Gentle Transnational Spirits

Abstract

Kamisato Yudai’s Immigrant Ghost Stories (2022) evokes past generations that suffered violence yet nevertheless haunt the present as gentle spirits, whether as reincarnated animals, reincarnated people, or repeated patterns of physical gesture and movement. Blurring the borders between fiction and documentary, storytelling and physical theatre, the work stages transnationality as both an economic practice and a sociocultural necessity, encouraging us to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Japanese–Latin American and other Japanese transnational identities.