s comment and expresses that this is how Okiyo is thought of by other Japanese in the neighborhood: 

 

This was the feeling of the Japanese adults in town toward Okiyo-san.  When living in a foreign country, one was apt to feel that each person represented his or her home country.  Since at that time national prestige was important, the Japanese residents especially were strongly self-conscious.  Women were even forbidden to go out without socks or stockings.  It was thought that Japanese women’s skin should not be exposed to foreigners’ eyes.  ([異国人の目に日本女の肌を曝してはならぬ.]) My mother, too, went out wearing white tabi as though rich.  Beggars, robbers, and even poverty were a disgrace to the nation, and were considered grounds for repatriation.[26]

 

This long passage conveys the narrator’s thought in the narrative present rather than in the past when she was just a little girl.  The narrator retrospectively explains how the imperialist discursive paradigm shapes the utterance of the mother.  The same mentality among the Japanese residents in Shanghai leads to the discrimination of Okiyo in the Japanese community.  The implication behind the Japanese women’s dress code is that Japanese women’s body is a site for constructing a superior and clean Japanese identity.  In this context, Okiyo is associated more with the inferior position of the occupied Chinese than with the superior Japanese.  An important criterion for the Japanese adults including the mother to judge each other is to see whether one can keep up with the national prestige of Japan.  This manifests ordinary Japanese’s internalization of the imperial ideology of wartime Japan.  In order to distance the Japanese from the Asian other, the dominant discourse in imperialist Japan defines and maintains the Japanese self as being strong, rich, and superior.  It emphasizes an inward critical gaze on the self as much as an outward gaze on the Asian other.  This strong sense of the self image is an important feature of Japanese imperialism. 

 

The narrator has not entered the discursive realm of the adults and therefore is sympathetic toward Okiyo.  Because of her poverty and her decadence, Okiyo is excluded from the proper category of normal Japanese citizens abroad and from the immediate Japanese community.  In the eyes of the narrator, Okiyo does not seem to mind being treated that way.  She does not have a strong sense of Japanese self like the other Japanese in Shanghai do. 

 

In the second encounter between Okiyo and the narrator, Okiyo is taking cholera immunization on the street like any other Chinese.  When summer comes, all the Japanese go to designated hospitals or neighborhood associations (chōnaikai) to receive cholera immunization.  Okiyo does not belong to any neighborhood association and therefore has to go to the street to get immunization like the Chinese.  On that day, the narrator spots Okiyo standing in the all-Chinese line: “In her Chinese dress, she seemed no different from the others.  The people before and after her didn’t seem to notice any difference.”[27]  “Okiyo-san looked pitiable to me, shut out by her compatriots and joining the foreigners’ line.”[28]  “The army surgeon who stood with his legs apart like a Deva king grabbed her left arm and abruptly stabbed it with a needle without even sterilizing it.  Injecting the liquid in a flash of a second, he hurriedly pulled out the needle.  The point of the needle seemed to have been worn, for a black drop of blood came out after it was pulled out.  ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked. ‘Huh?’ the surgeon inclined his head, and asked Okiyo-san, ‘Are you a Japanese, too?’ Okiyo-san didn’t answer. Rubbing the drop of blood into her arm with her palm in the same way as the Chinese did, she started to walk in the opposite direction from home.”[29] 

 

The scene above conveys Okiyo’s alienation from the Japanese community and her liminal position vis-à-vis the Japanese national identity.  It is suggestive that when the Japanese military doctor asks Okiyo whether she is Japanese Okiyo does not respond.  It is an act of denouncing her Japanese identity.   

 

After the immunization shot, the narrator and Okiyo make their way into the rape blossom fields nearby and they see a few Chinese graves in the shape of little white houses.  Looking inside the window of the little houses, they find nothing but tall grass.  At that time, Okiyo makes the comment that we are all grass.  This comment reveals Okiyo’s defiance against the man-made categories of Japanese and Chinese. 

 

Okiyo commits suicide by hanging herself after hearing the news about the upcoming war between China and Japan in 1937 and the news that many Japanese in Shanghai are repatriating to Japan.  Her dead body is carried away by a black Municipal Police car, which is used to clean the streets and to collect dead cats, dogs, and human corpses on the road.  To the narrator, it is unclear why Okiyo commits suicide.  Okiyo dies an obscure death as she lived an obscure life.  The importance of the figure of Okiyo to the argument of this chapter lies in the fact that she is described as an individual struggling at the bottom of the social structure of Shanghai.  Her Japanese identity is not emphasized but is questioned.  “Yellow Sand” allows us to understand individual suffering without the nationalist framework.  Similarly, Hayashi’s atomic bombing narratives always go back to the foundational question of personal trauma that transcends national boundaries. 

 

“Yellow Sand” is different from “Hibiki” and other stories in Giyaman biidoro because of the absence of reference to the atomic bombing in this story.  As the number six among the total fourteen stories, the story disrupts the flow of the atomic bombing theme in the collection.  Readers who read the stories in the collection one by one would find that this story in the middle has nothing to do with the previous one and the next one.  The story therefore forces the reader to put into consideration other historical factors into his/her reading about the atomic bombing. 

 

 “Yellow Sand”’s relevance to Hayashi’s discourse of the atomic bombing does not exist on the narrative level of the story, but on the exegetic level.  The figure of Okiyo is connected to atomic bombing victims because they are all absent and forgotten in the present.  Okiyo’s story is unlikely remembered by others in Japan because she died an obscure death in the colony and because she was despised by her fellow Japanese before her death.  The narrator, however, bears witness to Okiyo’s suffering.  The beginning of the story describes that yellow sand blows all the way from continental China to Japan in the spring and that it also brings back the narrator’s memory of Okiyo.  It seems that the forgotten spirit of Okiyo has transformed into yellow sand, crossed the sea to Japan, and has called upon the narrator to remember her.  Through the narrator’s reminiscence of Okiyo, Hayashi recovers the existence and history of an obscure individual and therefore adds to the discursive effort of recovering suppressed voices.

 

Similarly, Hayashi’s accounts of her high school classmates and teachers who died in the Nagasaki bombing seems to be responding to their demand of being remembered by the survivors.  As the critic Kawanishi Masa’aki comments,[30] the stories in the collection emphasize the existence of fuzaisha (absent people)—those who died in the bombing and  who are absent in the present.[31]  As a survivor of the atomic bombing, Hayashi assumes the responsibility of commemorating the dead and of acknowledging the details of their existence in her writing.  The act of continuously writing through time serves as a dose of anti-amnesia for Hayashi.  Through writing, she gives voice to those who cannot represent themselves in the present.  “Yellow Sand” and the other atomic bomb stories in the collection remind readers of the forgotten aspect of Japanese history that becomes increasingly distanced from the prosperous consumer society of contemporary Japan. 

 

More importantly, the figure Okiyo’s relevance to Hayashi’s atomic bombing narratives also lies in the fact that Okiyo is described as being stigmatized and marginalized by her fellow Japanese in Shanghai.  In a similar fashion, there is a stigma attached to the atomic bombing survivors in Japan.  Part of the reason is because bombing survivors personify the embarrassing defeat of Japan and the government’s inability to protect its people.  It is also because the very existence of the bombing survivors reminds people of the conflicts and ambiguity of Japan’s politics as manifested in its nuclear policy and its allied relationship with the U.S.  The wartime stigmatization of Okiyo can be easily translated into postwar stigmatization of the atomic bombing survivors and other marginal figures such as war orphans, repatriates, and ex-service men.[32]  When reading “Yellow Sand” in relation to Hayashi’s other atomic bombing narratives, we see how prewar and wartime conservative politics continues in postwar Japan. 

 

I have demonstrated earlier that in “Hibiki,” the author breaks down the national boundary between Japan and China through connecting the atomic trauma with the catastrophic experience of the Chinese in occupied Shanghai.  Similarly, in “Yellow Sand,” the polemic is not the conflict between Japan and China, between the occupier and the occupied, but lies in the suffering of Okiyo as an individual whose experience cannot be subsumed by either the category of Chinese or Japanese.  Her liminal position conveys that there are variations in each category.  The category of a superior Japanese identity is mobilized by the imperialist Japan to justify its colonial and military actions in Asia.  In the story, however, the categories themselves are questioned.  Okiyo is linked to the poor Chinese residents in Shanghai.  Although Okiyo is ethnically Japanese, she demonstrates visibly important Chinese features as demonstrated above in the analysis of the two encounters between the narrator and Okiyo. 

 

Eishamaku (The Movie Screen)

 

The theme of implicating the discourse of colonial memory and that of the atomic bombing is also reflected in the story of “Eishamaku (The Movie Screen),” in which the connection between them is made implicitly rather than explicitly, and in which both traumatic experiences are described as being suppressed in postwar society.[33]  This story appears as the last story in Missheru no kuchibeni, a collection of short stories delineating the narrator’s colonial experience in Shanghai.  The story is the site where discourses of the colonial past, the atomic bombing and the American occupation intertwine. 

 

The narrative centers on a first person narrator, a teenage girl, who is traumatized in the recent atomic bombing in Nagasaki although without visible wounds.  In the town of Isahaya, where she had been evacuated, many young survivors of the Nagasaki bombing are dying one after another.  She stays at home and is afraid of going to school and facing the empty seats of her dead classmates.  One day, her mother takes her out to see a movie hoping to cheer her up.  The narrator goes reluctantly with no interest of seeing a movie.

 

In the theater, they accidentally found that their neighbor in Shanghai, a woman and her son Tsuda are also in the audience.  At this point of the narrative, the narrator inserts flashbacks of the days in Shanghai.  She describes the children’s tea party at the Japanese community club, at which the narrator and another girl were dancing accompanied by Tsuda on the harmonica.  There was a small movie screen on the stage for showing movies to the children.  (The significance of the movie screen is not made explicit.  However, it resonates with the movie screen of the theater in the narrating present.) She last saw Tsuda in the summer of 1943 before he volunteered as a young pilot to go to the war.  The narrator’s flashback conveys the happy life of the Japanese children in colonial Shanghai.  It also evokes the historical period when Japan occupied a large part of China including Shanghai and when Japanese children in the colonies were mobilized to join the Pacific War.  The narrator does not know what happened to him after he joined the war.  Tsuda in front of her, however, is downcast, silent unlike the energetic and fearless Tsuda a few years ago.  It is also to the narrator’s surprise that Tsuda is wearing prisoner’s clothes.  The narrator only speculates: “Did he kill someone? … Or did he become a swindler?  Did he sell Western goods and alcohol from the occupation army on the black market?”[34]  The important thing about Tsuda and the narrator is that they both share the same experience of living in colonial Shanghai as a teenager.  At the same time, Tsuda is connected to the war, which the narrator does not directly experience, whereas the narrator encounters the atomic bombing, which Tsuda does not go through. 

 

While the narrator’s personal reminiscence brings back the colonial past and the war to the consciousness of the reader, the document film before the feature movie captures the reality of the immediate years of postwar Japan.  Before showing the feature movie, the theater presents to its audience news about General McArthur, GIs, and panpan girls (prostitutes), which represent the cultural and political milieu of postwar Japan.  In the news the panpan girls in American-style long skirts are walking arm in arm with GIs in the ruins of a burned out city.[35]  The narrator’s internal thoughts about her past in Shanghai and her recent traumatic experience in the bombing form a contrast with the postwar atmosphere represented by the GIs and the panpan girls.  Tsuda, who is involved in the war and presumably traumatized by it, seems to be out of place in the theater.  Both the narrator and Tsuda encounter a new Japan represented by the news on the movie screen when they are hardly able to work through their respective traumatic experiences. 

 

The feature movie is a “flowery movie with singing and dancing.”[36]  It presents the narrator with beautiful visual images, such as cherry blossoms and the dazzling actress, which enable her to forget temporarily her traumatic experience, her dead and wounded classmates and even the existence of Tsuda and his mother.[37]  The narrator experiences conflicting emotions in response to the movie.  On the one hand, she is temporarily relieved.  On the other hand, she feels ill at ease in the theater.  She describes the movie screen in the following words: “The border of the screen was black cloth.  In this way, the images seem more vivid.  However, to me, it looked like a photo with a black frame [of a dead person] often seen on a family Buddhist altar.”[38]  The narrator sees the image of death from the shape of the movie screen.  No matter what happy images are presented on the screen, her inner anxiety cannot be dispelled.  The implication here is that similar to the movie screen, which is being framed by the ominous black cloth, the postwar society is always framed by the recent traumatic histories no matter how fast Japan has moved forward. 

 

The encounter of the two families in the theater is suggestive.  Not only are the two young people psychologically distanced from what is portrayed on the movie screen, they are also unable to communicate with each other even though they were close neighbors in Shanghai only a couple of years ago.  “Eishamaku,” therefore, captures the gap between the past experience and the current social and discursive condition in Japan.  After knowing that the narrator experienced the atomic bombing, Tsuda’s mother shows her sympathy but Tsuda remains silent.  “He looked at me in the eyes for the first time.  He stared at me for a while and then looked down again.  From his staring eyes and downcast eyes I could grasp no message.  With his hands in the pockets of his pants, Tsuda started to walk the street leading to the private railway.”[39]  At the end of the story, the narrator and Tsuda part again without exchanging one word.  The narrator finds no meaning in Tsuda’s eyes. 

 

The incommunicability between them shows that they do not possess the same language if they possess any language at all to share their respective traumatic experiences.  The ending of the story is highly suggestive.  It conveys that within the postwar social paradigm characterized by the U.S.-Japan allied relationship and the rhetoric of recovery and growth, the atomic bombing, the war, and the colonial past become unarticulated experiences.  More importantly, the passage above highlights the irreducibility of the individual experience.  Although the narrator and Tsuda have a similar background in colonial Shanghai, their separate experiences prevent them from communicating fully about what has happened to them.  With the ambiguity about what exactly happened to Tsuda, the text provides insights for us to recognize the specificities of individual experience. 

 

Conclusion

 

Critics of Hayashi have largely overlooked the significance of the colonial element in her narratives about the atomic bombing and focused instead on subtle and persistent representation on the ongoing struggle of the bombing survivors.  In “Hibiki,” the narrator comes to terms with atomic trauma through understanding the suffering of the Chinese refugees in colonial Shanghai.  The story shows that colonial history and the atomic bombing illuminate each other’s traumatic nature.  Her story “Kōsa” reminds the reader that besides atomic bombing victims, there are other marginal and forgotten images like Okiyo in modern Japanese history.  In “Eishamaku,” conceptualization of the atomic past and the colonial past is complicated by the new historical context of the American occupation.  Hayashi’s living experience in colonial Shanghai from 1931 to 1945 has been written into her many other narratives about the Nagasaki atomic bombing: “Matsuri no ba (The Ritual Site),” “Futari no bohyō” (Two Grave Markers), “No ni” (In the Field), Naki ga gotoki (As If Not), and Yasurakani ima wa nemuritama’e (Rest Now in Peace), etc.  In these works, Hayashi uncovers Japan’s colonial history that has not been contextualized with other aspects of Japan’s history.  She also shows that the atomic bombing and Japan’s colonial history are connected in multiple ways and that the atomic catastrophe should not be considered as a single isolated event on its own.

 

The Japanese historian Andrew Gordon argues that the image of a harmonious postwar Japanese society derives from erasing persisting differences among people and that the mass-culture industry plays an important role in unifying people’s imagination of society.  He writes, “In creating a public memory, mainstream historians … produced a homogeneous version of a Japanese past that left out those on the margins (women, atom bomb victims, Burakumin, Okinawans), who in turn were prompted to write their own separate histories.”[40]  Gordon’s idea is that Japanese mass’s perception of the present as being harmonious and homogeneous results from an incomplete understanding of the past.  Hayashi uses her lived experience to retell the past that challenges contemporary Japan’s complacent view of history.  As a kataribe (ritual reciter) of the atomic bombing, Hayashi consistently describes the bombing survivors as representing a voice different from mainstream society.  At the same time, she does not essentialize the atomic bombing experience.  She achieves that through connecting the voice of the atomic bombing victims and that of the occupied Chinese.  She also relates stories of the bombing survivors to stories of the forgotten images such as Okiyo.  In other words, Hayashi not only provides a transnational perspective in conceptualizing the atomic bombing but also situates the atomic bombing in relation to other portions of Japan’s modern history.

 


Notes
[1] Both Lisa Yoneyama and James Orr discuss the role that the official atomic bombing discourse plays in valorizing the victim consciousness in postwar Japan.  Yoneyama asserts: “remembering the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as events in the history of humanity has significantly contributed to the forgetting of the history of colonialism and racism in the region.”  Orr has written: “The mythicizing of war victimhood within the peace movement manifested a tendency to privilege the facts of Japanese victimhood over considerations of what occasioned that victimhood.  In its most common form this tendency appeared in the restricted contexts of discourse on personal Japanese war experiences in stories of the atomic and fire bombings, the repatriations of civilians from Manchuria and Korea, and general privations such as hunger on the home front.  Memories of Japanese victimizing others were not always forgotten.  But in many of the antiwar narratives that were asserted to represent the common war experience, issues of individual or collective responsibility for Japanese aggression were sidestepped.” See Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 12. James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001) 3.

[2] As the symbol of the official commemoration of the atomic bombings, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, constructed in 1955, originally excluded the four thousand Korean victims in Hiroshima bombing from being officially memorialized and later only allowed the Korean Monument to be raised in the outskirts of the park.  The Memorial Park represents the atomic bombing as a unique Japanese experience.  Its exclusion of the Korean victims suppresses Japan’s history of colonizing Korea and erases the multi- ethnicity of both pre-war and postwar Japanese society.  The park exemplifies the fact that the official perspective has not incorporated Japanese imperial past as an integral part of the collective memory of the atomic bombing.  See Lisa Yoneyama, “Memory Matters: Hiroshima’s Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity,” Living with the Bomb.

[3] See Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds. Introduction to Living With the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997) 7.

[4] See John W. Dower, John Junkerman ed. The Hiroshima Murals: the Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki (Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1985).

[5] Kamata emphasizes the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki played an important role in Japan’s modern military history as two cities with important military facilities.  See Kamata Sadao “Jūgonen-sensō to gembaku bungaku,” Hankaku, bungakusha wa utaeru (Tokyo: Horupu Shuppan, 1984) 169-218.

[6] He introduces, for example, Hotta Yoshi’e’s novel Shinpan, Iida Momo’s novel Amerika no eiyū and Ino’ue Mitsuharu’s novel Chi no mure. See Naga’oka Hiroyoshi, “Genbaku bungaku no keifu,” Hankaku, bungakusha wa utaeru (Tokyo: Horupu Shuppan, 1984) 221-248.

[7] One aspect that this chapter does not deal with but is important for us to understand Hayashi’s writing is to situate her works within the context of narratives about the Nagasaki bombing.  John Treat in his book Writing Ground Zero writes that there is a hierarchical order within atomic bombing narratives with narratives about the Hiroshima bombing being at the center and Nagasaki narratives at the periphery.  Another important figure in Nagasaki atomic bombing literature is Dr. Naga’i Takashi (1908-1951) who taught at the Nagasaki Medical College.  He was wounded in the Nagasaki bombing and his wife died instantly in the bombing.  As a devoted Catholic, he considered the loss of lives in the bombing as religious sacrifice.  He wrote more than ten works on the Nagasaki bombing and his best-seller novel Nagasaki no kane was published in 1949. 

[8] The Japanese began to live and open businesses in Shanghai in the 1860s.  In 1872, the Japanese consulate was opened in Shanghai.  After the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, more and more Japanese went to live in Shanghai.  The Japanese forces attacked Shanghai in February 1932 following the Manchurian Incident in September 1931 and the incident was known as the First Shanghai Incident.  The Japanese military again attacked the Chinese forces in Shanghai in August 1937 following the China Incident (or The Marco Polo Bridge Incident), which marks the full scale war between China and Japan in July 1937.  This event was referred to as the Second Shanghai incident.  After the defeat of the Chinese troops in November, Shanghai fell in the hand of Japan’s military, political and economic control until 1945.  Historically Shanghai in this period was referred to as an isolated island.  For a historical account of Shanghai under Japanese occupation, see Riwei Shanghai shi zheng fu (Shanghai City Government Under Japanese Control), Shanghai Shi dang an guan bian, (Hong Kong: 1986-1988).  For Japanese immigrants’ experience in Shanghai, see Kojima Masaru, Ma Honrin, ed. Shanhai no nihonjin shakai: senzen no bunka shūkyō kyōiku (Kyoto: Ryūkoku Daigaku Bukkyō Bunka Kenkyūjo, 1999).

[9] Born in Nagasaki in 1930, Hayashi (her real name Miyazaki Kyōko) went to Shanghai with her family at the age of one and went back to Nagasaki in March 1945, where she experienced the atomic bombing. For biographical information of Hayashi, see Davinder Leslie Bhowmik’s M.A. thesis, “Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Fiction of Hayashi Kyōko,” University of Washington, 1993.  For a limited study of Hayashi’s work and her brief biography in Japanese, see Kuroko Kazuo, Genbaku to kotoba: Hara Tamiki kara Hayashi Kyōko made (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1983).

[10] Hayashi has won numerous literary prizes. In 1975, she won the most prestigious literary prize in Japan—Akutagawa shō with her short story “Matsuri no ba.” In 1982, she won Joryū bungaku shō with the collection of short stories Shanhai. Her novel Sangai no ie, won the eleventh Kawabata Literary Prize in 1983. Her novel Yasuraka ni ima wa nemuritamae won 1990 twenty-sixth Tanizaki Junichirō literary prize. In 2000, her novel Nagai jikan wo kaketa ningen no keiken won the fifty-third Nōma bungei shō. See Tsukui Yoshiko, “Gentei e no tabi: Hayashi Kyōko Sakuhin kō,” Meisei Daigaku Kenkyū kiyō: jinbun gakubu 39 no.3 (2003) 57-64.

[11] Hayashi, “Hibiki,” Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro, 250. All the English translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise indicated. 

[12] Hayashi, “Hibiki,” Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro, 250.

[13] I am using John Treat’s translation in Writing Ground Zero, 115-116.

[14] Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, Maryland: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 8.

[15] Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24.

[16] Hayashi, “Hibiki,” Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro, 262.

[17] Hayashi, “Hibiki,” Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro, 258.

[18] Orr, The Victim as Hero, 66.

[19] Giyaman biidoro was published in 1978.  There are twelve stories in the collection.  “Akikan (The Empty Can)” was translated into English and was incorporated into Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath edited by Ōe Kenzaburō.

[20] Giyaman biidoro won the award of Geijutsu senshō shinjin shō, a national award issued by the Minister

 of Education 1978, but Hayashi declined the award.

[21] Hayashi Kyōko, “Chosha kara dokusha e: futatsu no inochi to jinsei,” Matsuri no ba, Giyaman biidoro, 372.

[22] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Trans. Kyoko Selden. In Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Selden, ed. And trans., Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991. 198.

[23] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 199-201.

[24] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 200.

[25] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 202.

[26] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 202-203.

[27] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 203.

[28] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 203.

[29] Hayashi, “Yellow Sand,” Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, 204.

[30] Kawanishi Masa’aki, “Hayashi Kyōko shōron,” Matsuri ni ba, Giyaman Biidoro, 373-386.

[31] For example, in “Akikan (Empty Can),” the figure Kinuko is not present in the story.  Her stories are told by her former classmates.  In “Ka’eru (Return),” the classmates have lost contact with Shima, who was said to have gone to the U.S. In “Kiroku (Records),” the narrator gathers pieces of information about a classmate Hatta Reiko, who died instantly when the bomb was dropped.  In “Tomo yo! (Ah! Friend!),” the narrator describes one classmate’s one tragic fate of losing all her family members in the bombing.  In “Kage (Shadow),” the narrator talks about the deaths of another classmate Okano’s family members.  In “No ni (In the Field),” the narrator commemorates two girls whom she knew little about and who died in the bombing. 

[32] See John Dower, Embracing Defeat, Japan in the Wake of World War II, W.W. Norton & Company and The New Press, 1999. Lori Watt addresses the issue of the stigmatization of the repatriates in postwar Japan.  She argues that there is continuation between “wartime suspicion of colonial freelancers” and “postwar prejudice against repatriates.” See Lori Watt, “When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation in Postwar Japan, 1945—1958,” diss., Columbia University, 2002, 5.

[33] “Eishamaku” is incorporated in the collection Missheru no kuchibeni, which will be discussed later in length.

[34] Hayashi, “Eishamaku,” Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni, 402.

[35] Hayashi, “Eishamaku,” Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni, 396-397.

[36] Hayashi, “Eishamaku,” Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni, 398.

[37] Hayashi, “Eishamaku,” Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni, 399.

[38] Hayashi, “Eishamaku,” Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni, 409.

[39] Hayashi, “Eishamaku,” Shanhai, Missheru no kuchibeni, 411.

[40] Andrew Gordon, “Conclusion,” Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 462-3.