The Trauma of Another:The Female Body and National Victimhood*

2019-11-12 23:08HUANGJunliang

国际比较文学(中英文) 2019年1期

HUANG Junliang

Abstract:This paper discusses the nationalization of individual victimhood in literary works on the Asia-Pacific War.Taking a comparative approach, it focuses on the traumatized female body, its revelation as well as its suppression, in wartime and postwar literary narratives in Japan and China.Looking into the politics of the female victim's traumatized body in some influential literary works set in wartime Japan and China, I argue that in both countries, the discourses of the war are imprinted with a gendered mark in the self-claimed victimhood of the nation that represents and reveals itself through the victimhood of its women.Such practices always sacrifice a subtle and affective reading of those wounds for some greater purposes or meanings for the sake of the patriarchal nation.

Keywords:trauma; the female body; the Asia-Pacific War; nation state; gender oppression

The Asia-Pacific War (1931-45) involving China and Japan was a man-made catastrophe and a momentous event that dominates the grand narrative of both nations' modern history.In many instances, these histories are written to arouse nationalistic sentiments towards a national victimhood.Carol Gluck points out that in the monolithic national narrative of modern warfare, “each country told the war from its own point of view, seeing victory, defeat, liberation, or division as an almost entirely national experience,”disregarding the viewpoints of the other side.For most Japanese, the war is remembered with the 41, 592 tons of bombs that the U.S.Army had dropped in sixty of Japan's largest cities by July 1945,the two A-bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the seven years of the Allied Occupation between 1945 and 1952.Ironically enough, the Asia-Pacific War entered the media and discourses in the United States (U.S.) only after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and focuses on the military losses.On the other hand, for the Chinese, the war with the Japanese is represented by the bombing of Shanghai, the Rape of Nanjing, the “three-all policy” (burn all, kill all, destroy all), and Unit 731.Together they have become an integrated part of Chinese understanding of a “century of humiliation” and of anti-imperial struggles.In a way, when invoked and recounted in the national narrative, the war is also being “translated,” in a Benjaminian sense, into its postwar afterlife in those different societies.

Such a “translation” penetrates people's everyday life and shapes their perception of the war, through the working of what Louis Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), especially the educational ISA and the communications ISA.In addition to disseminating the history textbooks approved by the government, the state often holds public commemorations of the significant events in the war to reinforce the imagination of the country's traumatized past as registered in the national narrative.For instance, in 2014, at the first national ceremony of the Nanking Massacre, held on its seventy-seventh anniversary, China's President Xi Jinping defined the incident as one of the three most inhumane genocides in the history of World War II.Furthermore, December 13, the day of the ceremony, was named the “National Public Mourning Day” (

guojia gongji ri

) in China introducing a new tradition.Compared to Auschwitz and Hiroshima/Nagasaki—the other two “most inhumane genocides”—, there has been much less recognition or remembrance of the Nanking Massacre in the international community.The invention of a new “National Public Mourning Day” is precisely to confirm the nation's victimhood among its citizens and expand the influence of the massacre internationally.The work of mourning is, in Derrida's terms, always to “identify the bodily remains and localize the dead.”Through speeches and ritual performances, the “national” and “public” mourning ceremony becomes a formal disclosure of a national identity that defines the Chinese national as the living witness and/or descendant of victims of war who share the same memory of a traumatic past of the nation.It is a process in which the relationship between the living and the dead is enunciated and confirmed, and personal trauma is publicized and nationalized.

We can find the nationalization of individual victimhood in literary works as well.Being a powerful ISA in the domain of culture as Althusser maintains, literature allows individual trauma to be recovered in a concrete, vivid, and tangible way.It is a sharp contrast to politicians' speeches or history textbooks that give the cold numbers of victims in a manner that would easily result in “the loss of specificity, originality, and revelation”in the allegory of death or trauma.In many literary accounts of traumatic experiences in wartime, violence against women including sexual assault, abduction, exploitation, and exposure to radiation leaves abundant evidence of wartime atrocities that are frequently invoked in the grand narrative of the war.However, when incorporated into national victimhood and interpreted in the context of a national crisis, such gendered trauma would lose its concreteness and be suppressed again in the patriarchal system of the modern nation-state.Taking a comparative approach, this paper focuses specifically on the traumatized female body, its revelation as well as its suppression, in wartime and postwar literary narratives in Japan and China.

The Defected Body after Hiroshima/Nagasaki

An influential genre of writing on the Asia-Pacific War is called “atomic bomb literature,” or

genbaku bungaku

.Published in postwar Japan, this literature frequently invokes, recounts, and reproduces the image of a female body that has been deformed, dysfunctionalized, and traumatized by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.Among the bestknown

genbaku

writers, Ōta Yōko (1903-63), Hara Tamiki (1905-51), and Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), is also the prominent Hayashi Kyōko (1930-2017), who had a long and productive career.She was also a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic holocaust.Her accounts of August 9th always present the gendered body of the victim as a territory of loss, confusion, and wounds.Hayashi's short story entitled “Masks of Whatchamacallit” (“Nanjamonja no men,” 1976), for example, introduces Takako, the protagonist who is also a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing.Takako has suffered literally every possible harm that fallout from the atomic bomb could cause to the human body.This includes burns, hair loss, diarrhea, vomit, skin eruptions, inflammation, purple spots, and cancer—several times over.She pursues multiple treatments, including the removal of one of her breasts.Following each operation, Takako sees some hope, but she is betrayed every time.Eventually, she dies from cancer that has spread all over her body.The life of the

hibakusha

depicted in the story is a brutal testimony of the victory of death, as shown in the survivors' dread of “not being able to die easily.”Toward the end of Takako's life, she starts to buy young, healthy, and energetic men, not for sexual pleasure but simply to “hold young men, imbibe some of their energy,” and gain “a solid sense of being alive.”Of course,

hibaku

, or radiation exposure, is by no means an experience limited to women.According to the Hiroshima atomic bomb victims register in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, a total of 297, 684 deaths have been identified as of August 6, 2015.The dead include 160, 606 men and 137, 019 women.Similar demographic patterns should apply to the

hibakusha

, or survivors of the atomic bombing, but it is only more difficult to obtain the exact number, as the boundaries of “radiation exposure” are often hard to define.Men and women have been living their everyday lives after the atomic bombing in the same losing battle with death.Common struggles that confronted the

hibakusha

are depicted abundantly in, for example,

Black Rain

(

Kuroi ame

, 1965), a novel by another

genbaku

author Ibuse Masuji.It is probably the most widely read story on

hibaku

.In the novel, the male protagonist Shigematsu comes across hundreds of thousands of

hibakusha

, dead or alive, in Hiroshima on and after the day of the bombing.The novel offers one of the most vivid accounts of post-bombing Hiroshima as a living hell.Ibuse discusses not just the burns, wounds, diseases, and mental trauma of men and women who have been directly bombed, but also the long-lasting impacts of the A-bomb as a critique of the war.That being said, however, the female body is usually the focal point of the narrative in

genbaku

literature and that is also true of Ibuse's story.When the serialized story published as

Black Rain

, which was originally published under the title of “Marriage of the Niece” (

mei no kekkon

),begins, the protagonist Shigematsu is the first character diagnosed explicitly with the socalled “radiation sickness” or “atomic bomb disease.” In contrast, his niece Yasuko

was in no sense sick.She had been examined by a reputable doctor, and she had submitted to one of the periodic check-ups for survivors of the bomb that were given at the local health center.Everything was completely normal—corpuscle count, parasites, urine, sedimentation, stethoscopy, hearing, and so on.

However, four years and nine months after the end of the war, when Yasuko had the chance of an engagement, Shigematsu is so anxious about the possibility that it might again end up being spoiled by rumors of her exposure to radiation on August 6, 1945.That is, ever since the end of the war, Yasuko has had difficulty finding a husband simply because of the possible damage that radiation exposure could have done to her body.Believing that Yasuko was not affected by the bomb, Shigematsu starts to revisit wartime journals he and Yasuko had kept, but nonetheless found evidence that would prove Yasuko's

hibaku

because of the “black rain” that fell upon her that day.Furthermore, as the story unfolds, it turns out that Shigematsu's radiation disease is in fact mild and curable:“Whenever he applied himself too enthusiastically to working in the fields, he would be overcome by sudden lethargy, and small pimples would appear on his scalp.If he tugged at his hair, it came out, quite painlessly.At such times, he would take to bed for a while and eat plenty of nourishing foods.”The burn on his left cheek is the only scar the war has left him, which is quite unusual given that he has been directly bombed and exposed to massive amounts of radiation.In the same story, another character, a Dr.Iwatake, is also able to find a cure to keep him alive and even practicing in Tokyo after going through various critical bouts of radiation disease that could have killed him more than once.His miraculous recovery is considered by the doctor who has cured him as “due to the most remarkable good fortune.”On the other hand, however, not only has Yasuko been discriminated against in the marriage market because of the potential that her body is contaminated by radiation, but also when signs of radiation disease appear, her condition is much more severe than Shigematsu's.The story ends with no optimistic promise for her future.In Hayashi's story “Masks of Whatchamacallit,” a male character claims, “All Japanese were scarred by the war.”But from the female protagonist and narrator's viewpoint, men can choose to distance themselves from the scars of war, whereas women, whose wombs are “stained”by the radiation, are considered to have lost the ability to make healthy babies and are considered “flawed merchandise.”Unlike Yasuko, both of Hayashi's female characters are able to get married and even pregnant, although their husbands are not interested in having a child.The two mothers-to-be interpret their pregnancies as a symbol of the health, vitality, and fertility of their damaged body, in contradiction to the notion of the “stained womb.” At the same time, they also experience anxiety and fear for any potential deformity in their unborn child, with constant doubts and physical selfexaminations representing an internalization of the post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki view of women in Japanese society.

Hibaku

becomes a living memory shared by the female

hibakusha

and her child, but not her husband.

The complete indifference of the narrator's husband to her pregnancy shows precisely how the “stained womb” has become the mother's own fault and responsibility.Declaring that the “fellow” inside of the mother's womb belongs to her, the husband makes it very clear from the outset that any disabilities the child might have will still be her problem after birth.Takako's husband, on the other hand, opposes the idea of keeping the baby, repeatedly reminding her of the high risk of having a deformed child because of what she went through on August 9th.Eventually, Takako gives in and decides to get an abortion at five months, only to find out that she has killed a perfectly healthy baby boy.Her husband reacts by blaming her.

“Before I realized it,” he added, “I was as involved as you in your A-bomb ‘disease' and found myself looking at our unborn child with the mentality of a victim.I was made to see clearly the fragility of reason.I feel miserable.I have had enough of former soldiers begging on the train, and I have had enough of your A-bomb ‘disease'.” With this he left the room.

When the war is over the two husbands are able to move on to a radiation-free life, leaving the women to deal with their incurable wounds and haunting memories that are passed on to their children carried in their “stained wombs.” “Her parents, too, had found her a husband and then gone away.” Hayashi adds, “Takako was always left just as she was.She was left in the midst of raw wounds that had lasted since August 9.”Like Takako, the female

hibakusha

is forever trapped in her gender as the breeding sex, while her child, an extension of her traumatized body, shares her outrage, loneliness, helplessness, and alienation, and continues to drag her back to the scene of August 9th.

After the abortion, Takako and her husband get a divorce.She starts to do volunteer work with handicapped children, work that gives her the strength and courage to accept a disabled child and the possibility of “leading a life, however bloody, parent and child together.”One day she and the narrator are discussing their children,

“Any children?” Takako asked, pouring whiskey in her glass.I raised one finger.

“A boy,” I added.

“Are his limbs and brain all functioning?” Takako asked unceremoniously.I made no reply.

“Sorry,” she apologized, quickly reading into my feelings.

“I meant no harm,” she added as she lowered her head,” “I've experienced so many things

that I've lost all sense of shame.”

After all she has been through with her unborn child, Takako's first reaction to the new life that the narrator, another

hibakusha

, brought into the world is still to see it through the lens of the mother's “stained womb.” Her reaction is so spontaneous and genuine, that it is obvious that even after so many years have passed, both the mothers and their second-generation

hibakusha

children are still trapped in the temporality of August 9th.In this temporality, the mother's wound is imprinted on her child's genome and continuously reproduced and passed on to later generations, making the catastrophe a living memory rather than a past event.Will their children be healthy? If they are healthy, as the narrator's son turns out to be, does it mean that her genes are free from radiation damage, or have they just gotten lucky this time? Would they be betrayed later? Is it all right to have hope? They will never know the answers, yet they can never stop wondering.The lasting psychological and mental impacts of the atomic bomb on the female survivors have, in many senses, made them more vulnerable protagonists in atomic bomb literature.Authors writing in Japanese in the last seven decades have created thousands of novels, poems, plays, and short stories, as well as testimonials, essays, and manga that discuss the atomic bombings.Although often absent from international bibliographies and anthologies of nuclear literature, they all play an important role in the postwar discourse of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan.In this discourse, the Japanese body that is in pain frequently speaks about the brutality of the war through the female

hibakusha

's agony, fear, anger, and despair.However, this gendered mark left in the nationalistic imagination of Japan's wartime victimhood is a reminder of the dual oppression confronting the female survivor:the first time when she is the target of the bomb and the second time when her traumatized body becomes an embodiment of the nation's victimhood.Despite that interpretation, the reality is that the woman's “stained womb” is more often than not taken as if it were her own fault and sole responsibility.

Virginity after the Rape of Nanjing

In China, the wartime sexual violence against women is often invoked in narratives about national trauma.“During Japan's invasion of China from 1938 to 1945,” as Graham J.Matthews points out, “more than 200, 000 women and girls were abducted and subjected to torture and rape.”Most of these incidents are either forgotten or even unheard of.The Rape of Nanjing, on the other hand, has long since become a symbol and the site of “competing narratives from politicians, historians, nationalists, revisionists, and educationalists from China, Japan, and the United States.”In those narratives, “Nanjing” represents Japan's collective atrocities against Chinese women and, as such, an insult to the national body.

Iris Chang, the author of

The Rape of Nanking

, which was a

New York Times

bestseller in 1997, states that estimates of the number of women raped in Nanjing “range from as low as twenty thousand to as high as eighty thousand.”In her book, Chang describes rapes of Chinese women of all ages.Because these rapes might occur in all locations and at all hours during the fall of Nanjing, women would try to elude would-be rapists using a variety of methods, including disguise, feigning sickness, and running to death.What Chang does not mention in her book but is described in a 2006 novel by Geling Yan is that the price of escape might be other women's lives.One of the most influential female writers in contemporary China, Yan picks up the weighty and sensitive topic of the Nanjing Massacre in her novel

The Flowers of War

(

Jinling shisan chai

), and reveals how even the Safety Zone in 1937s Nanjing was not free of rapes and killing.However, her protagonist and twelve other young female students like her were not only able to survive the holocaust, but also to keep their virginity intact because thirteen Chinese prostitutes offered themselves to the Japanese soldiers in their places.The group of prostitutes is taking shelter in Father Engelmann's church where they meet the students, who are only thirteen years old.In the story, the students have taken refuge upstairs, whereas the prostitutes are in the basement.There is very little communication between them until the day that the Japanese soldiers show up in the church and demand the students to “sing” for them.Father Engelmann asks the Japanese to wait for a couple of hours so that the students can get ready, but what he really has in mind is to “be cruel and sacrifice some lives in order to preserve others.”He will ask the prostitutes to go instead of the students.In his mind, “they had to be sacrificed because they were not pure enough, because they were second-rate lives, because they were not worthy of his protection, of the church's protection or of God's.”Father Engelmann's disdain for the prostitutes is critically depicted in the novel.Needless to say, rating the value of women's lives based on the “purity” (i.e.virginity) of their bodies is a common practice in patriarchal societies (and churches).Surprisingly, however, those “second-rate” women, who view themselves as “the scum of the earth” that should not even dream of being reborn as “nice schoolgirls,”offer to go with the Japanese soldiers in the students' places before they are asked.They are questioned by Deacon Fabio Adornato, the only person who tries to argue that every life is equal.The leader of the prostitutes, Yumo, emphasizes specifically:“We're not being dragged, we're volunteering.”The internalization of the way a patriarchal society values the female body, as shown in these prostitutes, makes the novel read like a story about saving the “pure,” virgin lives that are symbols of the dignity of the falling nation.The ending of the story confirms that because of the sacrifice of those “less pure” lives, the thirteen young students are able to elude the cruelest killing and rapes in 1937 Nanjing, and finally leave the city intact.On the other hand, all the prostitutes die either that night or later at the comfort stations that they are sent to, except for Yumo.After four years as a comfort woman, at the end of the war Yumo cuts her ties with the past by changing her appearance completely and takes a different identity, so that she could go on living.Unlike the female

hibakusha

who is trapped in the temporality of August 6th and 9th, survivors in

The Flowers of War

have moved on from the ordeal of a nightmarish past.Despite Yumo's brutal experiences, this story offers surprisingly little description of her physical, psychological, or mental trauma.She appears to be a strong and noble person who has maintained her own dignity throughout, an image very different from the accounts by female victims recorded in such documentary works as

Chinese Comfort Women:Testimonies from Imperial Japan

s Sex Slaves

(2014).In many other examples of modern Chinese literature, comfort women, sex spies, and military prostitutes purposefully make use of their own bodies by becoming collaborators of the revolution.Ding Ling's short story, titled “My Stay in Xia Village” (

Wo zai xiacun de shihou

, 1940), offers the eighteen-year-old village girl Zhenzhen as another example.She has an ironic name that means “chastity.” She lost her chastity in a most cruel way by being caught and raped by Japanese soldiers one day when she tries to run away from her parents to escape an arranged marriage.According to the rumor that goes around the village, Zhenzhen has then spent a couple of years in a Japanese comfort station and become a so-called “po xie,” meaning “prostitutes” in the local dialect.For that reason, many scholars read “My Stay in Xia Village” in relation to the sensitive topic of the comfort women.

The first-person narrator has a chance to meet Zhenzhen when she happens to be back in the village to treat her venereal disease.Despite her tragic fate—and the low opinion of comfort women—, however, Zhenzhen appears to be intelligent and cheerful.The narrator describes her first impression of Zhenzhen as follows.

The shadows lengthened her eyes and made her chin quite pointed.But even though her eyes were in deep shadow, her pupils shone brightly in the light of the lamp and the fire.They were like two open windows in a summer home in the country, clear and clean.

In “Masks of Whatchamacallit,” Hayashi also uses the eye as a signifier of character.The left eye of the Japanese protagonist Takako suffers from spot bleeding caused by her radiation disease, which produces a bloody bubble next to her pupil and makes it look as if she has two pupils in one eyeball.Her red eyeball makes everything that she sees look red, and the faces of healthy, beautiful women would appear to be “those of red demons.”In other words,

hibaku

has changed the way Takako sees the world, both practically and symbolically.But in “My Stay in Xia Village,” Zhenzhen's gaze remains pure and naive, and her eyes “clear and clean,” just as her name implies.

Feeling awkward, the narrator does not know how to open up the conversation.It is Zhenzhen who forthrightly starts to talk about her experiences with the Japanese, her envy of modern Japanese women and the education they are able to obtain, and even shares her thoughts about everything that has happened to her.“You must have known many hardships,” says the narrator.

“Suffering?” Zhenzhen asked, her thoughts apparently far, far away.“Right now I can't say for certain.Some things were hard to endure at the time, but when I recall them now they don't seem like much.Other things were no problem to do when I did them, but when I think about them now I'm very sad.More than a year...It's all past.Since I came back this time, a great many people have looked at me strangely.As far as the people of this village are concerned, I'm an outsider.Some are very friendly to me.Others avoid me.The members of my family are just the same.They all like to steal looks at me.Nobody treats me the way they used to.Have I changed? I've thought about this a great deal, and I don't think I've changed at all.If I have changed, maybe it's that my heart has become somewhat harder.But could anyone spend time in such a place and not become hardhearted? People have no choice.

They're forced to be like that!

The narrator observes that Zhenzhen has “no intention whatsoever of trying to elicit sympathy from others.”In 1940s Chinese society, especially in the countryside in a small village such as Xia, a woman assaulted by the enemy would need a lot of courage and strength to go back to her hometown and face her countrymen's curiosity that usually comes with a mixture of sympathy and criticism.Zhenzhen seems to be in a similar situation, feeling alienated, misunderstood, and judged by people with whom she used to be close.But she also appears to be determined that what she is doing is right, despite all the social pressure and difficulties.(Elsewhere, the writer herself has described Zhenzhen as “solitary, prideful, and strong.”) Later in the story, we learn that since being raped by the Japanese soldiers, Zhenzhen has in fact been working for the Chinese Communist Party as an undercover sex spy, delivering intelligence to the anti-Japanese forces.The disclosure of the secret about Zhenzhen's real identity immediately elevates a helpless victim of brutal sexual violence into a strong-willed woman who is able to move on from personal tragedy and devote herself to a positive and productive career working for the regime.

It is surprising to see that, as a story of a comfort woman who has suffered in a violent imperial war, “My Stay in Xia Village” has a rather bright and hopeful ending:Zhenzhen is promised a trip to Yan'an, the headquarter of the Chinese Communist Party, to have her disease treated and to “stay there and do some studying.”As mentioned in several of Ding Ling's essays,the character Zhenzhen was based on a story told to the writer by a friend when she was in Yan'an.The friend told about a woman who had similar experiences of being raped by the Japanese and converted to work for the Chinese Communist Party as a spy.Ding Ling was deeply touched by this woman who “was able to escape from a humiliating and tortuous personal past, and advance toward a brighter future.”In the story, the wounded and diseased female body of Zhenzhen is also transformed from a “shameful woman”—a term often used to describe comfort women—to a powerful woman warrior, a patriotic and revolutionary national, and an educated youth useful for the future of the country.In many works of modern and contemporary Chinese literature that depict wartime catastrophes in China's “century of humiliation,” it seems as if the transcendence of the female victim's wounds is always expected and praised at the end of the story.Essentially, it is not a gaze into those wounds, but rather a strong desire to move away from them and never look back.

In “My Stay in Xia Village,” Zhenzhen's frustration about people in her village for their ignorance and backwardness in terms of their political consciousness obviously overshadows her physical and mental suffering caused by the Japanese at the comfort station.With great sarcasm, the writer criticizes the reaction of other women in the village to Zhenzhen.These women become “extremely self-righteous, perceiving themselves as saintly and pure,” as if they were “proud about never having been raped.”The reader does not get details about her violent experiences, but rather, those experiences are presented as something that is “all past.”

After looking into the politics of the female victim's traumatized body in some influential literary works set in wartime Japan and China, I conclude that in both countries, the discourses of the war are imprinted with a gendered mark in the self-claimed victimhood of the nation that represents and reveals itself through the victimhood of its women.For Japan, its past as a war victim is best manifested in the despair and fear of the female

hibakusha

, whereas for China, its humiliating history cannot be told without recounting the violence of the Rape of Nanjing and the comfort women.At the same time, however, the nationalization of the female victim's wounds and trauma sacrifices a subtle and affective reading of those wounds for some greater purposes or meanings for the sake of the patriarchal nation.

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