Kibei Hibakusha in Yamazaki Toyoko’s Futatsu no Sokoku and Naomi Hirahara’s Summer of the Big Bachi

Through a comparative study of Yamazaki Toyoko’s Futatsu no sokoku (1983) and Naomi Hirahara’s Summer of the Big Bachi (2004), I will show how both Yamazaki's and Hirahara’s works recuperate a WWII experience of the Kibei that portray the complex issues of Japanese American victims of the nuclear holocaust. Futatsu no sokoku depicts Kibei war experience in Hiroshima and in particular their victimization in the atomic bombing. Viewed as a controversial writer, Yamazaki has been alleged as a Japanese nationalist and her integrity as a writer has also been countlessly challenged, but Futatsu no sokoku provocatively illustrates the significantly underrepresented history of Japanese Americans during war time in not only the US but also in Japan bringing into relief the multifold layers of trauma they experienced in addition to that caused by internment. On the other hand, Hirahara, who is Japanese American and whose parents lived through the Hiroshima bombing, illustrates what life was like for those that chose to return to the US after the war ended. They both depict how Kibei hibakusha trauma manifested as residual traces not only in the individual victims themselves but in the surrounding socio-dynamic and systemic environment they inhabited. What sort of questions do their narratives raise in how we may reevaluate Japanese American war narratives meant to provide visibility to the underrepresented and wronged but in turn also reveals mechanisms that work to occlude national war responsibility? What are some productive ways we may consider the mechanisms of such occlusion? In comparing Yamazaki’s novel with Hirahara’s, this paper explores the significance of the distinctly different ways in which they depict the psychological debris that the Japanese Americans carry as a consequence of nuclear warfare.