The Consciousness of Homeland and National Identity: The Study on Oba Minako’s Shabby Museum

Oba Minako is the representative of the female writers in the Japanese post-war literary arena, who are known as “the introverted generation”. Shabby Museum, one of her medium-length novels, won the Japanese Female Literary Award in 1975. This novel gives an account of the life of three Asian females living in Alaska. The author, taking Alaska, a city of wasteland, as the stage, keeps on focusing on the “postwar” life and spiritual state of the females and successfully portrays the image of “spirit of rebellion” of the heroines who are suffer war damage. As an important part of female writing, Shabby Museum is one of Oba’s major pieces, in which she has not only carried out a profound analysis of the cruelty of war and the existence of females, but also explored the ideal of harmonious co-existence of human beings. The novel also highlights the heroines’ loss of national identity and “the consciousness of homeland”. During the process of exploring the possibility of coexistence of multi-racial groups and the diversity of living patterns under the multi-cultural circumstance, the novel, meanwhile, calls in question the order of the “post-war” world.