Shōwa era

The Shōwa era begins in 1926, the year of Emperor Taishō’s death, and carries a double meaning in the novel: it marks the start of a new Japanese period, but also the end of a brief modernist and democratic interlude and the approach of fascism. Elsewhere, 1926 is part of Tengo and Fukaeri’s reading of Chekhov’s account of Sakhalin, where the act of recording history becomes a question of what documents preserve—and whose account they remain.

A New Era and a Foreboding Chronology

The transition to the Shōwa era is presented as a hinge in Japanese history. Modernism and democracy have had their brief interlude; once it is over, fascism will impose its rule. The compression gives the date its weight: a change of era is at once a calendrical fact and a warning about political possibilities that have not yet fully arrived.

Aomamé’s reflections on 1926 elsewhere in the novel place this Japanese turning point beside a European one. She imagines postwar Czechoslovakia enjoying a temporary peace, without knowing that Hitler will soon destroy the country. The historical perspective is therefore divided between what later observers can connect and what people living through the moment cannot foresee. The Shōwa era’s beginning belongs to that same structure of hindsight: the reader can see the coming darkness, while the people at the beginning of the era cannot yet know what is ahead.

Sakhalin as a Record of History

The novel also brings 1926 into Tengo and Fukaeri’s conversation about Anton Chekhov, who travelled to Sakhalin in 1890, aged thirty. Tengo describes the journey as a costly departure from the life of a young, successful writer in Moscow: Chekhov crossed more than four thousand kilometres by horse-drawn carriage in extreme cold, at a time when the Siberian railway did not yet exist. His resulting book, based on eight months on the island, puzzled readers because its literary elements were sparse and its approach resembled a practical report or topographical description.

Tengo values precisely that documentary character. Chekhov collected figures and statistics systematically, yet the accumulation of facts also reveals the writer’s determination and energy. Scattered among the reports are striking observations of people and landscapes. Tengo points to Chekhov’s account of the Gilyaks, Indigenous inhabitants of Sakhalin whose culture he understood to be disappearing under Russification. Chekhov’s effort to record what remained gives the book urgency, but its descriptions are not a transparent window: they organize human lives through the categories and judgments of an outside observer.

What the Ethnographic Account Reveals—and Conceals

As Tengo reads aloud, Chekhov’s portrait moves from physical description to subsistence and cultural change. He describes the Gilyaks as compact and muscular, their bodies adapted to the cold and damp, and links that adaptation to a diet rich in seal, salmon, sturgeon and whale. He records that their food could be raw, dried or frozen, and that bread introduced by Russians had become a prized novelty. These details make the account concrete, but they also show how an observer turns a people into a sequence of characteristics, explanations and comparisons.

The passage is more disturbing when it addresses social relations. Chekhov depicts the Gilyaks as rejecting authority and treating men within a family as equals, then describes women as having no rights and being treated as property. The account’s sharp contrast between male equality and women’s subordination resists any easy celebration of a society beyond familiar authority. Its details matter not only as a record of customs, but as evidence of the limits and moral judgments built into the record itself.

Chekhov’s observations also make geography part of the argument. The Gilyaks, Tengo reads, do not understand the purpose of roads and continue to travel through the taiga even where roads exist. Fukaeri later recasts the image in her own terms: roads are practical, but walking through the forest away from them can be easier; the Gilyaks would have to learn how to walk on roads and change other things as well. The image shifts from an ethnographic description to a way of thinking about imposed routes and the difficulty of adopting another person’s way of moving through the world.

Fukaeri, Writing, and the Limits of the Record

Fukaeri connects the Gilyaks’ lack of written signs and documents to her own relation to authorship. She says that she asked Azami to research them at the library, but that once her story is written down it is no longer her story. She recognizes that Tengo has changed the written version exceptionally well and tells him that this is not his fault; her concern is not an accusation but a distinction between her experience and its literary form.

This exchange complicates the historical promise of recording what might disappear. Chekhov’s book preserves observations of a culture under pressure, yet its documentary form cannot erase the distance between the people described and the writer who describes them. Fukaeri’s insistence that a written story becomes something other than the story she told makes that distance personal. Across the novel’s uses of 1926, history is neither simply a succession of dates nor a complete account of the past: chronology helps reveal connections, while documents preserve particulars and expose the limits of what a record can claim to contain.