A landmark study, Fukushima Fiction explores literary responses to the triple disasters of the earthquake, tsunami, and the meltdowns at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011, now dubbed 3/11. Rachel DiNitto draws on her wide-ranging reading in Japanese fiction and commentary, disaster literature from Japan and abroad, and humanities and social science research. Her approach is sophisticated yet accessible, and her topic, all too timely. As the pandemic has shown us, the world can change radically and unexpectedly, impacting some much more than others, giving rise to strife and misinformation, but leaving no easy escape for anyone.

What is Fukushima fiction and why does it matter? In her introduction, DiNitto explains how the term encompasses responses to all three disasters collectively (and euphemistically) known as the “Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Disaster” (Higashi Nihon daishinsai). Most stories were written within a year of the disaster, and largely by writers outside the disaster zones—a departure from the atomic bomb literature, typically penned by victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather than presenting any unified vision, Fukushima fiction reveals a variety of “genre, style, voice, and the treatment of the disaster” (p. 8). Although, as with 9/11 literature, Fukushima fiction exhibits a strong tendency toward realist prose, many of DiNitto's most striking examples invent fantastic dystopian worlds. She describes 3/11 as moving writers to a creative, impassioned response, making “a profound impact on Japanese artistic production” and producing “a defining moment for contemporary fiction” (p. 1).

In crafting Fukushima Fiction, DiNitto focuses on “serious fiction” (junbungaku), mainly responses to the Fukushima meltdown, the attendant government and corporate duplicity, and its disastrous after-effects, especially on the region's residents. She explores how writers “moved past more traditional notions of disaster literature. . . . toward a grappling with the ethical and global consequences of the nuclear disaster” (p. 3). They risked exceeding the “correct speech” about the disaster promoted by the government and nuclear industry, breaking the taboo against discussion of nuclear risks and responsibilities—a resistance that emerges as a strong theme in much of their writing. DiNitto praises the best of this fiction for restoring “our ability to imagine the unimaginable and the unforeseen in the wake of such disasters” (p. 10), finding that “Fukushima fiction reaches its full critical and imaginative potential when taking on the nuclear disaster” (p. 6). Analyzing this vast and varied literature, DiNitto adopts a spatial approach, often inflected by attention to the temporal as well. She moves from the epicenter outward, considering the impact on the Tohoku region; links to Hiroshima and Nagasaki literature, atomic bomb victims (hibakusha), and decades-old anti-nuclear protests; and, finally, the connections made to the “global nuclear” by Japanese writers.

Chapter 1, “Voices from the Debris,” examines the thorny question of who counts as a victim, the usefulness of this designation, its potential for incurring shame, and its misuse in framing easy solutions. DiNitto underscores the problems of defining nuclear disaster victims narrowly when contaminated food, water, and air have far-reaching effects. She employs an admittedly imperfect concentric circle model to capture the differing realities of immediate victims; the insider/outsiders who visit disaster zones; and the widest circle, those only peripherally affected. She finds that stories set the farthest from the epicenter tend to offer the most closure, while those set in the innermost circle emphasize “characters’ inability to move forward” (p. 47). Stories about those in the insider/outsider category delve into how they attempt to make connections to the disaster zone.

Noting the difference between victims of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, familiar calamities in Japan, and the nuclear victims, DiNitto stresses that we must consider the nature of the disaster to understand “its impact on the fictional retelling” (p. 49). For example, Shigematsu Kiyoshi's short story “To the Next Spring—Obon” (2011) conveys irreversible rupture. It turns on the annual summer practice of returning to one's hometown to pay respects to one's ancestors. But in this story, evacuees from a small mountain village, now irradiated, are allowed to return for only three days of Obon. Many fear to do so. Those returning feel the loss of their community and their land, their past and their future, and even their ancestral spirits. The contamination will last for hundreds of years. Thus, unlike for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, there is no hope for these nuclear victims to rebuild or return.

Chapter 2, “Tohoku on the Margins,” analyzes one of the earliest and most experimental literary responses in Fukushima fiction, Furukawa Hideo's novel Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (2011), a work that blends the author's actual post-3/11 road trip in Fukushima with fantastic characters from his earlier Tohoku work, The Holy Family (2008). Intentionally complex, the novel merits DiNitto's close reading. Skillfully taking readers through Horses as an “alternate history of Tohoku,” DiNitto draws our attention to depictions of Tohoku as a longtime “internal colony” of Japan, whose “veneer of prosperity” supported by nuclear subsidies shows “a region teetering on the brink of survival” (p. 57). Here, she invokes Hurricane Katrina, making an apt comparison with oil-rich Louisiana's “similar tributary relationship to the U.S.,” where impoverished residents bear the greatest burden, suffering the effects of environment disaster without adequate government support (p. 72). DiNitto explicates Furukawa's stylistic experiments, his struggle working with fictional and nonfictional modes, and mythical beginnings. She identifies the notion of “disaster time” as a major theme for both Furukawa but also Fukushima fiction and disaster fiction more broadly (p. 79). Furukawa himself asks, “How do you write about a world where time itself has broken?” (p. 79).

Chapter 3, “Hiroshima Encore,” reads Fukushima fiction in comparison with the atomic bomb literature, its connection to the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan's relationship to nuclear testing in the Pacific, including its own history of World War II. Writers such as atomic bomb survivor Hayashi Kyōko consider the fate of “another generation of nuclear victims” in Fukushima (p. 21). DiNitto observes how longtime anti-nuclear activists and Fukushima fiction writers fight to make these connections, pushing a “recalcitrant government” to recognize victims’ suffering and provide them health benefits (p. 90).

Addressing the complexities of claiming the term “atomic-bomb victim” (hibakusha), DiNitto explores fiction that firmly identifies characters as such. Gen'yū Sōkyū's short story collection Mountain of Light (2013) takes on the privatization of risk, depicting characters handling life in the disaster zone in various ways, often in conflict with each other. Ultimately powerless, the characters “take on the risk that should be shouldered by the government and power companies as that risk becomes domesticated and privatized” (p. 105).

Satō Yūya's controversial short story “Same as Always” (2012), which DiNitto has translated elsewhere, imagines a mother in the disaster zone poisoning her child by deliberately feeding it contaminated food.Footnote ¹ The government's warnings about foods to avoid determines her shopping list. The baby's lack of any visible sign of harm confronts the issue of internal exposure to radiation that atomic bomb victims unsuccessfully fought the government to recognize. DiNitto explains that Satō's story forces readers to question whether this baby, who shows no harm, is a victim; disallows an easy condemnation of the murdering mother; pushes readers to consider their own complicity; and “drives home the helplessness and powerless of the situation” where life is the “same as always” (pp. 109–10).

Tsushima Yūko's novel Mountain Cat Dome (2013), a story that spans the 1920s to the present, connects the Fukushima meltdown to nuclear disasters in the Pacific, drawing attention to “those around the globe who have labored for the nuclear industry” (p. 120). In sum, the authors discussed in this chapter investigate the privatization of risk, the shunning and isolation of victims, and government and nuclear industry failure to take responsibility. But they also “refuse to allow individual citizens to regard themselves as blameless in Japan's rush to nuclearize and in the willing blindness that came with the cheap energy of a thriving postwar economy” (p. 120).

Chapter 4, “Chernobyl and Beyond,” takes the reader beyond Japan, showing how six Japanese writers connect to local struggles elsewhere, giving visibility to the global nuclear. They establish fictional worlds where, “Radiation and its culture of nuclearity have become embedded in daily life, and there is no going back” (p. 123). Here, DiNitto employs Gabriel Hecht's concept of nuclearity, which reveals how power disparities shape inconsistencies in defining what constitutes nuclear terrain, leading, for example, to the failure to include “uranium mining in Africa as official nuclear activity” (p. 123). She also relies on research on the nuclear in humanities and social science, developing a complex analytical framework for the Japanese fiction introduced. Challenging secrecy, surveillance, and language that obfuscates danger and promotes the “myth of safety” proves a striking theme in many of these dystopian stories. Thus, DiNitto points out the allusions to wartime repression and even Edo-era censorship operating in the Japanese stories, drawing parallels, too, between these fictional worlds and the contemporary politics of Japan's 2014 State Secrecy Law. She notes how fictional settings portray “nuclear landscapes,” featuring “depleted uranium munitions, nuclear power and processing plants, nuclear waste sites, communities built on irradiated ground,” creating barely inhabitable spaces (p. 123).

The stories are fascinating and varied. Kurokawa Sō's short story collection Things That Once Happened in This World (2012), which DiNitto terms “documentary fiction,” features one story that educates readers about the Navaho who suffered after mining uranium in Arizona, including them, along with Japanese, as atomic bomb victims. Another shows post-Chernobyl Belarusians grappling with survival in an irradiated land where their beloved mushrooms, now contaminated, are forbidden. Connecting Fukushima to these nuclear disasters elsewhere, Kurokawa criticizes Japan's failed response, cover-ups, and callousness toward the region's residents. Tawada Yōko's imaginative novel The Lantern Bearer (2014) sees the normalization of language, as defined by an authoritarian, omnipresent government, as central to her characters’ adaptation to their irradiated environment. But DiNitto observes a glimmer of hope in Tawada's work, noting that her focus on language also “shows its potential for political struggle as well” (p. 147).

The Epilogue, “Writing toward the Future,” parses the “conflicting messages coming out of Japan” in summer 2017 (p. 160). DiNitto visits the brightly lit consumer carnival of the “Summer 2017 Mirai (future) Tour” in Tokyo's posh Roppongi Hills shopping complex. Pop cultural figures celebrate a safe and happy world. It is a vision of the future radically different from those imagined in Fukushima fiction; its positivity complements the continuing taboo over discussing Japan's ongoing nuclear crises. Yet writers persist in drawing attention to the risky reality of nuclear power. DiNitto cites, for example, Kirino Natsuo's 2016 novel Baraka about the imagined plight of a Brazilian-Japanese girl treated for thyroid cancer caused by living in the irradiated area, who ends up being used as a symbol; anti-nuclear activists view her as victimized by the government, while pro-nuclear proponents see her as proof that living in the irradiated area is not fatal. Kirino thus includes the precarious status of minorities in Japan in the debate over nuclear energy. DiNitto concludes that Fukushima fiction writers use their literary talents productively and will continue “to challenge a government and a nuclear industry that want nothing more than this bright, simple, amnesiac future” (p. 165).

A remarkable and important study, Fukushima Fiction shows the power of literature to educate, provoke, and engage critical thinking by inventing new futures and new temporalities. DiNitto's richly descriptive analysis makes these stories available to readers outside Japanese studies. The sheer variety of this literature fights back against pronouncements that seek to promote the myth of safety and the taboo against speaking up. The question remains, “Does the ultimate success of Fukushima fiction depend on inspiring concerted action on the part of the citizenry?”