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

This anthology is as incisive and demanding of consideration as any that I have read. The central question reframed again and again in each of the essays in Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film is how the literary arts, narrative and film in particular, deal with cruelty, atrocity, and brutality on an unimaginable scale. The basic premise underlying the anthology, as expressed in David Stahl's and Mark Williams's fine introductory essay, is that "the moment [the author] calls up a former experience, an element of fictionalization intrudes as early mental formations are superseded and new ones created. Already, there is an element of going beyond what was an attempt to situate the experience of the past in a comprehensive, interpretive context" (p. 9). There is thus an unbridgeable gap between the brutal reality of historical events and their literary articulation.

The next issue the introductory essay addresses is why one should remember history's atrocities in the first place. How many times have we heard the children of survivors of World War II declare that their parents never spoke of their experiences during that time. It was only much later, from outside sources, that the children learned of the terrors their parents had lived through. There is a great deal to be said for repression or forgetting, or at least not dredging up the horrors of war and its aftermath and dwelling on them. Stahl and Williams justify what for most is the profoundly unsettling, if at times fascinating, experience of writing and reading literature about war.

First, they argue, following Walter Davis, that "one of the definitive characteristics of artistic expression is its ability to represent historical trauma in terms of the situated immediacies of affective experience" (p. 12). Surely, as they contend, literature is the only linguistic expression of experience that can make the history of terror understood on a personal, immediate, and emotive level: Literature, due to its plasticity of representation, has a way of making the history of terror new through the image. Second, they argue that through a dialogic encounter with the past that is neither "detached objectification" nor identification that leads to conflation of self and other, "empathetic engagement with representations of historical trauma opens up valuable opportunities for self-reflection, self-critique and responsible action" (p. 17). What is not expressed in the anthology is some sense of the number of readers and writers who are willing or able to regard the past with such equanimity.

Finally, Stahl and Williams see a kind of therapeutic value in the performative act of reimagining repressed, horrific images. "Left unengaged, unconstituted, uncognized and unacted upon, such images—and the historical traumas they reference, visualize and embody—will, whether we realize it or not, continue to disturb us both personally and collectively like recurrent but unregistered nightmares, haunt the present and threaten the future" (p. 18).

The chronological ordering of the essays is a surprise. The anthology begins with the teaching of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings to today's students, proceeds to the contemporary author Murakami Haruki, and then moves on to the postwar writer Mishima Yukio. It does not deal with writers who directly experienced terrible physical suffering until the middle of the volume. The book concludes with a discussion of anime representations of war set in the future and created well after World War II ended. Ordering the volume according to the dates of the historical incident described rather than the age of the artist is an inventive way to emphasize the fact that the wars Japan engaged in from 1931 until its defeat in 1945, as well as the aftermath of this series of conflicts, remain alive as recurring images of loss, regret, and destruction not only among those who...