ABSTRACT
This chapter traces a Transnational American Studies literary history through the rise of post-planetarity theory in the twenty-first century as represented by concepts such as Gretchen Murphy’s (2005) “Hemispheric Imaginings,” Wai Chee Dimock’s (2006) “Deep Time” and Yunte Huang’s (2008) “Transpacific Imagination.” This perspective enables a reconsideration of the impact of the Nobel Laureate William Faulkner’s disaster novel The Wild Palms (1939) upon a number of Japanese novelists, especially distinguished science fiction writer Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (1977[1973]), to develop an understanding of transpacific literature, moving from Komatsu’s The Japanese Apache (1964) to Japanese American magic realist Karen Tei Yamashita’s Brazil-Maru (1992).
