Putting a Splintered Life Back Together

The Atlantic

24-03-2025

In 1940, just before his death, the theorist Walter Benjamin conjured a famous metaphor for watching the past: the 'Angel of History.' The angel was inspired by a print, Angelus Novus, by his friend Paul Klee, which features a great and beneficent being with his wings spread wide. Whereas we humans experience life as a chain of chronological events, the angel, Benjamin writes, faces the past and watches a tower of debris growing taller and taller, burying the victims of history. However much the angel wants to 'make whole what is smashed,' he is helpless against the wind propelling him into the future.
The author who writes after great catastrophe frequently assumes the angel's position: Many historical novels float above history, bearing witness but drawing simple lessons, or casting dogmatic judgment, from the safe vantage of the present. In these books, the crises of earlier eras are held at a distance. By charting the course from then to now, these authors find comfort in the fact that time passes on, leaving the past safely in the past.
Yet for those surrounded by the debris, history remains a living thing. Over the course of her life, the Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima, who was born just after World War II and died in 2016, witnessed firsthand how a nation and a society can transform completely without ever losing the scars of its past. In Wildcat Dome, published in 2013 and newly translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, she narrates more than half a century of her country's history, from wartime defeat and American occupation to the political and social upheavals of reconstruction. But rather than holding herself at a remove, Tsushima imbues these traumatic and transformative decades with a vivid and disturbing vitality, and uncovers in the process an unsettled zone where nothing is made whole, and not even the dead can rest.
Wildcat Dome is told across the span of Japan's postwar recovery, when it reinvented itself as an American ally and a cultural juggernaut. With the loss of its colonial empire, it became a junior partner in globalization, shipping its artistic and material products around the world. A common narrative holds that the cataclysm of Japanese defeat became a site of reinvention, allowing a peaceful democracy to rise from the ashes. Yet Tsushima begins her novel with a disaster that reopens the damage of the past for both its main character and his nation. It's the spring of 2011, and an elderly man named Mitch has returned to Tokyo, the city of his childhood, after years spent abroad. Mitch's life has been an accumulation of catastrophes both big and small. The son of a Japanese woman likely raped by an American GI, he is abandoned after World War II at an orphanage full of children with similar parentage. Growing up in the immediate postwar decades, these mixed-race children are a palpable reminder to their neighbors of Japan's losses and occupation, a legacy as radioactive as atomic fallout.
At a young age, Mitch was crushed by a portable heater, leaving him with a lifelong limp that set him apart from friends and lovers, if only in his own eyes. Around him, Japan is rising and remaking itself. Yet Mitch cannot overcome his childhood agonies or mature with his peers or his country. What draws him back to Japan after decades abroad is another atomic catastrophe—the meltdown of reactors at Fukushima following 2011's earthquake and tsunami. 'For years,' Tsushima writes, 'Mitch had denounced Japan, wishing this hateful country would disappear from the face of the earth.' Now that seems finally to be happening.
The greatest disaster of Mitch's life is more intimate in scale. One day, a few years after his adoption by a local woman, Mitch is playing hide and seek with his adopted brother, Kazu, and their friend Yonko, when the three children witness the drowning of a young girl named Miki-chan. The murderer is Tabo, a disturbing, reclusive boy from the neighborhood surrounding the orphanage, and his crime is frightening and mysterious; none of the children seem to understand Tabo's motive, not even the boy himself. Perhaps it was an accident, the children reason. Maybe he was provoked by the color of the girl's orange skirt? Yet rumors soon begin to swirl, pinning the 'accident' on this trio—these mixed-race children, viewed with suspicion, and their playmate. Mitch and Kazu's beloved Mama protects them by shipping them off to a boarding school in England.
The children grow up, move forward with their lives, take on new names and countries. Yet nothing is fully within their control, as if they have been marked by that formative blight. Every decade or so, no matter how far apart Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko have drifted, they are drawn back to one another by some news story involving the murder of a woman who was wearing something orange. For these children of misfortune, the disparate crimes come to feel like 'the same event repeating itself over and over, till it made you sick,' Mitch thinks. They are stuck, all 'living alone at the bottom of this pond' with Miki-chan, unable either to drown or to surface. Unlike Benjamin's angel, they cannot float above the events.
Tsushima knew what it was like to grow up on the outskirts of society. She was born in 1947, the daughter of a schoolteacher and the famous novelist Osamu Dazai. Shortly after her first birthday, Dazai and another woman killed themselves together, and Tsushima was raised, alone, by her mother. Her novels tell many stories of women struggling to rear children in the face of absent fathers and oppressive social obligations. As a single mother raised by a single mother, Tsushima knew that such experiences could be grueling. Yet in some of her works, including her 1980 novel, Woman Running in the Mountains, this break with convention comes to feel liberatory, like the promise of something wild and deep that allows the body to survive the convolutions of history.
Wildcat Dome is considerably less optimistic. The novel was first published two years after the Fukushima disaster and near the end of Tsushima's life. In it, the author works to expand her own experiences of fatherlessness and social isolation into a story of her country's predicament. She deploys an array of shifting perspectives, with chapters switching among time periods and points of view—first Mitch, then Kazu, then Yonko, even Tabo's poor and infirm mother. For these characters, life is a series of strange and unpleasant transformations over which they have little control. In Wildcat Dome, objects speak, memories take on physical form, and metamorphoses abound. The beautiful blue sky pulls Kazu off a tree branch. After his death, he speaks to Mitch in the form of an irradiated beetle. Tabo turns, in his mother's eyes, into a cold and unfeeling stone. History is a curse, and experience a prophecy.
Tsushima writes in a fluid, ambiguous present tense that muddles the distance between past and present, self and other. The reader is always right there with the character, suspended in a static moment of thought or trapped within their recursive stream of consciousness, circling revelation without ever arriving there. As one character remarks, 'The end of the world is here, now.' And no matter how many times the world shuffles away from ruin, there is an absence of forward movement: Though Japan has emerged from the war apparently whole and strong, Fukushima is an eerie reminder of how close devastation really is. For Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko, things always feel like that, a permanent apocalypse they cannot escape.
In this frankly astonishing novel, to survive affliction is to remain forever unmoored. Mitch attempts to reinvent himself, in and out of Japan, with little success. His wounds cannot be healed, only endured. 'Though it will be a miserable life,' someone commands him, 'you must live it anyway.' Like Benjamin's angel, he will be buffeted along by time, made to face backwards toward the steadily accruing wreckage of the world. Yet in telling his story, Tsushima does what the angel cannot, calling out to awaken the dead.