Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific By Nao ...

(Light, wind, and dream), in accordance with exotic imagery of Nanyo and the atmosphere of wartime. Despite the alteration, the novel (as well as some of his other works) suggests that once a literate or “civilized” person migrates and settles into a nonliterate sphere, he or she is never allowed to return; a writer is to die or go native (forget writing). However, the focus of Nakajima's macabre depiction of colonial exotics (accompanied by the colonized places’ deadly counterattacks) shifts from indigenization (escape from modern/imperial centers) into civilization (the reformative forces to which hybridized/colonized subjects react differently). This shift can be seen in his works written during the months between his return to Tokyo in March 1942 and his death of chronic asthma in December 1942 (aged thirty three).

“Tales of the south islands” and “Atolls,” as well as Nakajima's other texts that were written after his homecoming, draw attention to the crucial effects of colonial encounters on both sides. “Tales” and “Atolls” appropriate his own experiences in Micronesia, especially his encounters with female islanders and Palauan picture stories carved on bai (village meeting houses), as well as materials from his companion informant in Palau—an artist and ethnologist named Hijikata Hisakatsu who had a longer stay in Micronesia (1929–1942). Despite the accepted image of the obedient, simple-minded, and tamed islanders—different (uncivilized, savage, Other) but similar (tamed, moderately Japanized)—which suited the ambitious official assimilation policy, the texts by Nakajima depict the islanders as similar but different. In the texts, they are partly Japanized or civilized (similar); yet they are also incomprehensible (different) to the first-person narrator. In “Atolls,” a young native mother (modeled after a woman he met in Palau) is educated in Japanese culture. She is so civilized as to disapprove