In what follows, I seek to develop a reading of A Tale that might offer new insights to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the connections that Ozeki attempts to make or has arguably elided in her novel. I will do so by focusing on the two secret diaries of Nao and her great-uncle Haruki #1. Helpfully annotated by Ruth, Nao’s diary leads its readers to imagine violence not so much in the extraordinary scenarios of rape and harassment it initially evokes, but rather in the banal, ordinary setting of everyday school life. Nao’s diary reveals that school, presumably a place to learn, “just isn’t safe” for Nao (44) as it is marked by the hostility, aggression, and hatred that high school students and teachers collectively direct against individuals who fail to conform to what is deemed to be normal in terms of behavior, social status, and national belonging. In Nao’s case, she fails to integrate into the micro-society of her classroom and ends up becoming a target of bullying because of her financial vulnerability resulting from the bursting of the dot-com bubble as well as the Americanness that was part of her upbringing. As Nao bluntly puts it, being a “poor loser foreign kid” who neither understands “how [she is] supposed to act in a Japanese classroom” nor has extra money to buy “any nice stuff” to keep up with the fashion trends popular among junior high
school students, she “basically” got tortured (44). Nao’s matter-of-fact explanation about the causes of her torture, however, does not adequately reflect the severity of what she has
experienced. As readers of her diary find out, the forms of bullying that Nao has faced are not limited to the disparaging verbal remarks such as “gaijin kusai”/“She stinks like a foreigner”
(48), “bimbo kusai”/“She stinks like a poor person” (48), as well as “baikin”/“germ” (100) that her classmates unapologetically threw at her face. Online abuse is also included in the cycle of brutal violence in which she was trapped. In one extreme scenario, Nao was pronounced dead in a mock funeral that her substitute teacher Ugawa-sensei and her classmates had staged, filmed, and put online. Filled with poignant scenes of abuse,
humiliation, and torture, Nao’s diary makes visible violence in its banality, calling attention to the social mechanisms and institutional practices that perpetuate cultures of bullying.
Read within the historical context of a post-3.11 world, Ozeki’s fictional account of Nao’s painful school life in Tokyo almost becomes an allegory of the broader struggle against stigmatization, discrimination, and ostracism that evacuees from Fukushima—especially school children—have faced in their exiled life. While in the shocking aftermath of the triple disasters, Japan saw a proliferation of discourses celebrating the bonds of love and solidarity (kizuna), cooperation, and communal support among its people, numerous media reports have sought to represent this seemingly harmonious relationship between Japan’s disaster-affected and non-affected populations otherwise, highlighting the internal conflicts and dissonances among them. As Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt point out, reports about
“evacuees from Fukushima being stigmatized and discriminated against” ranged from “a refusal to allow them to get gasoline refill to the non-acceptance of evacuated children in nurseries outside Fukushima” (8). Moreover, unreported “fears” among evacuees that what awaits them is “the marriage discrimination experienced by the victims of the 1945 atomic bombings” were everywhere (8). In 2016, five years after the triple disasters hit Japan, more stories about nuclear bullying (genpatsu hinan ijime), or the serious stigmatization,
discrimination, and bullying that children from Fukushima faced at school started to come to the surface. In one case, a junior high school boy from Fukushima was reported as being bullied in his first and second elementary schools in Tokyo, where his classmates attacked him with disparaging comments not unlike those appearing in Ozeki’s novel (“2nd
Fukushima Boy Speaks Up about Bullying in New Schools”). In particular, “germ,” an injurious and derogatory term used to pathologize an individual for his or her difference—in Nao’s case, her Americanness—was employed by this Fukushima boy’s classmates to punish him for being an evacuee who spreads fears of radioactive contamination around the
classroom. While the social and historical conditions that lead to the suffering of this bullied evacuee from Fukushima and the fictional character of Nao differ significantly, their
agonizing experiences of being subject to intense bullying—both real and imagined—call for a critical reflection on how otherness is (mis)managed by Japan’s contemporary educational system and society at large.
Examining the plausible commonality between Ozeki’s devastating representation of Japanese school life and the cases of “nuclear bullying” to which evacuees from Fukushima are subjected is just but one way to read Nao’s diary. In A Tale, Ozeki has used her
meticulous depictions of Nao’s vulnerability and helplessness to make a more direct and striking comparison, this time with the suffering of a kamikaze pilot. Named Haruki, or oftentimes referred to as Haruki #1, this kamikaze pilot is Nao’s great-uncle who studied French philosophy at the University of Tokyo before being drafted into Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II. In the early pages of A Tale, Ozeki’s readers, following Nao’s description of her family history, are able to understand that Haruki #1’s love of philosophy has made him a target of bullying in the army. Instead of having Nao describe in great detail the sufferings of her great-uncle, however, Ozeki chooses to create yet another secret diary to elaborate on a different case of intense bullying in her novel. Translated by a Québécois character named Benoit and also annotated by Ruth, this secret diary, which was originally
written by Haruki #1 in French, contains what its owner called “lengthy and self-indulgent accounts of what are the routine and quite banal cruelties of military life” (319). It documents not only the physical abuses like punches, kicks, and blows that Haruki #1 received as
punishments for his derivation from what is deemed proper masculinity in the military. It also recounts the atrocious acts including rape, torture, and massacres that Japanese commanding officials inflicted upon Chinese civilians during Japan’s invasion of China. Though the violence that Haruki #1 endured and witnessed in his squadron is shocking, monstrous, and cannot be compared to what Nao has experienced in her classroom, both are products of a system that values cohesion, conformity, and obedience. Marked as outsiders or
non-conformists, Nao and Haruki #1 contemplated committing suicide, with at least one of them succeeding. By presenting in A Tale two secret diaries whose owners are targets of intense bullying, Ozeki invites her readers to reconsider the differences, similarities, or continuities between cultures of violence in wartime and postwar Japan.
In fact, besides Ozeki’s juxtaposition of Nao and Haruki #1’s two secret diaries, there are other passages in A Tale which encourage its readers to examine how Japan’s wartime and postwar cultures of bullying can be relevant to each other. In her discussion about Ozeki’s representation of interwoven pasts and presents, Lisa Kabesh draws attention to a scene in Nao’s diary in which Old Jiko, Nao’s great-grandmother, reveals her personal views about the war that caused Haruki #1’s loss of life and its long consequences. Calling young Japanese “heiwaboke”/“peace-addled” individuals who can only picture Japan as a peaceful nation and cannot understand the gravity of war, Old Jiko, in a cautionary tone, urges Nao to remember that “actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past” (180). As Kabesh observes, this scene importantly points to the fact that “Nao’s present-day peace bears the contours of war and mass violence,” and that “Jiko’s harsh words . . . mark a stern call for remembrance” (94). Drawing on Roger I. Simon’s work on “remembering
otherwise,” Kabesh seeks to further elaborate on the “particular form of remembrance that
seeks to connect violent pasts to relatively tranquil presents” (94). Kabesh explains that remembering otherwise, according to Simon, is:
a form of remembrance based in practices not sanctioned by official histories and other pedagogies of state and nation; it is a critical remembrance that acknowledges ties between past and an ever-changing present. Remembering otherwise is a practice that seeks to acknowledge that past violence (physical, psychical, political, discursive, and symbolic) is antecedent to—indeed, cedes—the present, and that these pasts, even if unacknowledged, have the terrible power to foreclose futures. (95)
In A Tale, Ozeki sets the practice of “remembering otherwise” that Old Jiko has called for against what Kabesh identifies as “pedagogies of the state,” the “suppressive remembrance practice” that is manifested through Haruki #1’s official letters (109).21 Unlike the secret French diary which manages to record the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army, Haruki
#1’s official letters are written so as to convey a false sense of patriotism that has misled Nao to believe that her great-uncle was a “War Hero” who was “willing to fly his plane into the battleship and die to protect his country” (261). Kabesh argues that these official letters have made explicit how “state pedagogies alter national inheritance [of war memory]” (109). By contrasting Haruki #1’s secret diary with his official letters, Ozeki has effectively reminded her readers that “in failing to acknowledge the difficult inheritance of political, systemic violence, publics are in fact failing to acknowledge how the very structures and ideologies of dominance and exclusion that produce such violence are themselves passed down from one generation to the next” (111).
Through her exploration of the possible meanings of Jiko’s words, Haruki #1’s official
21 For a detailed examination of how Yūshūkan, a war museum attached to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, has been mobilizing stories and images of kamikaze soldiers as an affective means to arouse patriotic sentiments from its visitors, especially a younger generation of Japanese who do not have direct memories of the wars Imperial Japan waged in Asia and the Pacific, see Sakamoto. For a discussion of how Ozeki has been one of the “first authors to approach the characterization of the kamikaze pilot in Anglophone fiction writing as a serious narrative endeavor” (10), see McKay.
letters and secret diary, Kabesh has managed to foreground the necessity and urgency to
“remember otherwise”—a practice that can be used to counter oppressive pedagogies of the Japanese state. What remains unclear in her argument, however, is the historical specificity of
“the war and the past” that, according to Old Jiko, have continued to shape Nao’s present.
While obviously, “the war” in Japan, as Nao has explained to her readers, always means
“World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in” (178), there is no further information in her diary to indicate which battle exactly her great-uncle was assigned to carry out his suicide mission. By contrast, in Haruki #1’s secret diary, readers are provided with more precise information: that he was scheduled to die in “Tetsu no Ame,” which, according to Ruth’s relatively lengthy and helpful annotation, is described as follows:
Tetsu no Ame (鉄の雨)—Typhoon of Steel (also Battle of Okinawa), which resulted in the highest number of causalities in the Pacific Theater during World War II. More than 100,000 Japanese troops were killed or captured, or committed suicide. Allied
causalities numbered over 65,000. Somewhere between 42,000 and 150,000 Okinawan civilians were also killed or wounded, or committed suicide (between one-tenth and one-third of the indigenous Okinawan population). (327)
Instead of focusing on “the war” or World War II as a whole, critical attention to “Tetsu no Ame,” or what is oftentimes referred to as the largest sea-land-air battle in world history, I would argue, can bring forward a reconsideration of what needs to be “remembered
otherwise,” not only in Nao’s present, but also in the historical conjunctures in which readers of A Tale find themselves.
In Okinawa, military violence has not disappeared following the conclusion of the battle that devastated much of its land and population. As Wendy Matsumura points out in
“Okinawa: The Cold War Creation of a Model Jungle,” after being designated “as a fortress against Allied attack of mainland Japan during World War II,” Okinawa was “sacrifice[d]” by the Japanese nation state “in exchange for keeping the imperial institution intact following
the signing of the postwar surrender documents” (39).22 Indeed, not only did Article 3 in the San Francisco Peace Treaty that Japan signed with the Allied Forces in 1951 allow Okinawa to be “sacrificed” and put under direct U.S. military administration; signed in 1952 and amended in 1960, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, or what is oftentimes referred to in Japanese as Anpo, also permitted the United States to retain its military presence on the island, thereby maintaining its imperial hegemony over Asia and the Pacific and keeping postwar Japan, a demilitarized nation, safe.23 In A Tale, details about Okinawa’s long history of colonial subjugation are nowhere to be found.
What offers Ozeki’s readers a glimpse of the island’s wartime suffering comes only in the form of an annotated note written by Ruth in the margin of Haruki #1’s secret diary. Yet as marginalized as it may seem, “Tetsu no Ame” and its long aftermath, as Old Jiko’s warning to Nao arguably implies, is what shaped postwar Japan into a “peaceful nation” (180). If, as Kabesh argues, “[r]emembering otherwise is a practice that seeks to acknowledge that past violence . . . is antecedent to . . . the present, and that these pasts, even if unacknowledged, have the terrible power to foreclose futures” (95), remembering the violent past and present of Okinawa—memories that fail to neatly align with postwar Japan’s narrative of peace—is a practice that may potentially open up futures that are unanticipated by militarist imaginings of Japan and the United States.