Queering imperial history: The ethics of reconciliation in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain

Abstract

Drawing on the postcolonial discourse of reconciliation, this article critically examines The Gift of Rain (2007) by Malaysian Chinese writer Tan Twan Eng. It attends to the reparative work that the novel performs in relation to Japanese imperialism in Asia, particularly the Japanese occupation of British Malaya (1941–1945). It argues that Tan’s text, with its investment in the Buddhist-inflected queer passion between its Anglo-Chinese protagonist (the colonized) and his Japanese aikido master (the colonizer), gestures towards an ethics of reconciliation. Framing the queer romance in the Buddhist idiom of reincarnation, the novel offers a distinct cultural conception of reconciliation as an ongoing process. By queering and querying the specific Asian imperial encounter that is the Japanese Occupation, the novel ultimately registers a desire for restoring cultural connections in the wake of atrocities in postcolonial Asia.

Tan Twan Eng and his postcolonial context

Born in Penang in postcolonial Malaysia, Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian Chinese writer who holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Law from the University of London and the University of Cape Town respectively (The Man Booker Prize, 2016: n.p.). He practised as a lawyer in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, before relocating to Cape Town in South Africa where he launched his career as an Anglophone writer (The Man Booker Prize, 2016: n.p.; Tan Twan Eng Website, n.d: n.p.). Travelling between three continents has made Tan believe that to reach “a universal audience”, writers should look beyond their “national boundaries” (Hite, 2013: n.p.). Such a transcontinental trajectory, which repudiates restrictive national frames, configures Tan’s reparative vision of Asia. Tan’s authorial exposure to the socio-political dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa may well have informed his postcolonial intervention into Asian history. Irrespective of authorial intent, it is productive to put into dialogue the South African experiment and Tan’s imaginative work. As the location of Tan’s enunciation, South Africa offers a distinct postcolonial redress culture that resonates with Tan’s reconciliatory account, its historical difference from Southeast Asia notwithstanding.

A critical examination of Tan’s works is prompted by the author’s growing global acclaim and his relative absence to date from the larger postcolonial field despite his engagement with imperial legacies. Tan’s emergence into the global literary scene came in 2007 with the publication of his debut novel, The Gift of Rain, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (The Man Booker Prize, 2016: n.p.). He garnered global encomiums again with his second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), which was not only shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize but also won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (The Man Booker Prize, 2016: n.p.; The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, n.d.: n.p.). Prominent in both novels is the narrative focus on the Japanese occupation of Malaya, an erstwhile British colonial territory that included present-day Malaysia and Singapore. During the war, Japan mobilized an anti-imperialist discourse predicated on the promise of liberating colonial Asia from the West, as part of a racially charged design in advancing its imperial agenda, to which the invasion of Southeast Asia was indispensable. Key to Japan’s rhetoric was the deployment and distortion of pan-Asianism, an ideal of continental cosmopolitanism formulated by Asian intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin who envisaged regional solidarity and unity (Bharucha, 2006: xix–xx). As Eri Hotta elucidates, pan-Asianism became inseparable from Japanese foreign policies with the declaration of the “Asiatic Monroe Doctrine” in the early 1930s (2007: 2). In its figurations in the “New East Asian Order” and the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”, pan-Asianism was summoned to promulgate Japanese expansionism (Hotta, 2007). ¹ Ultimately, such political manipulation corroborated Japan’s ascent to the status of an imperial power in direct geo-political rivalry with European powers scrambling for Asia.

The history of the Japanese Occupation takes some thematic precedence in a recent corpus of Anglophone Asian fiction that includes but is not limited to Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000), Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother (2002), Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue (2004), Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), and Chong Seck Chim’s Once Upon a Time in Malaya (2005). As the Occupation recedes in historical time, its revitalization by these writers has granted it a literary afterlife whose shifting socio-cultural implications resist resolute closure. While publishers’ interests in an advancing Asia might have contributed to its literary burgeoning, more crucially this textual archive registers a collective act of recuperating a sui generis episode of Asian history that has hitherto largely been eclipsed by two domains of literary studies. At one level, the Japanese Occupation has been overshadowed by events accorded more global import such as the Holocaust and regional happenings including the Korean War and the Vietnam War in Western academia’s memory studies. At another level, novels that foreground Japanese imperialism introduce an additional interpretive layer that complicates mainstream Anglophone postcolonial studies with its focalization on Euro-American empires. Tan and the abovementioned writers’ texts then constitute a significant postcolonial rejoinder, reminding us that Asia has had colonizers who were both internal (for example, Japan) and external (such as European powers). To speak of imperial histories in Asia thus necessitates that we also revisit Japanese imperialism.

By critically examining The Gift of Rain (2007), this paper attends to the reparative work that the novel enacts with regard to Japanese imperialism in Asia or, more specifically, the Japanese occupation of Malaya (1941–1945). It argues that Tan’s text, with the investment in the Buddhist-informed queer passion between its Anglo-Chinese protagonist (the victimized) and his Japanese aikido master (the victimizer), gestures towards an ethics of reconciliation. Framing the queer cross-cultural romance in the Buddhist idiom of reincarnation, the novel offers a distinct cultural conception of reconciliation as an ongoing process. In advancing a post-conflict reconciliation through queering and querying the history of the Japanese Occupation, Tan explores the emancipatory power of literature; that is, he probes the capacity of fiction to contest a dichotomous political propensity that rehearses the familiar narrative of the vicious colonizer versus the virtuous colonized along national lines. In doing so, the novel animates reconciliation as an ethical postcolonial practice that is conducive to community building in post-war Asia.

In the following, I shall first provide a precis of Tan’s novel. I shall then revisit the postcolonial discourse of reconciliation, with particular reference to the South African model. This will be followed by a critical exegesis of Tan’s text: its ethics of reconciliation through the Buddhist-coded queer romance and, hence, queer historiography of the Occupation. Finally, I shall briefly consider the dialectic of remembrance and forgetting that is integral to the practice of reconciliation.

Constructed within a frame narrative, The Gift of Rain commences with an outer narrative in 1995 in postcolonial Penang in Malaysia as Philip Hutton, the half-British and half-Chinese septuagenarian, relates his past to Michiko Murakami, a widowed Japanese and surviving victim of the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This narrative structure, which intimates a private reconciliation, frames Philip’s confession as a testimony that finds validation from Michiko, the belated Japanese confessor who suffers from radiation poisoning. Within this outer narrative lies an inner narrative: Philip’s implicit homoerotic relationship with his Japanese sensei (or master) and eventual colonizer, Hayato Endo, a secret agent in his forties who instructs the teenage Philip in the martial art of aikido prior to and during the Japanese Occupation. Notably, this queer attachment is couched in the Buddhist vocabulary of reincarnation, which offers a unique cultural elaboration on reconciliation. As Philip awakens to his teacher’s involvement in the war, he both collaborates with and resists his master in an attempt to protect his family. When the war ends, Endo asks Philip to execute him, a manner of death befitting a Japanese samurai. As Philip concludes his testimony, Michiko perishes. In the novel, Buddhism figures as a constitutive part of Asian epistemologies that helps reinstate cultural affinity in the wake of atrocity.

The ethics of reconciliation

As mentioned at the outset, Tan resides in South Africa and would be aware of that country’s socio-political realities; in particular, the history of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose conditions of emergence were both international and national. Regardless of whether or not Tan’s novel has been shaped by the South African experience, it is worth comparing and contrasting the former with the latter. In her genealogical account, Deborah Posel underscores that truth commissions and transitional justice are an international phenomenon that emerged in the 1970s amidst “waves of democratization and constitution making in the developing world” in a post-Second World War climate (2008: 119). As techniques of “nation-building”, they are chiefly products of the transition from “an authoritarian regime to democratic rule” (2008: 120). Committed to human rights, they engage in a mode of history writing inflected by humanist thinking (2008: 119–20). Against this international context, the South African model assumed symbolic import as the first TRC to institute a “public confessional” to confront the “conundrum of truth” by reconciling the postmodern assault on “truth” with the reassertion of “truth” from contending perspectives as the basis of justice (2008: 127).

The contentious spectacle that was the South African TRC was part of the negotiated settlement for the country’s transfer of power. Unlike the Nuremberg trials, the TRC was a restorative rather than retributive justice body launched in 1996 to integrate the post-apartheid nation (Sanders, 2007: 3). Between 1996 and 2001, public hearings were held to create a public archive of gross human rights violations committed “at the height of the apartheid era and in its immediate aftermath”, as mandated by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (Sanders, 2007: 1). A deeply political dimension was the granting of amnesty to culprits who provided full disclosure and political motives for their crimes. A “quasi-judicial” body, the Commission also facilitated victim rehabilitation (Sanders, 2007: 2). Fundamentally, the TRC enacted “a national talking cure through the medium of Christianized public testimony” (Boehmer, 2008: 79). Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Commission’s Chairman, personified the Christian ethos. Stressing “a delicate network of interdependence”, Tutu iterates the African idiom, “a person is a person through other persons” (1999: 13, 35). As Mark Sanders explicates, the TRC “generalized responsibility across the body politic by being a proxy for the perpetrator vis-à-vis victims” (2007: 9). By extending this symbolic substitution to others, a phantasmatic “perpetratorship” and the “agency of reparation” were made accessible to all. Such intersubjective solidarity created “bonds of ethical responsibility” (Sanders, 2007: 145).

Within the postcolonial field, reconciliation as a theoretical paradigm has sometimes been dismissed as constituting ideological compromise that ultimately serves dominant politico-economic interests. In a defining statement, Frantz Fanon declares that “no reconciliation is possible” in postcolonial societies (1967: 39). Reconciliation is impossible because after the demise of colonialism, colonizers harbour no interest in “remaining” or “co-existing” (1967: 45). In the wake of Fanon, critics have cast their suspicion on the efficacy of reconciliation. Speaking of the South African TRC, Benita Parry states that its historical chronicle possesses “neither an analytic, active engagement with history, nor a theoretical demolition of the ideologies underpinning segregation and apartheid” (2004: 187). ² She contends that amidst an unequal global modernity, “our best hope for universal emancipation” lies in “remaining unreconciled to the past and discontented with the present” (2004: 193). Opposing a “reconciliatory” mode to a “critical” mode of postcolonial praxis, Simon During also dismisses reparative energies (1998: 31–32). The valorization of cultural exchange and negotiation, During opines, prompts a politically fallacious turn to reconciliation and precipitates the passing of postcolonial studies as a robust field of inquiry (1998: 31–32).

As this critical overview indicates, reconciliation remains contested in the postcolonial field. This may be further aggravated by the ideological ambiguity of the verb “reconcile”, which, when followed by the preposition “to”, connotes “an attitude of resignation, surrender, or submission that precludes the possibility of struggle, antagonism, or opposition” (McGonegal, 2009: 9). Yet despite critics’ denunciation, Julie McGonegal affirms “reconciliation as an ethical ideal” by attending to its “positive and enabling inflections” (2009: 9):

[T]he conditions of inequality that structure postcolonial societies cannot be altered unless we venture to seriously engage an ethics of reconciliation, unless we strive to realize a time and space beyond violence. To realize that future it is necessary, certainly, to actively engage with the past, not in order to efface it from memory of course, but for the sake of reprocessing it into something new, of recuperating it as a resource for superseding the injustices of the present. (2009: 31–32)

McGonegal’s thesis is that reconciliation is not opposed to oppositional politics. As The Gift of Rain will testify, in revisiting Asia’s violent past, reparative initiatives seek not to excise it but to revive it for present demands. Such efforts recognize the import of what Sanders calls “responsibility in complicity” as the basis for opposition to historical injustice in post-conflict Asian locales (2002: 11). Different from its narrow and pejorative sense, there is a greater, more enabling sense of “complicity” as “a folded-together-ness (com-plic-ity) — in human-being” (2002: 5). By accepting this greater complicity or foldedness, Sanders argues, we assume responsibility for the other, thus imagining a just future. Sharing the sentiments, Tan’s novel approaches reconciliation “not as the reinforcement or reproduction of colonial or neocolonial relations but as the establishment of new conditions of interaction” that foreground “the ideals of negotiation, collaboration, and reciprocity” for postcolonial Asia (McGonegal, 2009: 9).

In probing the reparative ethics in The Gift of Rain, this paper invokes the South African model as a paradigmatic model of reconciliation, and illustrates how Tan’s literary experiment with post-Second World War Asia compares to this model. Granted the geo-political and geo-cultural disparities between the two postcolonial sites, one might ask: to what extent is the South African model transposable? How does Tan’s novel implicitly translate it into Asia? What is gained and lost in the process? In what ways does the incorporation of Buddhist ethics in Tan’s text lend nuance to the discourse of reconciliation? As this paper proposes, while the novel activates the model of reconciliation embodied by the South African TRC in an Asian context, it also modifies and localizes it through Buddhist cosmology.

While the South African TRC staged a public spectacle of social healing, Tan’s novel enacts a private scene of reconciliation in post-war Asia. This prioritization of the private over the public might be reckoned a fictional corrective to a major criticism of the TRC: that the public performance of mourning under stipulated conditions and subject to instrumental calculus undermines genuine “catharsis” (Parry, 2004: 187–89). In Disgrace (1999), for instance, J. M. Coetzee famously probes the efficacy of public repentance through the protagonist David Lurie’s refusal to perform according to the dictates of a university committee that resembles the TRC. As a literary rejoinder, Tan’s outer narrative retreats to an intimate setting wherein Philip confides in Michiko, thus inaugurating a personal reconciliation outside bureaucratic and legal domains. Travelling from post-imperial Japan to postcolonial Malaysia in 1995 upon a delayed receipt of her former lover Endo’s letter five decades ago, Michiko’s visit initiates in Philip a belated testimony on the Japanese Occupation: “Fifty years I had waited to tell my tale […]. Still I hesitated like a penitent sinner facing my confessor, unsure if I wanted another person to know my many shames, my failures, my unforgivable sins” (Tan, 2007: 23). ³ Half a century after the war, Philip is still haunted by his complicity with the Japanese and concomitant feelings of shame. While Michiko plays no part in Japan’s imperial crimes, she acts, akin to the TRC’s commissioners, as a proxy for the perpetrators. She accepts her “responsibility in complicity”, her foldedness with victims of Japanese imperialism against whom aggression was committed in her absence (Sanders, 2002: 5). Throughout the hearing, she acts upon her moral duty as an empathetic listener. When Philip struggles to shed his long suppressed tears, Michiko “with both her hands reached out for [his] face” and “ruptured the trembling skin of [his] tears” (427). Running counter to the performative utterances demanded by institutional and judicial bodies, Tan’s novel punctuates a spontaneous ethics of compassion. This is reciprocated when, noticing that Michiko is weeping at the sight of Endo’s burial ground, Philip holds her, requiting her compassion. The subtle exchange of kindliness buttresses McGonegal’s insistence that reconciliation demands dialogic and collaborative processes of negotiation (2009: 9). By spawning this private reconciliation, Tan’s text stresses the power of intersubjective affect in restoring reconciling parties as feeling subjects capable of empathy.

As explained earlier, the South African experiment in reconciliation is informed by a conditional logic: the provision of amnesty to perpetrators is contingent on the revelation of their crimes and political motivations. Such recognition of historical violence establishes the condition of possibility for reconciliation. A similar conditional logic structures Tan’s novel: reconciliation is conceivable inasmuch as perpetrators or their representatives express repentance. While the granting of conditional pardon is provided by the state in South Africa, it becomes individualized in Tan’s text. The right to pardon or non-pardon, the novel illustrates, rests with the individual’s discretion, not that of the state apparatus. The ethical primacy of the will to redress historical injustice is underscored in the inner narrative wherein Tanaka, another Japanese person in Malaya, offers a personal apology to his aikido student, Kon, for Japan’s aggression: “On behalf of my people, I apologize to you for the terrible things done here” (378). To this sincere apology, Kon replies, “Sensei, please” (378), signalling mutual rapport between the master and pupil. In staging this episode of private apology, Tan’s text establishes the requisite ethical ground for its reparative politics. This conciliatory move recalls the official state apology of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Issued by “a Japanese leader of contrition” (Togo, 2013: vii), the national apologetic address conveys Japan’s profound remorse for its historical crimes and its ethical commitment to advancing peace (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 1995: n.p.). ⁴ Granted the anchoring of its narrative present in 1995, Tan’s novel displays a critical awareness of its post-war historicity and Japan’s state apology, upon which its restorative ethics is predicated. This historical consciousness demonstrates the novel’s suspicion of reparative work that transpires without having offenders admit culpability, as that may entail a second act of violence against the victims. Though Tan’s text foregrounds the individual rather than the state as the agent of remission, it echoes the South African TRC’s premise that reconciliation is not unconditional.

In negotiating reconciliation in Asia, Tan’s novel also addresses disputants’ indignation at the power asymmetry between the parties to be reconciled. Reflecting on reconciliation in the post-apartheid state, Achille Mbembe observes that racial disparities are still extant despite the policies of “transformation” which aim at a reparative social engineering through economic redistribution (2008: 5–18). The persistence of power inequality inevitably raises the spectre of reconciliation being an instrument of the powerful. While Tan’s novel does not discuss material redress, it is nonetheless aware of the workings of power dynamics and attempts to level the power imbalance with the benefit of historical hindsight. As mentioned earlier, Michiko is a victim of the American bombardments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The invocation of the nuclear attacks emphasizes the shared susceptibility of Asian locales such as Malay(si)a and Japan to imperial forces outside the continent. With Michiko’s victimhood, Tan underscores Japan’s dual historical role as the victimizer in the Asia-Pacific War and the victimized after American bombings and the subsequent Occupation (1945–1952). This complicated portrayal that gives Japan historical agency illustrates that while Tan censures Japanese imperialism, he refuses to treat it as an isolated episode. Instead, he locates it in a wider Asian historical narrative that takes into account the unwarranted consequences of its aggression: the atomic bombings. Significantly, Michiko, who survives the atomic blasts, is a female victim. This feminization of victimhood signifies a covert gendered critique of masculine projects of imperialism such as that of Japan, the violent outcomes of which are often borne by innocent women on the home front like Michiko. Michiko’s eventual demise then reminds us retrospectively of the many innocent bodies whose unjustified deaths in the nuclear disaster become reluctant repayments of Japan’s historical debt to its Asian victims. In assigning Michiko the role of a female bomb victim and witness to Philip’s story, Tan’s novel echoes the humanistic ethos of the South African TRC by stressing mutual vulnerability to imperial violence.

Queering/querying imperial history

If the outer narrative sets the reconciliatory tone, the inner narrative of The Gift of Rain as recounted by Philip to Michiko enacts reparative work through a Buddhist-coded queer historiography of the Japanese Occupation. As David Halperin contends, queer bespeaks “a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” and is “at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (1995: 62). For Alderson and Anderson, queer carries the potential to overturn the grounds of “normative judgments” (2000: 2). Its “political promise” lies in its capacity to engage other “social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion” (Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, 2005: 1). Following the lead of critics such as Judith Butler, I deploy “queering” as a way of “querying” normative regimes and their unspoken assumptions (1993: 170). As a mode of critique, queer troubles the totalizing logic of classificatory systems by “torturing their lines of demarcation, pressuring their easy designations” (Hall, 2003: 14). ⁵ Importantly, as Eve Sedgwick reminds us, coming from “the Indo-European root —twerkw”, “queer” means “across” (1994: xii), which implies not only opposition, but also intersection and interchange. The latter connotations chime with the dialogic nature of reconciliation between opposing parties. Unlike categories such as “gay” or “homosexual” which primarily indicate dissident sexual orientations, queer designates not only non-normative sexual identity but also non-dominant discursive positionality. This conceptual elasticity proves instructive in scrutinizing the deployment of queer intimacies as a metaphor for cultural reconciliation in Tan’s text.

Before expounding on the novel’s reparative historical discourse through the phenomenology of queer and its Buddhist inflection, it is necessary to revisit the textual instantiations of queer desire. While the novel makes no mention of any male lovers of Philip after Endo’s death, we know that he is not married. Tellingly, five decades after the war, Philip still feels Endo’s presence: “He’s always here, […] whenever I go, I always yearn to return” (5). Such queer attachment is salient when Philip aches for his teacher while away from him:

He had become a defining feature in my life. I missed spending my mornings with him, watching him, listening to him, anticipating his moods, his whims. I longed for the way the sun fired up his silver hair, the way his teeth glinted behind his smile, his wry humor, and the hidden sadness within him. (134)

This affective declaration constitutes Philip as a queer subject. As David Lim argues, while the novel never depicts scenes of consummation, there are narrative codes that betoken the master and student’s coming together (2011: 238). In an aikido lesson on trust, Endo grips Philip’s hands and asks him to lay his palms on the teacher’s wrists. Philip reflects, “This connective touch […] was the most basic of human interaction, but it seemed also to reach into a higher plane of union that leaped across the physical and I felt I had lost something invaluable when he released my hands” (38). The “loss” here may register the symbolic loss of innocence that accompanies an initial sexual union. When Philip asks to be hurled until he is “exhausted and could do no more” (39), Endo later responds, “Now you will always remember me as the man who taught you to touch heaven” (62). While both characters refer to the aikido movement of earth–heaven throw, Lim argues that “being thrown and touching heaven” are “potential euphemisms for sex and climax” (2011: 238). Such homoerotic feelings seem to be reciprocal. After the disclosure of his identity as a Japanese spy and the imminent invasion of Malaya, Endo speaks to Philip: “even when we appear to be fighting to the death […] Remember always that I love you, and have loved you for a long, long time” (218). This profession of love reflects the homoeroticism that binds together the colonizer and colonized. Crucially, Endo’s accentuation of his enduring queer passion underscores the novel’s Buddhist subtext, which I will explore below: the master and protégé have had a history of conflicts in their past lives and are reincarnated to resolve their karmic imbalance in the present life.

As Tan experiments with the paradigm of reconciliation in Asia, the significance of cultural context assumes particular urgency. Departing from the “euphoric Christian revivalism” that suffused the South African TRC (Parry, 2004: 187–89), Tan’s text animates the Buddhist idiom of reincarnation as part of Asian cosmologies to articulate a culturally specific ethics of reconciliation. This entails the Buddhist coding of the queer relationship in a karmic cycle spanning across lifetimes. Various characters such as a female fortune-teller, Philip’s Chinese grandfather, and Endo and Philip themselves possess psychic visions of the past that recall the Buddhist ideas of previous lives and afterlives. As Endo remarks, “we’ve known each other for many lifetimes. […] And our prints will again cross one another’s. […] In pain and unfulfilled, without completion. And that is why we are forced to live again and again, to meet, and to resolve our lives” (217). In the text’s broader ethical economy, this thematic of queer reincarnation as reparation suggests this: just as Philip and Endo will take many lifetimes to resolve their karma, reconciliation necessitates not one-off legal or semi-legal trials or testimonies enacted in criminal tribunals or truth commissions, but patient processes of working through historical injustice. The persistence of the past in the present implies that like reincarnation, reconciliation as a mode of renewal does not negate past injustice. By couching the queer passion in the Buddhist lexicon of rebirths and redeaths, the novel mounts a powerful cultural critique of the formal closure of historical violations implied by mainstream Western retributive justice bodies and even restorative justice bodies like the South African TRC. Always already the karmic effects of previous lives, reincarnation creates chances of restitution and rectification through accruing good karma. This foundational Buddhist doctrine proffers a persuasive formulation of accountability and justice from an Asian perspective. Insofar as there are karmic repercussions to one’s actions, accountability is ineluctable: as the queer narrative suggests, it is either here and now in the present life or there and later in the next.

As this article shows, the Buddhist-coded narrative of homoeroticism is integral to Tan’s queer chronicle of the Japanese Occupation. In producing a history of ethical transgressions, the novel shares the South African TRC’s reckoning with the “conundrum of truth”: the insufficiency of “a purely objectivist notion of truth” and the necessity of validating other modalities of truth given the postmodern incredulity towards grand narratives (Posel, 2008: 132). In this light, the queer narrative registers a form of “personal or narrative truth” that recuperates silenced “individual subjective experiences” (Posel, 2008: 132). With this queer rendition, the novel questions a moralistic fixation on the history of violence that reifies the divide between the Japanese colonizer and the Asian colonized. This queer politics attends to Philip’s status as a Eurasian in Malaya, whose sense of homelessness in British or Chinese social circles begets an alternative worldview. Embodying hybridity, Philip inhabits a “third space” of “in-betweenness” which, as Homi Bhabha (1994: 1–27; 53–56) theorizes, constitutes the ground for political mobilizations for minority groups. His very existence challenges stable categories of identity, especially those prescribed by a constrictive national identity politics. This explains why Philip sees Endo beyond national delimitations: “I treated Endo-san not as a Japanese, not as a member of a hated race, but as a man, and that was why we forged an instant bond” (37). The word, “man” signifies both the male sex, hence Philip’s homosexual disposition; and mankind as a whole, hence his conciliatory leaning. This cultural openness informs Philip’s worldview throughout: “I had become so close to Endo-san that I hardly thought of his nationality now and, when we conversed, I was not aware that we spoke Japanese or English or a mixture of the two, but only that we spoke and understood each other so well” (195). Philip’s refusal to reduce Endo to the bearer of a national identity marker registers a queer reconciliatory ethos that underpins Tan’s vision.

With its queer historiography, Tan’s novel opens up a reparative epistemology that moves beyond the history of regional conflicts. While the novel’s restorative chronicle of the Japanese Occupation harkens back to the South African Commission’s historiography, which sought to “redeem the humanity of both victim and perpetrator” and transcend past “ethical violations and social breaches” (Posel, 2008: 132), it also moves beyond the TRC’s Christian closures. At the risk of doing a disservice to the victims’ memories, Tan’s text delineates a complex psychology of the Japanese. In this envisioning, Endo’s father publicly rejects Japan’s regressive nationalism. This political dissidence constitutes treason against the Japanese emperor, resulting in his incarceration. Although Endo shares his father’s political conviction, he submits himself to the Japanese military so as to secure medical treatment for the ailing patriarch. What Tan’s novel underscores is that even as Endo partakes in propagating imperialist ideologies, he is not an out-and-out devil bereft of humanity. His “coerced” collaboration with the army stems from an otherwise commendable attribute of filial piety. With this account of Endo’s motive in Malaya, the novel’s queer critique embraces the South African TRC’s notion of “human mutuality” (Posel, 2008: 129). All, victims and perpetrators included, were deemed damaged by the apartheid, and all share a need of healing (Posel, 2008: 135). In Tan’s text, this mutuality of dignity and humanity entails not a negation of justice, but a repudiation of any simplistic portrayal of the colonizer–enemy without moral complexity.

Reverberating with, yet exceeding, the South African model, Tan’s novel invests in restorative rather than retributive justice for historical violations. Insofar as restorative justice focuses on repair, it is future-directed rather than past-oriented. This is salient in how the Buddhist-informed queer narrative concludes with Endo’s demise as the delivery of a form of poetic justice. Whereas in their reincarnation in seventeenth-century Japan, Philip was beheaded by Endo for betraying the Shogun’s government; now the karmic ramification seems to be that upon the defeat of Japan, Philip beheads Endo at his behest after the latter flees his life imprisonment for war crimes in twentieth-century Malaya. This narrative recourse to private execution rather than public trials again shores up the novel’s general mistrust of retributive justice circulated in legal avenues of redress. Given that the decapitation preserves Endo’s dignity as a descendant of a Samurai family, Philip delivers Endo from disgrace by helping him to die an honourable death. The mode of justice that Tan espouses is thus restorative, not retributive. Consistent with the Buddhist ethics driving the novel, with death comes reincarnation and therefore the possibility of expiation and restitution by earning good karma, virtuous rebirths, and eventual nirvana. In this restorative account, Endo the perpetrator is endowed with the capacity for reparation as he insists on Philip killing him: “We must achieve harmony now, find an equilibrium, so that the next time I see you, the sand will have been wiped smooth” (421). If anything, reincarnation also implies impermanent existence and, consequently, the ethical import of non-attachment to craving and non-aversion to others, which constitute the root cause of human suffering in Buddhist cosmology. As a form of restorative justice, Philip’s beheading of Endo then registers a form of queer love, which consists in the granting of death in the present life as the granting of grace and rebirth in another life.

In The Gift of Rain, queerness operates both as a critique of excessive nationalism and a metaphor for ethical conciliation. The distrust of nationalistic thinking resonates again with the Buddhist principles of non-attachment (to nationalistic desire) and non-aversion (to the other). It rejects any straightforwardly didactic narrative that settles on demonizing Japanese aggressors, for that may be easily manipulated by coercive state politics to fuel the ideology of nationalism. After all, it was extreme nationalism that propelled Japan’s regressive pan-Asianism during the war. While critics like Jasbir K. Puar argue that queer could be co-opted by liberal state politics to forge a repressive form of homonationalism sustained by homonormative ideologies (Puar, 2007: 1–36), Tan’s novel invests queer with the productive potential of creating cultural intimacies among Asian locales in a context wherein one may be accused of betraying victims’ war remembrance. Redolent of the South African TRC, Tan’s text recognizes the import of individual memory and subjective affect, including queer affect, in narrating the public history of ethical violations. In its postcolonial intervention, the novel queries a morally sanitized version of the history of the Occupation and interrogates any ethical consensus as to how properly to narrate historical violence. As Philip Holden remarks en passant, by including major Japanese characters, the novel intimates “a larger series of Asian connections which exceed the history of colony to nation”, and reflects current scholarly interest in “pan-Asian connections”, past and present (2012: 55). Problematic as it may be, queerness figures not so much as a rights-based category for lobbying for the recognition of dissident sexual minorities as a political metaphor for inter-Asian reconciliation.

Remembrance and forgetting

Narrating history in a reparative register, The Gift of Rain grapples as the South African Commission did with the necessarily difficult injunction both to remember and to forget the past. This dialectic of remembering and forgetting evinces a profound sensitivity to the complexity of restorative work, given the magnitude of the atrocities. Undoubtedly, the novel remembers and reproves Japanese imperialism. Seeing reconciliation and remembrance as “competing claims”, Parry holds that a reconciliatory historiography, like that fashioned by the South African TRC, promotes the forgetting of colonial injustice and, concomitantly, political responsibility (2004: 183). Tan’s novel, however, challenges this rhetoric of incommensurability by showing that reconciliation need not obviate historical remembrance. From the merciless torture of members of the Aid China Campaign to the massacre of innocent villagers and hordes of other nameless victims, Philip confronts the carnage of the Occupation. He reveals how Japan’s expansionist ideologies engender what Hannah Arendt designates the banality of evil, wherein “quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous” people could perpetrate heinous deeds without the slightest moral contrition (1971: 4). The savagery of Japanese imperialism is laid bare in the deaths of Philip’s family members and friends. Amidst the array of imperial violence, Tan’s text remembers the cruelty and truculence integral to the Japanese Empire.

At the same time, the novel momentarily forgets Japanese atrocities by reminding readers of Japan’s history of subjection. Due to American intervention, Japan emerged in the late nineteenth century from two centuries of national seclusion (Buruma, 2003: 9–31). As Endo remarks: “When the Americans sailed to our shores we had to succumb to their demands to open up the country” (48). To this, Philip replies: “It was the same all over Asia. I myself was the result of such a tale” (48). Philip’s instinctive reply bespeaks a regional identification with Endo, which is grounded on a recognized Asian “sameness”, the shared histories of Asia’s subjection to Western imperial powers. As with many Asian countries, Japan’s modernization invariably entails partial Westernization: “We sent our brightest minds to Europe to learn, and the success of the Western nations inspired our own military ambitions” (48). While this is certainly no ethical exculpation for justifying Japanese imperialism or lessening its accountability, the unrelenting effort to give historical density to the colonizing nation should be apprehended within the broader scheme of Tan’s desire for inter-Asian rapprochement decades after the violence. If anything, the dialectics of remembering and forgetting suggests that reconciliation as an intricate task demands multiple delicate balances. Requiring repeated work, reconciliation is “ongoing and perpetually unfinished” (McGonegal, 2009: 33).

Philip’s Chinese grandfather, who resembles a Buddhist anchorite near the finale, embodies the novel’s placatory philosophy. Before vanishing, he shows Philip a Chinese stone inscription. Written during a most turbulent time in Chinese history, “thousands of years before Jesus Christ delivered the same message”, the inscription reads: “I have journeyed the limits of this world, | Seen magical things | And met many people, | And I find that across the Four Oceans | All men are brothers” (364). The Chinese idiom “All men are brothers” recalls the African idiom “A person is a person through other persons” invoked by the South African TRC. A language of human fellowship, it bolsters the ethical belief in togetherness despite differences. Drawing on ancient Chinese wisdom, this ethical vision closely approximates the TRC’s assertion of our shared humanity. With the grandfather’s cautionary caveat, “Do not let hatred control your life”, the novel reinstates the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and aversion (409). Inasmuch as the attachment to enmity traps one in a karmic cycle of suffering, it should be overcome. Just as the South African TRC was created with the intent to forestall revenge and retaliation, Tan’s text approaches reconciliation as a redemptive resolution to unresolved feelings of vindictiveness towards Japan in post-Second World War Asia. Though the risk of potential cycles of hostility is relatively low in contemporary Malaysia, which has largely moved on from this atrocious history, feelings of unappeasable anger continue to define the war memories of other Asian countries such as China. The presence of Philip’s Chinese grandfather and his advice against hatred thus indicate that the novel’s ethics of reconciliation speaks to a wider Asian context that exceeds postcolonial Malaysia. Echoing the TRC, Tan’s text represents a critique of the Western model of retributive justice that prioritizes political retaliation over social healing. Given that it does not necessarily effectuate repentance, retaliation through punitive measures may not be the most expedient means of righting wrongs. The transformative potential of restorative justice is reasserted when Philip remarks upon finishing his testimony: “a growing lightness lifts my heart to a place it has never been before” (432). Insofar as Tan’s novel treats the private scene of restitution as symbolic of a pan-Asian scene of restoration, reconciliation might designate not so much an end to struggles as a beginning, a lifting of the wounded hearts of post-conflict Asian communities that opens up a different future, which internalizes the past and yet resists its determinism.

Conclusion

Adopting the paradigm of reconciliation for post-war Asia, The Gift of Rain concurs with the South African TRC’s general humanist ethos but also revives an older Buddhist discourse on reincarnation, non-attachment, and non-aversion to offer a cogent cultural account of the ongoing nature of reconciliation and inevitability of accountability. The novel may be construed as a thought experiment that posits how Buddhist-inflected restorative work in Asia might inspire and model recovery efforts in post-conflict sites such as South Africa. By rewriting the historical catastrophe that is the Japanese Occupation, Tan’s novel activates the progressive function of aesthetic endeavours as an alternative reparative medium that falls outside the judicial or semi-juridical purviews of legal tribunals and bureaucratic institutions like the TRC. With its reconciliatory ethics and Buddhist-coded queer historiography, the novel recalibrates the meanings of the Occupation for the Asian present. If fiction is a potential problem-solving mechanism, The Gift of Rain demonstrates how literature might contribute to a reparative imaginary, one that transcends historical determinism in order to imagine a radically different future for post-conflict communities.