Ambivalent Filiation: Cultural and Representational Mediation of Imperial Japan in The Samurai’s Garden

Ludan Hu; Eugene Chua

doi:10.22452/

Authors

Ludan Hu
Eugene Chua Kee Hong University of Malaya

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22452/

Keywords:

Gail Tsukiyama, Asian American literature, return narrative, Japan, Japanese culture, War

Abstract

This article examines how Gail Tsukiyama’s The Samurai’s Garden (1994) imagines wartime Japan under the pressure of imperial violence. While scholarship on Asian American return narratives has often emphasized cultural recovery and countermemory, less attention has been placed on its complications. Tsukiyama’s novel constructs affective attachment to Japan, even as it is also the aggressor in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Drawing on Patricia Chu’s theorization of Asian American return narratives, this article argues that The Samurai’s Garden stages an ambivalent return to wartime Japan. The novel makes return possible through idealized representations of pastoral space, refined cultural practice, and encounters with Japanese figures whose civilian vulnerability or bodily marginalization places them outside wartime national mobilization. Yet these same strategies dehistoricize Japanese cultural forms by bracketing off their entanglement with wartime imperial ideology, thereby compromising the cultural recovery on which return depends. This return, however, remains unstable. The novel problematizes existing accounts of Asian American return narratives by showing that return, Orientalist mediation, and historical accountability are structurally interdependent forces.

Author Biographies

Ludan Hu

Ludan Hu is a master's student from Universiti Malaya. Her research interests include Asian American literature and trauma narratives.
Eugene Chua Kee Hong, University of Malaya

Eugene Chua Kee Hong is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at Universiti Malaya, where he teaches American, Malaysian and World literature. His current research focuses on the question of nationhood in cultural texts from Malaysia and Singapore.

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