Taishō era

The Taishō era is presented as a short-lived opening of modernism and democracy, closed by Emperor Taishō’s death in 1926 and the start of the Shōwa era. Its significance lies in the contrast between a moment experienced as a new beginning and the darker history that followed—and in the novel’s insistence that historical hindsight must not be mistaken for knowledge people possessed at the time.

The end of an interval

The account of 1926 gives the transition a sharp edge: the death of Emperor Taishō marks the beginning of a new era, but the change is not treated as uncomplicated renewal. Modernism and democracy had enjoyed only a brief interlude; once it ended, fascism would impose its rule. The Taishō era thus stands in the narrative as a fragile political opening whose significance becomes clearer through the authoritarian period that follows.

Aomamé’s historical imagination makes that reversal part of a wider pattern. Listening to Janáček’s music, she pictures Czechoslovakia in 1926: a country newly free of long Habsburg domination, where people drank Pilsner in cafés and enjoyed a temporary peace in Central Europe. She also knows, from the position of hindsight, that Hitler would soon destroy that small country. The contrast does not make the people of 1926 prescient; it emphasizes that they could not know what was coming.

History in time and place

Aomamé is drawn to history more than to novels, and especially to events fixed to a clear chronology and location. Dates come readily to her once she understands how events fit together. Her way of reading history therefore gives the era a precise place in a sequence: 1926 is both the end of the Taishō period and the threshold of the Shōwa period, as well as a year whose European calm would later appear precarious.

The novel’s historical reflections resist turning that sequence into a simple story of inevitable progress or decline. The future is visible to the retrospective observer, not to those living through the present. The remembered maxim that no one knew what was about to happen makes uncertainty part of historical understanding, rather than a defect that hindsight can erase.

Historical records and the unrecorded

A separate reading scene extends this concern from political periods to the making of historical knowledge. Tengo reads passages from Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island to Fukaéri, explaining that Chekhov travelled to Sakhalin in 1890, at thirty, and spent eight months there. The resulting book was strikingly documentary: it relied on figures and statistics, minimized literary presentation, and recorded observations of people and landscapes. Tengo values the writer’s determination and the vividness that emerges within those factual reports.

The passages about the Gilyaks show both the value and the limits of such documentation. Chekhov tried to record a culture he believed was disappearing under Russification, while the novel presents his descriptions—including sweeping judgments about bodily life, social relations, and customs—as a historical observer’s account, not a neutral window. The Gilyaks’ lack of written signs and documents becomes especially important when Fukaéri explains that she, too, does not want her experience fixed by writing: once written down, it is no longer her story. The Taishō era’s place in a chronological record and Fukaéri’s refusal of written preservation thus illuminate two different stakes of history: the ordering of events and the authority to represent lives.