Commentary | Clara Iwasaki, Transpacific Search Party or How to (Not) Find Yu Dafu’s Remains
Transpacific studies has been growing in influence and popularity in cultural studies. Conceived of as a response to the economic configuration of the Pacific Rim and the field of transatlantic studies, transpacific studies suggests that the Pacific, like the Atlantic, is a place traversed by routes of historical trade, as well as overlapping colonial and neocolonial dominations and ambitions, along with resistance to and alternative constructions of these ambitions. The transpacific also seeks to elucidate how Asia has exerted its influence upon the Americas. The impact of this concept can be seen by the publication of a significant number of prominent monographs that build on the transpacific in recent years, such as Yuichiro Onishi’s Transpacific Antiracism, Chih-Ming Wang’s Transpacific Articulations, Richard So’s Transpacific Community, and Lily Wong’s Transpacific Attachments. Yet, all of these scholars are working in American studies and their works look at the interaction between the United States and at least one Asian country. The scholars listed above engage substantially with Asian scholarship, but are trained in American studies; scholars trained in Asian studies in an area studies model have not taken up transpacific studies to a comparable extent.
This is not to say that Asian studies has uncritically accepted the area studies model. Frameworks such as Shu-mei Shih’s concept of the Sinophone and Chen Kuan-hsing’s concept of Asia as Method have both presented ways of questioning the historical constructions of Asian studies as area studies. However these constructions have other concerns than those of transpacific studies.
When researching what would become a chapter of my book Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon, I came across an unusual piece titled “Calling on an Old Friend” (Kyūyū ni yobikakeru). It was the script of an NHK radio broadcast written by the modern Japanese writer Satō Haruo in the form of an open letter to his former friend, the Chinese writer Yu Dafu and performed by Higashiyama Chieko on December 12, 1945 at 7:30 pm. Why was a Japanese writer writing a letter to a Chinese writer a few short months into the American occupation of Japan? While ostensibly reaching out to Yu in the spirit of renewed Sino-Japanese friendship in the immediate postwar period, “Calling on an Old Friend” attempted to paper over a serious conflict between two long-time friends. Satō and Yu had become friends in the early 1920s, on the basis of their modern literary interests and their shared love of a premodern Sinographic literati culture. The two kept up a long-distance friendship until Satō wrote a movie treatment in 1938 entitled “Children of Asia” (Ajia no ko) heavily based on their mutual friend Guo Moruo’s defection to China, in which Yu appears as an adulterous pimp and villain. Yu responded to the piece in an essay titled “Japanese Writers and Whores.” His conclusions about pro-fascist writers like Satō is evident from the title.
Although Satō could not have known it, at the time of the broadcast, Yu Dafu was missing, having last been seen on the evening of August 29, 1945 answering a call to report to the Japanese police in Payakumbuh, Sumatra, shortly after Japan’s surrender. It has been presumed that he was executed by the Japanese, although the specifics or motivations have never been known. Yu’s body has never been recovered.
Finding this particular document was not a masterful piece of archival retrieval on my part. Its existence has been noted by many scholars and it is widely available in a supplemental volume of Satō’s complete works. The fact that it remains not widely discussed in Anglophone scholarship is perhaps due to its odd format and subject matter. How does one categorize a radio script addressed to a Chinese author and promoting pan-Asianism after Japanese surrender? “Calling on an Old Friend” sits uneasily between Chinese and Japanese literary history, neither one nor the other.
However, viewed through a transpacific lens, “Calling on an Old Friend” is no longer uncategorizable, but instead illuminates a pivotal intersection of complicated relations that traverse the fault lines of Sino-Japanese, Axis and Ally, and Cold War tensions. Satō’s public attempt to resurrect his friendship with Yu speaks to the cultural and artistic connections between Chinese and Japanese literati as well as the ways that the objectives of Japanese and American imperialisms affected these connections. It also becomes a key to understanding the transpacific nexus that has coalesced around Yu Dafu’s disappearance and death.
“Calling on an Old Friend” acquired even more significance when I realized that Satō was not the only writer who at least symbolically attempted to call on the departed Yu. Yu’s disappearance and almost certain death in Sumatra has continued to hold the attention of a host of writers and scholars from a number of different countries. From 1945 to 2004, the Chinese writer Hu Yuzhi, the Sinophone Malaysian writer Ng Kim-chew, the Japanese scholar Suzuki Masao, and Yu’s Chinese biographer Luo Yimin all attempted to invoke the writer, document, solve, or otherwise assign their own meaning to his death. These individual texts have been discussed within the specific context of Satō, Ng, or Yu’s literary work or biography, or the context of their respective national literatures. But examining them in a transpacific context gives these moments added significance, becoming a contestation between Chinese, Malaysian, and Japanese authors over who Yu Dafu’s memory belongs to and who is qualified to solve his murder.
Hu’s firsthand account of Yu’s disappearance is permeated with his discomfort with what he perceives to be Yu’s ethnic degeneration in Sumatra. Yu assumed a new identity as a Fujianese merchant named Zhao Lian and married an ethnic Chinese wife who spoke only Malay.
Suzuki Masao conceives of his biographical study Yu Dafu in Sumatra (Sumatora no Iku Tatsufu) as offering the final word on Yu’s death. Suzuki reveals that he has found a man, an officer based in Sumatra, who claims to have given the order to kill Yu Dafu. Suzuki hopes to resolve theories of Yu Dafu’s disappearance being an act of assassination or government conspiracy.
Ng Kim-chew responds to and satirizes both Hu and Suzuki in his fictional short stories about Yu’s fate where he posits a number of unlikely ways that Yu might have survived and lived on into the present day: his death was faked and he was marooned on an island; he converted to Islam; he became a Hakka pirate; he became a reclusive anonymous author of a prizewinning novel. Ng responds to Hu’s racist and dismissive attitude towards Sinophone Indonesians by directly addressing the criticisms the author made of Yu’s wife by using Yu’s voice. He also satirizes what he perceives as Suzuki’s proprietary attitude towards Yu through the figures of several other fictitious Japanese scholars who are obsessed with finding Yu’s archival traces through increasingly absurd physical remains: Japanese “banana currency,” toilet paper that might be a lostwhat might be Yu Dafu’s lost manuscript written on toilet paper, work of Yu’s or a mummified penis that might be Yu’s. Ng mocks the chauvinistic Chinese writer, the myopic Taiwanese reporter, and the obsessive Japanese scholar as being myopically obsessed with finding and claiming Yu, while remaining oblivious to the suffering of the Sinophone Indonesians that he lived among. Ng’s repeated use of Yu is also a way of asserting that Yu belongs not to the Chinese, Taiwanese, or the Japanese, but to the Sinophone community that he had joined when he died.
Luo Yimin is the latest person to attempt to solve the mystery of Yu Dafu. The fact that he attempted this in 2004 is a sign that he found the other writers’ approaches to the author’s death unsatisfactory. His conviction that Yu’s murder remains unsolved culminates in the final chapter of his book, which is devoted to an attack on Suzuki. Luo casts doubt on the motives of the Japanese scholar and states that unless Suzuki names D, Yu Dafu will never die and neither will his grievance. Luo’s refutation of Suzuki’s scholarship and approach is clearly couched in terms of national difference, contrasting the Chinese readers with the Japanese scholar. Luo’s discussion brings us back in a way to the break between Satō and Yu where the political tensions that opened up during the Pacific War remain present in today’s scholarly discourse, further exacerbated by the exclusion of the majority of Asian peoples from a reckoning with Japanese war crimes. While looking simply at Luo’s chapter and Suzuki’s indignant response to it would point to a scholarly difference of opinion or at most a reading of the continued nationalist tension between the People’s Republic of China and Japan, there is value in reading this exchange within the context of the history of searches for Yu Dafu.
“Considered together, these searches add up to a transpacific commemoration of an event that is deeply embedded in an overlapping series of multidirectional contestations.”
Viewed separately or even in conjunction with one other text, these searches seem either like explorations of Yu’s biography or national literature. But considered together, these searches add up to a transpacific commemoration of an event that is deeply embedded in an overlapping series of multidirectional contestations making it possible to see how Chinese, Sinophone, and Japanese authors and scholars have navigated and exacerbated slippery and shifting relationships from the interwar to the Cold War to the present day. In addition, a transpacific framing allows us to see how both Chinese chauvinism -- ignoring Sinophone Indonesians as insufficiently Chinese -- and the legacy of Japanese imperialism both in China and in Indonesia continue to refract in different configurations into the present day. It also reveals that tensions between scholars and authors of these two nations cannot simply be seen as a binaristic opposition, but transpacific relation between China, Japan, the United States, Indonesians, and Sinophone Indonesians.
Although some of the most prominent transpacific projects have looked at transpacific interactions between the United States and Asia, this is not the only way that transpacific relations occur. This is not to say that the people who searched and continue to search for Yu Dafu are not touched by American imperialism, but that there is benefit in studying the ways in which this influence is not the central concern.
Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of Alberta. She has been published in CrossCurrents. Her monograph, Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Transpacific is out now.
To cite this Commentary, please use the following entry:
Clara Iwasaki, “Transpacific Search Party or How to (Not) Find Yu Dafu’s Remains,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, May 19, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/HTTO5622.