Employing the Uncanny to Combat Historical Erasure: Inoue Mitsuharu

• In Event: Japanese Literature Brushing History against the Grain

Abstract

In his works Inoue Mitsuharu ruthlessly exercises a sense of justice informed by an ethic sympathetic to the circumstances of victims. As a result, his texts often incorporate the victims of larger historical events, such as the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, as a means for combatting the process of historical amnesia that was coterminous with Japan’s rapid postwar recovery. In his 1964 short story “Ninputachi no asu” (Tomorrow for the pregnant ones), Inoue depicts the impact of corporate “colonizing” practices on a coal-producing island off Kyushu. However, rather than represent the voices of the island’s victims directly, Inoue employs a literary mode to implant a sense of that injustice in the reader. Through the “literary uncanny,” he intervenes into the discourse of corporate paternalism by exposing and disrupting its underlying assumptions. I will demonstrate how this concept can be manipulated to engage readers’ sensibilities to challenge the dominant discourse by off-setting one end of a dialectical engagement that should be occurring between the principal characters within the text onto the reader. My analysis will expand on Inoue’s implicit comparison of corporate practices on the island to corporate complicity with the state’s practice of imperialistic expansion that led to World War II. Through this brushing of history against the trend toward historical amnesia, “Ninputachi no asu” suggests ways in which literary texts function to counter historical erasures.

Author

• Sarah Clayton, University of Washington