Transpacific Resonances and Affiliations in Leanne Dunic’s to Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s the Tale for the Time Being

Abstract

Abstract This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being. The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and recovering its transpacific resonances, both works recover and write transcultural links that are obscured in nation-bound narratives of events. By self-reflexively commenting on this process of creative forms of transpacific intimacy, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works directly address the potential for literary narratives to implicate individuals from disparate nations in a global, historical, narrative of events