Dystopia as a narrative keyword: Tawada Yōko’s responses to Japanese 3/11

On 11th March 2011 at 2:46 PM the Japanese writer Tawada Yōko was in Berlin, miles away from her Japanese homeland. Still, the author got affected by the 9 magnitude earthquake that stroke Tōhoku coast at that time. As the tsunami came to shore wiping out everything that was spared by the quake, the aftershocks reached Tawada and now reverberates in some of her last new literary works. First, Fushi no Shima (“The Island of the Eternal Life”) published in the collection Sore demo sangatsu wa, mata : a ten-page story about a no more lively island, namely, Japan. Then, after years of muteness regarding the Daishinsai topic, the 2014 collection of novels published under the evocative title Kentōshi (“The messenger of the votive lantern”) resonates the echo of that aftermath again : Tawada imagines a forthcoming catastrophic scenario clearly influenced by 2011 disaster. The dystopian keyword adopted by the author for these post-Fukushima narratives represents a camera lens through which the writer observes Japanese 11th March. This brief article aims to investigate these two Tawada Yōko’s responses to Japanese 3/11 with the aid of the journal the author wrote during those days and published under the French title Journal des jours tremblants : Après Fukushima.