Precis: A translation of an oral autobiography of the life of Usami Osamu (1926-2018), the human rights activist and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought, and won in 2001, by men and women whose lives were taken away under Japan's Hansen's Disease (leprosy) absolute lifetime quarantine policy, in effect until 1996, who passed away on April 10th. A portion of his ashes will remain at Nagashima Aiseien National Hansen's Disease Sanatorium in Okayama Prefecture where he lived for almost seventy years and another portion will be placed in his family grave in Aichi prefecture, the reunion with the parents he struggled for throughout his life.

We present this dossier on fiction-writer Tsushima Yūko (1947~2016) just as two new volumes of her writings have appeared in print. Two stories came out in Of Dogs and Walls in February 2018 in Penguin Classics, followed by Territory of Light (光の領分, 1979) in April 2018. Both by Geraldine Harcourt, these new translations build on works originally translated in the 1980s, Child of Fortune (寵児, 1982) and The Shooting Gallery (1988). These stories, like the works in this dossier, offer different points of entry into Tsushima's constellation of writings than earlier texts. New translations not only amplify our view of Tsushima's range. They also commemorate her work two years after her 2016 death, and join an exciting array of new translations into English of works by other female writers including Mizumura Minae, Shibasaki Tomoko, Tawada Yōko and Murata Sayaka—works that Tsushima's writing helped create an audience for in the 1970s. Our title, recalling Tsushima's use of classical languages, is meant to suggest the constant connection of memory to textuality that we see in her work: in remembering, reading.

Mother,

How are you getting on there?

It's been five months since I moved here. Long enough for winter to turn to spring, and now the blazing days of summer have arrived.

At first, I was too busy unpacking and tidying to spare a glance outside. It took me a good week just to sort your things. With the place unoccupied for five whole years since you went into the hospital, I was not at all sure what the chests of drawers and cupboards might harbor, but all that emerged were endless dead cockroaches and roach droppings; I never did see a live one, nor any mice. I guess in an empty house the cockroaches breed initially, then die out in due course as the food supply runs low. But goodness, what a mass of things! There were four kitchen scales alone, and three rice cookers.

A while back, a coworker at the company where I was working won a new writer's prize for a novel. I say coworker, but she'd already left the company before I started there, so until she won the prize I never even knew she existed. The prize-winning piece had as its narrator a woman working in sales at a building products manufacturer, and the work was clearly based upon my company. She became the sole topic of conversation around the office. Our company gave birth to a novelist, the in-house newsletter proclaimed, and there were five men who said you know, actually I was the model for that work. Looking coolly at the situation, T— who worked in the office commented:

But all she did was write about the company exactly as it is.

Borrowing from Judith Butler's notion of the ethics of plural and heterogeneous cohabitation, this essay reads two of Tsushima Yūko's novels in light of how they negotiate proximity and distance in forging ethical connections that constitutes such cohabitation; the first is her autobiographical work of mourning, On Grieving (2017). The second is the historical time-travel novel, Laughing Wolf (2000), crowded with humans and animals both spectral and real. The essay argues that reading these two modes of writing together can enhance the felt connection between the personal and the historical by turning thin relations into thick ones through the act of remembering.

With her 2004 novel Nara Report, Tsushima Yūko has presented us with a “report” through which memories borne by the dead come alive. This essay traces the ways in which the novel makes present day Nara emerge as a topos resounding with the voices of those subjected to Buddhist marginalization in pre-modern Nara— women, minorities, outcasts and animals— and considers how it creates space for reimagining this densely overdetermined place.

This article focuses on three of Tsushima Yūko's later works. It examines Tsushima's criticism of Japanese ruling policy, especially aboriginal policies in colonial Taiwan, in All Too Barbarian. The second, Reed Boat, Flying, exposes the repressed history of how, just after Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Japanese women returning from Manchuria who were raped by Russian or other foreign soldiers were forced into having abortions. Wildcat Dome, written after the 3.11 disasters, discloses how the inter-racial children born between Japanese women and American soldiers were discriminated against in postwar Japan.