Brown Bag - Hayashi Kyoko’s Dissent: Wayward Japanese, Dr. Nobuko Yamasaki

Dr.Nobuko Yamasaki, Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures

 

Professor Yamasaki in her presentation, “Hayashi Kyoko’s Dissent: Wayward Japanese,” unpacks the Japanese nationalism that Hayashi (1930-) captures in her semi-autobiographical short story “Yellow Sand” (1977) by closely examining a Japanese prostitute in Shanghai at the onset of and during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45).  As a survivor of the Nagasaki blast and a member of a diasporic community of imperial Japan in Shanghai, Hayashi is uniquely positioned to critique violence inherent in the sense of national belonging. Professor Yamasaki examines the ways in which an unwanted figure, the prostitute, is needed for the nation formation within the Japanese community. In other words, she brings into relief the dialectical processes through which the Japanese prostitute enables the coherence of a fictive Japanese national subject for the creation of community. Professor Yamasaki works with the theory that the nation, the atomic bomb, and nuclear power are inseparable categories in the works of Hayashi.