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Becoming the Wolf: A Time-traveling Trip Overlooking Past Corruption in Post-war Japan

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Cover Art for Tsushima Yūko’s Laughing Wolf
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Poster for The Jungle Book

War is not isolated. It is ultimately a trade-off between several nations. In the aftermath of World War II, natural disasters, poverty, and corruption spread throughout Japan, putting an even more desperate color on the defeat of the battle itself. When we look back at the war, is it the enemy from the outside that destroys the nation, or is it the internal decay and inferiority that is more intimidating?

Tsushima Yūko’s Laughing Wolf sets the story in postwar Japan, revolving around the journey of a young boy and a girl that breaks through the limits of time and space. The presence of “wolf” is more evident in this novel than in Lu Xun’s Misanthrope, where the young protagonists choose to become characters in The Jungle Book at the beginning of their journey - Akela and Mowgli, respectively a wolf and a human child, but with a kinship of flesh and blood. Similarly, however, the wolf remains an image of despair in the story - Akela, the leader of the pack, dies a brutal death in battle and ends up singing the “Death Song” in agony. Still, even in the face of death, the protagonists remain firm in their identity as wolves, believing that they are the ones who seek freedom, that they do not belong to other creatures, and that they are inviolable even when vulnerable. Even Mowgli, as a human child, says aloud while confronting Akela’s death:

“I am a wolf. I am of one skin with the free people. It is no will of mine that I am a man.”

The image of the wolf contrasts sharply with the monkey in the story, a creature whose language is boring and meaningless, as if it were plain noise. Bearing the metaphorical meaning of the Japanese people who have lost their national spirit in the aftermath of the war, monkeys belong to a species that is large in number but is also lifeless as a scattered mass. Throughout the novel, the young protagonists spend almost all of their time in the cramped confines of the train, and it is in this chaotic space that they witness the starving, poverty-stricken, disunited Japanese living in squalor. The protagonists do not want to live with the “monkeys” and have always viewed them with disdain:

“The shrieking of monkeys and the piercing sounds of construction suddenly came pouring down on them. A small kid had tumbled onto the floor right in front of them and was screaming and crying. Next to him an older child was brandishing a toy machine gun that fired with a crackling rattle...”

During this train trip with the “monkeys”, the hero and heroine experience countless seemingly absurd events, but all of them align with history, linking the fictional world that Tsushima creates to events that happened in Japan after WWII. Often at the end of one chapter, Tsushima skillfully attaches events that have appeared on the news before, even if they don’t match the timeline in which the novel is set, using a calm, deliberate language that recreates the historical events in the context of a seemingly absurd journey. Malicious shipwrecks, abandoned babies, suicides, thefts, and all kinds of bad events keep happening in this fictional world, witnessed by the eyes of the young protagonists, but they can only experience such things as “travelers”, as they barely possess any power to change. This sense of uncontrollable powerlessness permeates the novel itself, as if corruption is an objective norm that envelops Japan. Similar to Lu Xun’s work, Laughing Wolf also breaks out of the space and time of the novel, telling the story of a real post-war world of Japan that has been covered up by history through the eyes of two children who “become wolves”, loathing all the corruption around them but fail to change the reality, and ultimately being unable to escape being hunted down by adults and beaten back to reality.

In Miyazaki Hayao’s newly released film The Boy and the Heron, which is also set in Japan during World War II, the protagonist arrives in a world far from suffering through the seemingly weird heron – yet another mysterious animal that ties to freedom, spirits, and another world2- and begins a journey in search of himself and the bonds (つながり)that bind people to each other. Despite witnessing the beauty of heaven, the boy still returns to the real world of the war years and continues his life in the chaos and inequality, which draws on the trade-offs and sense of boundaries between reality and the fictional perfect world. This use of real and imaginary worlds combined gives people the imagination to look back at history and explore the power of asserting oneself in the face of death and the borders of freedom in the midst of war.

2. How centuries of Japanese folklore inspired “The Boy and the Heron.” 2023 Dec 15. Culture. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/heron-japan-myth-folklore.

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Poster for The Boy and the Heron