A surprising number of animals appear in the fictional representations of the March 11, 2011 disasters in Japan. Why? My hunch is that the portrayal of animal inferiorities and portrayal of disaster are linked by narrative challenges and techniques: they both are "impossible." Furukawa Hideo has been writing through animals for some time, and with added poignancy after the Tohoku disasters; this presentation focuses on his fiction of Furukawa Hideo to examine his exploration of the fictional possibilities, and limits, of portraying animal inferiorities in fiction.
