My current research project investigates the discursive formation and theoretical limits of “repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku) through an examination of fiction, essays, and memoirs on the subject of repatriation to Japan. I bring together the writings of various individuals who were rendered invisible by Japan’s reconstitution from multiethnic empire to defeated nation-state – Japanese colonial repatriates, resident Koreans, “returned” Nikkei – in order to show how the visibility/invisibility of difference was neither natural nor inevitable but instead willed into being through specific discursive practices, in Japan as well as in North America.