Slow Violence in Japan’s Nuclear Future: Kirino Natsuo’s Baraka

This chapter examines the slow violence of radiological contamination on the people and ecosystems made disposable in post-Fukushima Japan. In mystery writer Kirino Natsuo’s Baraka, a fictional nuclear disaster turns eastern Japan into an evacuation zone, later occupied by various minority populations. Just as theories of the Global South redirected our gaze to internal peripheries, Kirino brings a visibility to the invisible, namely, disaster victims, antinuclear power activists, and immigrant labor who are targeted by the government and take on the somatic risk of decontamination and decommissioning the nuclear plant. Among them is Kirino’s protagonist Baraka, a Brazilian-Japanese girl and nuclear victim who is forced to live in irradiated Fukushima after having been sold in a baby market in Dubai. Through her novel, Kirino addresses the status of minorities and the global flows of labor in the nuclear economy of postdisaster Japan. The chapter expounds on the potentialities of the mystery genre to depict the conspiracies of Japan’s nuclear village and fulfill Rob Nixon’s charge of bringing “imaginative definition” to slow violence.