Life after Death? Writing the Alienated Self in Post-war Japan

摘要

This paper represents an attempt to consider how artists in general—and Japanese post-warnovelists in particular—deal with traumatic experience and how this process is reflected intheir subsequent literary texts. More specifically, it will consider how two Japaneseimmediate post-war authors, Shimao Toshio (1917–86) and Shiina Rinzō (1911–73)—neither of whom saw active experience at the front but who both emerged, by their ownadmission, heavily traumatized from their experiences of the period—tackled the issue ofdepicting in their literary texts their wartime experiences and their subsequent attempts toreturn to ‘normal’ life in the immediate aftermath of war. The literary process whereby theyfirst ‘act out’ and subsequently ‘work through’ their particular traumatic experiences willbe examined—and, in so doing, their oeuvres will be presented as ongoing, collaborativeprojects aimed at more fully ‘constituting’ certain traumatic events in cognitive, affectiveand ethical terms.