The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 27 (2016)
Copyright © 2016 Yasuko Kase. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s
Anshū: Dark Sorrow

Yasuko Kase*

To photographic corroboration of the atrocities committed by one’s
own side, the standard response is that the pictures are fabrication, thatno such atrocity ever took place, those were bodies the other sidebrought in trucks from the city morgue and placed about the street, orthat, yes, it happened and it was the other side who did it, to themselves.
—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Introduction
The year 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki.1 The politics surrounding the commemoration ofthese historical events, both in the United States and in Japan, reveal that theact of remembering is both selective and strategic. In Japan, the events in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generally served to construct the country’s
official memory of World War II, emphasizing the uniqueness of theexperience of the bombing, or hibaku, to create a Japanese postwar national
identity based on the narrative of victimhood. Conversely, in the UnitedStates, the predominant memory of the dropping of atomic bombs in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki has emphasized the “good” contribution of the*Associate Professor, University of the Ryukyus

235

236

Yasuko Kase

magnificent scientific achievement that brought the war to an early end andsaved American lives. The inconsistency of these incongruous claims
typically reveals the operation of what Homi K. Bhabha calls the“pedagogical” memories of these two modern nation-states (142). Bhabha
discusses the attempts of modern nation-states to construct and maintain alinear official developmental history of pedagogical remembering (142). In
Japan, the perceived urgency of overcoming the disruption of the country’s
national history caused by defeat in the war and the necessity of reconstructing
the national subject have conditioned the production of a narrative ofJapanese victimhood founded on the hibaku experience. Thus, fromcomplete devastation to a “miraculous” resurrection, Japan’s official
postwar history exhibits a narrative of constant development. In the UnitedStates, compared with the notoriety of the Vietnam War, World War II isremembered as a good war that ended in victory. This victory establishedthe United States as a prominent world power and promised further national
development. Thus, both countries exhibit coherent national pedagogicalmemories related to the ending of the war and postwar development.
It is in alternative memories constructed by minorities within the nationstate that Bhabha locates the power to bring about, from within, theintervention of Derridean différance in the national pedagogical memory(152-57). By presenting diasporic perspectives that extend beyond theboundary of a modern nation-state, and by questioning its dominant
formation based on an (illusionary) uniformity, Juliet S. Kono in her firstnovel, Anshū: Dark Sorrow (2010), provides a more radical critique ofnational pedagogical memories than Bhabha’s model of the memories ofminorities. In this work, Kono creatively uses and revises the genre of the
bildungsroman. Samina Najmi notes that the “bildungsroman” has been
considered a unique German genre and that “the bildungsroman has a long
history of engagement, and even identification with, nationhood” (Najmi
211). Najmi points out that in its original formula, the representation ofnationhood is manifested by the white male protagonist, and the developmentof his subjectivity corresponds to the linear development of the nation (211).
Najmi argues that this androcentric tradition can also be found in thescholarly analysis of the English and American versions of the bildungsroman(211). In representing a nation’s development, this genre has been definedas the genre that contributes ideologically to constructing the image of an
ideal citizen. Thus, revision of this genre to incorporate minority characters,
notably, female protagonists, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, andmisfits, offers a crucial and challenging critique of a naturalized formation

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow237

of nationhood and enables negotiation with the dominant model of its
citizens. Kono also creatively alters the original bildungsroman formula.
She introduces a nontraditional protagonist, a young Nisei, or secondgeneration Japanese American, woman named Himiko, who was born inHawai‘i but forced to leave and relocate to Japan because of her teenage
pregnancy. She is then stranded in Japan during World War II and eventually
endures the US bombing of Hiroshima. Thus, in her stigmatized Otherness,she exceeds the measure of normalcy as a citizen of both US and Japanesesocieties. I focus on the diasporic setting of Kono’s unconventional
bildungsroman that extends beyond the national boundaries of both theUnited States and Japan. In doing so, I examine how Kono’s work challenges
the governance of modern nation-states that clearly delineate “us” thecitizens and the Other during times of warfare. In particular, I attend to
Kono’s depiction of Himiko, a Japanese American hibakusha, or bombing
survivor affected by radiation, who carries the burden of being a victim of
the war. Moreover, having accidently killed her cousin during a crisis
moment of the March 1945 Tokyo air raid, she also silently bears the guiltof being a perpetrator. Thus, Kono’s detailed portrayal of Himiko as adisfigured Japanese American hibakusha disrupts the clear lines between
the binaries: we/the Other and victim/victimizer, revealing traumatic
residues that challenge the symbolic order of national remembering in boththe United States and Japan. In this article, I focus on the issue of the Other’s
suffering and discuss how Kono’s graphic depiction of the JapaneseAmerican hibakusha disrupts the boundary between “us” and the Other.

Averted Gaze
After enduring the US atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, where she has
been evacuated from Tokyo, Himiko undergoes an extended period of
suffering from severe burns, other injuries, and radiation sickness thatcauses continuous bleeding, nausea, diarrhea, and high fever. Confronting
her physical changes, reflected in the mirror, for the first time, Himikoobserves: “On the right side of my head where the scalp had been burned, athicket of hair had grown in white as Norio’s [Himiko’s cousin] snow. A
raw-looking red keloid scar on that side of my face clawed its way toward
my eye and cheekbone, the lines of red skin tapering into my face andgripping it like the talons of a falcon” (277). All over her body, including
her shoulders, arms, back, and even her genital area, she finds keloids andother scars. Furthermore, one breast and three toes on her right foot are

238

Yasuko Kase

missing. Although she already knows, before this confrontation, that her
former image as a tall, beautiful, and healthy looking young JapaneseAmerican woman will no longer look back at her from the mirror, thisreflection of a hibakusha that she must now identify with is overwhelming.
Following Himiko’s first-person narrative, readers are led to identify
with Himiko’s gaze and her reflected image as their own. At this point, doreaders stop reading the text, experiencing the impulse to avert their gazefrom the picture created in their minds? How do a reader’s nationality andother markers of identity influence the degree of his or her identification
with Himiko? Is the flood of affect evoked by the graphic description one ofhorror, pain, empathy, or shame, or does it comprise a mixture of these
emotions? If readers have a sudden impulse to avert their gaze, does not thisurge signify a compelling desire to cut off the contagious power of theiridentification with the mirrored image that reminds them of their own
vulnerability?
Canadian novelist and visual art critic Kyo Maclear has studied visual
images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She notes that during the American
occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, photographs of ground zero wereprohibited from being publicly circulated in Japan by Occupation authorities.
This censorship was also applied to the American and international media.
Indeed, in the United States, the government concealed visual records of themass deaths and plight of hibakushas from the public until 1980 (37).
Maclear further notes that the first visual image to appear publicly in the
United States was a military photograph focusing on the mushroom cloudthat was taken from the cockpit of a military jet, which excluded the imageof the devastated city below (36-37). The photograph, which later became
iconic of the technological advancement of the United States during theCold War, omitted any concrete images of human suffering. By regulating
the visual field through the exclusion of images of human remains andinjured hibakushas, the United States attempted to justify the use of atomic
bombs. In this official discourse, the bombs signified a breakthrough inphysics, the target was military, and the bombs saved American lives andended the war (36). The content of this discourse is very similar to that of
the regulated visual field: any description of actual human pain and suffering
is absent in both. As Elaine Scarry succinctly points out, “The main purposeand outcome of war is injuring. Though the fact is too self-evident andmassive ever to be directly contested, it can be indirectly contested by manymeans and disappear from view along many separate paths” (63-64). Scarryfurther points out that because of the strategic application of several literaryDiasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow239

forms, including omission and redescription, the actual damage inflicted onhuman bodies is never acknowledged, thus masking the actuality that “thepurpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut)human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of theobjects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves” (64).
Very similar to later US censorship of visual images of the Iraq War, thetactics used to justify the use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
concealed the effects of nuclear force on the residents of these cities. These
deceptive campaigns served to delineate a clear boundary between the
remote and abstract enemy and “we” Americans by preventing the creationof empathic identification with the victims. This official justification stillprevailed in 1995, as evidenced by the intervention of war veterans, major
US news media, and conservative politicians in the attempted historicalrevision by the Smithsonian Institute. Curators at the Smithsonian Institutetried to bring scholarly analysis and investigation of the historical records
that registered the circumstances of the US decision to use atomic bombs inJapan and the horrific damages on the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However, they encountered massive protest by war veterans and theirsupporters (Hogan 203-20). The removal of ground zero artifacts to maintainthe patriotic solidarity of “we” Americans is a persistent attempt to divert
the gaze of the American people from confrontation with hibakushas. In thiscontext, hibakushas have been classified as, and equated with, the Japaneseor the former enemies.
In Japan, hibakushas have experienced stigmatization and social
marginalization because of many people’s misunderstanding their physicalconditions as being a contagious illness, and there have been limited
opportunities for confronting their real physical images within the popular
media except during the annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations.
However, abstract and disembodied ideas about the victims have been
intentionally used in a Japanese major historical narrative to create aparticular kind of national subject after Japan’s defeat in World War II andto produce a strategic and asymmetric commemoration of the war. This has
entailed persistent denial of atrocities associated with Japan’s colonial
domination in Asia during the war. Conversely, Japanese victimhood has
been emphasized through the commemoration of the deaths of civilian
women, children, and elders during the March 1945 Tokyo air raid and theHiroshima-Nagasaki attacks, through various forms of mediated images
and lessons in history. This “Japaneseness,” constructed through symbolic
identification with the actual victims, by erasing their diversity,

240

Yasuko Kase

problematically obscures Japan’s colonial domination that entailed the useof what Achille Mbembé calls “necropower” (25). This involves strategic
manipulation of the enemy’s health during war and colonial/neocolonial
invasions and domination by devaluing the life of the Other both within andbeyond the national space (25-30; Carrigan 26). For instance, the perspectivesof “innocent” females or youths are frequently used to retrospectively
critique the fanatical nationalism that led to the sacrifice of the lives of
unprepared enlisted young men portrayed in numerous mainstream Japanese
TV dramas and literary works. However, these works do not provide analternative perspective that depicts Japanese atrocities committed in Asian
countries, including the Nanjing Massacre, the cruel sexual abuse of military
sex slaves from various countries including Korea and China that resulted
in widespread venereal diseases and damage to the reproductive organs of
the victims, deaths from illness or execution, and live human experiments
conducted by the Japanese military.
The United States and Japan have each attempted to create a coherent
narrative of World War II by controlling the visual field and producing
homogeneous national subjects. Considering the context of visual control of
the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States to
obscure the fact of the Other’s suffering, Kono’s detailed description of aJapanese American hibakusha’s suffering body provides a challenge to thisattempt to establish a clear boundary between we/Americans and the Other/enemies. The Other’s suffering has been obscured and made remote throughvisual control and, thus, has concealed the immediacy of physical andpsychic pain. Kono’s realistic writing reinstates the simple and evident factthat the main purpose of the atomic bombs was, to borrow Scarry’s way of
expression, injuring and altering human tissues. For Himiko, her lived
experience as a hibakusha does not resonate with the dominant US war
memory discourse that celebrates the use of atomic bombs to protect
American lives. While Anshū disrupts this official US remembering, thenovel also challenges the Japanese government’s strategic equation of
hibakushas with Japaneseness. Himiko’s American nationality reminds thereader of the heterogeneous composition of hibakushas, which includes
Japanese Americans like Himiko as well as some of the colonized Korean
people who were brought to Japan by force. As Hiroko Okuda’s study has
shown, hibakushas in Japan encompassed twenty-one different originating
nationalities (40). Thus, Kono in Anshū critiques the problematic conceptionof the hibaku experience as being a uniquely Japanese experience that
ignores the individualities of hibakushas. Furthermore, Kono’s realistic

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow241

description of Himiko’s suffering body challenges the abstractness of asymbolic equation that lacks the urgency and immediacy of physical andpsychological suffering.
Himiko’s alternative position vis-à-vis the dominant US and Japanesememories of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revives themarginalized and effaced suffering of the Other. The production of the Other
who can be the target of various forms of violence is not unrelated to salient
forms of difference, including racial and ethnic otherness. In 1945,
responding to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki events, African American poet
Langston Hughes astutely observed that the United States targeted Japanand not Germany for deployment of atomic bombs because of the racial
otherness of “yellow-skinned Japanese” (Stone 38). At the time of theatomic bombing by the United States, both President Truman and theCanadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, made racist remarks in relation
to the decision to use atomic bombs. According to Truman, the Japanese
were “beasts” and thus needed to be treated as such (Maclear 38). Similarly,
King expressed his relief that the United States had unleashed the atomic
bombs on the Japanese rather than a white European race (Maclear 38).
Furthermore, the direct equation of hibakushas with “Japaneseness”/theenemy was typically observed when, during the early 1970s, JapaneseAmerican hibakushas sought financial support from the US government tocover the medical costs for their radiation sickness treatment. Some US
legislators claimed that those Japanese American hibakushas were theenemy and were, thus, not eligible for any governmental support (Sodei
247). In this case, the racial otherness of Japanese American hibakushas
barred them from receiving support to which they were entitled as American
citizens. The legislators somehow equated the otherness of hibakushas with
racial (Asian) otherness and, thus, with foreignness in general in order tomaintain the illusion of a clear boundary separating them from “weAmericans” who were not threatened by radiation sickness. In Japan,
conversely, where the hibaku experience is remembered as a national
tragedy, the fact that hibakushas also included Koreans who were forcibly
brought to Japan has been sidelined.2 According to Maclear, because ofsocial discrimination, most Korean hibakushas were denied adequate
medical treatment, resulting in their deaths (174).
Before further examining the issue of entangled relations between the
production of the Other and the various forms of physical suffering causedby the atomic bombs and radiation, it is imperative to reflect on the criticaland controversial argument as to whether hibakushas should be categorized242

Yasuko Kase

as disabled. For the complex process of the creation of the subject goes
hand in hand with the production of others excluded from the category. As
Clare Baker and Stewart Mulley have thoughtfully argued, while theparticular subject position created by hibakushas as a result of theiroppression, discrimination, coalition, and activism resonates with disability
politics, the “disabled” label may be inappropriate for them (231). Thisissue is pivotal when we consider that the field of disability studies was
initially developed within a Western context. Thus, instead of reductively
applying the notion of disability to non-Western contexts, awareness of thelocal context when dealing with such embodied experiences is anunavoidable necessity.3 Furthermore, the question of how to define disability
is part of a complex ongoing assessment that requires careful examinationof kinds and degrees of physical conditions and their diagnostic andprognostic definitions, the similarities and differences between chronic
illness and disability, and people’s own embodied experiences of what is
disabling in their particular localized and individual settings of social andcultural environment (Ingstad and Whyte 11).
Considering these arguments, and the serious problems involved withsimply absorbing hibakushas into the category of the disabled, I direct
attention toward the usefulness of critical and analytical approaches within
the field of disability and illness studies for examining issues surrounding
hibakushas. Our very desire to either include or exclude a certain category
highlights the need for a discussion of how and why such desires may begenerated in the delineation of a national hegemonic “us” as distinct fromthe Other. Disability studies on issues of stigma offers insight into how
stigmas can be attached to certain embodied experiences to produce the
Other and how we internalize socially coded values. According to Lerita M.
Coleman, a notable scholar in the field of disability studies, the verb tostigmatize “originally referred to the branding or marking of certain people”(143). Stigma creates a “predominant affective responses such as dislike
and disgust to include the emotional reaction of fear” (143). Colemansuggests that stigma is heavily dependent on the social context and is tosome extent arbitrarily defined. Thus, all human differences are potentiallystigmatizable (141). Certain differences, such as those that are physicallysalient, are targeted by the dominant “normal” group within society (14142). In this way, disability studies helps denaturalize notions of health andnormativity that govern various power relationships within the modern
nation-state. This raises the question of how normative ideas, generated
through the governance of physicality, drive our subjective and affective

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow

243

ways of identifying with and differentiating ourselves from the Other.
Examining the way our identification with and differentiation from the
Other leads us to the fact that not only racial or other labels of Otherness aremetaphorically linked to states of disability and illness but also people
labeled as Others can be targeted and thereby exposed to circumstances thatmake them vulnerable to states of physical danger and suffering. The
circumstances leading to the particular choice of targets for atomic bomb
attacks by the United States and the indifference of the Japanese people
toward Koreans illustrate the precarious status of the Other. These episodes
expose that both the United States and Japan devalued the lives of racial or
ethnic Others and their subsequent effacement of the suffering of the Other.
In their official rememberings, by looking away from the suffering Other,both the United States and Japan have strategically avoided creating
empathic identification with the figure of the Other in agony that disrupts aclear demarcation between “us” and the Other.4
In light of the above evidence regarding states’ control of visual fields todelete evidence of the Other’s suffering, I would now like to return toHimiko’s confrontation with her own physical image. Her femaleness and/or Japanese Americanness can serve as a safeguard for some readers toprotect themselves from identification with her. However, Kono’s graphic
depiction of Himiko’s body forces us to critically examine the desire todifferentiate ourselves from this abjected body, which is the very reason forthe practice of a politics of the visual field in both the United States andJapan. The sensory images of the suffering Other elicit a traumatic shockthat reveals the gap and discrepancy in the national pedagogical memoriesof these countries so as to radically and violently destroy their respective
self-images as hero (for the United States) or victim (for Japan).
Laura E. Tanner suggests that the exchange of gazes between a dying
person and a healthy watcher troubles the very distinction between subject
and object, allowing for the possibility of dissolution of the distance between
the two. Thus, the healthy watcher must confront flooding feelings of pain
(19-25). Tanner explores the possibility of an alternative gaze that extends
beyond Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic model, which emphasizes visualpleasure derived through sexual differences. It also extends beyond Michel
Foucault’s conceptualization of the medical gaze that reduces the patient to
his or her symptoms, thereby failing to fully recognize the patient’s
subjectivity (Tanner 19-23). Tanner points out that the exchange of gazes
between the dying patient and healthy watcher reminds onlookers of thevulnerability stemming from their shared mortality and upsets the distinction

244

Yasuko Kase

between these two individuals (23). In a close parallel, Himiko’s body
impels us, the readers, to consider the necessity of a careful reexaminationof the politics of the visual field. These politics have diverted our gaze fromthe issue of shared mortality and led us to avoid confrontation with thedying body of the Other, as well as ethical responsibility for the Other’s
suffering. Himiko’s status as a transnational hibakusha interrogates theboundary between “us” and “the enemy” that is produced through thepolitics of the gaze in both the United States and Japan. Furthermore, her
minority status compels the reader to consider the vulnerability of people
who are socially marginalized during disabling crises and the horrifying useof necropower that has devalued the bodies and health of those considered
Others within colonial and neocolonial contexts.

The Transnational Bildungsroman
What a strange thing it was–my looking up at planes from my country
that had bombed me. Which side was I on? Then again, how could I
hate either?
—Juliet S. Kono, Anshū: Dark Sorrow
As mentioned in the introduction, in Anshū, Kono revises the traditional
German genre of the bildungsroman. Lisa Lowe argues that this genre
interpellates the reader as a proper citizen of a nation-state through his or
her identification with the protagonist (98). Referring to the “imaginedcommunity” posited by Benedict Anderson, which is premised on a uniform
national print culture, Lowe suggests that the bildungsroman’s teleologicaldevelopmental narrative operates to reconcile individuals with the social
order of the modern nation-state by leaving their particularities behind (98).
By extending Lowe’s analysis, Patricia P. Chu further clarifies this genre’s
ideological function of assimilating subjects to the dominant culture (12).
Yet the process of assimilation is also a process of exclusion when thereader’s identification with the protagonist is limited. Even in a femalefocused English bildungsroman such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, theideological movements of assimilation and exclusion occur simultaneously.
Referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s groundbreaking interpretationof this novel that identifies British colonialism as the significant backdropof Jane’s self-construction, Rey Chow and Jenny Sharpe argue that Jane’s
ultimate self-development as the wife of Rochester, her employer, isaccomplished through the sacrifice and exclusion of his Creole wife Bertha,Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow245

the racialized Other (Chow 162; Sharpe 45-47). In this text, identification
between white women and women of color cannot be achieved. The national
formation, represented through domesticity, reveals simultaneous processesof assimilation and exclusion. Thus, the adoption and revision of this genre
by minority writers demonstrate their construction of identities, explorationof the meanings of their identities, and negotiation of the formation of themodern nation-state (Japtok 21).
For Asian Americans, who have always been equated with foreignness
because of their racially and ethnically inscribed Otherness, thebildungsroman operates as a site for claiming belonging to the United Statesthat has been denied to them. Furthermore, as Xioajing Zhou suggests in
The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, within Asian
American literature, modification of Western genres provides a way ofcreating an alternative cultural realm for Asian Americans as well as amethod for intervening in and interacting with the mainstream to produce aform of alterity that is richly heterogeneous. Thus, as Chu astutely points
out, Asian American authors seek “both to establish their own and theircharacters’ Americanness and to create a narrative tradition that depicts andvalidates the Asian American experience on its own terms” by using the“contested site” of the bildungsroman (12).
In Anshū, however, the boundary of a nation is transcended because ofHimiko’s enforced departure from Hawai‘i and her resettlement in Japan.
Thus, Kono further modifies the generic boundary.5 Through her depictionof Japanese American Himiko, who is exposed to American military attacks
and eventually becomes a hibakusha, Kono questions the artificiality ofnational boundaries that create a “we and “the Other.” Moreover, in Himiko’s
embracement of her identity as a hibakusha who is marginalized and yetholds the possibility of creating transnational commonality by evoking
shared mortality, Kono questions the naturalized boundaries of the modern
nation-state.
Kono’s depiction of disability and illness within a transnational setting
represents both symbolic and actual conditions of the novel’s characters andsocieties located in Hilo in Hawai‘i and in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto in
Japan during the first half of the twentieth century. While following thesymptomatic tradition of using disability and illness as problematic symbols
of an unwelcoming situation or as defective psychological aspects of her
characters, Kono also illustrates how a state of disability and illness is
produced and linked with other factors relating to social marginality, suchas transnationality, and how this also preconditions people’s lives during a

246

Yasuko Kasestate of war.6
Throughout the course of her life, Himiko exceeds the normalcy andsocietal standards of both the United States and Japan. As the younger
daughter of Japanese immigrant parents who emigrated from Hiroshima toa Japanese American farming community in Hilo, Hawai‘i, Himiko is
positioned at the social margins of US society while still enjoying a secure
life. Her protected life is suddenly shattered by her father’s death from aninfection caused by a leg injury he sustained while trying to protect Himikofrom a stalking fireball, which is believed to carry the soul of the dead andto cause death. Her father’s death results in the loss of the “normalcy” offamily life. Himiko’s mother loses the financial and emotional stability that
her late husband provided, while Himiko’s sister, Miyo, whose left leg isshorter than her right leg, begins to reveal her disability in public after her
father’s death. This happens because he is no longer there to adjust her
shoes to enable her to pass as “normal.” Miyo’s social opportunities arefurther limited by her withdrawal from school, which restricts her social
mobility by way of a career or marriage. Meanwhile, Himiko, left alone athome, starts to develop a romantic relationship with their neighbor’s son,
Akira. In her depiction of Himiko’s forced departure from Hawai‘i because
she is pregnant with Akira’s baby, Kono critiques the problematic governanceof female sexuality and bodies. Teenage pregnancy is perceived as a disgraceand social disability for a woman if it occurs outside of marriage. Thus,
Himiko’s transnational departure is a means of discovering an alternative
space that may absorb her difference. Her failure to comply with the social
code governing female sexuality makes Himiko into a subject to be excluded
from a nation-state.
In her portrayal of Himiko, who eventually becomes a hibakusha andembraces this identity, Kono questions the ideological governance of the
body in the modern nation-state. Referring to Martha Nussbaum’s work,
Tanner considers the ideal citizen to be a competent and independent person
who is autonomous and invulnerable (4). Therefore, through the characterof the protagonist, Himiko, Kono radically challenges the figure of the
exemplary citizen in the dominant formation of the nation-state. If the ideal
citizen is presumed to be physically invulnerable, how is a person with anillness and/or disability situated vis-à-vis social and cultural rights ofcitizenship? If, in Himiko’s narrative, the process of her becoming does notconform to the predicted course of national development, the reader isinevitably encouraged to be open to an alternative form of unpredictablebecoming that deviates from and exceeds the bildungsroman formula.

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow

247

Himiko’s transnational becoming repeats the process of differentiation or
repulsion from and eventual empathic identification with disabled or“abject” characters. When she was living in Hawai‘i, especially around thetime of her entry into adolescence, she realized that she was beautiful andindulged in narcissistic visual pleasure derived from observing her own
reflection in the mirror. Her vigorous body image allowed her to differentiate
herself, in sharp contrast, from her disabled sister. However, in Japan, the“abnormalcy” of Himiko’s status becomes apparent with the revelation ofher lack of fluency in the Japanese language and physical anomalies such as
her tall height and tanned skin that were unusual features among Japanesewomen at the time. Even within her uncle’s home, located in a downtown
ghetto in Tokyo to which the family has moved because of financial failure,
Himiko finds herself occupying the lowest social status as a servant. Her
former status as a protected younger daughter, who possessed the privilegeof being excused from physical labor, is now lowered to that of her sister
Miyo. By retrospectively identifying her current damaged self in Japan withthat of Miyo, Himiko starts to discover a commonality and identification
with her disabled sister, who sacrificed herself by accepting manual workand giving up her savings to pay for Himiko’s diasporic escape to Japan.
While Himiko’s narrative unfolds chronologically, her personal growthoccurs as a cyclical process rather than following a linear developmental
course.
This cyclical repetition can also be enacted in the reader’s own experienceof reading this novel. The title page of each part includes the name of thespecific location and time frame, for example, “Tokyo: November 1941–
March 1945.” Thus, in precise chronological order, Japan’s historical WorldWar II trauma–especially the events of the Tokyo air raid and the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima–unfold before the reader. While Himiko’s narrative
reveals her traumatic experiences, her narration does not follow the styleobserved in many texts within the genre of trauma fiction such as postmodern
fragments and flashbacks that mimic trauma symptoms (Gibbs 24-26).
Rather, based on her own meticulous research, Kono offers the reader arealistic depiction of civilian lives in Japan from Himiko’s perspective.7 If
the reader is familiar with the historical information, he or she inevitably
predicts the ominous traumatic events that await Himiko (Sumida 16). Here,
Kono’s realism not only (re)informs the reader about painful historicalevents but also compels the reader to (re)confront and (re)experience these
events by affectively immersing himself/herself within Himiko’s embodied
traumatic experience. Considering the politics of the visual field that is248

Yasuko Kase

enacted in the remembrance of the atomic bombings in the United Statesand in Japan, Kono’s realistic and graphic depiction of war trauma challenges
the absence of sensory images of embodied and actual forms of suffering
endured by people.
The two significant historical events of the March 1945 Tokyo air raid
and the August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima strongly affect theprocess of Himiko’s becoming. While escaping from the fires caused by the
Tokyo air raid, Himiko accidently kills her cousin Sā-chan, whose constantindulgence in her own physical beauty and spoiled status within the family
remind Himiko of herself in the past. Irritated by Sā-chan’s selfishness, andalso overwhelmed by the heat of the surrounding fire, Himiko pushes her
cousin toward the fire when Sā-chan refuses to run through it to reach safety.
When she falls into the fire and is encompassed in flames, her body lights
up like charcoal, and half of her face melts away. This horrifying image of
Sā-chan haunts Himiko, who is wracked with guilt and shame, andeventually merges with her own self-image when she becomes a hibakusha.
Thus, the two historical events of the Tokyo air raid and atomic bombing in
Hiroshima shape Himiko’s becoming. These events compel Himiko torealize who she was, as reflected in Sā-chan’s personality, when she becomesa hibakusha. She undergoes very similar physical suffering to that enduredby her cousin and apprehends the limit of her own humanity.
Kono’s novel critiques the popular Japanese war memory, based on
innocent victimhood, by describing the inhuman violence that Himiko andother people in Japan display for the sake of their own survival. These actsare followed by feelings of unspeakable guilt and shame. Gazing down at ascorched corpse, presumed to be that of Sā-chan, Himiko feels the complete
loss of humanity of those who survived the air raid, including her own: “Intruth, I no longer knew who we were, what we were as people, or what wewere as fellow human beings. What I was as a human being. I didn’t know
how we are all connected anymore” (168). Here, the notion of humanitythat is required to regulate “normal” civilian life is completely lost. Alongwith Himiko, many of the people who survived the air raid “committed
secret acts of violence in order to save ourselves in the firestorm” (171).
Filled with similar feelings of shame, people, therefore, avoid eye contact
the next day.
Repeated efforts to narrate a trauma are widely believed to have healing
power. However, Himiko is not allowed to confess her guilt and shame.
Thus her “anshū,” or dark sorrow, festers within her as a wound that is notallowed to fully heal. Several times, she tries to confess the details of her

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow249

cousin’s death to her uncle Shinichi, Sā-chan’s father. However, she realizes
that he does not want to listen and that she, therefore, must remain silent
about what actually happened. Susan J. Brison discusses the importance ofthe listening other who listens to the victim’s narrative of trauma so as toenable the victim to return to his or her (original) self (147). Yet, Himiko’scase is complex in that she is both a victim and a victimizer. Gibbs observes
that the problem of trauma studies is that it produces only victims and has
failed to fully address the issue of perpetrator trauma, although PTSD was
included in the psychiatric diagnostic cannon as a result of the politicalactivism of Vietnam War veterans who were perpetrator trauma sufferers(165-66). Thus, Himiko’s narrative cannot be fully categorized as thenarrative of a trauma victim. Nor can it be categorized as heroic. Thus, inthis novel, the narrative of her silenced confessional testimony exceeds
popular war memories in both Japan and the United States.
Through her description of wartime Japan, Kono disrupts her readers’sense of normalcy in various ways. The social crisis caused by the war
disrupts ideas about health in general. Civilians’ lives were exposed todanger not only by the genocide inflicted on them by the US attacks but also
by the governance of their bodies by the Japanese government. The
widespread belief that the majority enjoyed good health and only a small
minority suffered from disabilities and illness was completely reversed
under the extreme wartime military dictatorship in Japan.8 Except for a verysmall proportion of people who were wealthy, civilians were starving or illfrom malnutrition or disabled like Himiko’s uncle, who, like her sister, had
one leg shorter than the other and was not, therefore, drafted. Like manyothers, Himiko finds herself constantly suffering from illness as a result of
the loss of her former physical strength. Thus, Kono depicts wartime Japanas a place where states of disability and illness were the norm.
At first glance, by depicting the desperate lives of Japanese civilians,
Kono’s perspective seems to resonate with popular Japanese depictions ofWorld War II. Very similar to the common formula of focusing on a young
female protagonist, Kono focuses on the suffering of people within Japan.
Thus, if Japanese readers do not fully attend to Kono’s critical depiction of
the relationship between transnationality, disability, and social marginality,
they may reduce Himiko’s Japanese Americanness to mere “Japaneseness.”
Yet, as I have discussed, Himiko’s process of self-construction is not one of“innocent” victimhood, represented by the heroines of Japanese melodramas,that has been a product of the national memory.
Kono compels the reader to confront the impossibility of simply creating

250

Yasuko Kasesuch shared “innocent” victimhood in her description of Himiko’s initial
encounter with the term hibakusha. One day after the war, Himiko encountersa boy who looks at the scars on her face and calls her hibakusha in a
disdainful manner. Himiko discovers that he is also a hibakusha. However,
because his scars are not visible, he can hide this fact and does not, therefore,
identify with this status: “ ‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ he said, jumping backwhen I tried to keep him from running away. ‘No one can tell if I was in thebomb,’ he said” (284). There was stigma attached to the hibakusha becauseof the belief that ailments and visible physical differences, caused by theatomic bomb attack, were contagious in addition to being signs of spiritual
defilement. In contrast to the shared and abstract victimhood that the
postwar Japanese war memory has utilized, the actual embodied experiencecreates divisions even among atomic bomb victims. Thus, some hibakushas,
like this fictional boy, who do not have visible keloids or other scars,
discriminate against disfigured hibakushas like Himiko and attempt to passthemselves off as able-bodied people.
For Himiko, the hibaku experience completely alters her sense of herself.
She is exposed to the atomic bomb attack when she steps out from a bus
with her daughter and a cousin. After the event, while suffering from her
own physical pain and witnessing the horrific ways in which people die–including her own daughter–scarred and covered with maggots, blood,
vomit, and excrement, she counts the days from the time she stepped out of
the bus as if her sense of temporality has been completely altered. Indeed,
Himiko’s fiancé Kazuo, who rejects her because of her hibaku experience,exclaims, “[T]he Himiko I knew is dead” (308). However, Himiko rejects
this declaration by deciding not to hide her visible difference and to livewith her stigmatized identity as a hibakusha.
After a temporary stay in Kyoto following the war, Himiko moves backto Hiroshima “to be among the Hibakusha, my own people” (315). By
accepting her scars as “the marks of distinction–the story of [her] survival
as a victim of the bomb” (301), Himiko now embraces her body as evidenceof her life story, even when the US Army surgeon’s investigative team
examines and takes photographs of her body. Their clinical gaze reduces her
to a medical symptom and a valuable medical specimen for follow-up
studies on the effects of atomic bombs. Some army photographers, fascinatedby her scars, even fetishize her photographs as works of art. However,
Himiko regards her own body as “neither sublime nor profane” (321); rather
she accepts her body as the reality of who she has become.
Whereas the image of the developed (male) protagonist at the end of aDiasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow251

conventional bildungsroman maintains consistency with his younger image,portrayed in the opening pages, by adding favorable maturity, Anshū does
not provide such a consistent and narcissistic mirroring identification
between the opening and concluding images of her protagonist. The sharp
gap created between the healthy and youthful Himiko at the opening of thebook and the image of a disfigured hibakusha at the end, prompts the reader
to reexamine models of “normalcy” relating to health, race, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and class that prevail within the boundaries of the modern
nation-states of Japan and the United States. Through its critical engagementwith the issue of transnational hibakushas, Kono also provides insights fora dissection of how stigma operates in the visual field to create a national
official memory through dis/identification.

Coda
My analysis of Kono’s unconventional approach to the bildungsromanhas highlighted the need for a critical reexamination of how postwar
developmental narratives succeed in averting the viewer’s gaze from guilt
and shame regarding the use of necropower to injure the Other. Kono’s
graphic description of a Japanese American hibakusha troubles any clear
delineation drawn between “us,” the citizens, and the Other by prompting
the reader’s affective identification with, and ethical responsibility for, theOther who is in a state of pain and suffering.
Reading Kono’s novel in light of Japan’s current nuclear crisis caused by
the Great East Japan Earthquake and following tsunami in March 2011 calls
our attention to the irony that Japan’s postwar nation building has depended
heavily on nuclear power, which has often endangered the lives and healthof people living close to nuclear plants. This too is a type of necropower thatdevalues the lives of people living in rural areas, which are the usual
locations of nuclear plants. Furthermore, we have (re)witnessed how easilysocial stigma can be attached to the people who are, or who are thought tobe, exposed to nuclear radiation. Reading Kono’s novel on the 70th
anniversary of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at this momentof nuclear crisis in Japan, offers us a critical opportunity to reexamine thepolitics of memory surrounding hibakushas.

Notes
This article was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant-in-252

Yasuko Kase

Aid for Scientific Research number 26370320.
Portions of this article were developed from my comments as a discussant of Stephen
H. Sumida’s keynote speech for the Asian American Literary Association (AALA) 25th
Anniversary International Forum held in Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in
September 2014. My comments were published in AALA Journal 20 (2014). Two earlier
versions of this article were presented at the AALA regular meeting that took place in
Nagoya University in May 2014 and at the division meeting of Asian American studies
at the JAAS annual convention held in Okinawa in June 2014. My discussion of thegenre of the bildungsroman is based on the first chapter of my dissertation “Politics outof Trauma: Asian American Literature and the Subject Formation of Asian America,”
completed in 2010 and available through ProQuest (UMI number 3407909).
2 As Lisa Yoneyama has suggested, the memories of Korean hibakushas are still
marginalized in Japan, mainly because their presence is a reminder of the cruelty inflicted
during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea, which disrupts the dominant war narrativethat proclaims the Japanese as tragic victims (202–31).
3 The Ministry of Labour and Welfare differentiates the category of hibakusha fromthe designation of shogaisya used for the disabled. However, disabled subjects in Japanemphasize the commonality of these two designations. Shuncho Hanada, a disability
studies scholar who is also disabled, has included a Japanese text about hibakushas in theliterary genealogy of the representation of the disabled in Japan (240–44). We are,therefore, in a complex situation where the state’s classification intersects withhibakushas’ own personal and collective identities and with particular sociohistoricaland personal definitions of disability.
4 In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag contrasts the viewing subject, whostays in a physically safe place to look at photographs depicting cruelty, and the viewed
object/Other in the photographs, who is in extreme physical pain or has already becomea disfigured corpse (72). Pointing to the ongoing journalistic practice of exhibiting exotic
others as “zoo animals” (72), even in these photographs depicting cruelty, Sontag notesthat the Other, identified as those with “darker complexions in exotic countries . . . isregarded only as someone to be seen not someone (like us) who also sees” (72).
Consequently, any traits that can evoke commonality as human beings between the Other
and the looking subject are stripped away.
5 See Najmi’s discussion of the relationship between national boundaries and the
bildungsroman.
6 According to Cynthia Wu, the development of disability studies as a discipline hasgone through two phases. The first phase focused exclusively on the metaphorical use of
disability in literary products, using depictions of people with disabilities merely tofacilitate the flow of the storyline. Such people were described either in completely
1

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow

253

negative terms to evoke “scorn, fear, or disgust” or in “redemptive” terms to incarnate
childlike innocence. The disabled individual was a one-dimensional character. Thisfocus on representation was a necessary tactic for revealing how the use of disability
metaphors was damaging for the disabled. The second phase, according to Wu, calls
attention more to the analysis of naturalized standards of normalcy. By revealing theambiguity of the division between disability and ability, scholars have begun to focus
more on the discursive production of the division and social and cultural governance ofthe body.
7 In her “Interview” with Bamboo Ridge Press, Kono described the process of
implementing her research in Japan.
8 See Clare Barker and Stuart Murray 219–36 for a discussion of the relationshipbetween disability and the experience of mass disablement.

Works Cited
Barker, Clare and Stuart Murray. “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures
and Democratic Criticism.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.3(2010): 219-36. Project Muse. Web. 20 May 2014.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 1994. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Brison, Susan J. “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity.” Gender
Struggles: Practical Approaches to Contemporary Feminism. Ed. Constance L. Mui
and Julian S. Murphy. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 137-65. Print.
Carrigan, Anthony. “Postcolonial Disaster, Pacific Nuclearization, and Disabling
Environments.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.3 (2010): 25572. Project Muse. Web. 20 May 2014.
Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnics and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia
UP, 2002. Print.
Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian
America. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Print.
Coleman, Lerita M. “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified.” The Disability Studies Reader.
2nd ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 141-52. Print.
Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2014. Print.
Hanada, Shuncho, ed. Nihon-bungaku no naka no Shogaisya-zo. [The Representation of
the Disabled in Japanese Literature]. Tokyo: Akashi-shoten, 2002. Print.
Hogan, Michael J. “The Enola Gay Controversy: History, Memory, and the Politics ofPresentation.” Hiroshima in History and Memory. Ed. Hogan. New York: Cambridge
UP, 1996. 200-32. Print.
Ingstad, Benedicte, and Susan Reynolds Whyte. “Disability Connections” Introduction.

254

Yasuko Kase

Disability in Local and Global Worlds. Ed. Ingstad and Whyte. Berkeley: U of
California P, 2007. Print.
“Interview with Author Juliet S. Kono.” Bamboo Ridge Press. n.d. Web. 23 Aug. 2015.
Japtok, Martin. Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African
American and Jewish American Fiction. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2005. Print.
Kono, Juliet S. Anshū: Dark Sorrow. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge P, 2010. Print.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP,
1996. Print.
Maclear, Kyo. Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness. Albany:
State U of New York P, 1999. Print.
Mbembé, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003):
11-40. Project Muse. Web. 14 May 2014.
Najmi, Samina. “Decolonizing the Bildungsroman: Narratives of War and Womanhoodin Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman.” Form and Transformation in Asian American
Literature. Ed. Xiaojing Zhou and Najmi. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2005. 209-30.
Print.
Okuda, Hiroko. Genbaku no Kioku: Hiroshima/Nagasaki no Shiso. [Remembering theAtomic Bombings: The Thoughts on Hiroshima/Nagasaki]. Tokyo: Keio UP, 2010.
Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York:
Oxford UP, 1985. Print.
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
Sodei, Rinjiro. “Were We the Enemy?: American Hibakusha.” Living with the Bomb:
American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age. Ed. Laura Hein andMark Selden. New York: An East Gate Book, 1997. 232-59. Print.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003. Print.
Stone, Albert E. Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb. New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. Print.
Sumida, Stephen H. “Acts of War, Arts of Peace.” AALA Journal 20 (2014): 7-22. Print.
Tanner, Laura E. Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 2006. Print.
Wu, Cynthia. Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American
Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2012. Kindle file.
Yoneyama, Lisa. “Memory Matters: Hiroshima’s Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and thePolitics of Ethnicity.” Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural
Conflicts in the Nuclear Age. Ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden. New York: An East
Gate Book, 1997. 202-31. Print.

Diasporic War Memory in Juliet S. Kono’s Anshū: Dark Sorrow

255

Zhou, Xiaojing. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. Iowa City:
U of Iowa P, 2006. Print.