Abstract
This paper seeks to show how Takahashi Gen’ichirō exploits parody to show the critical function of self-reflexive literature in the novel Koisuru genpatsu. Coherently with his experience as a political activist in the sixties, Takahashi interprets literature as a revolutionary act of resistance; it can be argued that he broadly embraces the conception of art – ideally inherited by Marcuse’s aesthetic – as a space for thought and action that makes resistance to the social status quo possible. Through the analysis of significant elements of the novel’s peritexts and epitexts, this article tries to reconstruct the web of signifiers that constructs the novel, in order to show how – in Takahashi’s concept of literature - every act of speech needs to be placed in a social structure, where the agency of discursive subjects always modifies the signifying process.
Highlights
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real
This paper is focused on the novel Koi Suru Genpatsu (A Hot Nuclear Reactor) by Takahashi Gen’ichirō (b. 1951), which was first published in the November issue of the literary review Gunzō a few months after the Triple Disaster in Tohoku: the earthquake, tsunami, and melt down of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which struck the eastern part of Japan on 11 March 2011
It explains that the Japanese people will endure hardship as they have in the past, and the disaster tells a story of communal suffering on the national level and removes questions of blame from the politically fraught context
Summary
On 26 August 2017, a video produced by the Miyagi Prefectural Government in the region of Tohoku was censured and removed from YouTube. The episode resembles an ironic inversion, that is, a distorted reflection in a parodic mirror, of the unlikely narrative expediently conceived by Takahashi in Koi Suru Genpatsu. This impudent, fukinshin attempt to draw attention to the region devastated by the triple catastrophe six years before was phagocytised by the political correctness of public opinion through censorship.
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