ABSTRACT

After the Great East Japan Disaster on March 11, 2011, the devastating aftermath of the tsunami reminded the people of the bombed-out places from World War II; moreover, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants created another landscape, wherein nothing seemed to be changed except for the vanished humans. The disaster forced Japanese literary authors such as Natsuki Ikezawa, Tetsuo Takashima, and Yōko Tawada to revisit the historical concept of “the peaceful use of atomic energy” and inquire into the cause of the human desire for atomic power in different forms of writing.