6 - Narrating the Untellable: Yoko Tawada and Haruki Murakami as Transnational Translators of Catastrophe

Summary

WHEREAS JAPAN HAPPENED TO BE the stage for an unavoidable natural catastrophe, the Tohoku earthquake of March 2011, it was followed by a man-made catastrophe that the famous Japanese writer Haruki Murakami called a “second massive nuclear disaster” and that has been memorialized by the nuclear plant's name: Fukushima. Referring back to Hiroshima, Murakami distinguished between Japan's active and passive confrontation with nuclear threats: “This time no one dropped a bomb on us … we committed the crime with our own hands.” Subsumed under the name “Fukushima” is the conflation of a natural and a manmade catastrophe, as well as the confrontation with a nuclear threat that evokes memories of the atomic bombing, but this time with Japan as perpetrator, not victim.

Ortrud Gutjahr, the founder of the intercultural poetics lecture series INPOET at the University of Hamburg, points out that “nature has no conception of catastrophes.” They are described as such because “the effects of extreme elemental activity can only be calculated and controlled by humans to a limited extent, and are accompanied by destruction and loss.” The Fukushima catastrophe is a cultural catastrophe in the sense that it was caused by the limitations of man-made technology: the natural catastrophe was aggravated by the construction of nuclear plants that could not completely withstand natural forces. According to Gutjahr, it is “the nature-averse belief in technology and feasibility that summoned forth the global scope of the catastrophe.”

Fukushima can be considered a global rather than a local or national catastrophe. Not only were foreign nationals living in Japan affected (the same could be said about other tsunamis or floods that happen in a specific country without affecting people outside the country) but the uncontainable atomic threat itself was also mobile. At the same time, Fukushima was transnational in that it triggered ecocritical thinking in countries that were not located in the immediate vicinity. The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe quickly revived a nuclear debate in Germany that had continued with varying intensity since Chernobyl. Fukushima thus provides an example, though tragic, of the fact that thinking in terms of national borders has become completely obsolete when considering ecological impact. Yet, as Rob Nixon argues, environmental politics are made on the national level and are tied to national political interests, and thus the nation-state “remains a potent actor.”