Akiyuki Nosaka

• 1. Introduction

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  Akiyuki Nosaka was born in Kamakura, Kanagawa, and would go on to become a novelist, journalist, singer, lyricist, and member of Japan's House of Councillors. Yet the work that would define his name grew not from ambition but from guilt. It came from a wartime shelter in the summer of 1945, where a teenage boy ate his dying little sister's food and watched her starve. That guilt haunted him for more than two decades before it finally became a story. And that story became one of the most devastating pieces of Japanese literature of the twentieth century. How does a man carry that kind of memory, and how does he eventually put it into words? What does it mean to fictionalize your own worst act and make the version of yourself in the story far more noble than you ever were?

• 2. The Ashes Generation

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  Nosaka belongs to what Japanese writers call the Yakeato Sedai, the Generation of the Ashes. The name describes those who came of age in the rubble of wartime Japan, and it groups Nosaka alongside writers like Kenzaburo Oe and Makoto Oda. Nosaka's place in that generation was shaped early by a family arrangement that put him at a remove from his biological roots. Together with his sister, he grew up as an adopted child of a Harimaya family in Nada, Kobe. His foster mother, Aiko, was actually his maternal aunt.

  In March 1941, his foster parents adopted a baby girl named Kikuko, who died of illness before the year was out. In 1944 they adopted a second young girl, Keiko. Nosaka's biological father, Sukeyuki Nosaka, was an official of the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Construction, but it was this second family, in Kobe, that formed the world Nosaka lived in when the war came home.

• 3. June 5, 1945

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  On the 5th of June 1945, American firebombs hit Kobe. Nosaka lost his home and his adoptive father in the attack. Aiko survived but with severe burns across her body; she was taken by rickshaw to a nearby hospital. Nosaka and Keiko were placed in the care of a widow in Manchidanicho, a resort area in Nishinomiya.

  The family had managed to dig out a large cache of provisions their adoptive father had buried for emergencies at the destroyed home. But the supplies ran out quickly. Nosaka began foraging for rice, stolen vegetables, and whatever else he could find, including snails. Keiko began suffering from malnutrition. She could not eat hard foods, and Nosaka admitted, years later, that he would regularly eat her portion of food.

  He described himself in retrospect as a gaki. He wrote about blowing on spoonfuls of broth to cool them for her, only to find himself putting them in his own mouth instead. In his essay "The Distance of Fifty Steps," he wrote directly about this: "When I think of how my sister wasted away to skin and bones by a process of reverse development that eventually left her too weak to raise her head or even cry, how she died alone, and how there was nothing left of her but ash after she was cremated, I feel that I was too preoccupied with self-preservation. When I found myself in the hell of starvation, I ate her share of food."

  Traumatized from the bombing, Nosaka would flee with Keiko to a nearby bomb shelter whenever air raid sirens sounded. The neighbors called him a coward for not staying to help fight fires. A girl he had become fond of, Kyoko, two years his senior, was mobilized to a factory in July 1945. Her absence, combined with ongoing friction with the widow over accusations of theft, pushed Nosaka to take Keiko to live permanently in the shelter.

• 4. Keiko's Death

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  Living in the shelter worsened Keiko's condition. By August 1945, the two were sent to Fukui Prefecture to stay with an acquaintance of the family. Keiko had stopped walking and reverted to crawling. She was too weak to eat or cry. She died in her sleep on the 21st of August. Nosaka obtained a death certificate, cremated her remains, and then traveled to Moriguchi to find what was left of his family. Aiko was still recovering, though no longer in immediate danger.

  In 1946, Nosaka returned to school but failed the high school entrance exam the following year. He resorted to acting as a pimp for occupation soldiers around Osaka before moving to Tokyo, where Aiko had extended family. There he was caught stealing from two elderly women he had been living with. He was held for two months alongside war orphans and underage delinquents in a cell with no furniture, no glass in the windows, and only a single bucket for a toilet. Their food was a mix of barley, sorghum, and water. Several of his cellmates grew ill and died. When Nosaka noticed his own health declining, he informed the authorities of his biological father. Sukeyuki Nosaka claimed him by the end of December. Writing in 1992, Nosaka noted that after his rescue he proceeded to simply forget all about the traumas. He carried that forgetting for years.

• 5. Building a Career

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  Nosaka went on to attend Waseda University, and while still a student he began writing scripts and commercial lyrics. In 1959 he co-wrote the lyrics to a song called "The Toys' Cha Cha Cha" with Osamu Yoshioka. The song was later adapted into a children's nursery rhyme and won the Children's Song Award at the 5th Japan Record Awards. It has since been covered by dozens of artists.

  His literary instincts ran in a very different direction. His debut novel, The Pornographers, was translated into English by Michael Gallagher and published in 1968. Critics noted his preference for sexually explicit material and a writing style compared to the comic prose of the seventeenth-century Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku. The Pornographers was also adapted into a live-action film directed by Shoei Imamura. Nosaka worked under additional names as a broadcasting writer and chanson singer, maintaining a public presence that cut across entertainment, letters, and eventually politics.

• 6. Writing About the War

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  Nosaka married in 1962, and two years later had a daughter named Mao. As she grew older, she became, without meaning to, a trigger for memories of Keiko. Nosaka became irrationally agitated whenever Mao left food on her plate. He grew paranoid that she might die suddenly in her sleep. He had visions of his house going up in flames. At the same time, the Second Indochina War was generating images of conflict that kept appearing in the press. Together, these pressures pushed him back toward writing about what he had witnessed.

  In 1967 he wrote several pieces touching on the war. One, "A Playboy's Nursery Songs," stands as one of his earliest factual accounts of the June 5th bombing and its aftermath. He also wrote "American Hijiki," a fictional story about a man who grew up in wartime Japan and confronted the sudden postwar reversal of attitudes toward the West.

  Also in 1967 he wrote the short story known in English as "Grave of the Fireflies." The story is a semi-autobiographical retelling of his experiences with the firebombs and Keiko, told through an older brother named Seita and a younger sister named Setsuko. Crucially, Seita behaves far more nobly than Nosaka had. And unlike Nosaka himself, Seita also dies by the story's end. Nosaka recalled writing it at speed, pressed against a publisher's deadline, his hand moving almost without conscious direction. He sent it off without revision. He won the Naoki Prize for both "Grave of the Fireflies" and "American Hijiki."

• 7. Obscenity, Politics, and Legacy

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  In July 1972, while working as a magazine editor, Nosaka published an erotic short story from the Taisho era, written by Kafu Nagai, called "Yojohan fusuma no shitabari." The publication was immediately controversial. In August 1972 he was prosecuted for public obscenity. Authors including Saiichi Maruya and Sawako Ariyoshi testified in his defense during the trial. In 1980, the Japanese Supreme Court found him guilty. He was fined 100,000 yen, which at the time amounted to slightly less than US$300.

  In December 1978, Nosaka was credited with giving former rugby player turned professional wrestler Susumu Hara his ring name: Ashura Hara. He was elected to the Japanese Diet in 1983. In 1988, the animated film Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata, was released. It was based directly on Nosaka's 1967 short story.

  Nosaka suffered a stroke in 2003 but continued writing a column for the daily Mainichi Shimbun despite ongoing effects from the stroke. He died in 2015. On NHK's December 10th broadcast announcing his death, a veteran journalist described him as someone notable for questioning what most people accept as common sense, adding that Japan had entered an era in which that kind of questioning was no longer possible. His short story "American Hijiki" was included in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, published in 2017, two years after his death.