The past can have a lasting impact on the ways in which we experience the present and approach the future. Authors Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kanehara Hitomi pen stories about women working to overcome their personal histories. Kakuta’s Taigan no kanojo (Woman on the Other Shore) and Kanehara’s Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings)—both published in 2004, in the wake of Japan’s recessionary era—offer sobering portraits of literary characters mired in the wreckage of the past. They are stuck. These two books, however, are ultimately optimistic in outlook, examining the lengths to which the female protagonists go to assuage the traumas of the dark past and secure bright futures. Such endeavors are not without risk, but, as the close readings that follow demonstrate, the risk is well worth it.

Introduction

What is trauma? In a word, it is painful history—dislocating and jarring: ever present and ever defining. As Lauren Berlant explains, “Trauma can never be let go of: it holds you. It locates you at the knot that joins the personal and the impersonal, specifying you at the moment you have the least control over your own destiny and meaning” (Berlant 2011, 126–27). If trauma is painful history, history itself contains the seeds of violence and struggle, for as Berlant reminds us, citing theorist Frederick Jameson: “History is what hurts” (Berlant 2011, 126). This chapter is about the painful history of literary characters in two works of Japanese literature, published during a painful moment (2004) in Japanese cultural history: Kakuta Mitsuyo’s novel Taigan no kanojo (2007, Woman on the Other Shore*) and Kanehara Hitomi’s short work Hebi ni piasu (2006, Snakes and Earrings*). In these books, both Kakuta and Kanehara evoke the maxim of painful personal history, crafting stories about lives that are less traumatized, per se, by a singular event but rather “formed in a constant state of traumatic disruption” (Hurley 2011, 86). The historical backdrop to these two works of fiction is the painful milieu of the recessionary era of the 1990s and early 2000s, a time of dithering, struggle, and exhaustion for many individuals. “History hurts,” indeed (Berlant 2011, 121).