Rachel DiNitto - Böcker

The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres, including fiction, ­zuihitsu (essays), war diaries, poetry, travelogues, and children’s stories. In discussing his oeuvre, critics have circumscribed Hyakken to a private literary realm detached from the era in which he wrote.Rachel DiNitto provides a critical corrective by locating in Hyakken’s simple yet powerful literary language a new way to appreciate the various literary reactions to the modernization of the early decades of the twentieth century and a means to open up a literary space of protest, an alternate intellectual response to the era of militarism.This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time: a consumer-oriented print culture; the popular entertainment of film; the capitalist and cultural force of an emergent middle class; a planned, yet sprawling metropolis; and the war machine of an expanding Japanese ­empire. Emerging from this analysis is a writer who relied on the quotidian language of the everyday and the symbols of cultural modernism to counter the harsh realities of modernization and imperialism and to express sentiments contrary to the mainstream ideological rhetoric of the time.

Fukushima Fiction introduces readers to the powerful literary works that have emerged out of Japan’s triple disaster, now known as 3/11. The book provides a broad and nuanced picture of the varied literary responses to this ongoing tragedy, focusing on “serious fiction” (junbungaku), the one area of Japanese cultural production that has consistently addressed the disaster and its aftermath. Examining short stories and novels by both new and established writers, author Rachel DiNitto effectively captures this literary tide and names it after the nuclear accident that turned a natural disaster into an environmental and political catastrophe.The book takes a spatial approach to a new literary landscape, tracing Fukushima fiction thematically from depictions of the local experience of victims on the ground, through the regional and national conceptualizations of the disaster, to considerations of the disaster as history, and last to the global concerns common to nuclear incidents worldwide. Throughout, DiNitto shows how fiction writers played an important role in turning the disaster into a narrative of trauma that speaks to a broad readership within and outside Japan. Although the book examines fiction about all three of the disasters—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns—DiNitto contends that Fukushima fiction reaches its critical potential as a literature of nuclear resistance. She articulates the stakes involved, arguing that serious fiction provides the critical voice necessary to combat the government and nuclear industry’s attempts to move the disaster off the headlines as the 2020 Olympics approach and Japan restarts its idle nuclear power plants.Rigorous and sophisticated yet highly readable and relevant for a broad audience, Fukushima Fiction is a critical intervention of humanities scholarship into the growing field of Fukushima studies. The work pushes readers to understand the disaster as a global crisis and to see the importance of literature as a critical medium in a media-saturated world. By engaging with other disasters—from 9/11 to Chernobyl to Hurricane Katrina—DiNitto brings Japan’s local and national tragedy to the attention of a global audience, evocatively conveying fiction’s power to imagine the unimaginable and the unforeseen.

Fukushima Fiction introduces readers to the powerful literary works that have emerged out of Japan's triple disaster, now known as 3/11. The book provides a broad and nuanced picture of the varied literary responses to this ongoing tragedy, focusing on ""serious fiction"" (junbungaku), the one area of Japanese cultural production that has consistently addressed the disaster and its aftermath. Examining short stories and novels by both new and established writers, author Rachel DiNitto effectively captures this literary tide and names it after the nuclear accident that turned a natural disaster into an environmental and political catastrophe.The book takes a spatial approach to a new literary landscape, tracing Fukushima fiction thematically from depictions of the local experience of victims on the ground, through the regional and national conceptualizations of the disaster, to considerations of the disaster as history, and last to the global concerns common to nuclear incidents worldwide. Throughout, DiNitto shows how fiction writers played an important role in turning the disaster into a narrative of trauma that speaks to a broad readership within and outside Japan. Although the book examines fiction about all three of the disasters - earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns - DiNitto contends that Fukushima fiction reaches its critical potential as a literature of nuclear resistance. She articulates the stakes involved, arguing that serious fiction provides the critical voice necessary to combat the government and nuclear industry's attempts to move the disaster off the headlines as the 2020 Olympics approach and Japan restarts its idle nuclear power plants.Rigorous and sophisticated yet highly readable and relevant for a broad audience, Fukushima Fiction is a critical intervention of humanities scholarship into the growing field of Fukushima studies. The work pushes readers to understand the disaster as a global crisis and to see the importance of literature as a critical medium in a media-saturated world. By engaging with other disasters - from 9/11 to Chernobyl to Hurricane Katrina - DiNitto brings Japan's local and national tragedy to the attention of a global audience, evocatively conveying fiction's power to imagine the unimaginable and the unforeseen.