Narrating the cultural trauma of 3/11: the debris of post-Fukushima literature and film

Abstract

Images of debris dominate our understanding of the 3/11 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown – that took place in Japan on 11 March 2011. They have been effectively used to rewrite the story of individual suffering into one of collective tragedy. In this article, debris is a locus for examining the construction of the narrative of 3/11 as cultural trauma. The article analyzes three texts that deal directly with images of 3.11 debris: Fujiwara Toshi's documentary film No Man's Zone and two short stories: Murakami Ryū's ‘Little eucalyptus leaves’ (Yūkari no chisana ha, 2012) and Saeki Kazumi's ‘Hiyoriyama’ (2012). Fujiwara interrogates the position of the viewer via images of destruction, Murakami connects 3/11 to the multidirectional memory of other global traumas like Auschwitz, and Saeki constructs a local narrative that contrasts the personal experience of the disaster with a televisual or filmic representation. These texts are engaged in the cultural work of constructing 3/11 as collective trauma. They create a collective identity, a ‘we’, for this trauma that speaks both for and against the national narratives of recovery. This article examines images of debris around the one-year anniversary of 3/11 and speculates on the concurrent lack of images of bodies.