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In this article, Thouny discusses a short novella by Shōno Yoriko published in 1996, Time Warp Complex. Although this novel does not address the issue of radioactivity or nuclear pollution as such, it asks similar questions, making us wonder how to dwell in and learn to love a dying place. Time Warp Complex shares the same temporality of ongoing loss and decay that characterizes Fukushima Japan, and poses "love without another" as a possible answer to this everyday condition. Fukushima Japan makes us face the impossible task of narrating an ongoing disaster without knowing what comes next, precisely the same question faced by Shōno Yoriko as she traveled the ruined landscapes of neoliberal Japan. By going back to the lost decade of the 1990s and its post-Bubble melancholic atmospheres, this article displaces the celebrated postwar narrative of loss, mourning and development onto a melancholy ethics. As Shōno Yoriko explains, this is a story about love without a lover, and Thouny proposes to read this "without" as a positive affirmation, the embrace of an ongoing situation of decay from which emerges a different relation to the world, a planetary love.

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-2007-0_4

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