Trauma Remythologized: Natsuo Kirino’s The Goddess Chronicle

Abstract

Natsuo Kirino’s The Goddess Chronicle has been so far analyzed from various standpoints by researchers such as Copeland (2018), Dumas (2018), Qiao (2018), and Lianying (2018), most of them being connected to feminism. This article takes another approach and deals with the issue of trauma and death as a literary representation as portrayed in the novel. The paper demonstrates how implementing myth in a revised form helps Kirino to depict trauma in a literary text – the task that many researchers of trauma studies deem impossible. At the center of this paper’s analysis are the main mythologems of traditional Japanese culture retold from the female viewpoint, connecting the fate of the goddess to the fate of a mortal woman: the latter in many ways repeats what happened in the “divine” story. The repetitions create a mythological cyclical description of life as well as its tragedy perceived as traumatic experiences, which is characteristic of the writer’s novels, and outline a universal archetype of human behavior. This paper attempts to analyze these mythologemes in connection to trauma studies and shows that, if put in the fantastic (in this case, mythological) realm, representation of trauma becomes possible.

Keywords

• myth
• mythopoetics
• representation
• revisionist mythmaking
• trauma