Dennitza Gabrakova's The Unnamable Archipelago is an ambitious critique of postwar contemporary literature from a postcolonial perspective that has been overlooked by conventional studies of Japanese literature in the English-speaking world. Gabrakova states that this book “took shape within the disciplinary setting of Japanese studies, but its secret yearning is to be a book about the unnameable archipelago, not Japan” (p. 5). She employs the theory of “archipelago” developed by the Japanese cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryūta, who visualizes Japan as a part of an archipelago extending from Southeast Asia, undermining the illusion of Japan as a sovereign state. Imafuku garnered ideas and insights from Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Yanagita Kunio, and Shimao Toshio, as well as the Caribbean postcolonial writers Eric M. Roach and Derek Walcott, to shape his theory.
The first chapter introduces Imafuku's theory of archipelago, a geopolitical intervention that evades the mechanisms of modernization, capitalism, and the nation-state that led to the colonization of the Asia-Pacific and Caribbean, to trace the common experiences among islands. This theory is deliberately ambiguous, opaque, and antitheoretical in its attempt to dislocate the islands in the current geopolitics. The second chapter critically examines Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword through Ukai Satoshi's discussions of the function of translation, which universalizes the wounds of colonization, thereby losing the unique pain and emotions. Then the works of Ōba Minako, Hino Keizō, and Shimada Masahiko are discussed in chapter 3, Ariyoshi Sawako and Ikezawa Natsuki in chapter 4, and Tawada Yōko in chapter 5, analyzing the settings of “island” in their works as common traits. Chapter 6 summarizes chapters 3–5 using the postcolonial theory of Yoshimi Shun'ya, Sakai Naoki, and Komori Yōichi, and the conclusion again emphasizes the significance of Imafuku's archipelago theory. The unique aspect of this book as a literary treatise is its interpretation that the seemingly unconnected writers Ōba, Hino, Shimada, Ariyoshi, Ikezawa, and Tawada use the metaphor of “island” to discuss the postcoloniality of Japan during the Cold War period.
In Ōba's novels, such as Funakuimushi (Shipworms), the postcolonial perspective, the doubling of the Arctic island near a nuclear testing site and Japan, is rather subtle, but Gabrakoba extends Ōba's vision to see Japan through the lens of peripheral islands and applies it to the works of other Japanese authors. Hino's Isle of Dreams in the Tokyo Bay, Shimada's Iturup, Ariyoshi's Puerto Rico, Ikezawa's imaginary island in Micronesia, and Tawada's Canary Islands are the topoi through which they question the sovereignty of Japan as a nation-state and explore the location of wounds concealed under the guise of Japan's reidentification as an economic power after its defeat in World War II and subsequent military occupation.
The key to understanding the coordination of these seemingly unrelated literary works is the concept of “self-colonization” discussed by Komori Yōichi, which Gabrakoba quotes as “the state of a feigned spontaneity, but following the logic half-imposed by the [W]estern powers, in colonizing the country's systems, cultures, lifestyles in order to protect the country's territory” (p. 79).
If we look at Japanese modernization as self-colonization by the ruling class (via the West), then Japanese modern literature can also be interpreted as postcolonial literature. Furthermore, this gaze captures the presence of US military bases in contemporary Japan and the inequality of the Status of Forces Agreement and brings to light the similarities between Japan (Okinawa) and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean islands. Such claims tend to fall into the trap of entrenched anti-modernization arguments, but what appears to save this book from such bigotry is Imafuku's theory of the archipelago.
Gabrakova adopts Imafuku's thesis linking Hiroshima and Fukushima through the eponym shima, which is “island” in Japanese; however, neither name has anything to do with an actual island in the ocean. The link is a “poetic” one based not on etymology but on the sufferings of war and the economic development of Japan. Imafuku tries to subvert the modern frameworks of the sovereign state by refusing to return to the premodern (imagined) cultural solidarity of Japan and instead using geological, anthropological, and historical understandings of the archipelago as that which shares “the traumatic histories of colonialism, racism, military occupation, and environmental depletion” with Southeast Asia and the Caribbean islands (p. 163). Thus, Hiroshima, Fukushima, Okinawa, and the islands in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean are aligned as an “archipelago.” In this way, Gabrakova, via Imafuku, aims at transcending, if not critiquing, the framework of “area studies.”
This book is a complex treatise that draws not only on the thinkers and writers mentioned earlier, but also on a variety of thoughts by Marilyn Ivy, Yoshimasu Gōzō, Karatani Kōjin, Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and many others. For its complexity and density, it is regrettable that there are some typos in the book, such as misnaming 遠野物語 as 東野物語 (Tales of Tōno, p. 15). In the end, however, Gabrakova argues that we should deconstruct the framework of the quasi-sovereign “Japan” imposed during the Cold War and reread postwar contemporary literature from the perspective of postcolonial theory, which has been excluded from “Japanese studies.” It is questionable whether Japanese cultural and literary theory in the twenty-first century will converge on postcolonial theory alone, but it is certain that Japanese studies in the twentieth century are now being historically reviewed. This book is a valuable contribution to the exploration of the unconscious in twentieth-century Japanese studies.
