An allegory about a country that really is an allegory about a country: "Lucky Dragon" by Viet Dinh

When literature professionals interpret a story and see big ideas woven into it, lay readers often cry foul. They feel that the literary folks are reading too much into what they see as a simple story. One of the most common versions of this disagreement comes with stories that professors and critics see as speaking in some larger sense to the state of the country in which the story is set. One could cite any number of "great American novels"--Huck Finn, Grapes of Wrath, Great Gatsby--where these arguments might play out in a classroom, where students might accuse professors of finding something that isn't there.

But "Lucky Dragon" by Viet Dinh overtly encourages us to see the struggles of the story's protagonists as deeply tied to the state of post-WWII Japan. As one character tells the captain of the Lucky Dragon, the ship from which the story gets its name, "Your struggle is the nation's struggle."

I may have overstated it in the title by saying it's an allegory of Japan, as allegory has a fairly limited meaning, but the fate of the main characters is very much meant to mirror Japan in the first decade after the war. The crew of the Lucky Dragon have the bad fortune to be out fishing near enough to the Bikini Atoll when America tests its giant nuclear bomb that they all get radiation poisoning. (You get it? The ship is called "Lucky" Dragon, but they're all terribly unlucky.) The crew doesn't really understand what happened, but when they get back to Japan and it all gets straightened out, the crew is loved and showered with affection and money by Japan and others throughout the world. Japan has been transformed from the pre-war colonial power, raping Korean comfort women and killing wildly in Nanking, to a sympathetic victim of war. As the main character puts it when he finds out what happened, "Hadn't they already been thoroughly humiliated?"

But the crew doesn't stay sympathetic for the public, at least not the captain, Hiroshi. His father, who lives by the old code of death before dishonor and has never forgiven his son for allowing himself to be taken as a prisoner of war rather than die, tells the newspapers that his son was one of the shameful ones who tried to escape from a POW camp and failed. The public turns against him, at least in Japan.

At the same time he is being rejected, the bodies of the crew are turning reptilian. There is more than one dragon in the story than the boat. One of the crew died soon after exposure to the blast and was buried at sea. When the crew reluctantly throws his body overboard to bury him, his body is "seized" by Ryujin, the mythical dragon who is also the god of the sea. The crew then begin to turn dragon-like themselves.

The townspeople misinterpret the transformation of Hiroshi and his friend Yoshi. They think the two are turning into ningyo, or mermaids. To eat the flesh of a ningyo makes you immortal, so the townspeople grow increasingly avaricious of the flesh of Hiroshi and Yoshi. But here, Hiroshi tells us that the townspeople have misread the signs, because even if they were mermaids, to catch a mermaid is to invite bad luck.

In the end, the story seems to land on the idea that Japan can be forgiven, but only by abandoning its warrior ethos. Although most of the public shuns Hiroshi for having surrendered, one person defends him. And the public does seem to feel pity for the other members of the crew: "...public opinion of them swayed from disgust to pity, and now, to sympathy. It was possible that people thought differently of (Hiroshi) too. Perhaps they were willing to forgive his conduct in the war. Strange: when he was a man, he had been a monster; now that he was a monster, he was once again a man."

However, the public does not ultimately leave behind the old ways. They chase Hiroshi, who is carrying the dead body of Yoshi after he commits suicide, to the edge of the water. The two transform into water dragons and return to the sea.

Personal reactions

I didn't like the story the first read-through. Parts of it felt over-written. There was a sentence that used the word "endemic" in a way I don't think is correct. I thought it relied a lot on obvious symbolism for a story about Japan.

But there was a bigger issue. Trying to make Japan seem sympathetic because they were the victims of atomic bombs is telling half the story. I do not claim to be any kind of Japan expert. I carry with me a lot of the prejudices of Korean people toward Japan--not to the extent that some Koreans do, but I'm aware of what colonial Japan was like. I can certainly feel some sympathy toward civilian casualties, and of course the children were not to blame for anything, but Japanese culture bought wholesale into the ethos that made them a colonial power. So the Japan-as-a-victim story rubbed me the wrong way.

But on a second reading, I saw that the story wasn't really excusing Japan's pre-war militarism. The father's attitude is clearly the wrong one. Yoshi (which means "good" in Japanese) sums up pre-war Japan: "We were cursed even before we went to war...our skin matches our souls."

The transformation of the crew of the Lucky Dragon into monsters completes a cycle. Japan comes from the sea and goes back to the sea. Japan must become a monster before it can be transformed back into something human. Japan was monstrous before the war, but fire has transformed it back into something human. It has learned wisdom from its suffering.

I hope other world empires will take note of the lesson so they don't have to learn it the hard way.