Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film (review)

Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film, edited by David Stahl and Mark Williams, brings together an impressive collection of essays. This volume is hefty in every sense of the word: not only are the essays weighty in their topics and treatment, but the 12 essays bring the volume to just over 360 pages. The essays are almost all uniformly strong—cogent, complex, and expanding the boundaries of what we know and think—and, although they range widely in subject matter, a reader who reads from start to finish comes away with the impression of consistency and uniformity. This is rarely achieved in an edited volume. It may not be necessary at the end of the day: most of us, in actual reading practice, will go to the essays by topic and author that are relevant to current projects and presentations. Nonetheless, it attests to the care of the editors and their success at shaping this book into a coherent whole. It is an important collection.

The volume augments the existing body of work on trauma and memory by the focused attention paid to creative work—fiction, film, and photography. The editors write that the “undervaluation and neglect of artistic works . . . help explain why so many constitutive elements of the Asia Pacific War . . . remain controversial and insufficiently fathomed to this day” (p. 1). These essays make such creative work central. The essays balance on a fulcrum situated between the imagination and the imaging—as the title draws attention to. Another balance point is found in spaces between individual experience of traumatic events and communal or national experiences.

That is, the essays fall along a continuum, from the recording of a traumatic event such as the experience of the Asia-Pacific War (the de facto focus of most essays) on one side to the various ways of processing and making sense of the trauma on the other. The editors move the analysis forward from memoirs and memorialization, where such considerations are usually rooted, to consider how artistic works participate in the process of making sense of and living with trauma. The collection’s concern for trauma results in attention to three phases: the cause of the trauma (war and violence), the experience of the violence by individuals, and the expression of that violence. The introduction lays out the terms and the parameters of the volume. It is theoretically rich, drawing from the existing scholarship. The introductory essay is, however, among the least accessible essays in the volume. It seems to stagger under the weight of its intentions, which are reflected in the heaviness of the prose, and a desire to be exhaustive in its phrasings.

The ponderousness of the academically styled introduction is made the more obvious by the light touch of the essay that follows. Alan Tansman’s writing is a model of how to make the weighty and dense approachable. Tansman’s essay (the only reprinted essay in the volume; Jay Rubin’s essay is adapted from his earlier book; the rest are new) is a very personal record of teaching trauma, in this case teaching the Holocaust together with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima. Such a project is fraught all along the way, starting with the very pairing of the two events, by suggesting that one might be able to compare the incomparable. It is fraught at the level of the historian’s task, it is fraught at the level of individual history and interaction, it is fraught with the realities of its medium, which here is the university classroom. But the task is important, and this record of an experiment also focuses many of the issues dealt with throughout this volume. The interaction with trauma circulates at three levels: the personal trauma of the event, the personal interaction with the...