Novels After the Great East Japan Disaster and Garbage, Animals, and Humans in the Age of the Anthropocene : Kimura Yūsuke’s Flaming Portraits of the Stray Humans and the Other Works

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  • 東日本大震災後の小説と人新世における「ゴミ」、「動物」、そして「人間」 : 木村友佑『野良ビトたちの燃え上がる肖像』を中心に

Abstract

The term “Anthropocene” signifies a new geological period marked by the emergence of human force that dominates the earth’s environment, and it also brings forth a novel conception of the human, situated in the reciprocal relationships with non-human agencies. Such understandings of human-non-human relationships influence the ways in which we perceive our culture. The Great East Japan Disaster in 2011 was a compound disaster caused by earthquakes, tsunamis, and the meltdown of the nuclear power plants, and it also marks the epoch of the Anthropocene. Some of the cultural products in post-disaster Japan incorporated the nonhuman agencies of the debris, the radioactivity, and the animals, eventually questioning the identity of human beings. This article first overviews the novels written after the Great East Japan Disaster that depict the debris, and then, sheds light on Kimura Yūsuke’s Flaming Portraits of the Stray Humans (Norabito tachi no moeagaru shōzō), wherein I discuss the shifts in the paradigmatic relationships among garbage, animals, and humans. The different relationships and perceptions of garbage and animals reveal the altered identities in human beings in the Anthropocene era.

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