Crisis and Literature in Contemporary Japan: From 3-11 to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kanehara Hitomi’s Fiction

ABSTRACT It has been observed that ‘3–11’ marked an inflection point in Japanese cultural discourse, after which there prevailed a broad malaise about the social faults and systemic inequities that the natural and nuclear disasters had exposed in their aftermath. Kanehara Hitomi’s novel Motazaru Mono (Those without, 2015) explores this affective shift through her characters’ struggles to contend with the upending of their worldviews and values since 2011. In turn, Kanehara’s stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic’s peak of 2020–2021 show characters responding to the global crisis through the lens of a generalized state of precarity that, I argue, harkens back to 3–11 and earlier. With reference to Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘crisis ordinary’ mentality, I analyze ‘Unsocial Distance’ (June 2020), a love story between two youths who regard COVID-19 as an inconvenience rather than a true emergency. I then examine ‘Techno-break’ (January 2021) which ends with the protagonist’s mental and moral devolution in the socially distanced solitude she first enters as an anti-COVID measure. ‘Techno-break’ advocates for confronting the tolls of the prolonged pandemic, and for addressing the deeper-seeded fault-lines of Japanese society that contribute to more recent challenges.