Yellow Sand (Kousa)

Yellow Sand, from "Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction"

Author	Hayashi Kyoko
Original title	Kosa (吾輩は猫である)
Illustrator
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Genre	Nuclear Bomb Literature
Publisher	Imprint Routledge
Publication date	1991
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages

Yellow Sand (Japanese: 黄砂, Hepburn: Kosa) is is an autobiographical wartime novel written by the Japanese novelist Kyoko Hayasho (1930-2017).

First published in 1977 in Gunzo Magazine, Yellow Sand is a foundational text of the so-called “Nuclear Bomb Literature,” in which colonialism, nationalism, and cultural memory are called into question against the horrors of the Second World War.

Cultural authenticity and nation formation are scrutinized through the eyes of the narrator and her interactions throughout occupied Shanghai, particularly centering on Okiyo, a prostitute and fellow Japanese colonizer. Yellow Sand depicts Hayashi’s fourteen year experience as a transplant in a Japanese community just prior to the outset of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The year is 1937 and the narrator (Hayashi)

Yellow Sand refers to the dust storms that accumulate across East Asia settling across Japan and Korea, blanketing the sky a saffron haze, dusting the island in fine grains.

The Themes:

Nostalgia of a lost past and the attempt to rebuild. Japanese identity is sustained in the Shanghai community by implementing social and class delineations in an attempt to maintain a sense of self and nation. How does one preserve a culture without the continued exclusion of the “other.” An incessant ideology is upheld by the dominating forces to orchestrate selfhood and in so doing create an artifice of self to the detriment of others.

Culture memory, authenticity.

“The Japanese observed each other with an even more severe eye. Such words as ‘traitor to our nation’ and ‘repatriation’ often characterized their conversation.16”

Plot summary

Hayashi recalls her own experiences as the novel opens on the narrator in 1977 as she’s caught in a wave of yellow sand. The air carries a haunting effect and transports her back to her childhood in Shanghai. The narrator is seven-years old and befriends a Okiyo, a Japanese prostitute who breaks convention having sex with Chinese clients. Okiyo-san, slandering Japanese national pride and welcoming. Okiyo blurs the line between Japanese and Chinese identity, dressing in Chinese clothes, navigating Chinese Shanghai, yet Japanese in her cultural proclivities. Hayashi’s clear questioning of the morality of national ideology and self-hood renders the Japanese colonial project a fascist agenda, particularly interested in the redundancy of race as a means of exclusion. The novel concludes with Okiyo-san’s confessional longing for her homeland and sudden death. The narrator and her family return to Japan in the final passage, as if her experiences in Shanghai were just a dream themselves.

External links

• Full text (Kyūjitai and Historical kana orthography) at Aozora Bunko
• [1] [Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction]
• [東アジア研究_第20号_003]

{{Kyoko Hasashi}}

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