Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States (review)

With deep empathy for the experiences of children and youth, Adrienne Carey Hurley examines representations of child abuse and youth violence in the United States and Japan from a place of profound moral and political conviction. Her perspective is one of an intellectual whose commitment to children and youth has extended beyond the halls of academia as a court appointed special advocate for abused youth in California and a founder and director of the University of Iowa Youth Empowerment Academy. She brings this considerable and varied experience to bear on Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures, in which she unequivocally rejects the idea that child abuse and youth violence are “inexplicable” (p. 32). She argues instead that adults are not only “complicit in the conditions that engender violence” but also are responsible for the betrayal of youth and thus for the (often violent) “desperate measures” to which they may resort. So egregious has been adult abandonment of children and youth, suggests Hurley, that reparations must be paid as one facet of “do[ing] better by your youth” (pp. 216–17).

The first of two main parts of the book explores how the act of storytelling can help victims survive child sexual assault and develop an identity as an adult survivor by tapping into and expressing Orpha—“the ‘organizing life instincts’ that propel the victim toward self-preservation” (pp. 34–35). Originally named by Elizabeth Severn, a patient of psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, Orpha is of central theoretical importance to Hurley, who illustrates how it can function by analyzing the storytelling strategies of the main characters in two novels: Shizuko in Uchida Shungiku’s Fazā fakkā (Father fucker) and Bone in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, both published in 1993.

The second part of the book moves from the topic of child abuse to violence committed by youth, the somewhat awkward transition explained as one “between a moment of violation and the aftermath of a violent response to that violation” (p. 109). Hurley seems to imply here that youth violence might be understood and considered sympathetically as a response to child abuse. She then contextualizes youth violence further by suggesting that it is mediated by stifling hierarchical relationships of power (parent and child, state and citizen, emperor and subject). By analyzing fiction, poetry, and media portrayals of youth violence as well as the voices of youth themselves, she illustrates how figures like the violent teenager and young anarchist are constructed as societal dangers to be feared. And Hoshino Tomoyuki’s novel Ronrii hātsu kirā (Lonely hearts killer) is read closely to demonstrate how representational violence can push back against such hierarchies and fears.

The book’s overarching claim that adults disappoint children and youth is generally convincing but diffuse, largely because of a methodology that merits greater and more explicit discussion of its assumptions and implications. In this analysis of cultural discourse, there are no distinctions made between mediums of representation (literary, journalistic, filmic) or between fictional and nonfictional representations. Fictional characters are treated as psychological case studies; literary analysis is interwoven with descriptions of places or events not necessarily mentioned in the work itself; and the shifts from discussions of newspapers to novels to films are seamless. These decisions were surely intentional and most likely informed by potentially thought-provoking ideas about the definition of truth, the meanings of fiction, and the nature of discourse. But without elaboration on what informs and underpins this methodology, the reader is left to speculate about its logic and the door is opened to doubt about whether written and visual texts with different aims, methods of production and dissemination, readership/ viewership, modes of communication, and reception should be treated as indistinguishable.

Such elaboration would have been particularly helpful on the question of how the author views the...