Writing Colonial Lineage in Sakaguchi Reiko's "Tokeiso"

This essay examines Sakaguchi Reiko's novella "Tokeisō" (Passionflower, 1943) in which the generational divide between a Japanese father and his Japanese-Aborigine son reflects an ideological division between diverse colonial subjects and different forms of Japanese colonialism. I show how Sakaguchi articulates seemingly "new" colonial lineages—political and literary—through the reformulation of the popular tropes utilized in colonial discourse, including nature, culture, family, and marriage. While these "new" lineages differ from their predecessors in form, they ultimately maintain colonial union and consequently provoke questions about the possibility of articulating resistance in the colonial context.