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In her 1984 autobiography, Oba Minako compares her childhood during World War II to the sensation of being impaled on a hook, writing, "My experiences during the war years continue to burn in my throat. (In the same way that) they say a fish swallows a hook..." (Mae, Mae. Katatsurn [Dance, Snail, Dance]. Tokyo: Fukutake Bunko, 1990, 199). Such imagery, disturbing as it is thought-provoking, can be found throughout Oba's writing. Whether poetry, fiction, fairy tale or essay, oba persistently constructs discursive realms that conflate the fantastic and horrific, her preferred setting an isolated wilderness where crabs creep, scorpions sting, skeletons dance and witches grin, or where, as in her autobiography, the writer herself suffers gut-wrenching torment. Moreover, such affliction is not likely to be assuaged, as she tells us, for (to continue the quotation above): "(the fish), having narrowly escaped by breaking the line, returns after a few moments to bite again and again at the same bait." The painfulness of memory, as well as the inability to find release, points to the traumatic nature of the memory itself. Like the fish endlessly pursuing the hook, )ba envisions herself reflecting repeatedly upon her wartime experiences.
According to a recent study of memory and trauma, "traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be...transformed into narrative language. ... for this to occur successfully, the traumatized person has to return to the memory often in order to complete it ("The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," by Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth, ed. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 176). Indeed, in her work, Oba continues to write and rewrite, devising a distinctive and award-winning body of literary work that has as its touchstone the traumatic events of her early youth. At the same time, however, )ba's focus on the production of horror and death has resulted in the making of new meanings and new stories, ones which are ultimately as difficult and as "untellable" as the traumatic memories of the past.
Born in Tokyo November 11, 1930, the eldest daughter of Shiina Saburo and his wife Mutsuko, Minako enjoyed life in...