Manchurian Sleepwalkers

Thomas Lahusen • 2019

With the passage of time, remembering becomes a form of sleepwalking. One-time émigrés of Manchuria and its legendary city, Harbin, take us on a journey of memory back to China. For many -- Russians, Poles, Germans and Japanese -- who left the country of the “last emperor” during the late 1940s and 50s, remembering borders on obsession. For Kumiko Muraoka, a Japanese-French poet, only forgetting alleviates the pain of having lost her childhood home.