This anthology is as incisive and demanding of consideration as any that I have read. The central question reframed again and again in "Imag(in)ing the War in Japan" is how the literary arts, narrative and film in particular, deal with cruelty, atrocity and brutality on an unimaginable scale.
While establishing the premise that "the moment [the author] calls up a former experience, an element of fictionalization intrudes," the book's introductory essay also sets out a range of arguments for the importance of remembering history's atrocities, justifying what for most is the profoundly unsettling, if at times fascinating, experience of writing and reading literature about war.
The chronological ordering of the essays is a surprise. The anthology begins with the teaching of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings to today's students, proceeds to the contemporary author Murakami Haruki, and then moves on to the postwar writer Mishima Yukio. It does not deal with writers who directly experienced terrible physical suffering until the middle of the volume. The book concludes with a discussion of anime representations of war set in the future and created well after World War II ended.