Event Details:

How do nuclear weapons and nuclear disasters shape the stories we tell? This talk explores the shifting nuclear imagination in modern Japanese fiction through two provocative novels that move from Cold War anxiety to post-Fukushima visions of future conflict: Kobo Abe's Ark Sakura (1984) and So Kurokawa's From the Rocky Cliff (2017). Abe's darkly humorous tale unfolds over a single day inside a nuclear shelter, where eccentric characters prepare for global annihilation.

Kurokawa's novel imagines Japan in the year 2045, confronting environmental disasters, overflowing nuclear waste, international wars, and a military uprising at a nuclear power plant that risks another catastrophe. By reading these works together, the talk situates the nuclear imagination within broader debates on environmental crises and asks what Japanese literature can teach us about living with long-term nuclear risk on the 15th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster.

Rachel DiNitto is Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon. Her research explores the nuclear environmental humanities through contemporary cultural production including literature, film, and manga. Her publications include the books Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan's Triple Disaster (2019) and the edited volume Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema (2024).