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Book review: Bodies of Memory
Feb. 6th, 2014 18:54Bibliographic Data: Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Main Argument: Igarashi argues that "Japanese society rendered its traumatic experiences of the war comprehensible through narrative devices that downplayed their disruptive effects on Japan's history" (3). Igarashi, focusing "on how memories of the war were transformed in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period," argues that Japan's "memories were discursively constructed through bodily tropes" because "many Japanese discovered their bodies as the entities that survived destruction and thus embodied historical continuity. Their bodies became sites for national rehabilitation, thus overcoming the historical crisis that Japan's defeat created" (5). Examining the tension between repression and expression, Igarashi uses both to study the impact of the war on postwar Japanese society.
( Bodies of memory (and forgetting) )
Critical assessment: I think this is a good book, but at times, perhaps inevitably, it feels somewhat claustrophobic. I appreciate Igarashi’s insistence on not treating the postwar period as one long, homogeneous period, and his focus on the first twenty-five years after the war provides his study with a valuable finite frame; I very much appreciated his insistence on historicizing the postwar in general. That said, if his final sentence (“Historical studies may not make the pain of others more comprehensible; but they do teach us how to resist certain narrative practices that reduce such pain to easy categorical knowledge” (210)) is meant to refer to this book in particular, I have to question to what extent Igarashi actually achieves his aims. “Suffering Asian bodies” recur in his narrative, but are never fully brought into it; the empire, which doesn’t even merit an index entry, remains in the end the unreachable exterior of his study. I wonder if the Derridan notion of “hauntology,” those specters of the past that are neither extant nor in-extant but that continue to dog the present, might have been more productive than psychoanalysis.
That having been said, within its limits this is an excellent book, much more adept at its reading of popular discourses and unabashed in its critical viewpoint. I think Igarashi here has added a crucial piece to the construction of a full narrative of postwar Japan (and I especially liked his criticisms of Maruyama, I have to admit).
Further reading: Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home; Perilous Memories, ed. Takashi Fujitani et al.
Meta notes: Some historians are very good at the analysis of cultural productions.
Main Argument: Igarashi argues that "Japanese society rendered its traumatic experiences of the war comprehensible through narrative devices that downplayed their disruptive effects on Japan's history" (3). Igarashi, focusing "on how memories of the war were transformed in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period," argues that Japan's "memories were discursively constructed through bodily tropes" because "many Japanese discovered their bodies as the entities that survived destruction and thus embodied historical continuity. Their bodies became sites for national rehabilitation, thus overcoming the historical crisis that Japan's defeat created" (5). Examining the tension between repression and expression, Igarashi uses both to study the impact of the war on postwar Japanese society.
( Bodies of memory (and forgetting) )
Critical assessment: I think this is a good book, but at times, perhaps inevitably, it feels somewhat claustrophobic. I appreciate Igarashi’s insistence on not treating the postwar period as one long, homogeneous period, and his focus on the first twenty-five years after the war provides his study with a valuable finite frame; I very much appreciated his insistence on historicizing the postwar in general. That said, if his final sentence (“Historical studies may not make the pain of others more comprehensible; but they do teach us how to resist certain narrative practices that reduce such pain to easy categorical knowledge” (210)) is meant to refer to this book in particular, I have to question to what extent Igarashi actually achieves his aims. “Suffering Asian bodies” recur in his narrative, but are never fully brought into it; the empire, which doesn’t even merit an index entry, remains in the end the unreachable exterior of his study. I wonder if the Derridan notion of “hauntology,” those specters of the past that are neither extant nor in-extant but that continue to dog the present, might have been more productive than psychoanalysis.
That having been said, within its limits this is an excellent book, much more adept at its reading of popular discourses and unabashed in its critical viewpoint. I think Igarashi here has added a crucial piece to the construction of a full narrative of postwar Japan (and I especially liked his criticisms of Maruyama, I have to admit).
Further reading: Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home; Perilous Memories, ed. Takashi Fujitani et al.
Meta notes: Some historians are very good at the analysis of cultural productions.
