Remembering and (Re)storing War Memories : The Postwar Fiction of Shimao Toshio

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The tension between remembering and narrating war memories has been a significant theme in the discussion of postwar Japanese literature because it is closely tied to the broader issue of historical consciousness (rekishi ninshiki mondai) in postwar Japan. This article focuses on the postwar fiction of Shimao Toshio (1917-1986), whose work was shaped by his tokkōtai (special attack force) experience in the Asia-Pacific War. The article argues that the memory of imperial Japan forms an overarching thematic thread in Shimao's postwar fiction. The author engaged with this theme by employing Christian motifs in his work. While his early fiction tends to mask the memory of imperial Japan's violence, his later novels, culminating with his best-known fictional work, Shi no toge (The Sting of Death, 1977), uses such imagery to deal with the traumatic past, exploring the possibility of a restorative approach in dealing with past failures and their consequences. In this way, Shimao goes beyond the dynamics of victim-victimizer, providing a key illustration of the ways in which the traumatic memory of modern Japan can be transformed into a resource for the regeneration of society.

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