Of Culture and Contamination: Adolf Muschg’s Returning Home to Fukushima

Adolf Muschg’s 2018 novel Returning Home to Fukushima (Heimkehr nach Fukushima) tells the story of Paul Neumann, a Swiss architect in his early sixties who accepts an invitation to visit Fukushima. Returning Home engages with Japanese responses to the 3.11 catastrophe through the work of Adalbert Stifter, whose stories the protagonist reads throughout the trip and shares with his Japanese interlocutors. While the exploration of Fukushima through German high culture might be considered an unusual approach, this model of transcultural intertextuality allows Muschg to propose ways of thinking about, through, and beyond the disaster that are both specific to the Japanese situation and applicable to other contexts as well. The novel does not pretend to achieve synthesis, let alone provide answers. Yet it acknowledges the practical as well as the emotional impact of Fukushima on individuals and communities, on the local and the global level, in the immediate aftermath and during the years following the devastation. In Muschg’s rendering, the post-Fukushima age calls for the creation of futures through sharing culture—and this need not be a shared culture. This chapter analyzes Muschg’s compelling novel in terms of its intertextuality and the extraordinary but also subtle role it assigns to culture in the recovery from disaster.