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Japan Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
‘Wildcat Dome' challenges Japan's historical narratives
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.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Putting a Splintered Life Back Together
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. Read: The careful craft of writing female subjectivity 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. Read: The cult classic that captures the stress of social alienation 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. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Putting a Splintered Life Back Together
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.
South China Morning Post
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
From Hiroshima to Fukushima, Yuko Tsushima's novel Wildcat Dome is strangely riveting
Japan's three historic nuclear events – the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II and the 2011 nuclear plant meltdowns in Fukushima – form a key backdrop for Wildcat Dome, a novel by Yuko Tsushima. Advertisement Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda's English translation of the book by the Kawabata and Tanizaki awards-winning writer is now out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and goes on sale this month. As befits its catastrophic theme, the writing rambles – although intentionally and in a delightfully mesmerising style – meandering from a description of a scene to a dialogue, only to be interrupted by a sound, an image or an action, like memories of a dream or nightmare. Among the main characters are children born to Japanese women and American servicemen, who grow up in an orphanage. They embody the human costs of war, and the suffering of living in a discriminatory society. The cover of Hofmann-Kuroda's English translation of Tsushima's novel. Photo: FSG via AP The layering of the subplots involving radiation and racism, as well as personal conflict, leads always to the big question: why? Advertisement
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Book Review: Yuko Tsushima, now in English translation, explores nuclear, and personal, nightmares
Japan's three historic nuclear events — the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II and the 2011 nuclear plant meltdowns in Fukushima — form a key backdrop for 'Wildcat Dome,' a novel by Yuko Tsushima. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda's English translation of the book by the Kawabata and Tanizaki awards-winning writer is now out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, going on sale this month. As fitting of a catastrophic theme, the writing rambles, although intentionally and in a delightfully mesmerizing style, meandering from a description of a scene to a dialogue, only to be interrupted by a sound, an image or an action, like memories of a dream, or a nightmare. Among the main characters are children born to Japanese women and American servicemen, who grow up in an orphanage. They embody the human costs of war, and the suffering of living in a discriminatory society. The layering of the subplots involving radiation and racism, as well as personal conflict, leads always to the big question: Why? The author never gives us a real answer or pretends to try. The book has references to sweeping social themes like Dr. Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, and the Vietnam War, as well as the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. And they are juxtaposed with personal catastrophe. The characters live through the Fukushima disaster, the fear of radiation, witnessing crowds of people wearing masks, then forgetting to wear them, followed again by more fear. In another segment, a mother is taking care of a son who has 'turned into a cold stone,' haunted by a child's drowning. 'The mother sighs and opens the door. The floorboards squeak like a cat's helpless meow, drawing her inside,' a passage reads. 'Raindrops, glimmering white, slide off each leaf, the sound of the drip, drip striking his eardrums like a song, a quietness that could only be called a raindrop song, a cheerful song,' goes another passage typical of Tsushima's language. Traveling across time, back and forth, as well as geographically, to Europe at one point, as well as Japan and the U.S., the storytelling may be easily called a bit chaotic. But one wouldn't expect a nuclear disaster, war or murder to be too orderly. In the hands of Tsushima, the daughter of famed novelist Osamu Dazai, who wrote 'No Longer Human,' it's strangely riveting. 'Wildcat Dome' is Tsushima's final work. She died in 2016. ___ AP book reviews: Yuri Kageyama, The Associated Press
