担当教員：メアリー ナイトン
講義題目：Reading the Occupation in Japanese Postwar Literature and Culture
This semester-long seminar will focus on literature of the Occupation Period (1945-1952 [1972 ends the American Occupation of Okinawa]) in Japan. We will read the Japanese literature of this period against selections from two well known studies by critics Molasky and Orbaugh that explore them in explicitly gendered as well as racialized terms, considering the ways the historical situation – for example, Japan’s fire-bombed and nuclear ruins, black market dealings, popular decadence, nikutai no bungaku, omnipresent American military bases and personnel, panpan girls, the RAA “comfort woman” system, and mixed-race children -- finds itself expressed in the literature. I will suggest reading seminal works both short and long by Sakaguchi Ango, Tamura Tajiro, Ishikawa Jun, Nosaka Akiyuki, Hirabayashi Taiko, Kôno Taeko, Tanaka Kimiko, and Oe Kenzaburo, among others, but upon consultation with students in the class we may add others. We will conclude the course with Saegusa Kazuko’s A Winter’s Death (『その冬の死』 1989) read in parallel with Native American writer Gerald Vizenor’s contemporary revisioning of Japan’s postwar in Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) in order to critically evaluate key concepts such as survivance, the national body, fake peace, and the postnuclear age. Readings will be in both Japanese and English, and class discussions will be mostly in English.