The Culling Times

A sweeping novel set between 1938 and 2011, this multi-generational story follows the history of one Japanese family as they live through World War II, a host of family dramas, and, finally, the Fukushima disaster. This deeply felt, formally inventive, ambitious novel pulls heavily from the author's own life, including the death of her famous father, the writer Osamu Dazai.

The Culling Times is a multi-generational saga of the Kitamura and Komori families told through a complex series of flashbacks situated between the visit of the Hitler Youth to Japan in 1938 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. The central character is Emiko, whose life has been profoundly shaped by the deaths of her father, who was murdered when she was an infant, and of her older brother, who was born with severe physical and mental disabilities.

Emiko is haunted by an uncertain recollection of something whispered to her when she was a child, a memory related to the Hitler Youth parade and a troubling presence that leads to a fraught relationship with members of her family. The novel’s depiction of individual trauma is inextricably entwined with Japan’s modern history: the violence of war and the deprivation and injustice that marked postwar society. The tension Emiko feels between a desire to escape the past and an inability to forget it affects every member of these families. It is revealed in their yearnings to be someone else, or to be somewhere else, and in their shared sense of guilt over Japan’s complicity with the racial and eugenicist ideology it shared with Nazi Germany.

The Culling Times was Yūko Tsushima’s last novel, and the character Emiko is based on autofictional details from the author’s own experiences: the scandalous suicide of her famous father, the novelist Osamu Dazai, and the deaths of a disabled sibling and of her own son. Her moral vision and artistic daring serve as an uneasy disruption and critique of the complacency and indifference of contemporary society toward the traumas of the recent past, making her one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Japanese literature.