‘Wildcat Dome' challenges Japan's historical narratives

Japan Times

25-04-2025

Ambitious in scope and spanning decades, Yuko Tsushima's 2013 'Wildcat Dome' uses an unreliable, shifting perspective to represent the instability of historical narrative.
Published last month in English translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, the novel centers on the mixed-race orphans of American soldiers, — children who were abandoned during the U.S. military occupation of Japan (1945-52), ostracized from Japanese society and raised in segregated orphanages such as the real-life Elizabeth Saunders Home (though the book features a fictional orphanage).
Wildcat Dome, by Yuko Tsushima. Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. 272 pages, MACMILLAN, fiction.
'Wildcat Dome,' however, doesn't take place solely in postwar Japan. Instead, it starts and ends in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Using radiation as a metaphor for the lingering, toxic impact of militarism around the world, Tsushima references several significant points in recent history, including the Vietnam War and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City.
On the surface, the novel tells a personal story of damaged children — now adults — bound together by tragedy. Underneath, there's a constant undercurrent of political consequence, invisible and pervasive like radioactive particles.
'Tsushima explores themes of militarization, colonialism and occupation through the identities of these mixed-race characters,' says translator Hofmann-Kuroda.
The title of the novel, obliquely explained in Tsushima's author's note, also further clarifies the writer's intentions. She references forcibly displaced islanders and the Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands, the site of a decaying radioactive waste repository from the U.S. testing of nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958. The Japanese cover of the novel features a photograph of Runit Dome, and wildcats can be a reference to the children, treated like stray animals in postwar Japan.
Hofmann-Kuroda, who is of Japanese and American heritage herself, was drawn to the novel and reached out to the editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who published one of Tsushima's earlier works, 'Territory of Light.'
'We're definitely at a moment of increasing nationalism, increasing xenophobia, a kind of right wing consolidation around historical narratives that can be very revisionist,' Hofmann-Kuroda, who lives in New York, says. 'It's really important to challenge the idealized images of Japan that we often get through translated literature that may be cute or unthreatening. It's important to read writers that challenge historical narratives.'
'Wildcat Dome' is Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda's first solo full-length translation. |
Courtesy of Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda
'Wildcat Dome' is Hofmann-Kuroda's first solo full-length translation (she co-translated 'Kappa' by Ryunosuke Akutagawa with Allison Markham Powell in 2023), and it's the first novel of Tsushima's that tackles history to be published in English.
Tsushima, who passed away in 2016, was a prolific writer with over 50 publications spanning novels, short stories and essays. Before 'Wildcat Dome,' most of Tsushima's works translated into English were from her earlier period, where she focused mainly on important feminist issues, like single motherhood. Tsushima's later works focused on 'excavating Japanese history,' as Hofmann-Kuroda says, writing novels and essays on topics that include the indigenous Ainu people and the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.
'There was this whole generation of women writers in Tsushima's generation, active in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, who have been overlooked because that was a time when it was still mostly Japanese men being translated,' says Hofmann-Kuroda. 'They were experimenting with fiction in really radical ways and were very political in their writing.'
Alongside prominent writers and social critics of this period, like Minako Oba or Taeko Kono, Tsushima's later works belong firmly in this overlooked subset of resistance literature in Japan.
Admittedly, the experimental style of the novel is a challenge at first, both for readers and for translation, according to Hofmann-Kuroda.
'With her historical themes and the timescale of the novel that are much broader beyond one character's perspective, Tsushima created a floating consciousness ... that moves between multiple characters' the translator says. 'Sometimes it's difficult to figure out whose perspective you're seeing.'
The Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands was built by the American military to cover the site of nuclear weapons testing. |
Wikimedia Commons
Various perspectives weave together to form the whole narrative. Mitch is a mixed-race orphan of African American descent who is adopted alongside Kazu, also a mixed-race orphan of unspecified ethnicity. The two are raised as brothers and form a friendship with Yonko, an introverted Japanese girl who becomes their loyal playmate since her single mother is related to the woman who adopts the boys.
Another key mixed-raced character is Tabo, the rumored child of a Chinese national. He's 'repatriated back to Japan' with his Japanese mother after Japan's occupation of China ends, and his mother's perspective forms an important part of the narrative that includes the ostracizing that Tabo endures in Japanese society.
When the children are eight, they witness the drowning death of another mixed race orphan, Miki, who may (or may not) have been targeted for her orange skirt and obviously non-Japanese facial features. Tabo, a year older than the others, may or may not have been responsible for her death. Although authorities determine no official crime has been committed, various dark rumors surface and the children's own memories are unreliable and incomplete.
The book is a delicate weave of the personal and the political, as the children grow to adulthood, forever marked by the tragedy, endlessly searching for a truth they can not uncover, unable to thrive in Japan.
The orphanage in "Wildcat Dome" is similar to the real-life Elizabeth Saunders Home that took in the mixed-raced orphans in postwar Japan in the 1950s. |
Wikimedia Commons
Tsushima presents a clear criticism of Japan's deliberate political silence during its postwar rebuilding era — on the plight of U.S. military orphans, on victims from the atomic bombs, or its collusion with the U.S. government's successful propaganda campaign for nuclear power — as enduring impacts for future generations.
Similarly, the color orange becomes a powerful symbol of the U.S. military, subtly creating a connection for its toxic military impact. Tsushima references Agent Orange, the chemical herbicide used as a weapon in the jungles of Vietnam, where another of the grown orphans goes missing after getting adopted by an American family only to be later drafted into its military. The author also alludes to the orange uniforms worn by Chilean dissidents during a CIA-backed coup d'état in 1973. Finally, the color orange appears back in Japan, in a haunting series of murders that may or may not be connected to Miki's drowning.
The uncertainty presented by her shifting narrative style is exactly Tsushima's intention.
'A destabilizing effect is what she's going for because historical narratives are never really as stable as we think,' says Hofmann-Kuroda. 'And there is a through line in all of her work that she's always been interested in memory. But in her later works, she veers more in the direction of how memory intersects with history and the unreliability of historical narrative.'
Despite the challenges in style, by the end, Tsushima's overall metaphor is crystal clear. The residual of political history — atomic or otherwise — continues to impact the individual, long into the future.