재난과의 거리: 『내가 없었던 거리에서』와 동일본대지진 ‘이후’의 일본문학

Abstract

The massive earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accidents, which had occurred in Tohoku, Japan, have brought various discussions to Japanese society. In the Japanese literature, this event was recognized as the moment of change as shown in the expressions of “After” of the Great East Japan Earthquake, ‘saigo(災 後)’, ‘post 3.11’ etc. However, there is a mixture of the nuclear accident and the impact of the tsunami death. In this article we examine that the death of the tsunami appeared as the events showing that the world has changed or there are limits to language or representation in Japanese literature, and analyze Shibasaki Tomoka's On The Street Where I Wasn’t focusing on the perspective of the distance from a disaster. This work, like other works affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, starts from the history of Japan's past war. However, it makes us think how we can deal with deaths in distant places through the protagonist who repeatedly watches the wars having occurred elsewhere in war documentaries and raises a question about the distance between disasters and people who look at it from a distance. Natural disasters and wars are represented not so differently in this work, therefore the problem of causal relationship or responsibility is not considered. And this is common to many discussions comparing the Great East Japan Earthquake to Japan’s past war. The work shows that the distance between all of the events and the people who look at them is equally far, making many of the wars the protagonist looks irreversible past events, but nevertheless we try to find a tiny clue in it that there is still a possibility to relate the deaths outside the border to ourselves.