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5. Women in Atomic Bomb Narratives: Hagiography, Alterity, and Non-Nomological Ethics
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5 Women in Atomic Bomb Narratives hagiography, alterity, and non-nomological ethics Woman was the embodiment of respectability; even as defender and protector of her people she was assimilated to her traditional role as woman and mother, the custodian of tradition, who kept nostalgia alive in the active world of men. —george l. mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality Women and the Bomb The eponymous protagonist of the television drama Yumechiyo Nikki, or The Diary of Yumechiyo (hereafter Yumechiyo), is thirty-four years old and has been diagnosed with leukemia. Her illness is attributed to her exposure, while still a fetus in her mother’s womb, to the atomic bombing of 1945 in Hiroshima. With only three years to live, Yumechiyo must travel twice a year to a hospital in the city, several hours by train from her small village. Keeping her sickness a secret, she continues her life as a geisha and caretaker for other geisha. Despite its grave themes—the plight of the geisha, leukemia, and the atomic bombing —or perhaps because of its dramatic seriousness, the Yumechiyo story, by renowned screenwriter Hayasaka Akira, enjoyed wide popularity upon first airing in Japan in 1981. The show began with five episodes from NHK, a public television station, and was followed by two sequels, a movie, and numerous theatrical productions. No other atomic bomb narrative before it had garnered so much attention in popular media. The plot of the series revolves around the character of Yumechiyo, who has returned to her small childhood village to take up her mother’s occupation—working as a geisha and landlady. She has become a 146 r e s p o n s i b i l i t y mother figure for other geishas working under her but has given up a romantic relationship owing to her infertility. Relinquishing her love not only gestures toward the relations between her radiation exposure while a fetus and her incapacity to reproduce, but also points to cultural norms and virtues, in which bearing a child constitutes the happiness of women and of the family; a barren woman should not expect such happiness. Further intensifying this already melodramatic background, the story begins after her diagnosis with leukemia, leaving her with just three years to live before her inevitable death. The story thus unfolds from the perspective of a woman whose life is coming to an end sooner rather than later. Feminist thinker Maya Morioka Todeschini rightly criticizes the plot of Yumechio, arguing that such a generic story not only ignores individual female survivors’ sufferings but also emphasizes, and even glorifies, the conflation of inner and outer feminine beauty through portrayals of romanticized suffering and premature death: These beautiful, unscarred maidens exhibit the virtues of patience and consideration toward others , even as they endure intense emotional and physical suffering. Furthermore , Todeschini argues that the image of long-suffering women evokes nostalgia for cultural purity, since women are portrayed ‘‘as embodiments and symbols of a ‘tradition’ that persists even if their bodies might perish.’’1 In other words, we encounter in this popular narrative the themes of self-sacrifice and nationalism that we discussed in Chapter 2, here specifically the self-sacrificial attitudes of virtuous women, and nationalism in the portrayal of these suffering women as carriers of cultural purity. Before extending Todeschini’s critique, we should consider the importance of attending to such fictional narratives. As literary critic Hayden White puts it in his celebrated analysis of narrative structure, The Form of the Content, ‘‘narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine .’’2 I want to argue that, by relativizing conventional understandings of good and evil, the first season of the original Yumechiyo television series sheds light on the characters whose acts often go beyond social norms defining good and evil. Such acts are usefully illuminated through Buddhist scholar Sueki Fumihiko’s notion of transethics. Their [3.88.60.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:20 GMT) Women in Atomic Bomb Narratives 147 ethical import can be further understood through Edith Wyschogrod’s concept of non-nomological concern or care for others. One well-known nonfictional account, for example, is the story of Sasaki Sadako, who was exposed to the atomic bombing when two...