Fragmenting Nationalist Narratives: Hayashi Kyôko

• In Event: Japanese Literature Brushing History against the Grain

Abstract

By examining “Yellow Sand” (1977) by Hayashi Kyôko, this paper attempts to explore voices and experiences that have fallen away from official historiographies or imperial nationalist archives. The paper foregrounds such voices and experiences that Hayashi’s literature is elegantly able to capture, embrace, and recuperate, if not fully then at least momentarily, while cutting through and fragmenting imperial nationalist narratives. The paper unpacks race-based Japanese nationalism in “Yellow Sand,” using ideas drawn from Étienne Balibar but doing so with a sensitivity to gender and sexuality. I thereby examine the ways in which an unwanted figure of the other is needed for nation formation within the Japanese community in Shanghai at the onset of second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). In addition, my analysis brings into relief the dialectical processes through which a Japanese prostitute in Shanghai enables the coherence of a fictive Japanese national subject for the creation of community. This paper is based on the theory that the nation, the atomic bomb, and nuclear power are inseparable categories in the works of Hayashi, herself a victim and a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, and that therefore her series of atomic bomb-related works ought to be reread for critical insight into the dynamics of nation formation and the sentiments of national belonging.

Author

• Nobuko Yamasaki, Lehigh University