Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century have constructed a division between the ‘Self ’ and the ‘Other’ in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault and Lacan, the chapters seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to the central question of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and of how best to define their identity. A study of how these writers each arrived at their understanding of the Japanese ‘Self ’ through the construction of some contrasting ‘Other’ is undertaken through a categorisation of the ‘Others’ in question into three broad categories. Part I examines a series of ‘external Others’, established by authors such as Nagai Kafu¯, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ and Yokomitsu Riichi, whose own journeys abroad enabled them to consider the question of national identity from a new vantage point. Part II considers a series of ‘internal Others’, minority writers including burakumin authors and those who, for whatever reason, have perceived themselves as on the periphery of society looking in at the ‘Japan’ that has marginalised them. Finally, Part III addresses those writers who can be characterised as occupying some middle ground and whose writings deal with the question of whether the ‘Other’ can ever become the ‘Self ’. Using a diverse cross-section of writers and texts as case studies, Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature brings together contributions from a number of leading international experts in the field and will be essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, colonialism, identity studies and nationalism. Rachael Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Colgate University, New York. Her current research interests focus on the dynamics of representation in a range of textual and new media, including the literature of Nagai Kaf u, ¯ the films of Kurosawa Akira and the manga of Tezuka Osamu. Mark Williams is Professor of Japanese Studies and Head of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. His previous publications include Endo¯ Shusaku: ¯ a Literature of Reconciliation (Routledge, 1999), and with John Breen (as editors) Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses (Macmillan, 1996).
Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series Series Editor: Glenn D. Hook Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield
This series, published by Routledge in association with the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, both makes available original research on a wide range of subjects dealing with Japan and provides introductory overviews of key topics in Japanese Studies. The Internationalization of Japan Edited by Glenn D. Hook and Michael Weiner Race and Migration in Imperial Japan Michael Weiner Japan and the Pacific Free Trade Area Pekka Korhonen Greater China and Japan Prospects for an economic partnership? Robert Taylor The Steel Industry in Japan A comparison with the UK Hasegawa Harukiyo
Japanese Business Management Restructuring for low growth and globalization Edited by Hasegawa Harukiyo and Glenn D. Hook Japan and Asia Pacific Integration Pacific romances 1968–1996 Pekka Korhonen Japan’s Economic Power and Security Japan and North Korea Christopher W. Hughes Japan’s Contested Constitution Documents and analysis Glenn D. Hook and Gavan McCormack
Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan Richard Siddle
Japan’s International Relations Politics, economics and security Glenn D. Hook, Julie Gilson, Christopher Hughes and Hugo Dobson
Japan’s Minorities The illusion of homogeneity Edited by Michael Weiner
Japanese Education Reform Nakasone’s legacy Christopher P. Hood
The Political Economy of Japanese Globalisation Glenn D. Hook and Hasegawa Harukiyo Japan and Okinawa Structure and subjectivity Edited by Glenn D. Hook and Richard Siddle Japan and Britain in the Contemporary World Responses to common issues Edited by Hugo Dobson and Glenn D. Hook Japan and United Nations Peacekeeping New pressures, new responses Hugo Dobson Japanese Capitalism and Modernity in a Global Era Re-fabricating lifetime employment relations Peter C. D. Matanle Nikkeiren and Japanese Capitalism John Crump Production Networks in Asia and Europe Skill formation and technology transfer in the automobile industry Edited by Rogier Busser and Yuri Sadoi Japan and the G7/8 1975–2002 Hugo Dobson The Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan Between nation-state and everyday life Takeda Hiroko
Grassroots Pacifism in Post-War Japan The rebirth of a nation Mari Yamamoto Interfirm Networks in the Japanese Electronics Industry Ralph Paprzycki Globalisation and Women in the Japanese Workforce Beverley Bishop Contested Governance in Japan Sites and issues Edited by Glenn D. Hook Japan's International Relations Politics, economics and security Second edition Glenn D. Hook, Julie Gilson, Christopher Hughes and Hugo Dobson Japan's Changing Role in Humanitarian Crises Yukiko Nishikawa Japan's Subnational Governments in International Affairs Purnendra Jain Japan and East Asian Monetary Regionalism Towards a proactive leadership role? Shigeko Hayashi Japan's Relations with China Facing a rising power Lam Peng-Er South Korean Engagement Policies and North Korea Identities, Norms and the Sunshine Policy Son Key-young
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature A critical approach Edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa Miyume Tanji Nationalisms in Japan Edited by Naoko Shimazu
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature A critical approach
Edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams, editorial matter and selection; the contributors, their contributions This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Representing the other in modern Japanese literature : a critical approach / edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams. p. cm. -- (Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Japanese literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Other (Philosophy) 3. Self-perception in literature. I. Hutchinson, Rachael. II. Williams, Mark,-d1957- III. Series. PL726.65.R47 2006 895.6'09384--dc22 2005031246 ISBN10: 0-415-36186-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36186-6 ISBN10: 0-415-36185-0 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36185-9 ISBN13: 978-0-203-01234-5 (ebk)
Contents
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements
Introduction: Self and Other in modern Japanese literature
ix xiv
1
R AC H A E L H U TC H I N S O N A N D M A R K W I L L I A M S
1
Hermes and Hermès: Othernesses in modern Japanese literature 19 I R M E L A H I J I YA - K I R S C H N E R E I T
2
Meet me on the other side: Strategies of Otherness in modern Japanese literature
38
SUSAN NAPIER
PART I
External others
3
Who holds the whip? Power and critique in Nagai Kafu’s ¯ Tale s of A m e ric a
55
57
R AC H A E L H U TC H I N S O N
4
‘Foreign bodies’: ‘Race’, gender and orientalism in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’
75
A D R I A N P I N N I N G TO N
5
Self and Other in the writings of Kajii Motojiro¯
96
STEPHEN DODD
6
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others: Paris and Shanghai D O U G L A S S L AY M A K E R
109
viii
Contents
PART II
Internal others
125
7
127
Passing: Paradoxes of alterity in The Broken Commandment MARK MORRIS
8
The Burakumin as ‘Other’ in Noma Hiroshi’s Circle of Youth
145
JA M E S R A E S I D E
9
Sincerely yours: Uno Chiyo’s A Wife’s Letters as wartime subversion 165 REBECCA L. COPELAND
10 Foreign Sex, native politics: Lady Chatterley’s Lover in postoccupation Japan
183
ANN SHERIF
¯e 11 The way of the survivor: Conversion and inversion in O Kenzaburo¯ ’s Hiroshima Notes
211
DAV I D C . S TA H L
12 Free to write: Confronting the present, and the past, in Shiina Rinzo¯’s The Beautiful Woman
230
MARK WILLIAMS
PART III
Liminal sites
253
¯ shiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction 13 Yuta as the postcolonial Other in O
255
L E I T H M O RT O N
14 Modernity, history, and the uncanny: Colonial encounter and the epistemological gap
271
FAY E Y UA N K L E E M A N
15 ‘There’s no such place as home’: Goto¯ Meisei, or identity as alterity
292
AT S U KO S A K A K I
16 Beyond language: Embracing the figure of ‘the Other’ in Yi Yang-Ji’s Yuhi
312
C AT H E R I N E RY U
Index
332
Notes on contributors
Rebecca L. Copeland is Professor of Japanese Literature at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Her major publications include: Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (2006); Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (2006) co-edited with Dr Melek Ortabasi; The Father– Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001) which she coedited with Dr Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen; Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (2000); and The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo (1992). Stephen Dodd gained BA degrees in Chinese (1977) and Japanese (1980) from Keble College, Oxford. He obtained a PhD in Japanese Literature from Columbia University (1993). After teaching briefly at UC Santa Barbara (1993), he became Assistant Professor in Japanese Literature at Duke University (1993–94). Since 1994, he has been teaching at SOAS, University of London, where he is Senior Lecturer in Japanese. He has written a wide range of articles on modern Japanese literature, including ‘Fantasies, Fairies, and Electric Dreams: Sato¯ Haruo’s Critique of Taisho¯ ’, Monumenta Nipponica 49 (1994); and ‘The Significance of Bodies in So¯seki’s Kokoro’, Monumenta Nipponica 53 (1998). He is the author of Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature (Harvard East Asian monographs, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2004). He is presently researching the writer Kajii Motojiro¯, with the aim of producing a series of articles and a book. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is Professor of Japanology (Literature and Cultural Studies) at Berlin Free University. Her research interests are: transcultural studies in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, translation studies, semiotics of culture. Her major publications include: Das Ende der Exotik (Frankfurt, 1988); Was heisst: Japanische Literatur verstehen? (Frankfurt, 1990); Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shisho¯setsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Japanische Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein Handbuch (2000); Kulturbeziehungen zwischen Japan und dem Westen seit 1853 (ed., Munich, 1999); Canon and Identity: Japanese Modernization Reconsidered (ed., Munich, 2000). She is also the editor of Japanische Bibliothek (Insel Publ., 34 vols, 1990–2000), and of Iaponia Insula (Wiesbaden, Munich, 15 vols).
x
Notes on Contributors
Rachael Hutchinson earned her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2000, and is currently Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Colgate University, New York. Her publications include: ‘Occidentalism and Critique of Meiji: The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kafu¯’, Japan Forum 13(2) (2001): 195–213; and ‘Orientalism or Occidentalism? Dynamics of Appropriation in Akira Kurosawa’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song-Hwee Lim (eds) Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006). Her latest work, ‘A Fistful of Yojimbo: Appropriation and Dialogue in Japanese Cinema’ is forthcoming in Paul Cooke (ed.) Dialogues with Hollywood (Palgrave). She is currently working on a book-length manuscript exploring the Occidentalist critique of Nagai Kaf u¯ . Her wider research interests focus on representation and identity in a range of narrative media. Faye Yuan Kleeman is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Colorado. Her main research interests are: colonial literature, women writers, comparative culture. Her major publications include: Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); ‘A House of Their Own: Constructing the Gynocentric Family in Modern Japan’, Japan Studies Review 1(2) (Summer, 1998); ‘A Defiant Muse: Reading and Situating Kurahashi Yumiko’s Narrative Subjectivity’, in Tomoko Kuribayashi (ed.) The Outsider Within: Ten Essays on Modern Japanese Women Writers (University Press of America, 2001); ‘Minzuxue yu zhiminzhuyi: Xichuang Man zai Taiwan’ (Ethnography and colonialism: Nishikawa Mitsuru in Taiwan), Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu tongxun, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, 11(1) (2001); ‘Gender, Ethnography and Colonial Cultural Production: Nishikawa Mitsuru’s Discourse on Taiwan’, in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory (Columbia University Press, 2005); and ‘The Gendering of Modernity: The Colonial Body in Japanese and Taiwanese Literature’, Journal of Modern Chinese Language and Literature 7(2) (2005). Mark Morris received his BA from Columbia University, and his PhD from Harvard University. He has taught Japanese literature and film at the University of Adelaide and, since 1989, the University of Cambridge, where he is a Lecturer in Japanese Cultural History. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of several major articles on classical literature and literary criticism in The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies: ‘Sei Shonagon’s Poetic Catalogues’ (June 1980); ‘Buson and Shiki: Part One’ (Dec. 1984), ‘Part Two’ (June 1985); ‘Waka and Form, Waka and History’ (1986). His work on modern fiction includes: ‘Japan’, in The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing (1996); ‘Magic Realism as Ideology: Narrative Evasions in the Work of Nakagami Kenji’, in A Companion to Magical Realism (2005); and, as editor, a special issue of Japan Forum (1996), entitled ‘Towards Nakagami’. His work in progress includes ‘Postcolonial Visions: Japan in Recent Korean Films’ and ‘Ozu’s War’.
Notes on Contributors xi Leith Morton teaches English at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, where he is a Professor in the Foreign Language Research and Teaching Center. His main research interests are: modern Japanese literature, culture and aesthetics. His major publications include: Tales from East of the River (Melbourne: Rigmarole Press, 1982); Divided Self: A Biography of Arishima Takeo (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988); The Fox (Tokyo: Kumon Publishing Co., Ltd, 1989) (illustrated by Murakami Yukuo); as co-editor and translator, Seven Stories of Modern Japan (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1991); as editor and translator, Mt Fuji: Selected Poems 1943–1986 by Kusano Shinpei (Michigan: Katydid Press, 1991); An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993); The Flower Garland (Sydney: Island Press, 1993); A Day at the Races (Macao: English Dept., University of Macao, 2003); Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2003); At the Hotel Zudabollo (Sydney: Island Press, 2004); Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); as poetry co-editor and co-translator, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature vol. 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868–1945 (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005). Susan Napier is Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of three books: Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Works of Mishima Yukio and O¯e Kenzaburo¯ ; The Fantastic in Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity; and Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation. She is currently working on a book concerning the construction of ‘Japan’ in the Western imagination. Adrian Pinnington is Professor of Comparative Literature, The School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo. His main research interests are: the reception of classical Japanese literature in modern Japan and the West; Japanese cultural identity; waka and haiku. His publications include: ‘R.H. Blyth, 1886–1964’, in Ian Nish (ed.) Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1994); ‘Arthur Waley and Japanese Literature’, in The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. 12 (Tokyo: The Asiatic Society of Japan, 1997); ‘Yoshimitsu, Benedict, Endo¯: Guilt, Shame and the Post-war Idea of Japan’, Japan Forum 13(1) (Winner of the Toshiba International Prize for best paper in Japan Forum, 2002); and as editor with Hoshino Tsunehiko, Takaha Shugyo¯, Selected Haiku (Tokyo: Furansudo¯, 2003). James Raeside is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Keio Gijuku University, Tokyo. His main research interests are: comparative literature, in particular, European and Japanese novelists of the twentieth century; Noma Hiroshi; Mishima Yukio; postwar Japanese fiction. His major publications include: ‘This is not Hell nor am I out of It: Noma Hiroshi’s Waga to¯ wa soko ni tatsu’, Japan Forum 9(2) (1997): 195–215; ‘The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Strong: Mishima Yukio’s Kinjiki and Oscar Wilde’, Comparative Literature Studies 36(1) (1999): 1–23. ‘Quelques liens entre l’érotisme de Georges Bataille et Gogo no
xii
Notes on Contributors
Eiko¯de Mishima Yukio’, Japon Pluriel 3 (1999): 377–94; ‘Kurai e kara Dark Pictures e’, Noma H’iroshi-kai no Kaiho¯ 7 (2000): 29–34; as translator, Dark Pictures and other Stories (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000); ‘The Money-Go-Round: Twentieth-Century Picaresque in Priestley’s The Good Companions and Ibuse’s The Bill-Collecting Trip’, New Comparison 35/36 (2003): 266–80; and ‘This Death in Life: Leprosy in Mishima Yukio’s Rai¯o no terasu and Beyond’, Japan Forum 15(1) (2003): 99–123. Catherine Ryu is Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Her main research interests are: Heian narratives, gender studies, No¯ drama, zainichi literature, and Korean literature. Her major publications include: ‘A Golden Needle, a Rabbit’s Tail, and the Density of Female Body Fat: An Analysis of Muro¯ Saisei’s Metaphors for Enchi Fumiko’s Writing Libido’, in Eiji Sekine (ed.) Love and Sexuality: Proceedings of the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies (Purdue University, 1999); ‘Kaigai ni okeru Genji kenky u¯ : Raiza Darubii cho Murasaki Shikibu monogatari: Nantonaku Heian kagirinaku murasaki’, Genji Kenky¯u 7 (April 2002); ‘“Reading” the Female Reader in Liza Dalby and Her Tale of Murasaki’, in Eiji Sekine (ed.) Japan from Somewhere Else: Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (Purdue University, 2002); ‘Peter H. Lee: Envisioning the Future of Korean Literature in the Global Context’, in Pioneers of Korean Studies. Seoul, Korea (The Academy of Korean Studies, 2004); ‘Affirming the Feminine: Grandma the Maitreya in Kim Chong-han’s Surado (1969)’, in Hanmaum Seoun (ed.) The Proceedings of 2004 International Conference on Korean Nuns within the Context of East Asian Buddhist Traditions, vol. 1 (2004): 327–40 (in Korean) and vol. 2 (2004): 385– 402 (in English). Atsuko Sakaki is Professor in East Asian Studies and Associate Member of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her main research interests are: corporeality and spatiality; cross-cultural analysis; narrative studies; and gender studies. Her major publications include: Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1999); The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko (M.E. Sharpe, 1998); and ‘Scratch the Surface, Film the Face: Obsession with the Depth and Seduction of the Surface in Abe Ko¯bo¯ ’s Face of Another’, Japan Forum 17(3) (October, 2005). Ann Sherif is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Language at Oberlin College, Ohio, USA. She is the author of Mirror: The Essays and Fiction of Ko¯da Aya (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999); ‘The Aesthetics of Speed and the Illogicality of Politics: Ishihara Shintaro¯’s Literary Debut’, Japan Forum (2005); and ‘The Politics of Loss: On Eto¯ Jun’, positions (2002). Her translations include fiction by Yoshimoto Banana, Ko¯da Aya, and Hasumi Shigehiko. Her current research focuses on Cold War culture in Japan and the politics of Japanese publishing.
Notes on Contributors xiii Douglas Slaymaker is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY. He currently serves as Director of the Japan Studies Program and as a Co-director of the Asia Center at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of The Body in Postwar Fiction: Japanese Fiction after the War (Routledge, 2004), and the editor of Confluences: Postwar Japan and France (University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2002) and One Hundred Years of Popular Culture in Japan (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). His current research projects focus on the work of Tawada Yoko, and also on the interactions of Japanese intellectuals with China and France in the early twentieth century. David C. Stahl is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film and Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His major research interests are: the memory and representation of the Asia Pacific War experience in Japanese literature and film; psychoanalytic examination of Japanese survivor narratives; and issues concerning traumatic loss, mourning and recovery. His major publications include: The Burdens of ¯ o ka Sho¯he i’s Writings on the Pacific War (University of Hawaii Press, Survival: O 2003). He is currently writing a book on trauma, repetition and recovery in modern Japanese literature and film. He is also working on a psychoanalytical examination of Nosaka Akiyuki’s firebombing memoirs, focusing on his fictional treatment of his traumatic home front experience in ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ and Takahata Isao’s anime version of the same. Mark Williams is Professor of Japanese Studies and Head of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. His current research interests are: the memory and representation of the Asia Pacific War and the Occupation period in Japanese literature; tenk¯o literature. His major publications include: Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses (edited with John Breen, Macmillan Press, 1996); Endo¯ Sh usaku: ¯ A Literature of Reconciliation (Routledge, 1999); Foreign Studies and The Girl I Left Behind (translations of two novels by Endo¯ Shusaku); ¯ ‘Life after Death? The Literature of an Undeployed Kamikaze Squadron Leader’, Japan Forum 4(1) (1992); ‘Double Vision: Divided Narrative Focus in Takahashi Takako’s Yoso¯i seyo , waga tamashii yo !’, in S. Snyder and P. Gabriel (eds) O¯e and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999); ‘Bridging the Divide: Writing Christian Faith (and Doubt) in Modern Japan’, in M. Mullins (ed.) Japan Christian Yearbook (Brill, 2003); ‘Endo¯ S h¯usaku: Death and Rebirth in Deep Rive r’, Christianity and Literature 51(2) (2002); and ‘Shiina Rinzo¯: Imaging Hope and Despair in Occupation Japan’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66(3) (2003).
Acknowledgements
This book is the fruit of a research project that grew out of a meeting held on 30 May 2001 between British and Japanese research funding bodies, other interested parties, and the British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS). In the wake of the meeting, three research projects were identified as filling important gaps in the literature: the ‘Other’ in Japanese literature; governance in Japan; and modern and contemporary Japanese nationalism. It was agreed at a meeting of the BAJS Council shortly thereafter that three members of Council would act as project leaders, drawing on both members of the association and others in the field in order to find the best possible contributors to produce three edited books. This is the second of those three volumes to appear in print, the others being Contested Governance in Japan, edited by Glenn Hook, and Nationalisms in Japan, edited by Naoko Shimazu. The members of these projects, and especially the project leaders and editors, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Great Britain–Sasakawa Foundation, and especially to Mike Barrett, its Chief Executive. If it had not been for the Foundation’s generous support, and Mike’s belief in us, these projects would not have been realized. We are also grateful to the Toshiba International Foundation and to BAJS for generous additional financial support. Craig Fowlie at Routledge agreed to take on the three volumes as part of the Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series, subject to the standard international peer review. We are grateful for his enthusiastic support of these projects and for the assistance we have received from Stephanie Rogers, Helen Baker and the rest of the editorial team at Taylor & Francis. Finally, as far as this project is concerned, in addition to the abovementioned sponsors, we would like to thank the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the British Academy and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds for further financial assistance that enabled us to invite our various contributors to an initial workshop in Leeds in June 2003 and to a follow-up workshop at the Association for Asian Studies annual convention in San Diego in March 2004. We would also like to express our gratitude to all of the contributors for their cooperation and willingness to meet our various requests and deadlines. Thanks are also due to our anonymous
Acknowledgements xv referees, to our respective colleagues at Colgate and Leeds, and, last but by no means least, to our families, who have enabled us to retain sight of the bigger picture as we completed this project. Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
Introduction Self and Other in modern Japanese literature Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
The history of Japan in the twentieth century reads like a rollercoaster of human experience: the rise and fall of empire; the tumult of the fifteen-year war waged across China, the Pacific and South-East Asia; the atomic bomb and its aftermath; rebuilding and repatriation; economic boom and collapse. From the closing years of the Meiji period right through to the present day, the nature of modern Japan, built as it was on empire and immigration, has made the question of what makes a person ‘Japanese’ an important site of intellectual endeavour. Whether pointing to one’s individual identity or to that of the nation, the task of defining the ‘Self ’ took on great significance in the twentieth century as change occurred more quickly than ever before. The question of how Japan should modernise yet still preserve its own heritage plagued intellectuals of the Meiji period, while others were more concerned with pinning down Japan’s position vis-à-vis other nations in the shifting power dynamics of Western colonialism. The concern with preserving the Japanese heritage came to the fore in the Nihon e no kaiki movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a ‘Return to Japan’ after years of Westernisation, while the often obsessive patriotism of the war years elevated ‘Japaneseness’ to an almost consecrated state of being. The devastation of war engendered a search for a new national model with which to rebuild Japan, while at the personal level individuals began the difficult task of reconciling their war personas with their postwar selves. As families separated in the war were reunited and repatriated, a new sense of alienation emerged in the culture shock of arriving back in Japan. Add to this the dizzying speed of economic recovery through the 1960s and 1970s, the height of the ‘bubble economy’ in the 1980s, and the shock of collapse and recession in the 1990s, and the postwar trend towards defining oneself by one’s economic status was suddenly revealed not only as problematic, but also as meaningless. It is not surprising that the literature of modern Japan, written by individuals living in often turbulent times, has revolved around the central questions of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and how best to define one’s identity. The focus on identity or the ‘Self ’ in Japanese literature is clearly seen in the fact that one of the most enduring and popular literary forms in Japan has been termed the shish¯osetsu, usually translated as ‘I-novel’.1 Kobayashi Hideo wrote in 1935 that, of all the writing in the world that centred on the individual ‘I’, only
2 Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams Japan’s literature focused on that ‘I’ without placing it in conflict with others in society.2 In Kobayashi’s critical reading, the Japanese concentration on the ‘purified I’ was seen as insular and problematic. Much has since been written on the Japanese search for self and subjectivity in terms of the ‘I-novel’ (Fowler 1988; Fujii 1993; Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996; Suzuki 1996), and this art form cannot be overlooked in considering Japanese formulations of identity. But there were other ways in which Japanese writers problematised their identity which did not depend on the confessional form or inward-looking explorations of the individual psyche. This volume looks at the process of self-identification, not in a vacuum, but in relation to others. In other words, how did Japanese writers see themselves in relation to society and the wider world? Looking at the twentieth century as a whole, we see that Japanese literature has sought many avenues of understanding through contrasting the Japanese ‘Self ’ against a wide variety of ‘Others’, both inside and outside Japan. One reason for directing this search for meaning away from the ‘purified I’ comes from historical circumstances, particularly the colonial relationships that dominated Japanese experience throughout the twentieth century. As John Lie and others have shown, the geographical definition of Japan changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing boundaries had far-reaching effects on the identity of people living within them (Lie 2001). The expanding borders of empire brought about an increase in physical mobility through immigration or wartime deployment. The further from Tokyo the colonising Japanese travelled, the more people they encountered who were different from themselves, while the wars that followed in East and SouthEast Asia and the Pacific brought direct contact with the foreigner as enemy. On the other hand, the further the empire stretched and grew, the more varied were the people who made up the new citizenry of that empire: by 1914, ‘Japanese’ subjects included former nationals of Taiwan and Korea, as well as the inhabitants of the Micronesian islands, the southern half of Sakhalin (Karafuto) and parts of southern Manchuria.3 Later, many of these same subjects would travel to the Japanese islands to take advantage of labour shortages during the war, so that the ethnic make-up of ‘Japan’ changed dramatically. Changing borders thus created a tension between the subject of empire and the individual experience of national origin. This tension between different versions of the Self can be seen clearly in the literature written by people subsumed into the empire as it grew, as well as that written by various members of the multi-ethnic society contained within the new borders of Japan. Similarly, the colonial experience of Japan during the Allied Occupation of 1945–52 created an identity crisis as the conquering empire was turned into newly colonised space. The painful outpouring of tenko¯ or ‘political conversion’ literature showed writers renouncing their former beliefs in Communism, in the divinity of the Emperor, in the very definition of imperial Japan. Responsibility, complicity and the search for a new Self form some of the most interesting questions of identity in postwar Japanese literature. It is clear that the historical context has been significant in the intellectual endeavour to define ‘Japan’. Although the particularities of the twentieth
Introduction 3 century underlie many issues explored in this study, however, our work is based on literary rather than historical discussion. This book examines the ways in which the idea of the Japanese Self has been problematised in literature, as writers through the twentieth century sought to define their identity in relation to a rapidly changing world. The way in which identity is problematised, defined, and explored in these works hangs on ideas of the ‘Self ’ as opposed to some kind of ‘Other’, and it is the ways in which these authors chose to represent this ‘Other’ that this book takes as its central focus. The ‘Other’ of our title thus indicates the imagined entities which literary authors have constructed as the defining Other for the Japanese Self. This kind of binary opposition is a fundamental structure of phenomenology, which places things in opposition to each other in order to arrive at definitions of those things. We define one thing in terms of another thing, or indeed in terms of a ‘notthing’, in order to seek some kind of truth as to the essence of the thing defined. One dialogic opposition frequently discussed in this regard is that between East and West, or Orient and Occident, and a major component of both Orientalism and Occidentalism involves what James Carrier has called ‘essentialist, dialectical definition’ of Self and Other, where ‘essentialisation’ is defined as the process of ‘reduc[ing] the complex entities that are being compared to a set of core features that express the essence of each entity, but only as it stands in contrast to the other’ (Carrier 1995: 3). These core features form a ‘timeless essence that pervades, shapes, and defines the significance of people and events that constitute it’ (ibid.: 2). These ideas of Self and Other, and of essentialisation, are especially applicable in an analysis of modern Japanese literature, because so much writing from Meiji through to the present period consists of essentialised representations of other nations and places, as well as different sections of society within Japan and the empire, in order to come to some overall definition of what it means to be Japanese.4 Before we begin our study of these essentialised representations, however, it is necessary to note that there are a number of problems involved with binary structures, both for the writers using binary structures as models with which to comprehend and represent their world, and for academics who wish to talk about those binary structures in describing the writers’ work. The main problems with using the binary structure are basic problems of phenomenology. First, any binary structure is arbitrary in its nature, as people must choose the objects to be contrasted against the thing they wish to define. This choice is subjective and arbitrary at best, but could be deliberately skewed, as choosing one oppositional object over another would produce a different, and perhaps more favourable, result. This problem helps us realise that the ‘Other’ that appears in many of the works we study may have been chosen in order to make a particular point about the Self which could not be made by contrasting that Self against some different Other. Second, binary systems nearly always construct hierarchies, placing the thing to be defined over and above the contrastive Other. The superiority of the Self against the chosen Other is, over time, taken as natural. Third, the act of comparison and contrast emphasises certain elements of the Self or Other to make the contrast more effective,
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focusing more on difference or more on similarity to make a point. These particular elements come to stand for the whole Self and the whole Other, in the process of essentialisation. The representations of the Other in the works studied in this volume do fall prey to these problems, demonstrating the bias, the naturalised hierarchy, and the essentialisation of the binary structure. However, the authors using these structures may also be doing so for effect. The very act of choosing the binary structure – who will be Self and who or what will stand in for the Other – is what is interesting about their work. Turning to the problems generated by the binary structure for academics who wish to talk about representations of Self and Other, we find that the main problem with writing about ideas of nationhood in terms of Self and Other or in terms of the nation itself (‘Japaneseness’) is that this can, all too often, end up reifying the very construct that the investigation seeks to expose as constructed. For example, a focus on the Meiji construction of ‘Japan’ can become mired in identifying essential characteristics which were perceived by contemporary people to comprise ‘Japaneseness’, thereby minimising the intended focus on the perception itself. Our genealogy of imagery depicting Japan in relation to various Others in the twentieth century must therefore look to the process rather than the end product of construction. The vocabulary can also become tortuous, as we seek to investigate how writers depicted relationships between the perceived ‘Japan’ and other entities both within and outside its perceived borders. It is, therefore, necessary to write in a clear way, but also necessary for the reader to bear in mind that ‘Japan’ is a perceived construct made by people for a reason, not an eternal, naturally occurring unit. Our answer to these problems of description and vocabulary is to always be as specific as possible. All the contributors to this volume have chosen specific case studies of instances where authors have represented the ‘Other’ in writing, engaging with these Others in the attempt to make sense of their own position and identity. The contributors have also been specific about what conclusions we can draw from these case studies. The more case studies we look at, it seems, the more interesting and complex this construct called ‘Japan’ becomes, as it shifts in relation to its chosen Others. In emphasising the constructed nature of Self and Other in the works studied here, our approach is very different from that of the vast body of work known as Nihonjinron, usually translated as ‘theories of Japaneseness’. Nihonjinron theorists of the twentieth century sought to define and pin down a particular ‘Japan’ opposed to various imagined ‘Others’. As Michael Weiner (1997) has pointed out, the primary focus of Nihonjinron is, as its name implies, the Nihonjin or Japanese people themselves, meaning that discussion of Japan inevitably boils down to an emphasis on racial division and difference. To be sure, issues of the Japanese ‘Self ’, definitions of identity, and so on are indeed connected to the movements of Nihon e no kaiki and Nihonjinron in the sense that they are all attempting to come to some definition of what it means to be Japanese. However, whereas a Nihonjinron approach to literature would attempt to identify ‘unique’ characteristics of Japaneseness, reifying the Japanese ‘Self ’ in contrast to ‘Others’, we aim
Introduction 5 to focus on the process of construction, to see how and why writers chose to construct particular images of Self and Other and for what purposes. By highlighting the fluidity of such concepts as Japan and Other, we aim to perform an archaeology of representation, one which illuminates the processes at work behind such representation and thus destroys the possibility of these concepts becoming fixed. Through the various works examined in this volume, ‘Japan’ emerges as an evolving, constantly changing, historical construct, malleable and open to reconstruction. In stressing that neither ‘the West’ nor ‘Asia’ nor ‘Japan’ can be treated as whole, everlasting, essentialised entities, but rather as so many overlapping systems, our work will point to the myth of Nihonjinron. At the same time, we aim to better equip ourselves to confront the tenuous and artificial nature of the divisions postulated by Nihonjinron, providing a frame of reference in which we can see that Nihonjinron is by no means the only way that Japanese have defined the ‘Japanese Self ’. The main problems involved with using and talking about binary opposition are thus arbitrariness, the naturalisation of hierarchy, essentialisation and a misleading focus on difference and division. But perhaps the most intractable problem with the binary structure is, as Derrida maintains, the fact that two totalistic entities cannot actually exist. Always in dialogue and always influenced by the Other, each has a trace of the other in it. As Atsuko Sakaki points out in her contribution to this volume, Derrida’s insistence that there is no ‘Self ’ autonomous of the ‘Other’ leads to the conclusion that the process of identification is always more important than the idea of identity in itself. In other words, the strong relationship between any two entities constructed in opposition to each other is far more significant than the construction of either entity in itself. Keeping Derrida’s sense of connection in mind, the volume opens with two chapters which take different approaches to this central question of the relationship between Self and Other in Japanese literature. In Chapter 1, Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit takes an historical approach to the meaning of ‘Otherness’ and ‘foreignness’ in Japanese culture, situating her case study of Mishima Yukio’s construction of the West in a set of concentric circles of historical engagement with the Other. In the process, she highlights the constructed nature of our own theoretical and academic engagement with ‘Otherness’, examining the many different terms used for the Other in European languages as well as the Japanese. Susan Napier’s Chapter 2 focuses more closely on the nature of the Self–Other relationship in modern Japanese literature, examining the tenuous membrane between ‘this side’ and ‘the other side’ of existence in the work of two authors at either end of the twentieth century: Natsume So¯seki and Murakami Haruki. What emerges most strongly in this chapter is a sense of permeability, a blurring and stretching of boundaries, as the Japanese Self, engaging with the Western or Asian Other, finds the trace of the Other constantly impinging on its own consciousness. The dialogic relationship is demonstrated through metaphors of visibility, of penetration and permeation, so that it is not the difference between ‘our side’ and ‘the other side’ that is important but the process of moving towards and engaging with that other side. It is in the space between Self and
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Other that the relationship emerges, and it is this relationship that serves as the wider focus of this volume. To analyse this relationship and the dynamics of representation, we base our approach on the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, who both used formulations of Self and Other to explain various phenomena in human experience. Theoretical discourse on the idea of the Other was largely shaped by Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, based on the acknowledgement of strangeness in the Other and an emphasis on distance and difference rather than shared characteristics or solidarity. ‘Other’, as used in capitalisation throughout this volume, is a term derived from Lacan’s metaphor of the ‘mirror stage’ of the developing infant. Lacan held that the child, looking in the mirror, would at once recognise itself as a whole independent being, and at the same time, would realise that this mirror image was completely unconnected to itself – unattainable, distant, alien and ‘Other’. Thus, the child’s self-image stems from a fundamental mis-identification, resulting in a fragmentation of the psyche. This fragmentation of the subject is compounded as the child passes through Oedipal stages, culminating in being denied access to the mother. Desire for the mother is forced to shift to desire for an ‘Other’, signifying an unattainable locus of desire in the subject’s subconscious. In Lacan, therefore, desire for the Other serves as a motivating force but also as a source of frustration, unfulfilment and fragmentation. As Kleeman points out in Chapter 14 in this volume, Lacan’s vision of the Other encompasses everything that the Self is not. But there is always a relationship between the two. While Lacan bases his theory on difference between Self and Other, it is desire for the Other that brings the ego into being – the desire for the Other thus shapes the Self. In Foucault’s work, on the other hand, the relationship between Self and Other is expressed in terms of power. Investigating social structures such as clinics and prisons, it was clear to Foucault that knowledge was equivalent to power: the act of knowing enables one to name, define, categorise and order objects (whether they be patients, prisoners, children or citizens of the state), thereby gaining power over them. The representation of the Other in words thus becomes an act of power. This relationship between language, knowledge and power is very strong in Foucault’s thinking, and is often referred to in terms of ‘discourse’, where a ‘discursive act’ refers to the use of words – whether speech, literature, recorded observations or any other media – whereby the speaking subject wields power over the recorded or represented object. The Self thus constructs the Other by way of a particular image of that Other, in the act of representation. But Foucault asks the crucial questions: who decides who is Other? Who writes and represents that Other, in what ways? What is the effect of such representational discourse? These fundamental questions on discursive practice – the actions of power inherent in the act of writing – necessarily underlie our project. Foucault’s concentration on power in society is structured in terms of centre and margins – not in a monolithic static system, but in a constantly challenged and reconfigured one, contested by individuals trying either to hang on to power or to wrest it away from the centre. The possibilities
Introduction 7 of counter-discourse from Foucault’s margins have inspired the best of postcolonial thought: Spivak (1987), Said (1978) and Bhabha (1994) have taken Foucault’s work to its limits in applications to the dynamics of power in literary representation. Lacan and Foucault thus have two very different approaches, but in both, it is the relationship between the Self and the Other that is ultimately more important than the constructs themselves. In Lacan, it is desire and yearning that fills the space between. In Foucault, the exercise of discursive power fills the space. These two very different thinkers are also complementary, and will help us talk about the constructs in the Japanese writers’ work without succumbing to binary essentialisation ourselves. Throughout this volume, the contributors constantly return to this relationship that fills the gap between Self and Other. The Self engages with the Other through feeling – whether desire, fear, yearning or prejudice – and also through the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the speaking voice or other bodily contact. These feelings, bodily contacts and modes of representation fill the perceived gap between Self and Other, connecting them in a relationship that cannot be severed. Rather than speaking in terms of a binary system of two opposed singular entities, therefore, we must speak in terms of negotiation, blurred and shifting boundaries, and conclude that it is in the process of contact, observation and representation that identity is defined. It is for this reason that we have entitled this book Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature, rather than Others in Modern Japanese Literature, because it is in the process of representation that the relationship between Self and Other is most visible. The question to be asked, then, is how did representing the Other lead Japanese authors to new definitions of what it meant for them to be ‘Japanese’? What problems, questions, crises of identity did these authors experience in recognising their own relationship with the Other? This book tries to apprehend the critical moment where Self engages with Other and expresses the effects of that engagement in writing. The moment of recognition that occurs in the space of the representational process is often uncomfortable, but always crucial. In the recent trend towards analysing memory and the signification of plural narrative histories, the same moment of recognition is central. To redress the elision of history – whether in the colonial encounter or closer to home – it is necessary to recognise one’s own role in contributing to that history. To catch the Japanese writers in their moments of recognition is to be privy to a private negotiation of identity as well as the responsibility that a chosen identity entails. This ‘critical moment’ points us towards our subtitle, ‘a critical approach’ to modern Japanese literature. All the contributors have focused closely on the critical thinking of the authors they study, exploring the conceptual orders that each author built to comprehend the world in terms of Self and Other. The acts of construction, interrogation, subversion and inversion uncovered in their works show the highly developed critical sense these authors trained on the modern world. Moreover, the ‘critical approach’ indicates our desire to turn the critical eye on ourselves as scholars, acknowledging the choices we have made in the uses of Western and Japanese theory as well as in the works we study and the translations we use as evidence. By taking Foucault and Lacan as the underpinning
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theorists for this book, we acknowledge that the structures of power and representation found in these thinkers profoundly influenced the ‘trinity’ of postcolonial studies – Said, Spivak and Bhabha – who in turn have influenced different branches of cultural theory as the field continues to specialise. Western theory is clearly not homogeneous, and our aim is not to simplify or make monolithic a ‘set’ of cultural theory. Individual chapters incorporate a variety of different approaches to research and inquiry into issues of identity and representation in the text, including postcolonial studies, gender studies and psychoanalytic theory. While some chapters here are more profoundly influenced by Lacanian psychology, or Foucauldian structures of power, or Said’s vision of Orientalism, the basic concept underlying the book is a willingness to explore the constructions of Self and Other visible in modern Japanese literature. It is our hope that this common ground between contributors, as well as the commitment to specific case studies and contextualisation, will make the book more readable and useful for readers daunted by the vast array of theorists in cultural studies. Similarly, the use of Japanese theorists is by no means homogeneous. While there are few contributors here who have not been influenced by Karatani Ko¯jin’s thinking on the ‘origins’ of Japanese literature, Kleeman directly addresses the ideas of Komori Yo¯ichi on colonialism and introduces us to the important concepts of what Komori calls ‘colonial regard’ and ‘colonial disregard’. Pinnington deconstructs the Japanese academic reception of Edward Said’s Orientalism, indicative of the strong trend in Japan, as elsewhere, to take a cue from France in discussing the colonial relationship. It is true that the reference to Western theory far outweighs the reference to Japanese theory in this book. One reason is that Japanese theorists have often followed Lacan and Foucault in discussing ideas of Self and Other. It seems reasonable therefore to go to the source in formulating our own models of interpretation. A future research project may do well to investigate how Lacan and Foucault have been interpreted and applied by Japanese thinkers, and to build on the essays here in showing how Self and Other have been analysed in Japanese literary theory. Another reason for the theory imbalance is that many Japanese thinkers who have written copiously on the ideas of Self and Other have done so in essentialist terms, contributing to Nihonjinron theory. A more systematic engagement with Nihonjinron is indeed necessary, in order to deconstruct its unbalanced view of the world and explore how it arose and its influence on academia. We hope that the present volume will provide an opening for this kind of engagement in the future.
Overview of the book The book is divided into three parts indicating what kind of ‘Other’ the writer is engaging with: Others outside Japan; Others inside Japan; and the complicated Other of the liminal colonial and postcolonial world. These divisions are somewhat arbitrary, but they also point to the way our perspective on the Other is formed: is the Other close to me, far away from me, or part of me? While we have chosen to include particular works depending on the type of Other that is
Introduction 9 represented, the works themselves are not ‘representative’: not everyone who wrote on America wrote like Nagai Kafu¯ , not every woman who wrote on the war wrote like Uno Chiyo, and not every visitor to the Asian colonies wrote in the same way as Sato¯ Haruo. All works analysed constitute specific instances of an encounter with the imagined Other and the construction of that Other in literature. While the politics of knowledge and representation are inescapable in the research process, we have included a mixture of those authors famous in the ¯ e Kenzaburo¯) with authors whose West (Natsume So¯ seki, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, O ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro) in names are not so well known (Kajii Motojiro¯, Yi Yang-Ji, O order to show the wide spectrum of writers engaged in the critical apprehension of the Other. Where contributors have felt it necessary, works have been re-translated from the original Japanese language, in attempt to show the original from another perspective than that provided in translations already available.5 Elsewhere, works have been chosen that have not yet been translated into English, to redress the balance of the translated canon.6 In terms of the language of the original texts, while the liminal sites of Japan’s colonies would undoubtedly provide many examples of representing the Other from both the colonising and colonised points of view, we have had to limit the current enquiry to those works written in the Japanese language.7 However, the works examined were written in the Japanese language by a variety of people who would define themselves variously as ‘mainstream Japanese’, Okinawan, Korean-Japanese, repatriated Japanese, or some other perceived minority identity. What these authors have in common, whether ‘mainstream’ or ‘minority’ Japanese, is that they have all problematised the idea of what it is that makes someone ‘Japanese’.8 Taken together, we have a collection of moments of engagement that show the crucial questions of identity asked by Japanese writers through the twentieth century. Part I External Others Part I focuses on Japan’s perspective looking at ‘Others’ outside Japan, exploring visions of what constitutes ‘non-Japan’ or the non-‘Nihonjin’. While Japan’s perspective on the external Other could also include such issues as the function of the ‘West’ in Meiji literature through the medium of translation, or the representation of European foreigners in Tokyo, the chapters here focus on the Japanese writer abroad, experiencing the Other through physical relocation and the shock of cultural difference. Although all the writers discussed in this section are coincidentally male, not all writers who travelled abroad were male. The point is significant, because the male discourse on the feminised ‘Other’ has been seen as the norm. The idea of a gendered Orientalism has so infused studies on representation of the Other that it is difficult to present work on a political or racialised Other without being asked to place the discussion in gendered terms. Although the dichotomy of the male subject Self writing the powerless (subaltern) and therefore feminised Other is a discourse with considerable weight, we reject this approach on the grounds that it replicates gender imbalances that
10 Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams should be uncovered through genealogy, not perpetuated through generalisations. In this book we have a number of authors, most of whom happen to be male, some female, but all of whom take on the subject stance when representing their chosen Other.9 The normalisation of the feminised Other may come, not only from the fact that most writers who travelled were men, but also from the definition of the Lacanian Other, which, as we have seen, implies desire. Many critics writing about the Other in cultural terms also speak in terms of desire.10 While desire is one factor in the relationship between Self and Other, however, it is not the whole story. As Rachael Hutchinson argues in Chapter 3, Meiji literature often deals with the Other in mediated, analytical constructions, often highly critical of the relationship between Japan and the Other in question. Not all Meiji literature can be categorised in terms of yearning for the Other, dominated by the desire and triangular mediation of ‘gap theory’. In Hutchinson’s reading of Nagai Kaf u¯ ’s Amerika monogatari (Tales of America, 1908 [2000]) we see a writer wrestling with the concept of Other, pondering the dichotomies of Europe and America, white and black, female and male, as well as East and West. In Kafu’s ¯ work there appears not one homogeneous ‘West’, nor one simple binary construction of ‘Japan and the West’, but a multiform, many-layered constellation of dichotomies which raise many questions for the critical observer. One of the most interesting and problematic questions to come out of postcolonial theorising on Japan is that of where Japan fits with regard to Orientalism. Writers such as Nagai Kaf u¯ and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ were certainly influenced by their reading of Pierre Loti, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and other French and British writers whom Said would doubtless define as Orientalists.11 In Chapter 4, Adrian Pinnington addresses this discourse on Japan’s relationship with Orientalism through Tanizaki’s portrayal of China, emphasising the complicated nature of the relationship between Japan and its perceived ‘Orient’. Pinnington clearly deconstructs the academic debate on Tanizaki’s Orientalism, and in so doing, achieves a new reading of Tanizaki’s construction of race, gender and the nation. Stephen Dodd’s Chapter 5 on Kajii Motojiro¯ similarly extends the recent discourse on modernity and the subject in twentieth-century Japanese literature by focusing on Kajii’s negotiation of selfhood in the rapidly changing world of Tokyo in the 1920s.12 A foregrounded cityscape and a vast array of material goods point to Kajii’s physical engagement with consumerist Tokyo, assailed by bright lights and harsh sounds as he seeks relief from mental anguish. As in many other Modernist works, mental anguish is related to physical illness, and in examining Kajii’s tuberculosis in relation to his literature, Dodd hits upon the importance of the bodily, physical subject in the Self of modern Japanese literature. A similar barrage of light and sound attacks Yokomitsu Riichi’s hero in Shanghai, a city which revolves on the axes of trade and possession: of land, bodies, and money. In Chapter 6, Douglas Slaymaker analyses Yokomitsu’s construction of the Other in Shanghai and Paris by way of his equally representational Othering of woman, arguing against the simple gendered binary in a complex layering of Otherness with the question of national identity at its root.
Introduction 11 Reading these four essays together, one is struck by the impact of movement on the writer’s body, as the fluidity of travel produces the encounter with the Other, accompanied by a fluidity of consciousness. As the writer’s consciousness expands to include a feeling of possession over the represented object, the emphasis is on the writer’s subjectivity and how the boundary delineating the Self may be expanded or contracted for different purposes. The writers here transcend the boundaries of ‘Japan’ to question the meaning of national identity. Such a shifting of boundaries may be seen as a defining characteristic of the modern. We see in the works analysed here a fin de siècle search for meaning, a dissolving world, as well as a fear of, or uncertainty towards, change. There is also an increasing focus on the writing process, as the narrative and writerly process takes centre stage. In this reflexivity, noted particularly in the writing of Nagai Kafu¯ and Kajii Motojiro¯, we have a doubling of the critical sense, so it is not just what one writes, but how one writes the Other, that becomes important. Part II Internal Others As seen above, the history of modern Japan, involving empire, colonialism, immigration, war and repatriation at once creates an idea of ‘Japan’ as one homogeneous national unit subject to periodic expansion and contraction, and also as a multi-ethnic community of people contained within the constantly changing national borders (Lie 2001). This section deals with the issue of centre and peripheries within Japan itself, exploring such questions as how the centre looks out at the peripheries and margins of its own society, as well as how the socalled peripheries look ‘in’ towards the centre. The very idea of a ‘central’ Japanese state, or the construction of ‘typical’ Japanese society, provides the fundamental question – who is it that defines the position of centre and periphery? Who decides which people belong in which category, and is this categorisation open to change? Part I of this volume does not include the perspective of how Western and Asian Others look at Japan, but Part II does address the question of how those constructed as Others inside Japan look at the ‘Japan’ that marginalises them.13 The crucial difference is that the ‘Others’ appearing in this section are also nominally ‘Japanese’, which raises many interesting questions about the definition of both ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’. People whose identities are often constructed in terms of being Other to some Japanese ‘norm’ are the burakumin, those of ambivalent sexualities, those left behind by the ‘economic miracle’, the deracinated postwar population, Korean-Japanese (or zainichi-Kankokujin) writers, and women writers. The lines of difference thus arrange themselves along the axes of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. Some of the questions raised in this section lead to yet more questions about liminality and the paradoxes involved in defining a ‘Self ’ against an ‘Other’. In exploring issues of being ‘Japanese’ in a liminal ground, we not only seek to explore the concrete experience of Japanese writers who occupy this liminal space, but also to challenge and investigate issues of closure inherent in any division constructed in discourses (and discursive acts) of binary opposition.
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The first two chapters here explore the representation of the burakumin, or former ‘outcasts’ of the Tokugawa social system, in terms of their Otherness to modern Japanese society. In Chapter 7, Mark Morris addresses the issue of ‘passing’ in Shimazaki To¯ son’s Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1906 [1974]) in terms of identity politics. Passing – assuming an altered identity of ‘other’ to a self which is dominated and othered by the dominant mainstream – is examined not only in terms of ethnicity, but also of gender. The politics surrounding the publication, republication, consecration and rewriting of the work are also shown to reflect contemporary social issues concerning the treatment and representation of burakumin alterity. In Chapter 8, James Raeside explores the burakumin identity from another angle, in Noma Hiroshi’s massive work Seinen no wa (Circle of Youth, 1946–70). Raeside examines the interpersonal relationships in Noma’s fiction in terms of Hegelian dualistic structures. Individual identity is seen to be stronger than assigned labels, as the characters, burakumin or otherwise, are revealed to have many varied motives – often more concerned with family vendettas than wider social issues, although the force of political protest is far stronger in Circle of Youth than in The Broken Commandment. Moving away from ethnicity to gender alterity, Rebecca Copeland’s Chapter 9 examines Uno Chiyo in the context of issues which faced women writing on the war, whether travelling to the front in Asia or remaining at home. How did the woman writer develop strategies that allowed her to exercise creative power at a time when masculine strength was valorised and the paternal power of the nation foregrounded? Uno Chiyo’s independence and creativity shine through once again in this study, which highlights Chiyo’s critique and her subversion of what constitutes a woman’s ‘acceptable’ behaviour. In Chapter 10, Ann Sherif looks at gender politics in a different light, examining the reaction of Japanese intellectuals to the trials surrounding the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Japan. Arguing that much of the objection to Lawrence’s novel was based on a differentiation between ‘native sex’ and ‘foreign sex’, Sherif at once recognises the inherent allure of the Other in the medium of translated literature, and highlights the complexity of translation in how it challenges our understanding of what constitutes ‘native literature’ or ‘foreign literature’ at any particular moment. David Stahl and Mark Williams show two sides of the aftermath of war in their respective chapters (Chapters 11 and 12), dealing with the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), and the writers who suffered for ideology in the tenko¯ (conver¯ e Kenzaburo¯’s Hiroshima no¯to sion) literature of postwar Japan. Stahl analyses O (Hiroshima Notes, 1965 [1995]) to show the ‘othering’ processes that operate on the disfigured, as well as the subjectivity available for the ‘othered’ through the inversion of the status quo. The emphasis on the word ‘survivor’ as opposed to ‘victim’ reminds us of the power and agency inherent in our choice of words, ¯ e’s representation or in our English translation of hibakusha. Stahl whether in O takes the act of hearing a narrative as a bodily experience, suggesting that the boundary between Self and Other is not only blurred but permeable. In the context of the rebuilding nation, Williams reads Japan as a colonised space
Introduction 13 during the Occupation years, using Said’s model of colonialism to reconfigure tenk¯o literature as a site of counter-discourse. Shiina Rinzo¯ ’s Utsukushii onna (The Beautiful Woman, 1955) is analysed in terms of the freedom of human beings to write their own past, foregrounding agency as the foundation for writing the Self. One central concept that emerges from these essays is the importance of the body in wartime and postwar literature. We have the absent body of the soldierhusband at the Front, the focus on body and sex in the 1950s trials and nikutai bungaku (carnal literature), and in the case of the burakumin, the question of the invisible trace of the Other within – ‘identity’ carried in the blood. As in Part I, the act of seeing in this section is significant. Not only is there an unwillingness on the part of society to see the hibakusha, but also the unwillingness of the hibakusha to have other people see their bodies. Nobody can see the soldier who is absent even though his absence engenders a great desire to see. When we are talking in terms of the centre and periphery, and the people who live on the margins of the main society, the issue of seeing and non-seeing becomes very important. But, just as the expansion of the Self overcomes the seemingly solid boundaries of the physical world in Part I, the same volition resurfaces in the act of showing oneself to others (and one can show oneself through the writing act). By choosing when to show, and to whom, the marginal can become subject, not just object to the Other’s gaze. The act of showing, as well as the act of seeing, constitutes a moment when the boundary between Self and Other is blurred. The effect that a visual image has on us is very strong precisely because it constitutes such a close and visceral engagement with the Other, coming into us through our eyes. Similarly, the hearing of another’s tale, especially if we don’t want to hear it, is a very direct engagement as the sounds come into us through our ears. This seeing and showing of the body within Japan seem to be another site of engagement like the permeable, flexible boundaries we saw in Part I. However, the most obvious site of engagement between Self and Other is the boundary itself. A boundary naturally implies duality, a place dividing one thing from another. At the workshop on Self and Other that formed the basis of this volume, James Raeside and Faye Kleeman pointed out that human beings dislike duality and the identity crisis it engenders, leading us to search for a point of resolution by facing our identity in a critical way. The most obvious place where boundaries become an issue for human identity is the colonial liminal site, bringing us to the final part of the volume. Part III Liminal Sites The two main questions that form the basis of our inquiry in Part III are: ‘What is it that brings the centre and peripheries together?’ and ‘Is there a middle or liminal ground?’ What becomes clear in this section is that the three parts of Self, Other, and any liminal ground are not fixed: ‘Japan’ is not a closed structure (as Nihonjinron theorists would have us believe) but malleable and open to reconstruction. This section explores what it means to define ‘Japan’ through an examination
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of those peoples who are not ethnically Japanese but who have at some time assumed or been forced to assume a Japanese identity due to historical circumstance. The most obvious example is that of coloniality through the Japanese occupation of Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, Manchukuo, and the Micronesian islands. The colonial Other represents the locus of the interface between Japan and the Other, as the site where the Other is forced into becoming the ‘Self ’. The question is, can the Other ever become the Self ? The chapters in this part examine the theoretical question of empire and the loss of empire, bound up in identity formation: what was the ‘Japaneseness’ that these people were forced to assume? Examining the process of Japanising the Asian Other will tell us much about the definition of Japanese identity. The Japanised Other will be analysed through writings of people who have undergone this process themselves and whose literature can be read as both construction and reflection of the ‘semicolonised self ’. Perhaps the most interesting case of the ‘semi-colonised’ writer comes in the case of Okinawan literature, which has experienced the double coloniality of both Japan and the United States. Invaded by the Satsuma domain in 1609, the kingdom of the Ryukyu Islands was annexed by the Meiji government and made a prefecture of Japan in 1879. Established as one of the main centres of the US Occupation after 1945, Okinawa remained under occupation until 1972, when it was supposedly handed back to the mainland. The fact that much of Okinawan territory remains under American occupation today ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, which forms the context of O explores the modern sense of identity through the figure of the female shaman, ¯ shiro’s texts challenges the or yuta. In Chapter 13, Leith Morton’s analysis of O classification of Okinawan literature as ‘peripheral’, and warns against reading the yuta as a ‘gendered Other’. The agency of the yuta in the face of bureaucratic and military obstacles is analysed with a reminder that the beauty ¯ shiro’s fiction are as much a part of the literature as any and humour of O dynamics of power. Faye Kleeman’s Chapter 14 situates the colonial context of Taiwan within a broader enquiry about the Othering process: is an Other that arose through the mediation of geopolitics, especially colonialism, different from an internal Other like Japan’s zainichi - Kankokujin (Korean–Japanese), burakumin, hibakusha, or Ainu? One distinguishing feature of the external Other as colonial or imperial subject is the necessity of incorporating him/her into the empire. Kleeman challenges Komori Yo¯ichi’s argument on colonial liminality in terms of agency, and uses the writing of Sato¯ Haruo to examine the epistemological gap inherent in colonial encounters within the specific context of the emergence of the modern subject. As a manifestation of the boundary or contact zone, the colonial Other could be the very site which best allows us to overcome the binary construct. In Chapter 15, Atsuko Sakaki examines the thoretical model, put forward by the writer Goto¯ Meisei, that urges us to revise the way we understand the cultural identity of Japan. Goto¯ was a returnee from the former colony of Japan, present-day North Korea. Being forced to ‘return’ to Kyushu, which didn’t feel like ‘home’, Goto¯ recognised that there is indeed no centre in Japanese culture or in the mind of the Japanese, as
Introduction 15 Japan is hybrid and torn from within. He proposed the model of an oval (as opposed to a circle) which has two centres (as opposed to one) as a metaphor for Japan. Overall, his case constitutes a valid antithesis to the theory of Nihon e no kaiki. As noted above, because the colonial moment is so important in this study, it is tempting to examine it ‘from the other side’, including writings from the colonised spaces written in languages other than Japanese. However, such a project is far beyond the scope of this study, so we must hope that others will continue to explore the question of how Self and Other have been represented in the former colonies of Japan, whether in Taiwan, Korea, Okinawa or elsewhere, and in the various languages of those countries. What is possible, and critically illuminating, is to examine ‘semi-colonised’ literature written in Japanese by a so-called ‘nonnative speaker’. Catherine Ryu’s Chapter 16 on Yi Yang-ji takes a novel by a Korean-Japanese writer as a case study to examine the possibilities and significations of language – issues which also form the basis of the novel under examination. Yuhi (Yuhi, 1988) is a novel about writing and signification, where both the novel itself, as well as the writing examined within it, are penned in Japanese by ‘non-native’ speakers. The counterpoint between the identities of author and narrator is analysed in terms of Lacanian language and symbol, reaching through the text to find that, in the space beyond language, the distance between Self and Other collapses completely. Ryu’s essay may be read as a pointer towards a loophole in Lacan’s work on the Self which heralds the possibilities of relation rather than distinction. Like the possibilities found on Foucault’s margins, the ‘Lacanian twist’ highlights the idea that the relationship between Self and Other, most clear in this section analysing liminal colonial sites, really is more important than the Self or Other in isolation. Ryu’s essay serves as a fitting conclusion to the volume, positing a theoretical model which emphasises the relationship inherent in the process of representing the Other, rather than the image that results from that representation.
Note on the text The system of referencing we have used shows the original date of publication first and then the date of the English edition is given in square brackets afterwards.
Notes 1 The inadequacy of this translation, stemming from the fundamental inequivalence of the words ‘sho¯setsu’ and ‘novel’, is widely recognised. For an interesting discussion of the problem see Miyoshi (1991: 9–36). While ‘I-novel’ is undoubtedly an unsatisfactory translation, we use it here to point to the indigenous Japanese art form that centres on the inner workings of the individual’s mind. 2 See ‘Discourse on Fiction of the Self ’, in Kobayashi (1995), especially pp. 69–70. 3 Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War yielded Taiwan as a colony from 1895, while victory over Russia added southern Sakhalin and the southern Manchurian territory in 1905. Korea was made a protectorate in 1905 and was formally colonised in 1910.
16 Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
4 5 6 7
8 9
10 11 12 13
Islands in Micronesia (called Nan’yo¯ in Japanese) were occupied from 1914–44. While Myers and Peattie (1984) define the Japanese empire in such terms as to categorise the territory gained in China, South-East Asia and the South Pacific from 1931–45 as an ‘informal’ empire, Beasley argues that we should widen the definition of Japanese imperialism to take these territories into account (1987). On binary opposition, and its particular applicability to analysing literature of the Meiji period, see Hutchinson (2000: 1–2). It may be interesting for readers to compare Stahl’s translation with that of Swain and Yonezawa, Hutchinson’s with Iriye’s, and Morris’ with Strong’s, for example. On the politics of translation, see Fowler (1992). This criterion is not as simple as it sounds: as Maher points out, what we call ‘the Japanese language’ is in fact a pluralistic mixture of dialects and modes of expression (1995). On writing from Taiwan and the colonial south by Japanese, expatriate and Taiwanese writers, see Kleeman (2003). An interesting case study may also be found in Ching (2001), Chapter 5. On Korean-language writing on the colonial experience, see Kyeong-Hee Choi and Michael Shin, both in Shin and Robinson (1999). Choi (2001) and Swaner (1997) also provide excellent readings of colonial Korean literature in terms of writing and the body. John Lie suggests the terms ‘Japanese Japanese’ and ‘Yamato people’ as alternatives to ‘mainstream Japanese’ (2001: 3). It is interesting to note here that Meiji and Taisho¯ period female authors writing on the Western Other mostly used it as a contrast by which to criticise Japanese gender dynamics. Most of these works were written by women who had travelled abroad (just as the male writers on the Western Other tend to be those who had travelled to Europe and America). Karen Kelsky argues that women’s writing on the Other came to a head in the Occupation when the racial Other was suddenly present and visible in Japan, resulting in a portrayal of the Western Other in a sexualised and fetishistic representation of the white male soldier (Kelsky 2001: 120–1). The most famous example being René Girard’s model of triangular desire, employed by Ken Ito (1991). See also Stephen Snyder (2000). Certainly, the question plaguing Nagai Kafu¯ in the closing years of Meiji was exactly how to position Japan vis-à-vis the ‘Orient’ of mainland Asia, and whether Japan was part of, or separate from it (Hutchinson 2001). An excellent example of this discourse is Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism (2002). The question of how Japan has been represented by others has been examined at length – some interesting examples for further reading are Miyoshi (1979, 1991), Clammer (2001), Wilkinson (1991) and Iriye (1975).
References Beasley, W.G. (1987) Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Burke, Kenneth (1969) A Grammar of Motives, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Carrier, James G. (ed.) (1995) Occidentalism: Images of the West, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ching, Leo T.S. (2001) Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Choi, Kyeong-Hee (2001) ‘Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyong’ae’s “Undergound Village”’, Public Culture 13(3): 431–58. Fowler, Edward (1988) The Rhetoric of Con fessi on : Shisho¯setsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Introduction 17 ——(1992) ‘Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction’, Journal of Japanese Studies 18(1): 1–44. Fujii, James (1993) Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela (1996) Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shisho¯setsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon, Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Hutchinson, Rachael (2000) ‘Occidentalism in Nagai Kaf u: ¯ Constructing a Critique of Meiji, 1903–1912’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Oxford University. ——(2001) ‘Occidentalism and Critique of Meiji: The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kafu¯ ’, Japan Forum 13(2): 195–213. Ito, Ken (1991) Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kelsky, Karen (2001) Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kleeman, Faye Yuan (2003) Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Kobayashi Hideo (1995) Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo – Literary Criticism 1924– 1939, trans. Paul Anderer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lie, John (2001) Multiethnic Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lippit, Seiji (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press. Maher, John C. (1995) ‘The Right Stuff: Towards an Environmental Linguistics’, in John C. Maher and Gaynor Macdonald (eds) Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language, London: Kegan Paul International. Miyoshi, Masao (1991) Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Myers, Ramon H. and Peattie, Mark R. (eds) (1984) The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895– 1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, New York: Pantheon. Shin, Gi-wook and Robinson, Michael (eds) (1999) Colonial Modernity in Korea, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Snyder, Stephen (2000) Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kaf u¯, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Methuen. Suzuki, Tomi (1996) Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Swaner, Scott (1997) ‘Frustrating Colonial Narratives: Writing and the Body in Dictée’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 3(2): 130–52. Weiner, Michael (1997) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, New York: Routledge.
Further reading Clammer, John (2001) Japan and its Others, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Derrida, Jacques (1996) The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, New York: Pantheon.
18 Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams Iriye, Akira (ed.) (1975) Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacan, Jacques (2004) Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton. Miyoshi, Masao (1979) As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wilkinson, Endymion (1991) Japan Versus the West: Image and Reality, London: Penguin.
1
Hermes and Hermès Othernesses in modern Japanese literature Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit
The promise of our topic is this: that in discussing the manifold dimensions of the Other as it is represented in modern Japanese literature we will gain an insight into the ways the ‘world’ of ‘Japanese’ literature is categorized and structured. I prefer to approach it in the form of four concentric circles. As an introduction, let me first of all give a rough historical sketch of ‘Japan and its (exterior) Others’, or at least of some remarkable aspects which may be of relevance for us here. Next, I will briefly discuss the notion of the Other. Then, I intend to take a somewhat closer look at our intellectual agenda, and, finally, I want to present the case of Mishima Yukio and his references to the West and to European literature as an example of a re-invention of ‘modern’ Japanese literature. But let us proceed by highlighting some historical aspects first.
Circle 1: Othernesses formed and formulated In our quest for ‘Japan and its Others’, it seems appropriate first of all to scrutinize, albeit in a necessarily superficial manner, Japan’s relationship to the world. Let us take a look at that topos which has determined Japan’s image through the centuries more than anything else. At the same time, we also witness Japan’s early encounter with a foreign culture, which had a fundamental influence on her selfimage. We are talking here of the influence of continental culture, above all of China, which served as a point of comparison for the earliest European travelers to the East, who used to describe Japan as being the cultural junior, the younger brother, the emulator and imitator. From a Japanese perspective, her geographical distance from the continent, on the fringe of the Chinese cultural community, was ideal and resulted in what can be called, after David Pollack (1986), a dialectical relationship in contrast to subjugation or subordination. Japan profited from the achievements of the dominant culture, but her distance made possible ample control over what to accept at what time and to what extent. In this process, China always functioned as a parameter of otherness. By taking in foreign elements, the Other was selectively internalized, so to speak, but at the same time, the very essence of the Self was articulated (Jackson 1990: 256).
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For many centuries, down to the so-called ‘opening of the country’ and its orientation towards the West in the nineteenth century, what was Japanese could only be perceived in relation to what was Chinese as the example of otherness. It goes without saying that we are not dealing here with a geographical entity or ‘objective’ cultural facts. ‘Japan’ in this sense is a construct, just as ‘China’ is, and of course, this applies as well to the other entities which come into play, be they called ‘Asia’, ‘Europe’, the ‘Occident’ or the ‘West’. Donald Keene (1973) even goes so far as to see in the relationship of attraction and rejection, in the ‘love– hate’ attitude towards China, a central aspect, not only of literature, but of the whole traditional culture of Japan. As a matter of fact, we could study in literature this process of national, cultural, and aesthetic self-definition vis-à-vis China, a process to which the question of so-called ‘influence’ is less appropriate but which could more adequately be studied as a ‘constructive dialectic’ in the form of a Japanese monologue with herself about China. Before 1868, Chinese was, with but a few exceptions, the only foreign language read in Japan. On the other hand, written Chinese had a very hybrid status because of the Japanese ‘invention’ of kanbun, which permitted a Japanese author to write a text in Chinese without being able to speak a word of the language. By this procedure of reading or articulating the written text as Japanese, not only was the otherness of the Chinese text suspended, but also the polarity of symbol and meaning was neutralized. It was only the encounter with the West which forced upon the Japanese a new understanding of ‘translation’, for they were now for the first time confronted with the fact that symbol and meaning do not coincide, that the connection between the written characters and what they denote is arbitrary and that therefore the meaning of a text in a foreign language can only be disclosed by a ‘real’ translation (Jackson 1990: 259). On the other hand, however, for the first time in several centuries there was a chance to meet foreigners in Japan,1 or, as a member of a delegation, abroad. How these Japanese travelers to the West on an official mission, beginning with the January 1862 mission, explored foreignness in very concrete terms is as fascinating a chapter in history as is the experience of Western diplomats and of the Western consultants called into the country by the government in Tokyo. Fortunately, both these explorations are well documented in Japanese as well as in Western languages.2 No less engrossing are the experiences of Japanese writers since the late nineteenth century in America and Europe which, in literary form, highlight the cultural shock and the different phases of self-exploration abroad and after returning home. But for the great majority of Japanese writers and intellectuals, their encounter with the West took place in their own country, although their spiritual and mental commitment was no less intense, with Christianity and Marxism being two focal points of their involvement. For the young elite of early modern Japan, Christianity as a ‘window to the West’ held a great attraction, embodying in their eyes a value system which seemed suited to help shatter traditional feudalism. Christianity undoubtedly served as a spiritual catalyst for the Japanese search for identity, which frequently
Hermes and Hermès 21 followed the characteristic pattern of a ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki): this pattern consists of a phase of enthusiastic adoption of Western culture and civilization and of Christianity, followed by rejection and a turning to whatever was considered to be traditional Japanese spirit and values. Nevertheless, the whole body of modern literature is interspersed to an astonishing extent with Christian motifs and biblical references, and these aspects exist independently of how intensively and how long the author was personally involved with Christianity (see Williams 1996: 156–74). The encounter with Marxism is of no less importance to Japanese intellectuals, although, like Protestantism in the late nineteenth century, it hardly affected the bulk of the population. Its influence on the country’s elite, however, was all the more intense. During the Taisho¯ period (1912–26), Marxism widely dominated intellectual life, as it offered a comprehensive model for interpreting history as well as the present age. Marxism therefore held great fascination both as a ‘science’ and as a revolutionary idea leading to concrete action, and continued to exert its influence even in cases where scholars and writers had to recant under political pressure (tenko¯ ). Japan’s colonial experience in the first half of the twentieth century, which Komori Yo¯ichi and others interpret as a form of compensation to divert herself from external colonial pressures,3 represents another set of encounters with the Other both within and beyond the boundaries of the Japanese islands. Here, the experience becomes even more complex, as the colonial Other is superseded by a second plane resulting from that conscious or unconscious act of self-assertion in the face of internal colonization. Thus, Japan has been conducting a dialogue with the Occident for more than a century, one that has, however, been largely ignored by the West.
Circle 2: Dialectics of difference: methodological considerations on the notion of the Other A culture that discovers what is alien to itself simultaneously manifests what is in itself. (McGrane 1989: 1)
This statement by Bernard McGrane aptly summarizes our expectations for the topic at hand. The alien, or the Other, as we here term it, is a relational notion. It assumes a dialectical relationship between the Self and the Other. The Self becomes aware of itself only through perceiving the Other, and cognizance of the Other is possible only to the extent that the Self consciously objectivizes and relativizes its own system of codes. As for possible definitions of the Other, we are faced with a wide spectrum of differing notions: there is the normative versus the cognitive Other, the intra- and the intercultural Other, ethnic Otherness, outsiders and outcastes, the unknown as a source of fear and fascination, the exotic and the intellectually attractive, the foreign and the non-member (non-belonging), the temporally or spatially distant, the repressed, the enigmatic and the uncanny or numinous (Wierlacher 1993: 39). All these concepts have been productive
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in literature in Japan and other regions of the world for centuries, although they have only rarely been studied in a systematic way. Modern disciplines such as law, sociology, cultural anthropology, theology, philosophy, and mathematical logic all define their own specific notions of Otherness depending on their research objectives. But even disciplines such as ethnology have so far refrained from attempting a precise definition of the notion. Xenology, or the study of the Other, as an interdisciplinary and interculturally oriented field of Cultural Studies, has, however, received a boost since the later 1980s due, inter alia, to the political situation after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, an accelerated globalization, the North–South conflict, and migration problems in the wake of such events. What has been a constant concern in this context is the question of how to thematize different cultures as systems of rules and hypotheses without subjugating them or alienating them from themselves. The question culminates in the observation that we will have to accept an incommensurable rest of cultural Otherness, which should be not suppressed but accepted within the framework of a critically informed hermeneutics (ibid.: 48–9). The notion of Otherness, however, prefigures a certain understanding rooted in the semantics of English. Research on the phenomenon in other languages may produce other distinctions and problematics, depending on different semantic fields in their respective notions. In English, foreigner and stranger designate non-membership of an ethno-political unit, or of one of its segments such as local communities, social class etc. respectively, while alien refers to a natural given otherness. The same tripartite structure holds for Italian with forestiero, straniero, and alieno, while French covers the first two categories by étranger, whereas the third category is represented by autre or d’autrui. Of particular relevance to our topic are, of course, the respective Japanese terms, from the binary notions of uchi versus soto (the ‘inner’ or ‘own’ versus ‘the outer’) or the distinction of ji (self) versus ta (the other) to terms designating a person’s spatial, social, ethnic, or cultural otherness such as yosomono, bugaisha, gaijin, gaikokujin, ijin, keto¯, nanban, etc. The rigidity or fluidity of these distinctions is also an aspect to be considered. In England, in early modern aristocratic households we find lists of visitors, which contain only two categories: ‘domestics’, i.e. those attached to the house by relationship or service, versus ‘others’. Or take the basic distinction of friend and foe with the implication that in tribal societies there was no third status in between tribal brother and enemy. The eminent importance of the status of guest in older societies can be explained by the fact that it provided the only chance of a temporary change from one to the other side of the binary distinction (Stagl 1997: 88). It goes without saying that all these distinctions on the level of everyday speech are reflected in the respective scholarly discussions. Research in German, for example, differentiates between the Strange (das Fremde) and the Other (das Andere), the Strange being Otherness interpreted (as ‘Interpretament’) (Wierlacher 1993: 62).4 Not just in modern writing but within the history of what has traditionally been understood as Japanese literature in a wide sense, including genres such as
Hermes and Hermès 23 travelogues (kiko¯bun), literary diaries (nikki) as well as topographies such as the Fudoki, essays (zuihitsu), anecdotal literature such as setsuwa and other forms, we can study the whole cultural spectrum of possible Othernesses, from ethnic and sociological to anthropological and existential, or from epistemological to political aspects. Let these very rough and cursory remarks suffice to demonstrate that our concern lies right in the center of an increasingly dense network of studies dedicated to aspects of the Other and fed by a wide range of disciplinary approaches and methodological premises.
Circle 3: Japaneseness and liminalities: practical considerations It may make sense to ponder a while about the implications and ramifications of ‘Japan and its Others’, before we plunge into an ocean of case studies. Put briefly, the focus of this volume is an examination of the ways in which authors writing in Japanese have constructed divisions between center and periphery/Self and Other in literary texts. This starting point – or should I better say purpose – of our investigations is naturally based on a number of premises, and it is these premises which deserve our attention, as they will inevitably shape the results of our work. What is it, then, that we are looking for as we investigate the Japanese Self as manifested in literary texts? Or, to put it more radically: What do we talk about when we talk about Japan? And does it make sense at all to look for a Japanese Self ? Do we want to learn something about Japan or about literature? Let me first present a few general thoughts, using no more than a general (scholarly) common sense, without any resort to ‘theory’, although, as we all know, we can never really tell where our comprehension of things is tinted by what the seventeenth-century German physicist–philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg described as processes of our intellectual digestion. As Hutchinson and Williams have reminded us in their Introduction to this volume, Japan’s ‘Self ’ and ‘Others’ do not make up a fixed, polarized, binary opposition, but are to be discussed as representations with a strong tendency to turn into essentialized entities. So far, so good. It seems wise, therefore, to question all those notions that we are dealing with, beginning with geographical, racial or ethnic identity, as well as any other issue of closure constructed in discourses. In our research design, we tacitly acknowledge the importance of ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’ as an essential unit of inquiry. This is perhaps one of the core problems of our agenda, and it would be wise not to lose sight of it as we plunge into concrete case studies. But where do we look for the Japanese Self and its Others in written literary texts? On the level of content or narration, we may first distinguish two broad categories of settings, namely, works set in Japan and works set abroad, so-called kaigai sho¯setsu, which, apart from Japan’s colonial adventure and literature instrumental in this context, have been relatively rare until fairly recently, probably reflecting the fact that most Japanese writers live in Japan and that, except for a large Korean-Japanese community, there are very
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few members of other ethnic groups writing in Japanese. These facts contrast strongly with many other literatures, where a conspicuous number of works regarded as representative texts are either written in diaspora by emigrant writers or inside the country by immigrants expressing themselves in what is their second or third language. Literary Japan has so far and in this respect been neither on the ‘dispatching’ nor on the ‘receiving’ side. Japan’s writers have usually preferred to find ways to adapt to the circumstances instead of leaving the country. On the level of content, we may next distinguish between different phenomena of Otherness in a Japanese literary text. The Other may make its appearance in the form of characters such as the Stolz family in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s novel Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters, 1943–48 [1956]), the American GI in Mishima Yukio’s Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956 [1959]) or the black deserter called ‘Spoon’ in Yamada Eimi’s Beddotaimu aizu (Bedtime Eyes, 1985 [1991]). We could further compartmentalize this category by determining the degree of focus or centrality of the respective character, from marginal such as the Westerners observed by the protagonist of Natsume So¯seki’s novel titled Sanshiro¯ (Sanshiro¯, 1908 [1977]) on his first trip from Kumamoto to Tokyo, through those, important but not central to the plot such as the American military personnel in a Hakone hotel where Namiko, the protagonist in Sono Ayako’s story Enrai no kyakutachi (Guests from Afar, 1954), works as a temporary staff member, to those examples where a foreigner is the protagonist of a whole work, such as in Tanizaki’s Dokutan (The German Spy, 1915) or Endo¯ Shu¯ saku’s Obakasan (Wonderful Fool, 1959 [1974]). It is not only characters, though, but also objects, concrete as well as abstract, which may represent the Other in a literary text. Any object of material culture imported from the ‘West’ can function as a condensed representation of the Other, be it neon lights and a flush toilet in Tanizaki’s essay ‘In’ei raisan’ (In ¯ ba Minako’s Praise of Shadows, 1933–34 [1977]) or an imported gramophone in O novel Mae mae katatsumuri (Dance, Snail, Dance, 1984). In Nosaka Akiyuki’s novella Amerika hijiki (American hijiki, 1968 [1977]), the packages of chewing gum dropped by American planes as basic food supply for the hungry population are grotesque symbols of miscommunication. While those who dropped them regard them as indispensable items for daily consumption and thus as blessings bestowed upon a needy people, the starving recipients who are desperately chewing those strange tasting sticks feel oddly betrayed, while the reader of this biting satire registers the cultural incongruity as well as the symbolic potential of this essentially American item. Objects of otherness in a Japanese text may be cultural artifacts on a referential as well as on an interliterary level, pertaining to contacts between different ‘literatures’ or literary systems. Since early Meiji, these references to ‘things Western’ are so abundant in so many works that their sheer frequency results in assimilating and ‘naturalizing’ the foreign. We can, however, discern a number of different functions these references may cover, from authorization, such as when shizenshugi (naturalist) writers quote Zola or Rousseau to make their case, to
Hermes and Hermès 25 distancing, as when Akutagawa Ry¯u nosuke sketches a Japanese way of realistic writing embodied by Shiga Naoya surpassing even masters such as Tolstoi. Interliterary references may be explicit, or implicit as in the case of Ogawa Yo¯ko’s novel Kusuriyubi no hyo¯hon (Specimen of a Ring-finger, 1994), with its subtle borrowings from Richard Harris’ Silence of the Lambs. Foreign objects could also take the form of institutions. Think of such quotidian assets as the café in Taisho¯ days, regarded as a paradigmatic site of the performance of so-called modern life. To what extent is this institution, adapted as it is to local needs while still maintaining the exotic flavor of the foreign to Japanese customers in the 1920s, a Japanese one? Obviously, this is a territory of shifting boundaries, and the question of where to draw the line clearly depends on the eye of the beholder and her purposes. In most cases, it will be difficult if not impossible to make clear distinctions. In other words, we are in constant danger of positing antagonisms and constructing othernesses for our own analytical purposes. When, for example, Hayashi Fumiko in her Ho¯ro¯ki (Diary of a Vagabond, 1930 [1951]) incorporates a cultural artifact such as ‘Katyusha’s Song’, ‘we can identify no purely Japanese or Western culture, nor is there a clear distinction between traditional and modern’, as William Gardner (2003: 98) aptly observes. The volatility of boundaries between Self and Other in modern Japan is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated in a case like the following, when, in a 1952 poem entitled ‘Cool’, Tanikawa Shuntaro¯ portrays jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in the following way: You are a cool Negro, Miles. You disgrace us with your pink blood. You pat us softly with the fair inside of your hand. I have Bach and Rembrandt, but You were born out of Bongo’s womb, Brought up at the blue creek’s bottom . . . (Rabson 1989: 86) It is not the strong racist undertones and the insulting nature of this negative stereotyping that I intend to point out here – Steve Rabson, to whom I owe this reference, has aptly done so already – but the fact that, in the confrontation with the black American, the borders of the Japanese Self are boldly stretched to include ‘Bach and Rembrandt’. It is amazing how these epitomes of European high culture, which, in another context, may figure as ultimate examples of Otherness, are claimed here to seal the cultural superiority of the Self. In passing, we may note how bitter an irony lies in the fact that Japanese cultural superiority is not secured by referring to indigenous artists. This observation has perhaps sensitized us to the importance of considering the historical moment in which a text was written and first read. Earlier studies of the image of foreigners in modern Japanese literature were in broad agreement that stereotyping in two extremes – ‘as objects either of unqualified
26 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit abhorrence or unequivocal admiration’ (Tsuruta 1989: 1) – had prevailed. Historical developments are, however, undeniable, and some of the most outrageous racist myths and offensive stereotypings of foreigners may not work any more today.5 Ted Goossen suspects that we also have to take into account the ‘distance’ of the foreign object.6 Were the black man – in this case the black ¯e Kenzaburo¯’s story ‘Shiiku’ (Prize Stock, 1958 [1981]) – to be recast, soldier in O for example, as a member of a more ‘familiar’ minority – ‘a Korean, let’s say, or a Chinese, or a member of the outcast buraku community, or even as a white – the impression left would surely be far more distasteful’ (Goossen 1989: 144). Whether and how this ‘distance’ in the case of African Americans might have shrunk during the past few decades can be studied, to cite but one example, in the works of Yamada Eimi which, I would maintain, still carry a subtext of racial prejudice running counter to her more differentiated and distinctly positive surface descriptions. What should have become clear by now is the fact that we are less concerned with a straightforward description of the image of foreigners or of foreign objects in these Japanese texts than with the textual strategies that incorporate these in the context of constantly shifting boundaries. Modern Japanese texts reflect a process of cultural appropriation characterized by the assimilation of previously non-belonging (foreign) elements, a process during which the standpoint of the Self is in continuous flux. Consequently, the perception of ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ is changing as well. Within this complex play, to resort to such questionable boundaries as ‘Western influence’ versus ‘Japanese tradition’ would be highly counterproductive. Such a conceptualization would not only imply the existence of a superior and supra-temporal stance determining the nature of certain elements – whether they are to be regarded as foreign or native; it would also claim something of a cultural copyright, the statement of which would, however, lie exclusively at the discretion of the beholder (Hijiya-Kirschnereit and Bollinger 1998: 658).
Circle 4: Mishima Yukio’s Kyo-ko no ie as a case study It is about time now for a closer look at one example in order to test the productivity of our set of questions. I have chosen Mishima Yukio’s novel Ky¯oko no ie (Kyo¯ko’s House) as the second most voluminous text,7 a work of ambition, published in 1958–59, of this representative postwar author. Mishima’s seriousness is emphasized by the fact that the work was published as one of his very few kakioroshi sho¯setsu (a narrative written in one casting) as opposed to the standard Japanese procedure of publishing the work in magazine or newspaper installments prior to the book form.8 Even though critics widely agree that the work was a failure, it is a paradigmatic text in many respects, called by the author his ‘study in nihilism’ (Mishima 1966: 625) and his farewell to the postwar period. Mishima intended, after The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, his 1956 story of one individual’s reaction to the change of atmosphere after Japan’s defeat in the war, to develop his interpretation of the postwar period as a whole in the vein
Hermes and Hermès 27 of a European writer. His ambitions are further underscored by the fact that in this one case he did keep a literary diary, published shortly after the novel, with the title Ratai to isho¯ (Bareness and Clothing, 1959), documenting and commenting on the gestation of his work in a manner reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (The Emergence of ‘Doctor Faustus’). Hashikawa Bunzo¯ was among those who read Kyo¯ko’s House as a ‘document of wartime and postwar intellectual history’ and thus called it ‘a very handy and indexed library’.9 Mishima no doubt intended to join the ranks of what was perceived as world literature by these very attitudes and modes of publication, but even more so by his literary style and themes. Throughout his career, Mishima had made it very clear that even though he productively referred to classical Japanese literature such as No¯ and appreciated the ‘modern classics’ of the Meiji and Taisho¯ periods, his frame of reference comprised Baudelaire and Balzac, Racine and Ibsen, Nietzsche and d’Annunzio, Pater and Rilke, not to mention Classical Greek authors such as Socrates, Plato and Euripides, whom he seems to have encountered mainly in the course of his intensive consideration of European symbolist and fin de siècle literature. It is not that Mishima was intent on distancing himself from the Japanese canon; his project obviously was an amalgamation of native and occidental, as well as of ‘traditional’ and modern elements. Hence his depic¯ gai plus Thomas Mann’.10 Moreover, the tion of his own works as ‘Mori O practical dimensions of this concept can be studied in the impressively complex and balanced architecture of a novel like Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors, 1951–53 [1968]), where Mishima unfolds a veritable maelstrom of allusions, knotting together motifs from symbolist and classical Greek works with Japanese literature. Several finely elaborated networks of mythical and interliterary references are thrown into the narration to form cascades of symbols and interconnected motifs. Most conspicuous are the numerous allusions to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, together with reminiscences of the Platonic Dialogues and a sophisticated chain of scenes modeled according to the classical repertory of locus amoenus.11 That neither his contemporaries nor later professional readers seem to have realized these complex encodings12 is a problem worth discussing in another context. Suffice it to say that the work’s reception was obviously overshadowed by its provocative aspects, the sensationalism of the hero as homosexual and the sarcastic portraits of foreigners. In other words, the work was deprived, in this most common reading, of all its dimensions until what was left was a barely realistic story of a young homosexual and his patrons, dismissed by Masao Miyoshi as ‘one of the gaudiest and emptiest [works] Mishima ever wrote’ (1974: 158). The fact that Mishima readers did not live up to what Wolfgang Iser has termed the work’s ‘implicit reader’ poses interesting questions concerning, inter alia, the validity of our research set-up. We may note first of all that Mishima’s intention of inscribing his work as world literature, which in the 1950s was identified, both in Japan and in the West, with canonized texts in European languages, was
28 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit thus ignored. The same thing happened with Kyo¯ko’s House. Here, too, the author’s aforementioned attitude concerning aspects of production, reception, and distribution points to a conscious appropriation of European modes, which was, however, not registered by his readership. And, furthermore, his references to the European literary subsystem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were left largely undiscovered, although we have to admit that they are much less in number and complexity as compared to Forbidden Colors and some other works. This incongruity between the production and reception obviously matters, but before elaborating on this aspect of Otherness assimilated or ignored, let us take a brief look at other phenomena of Otherness manifested in Kyo¯ko’s House. The novel, covering a narrative time span of two years from April 1954 through April 1956, tells the story of four young men in their twenties – the boxer Shunkichi, Natsuo, a painter, Osamu, an actor, and Seiichiro¯, a company employee – four individuals whose paths cross at the house of their extravagant female friend Kyo¯ko in Tokyo’s Shinanomachi quarters. Theirs is a world of prosperity, if not subdued lavishness, symbolized by such assets as open fireplaces, chandeliers and a well-functioning heating system – this at a time when few households in Japan boasted such items. Kyo¯ko and her female friends wear mink coats, the protagonists prefer Western food and Western outfits and live in Western-style houses.13 That they shake hands instead of greeting each other in a more conventional Japanese manner is a conspicuous sign of the extent to which they distance themselves from the ordinary postwar middle class in their attempt to adopt a Western lifestyle.14 Foreigners and products of foreign origin abound in most of Mishima’s works, and their function is to breathe an air of luxury and of cosmopolitan flair into the novel’s world. Kyo¯ko’s parties are garnished by the presence of foreigners. Comments such as ‘There were even four or five foreigners’ (gaijin sae shi, gonin ita), however, suggest a pride in this rare achievement, although a certain dose of inferiority complex in the face of ‘the West’ shines through as well (Mishima 1964: 355). This also applies to Osamu who is proud of the fact that his buttocks look attractive to women because they remind them of foreign sailors. He is equally proud that his mother has the air of a French brothel owner, and he dreams of sleeping with a foreign actress.15 When reading this postwar novel, we should bear in mind the still enormous prosperity differential between the West and Japan in the 1950s as well as the prestige and dreamland quality embodied by the former. On the linguistic/stylistic level, we find a characteristic blend of traditionalism and cosmopolitanism, to be read in the author’s stubborn adherence to historical forms of writing. Thus, in his ‘serious’ works, works which fall into the category of ‘pure literature’ (junbungaku) as opposed to works of a more popular kind,16 he refused to make use of the reformed type of jo¯yo¯ kanji (Sino-Japanese characters in common use). On the other hand, this conservative style, which can also be interpreted as an expression of his retrograde utopianism, is combined with an obvious delight in katakana words17 and quotations from European languages, a combination that attests to a strong elitist attitude, given the above-
Hermes and Hermès 29 mentioned prestige value of ‘things Western’. We can thus reveal attitudinal concurrences between the stylistic/expressive and the narrational level of the work. In his novel, the author also attempts an incorporation of the Other in the form of extending the geographical boundaries of the plot. In the later part of Kyo¯ko’s House, we witness Seiichiro¯’s move to New York and, by the end, Natsuo is making plans to leave for Mexico. What happens in New York is mainly ‘brought home’ – in the most literal sense – to the other characters as well as to the readers through letters, in which Seiichiro¯ depicts his life abroad. Only in the ninth of the ten chapters is the narratorial stance moved to New York. A conspicuous narratorial device is the increased frequency of ‘realistic’ details in this part of the book. Here, we are even informed about the Brooklyn accent of the garage attendant with whom Seiichiro¯ parks his black-and-white Packard, a 1951 model, for a monthly fee of 25 dollars. We also learn about the height of the white fir on Rockefeller Plaza, or about the number of bedrooms in a Japanese company representative’s home (see pp. 466–7, 493, 471). Particular care is given to the description of phenomena that appear to have been widely unknown to Japanese readers at the time of the book’s publication such as automatic door openers. Certainly, sections like the one in which their functioning is meticulously explained provide educational material for the Japanese reading public. The author, appropriating his average reader’s level of knowledge, adopts the role of cultural mediator and lards his text with commonsense information such as the remark that 1 a.m. is not late for a party by New York standards, or that some inhabitants of this city prefer to sleep with a window open even on the coldest of nights (pp. 494, 496). So much for educational effects in this novel on the most mundane and everyday plane. On the other hand, a certain degree of exoticizing these American habits on the part of the author cannot be denied. That Kyo¯ko’s House is, however, by no means a simple realistic novel becomes clear when we take into consideration the strategies of stereotyping and symbolism, which figure prominently in this work. Both of these strategies, with stereotyping frequently merging with symbolism, are to be observed in the configuration of the characters and in the acting spaces, beginning with the two megacities. Tokyo and New York are set in a relationship of gradation, with the American city functioning as an expanded space of action. Characters are likewise designed as magnifications or as diminutions of each other – for example, Ms. Yamakawa in New York who is introduced as ‘a Kyo¯ko of a global map standard’ (p. 473), while Fujiko, as Kyo¯ko’s ‘scion’ (p. 159), stands for the reverse relationship. For Seiichiro¯, his move to New York is a visible sign of his success as a professional, and for the whole novel, this widened geographical and cultural space implies a further generalization of the novel’s world, where both cities and their inhabitants are to be regarded as parts of the same paradigm. Thus, the upper middle-class atmosphere of Kyo¯ko’s house and her friends with their moderately exotic attitudes and lifestyle assets modeled on European and North American images (which, in their very clichéd patterns, remind us of
30 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit Hollywood motion pictures) is extended to the American continent. And, in a reverse movement, the foreign is thus familiarized. While this reading of the novel may well reproduce, in its socio-cultural subtext, the aspirations of Mishima’s Japanese readership at that time, the assimilation of an idealized ‘American way of life’, we should not overlook other dimensions of this complex work. As mentioned before, interliterary aspects figure prominently in this author’s texts, and it is the allusions to the fin de siècle European literary subsystem that give this work its special flavor and in turn provide links with other Mishima texts. It would exceed the given frame of this chapter to delineate the narratorial procedures and the multitude of levels on which these encodings are to be found. Suffice it to say that they are to be detected in all possible units of this work, from the lexical through the ‘philosophical’ level. The protagonists’ basic feelings are marked by leading notions, placed in the manner of leitmotifs, such as muchitsujo (disorder), sekai ho¯kai (end of the world), sutoishizumu (stoicism), waisetsu (obscenity), fuan (uncertainty), taikutsu (boredom), kodoku (loneliness), and muimi (meaninglessness). From the very first sentence this mood is alluded to: ‘Everybody was yawning’ (minna akubi o shite ita) (p. 5). This elitist mood of ennui and nihilism forms a curious contrast to the mundane bourgeois aspirations mentioned before, and it sets the protagonists off from the average individual in a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche’s superman. Splinters of these ideas are reflected in Seiichiro¯’s musings as well as in Shunkichi’s activism and anti-intellectualism. The division between consciousness (ishiki) and action (ko¯do¯), an elaborate aestheticism, the preponderance of aesthetic categories, which replace moral ones, and the glorification of the immoral (haitoku) are further hints in this direction. What is more, the work contains passages in which these references to the European fin de siècle are encoded in a more sophisticated way. As a matter of fact, those readers who do not recognize the strong mythological allusions in the following scene will realize only a superficial understanding of what is going on: On a cold January day, Osamu and Kyo¯ko met in town and go for a walk. The signal of a train passing served as a prelude to Osamu’s musing: ‘In the end, old age will also befall me. I will turn into an old man bothering others with his boasting talk of when he was young and strong’. A little girl in the street offered them a flower bouquet wrapped in cellophane paper in such an obtrusive way that Osamu stopped and bought it. From the woolen glove full of holes the girl’s thumb protruded like a pink ginger stem. ‘This is for me?’ asked Kyo¯ko. ‘No’, answered Osamu cruelly. And then, with his fingertips on which he wore the Hermès gloves that he had received from Mariko, he devotedly plucked one petal after the other from the tastelessly combined bouquet of withered chrysanthemum, narcissus, and winter rose and scattered them on the street as they walked on. Kyo¯ ko eventually joined in.
Hermes and Hermès 31 ‘We act as if we were drunk, don’t we?’ she said. Both of them had a premonition of being beside themselves with hilarity, but before this happened, the bouquet was used up. (p. 206) Osamu, we have to add here, has already been linked with the Narcissus of mythology by his frequent consultation of mirrors. In this scene, the Narcissus is tied up with the Hermes of mythology. Hermes, herald of the Olympian gods and the guardian god of youth, bears an essential likeness to Eros and Aphrodite. Hermes’ love is the love of the favorable moment, of the lucky love adventure, but at the same time, he also escorts the souls of the deceased to the underworld. It is these traits of the Hermes of mythology that are alluded to here, for shortly before this scene, Kyo¯ko and Osamu euphorically decide to marry when they are 80. With that age, which Osamu will not reach, death is thematized as well. A conspicuous multitude of syntagmatic links is to be found in this scene: the girl’s gloves are antithetical to Osamu’s, and her protruding thumb is contrasted with his fingertips in the exclusive garment. The simile of ‘pink ginger stem’ associates her with the flowers. The bouquet’s composition with three sorts of flowers refers to four seasons – spring with narcissus, autumn with chrysanthemum, summer and winter with (winter) roses. By the Hermès gloves the Narcissus mythological leitmotif is also addressed directly. In a similar way, we can observe in fin de siècle literature a predilection for this mythological feature, which is often thematized by way of hands to suggest the reflexiveness of art.18 The narcissus, the flower of the underworld and of the graves which, as legend has it, grew out of the blood of Narcissus, also refers to death. The gesture of plucking the petals alludes to those ecstatic experiences later in the work at the end of which Osamu will die. Thus, this scene is a multifaceted foreshadowing of coming events and of Osamu’s death. Mishima, in contriving an elaborate architecture of leitmotifs and mythical allusions, places himself in the tradition of European symbolism, or, to be more precise, he extends his frame of reference to include himself and his readership in the context of canonized literature of Western making. Let us finally turn to one more aspect which helps to specify further Mishima’s intentions. His ambition is to write ‘like a Western author’, as he confesses in his Ratai to isho¯ (Mishima 1966: 626). Although we have already presented numerous clues from the work that define which tradition he identifies with, it is enlightening in this context to consider a discussion with the famous critic Nakamura Mitsuo, published in 1968, where Mishima, under the rubric of ‘Nothingness and Substance’, discusses what he sees as the elemental experience of modernity in literature. He speaks of fundamental doubts concerning visible reality, and he refers to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous text ‘Ein Brief ’ (A Letter), first published in a Berlin newspaper on 18 October 1902, where this experience found artistic expression for the first time. The work consists of the letter of a fictive young English lord, Philip Chandos, dated 22 August 1603, addressed to
32
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit
his friend and mentor, Francis Bacon. In it, the writer requests the addressee’s understanding of the fact that he has been unable to realize any of his literary plans and then explains the reasons for his two years’ silence. The ‘Chandos letter’, as it is often called, is thought to be the most important text written by Hofmannsthal, and a key document of literary modernity. It is a brilliant play of hide-and-seek in which the young fin de siècle author who had already won considerable fame speaks, in rich prose, of turning silent in the face of everyday reality. The fear of the emptiness behind the words, the expulsion from the paradise of trust in language, the loss of all certainties lead to an existential crisis, which is more than just an individual’s plea. Hofmannsthal’s contemporaries already sensed the meaning of this ‘Letter’ as a document to an epochal feeling, which persists to the present. The empty talk of a backstage-like public, the scatterbrained and unconcentrated state of mind which we regard as a sign of our times, the discomforting feeling that the world dissolves in front of our gaze and leaves us with words devoid of meaning – these experiences were anticipated by Hofmannsthal a century ago. Mishima explains: Towards the end of the 19th century, there was an epochal current in which the belief in the phenomena of reality was suspended. This current eventually developed into existentialism. Even the activism resulting from existentialism can probably be traced back to this. (Nakamura and Mishima 1968: 41) Mishima then explains the key episode in Hofmannsthal’s work, a scene in which Lord Chandos walks in his garden and, upon seeing a watering can, is struck by a deep fear as suddenly words and objects fall apart in his mind. ‘This is the first voice’, says Mishima, ‘to describe this experience, which then extends to Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea).’ Interestingly, Mishima then distances himself from a Japanese tradition in his comparison with shisho¯se tsu (I-novel) writings: This kind of experience is never expressed in this way with shisho¯setsu characters. Here, everything has a meaning, and in the world of meaning all kinds of things happen . . . These experiences of the Self are expressed in the characters of the work as substantial entities. And as this is undoubtedly a creation, it is undoubtedly supposed to be art. However, didn’t we start out from a point where ‘things with a substance’ no longer exist? The word ‘nothingness’ to describe this may sound a bit too banal. (ibid.: 41–2) What Mishima makes very clear in his statement is the fact that he wants to be understood as a modern artist who gives expression to this key experience voiced in Hofmannsthal’s work. The native tradition of shisho¯setsu writing – and of Shiga Naoya in particular, whom he refers to in this context – is denied modernity and even artistic value. It is this doubt concerning the ‘substance’ of the real world,
Hermes and Hermès 33 which Mishima tried to express in Kyo¯ko’s House, in a scene that remains cryptic to readers who do not realize this referential plane. In an episode in New York, when Seiichiro¯ and Fujiko are heading home from the theatre, a horse-drawn carriage passes by: ‘Strange things coming along at this time of the day’, remarked Seiichiro¯. ‘It’s a carriage,’ replied Fujiko, but her answer was, strictly speaking, not an exact response to Seiichiro¯’s comment. It revealed the typically female, strong yardstick which seeks to make sense of reality in the simplest possible way. Seiichiro¯ sensed a strong aversion. What he himself had seen was, yes, a carriage pulled by grey horses, but he just briefly said, ‘That is your hallucination.’ (Mishima 1964: 489) This episode may seem strange or even bizarre. But instead of simply registering its misogynist flavor, we dig deeper in realizing that this and other eccentric views and experiences of the protagonists are devised by the author to express key experiences of modernity. This is not to say that Mishima is artistically convincing in each of these instances. Yet his intentions are clear, and they amount to opening up what he sees as a modern frame of reference. But what about his readership? While the average postwar Japanese reader may have had more educational knowledge than contemporary readers concerning literature in Japanese and in Western languages, not many of them will have had the capacity to sound the mythical allusions and the references to fin de siècle works. Most of them would have been happy to identify Hermès as a famous French house of leather and fashion as would contemporary readers whose world is even more commercialized than the postwar decade. Mishima, on the other hand, was not only keen on making his readership familiar with the mundane aspects of Western civilization in its ethnic, social, and cultural Otherness; he also claimed membership of a transnational literary canon, which establishes itself by way of explicit and implicit interliterarity. He was, of course, well aware of the elitist character of his ambitions and did not expect all of his readers to follow him. The same, by the way, applies to his romantic and utopian conservativism, expressed, inter alia, in his partly archaic use of language and of the pre-reform writing system. In his essay, ‘Sho¯ setsu to wa nani ka’ (What is the novel?), he calls it his cultural mission to restore to life forgotten Japanese. ‘Strictly speaking’, he writes, ‘it is impossible to use Japanese without believing in Japanese history.’ Whoever knows this antique vocabulary is his reader, the others are expected to use dictionaries (Mishima 1971: 105). What a cultural mission! Here is Mishima, the standard-bearer of postwar literature in Japan, aspiring to merge conservativism – a largely re-invented form of traditionalism – and what he understands as the most artistic and valid strand of literary modernity reaching from fin de siècle symbolism to existentialism in a highly eclectic synthesis. A synthesis is also attained in his ‘staging’ of moments of enlightenment and epiphanies repeatedly occurring in the text which indirectly
34 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit refer to the ‘Chandos letter’ while, at the same time, this pattern is also structured according to the mystical satori (enlightenment) experience, which relates to a traditional esthetics.19 As a result, the borders between the posited cultural Self and the cultural Other are constantly blurred, just as readers of his works are made to shift back and forth with their attention between a seemingly realistic and a mythological, symbolistic and interliterary level. In other words, Mishima’s work occupies a liminal space, an in-between area that aspires to transcend the boundaries of ‘Japanese literature’. Had Mishima lived on, he might have been asked by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to respond to Hofmannsthal’s ‘Chandos Letter’ like so many other authors whose essays on the one-hundredth anniversary of its publication were later collected in book form. Taken together, these thirty-five essays inspire questions as to whether Hofmannsthal’s concerns are still of relevance to writers and readers today. Naturally, the answers differ from emphatic agreement to bitter criticism of the author’s purported affirmative imperialism. But why not pose the same question regarding Mishima himself ? Instead of an answer, let me close by quoting from a poem by Lavinia Greenlaw, a young British writer, entitled ‘Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos, 1603’: Steady, Chandos. We are out of rhyme. Note the flaw in the empty eye. When things lift away from themselves, we can do no more in words than meet them in like vein. Why not remain speechless? Theaetetus complained to Socrates of dizziness when asked to see beyond what is as it is named. His sickness was wonder. (Spahr et al. 2002: 142)
Notes 1 This is, admittedly, a generalization. In connection with the sankin ko¯tai rules, those Japanese living alongside the routes of foreign delegations on their way to the Sho¯gun’s court in Edo were occasionally able to catch glimpses of Europeans and Koreans. Ronald Toby (1986) has given a fascinating account of these encounters. 2 For an overview of research on these cultural contacts between Japan and the West in the form of an annotated bibliography covering the years from 1853 through 1996, see Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1999). 3 See Komori (2001) and Faye Kleeman, Chapter 14 in this volume. 4 Another important distinction in a German research context concerns a cognitivecultural versus a social dimension of otherness or, in other words, non-familiarity versus non-membership or non-belonging. In English, one might speak, after Chantal Zabus (1990), of ‘foreignness’ versus ‘otherness’. While the ‘foreignness’ of European languages, for example, can be dissolved to the extent that they are acquired, their non-belonging to the African societies remains intact. To distinguish these two dimensions of otherness seems important in the light of the fact that it is a functional requirement in modern societies to disconnect ‘belonging’ and ‘familiarity’ (Münkler 1998: 22).
Hermes and Hermès 35 5 Tsuruta Kinya compares the development of writers such as Tanizaki or So¯seki, whose
6 7 8
9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18
19
images of the Other differentiate and ripen over the years with an analogous development on the level of the nation as a whole, from Edo through Sho¯wa (Tsuruta 1994: 501). Justin Stagl (1997) deals with ‘grades of otherness’, which would be another way of categorizing ‘distances’. It is only a few pages shorter than his novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors, 1951–53 [1968]). The individual volumes of his later tetralogy Ho¯jo¯ no umi (The Sea of Fertility, 1965–70) are shorter than this work. Interestingly, this mode was seen as the author’s ‘resistance to mass media’, and, in an interview on the occasion of the novel’s publication, Mishima admitted to a feeling of pride as well as one of ‘being left out’ on seeing his colleagues publish their works continuously in magazines while he preferred to confine his work to his study until its very completion (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1976: 32). Later, Mishima proudly compared his novel’s mode of publication – two chapters were pre-published in a magazine – with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (ibid.: 190). Quoted in ibid.: 227. With this comment, he refers to his novel Kinkakuji; see his essay ‘Jiko kaizo¯ no kokoromi’ (An Attempt at Self-improvement, 1956). A detailed delineation of the parallels to Mann’s Death in Venice, which form the portal to other symbolist as well as Classical Greek works; can be found in HijiyaKirschnereit (1990). This is not to say that the work is without serious weaknesses. But most of them lie on a plane which those readers critical of the novel did not even realize. Thus, it is not superficiality or a defective construction but the overabundance of symbolism and allusions, the excessive baggage of meaning and its all too perfect architecture that could be criticized (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1990: 68). See Mishima (1964: 355, 311, 191). All subsequent references to this novel are cited, as page number only, in the main text. The handshakes are mentioned in ibid.: 37, 261, 343. See ibid.: 355, 311, 191. On the problematic of the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘popular’ works, see HijiyaKirschnereit (1976: 205, 216). On katakana words in Kyo¯ko’s House, see ibid.: 230. The Narcissus motif figures prominently with writers such as Rilke, George, and Valéry, with whose works Mishima was familiar. In Thomas Mann’s Schiller novelette ‘Schwere Stunde’, this motif is thematized through the protagonist’s looking at his hands. A detailed delineation of satori experiences in Kyo¯ko no ie and a comparison with conventional representations of this pattern in Kurosawa Akira’s motion picture ‘Sugata Sanshiro¯’ and in the painter Hayashi Takeshi’s autobiography can be found in Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1976: 151, 194–7, 203, 265, 267).
References Main text Mishima Yukio (1964) Kyo¯ko no ie (Kyo¯ko’s House), Tokyo: Shincho¯sha (Shincho¯ bunko 1961).
Other references Gardner, William O. (2003) ‘Mongrel Modernism: Hayashi Fumiko’s Ho¯ro¯ki and Mass Culture’, Journal of Japanese Studies 29(1): 69–101.
36 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit Goossen, Ted (1989) ‘Caged Beasts: Black Men in Modern Japanese Literature’, in Kinya Tsuruta (ed.) The Walls Within: Images of Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese Abroad, Vancouver: Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, pp. 137–61. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela (1976) Mishima Yukios Roman, Kyo¯ko-no ie: Versuch einer intratextuellen Analyse, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ——(1979) ‘Thomas Mann’s Short Novel Der Tod in Venedig and Mishima Yukio’s Novel Kinjiki: A Comparison’, in Ian Nish and Charles Dunn (eds) European Studies on Japan, Tenterden: Paul Norbury, pp. 312–17. ——(1990) ‘Thomas Manns Novelle Der Tod in Venedig und Mishima Yukios Roman Kinjiki: Ein Vergleich’, in Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.) Was heißt: Japanische Literatur verstehen? Zur modernen japanischen Literatur und Literaturkritik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 59–74. ——(ed.) (1999) Kulturbeziehungen zwischen Japan und dem Westen seit 1853: Eine annotierte Bibliographie, Munich: Iudicium. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela and Bollinger, Richmod (1998) ‘Literatur als Instrument zur Bewältigung kultureller Unvertrautheit: Textstrategien am Beispiel von Kawabata Yasunaris Asakusa kurenaidan’, in Herfried Münkler (ed.) Die Herausforderung durch das Fremde: Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 611–700. Jackson, Earl (1990) ‘The Metaphysics of Translation and the Origins of Symbolist Poetics in Meiji Japan’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (March): 256– 72. Keene, Donald (1973) ‘Comparisons between Japanese and Chinese literature’, in Japan P.E.N. Club (eds) Studies on Japanese Culture, Tokyo: Japan P.E.N. Club, pp. 79–83. Komori Yo¯ichi (2001) Posutokoroniaru (Postcolonial), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. McGrane, Bernard (1989) Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other, New York: Columbia University Press. Mishima Yukio ([1959] 1966) Ratai to isho¯ (Bareness and Clothing), in Mishima Yukio hyo¯ron zenshu, Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, pp. 523–626. ——(1971) ‘Sho¯setsu to wa nani ka’ (What is the Novel?), Shincho¯ (January): 90–137. Miyoshi, Masao (1974) Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Münkler, Herfried (ed.) (1997) Furcht und Faszination: Facetten der Fremdheit, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. ——(ed.) (1998) Die Herausforderung durch das Fremde: Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Nakamura Mitsuo and Mishima Yukio (1968) Taidan – ningen to bungaku (Humans and Literature: A Discussion), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha. Pollack, David (1986) The Fracture of Meaning: Japan’s Synthesis of China from the Eighth through the Eighteenth Centuries, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rabson, Steve (1989) ‘“Occidentalism” and Self-Reflection: Western Personae in the Work of Modern Japanese Poets’, in Kinya Tsuruta (ed.) The Walls Within: Images of Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese Abroad, Vancouver: Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, pp. 82–118. Spahr, Roland, Spiegel, Hubert and Vogel, Oliver (eds) (2002) ‘Lieber Lord Chandos’: Antworten auf einen Brief, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Stagl, Justin (1997) ‘Grade der Fremdheit’, in Herfried Münkler (ed.) Furcht und Faszination: Facetten der Fremdheit, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 85–114. Toby, Ronald B. (1986) ‘Carnival of the Aliens: Korean Embassies in Edo-Period Art and Popular Culture’, Monumenta Nipponica 41(4): 415–56.
Hermes and Hermès 37 Tsuruta, Kinya (ed.) (1989) The Walls Within: Images of Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese Abroad, Vancouver, BC: Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia. ——(ed.) (1994) Nihon bungaku ni okeru ‘tasha’ (The ‘Other’ in Japanese literature), Tokyo: Shin’yo¯sha. Wierlacher, Alois (ed.) (1993) Kulturthema Fremdheit: Leitbegriffe und Problemfelder kulturwissenschaftlicher Fremdheitsforschung, Munich: Iudicium. Williams, Mark (1996) ‘From out of the Depths: The Japanese Literary Response to Christianity’, in John Breen and Mark Williams (eds) Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Zabus, Chantal (1990) ‘Othering the Foreign Language in the West African Europhone Novel’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17(3–4): 348–66.
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Meet me on the other side Strategies of Otherness in modern Japanese literature Susan Napier
I looked on her as she looked at me We looked and stood a moment Between Life and Dream We never met since: Yet oft I stand In the primrose path Where life meets Dream Oh that Life could Melt into Dream Instead of Dream Is constantly Chased away by Life. Natsume So¯seki (written in English, quoted in Eto¯ Jun, Natsume So¯seki)
The choice of title for my chapter is inspired by Leeds’ connection to popular music (specifically one of the all-time great rock albums, The Who’s Live at Leeds), but the title itself is from a more recent album, A New Day at Midnight by David Gray. The album is dedicated to Gray’s father who had died the year before and the song ‘The Other Side’ which inspires my title concerns the singer’s hope to meet someone (presumably his father or perhaps a lover, in any case a person lost to him) on the ‘other side’. Gray’s song never holds out the definite possibility of a meeting but is rather imbricated with yearning, suffused with a desire for two different entities to come together, if only transitorily. The other side, or muko¯gawa in Japanese, is a concept that crosses cultures, touching on the spiritual, the supernatural, and the mythic. In fact, in 1985, Kinya Tsuruta along with a number of other Japanese critics published a book called Bungaku ni okeru ‘muko¯gawa’ (The ‘Other Side’ in Literature), in which he defined the muko¯gawa as ‘something that exists in contradistinction to “this side”, something that is conceived as an artistic space and does not exist in reality . . . a place of compensation for “this side”, a space of illusion’. On the ‘other side’, according to Tsuruta:
Strategies of Otherness 39 the hands of the clock don’t necessarily keep the correct time, time hastens or slows and sometimes stops or, frequently, the hands even reverse themselves and go backwards. Spatially it is a place where the lines on the map may not be of any use. But most importantly it is a place . . . where what you expect to happen – the laws of nature – do not necessarily fulfill themselves. (Tsuruta 1985: 6) Much of what Tsuruta describes seems very applicable to the fantastic and uncanny texts of Japanese literature or even to more realistic ones where otherness impinges more subtly. We might remember the opening scene in Izumi Kyo¯ka’s Koya hijiri (Saint of Mount Koya, 1908 [1995]) in which the monk stands helpless in the mountains of Hida gazing at a useless map just before he ventures into a lost world of supernatural creatures and subversive memories. On a less clearly fantastic level, we might think of the hidden garden of Tanizaki’s Yume no ukihashi (Bridge of Dreams, 1959 [1977]) where two women transcend the inexorability of time and death to become an uncanny model of motherhood. But Tsuruta’s description needs to be amended in one area, I believe, and that is what seems to be his notion of a hard and fast dialectic between this side and the other. As the yearning first line in Gray’s song hints, we now live in an era where it does indeed seem possible to imagine ‘meet[ing] on the other side’, and the boundaries between this side and the other side, between Self and Other, or between the virtual and the real are not nearly as firm as Tsuruta seems to be suggesting. In recent years the old divisions and certainties that formed the backbone of Western philosophy have increasingly begun to be called into question. As Gilbert Rose points out in The Power of Form , ‘The boundaries of our separateness dissolve and reconstitute, dip back into and reemerge from looser, earlier arrangements of reality’ (1986: 91). In Japanese literature, ‘reality’, if such a thing exists, seems to be comprised of many forms of ‘arrangements’. From my own research on Japanese fiction, especially the realm of fantastic literature – a major part of Japanese literary output – it seems arguable that, if anything, Japanese literature and other arts have tended to be particularly comfortable with interrogating the notion of separateness and highlighting the fluidity of boundaries. Tropes of androgyny, including the specific incorporation of one gender into the other, metamorphosis, and phantasmagoria of all kinds, characterize many modern literary texts as well as theater and art in Japan. Even before the modern period, Japanese literature and art have highlighted the notion that the membrane between Self and Other is a highly permeable one. We need only think of the crucial spirit possession episodes in The Tale of Genji, not to mention the many depictions of transformation in ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) or kabuki theater. Even traditional poetry in which the poet’s persona dreams of becoming a ‘thing of spring’ suggests a willingness to flow between subjectivities while the persistent classical love poetry question of ‘Was it a dream or was it reality?’ (yume ka utsutsu ka) underlines the ambiguity of the cosmos.
40 Susan Napier With the twentieth century, the vision of the other side often becomes more politicized, existing as a counterpoint to modernity or evoking a crisis between the genders. Thus, Kyo¯ka’s monk stands poised at the entrance to an ‘old road’ down into the womblike valley of the Japanese past dominated by a motherly enchantress who turns the vulgar new men of Meiji into beasts. Although the monk escapes physically unscathed, the memory of the other side haunts him for the rest of his life. More recently, Kurahashi Yumiko’s 1987 science fiction fantasy Amanonkoku ¯okanki (Record of a Voyage to the Country of Amanon) describes a voyage in which the masculine principle known as ‘P’ (standing for penis) attempts to conquer the feminine realm of the country of Amanon, only to find itself/himself reinscribed within the maternal body and producing a child. While Kyo¯ka’s monk is painfully separated from the otherness of a past characterized by a fearsome but still maternal feminine, ‘P’ is forced to incorporate into the feminine principle of a provocative new world that hints at new directions for contemporary Japan. Even when a narrative appears to be working to expel the other, there are still moments of inclusion, even in relation to the thorny question of Japanese subjec¯ e Kenzaburo¯’s mimetic ‘Shiiku’ (Prize tivity vis-à-vis the Western Other. Thus, O Stock, 1959 [1981]), one of the great narratives of wartime exclusion, initially positions the Japanese and Western subjectivities as totally alien, emblemized by the captured black American soldier and the Japanese children’s fascinated incomprehension of him. But ‘Prize Stock’s’ tragic denouement also highlights the moment when the soldier places the young boy’s hand upon his own head in order to ward off the axe belonging to the boy’s father and, for a moment, the two form a solid pattern of resistance before the axe crashes down and sunders them forever. Of course, nationalist versions of Self and Other in Japanese literature are not restricted to Japan and the West. Seiji M. Lippit describes how Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai enacts a process of disintegration as its Chinese and Japanese characters travel through a city of ‘false fronts’ but ends with a ‘glimpse of a release from the conflicts of subjectivity’ (Lippit 2002: 114) as a prostitute in China envisions the face of the Japanese protagonist. This ‘release’ is only temporary, however, for soon the Japanese face becomes increasingly immersed in ‘the waves of the long tongues, the hair slicked back with oil . . . the breath reeking of opium’ (ibid.: 114–15), images that belong to her presumably Chinese customers. Lippit’s book also brings up another aspect of impinging Otherness: the phantasmagoria that he sees inhabiting and delineating Japanese modernism. To Lippit, these phantasms evoke the ambiguity of Japan’s position in the 1920s and 1930s, caught in a transition in which the old is both longed for but alien and the new is both threatening and enticing. I would take this theme even further, however, and suggest that the phantasmic Other and what Lippit terms ‘the instability of place and borderlines’ (ibid.: 5) exist at least as far back as Natsume So¯seki if not well before the modern period, and also extend to recent works by such contemporary writers as Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki. If
Strategies of Otherness 41 anything, twentieth-century Japanese literature has as its hallmark this sense of ‘instability’, although in each period this sense takes on its own distinctive form. Before turning to a more detailed look at twentieth-century Japanese fiction, however, it is worth pondering for a moment what we mean by the Other and Otherness, both in general and in relation to Japan. Simply put, the Other is what we are not. If we are masculine, the Other is feminine. If we are young, the Other is old. If we are talking of Japan, then the Other is the West, or perhaps it is China or Korea. If we are the here and now, then the Other is the past – history, memory – what David Gray in his song alludes to as ‘the ghosts that crawl upon my skin’. These can be personal ghosts or cultural ones. As Lois Parkinson Zamora says of Latin American magic realism, because ghosts make absence present, they foreground magical realism’s most basic concern – the nature and limits of the knowable – and they facilitate magical realism’s critique of modernity . . . they represent an assault on the scientific and materialist assumptions of Western modernity: that reality is knowable, predictable, controllable. (Zamora and Faris 1995: 498) The oppositional quality of the Other is very notable in modern Japan as well, where we cannot help but be struck by how important and how protean the notion of Otherness has been throughout its modern history and culture. A sense of an iconic ‘Japan’ vis-à-vis the rest of the world seems to have been an essential part of national identity since at least the Meiji Restoration. Of course, this situation is not unique to Japan. The magical realist literature of Latin America, especially that of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, grapples with its own Western shadows and its own ghosts from a severely problematic colonial past. Postcolonial English literature raises the ante by placing the Western and nonWestern Other side by side in London, the seat of the old British Empire, as exemplified in works such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or some of Salman Rushdie’s writings. But Japan occupies perhaps an even more uneasy position, situated as it is at the nexus between West and non-West, and modernity (or even postmodernity) and the discourses of a still smoldering local tradition. Not only does Japan need to contend with its own vision of the West, it also has in recent years finally begun to take into account its knotty relations with East Asian neighbors. These relations bring up further issues of Otherness, in particular ones related to the past and memory (or frequently the lack of memory concerning Japan’s colonial past). Moreover, I would suggest that modern Japanese culture is also still dealing with an increasingly complex dynamic between male and female, a dynamic that began at the turn of the twentieth century with a vision of the female as an uncanny repository of the past and has become by the end of the century a trope of the female as mediator to an Other world that the contemporary male can no longer penetrate.
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In Discourses of the Vanishing, Marilyn Ivy speaks of the ‘fatefully dense articulations of the Japanese imaginary with the fantasies of the West’ (1995: 6) and also mentions that ‘Japan seems to reinscribe the distinction ever more sharply between the “West” and Itself ’ (ibid.: 2). While not disagreeing with the importance of the Western Other, I would also, as with Tsuruta’s statement, want to suggest that this is not always a rigidly delineated relationship. Thus, while Ivy speaks of the Japanese anxiety to ‘keep the culture intact’ (ibid.), I would argue that, at least in literature, such an endeavor has met with only fitful success and has not necessarily even been the aim of many novelists. It is true that we have ¯ gai’s ‘Maihime’ (Dancing Girl, 1890 [1975]) or on the one hand Mori O ‘Fushinch¯u’ (Under Reconstruction, 1910 [1961]) in which the feminized West in an interesting role reversal is expelled or repudiated by the masculine Japanese or, from the same period, Akutagawa’s ‘Kamigami no bisho¯’ (The Faint Smiles of the Gods, 1921) in which the Japanese gods explicitly tell the intimidated Portuguese priest that The West too must change. We exist in the trees, in the currents of shallow water, in the wind that blows through the roses, in the evening light that lingers on the temple walls . . . Anywhere and anytime we are here. Please be careful . . . please be careful. (Akutagawa 1971: 10) But Akutagawa’s writing contains many examples of the overlay of the Western Other on the Japanese psyche (most notably in the famous line from ‘Aru Aho no issho¯’ (A Fool’s Life, 1927), ‘The sum of human life adds to less than a line of Baudelaire’ (Akutagawa 1970: 8)). Even ‘The Faint Smiles of the Gods’ has a prescient aspect to it, suggesting that the dynamic between the West and Japan can never be so cut and dried. This can be seen in the passage where the Japanese gods tell the priest that ‘it may even be that Deus himself will change into a dweller of this land’. While this at first suggests that Japanese culture will dominate, on closer inspection the statement hints at a more inclusive vision of the other. As Stephen Frosh says, ‘this “other” lies as much within as without’, and ‘put in literary terms, this recognition of the other within ourselves becomes an instance of intertexuality – reading the other we reconstruct ourselves’ (1995: 289). I would like now to turn to two writers whose recognition of the Other has led, if not to reconstruction, then at least to the construction of a more complex form of subjectivity vis-à-vis the Other. The writers I would like to discuss are Natsume So¯seki and Murakami Haruki, who, to my mind, bracket with great effectiveness the last century of Japanese literature. At first glance, they may seem very dissimilar. So¯seki, born the year of the Meiji Restoration, is touted as embodying the tensions and tragedies of Meiji masculinity. Steeped in traditional culture (in fact he had first wanted to be a China scholar and wrote Chinese poetry on his deathbed), So¯seki’s direct encounter with the West was in many ways a tormented one. Although a brilliant student of English literature, capable of writing both poetry and prose in English (see the quotation at the beginning of
Strategies of Otherness 43 this chapter), So¯seki almost immediately felt alienated from contemporary English culture and English citizens. Most students of his life are familiar with his description of his time in London where he ‘lived as a stray dog among wolves’, clearly seeing himself as the abject Other from the wolf pack of Western civilization. Even more intriguing is So¯seki’s disturbing anecdote of walking down a busy London street and seeing a yellow wizened man approaching him, only to realize as he grew closer that the man was himself – or rather, his reflection in a shop window (Miyoshi 1974: 56–7). This anecdote suggests that So¯seki himself became the phantasmic Other while in London, a creature who, in defiance of the Lacanian mirror stage where the infant learns to distinguish between itself and its mother through its delighted recognition of its own unique form, can only see itself as a distorted outsider. In contrast, the postwar Murakami appears initially to be the very model of a postmodern international writer. Murakami’s writings give the impression of the author as flitting seamlessly from Japan to Europe to the United States and, within the States, to be happy making his home there (as long as it is in a university town such as Princeton or Cambridge). Rather than being nostalgic for East Asian tradition, Murakami apparently went out of his way to avoid reading Japanese literature although, significantly, his father was a teacher of Japanese literature in high school. And while So¯seki struggled mightily, although often brilliantly, to create a theory of literature that would transcend that of any English critic, Murakami seems to toss off translations of American literature with almost contemptuous ease. Furthermore, when Murakami does tell anecdotes or write stories based on his direct experience of Western sojourns, they are usually funny, or at most slightly rueful, indicative of a vision in which it is the Westerners who come across as odder or more picturesque than their Japanese observer. Yet, So¯seki and Murakami share some major and fascinating similarities. As should be clear from the above descriptions, they are both deeply drawn to the Western Other and both of them may legitimately be seen as constructing an important part of their literary identity through interaction with the West. In So¯seki’s case, his ‘struggle in the abyss of the self ’ as Senuma Shigeki calls it, bore fruit not only in his extraordinary treatises on literature, but in some of his more creative and imaginative efforts, most notably the Yo¯kyosh u¯ (Drifting in Space), a collection of tales that he wrote in 1906 soon after returning from London, and his Yume j uya ¯ (Ten Nights of Dream) which appeared in serialized issues of the Asahi shinbun in 1908. While critics correctly identify these works as romantic or even slight compared to his later powerful novels such as Sorekara (And Then, 1909 [1978]) or Kokoro (1914 [1957]), and there is no question that the English Romantic and pre-Raphaelite threads clearly on display in these early works are rewoven with more subtlety and complexity in his later novels, the best of these works contain an ethereal energy that allows them to stand alone. Murakami’s incorporation of Western literature is even more obvious than that of So¯seki. As many critics have pointed out, he mixes hard-boiled detective fiction, cyberpunk science fiction, Greek tragedy and Raymond Carver-style
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realism to produce works that not only resonate profoundly with young Japanese but are also extremely accessible to Westerners. As Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s most prominent translators, says of Murakami’s prose style, ‘its American flavor is subtle and feels both foreign and natural at the same time’ (2002: 288). But this chapter is not simply about Western influences, nor even is it about the Western Other. So¯seki and Murakami are worth exploring not only for their significant incorporation of the Western Other in their work but also for their exploration of other ‘Others’, most notably the problematic role of the historical Other and the gendered Other. Furthermore, So¯seki and Murakami’s works both contain an openness to the ‘other side’ through the use of uncanny or phantasmagorical tropes that highlight the permeability of boundaries. These boundaries include those not only between Self and Other but between past and present and dream and reality. Both also highlight outsiderhood in terms of the self vis-à-vis, not simply the West, but also mainstream Japan, and themes of abjection and repudiation appear frequently in each authors’ writings. Turning to analyses of specific texts, I will begin with a brief work from So¯seki’s Yo¯kyosh u¯ entitled ‘Rondonto¯ ’ (The Tower of London). Written in essay style, ‘Tower’ purports to be a factual account of So¯seki’s one and only trip to the Tower. Yet, from the beginning, an air of unreality pervades the account. So¯seki describes himself as being like a ‘hare from the country let loose in Nihonbashi [the Japanese equivalent of London Bridge]’ (Natsume 1992: 23) and speaks of the ‘kumodeji’(cobweb system) (ibid.: 24) of London transport, implicitly suggesting that he is an insect, trapped in the web of the West. The Tower itself, however, signifies something very different. While it itself has ‘trapped’ many prisoners through the years (So¯seki renders an affecting, and seemingly eye witness account of the murder of the little princes and the execution of Lady Jane Grey, for example), for So¯seki himself, the Tower clearly becomes an image of enlightenment. As he says, ‘[b]etween those dark spaces [of arriving and leaving the tower] everything is bright. It is as if the darkness surrounding me was split with lightning . . . then the darkness returned. So the tower becomes for me the focus of my worldly dream’ (ibid.: 25). The use of the Buddhist term shukusei, rendered in translation as ‘the focus of my worldly dream’ but perhaps more accurately as a ‘dream of before one is born’ is intriguing, given that So¯seki is describing a place that he himself refers to as ‘the epitome of English history’. It is as if So¯seki, despite his overt objections to England and his sense of Otherness within it, still finds himself drawn to aspects of English culture. Indeed, it is possible to speculate that it was not England so much as modernity in general which alienated So¯seki. This hypothesis is reinforced by So¯seki’s comments when he actually reaches the Tower. He says: I found twentieth century London gradually disappearing from my mind and giving place to a fantastic picture of the past . . . After a while I felt as if someone on the ‘opposite side’ (muko¯ gishi, literally ‘bank on the other side’) was
Strategies of Otherness 45 reaching an arm across to seize me . . . the extended arm drew me ever so strongly and I found myself walking. The arm was so irresistible. (ibid.: 27)1 What is it about the Tower that draws So¯seki’s persona so ‘irresistibly’ to the ‘opposite side’ of the moat, a ‘side’ which is clearly England, imbued with English history, and also, as we subsequently discover, the female Other? Furthermore, why does he sense a ‘brightness’ that empowers him to create fantastic pictures of a past that is not his? What is it about the space (both fantastical and concrete) of the Tower that allows him to commune equally with the Other? On the one hand, So¯seki at the Tower is in control, which he was not on the cobweb streets of London. Steeped in English history, more versed in English literature than many of his host countrymen, So¯seki projects upon the physical walls of the Tower a variety of ghosts from the English past: the little princes reading aloud to each other before their death, their mother desperately bribing the gatekeeper for one last chance to see them, Lady Jane Grey going to her execution while wearing snow white clothes (although her blood spatters at the So¯seki persona’s feet). So¯seki conjures up these images from his reading and his immersion in the art of pre-Raphaelite poets and painters, enabling his projected self to act as a confident tour guide to the other side. Furthermore, as suggested by the list above, the images that So¯seki sees are not ones of a civilization of modernity and enlightenment. They are blood soaked (sometimes literally, in the case of Jane Grey) memories of a problematic past. It is perhaps significant that So¯seki particularly expounds on the victims in the Tower. Not only does the (presumably Japanese) reader see English justice at its most barbaric but it may also be a means for So¯seki to be able to identify with Western Other, since this is an Other that is vulnerable and powerless, adjectives all too appropriate for So¯ seki’s own condition in London. On the other hand, So¯seki’s sense of control can only last for so long and can be problematic in its intensity, tempting him to project his fantasies on to presentday England as well. An example of this occurs towards the end of his stay at the Tower as he incorporates the contemporary English feminine Other into his fantasies by projecting them onto a mysterious and beautiful woman who seems to have an uncanny knowledge of the Tower. So¯seki fantasizes that she is in fact the incarnation of Jane Grey in an attempt to incorporate the historical and the feminine Other into the reality of modern London. But the narrator is not allowed to remain immersed in his fantasies for long. Returning to his lodgings in a self-described ‘trance’, the Japanese visitor’s fancies are rudely rejected by his landlord who offers prosaic explanations for every seemingly uncanny event. The landlord is especially disillusioning on the subject of the mysterious woman, saying ‘scornfully’ that ‘London is full of such beautiful women. If you don’t look out, you may run into danger’ (Natsume 1992: 55). Given this ironic and disillusioning ending, we may well ask again, how could the Tower be so empowering as to seem comparable to a Buddhist flash of enlightenment? It seems as if contact with the Other can be empowering only
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when the subject’s imagination is in charge and no longer abject because of the realities of race and nationality. Similar to the ancient castle or house of a Gothic fantasy, the Tower becomes a site of Otherness where conventional rules are lifted or reversed and, in the free floating space of the uncanny, characters can take on, if only temporarily, new powers. Fujita Eichi asserts that So¯seki initially looked on his time in London as a chance to fulfill his pent-up ambition not only to master the English language but also to offer up the global achievements of English literature (Fujita 1999: 31). Thwarted in this ambition and thoroughly alienated from English life, it is not surprising that it was during this period that So¯seki constructed his doctrine of jikohon’i or ‘on my own terms’, which can be seen as an intellectual gauntlet thrown down in the face of Western society. And yet So¯seki’s terms are not merely a knee jerk resistance to the West. Rather, as James Fujii, in suggesting that we ‘abandon static models of binary influence’, says, ‘[So¯seki]’s literary view is much more a dynamic process of self-reflexive engagement with otherness’ (Fujii 1993: 11). Indeed, Hazama in his analysis of the ‘dense’ quality of the prose of ‘Tower’ suggests that So¯seki essentially explores a complex continuum involving real world history, drama (specifically works by Shakespeare and by the contemporary playwright Ainsworth) and infused with ‘illusion’ (genso¯ ), ‘imagination’ (so¯zo¯) and ‘fancy’ (k uso ¯ ¯ ) in order to touch what he (quoting So¯seki) describes as ‘that mysterious thing called the past’ (Hazama 1999: 10–21 passim). He also points to So¯seki’s frequent use of the word mieru (‘seems’, ‘looks like’) rather than the more straightforward miru (‘I see’) as implicating the narrator within his own fictional world (ibid.: 20). In his vision of the Tower, therefore, So¯seki creates and manipulates his own version of Otherness in which he is, if only transiently, a full participant. Perhaps So¯seki’s most sustained engagement with otherness is his brief work Ten Nights of Dream, written, like ‘Tower’, a few years after he returned from London. As with ‘Tower’, here again, So¯seki takes on the persona of the outsider but in this case the dreaming ‘I’ is never in control. Each dream is essentially an engagement with the Other, be it the past (both personal and national), the feminine, or the West. But in each dream the engagement is deeply problematic. This is not the place for a detailed examination of the dreams, but certain thematic clusters are obvious. A sense of entrapment pervades almost all the dreams, often combined with a sense that the dreaming subject has been repudiated from the dream world. In the Dream of the Seventh Night, this repudiation is from a dream of Western modernity emblemized by a ship sailing westward in which the dreamer seems utterly out of place – to the point where he jumps overboard only to realize that he also does not belong in the black waters (of the past, of Japan, of his own consciousness?) below. In the Dream of the Sixth Night, the dreaming ‘I’ desperately tries to incorporate the Japanese past into the problematic Meiji present, by sculpting ancient ‘guardian gods’ out of wood, only to be once again repudiated: he finds that there are no ‘guardian gods’ in the woods of the present day. While the Sixth Night Dream evokes the national past, the Dream of the Third Night evokes
Strategies of Otherness 47 both a personal and a national past. The dreamer is weighed down by the personal past in the form of a blind child upon his shoulders. The child announces that he is actually a blind man whom the ‘I’ murdered a hundred years before, suggesting that the child actually stands for a Doppelgänger of the dreamer who would normally repress his rage and guilt. But the ‘hundred years ago’ reference also hints at the nation’s own violent past and the historical burden that contemporary Japanese must bear. Otherness then, can be something imbricated within both the culture and the Self. The other side of entrapment is the desire to escape from it but, here again, the dreaming ‘I’ is stymied. As his samurai persona despairingly states in the Dream of the Second Night, ‘my internal self was sealed, all exits blocked’ (Natsume 1974: 34). In this case the dreamer is unable to escape into Otherness (in this case a longed-for Buddhist enlightenment) and is left with his lonely subjectivity. Although the dreamer is a samurai, and therefore again evocative of the past, his inability to escape his inner self suggests one of So¯seki’s later key themes, the inevitable loneliness of the individual in the modern world, no longer able to draw upon past tradition for empowerment. In the Dream of the Fifth Night, the ‘I’ is a condemned prisoner who has lost hope of escape. The only thing he waits for is to see his beloved once again but is betrayed by the machinations of an evil witch-woman. Issues of masculinity and femininity are also major elements in the dreams. The previously mentioned dream of the samurai can be read as referring to both spiritual and physical impotence as the dreamer watches his ‘9½ inch dagger blade’ dwindle down to a needle point as he desperately strives for enlightenment. The passive male ‘I’ on the ship in the Dream of the Seventh Night is approached by women asking incomprehensible questions, another reason, perhaps, for his decision to jump off the ship. In fact, it is often the enigmatic female Other who places the masculine ‘I’ in a passive or even humiliating position (with the single exception of a nurturing maternal presence in the Dream of the Ninth night). In general, as in the Fifth Night Dream, women are traducers: they appear in mirrors and disappear in reality. Ultimately, they are elusive. They die and transform into flowers (Dream of the First Night), suggesting a purified but unattainable form of female sexuality. In the memorable vision of the Dream of the Tenth Night, women threaten the male with a vision of despoliation. In this dream a mysterious and beautiful woman threatens the narrator’s friend, Sho¯taro¯, with the hideous fate of being licked by an endless series of pigs. The pigs with their ‘filthy snouts’ suggest an image of grotesque female sexuality – Sho¯taro¯ has to beat them off with his ‘stick’ – and this is supported by another of Sho¯taro¯’s friends who remarks (in an intriguing echo of the landlord in ‘Tower’) that ‘too much looking at women was never a good thing’ (Natsume 1974: 63). But the conveyor belt image of the endless numbers of pigs may also hint at the scene as a metaphor for industrial life or even, perhaps, the never-ending impurities inside one’s own soul. In this regard it is also interesting to note that Sho¯taro¯’s friend would like to receive his panama hat if, as seems likely, Sho¯taro¯ dies. If we see the hat as a signifier of the
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self, and the male self in particular, then not only Sho¯taro¯’s death but the loss of his hat suggests another image of ineffectual masculine identity, not only in relation to women but also, perhaps, to the West, since the soon-to-be lost panama hat would have been a relatively recent import. In this final dream, So¯seki brings together a number of visions of Otherness: the alienated self, the unattainable and threatening female, and the unmaintainable Western Other. If, as psychoanalysis suggests, dream characters are frequently projections of ourselves, an attempt to connect with a variety of ‘other sides’ within our own nature, then So¯seki’s dreams at heart hint at what might be described as a continually frustrated attempt to deal with Otherness. The dreaming ‘I’ is aware of his isolation and alienation and yearns for the Other but is ultimately incapable of crossing the boundaries. There are other moments in So¯seki’s literature, however, where Self and Other do seem to meet, at least transitorily. Perhaps one of the most memorable moments is in his mimetic later novel, And Then, when Daisuke, his intensely alienated protagonist, abandons himself briefly in an ecstatic union with the Absolute, symbolized by the white flowers that Michiyo, the woman he longs for but cannot possess, brings to him. For a brief moment, Daisuke actually does seem to penetrate to the ‘Other side’ as he finds ‘amid the rain, amid the lilies, amid the infinite past . . . a life that was pure and unsoiled’ (Nihon bungaku 1965: 321). But the novel’s ambiguous denouement hints that this is a condition that cannot last or is only attainable through death or madness. I would like to turn now to Murakami Haruki, another writer whose work has shown a sustained engagement with Otherness. Space does not permit me to deal with anywhere near the entirety of his lengthy œuvre so I would like to concentrate on the novel that many consider his masterpiece, Nejimakidori kuronikaru (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle). Written in 1996 (trans. 1998), almost one hundred years after So¯seki’s Dreams, and containing in its Japanese edition over nine hundred pages, Chronicle seems initially an unlikely comparison with So¯seki’s far shorter pieces. And yet, the work deals with a notably similar range of issues, including the burden of the past, both personal and national, the desire for salvation and enlightenment – often combined with a sense of entrapment – and a fascination with the mysteries of female Otherness on the part of a largely passive male subject. Furthermore, all these themes are encased in a mysterious atmosphere redolent of potential other worlds and permeated with dreams, psychic visions, and other conduits to Otherness such as a computer program that links to memories of the dead, and a well whose walls must be passed through in order for the protagonist to finally connect with the other side. It is perhaps not coincidental that Chronicle was one of Murakami’s first works after his return to Japan from a prolonged sojourn in the West. Although, by all accounts, Murakami’s time abroad was a largely pleasant one, it seems that the dynamic of an exile (even if, in Murakami’s case, a voluntary one) looking critically at Japanese culture is one that is shared by both writers’ works. Chronicle, as the ‘chrono’ in the title hints, ranges across time as well as space to present a memorable but disturbing vision of a Japan in which both masculine
Strategies of Otherness 49 and feminine subjectivities exist in uneasy relation to a problematic social fabric, and frequently in an estranged relationship to themselves as well – as the novel’s use of pairings and Doppelgänger underlines. Chronicle also deals in a brilliant and original manner with Japan’s experience in Manchuria. In the novel Manchuria becomes not only a non-Japanese Other but a genuine example of the ‘other side’ where maps are useless and where the laws of nature and humanity do not apply. Examples of the latter include the psychic powers of Lieutenant Honda and the quasi-occult experience of Lieutenant Mamiya when he is bathed in a ‘flood of light’ (p. 165) at the bottom of the well into which he has been thrown by Russian and Mongolian soldiers. Examples of the former are equally memorable, ranging from the skinning of Yamamoto by Mongolian soldiers to the killing of the zoo animals and the massacre of the escaped Chinese prisoners of war by the Japanese army. Murakami’s choice of Manchuria as not only national Other but uncanny Other might potentially be seen as a reluctance to engage with the reality of Japan’s incursion into Manchuria, a reality that has been erased in many postwar Japanese textbooks. Within the context of the novel, however, the ‘othering’ of Manchuria actually underlines both the protagonist’s and the nation’s problematic relationship with the reality of their past history. If the only way to deal with Manchuria is to make it an occult Other, this suggests the deep ambivalence that the Japanese feel toward confronting a past that at this point in time may appear surreal. By ‘othering’ Manchuria, Murakami paradoxically points to its stubborn reality. By defamiliarizing the war in Manchuria, Murakami forces the reader (especially the Japanese reader) to revisit the war in a new light. Perhaps one of the most intriguing instances of this use of defamiliarization is Chapter 9 which Murakami entitles ‘The Zoo Attack, or, a Clumsy Massacre’. The chapter records the ‘emergency liquidation’ of the animals in Hsinching zoo by a force of Japanese soldiers led by a reluctant lieutenant, in the last days of the war. The rationale for the killing seems somewhat dubious (as one character says, ‘the whole country is going down the drain and you’re asking me about a goddamn fucking zoo? Who gives a shit?’ (p. 401)), but this only heightens the surreal horror of the episode. The killings are seen from the lieutenant’s point of view and described in a flat, virtually affectless style which also adds to the horrific intensity as the animals writhe in agony, and the soldiers are almost suffocated by the smell of warm blood. The episode begs the question of why Murakami did not choose to describe the slaughter of human beings by the Japanese rather than animals. But, to my mind, Murakami’s decision to highlight the animals’ death brings home the ghastliness of war with a freshness that shocks all the more. Although the animals are clearly ‘Other’ in comparison to human beings, this Otherness paradoxically emphasizes the corrupting effect war has on the individual. The animals’ total innocence and total lack of connection to the insane world that war has wrought make their unnecessary deaths all the more disturbing. Intriguingly, So¯seki also deals with Manchuria in a work published at the same time as ‘Tower’, the short story ‘Shumi no iden’ (The Heredity of Taste, 1906).
50 Susan Napier The story begins with a vision of war itself as an ‘other’ world in which the narrative imagines the gods of war encouraging the Russians and Japanese to create a ‘massive slaughterhouse’ in which ‘ferocious hounds’ (Natsume 1974: 117) lap blood and devour mangled human flesh. War story competes with romance as the narrative progresses for, ultimately, ‘The Heredity of Taste’ is an occult love story in which the narrator/protagonist finds that his friend Ko¯-san, who had been killed in Manchuria, has left behind a psychic connection with a beautiful young woman who, although she never actually spoke to Ko¯-san, visits his grave and eventually becomes a nurturing friend to the dead soldier’s mother. While the narrator attempts to modernize the relationship by ascribing it to ‘heredity’ (owing to the fact that Ko¯-san’s father and the young woman’s mother had had an unfulfilled love affair), the reader is more likely to remember the scene when the narrator first sees the young woman at the graveyard in the Jakko-in Temple. As the narrator describes it: ‘There’s nothing in the world more deeply calm than a tomb: yet as she stood before it, this woman was more calm. The ginkgo’s yellow leaves are lonely and the tree, since it is haunted, lonelier still: but, seen in profile under its emptying branches, she looked so yet more utterly lonely as to seem the manifested essence of that sad-ghosted trunk’ (p. 167). In the narrator’s vision the woman is Other, not simply in her beauty and femininity but in her connection to the world of ghosts and death, in particular Ko¯-san’s death which, So¯seki hints, is an unnecessary sacrifice to the dogs of war. Although the story’s ending is technically an upbeat one, the images of death and the shadows of the past that surround the woman are hard to dismiss. She is, therefore, a potentially subversive conduit to other worlds, one who calls into question the values of society. In this regard, the woman shares much in common with the female characters in Murakami’s Chronicle. Essentially a quest narrative, the novel follows its narrator To¯ru Okada’s search, first for a disappearing cat, then for a disappearing wife, and finally for a self that may have disappeared long ago or perhaps never even existed. To¯ru is passive – for much of the novel he is more of a link to other characters’ stories than an independent protagonist. Initially these other characters include males, such as Lieutenant Mamiya whose account of his entrapment in a well brings To¯ru into contact with Japan’s recent history in Manchuria. But as the novel continues, it is the many enigmatic female characters who dominate, both galvanizing and tantalizing To¯ru as he attempts to break out of his passivity. As with So¯seki’s female characters, they vary considerably, but they are all far from ‘normal’ women. They range from a ‘prostitute of the mind’ to a virginal young girl who conducts surveys of balding men (another hint of male incapacity, perhaps), to a sophisticated middle-aged women who sells psychic services and has her own personal connection with Manchuria. Although To¯ru’s vanishing wife Kumiko dominates the book through her mysterious absence and ambiguous, disembodied voice, all the female characters seem to stand on the threshold between dream and reality. Again, like So¯seki’s female characters, they are associated with both purity and corruption, offering flashing glimpses of
Strategies of Otherness 51 otherworldly knowledge, healing, and enlightenment but also degradation and horror. To¯ru is initially unwilling to open up to the reality of his own past and to his own problematic identity, most notably the lies on which his marriage is based and the suppressed violence in his own nature. Through the prodding of the female characters, however, he begins to connect with the other side of his own nature and also, ultimately, that of his country’s recent past, as he and the reader learn of the violence of the Japanese incursion on the Asian continent and the pervasive corruption of Japanese society today, embodied in the person of his wife’s brother who may well be a dark Other of To¯ru himself. Or, as Rubin puts it, ‘Murakami has always written about half-remembered things that lurk in the mind until they unexpectedly jump out and grab us. In the Wind Up Bird Chronicle . . . what leaps out at his narrator from the depths of his individual memory is Japan’s dark and violent recent past’ (2002: 213). David Gray’s ‘ghosts that crawl upon the skin’ are made actual in Murakami’s work not only through his female characters but through his use of myth and legend. As with So¯seki’s work which clearly uses imagery derived from the English pre-Raphaelite tradition along with a Zen-inspired search for absolute transcendence, Murakami’s novel incorporates both Western and Japanese religious and mythic references. The most obvious of these are the Greek myths, including references to Theseus and the minotaur (symbolized by the unclean Ushiwaka, the warder of Kumiko), and the Orpheus myth in which Orpheus goes down into Hades to rescue Eurydice (To¯ru and Kumiko). But Murakami also acknowledges the similar Japanese myth of the god Izanagi’s search for his sister/lover in Yomi, the land of the dead. Incorporating the Other, however, does not necessarily guarantee a transcendence from the loneliness of subjectivity. To¯ru’s ultimate discovery of his wife does not lead to their reunion. As with many of his novels, the male protagonist is left wiser, more experienced, but ultimately alone with himself. In So¯seki’s works, both mimetic and fantastic, the male is usually either psychologically trapped (Kokoro, And Then, The Wayfarer) or else actually dead, most poignantly in Kokoro. As the narrator says despairingly of his dead soldier friend in ‘The Heredity of Taste’, ‘Ko¯-san since he jumped down into that damned ditch last November has not climbed back out. Though I rap my stick on the wall of the family tomb, though I shake it with my naked hands, Ko¯-san will sleep on in that ditch. He will sleep on not knowing that such a beautiful girl is coming to visit his grave carrying such beautiful flowers’ (p. 169). Both So¯seki and Murakami do, however, offer brief glimpses in which the Other is finally met in a moment of sacred union. In So¯seki’s case we must return to the Tower of London and his description of it as a flash of light bringing back images of a former life. The flash of light, however, is bounded by darkness, the reality of So¯seki’s existence in London, which is re-emphasized by the landlord’s cynical deconstruction of his Tower fantasies on his return from the visit. Chronicle also offers a literal flash of light, the scene of Lieutenant Mamiya in the well when a ray of light briefly illuminates his prison. But, as Mamiya goes
52 Susan Napier on to relate, the moment of radiance is evanescent. It does not save Mamiya or lead him to another, better world. To¯ru, looking for his own enlightenment, ultimately finds himself at the bottom of a well visited, not by light, but by rising water. Although we can interpret the water as purifying, washing away the illusions and corruption that To¯ru incorporates in himself and through his Doppelgänger figures, the image also has nihilistic implications as the water seems to wash away hope since, even after he is rescued from the well, he still cannot save Kumiko. Unlike Ko¯ -san, To¯ru can ‘climb back out’ but the mysterious female Other is still largely unattainable. Even more than So¯seki’s works, Chronicle shows many attempts to ‘meet on the other side’, especially in the attempted connections between male and female. In certain ways, To¯ru and his female interlocutors do help each other but ultimately remain sundered. For example, To¯ru’s birthmark helps the women who touch and kiss it but he himself never speaks or touches them. To¯ru makes love to the ‘prostitute of the mind’, Creta Kano, but never actually accompanies her to Crete and she ultimately disappears. In the novel’s most disturbing vision, Noboru Wataya has a sexual encounter with Creta Kano but this leads to her defilement, to the production of something grotesque within her. This is a meeting where Self and Other produce only abjection. Like So¯seki’s dreamers, Murakami’s male protagonists’ search for union and transcendence is ultimately stymied, a metaphor perhaps for the ultimate impossibility of connection between human beings. I began this chapter by emphasizing the permeability of the boundaries between Other and Self, or other side and reality, and hope that I have to some extent demonstrated this. Certainly ‘reality’ in both So¯seki’s and Murakami’s works is deeply overlaid with otherness. But, as should also be clear by now, the Other can only penetrate so far. Even after a century, the boundaries of Otherness still exist and the final transcendent meeting on the other side is inexorably postponed.
Note 1 So¯seki’s fundamental attraction to the more romantic elements of English culture is supported by the fact that two other stories in Yo¯kyoshu, ¯ ‘Maboroshi no tate’ (The Shield of Illusion) and ‘Kairoko¯’ (The Dew on the Shallots) are clearly inspired by English Romantic and pre-Raphaelite literature. Intriguingly, ‘The Shield of Illusion’ also highlights a mirror-like entity, in this case the shield belonging to William, the young protagonist. Unlike the repudiating ‘mirror’ of So¯seki’s London shop window, the shield, although decorated with a fearsome Medusa head, ultimately becomes a magical conduit through which William and his lover enter a ‘world beyond the shield’ containing a ‘southern land whereof the troubadours sing’. While So¯seki’s Japanese personae seem never able to finally break through to the other side, it is interesting that he sees his Western protagonists as having that capability.
References Akutagawa Ry unosuke ¯ (1921 [1971]) ‘Kamigami no bisho¯’ (The Faint Smiles of the Gods), in Akutagawa zenshu¯ vol. 3, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯. ——(1970) A Fool’s Life, New York: Grossman Publishers.
Strategies of Otherness 53 Eto¯ Jun (1974) Natsume So¯seki, Tokyo: Shincho¯sha. Frosh, Stephen (1995) ‘Time, Space and Otherness’, in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds) Mapping the Subject, London: Routledge. Fujii, James (1993) Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fujita Eiichi (1999) So¯seki to ibunka taiken (So¯seki and Cross-Cultural Experience), Tokyo: Waizumi shoin. Hazama Kafumi (1999) Natsume So¯seki shoki sakuhin (Natsume So¯seki: The Early Works), Tokyo: Waizumi shoin. Ivy, Marilyn (1995) Discourses of the Vanishing, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lippit, Seiji (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press. Miyoshi, Masao (1974) Accomplices of Silence, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Murakami Haruki (1996 [1998]) The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, New York: Alfred Knopf. Nakamura Miharu (1998) ‘Yukuefumei no jinbutsu’ (Lost People), Kokubungaku 43(3): 104– 10. Natsume, So¯seki (1974 [1907]) Ten Nights of Dream, Hearing Things, The Heredity of Taste, trans. Aiko Ito¯ & Graeme Wilson, Rutland, VT: Charles Tuttle. ——(1978) ‘Rondonto¯’ (The Tower of London), in Natsume So¯seki zenshu¯ , vol. 1, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯. ——(1992) The Tower of London, trans. Peter Milward and Kii Nakano, Brighton: In Print. Nihon bungaku (Anthology of Japanese Literature) (1965), vol. 13, Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ron. Rose, Gilbert (1986) The Power of Form, Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Rubin, Jay (2002) Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, London: Harvill Press. Tsuruta Kinya (1985) ‘Muko¯gawa no bungaku’ (Literature of the Other Side), in Kokubungaku kenky¯u shiryo¯kan (ed.) Bungaku ni okeru ‘muko¯gawa’ (The ‘Other Side’ in Literature), Tokyo: Meiji shoin. Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Faris, Wendy (eds) (1995) Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Part I
External others
3
Who holds the whip? Power and critique in Nagai Kaf¯u’s Tales of America Rachael Hutchinson
Introduction The representation of Self and Other in modern Japanese literature is arguably at its most evident in discourse of the Meiji period, at a time when Japan was seeking to define her place in a rapidly changing world. In a discursive context of European racial hierarchies and Social Darwinism, the Other that seems to dominate Meiji writing is the West, constructed as seiyo¯ (Occident) in binary opposition to Japan’s to¯yo¯ (Orient). This West assumed huge proportions in both political and literary discourse in the context of a modernising Japan. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) and the Meirokusha investigated Western models in their written search for a method for modernisation, while travel writing and fiction set in the West became increasingly popular.1 By the early twentieth century, authors such ¯ gai (1862–1922), Shimazaki To¯son (1872– as Natsume So¯seki (1867–1916), Mori O 1943) and Nagai Kafu¯ (1879–1959) had travelled in Europe and published short stories based on their experiences. But what was ‘the West’ in Meiji writing, and how did it function in literature of the period? When one encounters the miserable figure of So¯seki in London, weighed down by depression and an inferiority complex, and when one reads Meirokusha discourse, based on the principle of bunmei-kaika where Japan was to open up and achieve illumination and enlightenment by following in the footsteps of Europe, one might think that the West in Meiji writing functioned only as a model to emulate, an advanced entity able to exert imperialistic power through unequal treaties and cultural trends. Even though, after the Russo-Japanese War in particular, Japanese writers felt an increasing sense of unease with this model and took a more questioning and exploratory approach to issues of modernisation and defining the national identity, many critics have read literature and fiction of the period as subscribing to the ideals of bunmei-kaika discourse. This kind of theorising on Meiji literature I call ‘gap theory’, because it presupposes that any and every Japanese writer on the West or on the future of Japan felt in their hearts that Japan was inferior to the West and needed to catch up or close the gap. Such ‘gap’ theorising may be seen in readings of Nagai Kaf u’s ¯ Amerika monogatari (Tales of America, 1908 [2000]).2 Written in 1903–7, it spans a time when the popular image of America as the ‘sacred land of liberty’ was disintegrating
58 Rachael Hutchinson and Meiji writers were taking a more critical approach to modernisation and Japanese identity (Kamei 1975). However, Kaf u¯ has not often been seen as a critical writer, instead associated mainly with his love of the demi-monde and its prostitutes. Tales of America itself reads on the surface like travel writing, recounting the adventures of a young Japanese intellectual abroad, and when it was published Waseda bungaku reviewed it as ‘postcard-like’, with no coherence or deeper connecting ideology, a set of images of America appearing before the reader for the purpose of entertainment and delight. Edward Seidensticker (1965) reads the collection as mainly an egotistical pose to arouse envy from young Japanese males left at home, while Ken Ito (1991) reads it in terms of yearning for the Other after an Orientalist model. Ito’s argument is complicated by the application of René Girard’s triangular desire, but he states that the authorial persona of Tales of America ‘is a creature whose every perception is coloured by his yearning to become an artist of another race’.3 Ito argues that this yearning, coupled with a ‘sense of deprivation’ at being born in Japan and not in the West, formed Kaf u’s ¯ desire for the ‘given object’, or all things Western: A writer from a developing nation, he had learned to base his definition of what it meant to be cultured and civilized upon his understanding of the West. He viewed his own country’s distance from Western modernity as the essential feature of its identity. (ibid.: 42) Ito here assumes that Kaf u¯ subscribed to the view held by not a few intellectuals in the Meiji period, that Japan’s distance from Western modernity, culture and civilisation was the essential feature of its identity – thus defining Japan by its distance from the Western goal.4 This model portrays Kaf u¯ and other Meiji intellectuals as passively coming into contact with the superior West and reacting to it, perpetuating the ‘Western action, Eastern response’ stereotype of Japanese history. It has been argued that many intellectuals, including the Meirokusha ideologues, took the basic premise in their writing that Japan’s distance from ‘the West’ was what defined Japan as ‘Japan’, and that the Japanese Self existed only in contrast to its Western (superior) Other.5 But Ito’s use of this model in relation to literature overlooks the number of intellectuals and writers such as Futabatei ¯ gai, Nagai Kaf u¯ and others, who questioned Shimei, Natsume So¯seki, Mori O this definition of Japanese identity and asked whether Japan needed to Westernise at all in the pursuit of modernisation.6 Meiji literature is full of representations of the Western Other, and not always the white European male who came to visit Japan – the Other from far away impinging on the Japanese consciousness through physical presence.7 Japanese writers also travelled overseas, and reported back what they saw – not in the direct description of the Iwakura mission but in mediated, critical constructions, often analytical of the relationship between Japan and the Other in question. Far from being a discourse dominated by triangular mediation and exoticist yearning for the Other in terms of ‘gap theory’, Meiji
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 59 literature is often very critically aware and distanced from the supposed ‘object of desire’. Nagai Kaf u¯ ’s Tales of America is an interesting case in point. On a closer examination of the ‘America’ represented in the collection, and of how this representation is used, we see that Kaf u¯ uses the Western Other in these stories in a consistently critical way. The dynamic between binarism and complexity in Kaf¯u’s ¯ works demonstrates the active role of the writer in choosing how to represent the Western Other. At times Kaf u¯ employs a simple binary construct of Japan/America to make his point, while at other times he complicates the contrasts through inversion or by the introduction of an external observer. In this chapter I will examine three stories, each of which exemplifies one of these treatments of the American Other. ‘Ichigatsu Ichijitsu’ (‘January First’, 1907) demonstrates a simple binary construct, where ‘America’ is used for contrast against Japan and ultimately as the foil for cultural Self-definition. ‘Cho¯ hatsu’ (‘Long Hair’, 1906) shows an exploration of sexual and gender roles through inversion; and ‘Rinkan’ (‘In the Forest’, 1906) employs an external observer.8 The American Other acts as a trope through which Kaf¯u investigates ideas of power, freedom, sexual pleasure, gender roles, colonial legacy, nation-building, and the exile abroad. This Other is used for critique and definition of the Japanese Self, and for a deeper interrogation and problematisation of the very idea of Otherness. The representations, critiques and interrogations of the Other in these three stories are played out through narratives of sexual power. It is interesting that feminist readings of Kaf u¯ are almost nonexistent, because ‘January First’ seems like the perfect example to use as evidence for his critical awareness of the gender inequalities inherent in Meiji society. All three of the stories I have chosen for the purposes of this essay centre on the operation of power in relationships between men and women.9 ‘January First’ shows men’s domination of women in Japan and the comparative freedom of women in America, even though such ‘equality’ is acknowledged as superficial. In ‘Long Hair’ and ‘In the Forest’, Kaf u¯ goes much further into the implications of power relations between men and women, using the central relationship as the starting point for critical enquiry into the nature of power itself. The domination and submission in such relationships read as metaphors for racial domination, colonialism and slavery, while inversions of expected roles interrogate the expectations of Kaf u’s ¯ readers, both in the Meiji period and in the present. The question of who holds the whip in each relationship, and who is bound by cords, is the common question of all three stories which opens a window on Kaf u’s ¯ critical assessment of gender roles and national history.
Direct contrast: ‘January First’ When considering Kaf u’s ¯ three main treatments of the American Other in this collection, the treatment which seems the most simple and straightforward is that of direct contrast, drawn between Japan as a restrictive Confucian society and America as a land of individual freedom and democracy. ‘January First’, published
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in Taiseiyo¯ on 20 August 1907, provides a clear example of this technique. Masayuki Akiyama objects that Kaf u’s ¯ aestheticism is at odds with American Puritanism, so that his ‘understanding of American democracy may be said to be external, sensuous, subjective and self-centred’ (1981: 97). However, a lack of deep understanding or an aesthetic literary approach did not stop Kaf¯u from using the image of America as a land of freedom to great effect, portraying a value system far removed from Japanese Confucianism. Kaf¯u by no means accepted America uncritically as a true country of freedom, as evidenced by the shock expressed in his diary and his indignation in a later essay at the banning of Strauss’ Salome and the treatment of Gorky in New York.10 But freedom and independence, which Kaf¯u calls jiy¯u, are still an extremely important concept in Tales of America, used to introduce a severe criticism of a Japan which cannot experience such freedom itself.11 Kaf¯u’s imagined ‘country of freedom’ is used as a springboard from which he begins to criticise Japanese ‘feudal’ attitudes. As the title suggests, ‘January First’ opens at the New Year’s Day celebrations for expatriate Japanese employees of the US branch of To¯yo¯ Bank, complete with traditional food and drink such as z¯oni and sake. The party resounds with the slurping, chewing and crunching sounds of appreciation as the male guests seize the opportunity to escape the strains of fitting into Western society (KZ 3.168–9). The only person missing is Kaneda. He is described as being too ‘haikara’ for such gatherings, a word meaning ‘too Westernised’ in the Rokumeikan sense. Indeed, his ‘Japaneseness’ is questioned when it is revealed that he never appears at Japanese-style banquets and loathes the sight of sake and rice. Having lived in America for six or seven years, Kaneda apparently has no intention of ever returning to Japan. Kaneda’s anti-Japaneseness and refusal to be companionable with his fellow expatriates are given greater significance through Kaf u’s ¯ repetition of the words ‘sake’ and ‘rice’, three and four times respectively. The emphasis on the national aspect of these symbols through use of the particular words Nihonshu (Japanese sake) and Nihonmeshi (Japanese rice) increases Kaneda’s perceived distance from the Japanese community. One man finally speaks in Kaneda’s defence, asserting that he has good reasons for his avoidance of Japanese banquets. This new voice now takes over the narration, describing how he heard Kaneda’s story one night at a French restaurant. Once the scene is set, Kaneda himself takes over the story and we hear his words directly. This kind of embedded narration – from third person, to involved narrator, to central character and back again – features often in Tales of America, and has been criticised as cumbersome and distracting.12 But the embedded narration here serves a critical purpose, which becomes clear at the end of the story. Kaneda reveals that Japanese cuisine reminds him of his dead mother, who was subjected to constant criticism from her husband on everything from the quality of her cooking to her choice of tableware. The description of this father figure is telling: My father is probably well known to some people; now he has retired, but he was originally a Justice of the Supreme Court. He is a master of the Chinese
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 61 classics and poetry, with a pre-Restoration education, and on top of that, he’s an adept at tea ceremony, having studied the style of the Kyoto School. He is a connoisseur of everything from calligraphy, paintings and curios to swords, bonsai and bonseki, so the house always looked like a combination of a garden nursery and an antique shop. (pp. 171–2) This passage constructs the father as part of the Meiji establishment, well versed in every aspect of traditional Japanese arts and crafts except music and drama (but he even achieves this association when Kaneda likens his constant grumbling to a rakugo performance). Kaneda next outlines the roles played by his father and mother in the house: the first thing I heard when I was born was the hoarse complaints of my father, the first thing I saw was the figure of my mother who never untied the cords which bound back her sleeves; and the idea that fathers were frightening and mothers were pitiful was the first to take hold in my innocent child’s mind. (pp. 172–3) The tasuki – cords which hold back kimono sleeves – act as the visible symbols of power, not only in this household but also in the patriarchal values of Meiji society. Kaneda’s mother cannot untie these cords, bound as she is to a lifetime of servitude. The Kaneda household is thus constructed as the repository of all traditional Japanese culture and social values; but it is the ‘innocent child’s mind’ exposed to these values which undergoes a violent transformation in adolescence: Acquiring such preconceived ideas from such an environment, I finally progressed to middle school, and when I began to read the English language textbooks, contemporary magazines and so on which portrayed a perfect home life and innocent children, the Western ideas that were so full of words like ‘love’ and ‘home’ truly made a violent impact on my heart. Moreover, I felt that at some indefinable point in time, an extreme spirit of rebellion had built a firm foundation in my breast – telling me that words like ‘the teachings of Confucius’ and ‘bushid¯o’ that came from my father’s lips were the enemies of human happiness. (p. 173) Here the ideas of the West (se iyo¯ no shiso¯ ) are set up in direct contrast against those of Confucianism and bushido¯. Kaneda can no longer communicate with his father and leaves to attend school, but his mother dies from pneumonia in the winter before his graduation, struggling to bring in one of her husband’s precious bonsai from the snowy garden. It is thus a combination of servitude and Japanese traditional culture which kills her. From that point on, the sight of Japanese cuisine reminds Kaneda of his mother’s lifelong bondage and death. Since coming
62 Rachael Hutchinson to America, Kaneda has found he can avoid the sight of Japanese cooking. But it is not just the physical absence of Japanese food that frees him from grief: the Western philosophy of ‘love’ and ‘home’ is seen all around him in the treatment of women. Kaneda observes that in America, the roles of men and women seem at least on the surface to be much more equal. Within the home, relations are governed by respect and consideration, while outside the home women can still behave in a free manner and enjoy life. While other Japanese find fault with the independence of American wives, Kaneda thinks it is marvellous: I don’t care if it is just a superficial hypocrisy, a formality – if the husband carves the meat at table and places it on dishes for the wife, she in return will make the tea and cut the cake for him. Just seeing this gives me great pleasure, and if you pressed me to question that surface appearance I could not bear the destruction of such a precious, beautiful image. (p. 175) When Kaneda sees a girl freely enjoying a picnic of sandwiches or an apple, or married women in a restaurant sharing champagne and conversation late at night, hardly looking at their husbands, he is even happier: ‘Is this not a great consolation to my eyes, which have never before seen the happiness of a wife or a mother?’ (p. 175). ‘January First’ presents a harsh critique against Confucian morals and traditional samurai values, through contrast with a freer ‘America’. Kaf u’s ¯ critique of Meiji values is made possible through the construction of an opposing system of values in the West. The seemingly simple binary structure is used to great critical effect, as Kaf u¯ delves into the fundamental difference between Japanese and American shiso¯ through an exploration of gender roles within the home and in wider society.13 At the same time, Kaf u’s ¯ critical awareness is clear in his recognition of the ‘superficial hypocrisy’ of American gender dynamics. At the end of the story, the critical effect of Kaneda’s tale is borne out in the narrative present as the brackets of the embedded narration are closed one by one. Kaneda thanks the gentleman for accompanying him to the French restaurant and listening to his tale. After a break in the text, the gentleman addressing the assembled company at the New Year’s banquet closes his story, while the last paragraph is written from the original third-person perspective: The speaker finished his tale and once again picked up his chopsticks to finish his zo¯ni. The only sound to break the silence that fell upon the company for some time was the conspicuous sighing of the manager’s wife. The hearts of women are more sensitive towards everything, it seemed. (p. 176) The invisible third-person narration is tinged by a subjective observation, suggesting that the supposedly omniscient narration is actually only the personal viewpoint of one of the many assembled guests. The narrator says that only the
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 63 woman is affected by the tale, but it is evident that the entire company has been affected, because all have fallen silent. The narrator’s naïve insensitivity is made more evident when we realise the significance of the ‘conspicuous sighing’. The manager’s wife is sighing not in sympathy for poor Kaneda, but for his poor mother. She is sighing because she is Japanese, has come all the way to America, the so-called ‘country of freedom’, but is still serving her husband’s guests. She is the only woman here among her husband and the assembled men and bachelors, and there are no wives at the party. Kaf u¯ has recreated Meiji society in the microcosm of the expatriate banking community. These Japanese may be in America, but they have not undergone Kaneda’s violent epiphany nor experienced his spirit of rebellion against Meiji society. This is why Kaneda is not at the gathering – not just because he loathes Nihonshu and Nihonmeshi but also Nihonshakai (Japanese society) as well, governed as it is by a philosophy that denigrates women.
Inversion: ‘Long Hair’ First published in Bungei kurabu (1 October 1906), ‘Long Hair’ was written in May 1906. At first glance this story also seems to use a simple binary structure of a ‘free’ America versus a more restrictive Japanese society that prizes honour and family status above all things. But Kaf u¯ here uses not one binary structure but many, forming an interconnected system of binary sets: man/woman, Japan/America, submissive/dominant, deviant/normal. Kaf u’s ¯ use of the ‘Other’ in these binary structures becomes complicated as the expected behaviour of each side is inverted. Through such inversion and complication, Kaf u¯ examines the dynamics of power and interrogates the authority of so-called ‘normative’ structures in society and literature. ‘Long Hair’ reads on the surface as a tale of sexual liberation in New York. The opening scene centres on questions of gender roles and national identity, as the first narrator (jibun) spies an exceptional carriage out in Central Park one spring, carrying an exceptional couple. The carriage obviously belongs to the woman, with the man ‘riding next to her’. The narrator seeks clues to the couple’s identity in the appearance of their hair. The man’s long, black hair curled to his shoulders arouses speculation among onlookers about his nationality: Mexican or South American is suggested, but the narrator knows ‘in the very instant I first caught a glimpse of him’ that the man is Japanese like himself (p. 69). The narrator next wonders ‘what kind of Japanese’ the man is, and whether the woman next to him in the carriage is his wife. Here the woman is identified primarily by her blonde hair: ‘kinpatsu’ is written in kanji with ‘burondo’ appearing in the text as katakana rubi or supertext (p. 70). She is established as a white Western woman with foreign, exotic colouring. The association of the couple’s national identities with hair type reminds us of the title of the story, which as the narrative unfolds comes to represent deeper issues of national identity, gender stereotypes and sexuality. After this sight of the couple by the first narrator, the story is told by watashi, a fellow expatriate Japanese in New York.14 Having attended classes at Columbia
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University with the man in the carriage, watashi can reveal that the man is Fujigasaki Kunio, the eldest son of an aristocratic family. Kunio has left Columbia in order to pursue travel and leisure, and now lives in an apartment on Central Park with the blonde woman. When watashi tracks Kunio down, we have our second description of the woman as she opens the door. Kaf u¯ builds on the first exotic impression and creates an image of the ‘loose American woman’ based on the narrator’s reading of her sexuality. She is about 28, possessing green eyes with long lashes and ‘the usual indescribable expression of a Western woman’. Describing her hair, this time the word ‘blonde’ appears as a singular word in the text in katakana, unmediated by rubi. Watashi describes her as ‘vulgar yet fascinating’, partly because her hair is loosely tied and appears on the point of falling down to tumble about her shoulders, and partly because she wears a loose afternoon gown which shows off her rounded shoulders and arms (p. 72). This narrator’s first sight of the woman clearly represents her as a sexual being, on the point of becoming entirely dishevelled. This stereotypical image plays into the reader’s expectations of the female as ready to be possessed by the male, ready for the inversion of the female as possessor as the story unfolds. Elsewhere in Tales of America Kaf¯u makes use of the ideal of America as a country of romantic love and sexual freedom in order to criticise Japan.15 Here, Kafu¯ highlights the ideal of America’s libertarian attitude by saying that ‘in this country there was nothing at all unusual in a man and a woman going riding together and so on’ (p. 74). However, this apparent freedom is undermined by watashi’s reaction when he discovers that the two are having an affair. When Kunio finally admits to watashi that the woman is divorced and outcast from polite society, taking a succession of lovers to divert herself, watashi labels her a ‘fallen woman’, calling her immoral and ruthless. Her beauty and sexuality are now seen as snares to entrap men. The relationship between this divorced, sexually active woman and the young aristocrat breaks all social conventions, and watashi is shocked. While watashi censures their love for breaking social norms and expectations, we soon find out that he has even more reason to be shocked, in the nature of the relationship itself. Kunio admits that this relationship will only last until the woman finds someone else, but says that ‘I don’t mind if it lasts only a moment. Even if that moment is painful, I don’t mind as long as I have five minutes, even one minute, of sweetness’ (p. 76). Watashi first makes scholarly efforts to understand the situation, reading Daudet’s Sappho where the hero feels love and abhorrence for a woman simultaneously, but he feels that Kunio’s love is ‘completely different, of another kind altogether’. He observes that Kunio has not an ounce of ‘strong, manly love’ about him. ‘It was just as if man and woman had swapped their social positions (chi’i ) and he, despite being the man, was embraced in her arms, wishing to spend his days under the woman’s protection as if in a dream, like a male concubine’ (p. 77). In fact, the two have not only swapped social and financial positions, but their sexual roles as well. In Japan Kunio had spent his days seeking older geisha to protect and nurture him, pursuing his ‘strange variety of desire’ (sono ki-i na isshu no nozomi ). Kunio’s family had sent him to Columbia
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 65 University to curb him of his tendencies, but the image of America as a ‘sacred land of liberty’ gives way to a darker kind of liberation, where Kunio can seek out masochistic pleasures, ‘forgetting even his family, even his country’ under the spell of this beautiful sorceress. At this point in time Kunio has been kept by the woman for two years. Kunio is in agonies, going to great lengths to keep the woman’s favour, but ‘women are creatures such that the more a man humbles himself before a woman, the easier it is to fall victim to her tyranny’ (p. 78). This tyranny extends to physical torment. Her nerves frayed from so many years ostracised by society, the woman is prone to fits of rage in which she destroys her belongings and beats Kunio. One day she experiences some kind of epiphany while tearing out her hair and asks him to grow his hair long like Henry IV. He takes pleasure in carrying out her wishes: ‘Kunio immediately grew his lustrous black hair until it reached his shoulders, curling the ends out beautifully’. In the final sentence we find out that the woman has ordered him to grow his hair to satisfy her own sexual fetish, as the first narrator is told: When you saw him in the carriage, you probably thought that his long hair was done to be fashionable. But actually when she loses her temper, he lets her tear out his long hair, and grants a kind of painful pleasure to the frenzied woman. (p. 79) Kafu¯ uses the central relationship of ‘Long Hair’ to interrogate and problematise the nature of power. Kunio forsakes the most binding of all Japanese traditional ties, with family and country, in order to satisfy the woman and his own masochistic tendencies. In the revelation that the central relationship is based on sadomasochism, we understand why Kunio will not leave the woman: he has sacrificed everything for the opportunity to live out his submissive role. He is emasculated, but it is evident that he enjoys his subjugated position. Kunio is what we may call a ‘semi-colonised self ’. By choosing to live in this role, Kunio takes some of the responsibility for his situation and becomes complicit in his own ‘colonisation’. Kunio’s complicity is seen in Kaf¯u’s emphasis on the word ‘decision’ (kesshin) at the critical point in the story when Kunio leaves university for good. As watashi admonishes Kunio for dropping out of university halfway through his degree, Kunio is silent, eyes downcast, while we hear the woman playing the piano in the background. When the music stops, Kunio says ‘as if reaching a decision’, that he is taking leave from university for the moment. Kaf u¯ places great emphasis on this word ‘decision’, which is repeated four times, once in quotation marks: ‘the word that I used, “decision”, seemed to hold a deep significance for him’ (p. 74). Kaf u¯ makes a further statement in this story by naming the hero ‘Kunio’, with ‘Kuni’ represented by the character for ‘nation’. Is the Japanese nation to be colonised by white American power? Is Japan complicit in its own powerlessness in enduring unequal treaties with the West for so long? By placing the ‘nation’ in the centre of a text about sexual power, Kaf¯u gives a subtle hint at contemporary political dynamics.
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On the surface, ‘Long Hair’ represents ‘America’ as a liberated society, an Other which inverts Japan’s gender roles and family expectations. This seems to reinforce the image of America as everything Japan is not, where anything is possible. But looking a little closer, the simple surface contrast of liberated Other/repressed Japan does not hold true. The central relationship is only possible because the normative societies of both America and Japan have rejected these people as misfits – her because of her divorce and him because of his particular dissipation. Their outcast status allows them to find pleasure outside the norms of society as they live on its margins. Rather than liberated America/repressed Japan, we see a construct of normative behaviour opposed to sexual deviancy, a construct which transcends national boundaries. The story ends with the man’s complete submission to the powerful, yet dangerously unbalanced, ‘Western woman’. Her sexuality is such a threat that the second narrator ascribes it to derangement. Through the inversion of expected roles and the presentation of the deviant as something which can rather provide sweetness and pleasure, Kaf u¯ interrogates the authority of such ‘normative’ expectations. Yet another level of inversion is found in the narrative medium. Kafu¯ ’s audience of Japanese male readers would have expected the kind of demi-monde fiction of a young man abroad popularised by To¯kai Sanshi and to some extent by Kafu¯ himself in the early stories of Tales of America.16 As Stephen Snyder argues, ‘Long Hair’ would have been greatly disturbing to this audience, ‘resisting as it does patriarchal demands for male dominance, as well as reversing the financial order that is generally inscribed in demi-monde fictions, where male customers, writers and readers habitually purchase, textualise, and consume the female body’ (2000: 47). The emphasis on complexity and the questioning tone of this story show a more subtle criticism than that at work in ‘January First’, as Kafu¯ ’s critical inversions not only refer to the entities within the text ( Japan/ America, female/male) but also to the outside world of the reader. By making readers face their own assumptions about gender roles and sexual power, Kaf u’s ¯ critique extends to contemporary Meiji society in the act of reading, thus transcending the boundaries of the text.
External observation: ‘In the Forest’ Rinkan (In the Forest), written in November 1906, deals with the problem of race in America, specifically the black/white issue in Washington, DC. and how the history of slavery is still alive in the modern consciousness, here manifest in a white soldier’s treatment of a young black maid. Where ‘January First’ relied on a simple binary construct and ‘Long Hair’ used inversion of such binary constructs, ‘In the Forest’ introduces an outside observer to question the legitimacy of binary relationships which unavoidably involve power and marginalisation. ‘In the Forest’ is interesting because Kafu¯ makes it clear that the West, while serving as ‘Other’ to Japan, has its own definitions of ‘Other’ within itself. The ‘new continent’ of America is not a homogeneous whole, but is rift with the issue of racial discrimination. The opening of ‘In the Forest’ has the narrator commenting on the two
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 67 things which travellers most notice about Washington – first, that the capital city is open and park-like in design, and second, the surprisingly ‘large numbers of black people wherever you go’ (p. 108). The narrator is visiting Washington in the autumn, and for two weeks he has been sightseeing – first, the White House, ‘official residence of the President’, then the Capitol and various government offices, then Washington’s grave on the banks of the Potomac and finally the leafy suburbs. The narrator proceeds through the sights in descending order of political importance, the urban trappings of state set in contrast to the beautiful natural scenery of Maryland. We expect that as the narrator travels out to the forest the visible exercise of power will decrease, but in fact the central event of the story shows that, even in the middle of a forest, power is everywhere. In the opening lines we are thus alerted to the two main concerns of this story – race and the power of the state. Crossing the bridge across the Potomac into Virginia, the narrator (jibun) finds a small train station servicing Arlington, identified as a place with a large public cemetery, military training grounds, barracks and officers’ residences. Waiting at the station are a number of soldiers, some young black maids ‘who probably work in the officers’ houses’, and some ‘white middle-aged women apparently back from shopping’ (p. 109). The men form a homogeneous whole, representing the military state, while the women are classified by their race and by their social status as subservient maids or consumers (presumably also as officers’ wives). However, it soon appears that while the soldiers may represent state power in their uniforms, their bodies are anguished and oppressed by that power: as all the varied passions of their youth and fine physiques are oppressed by military rules and regulations, the anguish of their flesh is somehow expressed in their faces tanned by the sun and in the colour of their bloodshot eyes, making their appearance fearsome, but at the same time pitiful. (p. 109) The narrator stands on the platform with the men and looks back at Washington for the view of Capitol Hill. First he sees all the monuments and buildings gleaming white in the sun, then turning red and assuming an exotic, almost alien Otherness to his eyes.17 The city becomes state power incarnate as he muses on the significance of the scene: It was a clear, wide panorama. I was suddenly aware that this was the capital city which presided over this great continent of the Western hemisphere, and gazing at the setting sun reflected in the water, my abstract impressions of race, humanity, nation, political power, ambition, reputation, history – all these things began to pile on top of each other in my breast, coming and going, like the clouds on a summer’s day. (p. 110)
68 Rachael Hutchinson The narrator feels that his thoughts are incoherent and he would not be able to put them into words: ‘Only, it was like I was vaguely pursuing the shadow of something large, while at the same time I had the sensation of a kind of strong respect (sonkei) pressing down upon the base of my neck’ (pp. 110–11). We can surmise the nature of the ‘large something’ casting a shadow over his thoughts, as well as the source of the pressure on the back of his neck, from the order and significance of his ‘abstract impressions’ as he gazes at the capital. His first impression concerns race (jinrui), only then followed by humanity (jindo¯ ). If race is utmost in his mind when looking at the capital, we are reminded of the opening sentence that contrasted a park-like Washington with a large black population. In this capital city ‘race’ comes before ‘humanity’, as people are defined primarily by the colour of their skin and not by their shared status as human beings. Next he mentions ‘nation’ or ‘state’ (kokka), reminding us of the state power which represses the soldiers who serve it, and the ‘political power’ (seiken) which resides in the city. Government and the exercise of power is primarily the domain of white male adults,18 and the following focus on ambition (yashin) and reputation (meibo¯ ) in the city reinforces the powerful status of politicians and the President of the United States. Finally he thinks of history (re kishi ). The history of the American nation – one of immigration, pioneers, displacement of the native population, slavery, the Civil War and the establishment of the Union – is rife with the racial question which sparked his original train of thought. The narrator may not see the thread linking his thoughts and feel ‘incoherent’, but the pressure at the base of his neck is caused by ‘respect’ – a pressure to bow his head at the power of the American state, perhaps, or perhaps a feeling of sympathy with the subjugated races in his own position as a Japanese. This is interesting because it is the one place in the story when the narrator hints at his own position in relation to the black/white matrix. The pressure of the racial question intrudes upon his own body, because ultimately he must face his own position in an America rift with racial tension. In this passage, Kafu¯ has focused our attention on the narrator’s position vis-à-vis what he is seeing, and on Washington as the centre of American democracy and the culmination of colonial history. Both constructions intensify the following scene. The narrator walks into the forest and hides as he comes across a white soldier with a young black girl kneeling at his feet, crying and clasping her hands to her breast in an attitude of prayer. She is pleading, clutching his hand – ‘So, you are asking me to break up with you?’ The soldier is infuriated by her presumption, ‘spitefully and arrogantly’ asserting that it is he who will break off the relationship, not she, denying her the right to ask for anything or exercise choice in the matter. The girl is of mixed blood, ‘as much as half white’ but Kaf u¯ refers to her from the American soldier’s viewpoint: ‘He was a fine American, and she was a daughter of the black race, who were previously slaves’ (p. 112). The soldier is identified here as ‘American’, not ‘white’. No matter how ‘repressed’ his body may be by military regulations, he will always have the distinction of ‘Americanness’ in the colour of his skin. The girl is also American,
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 69 but is identified only by her slave ancestry, as she has no access to power. While it is not directly stated in the text, the white race may be read in terms of their relationship to the slaves – they were historically the slave owners. It is no coincidence that the story is set in Virginia, a Southern state. The whole history of the slave trade, which led to the economic might of the American South, informs the scene. The girl’s powerless position is emphasised by her inability to speak after this point. The narrator finds the ‘cruel and brutal live scene’ unbearable, but he only leaves when he fears discovery as his invisibility is compromised by a ray of sunlight. As the narrator walks back through the forest, it is not the couple or their relationship which arouse his interest, but rather ‘the long-standing problem of the black and white races in this country’: Why on earth, I wondered, was the black race so despised and looked down upon by the white race? Could it be because their appearance is ugly, perhaps, or because it is black? Or perhaps it is simply because fifty years earlier they were slaves. Perhaps human races will never be able to escape oppression unless they form a unified political group. Will the state and the army be necessary forever? (p. 113) Here the narrator directly connects state power to the racial question, and characterises that connection in terms of oppression and slavery. The capital city ‘others’ its black population; whites look down on blacks; blacks have no access to political organisation and so will be oppressed by the state forever. The relations between black and white are thrown into further relief by the scene in the forest, as sexual power complicates the colonial legacy. In some versions of the story, the narrator ends by saying ‘it seemed that I was still thinking about the various inconclusive aspects of this extremely large problem, so difficult to put into words’.19 Sakagami Hiroichi argues that Kaf¯u is not interested in the deeper racial problem and has no conclusions about it himself because it is so far outside his own experience (1997: 96). But if we read this story as a meditation on power, we see that Kafu¯ clearly questions the legitimacy of a political system founded along racial lines, and the scene in the forest demonstrates how cruel the exercise of such power can be. Other versions of the text omit this questioning train of thought, ending simply ‘I never saw that black girl again while I was living in Washington’.20 But this deceptively simple sentence reinforces the centrality of the act of seeing in this story. The central event in ‘In the Forest’ is ‘what the narrator saw in the forest’. Through the narrator, Kaf u¯ shows an incisive critical awareness of the powers of observation and the visibility or invisibility this bestows on the object observed. On one hand, the reality of the black/white relationship in America is visible only in the forest, in the margins, away from the city. Back in Washington, this kind of ‘cruel and brutal’ scene becomes invisible, naturalised as part of the fabric of society where black people only appear as maids and porters. The
70 Rachael Hutchinson invisibility of the colonial legacy in contemporary society is highlighted by the fact that the narrator never sees the girl again. On the other hand, Kaf u¯ questions the relationship between visibility and power. The story opened with the large numbers of black people the narrator sees wherever he goes, but these people have no power in the city. Mere visibility does not confer power, and the girl’s invisibility does not change anything. Both versions of ‘In the Forest’ question the nature of state power in relation to race, and the Othering of one race by another. The agency inherent in the narrator’s act of observation raises further questions about the positioning of races and nations relative to each other. While the narrator feels a pressure on his neck, like a yoke or the compulsion to bow, Kaf¯u shows no such subservience in his incisive use of the observer position. Kaf¯u, as representative of the ‘Oriental Other’ to the West, is here de-constructing American society in observing how it views the Others within itself. The introduction of the external observer is a method Kaf u¯ would use to great effect in Furansu monogatari (Tales of France, 1909) in observing Europe and its relationship to the so-called Orient of Egypt, Persia and India. The flexible positioning of the observer external to the dynamic of power relationships allows Kaf¯u to examine the workings of power between nations, often in a colonial context. ‘In the Forest’ shows the beginnings of Kaf u’s ¯ examination of colonial power, and the colonial legacy of a nation still dealing with its past. This attention to colonial power is seen again in ‘Shingapo¯ru no sujikan’ ¯ (‘A Few Hours in Singapore’, written in 1908), as Western overseers are shown using Malay and Chinese coolie labour to build up the economic might of the British Straits colonies. In both ‘In the Forest’ and ‘A Few Hours in Singapore’, Kaf¯u as an outside observer has a position of agency unavailable to the black girl or the Malay coolies. By writing a critique of America’s political and social systems, and by asserting his own position as observer of this powerful nation, Kaf u¯ interrogates the hierarchy of nations so prevalent in Meiji discourse.
Conclusion In the three stories examined above we see that Kaf u¯ used a number of different methods to examine power relations at work in America, Japan and the colonial world. Kaf u¯ ’s use of the ‘Other’ is both complex and critical, extending far beyond a simple ‘Japan versus America’ framework. It is not a homogeneous ‘America’ that appears in Tales of America, the totalised entity often portrayed by gap-theorists of Meiji discourse, but a complex constellation of dichotomies open to questions and critique, as Kaf¯u attempts to comprehend what such dichotomies mean for his own identity and for Japan’s place in the world. When America is contrasted directly with Japan, Japan and the values of the Meiji period come under scathing attack. When America is displayed as a place where anything might happen, the ‘anything’ often turns out to be much more complex than readers might have expected, as social and gender roles are reversed and the exercise of power comes to the fore. As he examines the power
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 71 structures operating between sets of social systems – gender, race, and nation – he makes it clear that these systems are fluid, changeable (open to inversion), observable (and therefore not closed systems in themselves) and open to critique. In examining the power dynamics at work in and between different sets of alterities, Kafu¯ interrogates the notion of ‘difference’ and ‘alterity’ in itself. Who is it that makes and defines roles in gender structures, in racial constructs? Who is it that has the power to decide which is Self/coloniser and which is Other/colonised? In constructing a shifting set of binary constructs on the basis of power relations, Kaf¯u is able to interrogate not only common images of ‘Japan’ and ‘America’, but also the dynamics of power operating between the two nations. This play between binary structures and flexible, shifting complex systems gives Kaf¯u’s work a great capacity for the critical. The ‘America’ of Tales of America is not the clear and simple ‘land of liberty’ or ‘civilised nation’ of Meiji discourse. American freedoms – social, sexual and political – are all held to account in the stories above. Social freedom and equality for women is visible in ‘January First’, but is acknowledged to be superficial and not up to close scrutiny. Sexual freedom is possible in ‘Long Hair’, but comes with the price of socially outcast status. Political freedom is possible for white males in ‘In the Forest’, but not for anyone in thrall to the power of the state or to preconceived racial constructs. By dismantling these popular images of American freedom Kaf¯u enacts a critique not only on ‘America’ but also on Meiji stereotypes and expectations. Elsewhere in Tales of America, the ‘civilised nation’ of America comes under equally harsh scrutiny: the cities may be modern, but the electric lights serve to make it easier for prostitutes to ply their trade at night, while many of these prostitutes were once wholesome farm girls, tricked into their profession by unscrupulous pimps. By casting doubt on the Othering of America as merely clean, modern and technologically advanced, by critiquing the ‘democracy’ where plays are banned and racism underpins the capital city, and by raising the spectre of colonial power, Kaf¯u casts doubt on the ideals of bunmei-kaika and the role of the West in the modernisation of Japan. By dismantling the image of America as the ‘sacred land of liberty’, Kafu¯ thus deconstructed and criticised a popular Meiji construct. In 1908, this process had been going on for some time, and we may see Kaf¯u’s work as part of a wider discourse of dissent and doubt circulating among intellectuals after the Russo-Japanese war. It is evident that political and literary writings on the West were not always served by the same ideals, but could instead be opposed in their representations and uses of the Western Other. Not all literature accepted earlier Meirokusha binarisms, and even travelogue or demi-monde literatures, long enjoyed for their exotic constructions of the Other, could surprise audiences with their critical insight and inversions. One of the outcomes of Kafu¯ ’s critique is to provide us with a new way of looking at the various Meiji constructs of the Western Other, while the critical effect of Tales of America today makes us question contemporary ‘gap theory’ underlying academic criticism on Meiji period literature.
72 Rachael Hutchinson
Notes 1 The Meirokusha, or ‘Meiji Six Society’, comprised Fukuzawa Yukichi, Mori Arinori
2
3
4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11
12 13
14 15
(1847–89), Nakamura Masanao (1832–91), Tsuda Mamichi (1829–1903), Kato¯ Hiroyuki (1836–1916) and Nishi Amane (1829–97). In their journal Meiroku zasshi these intellectuals discussed various issues relating to modernisation, including methods to achieve bunmei-kaika (civilisation and enlightenment) based on current trends in Western thought. See Matsuzawa (1984). Amerika monogatari is found in vol. 3 of Nagai Kaf¯u, Kaf u¯ zensh¯u, 28 vols, Iwanami Shoten, 1962–74, hereafter abbreviated as KZ. Bracketed page references in the text, unless otherwise noted, refer to this volume and edition. All translations are my own, although interested readers may find Mitsuko Iriye’s English translation of Amerika monogatari useful (American Stories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Ito (1991: 41). Ito’s structural application of Girard’s triangular desire is both useful and sustainable when considering Kaf¯u’s imitation of Western artists in ‘Ochiba’ (Falling Leaves, KZ 3.238–44) and ‘Pari no wakare’ (Farewell to Paris, KZ 3.541–57). It is his subscription to the inferior/superior systems of gap theory which I am addressing in this instance. See Matsuzawa (1984: 210–11). Ibid. Yamanouchi (1978) examines the contradictions felt by Meiji writers between imported Western culture and Japanese tradition, and their search for cultural and individual authenticity. Perhaps the best-known example of the physical Other appearing in Meiji Japan is the foreigner on the beach with Sensei in the first few pages of Natsume So¯seki’s Kokoro. These stories may be found in KZ 3.168–76, KZ 3.68–79, and KZ 3.108–16 respectively. The narrative frames of these stories often involve relationships between the male narrators, often used for critical effect. While this chapter focuses on the central stories of man-woman relationships, a good discussion of the framing narrative relationships may be found in Snyder (2000: 34–53). See diary entries for 12 and 16 April 1906 (Saiyu¯nisshisho¯, or Leaves from a Journal of a Western Voyage, is found in KZ 19.5–54); ‘Amerika no omoide’ (‘Memories of America’, 1945), KZ 17.205; Sakagami (1997: 98). This idea of freedom (jiy¯u) is most evident in the celebrated James and Stella scene in ‘Shikago no futsuka’ (‘Two Days in Chicago’, KZ 3.200–14), as well as in the narrator’s reaction to the Statue of Liberty in ‘Natsu no umi’ (‘The Sea in Summer’, KZ 3.216–26). Both stories contrast the free ‘American spirit’ with a restrictive Japanese society bound by Confucianism and sexual repression. Akiyama argues that the ideals of American democracy inspired Kaf¯u to rebel against ‘the semi-feudal and patriarchal system in Japan’ (1981: 96). See, for example, Seidensticker (1965: 23–4); Ito (1991: 36). This use of the West as a defining contrast and a tool for critique of the status quo at home may be read as what Xiaomei Chen calls ‘anti-official Occidentalism’. Kaf¯u was to make great use of this technique in his later works. See Hutchinson (2001); Chen (1995). Jibun and watashi can both be translated as ‘I’; Kaf¯u uses the two different pronouns to distinguish between the two first-person narrators. In Natsu no umi (The Sea in Summer, July 1905) the narrator admires the physical beauty of Western women (seiyo¯ fujin), especially their choice of clothes to suit their hair, face and figure. In comparison, ‘do not Japanese women seem to lack absolutely all of these arts?’ American freedom of sexual expression through appearance is contrasted sharply with Meiji society, where education is so full of ‘reproach and intervention’ that Japanese girls shrink in fear rather than maximise their natural endowments (KZ 3.220–1).
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf u¯ 73 16 To¯kai Sanshi, real name Shiba Shiro¯ (1852–1922). His serialised novel Kajin no kig¯u 17 18 19 20
(Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women, 1885–97) was a best-seller, based on his travels in America in 1879. Ken Ito equates this identification with Kaf¯u’s ‘Orientalisation’ of America as an exotic, mysterious Other (1991: 41–3). Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment notwithstanding, government in 1906 was dominated by white males. Women did not achieve the vote in America until 1920, while the struggle for black voting rights continued through the 1960s. This sentence appears in the 1972 Iwanami Shoten edition of Kaf¯u zensh¯u (KZ 3.116) but not in the original publication, nor in the 1992 Iwanami Shoten edition. This is the last sentence in the first edition of the story from 1908, reproduced in the 1992 Iwanami Shoten edition. It is this version which appears in Iriye’s translation (2000: 80).
References Main texts Nagai Kaf u¯ (1962–74) Kaf u¯ zensh u¯ (KZ) (Kaf u’s ¯ Complete Works), 28 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ——(1992) Kaf¯u zensh¯u (Kafu’s ¯ Complete Works), 30 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Other references Akiyama, Masayuki (1981) ‘The American Image in Kaf¯u Nagai and Henry James’, Comparative Literature Studies 18: 95–103. Chen, Xiaomei (1995) Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Girard, René (1965) Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hutchinson, Rachael (2001) ‘Occidentalism and Critique of Meiji: The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kaf u¯ ’, Japan Forum 13(2): 195–213. Iriye Mitsuko (2000) American Stories, New York: Columbia University Press. Ito, Ken (1991) Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kamei, Shunsuke (1975) ‘The Sacred Land of Liberty: Images of America in NineteenthCentury Japan’, in Akira Iriye (ed.) Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 55–72. Kanno Akimasa (1996) Nagai Kaf¯u junreki (Nagai Kaf u’s ¯ Meanderings), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Komori, Yo¯ichi (1997) ‘Rekishi-chiseiteki sakka Nagai Kaf¯u: Furansu monogatari kara Bokuto¯ kidan e’ (Nagai Kaf¯u as Historical and Geographical Author: From Tales of France to A Strange Tale from East of the River ), Eureka 29(3): 124–35. Ko¯no, Kensuke (1997) ‘Sei, tairiku, koroniarizumu: Amerika monogatari, Furansu monogatari ni okeru “intercourse”’ (Gender, Continent, Colonialism: ‘Intercourse’ in Tales of America and Tales of France ), Eureka 29(3): 170–5. Matsuzawa, Hiroaki (1984) ‘Varieties of Bunmei Ron (Theories of Civilization)’, in Hilary Conroy, Sandra T.W. Davis and Wayne Patterson (eds) Japan in Transition: Thought and Action in the Meiji Era, 1868–1912, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, pp. 209–23. Nagai Kafu¯ ([1908] 2000) American Stories, trans. Mitsuko Iriye, New York: Columbia University Press.
74 Rachael Hutchinson Natsume So¯seki ([1914] 1957) Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan, Chicago, IL: Regnery. Sakagami, Hiroichi (1997) ‘Nagai Kafu¯ Amerika monogatari: ikoku f¯udo no hakken’ (Nagai Kaf¯u’s Tales of America: The Discovery of a Foreign Climate), Kokubungaku Kaishaku to Kansho¯ 62(12): 93–8. Seidensticker, Edward (1965) Kaf u¯ the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kaf u, ¯ 1879– 1959, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Snyder, Stephen (2000) Fictions of Desire: Narrative For m in the Novels of Nagai Kaf u¯ , Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Suenobu, Yoshiharu (1997) Nagai Kaf u¯ no mita Amerika (America as Seen by Nagai Kaf¯u), Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ronsha. Suzuki, Fumitaka (1995) Wakaki Kaf u¯ no bungaku to shiso¯ (Literature and Thought of the Young Kafu), ¯ Tokyo: Ibunsha. Tsuruta, Kinya (1998) ‘Japanese Perceptions of Westerners in Modern Fiction’, in Keizo Nagatani and David W. Edgington (eds) Japan and the West: The Perception Gap, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 49–79. Yamanouchi, Hisaaki (1978) The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further reading Iriye, Akira (ed.) (1975) Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jansen, Marius B. (1965) Changing Japanese Attitudes towards Modernization, Tokyo: Tuttle. Miyoshi, Masao (1991) Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nagatani, Keizo and Edgington, David (eds) (1998) Japan and the West: The Perception Gap, Aldershot: Ashgate. Rimer, J. Thomas (1988) Pilgrimages: Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Seidensticker, Edward (1983) Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, London: Allen Lane.
4
‘Foreign bodies’ ‘Race’, gender and orientalism in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’ Adrian Pinnington
Reflecting the current strong interest in constructions of ‘otherness’ in modern Japanese culture, there has been much discussion recently among Tanizaki critics, both inside and outside Japan, of the presence of orientalist themes and attitudes in his works. One can think of a number of reasons for this interest, but one of these has undoubtedly been the strong impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism on Japanese intellectuals. As a number of different writers, however, have commented, there has been a certain oddity in much of the reception of Said’s work within Japanese scholarship.1 This has perhaps been most clearly expressed by Eiji Oguma: In the modern era, it was frequently the case that when Western ideas were imported into Japan, an attempt was made to ‘invent’ a corresponding idea in Japanese history . . . When Edward Said’s Orientalism . . . was translated and published in Japanese in 1986, a similar phenomenon was seen. ‘Orientalism’ was accepted as an authoritative academic paradigm of the West, and as a new, universal discourse. A number of scholars in Japan started to search for and identify Japanese versions of Orientalism in the words used by modern Japanese intellectuals when referring to Chinese and Koreans. On the other hand, however, there was very little research on how Japan was portrayed by the West as part of the Orient . . . Ironically, however, the more researchers emphasise the fact that an Orientalism existed in modern Japan just as it did in the West, the more they ‘prove’ that Japan had accomplished a modernisation that could be compared to that experienced by Western nations. (2002: 352–3) Oguma argues persuasively that there have been two main reasons for this tendency to emphasise Japan, as it were, as the subject rather than the object of orientalism: a sense of guilt about past Japanese treatment of Taiwan, China and Korea, and an unwillingness to echo the charges of Western discrimination against their country frequently voiced by right-wing thinkers in Japan. Indeed, these are perilous issues, and Oguma’s work itself perhaps does not entirely escape the danger of seeming to offer excuses for Japanese nationalism.2
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Nevertheless, it is striking just how precisely his remarks fit certain of the recent discussions of orientalist themes in the work of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯. These have depicted the author as creating in his writings of the Taisho¯ period an orientalist view of both India and China that was immediately influenced by, and reflected the same prejudices as, the orientalism of the West described by Said.3 Such an interpretation of Tanizaki’s work during this period is in many ways illuminating, but, it seems to me, for reasons that I will explain, hardly adequate to the complexity of his attitudes. In this chapter I want to stress, by contrast, the complication introduced into Tanizaki’s reception of such European orientalism precisely by his consciousness of Japanese racial difference from the West, and to suggest that this consciousness led him to relativise orientalist paradigms in interesting ways. As my title suggests, I am particularly interested here in the way in which issues of ‘race’, gender and orientalism converged in Tanizaki’s obsession with the body, particularly the female body, and also the way in which his foregrounding of the element of sexual desire in orientalism allowed him to develop an ironic distance from the very tropes that he was deploying. To illustrate this process, I would like to discuss his ‘Ningyo no nageki’ (The Mermaid’s Lament, 1917), a fantasy set in China in which, I shall argue, he takes up, reflects on and subverts themes derived from European orientalism. Before doing so, however, I would like to discuss briefly and more generally the issues of sexuality and gender in Tanizaki’s work and the ways in which these are complicated by ‘race’. Since the study of sexuality gained academic respectability in Japan in the 1990s, there has been an explosion of work on the historical construction of modern Japanese sexual attitudes (for an interesting discussion of this phenomenon itself, see Akagawa (1996: 193–204)). I think it can safely be said, however, that until this outpouring of research, a typically liberal narrative concerning the development of modern sexual attitudes in Japan held sway. According to this, a traditional and puritanical Confucian heritage was inherited and perpetuated in the Meiji period by a repressive state, but, largely under the influence of the West, Japanese attitudes were gradually liberalised, allowing the development up until the present of increasingly permissive and positive attitudes to nudity and sexuality.4 While such a view probably remains the common sense of many Japanese people, in the academic study of the past ten years or so, however, under the influence of both feminist and Foucauldian approaches, it seems to have been largely displaced by a very different account. In this new narrative, the Meiji period is seen as marking the development of a new essentialist view of gender, one which identified biological sex and social gender, stigmatised homosexuality and other unorthodox forms of sexuality as pathologies, fit only for medical or legal treatment, valorised virginity (which had hitherto hardly even been recognised as a physical condition), and created a ‘double standard’ which confined wives to the domestic sphere and other women to the outcast state of prostitute. In all of this, Western or European ideas, in the form both of the new science of sexology, and more generally of Christianity and Victorian moralism, are held to have played a large part. Thus it was in order to appear civilised in Western eyes that mixed bathing,
Foreign bodies 77 shunga, appearing naked in public, or cross-dressing, were all at one time or another banned by central or local governments in early Meiji.5 This view of the Meiji ‘modernisation’ of sexuality as an essentially repressive process, initiated largely under the influence of the West, has, of course, often been accompanied by the idea that the Edo period was the ‘other’ to this repressiveness. Thus Edo culture has been seen as understanding gender in a social or performative rather than essentialist manner – as symbolised by the figure of the onnagata – and also as producing in shunga a distinctively non-pornographic erotic art. Indeed, this idealisation of the Edo period has at points gone so far as to give rise to the surprising phenomenon of what Koyano Atsushi has called ‘han-kindai feminizumu’ (anti-modern feminism) (Koyano 1999), in which the Edo period is seen as actually less oppressive of women than the modern patriarchal order instituted in Meiji. Again, there is clearly a lot to be said for such a view of modern Japan; a work ¯ gai’s Wita sekusuarisu (Vita Sexualis, 1909 [1972]), for example, such as Mori O despite the fact that its sexual explicitness led to it being banned, has convincingly been argued to have been not only repressive in its attitude towards sexuality, but also deeply complicit with the discriminatory structures developing within Meiji society (see Mori 1972; see also Mihashi (1999: 8–42)). Indeed, probably the greatest mistake would be to opt simply for either the older or the newer narrative; we need to recognise that there were (and are) many different and competing sexualities present within Japanese society. The point I wish to make here, however, is that it seems to me that there is a danger that this new orthodoxy will cause us to lose sight of the important fact that, for many Meiji intellectuals, far from European culture being seen as a source of puritanical or repressive attitudes towards either sexuality or women, it was actually seen as at once deeply erotic and giving women a uniquely privileged status. An interesting instance of such an attitude can be found in the writings of Okakura Tenshin, normally no friend to Western culture. In his The Awakening of Japan, written in 1904 to defend Japan’s actions in the Russo-Japanese War, he writes of the goals of the Meiji Restoration: Another important feature of the reformation lay in the exaltation of womanhood. The Western attitude of profound respect toward the gentler sex exhibits a beautiful phase of refinement we are anxious to emulate. It is one of the noblest messages that Christianity has given us. Christianity originated in the East, and, except as regards womanhood, its modes of thought are not new to Eastern minds. As the new religion spread westward through Europe, it naturally became influenced by the various idiosyncrasies of the various converted nations, so that the poetry of the German forest, the adoration of the Virgin in the middle centuries, the age of chivalry, the songs of the troubadours, the delicacy of the Latin nature, and, above all, the clean manhood of the Anglo-Saxon race, probably all contributed their share toward the idealisation of woman. In Japan, woman has always commanded a respect and freedom not to be found elsewhere in the East . . . We have never hitherto, however, learned
78 Adrian Pinnington to offer any special privileges to woman. Love has never occupied an important place in Chinese literature; and in the tales of Japanese chivalry, the samurai, although ever at the service of the weak and oppressed, gave his help quite irrespective of sex. Today we are convinced that the elevation of woman is the elevation of the race. (Okakura 1905: 174–5) What is interesting here, I think, is that Okakura does not see respect for women as a universal or inevitable part of modernity, so much as a uniquely Western cultural trait, with deep roots in Europe’s particular history and racial character. For Okakura, who is intent on arguing that the Restoration and the new Meiji settlement owed almost nothing to the West, the admission that Japan should learn from this European cultural trait is a striking concession. Even more striking, however, is the very different way in which he handles the same contrast in his The Awakening of the East, the fiery anti-Western and anti-imperialist tract which he wrote in 1902 during his visit to India, but which was never published in his lifetime.6 Contrasting Eastern emphasis upon the family with Western individualism, he remarks: The protests of selfish rights and the demarcation of personal property blur connubial felicity, and form the source of those incessant discords, and unfortunate failings, so distressing to our eyes . . . Womanhood is worshipped as the Mistress, not the Mother. The flights of their poetry, the daring of their chivalry, all the tenderest emotions of their nature converge on the Lady-love, not the sweet Maternal. Sex-adoration holds an undue importance in their life. It is almost the whole of their emotions – with us, it is a part. These conditions suggest reminiscences of the predatory savage, who mated like the wild game that contested their existence. (Okakura 1984: vol. 1, 149; cf. 155) Okakura was not himself noted for his marital fidelity, and the vehemence of his expression here perhaps hints at some private emotional conflict; nevertheless, this way of understanding the European stress on women’s status and rights as both a unique cultural trait and the reflection of a disturbing eroticism, was certainly not confined to him. His exact contemporary, Nitobe Inazo¯, for example, an enthusiastic Westerniser, a Quaker, and himself married to an American woman, expressed an even stronger distrust of Western attitudes in his famous Bushido¯ (1905): The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido¯ was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that it was required not only of woman but of man. Hence, until the influence of its precepts is entirely done away with, our society will not realise the view rashly expressed by an exponent of woman’s rights, who exclaimed, ‘May all the daughters of Japan rise in revolt against ancient customs!’ Can such a revolt succeed? Will
Foreign bodies 79 it improve the female status? Will the rights they gain by such a summary process repay the loss of that sweetness of disposition, that gentleness of manner, which are their present heritage? Was not the loss of domesticity on the part of Roman matrons followed by moral corruption too gross to mention? (Nitobe 1905: 148) For Nitobe, who is concerned to depict bushido¯ as the Japanese equivalent of the European chivalric code, to insist nevertheless on the superiority of traditional samurai and Confucian notions of appropriate female behaviour, seems an odd paradox. The fear of ‘moral corruption’, however, is only too characteristic of his thought. Interestingly, though, we can find exactly the same disturbing blend of elevation and sensuality that Western women were imagined to exhibit in fictional treatments of the newly-educated young Japanese women of this period, the socalled atarashii onna (new women). In Tayama Katai’s famous Futon (1907 [1981]), for example, which is usually seen as the prototype for the kind of sexually ¯ gai was implicitly criticising in his Vita explicit confessional novel that Mori O Sexualis, the middle-aged hero finds himself sexually drawn to the young and educated Yoshiko, a well-educated young woman with literary ambitions. In a typical passage, he reflects on the contrast between his own wife and the young girl students of his own time: With the sudden rise of women’s education over the past four or five years, the establishing of women’s universities, and the fashion for low pompadour hairstyles and maroon pleated skirts, women no longer felt self-conscious about walking with a man. To Tokio nothing was more regrettable than his having contented himself with his wife, who had nothing more to offer than her old-fashioned round-chignon hairstyle, waddling walk, chastity and submissiveness. When he compared the young, modern wife – beautiful and radiant as she strolled the streets with her husband, talking readily and eloquently at his side when they visited his friends – with his own wife – who not only didn’t read the novels he took such pains to write but was completely pig-ignorant about her husband’s torment and anguish, and was happy as long as she could raise the children satisfactorily – then he felt like screaming his loneliness out loud. (Tayama 1981: 42) For an interesting discussion of this theme in modern Japanese literature, see Mizuta (1996: 25–60). Here, as with Western women, the atarashii onna are seen as not only more confident and self-assertive than traditional Japanese women, but also as more sexually alluring. Another example of this combination of independence, intellectual sophistication and erotic charm can be found in the character of Mineko, in Natsume So¯seki’s Sanshiro¯ (1908 [1977]), a work that is deeply concerned with the
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differences between European and traditional Japanese notions of beauty and the challenge of Western culture to Japanese sensibilities.7 Tanizaki’s relationship to this set of attitudes is complex. On the one hand, hostile to the prosaic gloom of much naturalist writing, from the beginning he incorporated and foregrounded elements of erotic fantasy in his writing. Yet, like many of his elders – only much more so – he also from the beginning found European culture, and European women, sexually alluring and liberating (on this, see, for example, McCarthy 1998). In a long and rambling essay written in 1931, ‘Ren’ai oyobi shikijo¯’ (Romantic Love and Sexual Desire, TJZ 20: 239–78), Tanizaki himself expressed his mature thoughts on this very issue of the influence of the West on Japanese sexual attitudes. Beginning with the question of the very low status accorded to works dealing with romantic love in the Japanese and Chinese tradition, he argues that it was only with the introduction of ‘a Western way of looking at things’ that such fictions began to be valued in Japan. Just as it had been Westerners who had taught the Japanese to appreciate ukiyo-e, so too – and for very much the same reasons – it had been Westerners who had taught the Japanese to appreciate the value of their own romantic fiction: the idea that ‘love, too, can be first-class literature, is something that we have been taught by Westerners’ (TJZ 20: 245). Tanizaki has no hesitation in attributing this traditional Japanese contempt for romantic fiction, and indeed for women themselves, to the dominance after the Heian period of the excessively masculine values of the bushi. In illustration of this, he cites episodes from late Heian literature that demonstrate a worship of women comparable to that found in Western literature. (Characteristically, one of these concerns a beautiful woman married to an ugly man, and the other a sadistic woman who whips her lover, this being, according to Tanizaki, perhaps the oldest oriental text in existence referring to ‘flagellation’ (in English in the original) for sexual pleasure (TJZ 20: 246–9)). It is when Tanizaki turns to the changes introduced in Japanese attitudes in the Meiji period, however, that he reflects on precisely the points that I have been making: Western literature has no doubt influenced us in many ways, but I believe that the biggest influence has in fact been ‘the liberation of love’ – or, to put it more bluntly, ‘the liberation of sexual desire’. The literature of the Ken’y¯usha group in the middle of the Meiji period still displays to some degree the attitudes of the authors of popular fiction in the Tokugawa period, but after that the literary movements connected with the Bungakkai and Myo¯ jo¯ journals arose. By the time shizenshugi (naturalism) had become popular, we Japanese had entirely forgotten the modesty of our ancestors, who had regarded romantic love and erotic desire as something base, and had abandoned the manners of Japan in the old days. If we actually compare the novels of Ozaki Ko¯yo¯ with those of the next great writer after him, Natsume So¯seki, we can immediately see a clear difference in the way women are viewed. Although So¯seki was a distinguished scholar of English literature, he was in no way a Westernised writer, but rather a writer of the
Foreign bodies 81 traditional Eastern bunjin type, yet even so the women characters that appear in such novels as Sanshiro¯ and Gubijinso¯, and the way the author treats them, are of a kind that it is very difficult to find in Ko¯yo¯’s works. The difference between the two writers is not so much a personal difference as a difference in the currents of the times that they are writing in. Literature is both a reflection of its age and, at times, one step ahead of it, reflecting as it were the age’s future intention. The heroines of Sanshir¯o and Gubijinso¯ are not the grandchildren of the gentle and refined women who constituted the ideal of old Japan, but rather are somehow reminiscent of characters in Western novels. But it was not the case that, at the time when these novels were written, there were in fact many such women in Japan, but rather that society was waiting for, and dreaming of, the appearance of such ‘self-aware women’. Probably almost all of the young men who were born into that period, as I was, and who, like me, had literary ambitions, carried in their hearts the same dream. However, dream and reality rarely coincide. In order to lift the women of Japan, who were weighed down by a long and old tradition, to the same status as the women of the West, the work of several generations, both spiritual and physical, would be required; there was no chance of achieving it within the short space of our one generation. In brief, it would require developing the Western beauty of pose, beauty of expression, beauty of gait. In order to give women spiritual superiority, it was of course necessary first to give them the appropriate physique. But when one comes to think of it, in the West they have the distant civilization of ancient Greece, with its female nudes, and still today everywhere in European and American cities we find the streets decorated with statues of goddesses from ancient myth. Naturally, the women brought up in such countries and such towns come to have wellbalanced and healthy physiques. For our women to develop the same level of beauty, we would need to live among the same myths, to worship their goddesses as our goddesses, and to transplant to our country their tradition of arts stretching back some thousands of years. Now I can confess this, but when I was a young man, I did indeed have such an impossible dream as this, and when I realised that such a dream could not easily be achieved, I felt an unutterable loneliness. (TJZ 20: 254–5) Tanizaki is here, of course, writing at a stage in his life when he has abandoned his infatuation with the West and is intent on creating an alternative fantasy, that of a ‘traditional’ Japanese sexuality, and indeed this very essay ends with an affirmation of a traditional and subtle Japanese iroke (sexual charm) over a crude, Western ‘it’, as exemplified by the Hollywood actresses popular at the time. What seems so characteristic of Tanizaki in the passage quoted here, however, is not merely the sleight of hand whereby romantic love is reduced to sexual desire, and respect for women to adoration of their bodies, but also the way in which he is able to blend what is merely a personal fantasy – the desire to worship powerful
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women – with a more widespread concern, the desire to modernise the relationship between the sexes on what was taken to be the model of the West. It seems to me that it is precisely this ability to find vehicles for a distinctively unorthodox sexuality – Tanizaki’s own self-avowed masochism – in much more widely shared fantasies, whether they be dreams of Western ‘modernity’ or visions of a unique, traditional Japanese ‘sensibility’, which gives his fiction both its resonance and its peculiarly subversive character. A novel such as Chijin no ai (Naomi, 1924 [1985]), for example, can be seen as, on one level, parodying such confessional novels as Katai’s Futon (The Quilt, 1907 [1981]), replacing the ‘new woman’ of the former fiction with the vulgar and consumerist ‘modern girl’ of the Taisho¯ period.8 The narrator’s infatuation with, and attempt to set up, an ideal modern home with the Western-looking Naomi naturally lead him into one humiliation after another, as if the author is poking fun at the contemporary drives to ‘rationalise’ Japanese houses and lifestyles on the basis of Western models (on these movements, see, for example, Kashiwagi 2000). At the same time, however, we gradually become aware that it is indeed these very humiliations that the narrator is seeking to experience through the relationship, whether he himself realises this or not. Tanizaki’s ability in this way to create narrators who seem not to understand fully the significance of their own narratives, a feature of many of his later fictions, was surely the most effective way of all to subvert the conventions of the ‘I’-novel (see T. Suzuki 1996: 160–74, for a similar reading). Here I would like to argue that there is often a similarly subversive quality to Tanizaki’s handling of orientalist themes. Perhaps the best example of this is his fantasy, ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’ (TJZ 4: 185–212). Writing in 1928, Tanizaki himself said of the story that he had taken the greatest pains over its composition, and, at the time it was published, it gained a very high reputation in literary circles. Reading it now, however, I realise that the works over which one takes the greatest pains are not necessarily those that last the best. (Tanizaki 1928: 3) Tanizaki’s later disenchantment is, in fact, easy to understand, for in the story he concentrates all his literary powers to produce an equivalent in Japanese literature of those jewelled Decadent fantasies, such as Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890), which he himself admired so much, but which also have not necessarily lasted well as literature. Despite Tanizaki’s own sense in 1928 that his fantasy had already grown dated, the story itself has recently attracted much attention, paradoxically being seen both as the starting point for the author’s Shina shumi (taste for China), exhibited in many different works between 1917 and 1926 (Nishihara 2003: 17), and also as the beginning of his infatuation with the West (S. Suzuki 1998: 46; see also Liu 2002: 55). Beginning in the time-honoured fashion of Japanese fairy tales with the phrase ‘Mukashi mukashi . . . ’ (‘Once upon a time . . . ’), Tanizaki signals clearly to his readers that this is to be a fantasy for adults, set in the Nanjing of Qing
Foreign bodies 83 China. The hero of the story, a young Chinese aristocrat, Mo¯ Seich¯u (Meng Shidao), whose father had made a fortune in the service of the Emperor but whose parents are now both dead, is in fact a typical Decadent hero: 9
He was young, he had money, and he had inherited the glorious name of an old family. These alone would have been enough to make him a truly fortunate person. In fact, however, his good fortune was not confined to these things, for in addition, he was also blessed in both face and mind, being at once unusually good-looking and unusually intelligent. (TJZ 4: 187) At once wealthy and free of parental control, from an early age the young prince sets about enjoying all the dissipations, including the sexual, offered by the flourishing metropolis, until, when he is still only 23, he finds himself assailed by a typically fin-de-siè cle ennui: Perhaps it was for this reason that recently his brain seemed to have become somehow dulled. Because he felt bored wherever he went, he ended up staying inside his mansion all day, passing the time dully, half-asleep and half-awake. (TJZ 4: 188) Moreover, behind this ennui, there lies a sense of desperation engendered by the hero’s consciousness of the passing of time: However, although Seich¯u’s wealth was inexhaustible, his life of course was not, and he knew that he would not be able to preserve the beauty of his youth forever. When, from time to time, he thought of this fact, then he would suddenly become desirous of some pleasure and he would be assailed by a sense that he could not fritter away his days in this fashion. Somehow or other, before the youth that he now possessed had vanished utterly, he must restore some tension to his slack existence, and boil up within his frigid breast some scalding passion. (TJZ 4: 189) Driven by this hedonistic dilemma, he begs the merchants who throng his mansion to find some new and exotic delight to titillate his senses; and the merchants, conscious of his inexhaustible wealth, vie with one another to supply him with unusual women and wines. At this point in the story, Tanizaki is able to exploit to the full for some pages his own wide knowledge of traditional Chinese literature and culture, producing more and more obscure and exotic lore (and ideograms with which to express this lore). None of the women and delicacies brought by the merchants, however, can tempt the young prince, and he finally takes to smoking opium to escape his boredom and disillusion.
84 Adrian Pinnington Up until this point, it is tempting to read this orientalist fantasy as nothing more than Tanizaki following his own advice, expressed in Dokutan (1915), that, if Japanese artists want to create an exoticism equivalent to that so popular in Europe, then they should take their material from China or India (TJZ 3: 233). Then, however, his fiction takes a surprising turn. One day, as the prince is smoking opium and leaning out over his balcony, he spies in the distance a shabby European merchant whom he takes for a Dutchman. The merchant comes to where the prince is, looks up and informs him, in broken and strangely accented Chinese, that he has brought a mermaid from the South Seas to sell to him. The prince immediately feels as though he cannot refuse this strange offer: Indeed, even before the prince had been shown the mermaid, he seemed to become entranced by the looks of the foreigner. Until now, he had always believed Westerners to be an uncivilized race, but the more he looked at the face of this beggar-like barbarian, the more he felt some refined power latent within it, a power that seemed to overwhelm and dominate him. The blue eyes of the foreigner, like the deep blue of tropical seas, seemed to summon his soul into their unfathomable depths. Again, although the prince had always prided himself on his own good looks, somehow this foreigner’s prominent brow, broad forehead and pure white skin seemed both far more graceful and clear-cut than his own features, and at the same time far more expressive, with their complicated mixture of melancholy and cheerful feelings. (TJZ 4: 197–8) The way in which the placid complacency of the prince’s world, as well as its stifling limitation, are suddenly broken open by the intrusion of this ‘foreign body’ is brilliantly suggested. This sudden introduction into an orientalist fantasy of a European can indeed be seen, as critics have argued, as an expression of Tanizaki’s sense of the superiority of European beauty to Chinese, or as an allegory of the displacement of a China-centred world-view by a Europe-centred one (Nishihara 2003: 76; Sakaki 1999: 198–9). To leave the matter there, however, seems to me to miss the deeply disruptive effect on the narrative. For Tanizaki’s very stress on the racial otherness of the merchant’s European body – his blue eyes and white skin – inevitably puts the Japanese reader into a radically different relationship with the prince. Far from being the exotic object of the reader’s curiosity, the prince now becomes the representative of the Japanese reader, as both are brought face to face with the even more exotic beauty of the stranger. In a complex movement, utterly typical of Tanizaki’s fiction, the prince at once feels his own beauty to be devalued by the exotic charm of the European’s body, and experiences the very awakening of desire for which he has been longing. It has been remarked that, in Tanizaki’s famous In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows, 1933–34 [1977]) the differences between ‘Japanese’ and ‘Chinese’ paper are effaced by the contrast between both and the brilliant ‘whiteness’ of European paper, and that this is precisely because the paper really stands for ‘skin’ (Tanikawa 2000: 112–13). In a very similar way,
Foreign bodies 85 the introduction of ‘race’ into the story fundamentally alters the relationship between the Japanese reader and the Chinese hero, as the latter shifts from being the object of a borrowed European orientalist gaze to being the subject of an exotic longing for Europe. Yet the subtlety of Tanizaki’s treatment of orientalism in the story goes beyond this reversal of the reader’s relationship to the tale. For when the prince sees the mermaid herself, he discovers her to be not only more beautiful than the merchant, but even ‘whiter’: Above all, what most startled the eyes and melted the heart of the prince was the pure white of the woman’s skin, which contained not a speck of impurity and was absolutely clean and spotless. The lustre of her skin was of a white so utter that it was impossible to express with the ordinary adjective ‘white’. Because it was so completely white, it felt as though it would be more appropriate to describe it as ‘shining’. Indeed, the skin all over her body shone just like the pupils of her eyes. It was such a deep and mysterious whiteness that it seemed as if some radiant substance was secreted within her bones and was giving off through her flesh a light akin to the brilliant rays of the moon. (TJZ 4: 203) As Tanizaki himself sometimes stressed, the admiration and yearning that he felt for the ‘whiteness’ of Europeans itself had deep roots within traditional Japanese attitudes to beauty, and indeed Japanese are recorded as having felt admiration for the skin of Europeans from relatively early on in their experience of the West (see Tsuruta 1998: 60). Yet here the ‘whiteness’ seems close to leaving behind colour and ‘race’, coming to symbolise rather the ‘desirable’ as such – and therefore desire itself (compare Lamarre 1999: 34–5). This is made clear when the prince asks the merchant, with a measure of contempt, why he is willing to exchange the mermaid for mere treasure. The merchant replies: To some extent, what you say is quite appropriate. However, in the countries of the West, mermaids are not such unusual creatures. My country lies in the north of Europe and is known as Holland. Ever since I was a child, I have heard that mermaids have lived since olden times in the river that runs past the town where I was born, the Rhine. The lower halves of these women’s bodies are sometimes the same as those of human beings, and sometimes they have the legs of birds. From time to time they reveal themselves from beneath the waves of the Mediterranean sea or in the waters of the mountains, forests and marches of the continent, and tempt human beings. The poets and artists of my land have unceasingly sung of the secrets of these women, and depicted their forms, teaching us just how fascinating their mysterious smiles and just how terrible their charms in fact are. For this reason, in Europe, even people who are not mermaids
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Adrian Pinnington have learnt from their bewitching beauty, and many women have developed to some degree white skin, blue eyes and well-balanced physiques like those of the mermaids. If you doubt this, just look at my face and the colour of my skin. Even an ordinary person like me who is born in the West has somewhere about him a grace and dignity which he shares with this mermaid. (TJZ 4: 204)
We immediately notice how close this theory is to the youthful dream described in the passage from ‘Ren’ai oyobi shikijo¯’ quoted above. In other words, it is not so much European beauty that Tanizaki desires, as the erotic desire that Europeans have felt for their own beauty. In the same way, I think that Tanizaki’s point is not that the clichés of orientalism are true, but rather that the desire expressed in orientalist fantasies, the European desire, is deeply attractive to him. If there is any value-judgement involved, it is that this European desire is more powerful and more intoxicating than any imagined by traditional Chinese culture. This is underlined in the climax of the story. Left alone with the mermaid, the prince passes his days in an unrequited longing for some response from her. Then, one evening, the prince, overcome with despair and misery, filled a jade cup with mature shao-hsing wine, and was enjoying the way in which this liquid, strong enough it seemed to burn the entrails, was spreading through his whole body. The mermaid, who had been curled up in the water like a sea-slug, suddenly rose up to the surface of the water, as if yearning for the warmth of the wine, and stretched both of her arms out of the jar. Before the prince could decide whether or not to put the wine that he held to her mouth, the woman forgot herself completely and, sticking out her brilliant red tongue, put her lips like sea sponges to the edge of the cup and emptied it in one gulp. Then, just like Salome in the picture on the theme of ‘The Dancer’s Reward’ by Beardsley, she assumed a wicked grin and growled again and again for another cupful. (TJZ 4: 208) This awakening of female desire and strength is, of course, a perennial motif in Tanizaki’s fiction, but the illustration by Beardsley used to describe it here, one of those created for Wilde’s Salome, seems to have had an especially deep impact on the young writer (see Iwasa 1990: 72–89). Here, however, its appearance also serves to underline the source of the fiction itself in Decadent fantasy, as if Tanizaki is returning the fantasy to its source.10 Once she drinks the wine, the mermaid recovers her power to use human speech, and she begs the prince to take her back to Europe and release her, telling him: As the Dutchman told you, my home is in the Mediterranean. If you ever have an occasion to visit the West, be sure to visit Italy in the south of
Foreign bodies 87 Europe. Among the many beautiful countries of Europe, this is especially beautiful with scenery as lovely as a picture. If at that time you happen to take a boat through the Messina Straits, and find yourself passing off the shore of Naples, then it is just there that my family has lived since ancient times. In the old days, when sailors passed through those seas, they would hear from somewhere the strange songs of the mermaids that would lure them into the fathomless depths of the sea. (TJZ 4: 208) Finally, the prince accedes to her wishes, and takes her by steamboat to Europe and releases her. Why, then, does Tanizaki choose the image of the mermaid to symbolise the object of his desire here? On the one hand, it is evident that the combination of a white-skinned woman, her oriental lover, a foreign man, water and alcohol had some special attraction for the author, perhaps one that was obscure even to Tanizaki himself.11 But why choose a mermaid? Recently, the noted Tanizaki scholar, Chiba Shunji, has argued that the mermaid figure, which recurs repeatedly in works of this period, is actually based on Seiko, the younger sister of Tanizaki’s first wife and usually considered the original for Naomi, the heroine of Naomi. The reason he offers is that, just as a mermaid is beautiful and yet impossible to engage sexually, so Seiko was deeply attractive to Tanizaki and yet, because of her extreme youth, he was unable to have sexual intercourse with her (Chiba 2003: 149–50). It seems to me, however, that although the mermaid figure may have come to take on such an association, the mermaid we find in this story is very different from such ‘hybrid’ figures as Naomi, or the ‘Eurasian’ prostitute Louise in Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1929 [1955]). Rather, Tanizaki goes out of his way to stress that it is a specifically European mermaid, although similar mermaids had in fact existed in Chinese and Japanese traditions from much earlier times (see Sasama 1999). This undoubtedly partly reflects the widespread popularity of the mermaid figure in late nineteenthcentury European literature and art, where, contrary to their present rather innocent and cheerful image, both mermaids and sirens were seen as types of the sexually predatory femme fatale (see the detailed discussion in Dijkstra 1989: 258–71). But there also had been at least one occasion where one of these decadent mermaids had appeared in a work much closer to home: Natsume So¯seki’s Sanshir¯o, one of the very novels singled out by Tanizaki for the Western flavour of its female characters. This occasion takes place relatively early in the novel, when the hero Sanshiro¯ goes to the mysterious Professor Hirota’s new house to help him sort out and put away his things. There he meets his friend Yojiro¯ and the alluring heroine of the novel, Mineko. The three of them begin to put away the professor’s books: The three of them put in half an hour of concentrated effort, by which time Yojiro¯ had stopped his grumbling. One minute he was hard at work, and the next he was seated cross-legged on the floor, facing the bookcases. Mineko
88 Adrian Pinnington nudged Sanshiro¯, who smiled and called out to him, ‘Hey, Yojiro¯, what’s going on?’ ‘Oh, nothing. What a shame. What does the Professor think he’s going to do with all these books he doesn’t need? He could sell them and buy stocks or something and really make some money. Ah, what’s the use?’ he sighed, without budging from his cross-legged position. Sanshiro¯ and Mineko looked at each other and smiled. As long as the brains of the operation was not functioning, they could relax a bit, too. Sanshiro¯ began to flip through a book of poems. Mineko opened a large picture book on her lap. The maid and the porter had a noisy argument going on in the kitchen. ‘Look at this,’ Mineko said softly. Sanshiro¯ leaned over her to look down at the album. He caught the scent of cologne in her hair. It was a picture of a mermaid, naked and in a sitting position with her fishtail curled around behind her. She faced forward combing her hair, holding the overflowing tresses in one hand. The sea stretched away in the background. Sanshiro¯’s and Mineko’s heads touched, and together they whispered, ‘A mermaid.’ (Natsume 1977: 72–3) In itself, this is an intensely erotic moment in the novel, and from this point on Sanshiro¯ begins to succumb to Mineko’s provocative charm. At the same time, however, the European origin of the image is emphasised in the original by the fact that the two characters both simultaneously use the English word ‘mermaid’ (given in katakana). Thus the incident also takes its place within a pattern of references in the book to the beauty of European women. There has in fact been much discussion as to what particular painting is being referred to here, the details fitting no known painting exactly.12 What is more important, however, is the way in which the image connects to the beauty of the Westerners seen by Sanshiro¯ at the beginning of the novel and the professor’s remarks about the ugliness of the Japanese compared to them (ibid.: 14–15), and to the ‘voluptuous’ (again the English word is used) paintings by Greuze that Sanshiro¯ is reminded of when he first meets Mineko at the professor’s house (ibid.: 66–7), as well as the later remarks by the painter Haraguchi concerning the differences between European and Japanese notions of beauty and the reasons why Mineko looks more Western than other models (ibid.: 176). Indeed, we are even told by some students, who are discussing whether the bachelor Professor Hirota hates women or not, that he has a Western nude hanging on his wall (ibid.: 129). It seems unlikely that Tanizaki, with his fondness for So¯seki, was unconscious of this earlier use of the mermaid image to represent Western beauty and sexuality. Whether this is so or not, however, it is clear that the fantasy had a wider resonance than the author’s personal fantasies. Moreover, ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’ is by no means the only one of Tanizaki’s works where orientalist themes are complicated and subverted by issues of race, and I hope on another
Foreign bodies 89 occasion to discuss some other examples, most notably the extremely interesting use of the Arabian Nights in Some Prefer Nettles. John Clark has suggested, with regard to the history of modern Japanese art, that it was precisely Japan’s position on the periphery of ‘Euramerican’ discourses that led to a relativised and reflexive understanding of modernity, and perhaps very much the same could be said of the Japanese reception of orientalism (Clark 2000: 25–7). Here, however, I would like to conclude by reflecting on a paradox that has also been pointed out by Kinya Tsuruta (1998: 76–7; 2001: 147–9). This is the fact that, despite his profoundly racialised imagination, in his later work, Tanizaki actually produces some of the most realistic and sympathetic portraits of Westerners to be found in modern Japanese fiction. Tsuruta instances, quite correctly, the extremely positive and humane depiction of the Stoltz family in Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters, 1943–8 [1957]); but I would argue that we first find this characteristic much earlier in his fiction, in Some Prefer Nettles itself, with its gentle and understanding portrait of the decaying Mrs Brent, the English Madame who runs the brothel that Kaname visits in Kobe, as well as of the half-Russian, half-Korean prostitute Louise. I think this is partly connected to the general shift in Tanizaki’s writing from the pure fantasy of much of his earlier work, to the profounder exploration of the role that fantasy plays in ordinary life, and especially in personal relationships, in his later work, a shift that integrates, as it were, the Decadent and the naturalist facets of his early fiction. But I would also argue that it is related to the fact that, for Tanizaki, from the beginning, fantasies, including the fantasies of ‘race’, Westernisation and orientalism, were clearly fantasies and as such were neither to be suppressed by the state nor confused with reality. Indeed, it is perhaps precisely this aspect of his thinking which allowed Tanizaki, unlike so many other Japanese intellectuals of his generation, to remain unmoved by the increasingly racialist fantasies developed and propagated by Japanese militarists in the 1930s.
Notes 1 In addition to the passage from Oguma (2002) discussed in the text, see Tsutsui (1999: esp. pp. 2–8) and Hasumi and Yamauchi (1999: 43).
2 This is not necessarily to argue that Said’s orientalist paradigm can be applied straightforwardly to Western perceptions of Japan. Indeed, it could be argued that, precisely because Japan escaped colonisation, Western attitudes towards the Japanese were never entirely the same as those towards the other colonised peoples of the Orient (see Koshiro 1999: esp. pp. 9 ff.). See also Elson (1964: 161–6) for an interesting discussion of the differences between how the Japanese and the Chinese were presented in US school textbooks in the nineteenth century. Cohen also argues that the image of Japan in the nineteenth century in the United States was very much more favourable than that of China because Japan was so much more successful in its cultural diplomacy (Cohen 1992: pp. 16 ff.). 3 Ironically it is the latest and by far the most detailed discussion of Tanizaki’s attitudes towards India and China that most fits Oguma’s account (Nishihara 2003). While Nishihara’s book is thoroughly researched and full of interesting information, he does indeed treat Said’s work as ‘an authoritative academic paradigm’, not even hinting at the criticisms that it has received, and declaring that it is his aim to apply Said’s work to Japan’s Shina shumi (taste for China) (ibid.: 13–20). Although he is anxious to
90 Adrian Pinnington demonstrate a clear connection between exotic treatments of China by Japanese writers of the Taisho- period and Japan’s imperialism, he does in fact concede that Japanese propaganda tended rather to stress Japan’s own racial and cultural identity with the peoples it colonised than their ‘otherness’. He does not seem to realise, however, what difficulties this creates for any attempt to understand Taisho- exoticism on the model of Said’s work, which anyway is itself perhaps not as clear on the connection between orientalism and colonialism as he takes it to be (ibid.: 19). Moreover, there is definitely something rather procrustean about Nishihara’s application of orientalism to Tanizaki’s work. For example, he quotes Tanizaki as observing that: All ethnic groups (minzoku) have their strengths and weaknesses. Although we Japanese have many good elements, it is with regard to the power to create fantasies that we are most lacking. In this respect the Germanic, Arab, Chinese, Indian and other peoples have gone far beyond us. Nishihara then remarks, ‘on the other hand, with regard to the West, Tanizaki consistently represents it as rational, scientific and modern’ (ibid.: 117). Not only does it seem odd to collapse a contrast between Japan and many other groups, including ‘the Germanic race’, into one between the West and the Orient, it also seems very misleading to suggest that, for Tanizaki, the main charm of the West lay in its enlightenment values. Liu Jianhui’s slightly earlier study (2002) makes rather more briefly many similar points to Nishihara, also stressing the role that the expansion of Japanese tourism played in the development of new exoticising attitudes to China. However, for Jia, Tanizaki’s work represents a reversal, under the influence of Decadence, of the low evaluation of China, as a backward nation, that had become widespread in Japan after the country’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War. It thus represents a new and uniquely Japanese form of orientalism (ibid.: 52–3). Chiba’s even briefer discussion (Chiba 1998) also compares Tanizaki’s treatment of China to the orientalism described by Said, but then goes on to make the important point that for Tanizaki orientalism itself was exotic, and that, moreover, Said’s criticisms of orientalism could as easily be applied to Tanizaki’s exoticising view of Europe (ibid.: 309–14). Interestingly, it is a mark of the ‘internationalisation’ of research into Japanese literature that all of these discussions in Japanese are themselves heavily indebted to the English-language scholarship on Tanizaki which pioneered discussion of this issue: Ito (1991: 30–63, esp. pp. 53–4), Fogel (1996) and Sakaki (1999). Lamarre’s (1999) remarks on Tanizaki’s orient and ‘the spectre of race’ are very interesting, and to some extent overlap with my own view, although his overall theme of a new ‘modern visuality’, exemplified by Tanizaki’s fiction, remained to me (perhaps appropriately) somewhat opaque. 4 Most of the writers in Inoue et al. (1996) seem to assume such an attitude on the part of their readers (e.g. Muta 1996: 79). Inoue interestingly compares and attempts to reconcile the two narratives in a consideration of changing attitudes to female exposure of their own bodies to public gaze, although he consciously, if somewhat implausibly, omits the question of Western influence from his discussion. Tanikawa (2000) is a useful reminder that many questions concerning Meiji – period sexual attitudes actually remain to be determined. 5 This is obviously a somewhat crude and reductive summary of a great deal of often fascinating work, but in its main outlines it seems to me fair. For representative examples see Muta (1996) or Kano (2001: esp. pp. 3–35). 6 See Okakura (1984 (I): 133–68). The manuscript was discovered by Okakura’s grandson in 1938 when he was going through his papers and first published in English in 1940 (ibid.: 436). In this connection, Hay, in his undeservedly forgotten work, is interesting both on the way in which Okakura absorbed European orientalist
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ideas in his vision of Asian culture, and on the general lack of response to his ideas from Japanese intellectuals (Hay 1970). I discuss the novel further below. In the novel itself, Mineko is repeatedly compared to the women in Ibsen’s plays (Natsume 1977: 102, 141). Takamiya also points out the superimposition of the figure of the Decadent femme fatale and the ‘new woman’ in the figure of Mineko (Takamiya 1997: 38). The ‘new woman’ and the ‘modern girl’, insofar as the latter existed at all, were very different phenomena, but, as Barbara Sato’s interesting recent discussion indicates, not only was the phrase originally coined to describe independent young British women, but also many commentators on the ‘modern girl’ were concerned to distinguish her from the ‘new woman’ exactly because there was considerable fear that they would be seen as the same (Sato 2003: 55 ff.). The manuscript of Tanizaki’s first draft of the story has recently been published, showing that he had intended at first to write the story as an ordinary realistic fiction, but that at a later date he made a conscious decision to change the style (Tanizaki 2003). Nishihara has an interesting discussion of the anachronism in the story, whereby the eighteenth-century prince travels by steamship via Hong Kong and Singapore to Europe (Nishihara 2003: 75). This paradoxical sense that the story is at once an imitation, a parody and a commentary on Decadent fiction is made even clearer in the illustrated edition of this and ‘Majutsushi’ (The Magician, 1917) which Tanizaki published in 1919 (see Tanizaki 1978). The black-and-white illustrations, by the Japanese-style artist Mizushima Niou, are a clear imitation of the prettier aspects of Beardsley and have themselves by now achieved considerable fame in Japan. According to an interview with Mizushima’s son, Kyo¯haku Aran, himself a well-known fantasy writer, his father had no special knowledge of Beardsley or Western art, a fact which suggests that Tanizaki himself must have specifically requested the illustrations be made in Beardsley’s style (Kyo¯haku Aran 1988: 14–15). It is fascinating to observe how, in a late and very different work, Kagi (The Key, 1956 [1960]), precisely the same combination recurs when the hero’s wife, Toshiko, the whiteness of whose skin is stressed again and again, repeatedly gets drunk, falls unconscious in the bath, and whispers to her husband the name of their young friend Kimura, a man who just happens to look very like a famous American film star (see Tanizaki 1960). Haga (1988: 381–98) first suggested the most likely model, John William Waterhouse’s Mermaid of 1900, which So¯seki may have seen in London. He was unable, however, to find any book containing a reproduction of the painting that So¯seki was likely to have seen. The painting itself, however, differs in various significant ways from the description given in the novel. Takamiya Toshiyuki has more recently thoroughly reviewed the question and suggested that So¯seki most likely saw a black and white reproduction published in 1901, and that this explains the lack of reference to the colours of the original in the novel (Takamiya 1997: 34–40). Takamiya himself has continued the grand tradition of Japanese interest in Decadent mermaids by publishing an essay and a collection of reproductions of Victorian paintings of mermaids and other women connected with water (Takamiya 1996).
References Main text Unless otherwise specified, all works by Tanizaki are quoted from: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ (1966–70) Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ zensh u, ¯ 28 vols, Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ Ko¯ronsha. (References in the text are given as TJZ followed by volume number and page.)
92 Adrian Pinnington Other references Akagawa Manabu (1996) Sei e no jiy¯u/sei kara no jiy¯u (Freedom for Sex/Freedom from Sex), Tokyo: Seiky¯usha. Aoki Tamotsu, Kawamoto Saburo¯ , Tsutsui Kiyotada, Mikuriya Takashi and Yamaori Tetsuo (eds) (1999) Nihonjin no jiko ninshiki (Japanese Self-Identity), Kindai Nihon bunkaron, vol. 2, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Boscaro, Adriana and Chambers, Anthony Hood (eds) (1998) A Tanizaki Feast: The International Symposium in Venice, Center for Japanese Studies, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Chiba Shunji (1998) ‘Kaisetsu: Kanata no akogare’ (Commentary: Yearning for the Other Side), in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, Ikoku kitan (Strange Tales of Other Countries), Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ronsha, pp. 309–19. ——(2003) ‘“Ningyo no nageki” ni tsuite’ (Concerning ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’), Eureka (May): 144–50. Clark, John (2000) ‘Indices of Modernity: Changes in Popular Reprographic Representation’, in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds) Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 25–49. Cohen, Warren I. (1992) East Asian Art and American Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Dijkstra, Bram (1989) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elson, Ruth Miller (1964) Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Fogel, Joshua A. (1996) The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haga To¯ru (1988) Kaiga no ryo¯ bun: kindai Nihon hikaku bunkashi kenky¯u (The Domain of Painting: Research into the Comparative Cultural History of Modern Japan), Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha. Hasumi Shigehiko and Yamauchi Masayuki (1999) Nij¯useiki to no ketsubetsu (Breaking with the Twentieth Century), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Hay, Stephen (1970) Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and his Critics in Japan, China, and India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Inoue Sho¯ichi (1996) ‘Mirareru sei, miseru sei ga dekiru made’ (Until the Establishment of ¯ sawa Watched Sexuality, Exhibited Sexuality), in Inoue Shun, Ueno Chizuko, O Masachi, Mita Munesuke and Yoshimi Shun’ya (eds) Sekushuariti no shakaigaku (The Sociology of Sexuality), Iwanami ko¯za: gendai shakaigaku 10, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 63–76. ¯ sawa Masachi, Mita Munesuke and Yoshimi Shun’ya (eds) Inoue Shun, Ueno Chizuko, O (1996) Sekushuariti no shakaigaku (The Sociology of Sexuality), Iwanami ko¯za: gendai shakaigaku 10, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Ito, Ken K. (1991) Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Iwasa So¯ichiro¯ (1990) ‘“Shisei”: “fuamu fuataru” no tanjo¯’ (‘The Tattooer’: The Birth of the femme fatale), in Chiba Shunji (ed.) Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯: monogatari no ho¯ho¯ (Tanizaki Junichiro: The Method of Fiction), Tokyo: Y¯useido¯ shuppan, pp. 72–89. Kano, Ayako (2001) Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender and Nationalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kashiwagi, Hiroshi (2000) ‘On Rationalisation and the National Lifestyle: Japanese Design of the 1920s and 1930s’, in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds) Being Modern
Foreign bodies 93 in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 61–74. Kawamura Kunimitsu (1996) Sekushuariti no kindai (Sexuality’s Modernity), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha. Koshiro, Yukiko (1999) Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan, New York: Columbia University Press. Koyano Atsushi (1999) Edo genso¯ hihan (Critique of Edo Fantasies), Tokyo: Shinyo¯sha. Kyo¯haku Aran (1988) ‘Chichi, Niou o kataru’ (Talking of my father, Niou), Genso¯ bungaku (April). Lamarre, Thomas (1999) ‘The Deformation of the Modern Spectator: Synaesthesia, Cinema, and the Spectre of Race in Tanizaki’, Japan Forum 11(1): 23–42. Liu Jianhui (2002) ‘Orientarizumu to shite no “Shina shumi”: Tanizaki bungaku ni okeru mo¯ hitotsu no seikimatsu’ (‘China Taste’ as Orientalism: Another fin-de-siècle in Tanizaki’s Literature), in Matsumura Masaie (ed.) Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ to seikimatsu (Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ and the Fin-de-Siècle), Kyoto: Shimonkaku shuppan. McCarthy, Paul (1998) ‘The West as Other’, in Adriana Boscaro and Anthony Hood Chambers (eds) A Tanizaki Feast: The International Symposium in Venice, Center for Japanese Studies, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 15–20. Mihashi Osanu (1999), Meiji no sekushuariti: sabetsu no shinseishi (Meiji Sexuality: A Psychological History of Discrimination), Tokyo: Nihon editaa suk¯uru. Mizuta Noriko (1996) ‘Seiteki tasha to wa dare ka’ (Who is the Sexual Other?), in ¯ sawa Masachi, Mita Munesuke and Yoshimi Shun’ya Inoue Shun, Ueno Chizuko, O (eds) Sekushuariti no shakaigaku (The Sociology of Sexuality), Iwanami ko¯za: gendai shakaigaku 10, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 25–60. ¯ gai (1909 [1972]) Vita Sexualis, trans. Kazuji Ninomiya and Stanford Goldstein, Mori O Rutland, VT: C.E. Tuttle & Co. Muta Kazue (1996) ‘Sekushuariti no hensei to kindai kokka’ (Changing Sexuality and the ¯ sawa Masachi, Mita Munesuke and Modern State), in Inoue Shun, Ueno Chizuko, O Yoshimi Shun’ya (eds) Sekushuariti no shakaigaku (The Sociology of Sexuality), Iwanami ko¯za: gendai shakaigaku 10, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 77–93. Natsume So¯seki (1908 [1977]) Sanshiro¯, trans. Jay Rubin, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Nishihara Daisuke (2003) Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ to orientarizumu: Taisho¯ Nippon no Ch¯ugoku genso¯ (Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ and Orientalism: Taisho Japan’s Fantasy of China), Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ron shinsha. Nitobe Inazo¯ (1905), Bushido¯, the Soul of Japan, 2nd edn, with Introduction by William Elliot Griffis, New York: G.P. Putnam. Oguma, Eiji (2002) A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images, trans. David Askew, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Okakura Kakuzo¯ (1905), The Awakening of Japan, London: John Murray. ——(1984), Collected English Writings, 3 vols, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sakaki, Atsuko (1999) ‘Japanese Perceptions of China: The Sinophilic Fiction of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59(1): 187–217. Sasama Yoshihiko (1999) Ningyo no keifu (The Genealogy of Mermaids), Tokyo: Satsuki shobo¯. Sato, Barbara (2003) The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Suzuki Sadami (1998) ‘Eroticism, Grotesquerie and Nonsense in Taisho Japan: Tanizaki’s Response to Modern and Contemporary Culture’, in Adriana Boscaro and Anthony Hood Chambers (eds) A Tanizaki Feast: The International Symposium in Venice, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, Center for Japanese Studies, pp. 41–53.
94 Adrian Pinnington Suzuki, Tomi (1996) Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Takamiya, Toshiyuki (1996) From the Deep Waters, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. ——(1997) ‘“Mizu no onna” toshite no Mineko: Sanshiro¯ ni okeru maameido o ch¯ushin ni’ (Mineko as a ‘Water Woman’: on the Mermaid in Sanshiro¯), Kokubungaku (May): 34–40. Tanikawa Atsushi (2000) ‘“Tasha” to shite no nikutai – “Nihonjinbanare” no bigaku’ (The Body as ‘Other’: The Aesthetics of ‘Nihonjinbanare’), in Shimamoto Kan and Kasuya Makoto (eds) Bijutsushi to tasha (Art History and the Other), Kyoto: Ko¯ yo¯ shobo¯, pp. 89– 116. Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ (1919 [1978]) Ningyo no nageki, Majutsushi (The Mermaid’s Lament; The Magician), Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ron shinsha. ——(1924 [1985]) Naomi, trans. Anthony H. Chambers, New York: Alfred A Knopf. ——(1928) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Meiji Taisho bungaku zensh¯u 35: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ sh u, ¯ Tokyo: Shun’yodo¯. ——(1929 [1955]) Some Prefer Nettles, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ——(1933–34 [1977]) In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker, London: Vintage. ——(1956 [1960]) The Key, trans. Howard Hibbett, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ——(2003) ‘“Ningyo no nageki” shoko¯ varianto’ (‘The Mermaid’s Lament’: A Variant First Version), Eureka (May): 135–43. Tayama Katai (1981) ‘The Quilt’, in Tayama Katai, The Quilt and Other Stories, trans. E.G. Henshall, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, pp. 35–96. Tipton, Elise K. and Clark, John (eds) (2000) Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Tsuruta, Kinya (1998) ‘Japanese Perceptions of Westerners in Modern Fiction’, in Keizo Nagatani and David Edgington (eds) Japan and the West: The Perception Gap, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 49–79. ——(2001) ‘A Pilgrimage to the West and Return: the Case of Tanizaki Junichiro¯’, in Yoichi Nagashima (ed.) Return to Japan from ‘Pilgrimage’ to the West, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Tsutsui Kiyotada (1999) ‘Nashionarizumu to Ajiashugi ni okeru nij¯u sei’ (The Ambivalence of Nationalism and Pan-Asianism), in Aoki Tamotsu, Kawamoto Saburo¯, Tsutsui Kiyotada, Mikuriya Takashi and Yamaori Tetsuo (eds) Nihonjin no jiko ninshiki (Japanese Self-Identity), Kindai Nihon bunkaron, vol. 2, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 1–20.
Further reading Apart from the books and articles given in the bibliography, the following will be useful for anyone interested in the development of Japanese racial attitudes: Dikötter, Frank (ed.) (1997) The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, London: Hurst & Co. Dower, John W. (1986) War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books. Leupp, Gary P. (2003) Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543– 1900, New York: Continuum. Weiner, Michael (1994) Race and Migration in Imperial Japan, London: Routledge.
Foreign bodies 95 With regard to the questions of gender and sexuality in modern Japan, in addition to the books and articles cited in the bibliography, the following are important: Fruhstuck, Sabine (2003) Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Johnston, William (2005) Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan, New York: Columbia University Press. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. (1999) Cartographies of Desire: Male –Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ueno Chizuko (1990) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Ogi Shinzo¯, Kumakura Isao and Ueno Chizuko (eds) Fuzoku Sei (Sexual Mores, Sex), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
5
Self and Other in the writings of Kajii Motojiro¯ Stephen Dodd
Some writers, like Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ , led such eventful, varied and – perhaps most importantly – long lives, that simply to investigate the petty dramas of their literary careers can prove to be a source of fascination. This cannot be said of Kajii Motojiro¯. Born in 1901, he wrote only about 20 short stories before dying of tuberculosis in 1932, and is best known today in Japan and (if at all) in the West for his short story, ‘Remon’ (Lemon, 1925). Kajii’s personal history can briefly be stated. Growing up in Osaka, his first ambition was to become an engineer. It was only after he entered Kyoto’s Third Higher School (Sanko¯) that fellow students encouraged him to develop a shared interest in music and the arts, and he eventually turned to the writing of literature. In 1924, he went to study at Tokyo University, and ‘Lemon’ appeared the following year in Aozora, a coterie magazine (do¯jin zasshi ) edited by Kajii and his fellow students. However, just as he was beginning to flex his literary muscles, his TB took a turn for the worse. He was forced to leave Tokyo late in 1926 and convalesced for sixteen months in the hot spring resort of Y¯ugashima on the Izu Peninsula. After a brief return to Tokyo, deteriorating health forced him to return home to Osaka in 1928, where his family nursed him until his death. While the brevity of Kajii’s period of literary activity is undeniable, his short stories stand out in terms of both their fascinating narrative twists, and their use of an undeniably beautiful poetic prose style. In this chapter, I will concentrate mainly on ‘Lemon’, but also touch on one more of his best-known stories, ‘Aru kokoro no fukei’ ¯ (Landscapes of the Heart, 1926), in order to discuss one of the major concerns of writers and intellectuals during the late Taisho¯/early Sho¯wa period, namely, the slippery problem of how to define the shifting boundaries between Self and Other. In this case, ‘Other’ refers to the world at large, exterior to the confines of the physical self. In conclusion, I will also suggest some ways in which this personal engagement with the world beyond the self might be related to the wider social context of the writer’s times. In the broad sweep of literary history, Kajii’s writing career began around the time of the Great Kanto¯ earthquake of 1923 and finished just as the government was cracking down on political dissent in the early 1930s. This was a brief but very significant moment for modern Japanese fiction when two literary forces in particular – the Neo-Sensationalists (Shinkankaku-ha) and writers of Proletarian
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Literature (Puroretaria bungaku) – emerged to argue over definitions of Self and Other, how best to articulate links between the individual and wider society and, just as importantly, the literary medium most suited to express such relationships. Though not strictly a member of either camp, Kajii was influenced by both. He admired the stories of Kawabata Yasunari, one of the founders of the Shinkankaku-ha, who was just then attracting attention as an up-and-coming writer with his Modernist-inspired experimental stories; in fact, the two men actually met and became friends while both were staying at Yu¯ gashima. On the other hand, during the last couple of years of his life in Osaka, Kajii became increasingly attracted to the possibilities of left-wing literature as a means of attracting and addressing the interests of a wider readership. The other major source of interest for writers and critics of the time was the shisho¯setsu (‘I-novel’) a genre equally focused on defining and differentiating the concepts of Self and Other. It is not surprising that Kajii’s own work should have drawn on all these influences when he came to articulate his own highly fluid and intriguing definition of the terms. Since I will be referring extensively to ‘Lemon’, it might be useful to provide a very brief synopsis. The narrator is a young student living in Kyoto who finds it impossible to find peace of mind. His feelings of unease are described in terms of an ‘indefinable lump’ which ‘was constantly pressing onto my heart’ (KMZ 1999: 7). Though there was a time when he was far happier with life, he now wanders the streets in a continuous state of dissatisfaction, while the fact that he suffers from tuberculosis only exacerbates his condition. One day, he happens to pass a greengrocer’s where he purchases a lemon, and its fresh appearance somehow revives his spirits, albeit temporarily. The reader has already been informed that the narrator once loved walking around Maruzen bookstore – a major centre for imported Western literature and goods – but has recently found even that place difficult to endure. However, the lemon endows him with renewed confidence to revisit the place, and he ends up building a fantastic castle from some large colourful books in the Art History Department. Suddenly depressed again, he takes the lemon out from his pocket and places it next to his ‘castle’. The story ends at the point where he has left the lemon in the shop and, walking down the brightly lit district of Kyo¯goku, he imagines the fruit as a bomb that will blow the shop to pieces. The fantastic element of this short story presents any reader with a challenge to make sense of it, but various possibilities offer themselves. For instance, given the writer’s use of a poetic prose style to express a destructive impulse, it would be interesting to explore a possible link with anarchist poetry emerging just then under the influence of Dadaism. In this connection, the poet Tsuboi Shigeji (himself evoking the tenor of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909) wrote an introduction for the first edition of the journal Aka to kuro in 1923, where he likens poetry to a bomb (Lippit 1997: 11). For the purposes of this chapter, however, the story may also be read as offering some useful insights into the author’s articulation of Self and Other. One way of exploring this concern is by examining how the narrator reveals himself to the reader through a variety of disparate memories. For instance, as
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the story begins, it becomes clear that the young man’s earlier pleasure in visiting friends’ homes in order to listen to music and poetry is no longer an attractive proposition; the sound of even a few bars of music makes him ‘suddenly want to get up and take my leave’ (KMZ 1999: 7). In other words, the unstable nature of the narrator’s identity is highlighted through a self that, telling the story from the narrative present, reflects on an earlier self no longer in existence. More generally, it is true that such memories sometimes appear to help confirm a fixed sense of self, but at other times they create the impression that, on the contrary, a settled sense of personal identity has been rendered unattainable. In order to clarify my point, let me refer to Kobayashi Hideo’s seminal essay, ‘Kokyo¯ o ushinatta bungaku’ (Literature of the Lost Home, 1933 [1967–69]), where he argues that people from the provinces who have grown up with a clearly defined understanding of native place (furusato ) are more fortunate than people from Tokyo. According to Kobayashi, people from the capital like himself lacked a sense of belonging to a particular home, even though they were born and grew up in the specific area of Tokyo. This is because the city’s landscape had undergone such constant physical change that inhabitants of Tokyo had no access to what he calls ‘hard and fast’ (kakko taru) memories attached to place. Without such memories, he laments, it was not possible to possess a clear and consistent self-consciousness (ji-ishiki ) (Kobayashi 1967–69: 31–2). It is unclear in ‘Lemon’ whether the student is a native of Kyoto; indeed, if we follow the I-novel conceit that assumes the protagonist to reflect the real circumstances of the author’s life, this is not the case. Moreover, Kajii describes the experience of living in a much smaller urban than to Tokyo. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels in terms of the general relationship between narrator and urban space. The young man certainly has access to a wide range of memories, but they tell a double-edged story about how he perceives himself. On the one hand, he describes his love of embossed glass marbles, and particularly the pleasure he obtained from sucking on them; such recollections – what he calls the ‘sweet memories of childhood’ (KMZ 1999: 8) – evoke links between youthful experiences and oral satisfaction, and the accompanying sense of security and belonging. In a similar fashion, his recollection of how he used to enjoy listening to music and poetry implies that he was once a typical student who was in the process of moving away from childish interests, and constructing a more grown-up, sophisticated sense of himself through participation in cultural activities; in addition, he was confirming his identity as part of a group of like-minded fellow students based in Kyoto. These memories might be understood as a positive means of consolidating an integrated, continually developing consciousness of self-identity related to a specific place. On the other hand, memories also reveal an alternative, less palatable understanding of self. The problem for the narrator in his present unhappy state of mind is that such recollections painfully emphasize that the earlier, relatively contented person no longer exists. Now, his memories are experienced against the background of the constant ache of the unfortunate lump deep within his body. What Kobayashi described as a ‘hard and fast’ memory has been trans-
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formed, one might say, into a hard and fast lump. It could be argued that the story’s narrative traces a positive development: the transfer of a repressed, internalized discomfort into an observable, externalized object which is resolved by story’s end through the fantasy of its destruction. But during the course of the narrative, the main focus concerns the very instability of self-identity. In particular, the malign growth generates such a source of alienation that the young man feels impelled to wander the city streets alone in search of some potential power of re-integration. Consequently, the city landscape comes to represent a sense, not of belonging, but of lost identity. In this way, Kajii confirms similar concerns expressed by Kobayashi only a few years later. As a writer inclined to poetic expression, the only way Kajii can reinvigorate a fractured and run-down sense of self is by transforming the oppressive lump through the aesthetic image of a beautiful lemon. In fact, the kind of introverted narrator portrayed in this story is a familiar character in the literature of the late 1920s: a young person, restless, rootless and afflicted by mental debilitation (shinkei suijaku) and, in this case, tuberculosis as well. His engagement with the external environment is shaped at least as much by fantasy and imagination as by mundane reality. And this leads to my second point connected to Kajii’s understanding of Self and Other, namely, that this very element of mobility/fluidity (both physical and figurative) is a fundamental aspect of modern self-identity in Japanese literature. On the practical side, such mobility is partly due to technological change; for the first time in history, electrical lighting in urban centres meant that disaffected youths had somewhere to wander during their angst-filled nights. But some comments by Franco Moretti on the history of the Bildungsroman – a novel dealing with one person’s early life and development – in Western literature might help to clarify this phenomenon as part of a more general cultural development in any modern society. Moretti (2002) notes that during the nineteenth century in Europe, the traditional concept of youth as merely a chronologically defined period in the biological life of a human being underwent a change. As traditional society collapsed, so did the predictability of youth’s future, and youth became more associated with the impulse towards anxiety and movement, expressed especially through an interest in travel and adventure. The author suggests that concerns with interiority and mobility emerged to epitomize youth, not because youth itself needed to be defined, but because at the end of the eighteenth century when Europe first encountered modernity, there existed no culture of modernity. If modernity was a kind of ‘permanent revolution’, then neither maturity nor old age could represent it any longer. Instead, youth was taken up by writers in Europe as a theme in order to attach meaning to the culture of modernity itself, and the youth-centred Bildungsroman emerged as an ideal literary form to meet this need (Moretti 2002: 555). In Japanese literature, if youth as a central theme is a mark of modernity, then Kajii’s work is certainly modern. At the very least, the author’s early demise ensured that the restless mobility of the youthful narrators and their strong concern with interiorized anxieties are never fully worked out. His narrators
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never come to resemble, for instance, the far more self-reflective watakushi of So¯seki’s Kokoro (1914 [1957]), whose earlier student experiences are reinterpreted in the course of the telling through the mind of a more experienced man. And, related to literature more closely based on the Bildungsroman pattern, Kajii’s characters are not ¯ gai’s Vita Sexualis (1909 [1974]), where the overarching chronological like Kanai in O narrative is powerful enough to reconfigure uncontrollable sexual urges into a more rational discourse. In ‘Lemon’, the narrator is still a student only at the beginning of a process of addressing his shift into full adulthood, still in the midst of what Moretti called the ‘permanent revolution’ of unresolved experience. An additional factor that emphasizes the aspect of modernity in Kajii’s writing is the very ordinariness of his personality. He comes from no great literary family, and is one of an increasing number of young people who have benefited from universal education and emerged with the innate potential to become established as a writer in late Taisho¯ society gearing up to address the increasing demands of a mass culture. Many of Kajii’s readers would have been able to identify themselves with his transformative experience of growing up, and to sympathize with the fundamental question, ‘who am I?’, that underpins the narrative of his stories. In any case, Kajii’s restless characters arise from a line of self-obsessed modern literary youths stretching from the indecisive Bunzo¯ in Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1886–89 [1967]) to the pathetically frantic figure depicted by Akutagawa in his posthumous Haguruma (Cogwheels, 1927). Another observation concerning Kajii’s articulation of self-identity connects with my earlier point that his literature is modern because it expresses an overall mood of mobility and fluidity. This mood also has relevance in the sense that the writer sometimes presents a multiplicity of selves that exist simultaneously or even overlap with each other within a single text. As a general concept, various critics have noted that a concern with multiple realities relates to an increase in forms of cultural production at the time. In particular, the cinema created new means of cultural expression that began to overlap with literary techniques; for instance, the opening scene of Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel, Shanghai (1928–31 [2001]), has frequently been linked to the cinematic gaze. Other writers such as Tanizaki and Kawabata expressed their interest in the medium by writing scenarios for the cinema. And certainly, quite a few of Kajii’s stories depict aspects of lighting and visuality that might have been influenced by cinematic techniques. However, a concern with simultaneous layers of reality can be related more specifically to literary texts. Seiji Lippit has suggested that literature of the 1920s is characterized by a deep crisis of identity. Precisely at this time when what had begun during Meiji as the startlingly new genbun itchi (correspondence between spoken and written languages) style of writing had come to be accepted by many as a commonsensical and transparent form, and when many writers saw the Inovel as the most appropriate genre to express the discrete consciousness of subject identity, other writers began to question the very possibility of representing reality just ‘as it is’ (aru ga mama), and endeavoured to cast doubt on the very idea of a fixed, bourgeois sense of self. Yokomitsu and other Shinkankaku-ha writers were at the forefront of this challenge to the orthodoxy of the I-novel
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(Lippit 2002: 29–30). One of the most extreme examples of this crisis of representation is to be found in Akutagawa’s story, ‘Aru aho no issho¯’ (A Fool’s Life, 1927), where a wide variety of literary forms is employed within the text because no single genre seemed capable of describing the full reality. Lippit notes that this work is best characterized by montage, a technique he describes as a series of rapid shifts between seemingly random events, without reference to any sense of logical or linear development. The material body of the text – the graphic laceration of the work and the prominent blank spaces between the scenes – represents the complete breakdown of Akutagawa’s faith in the capacity of fiction, and narrative in general, as a vehicle of selfexpression. (Lippit 2002: 51) In view of these comments, the final destructive fantasy in ‘Lemon’ may represent a similar ‘random event’, hinting at the writer’s exasperated effort to break through the tangle of language itself, to reconstitute a semblance of unified meaning through an anarchic impulse to engage head-on with the fractured reality of everyday life. It must be said, though, that the story in general conveys nothing like the degree of anxiety and total breakdown found in Akutagawa’s work; indeed, Kajii’s overriding attraction to aesthetic imagery reconfigures even the ‘bomb’ into a pleasurable image. Such an approach reflects a trend among many writers – especially following the forced closure of the Proletarian Literature movement – to smooth away, or even ignore, the socially divisive environment which had actually contributed to the shape of their literary impulse. Yet the very mixture of prose and poetry characterizing his writing suggests that, even for Kajii, any clear separation of literary genres has become problematic. Beyond this blending of genres, Kajii’s work also addresses the concept of multiple realities, and particularly multiple selves, in a more literal way. In ‘Landscapes of the Heart’, details of the main character Takashi are related in the third person, but his general circumstances – a young man, restless and uneasy, living in Kyoto – echo those of the first-person narrator of ‘Lemon’. At several points, Takashi pauses to observe street life from the window of a room, and closer examination of these particular scenes suggests that the protagonist constitutes less a fully integrated identity than an amalgam of diverse elements. The story is formally divided into parts. Part 1 begins with Takashi ‘gazing at the slumbering street from the window of his room’ (KMZ 1999: 93) deep at night as he contemplates the sorry state of his own life. Part 2 also opens with reference to Takashi sitting at the same window; the reason he sits here so late is ‘because sleep afflicted him with too many dark thoughts’ (ibid.: 95), thoughts which, it turns out, are connected to his fear of having contracted a disease from a prostitute. Part 3 appears to begin from the same vantage point, as Takashi sits in a room where ‘he could hear the sounds of drunken punters and the women enticing them to stop’ (ibid.: 97) in the street outside. However, further reading
102 Stephen Dodd reveals that this room is different; this time he is in a brothel awaiting the arrival of a prostitute. The fact that the same activity – the observation of outside activities from the confines of a room – is quite unexpectedly shifted to another locality highlights the still unresolved nature of Takashi’s personality: a sensitive, thoughtful poet is suddenly re-presented to the reader as a young man struggling with overwhelming sexual urges. Indeed, the very overlapping of experiences whereby an apparently single room turns out to be another space – creating, as it were, another viewpoint for Takashi to contemplate the world outside himself, as well as another angle by which the reader comprehends Takashi – highlights the complex play of similarity and difference in this supposedly unified character’s struggle to make sense of himself. Later on in the same story, another view from a window incorporating a sudden narrative shift goes further to challenge the concept of self-consciousness as a single identity. After Takashi and the prostitute have concluded their business, the woman prompts him to leave with her, but he is loath to return home since it is late at night, even though he suspects the brothel owner will not be happy to let him linger if he does not ask for another woman. The indecisive young man orders a beer from the maid but then, in the very next paragraph, it is already dawn and Takashi is contemplating the view outside: Sparrows chirruped in the guttering of the eaves. The view outside, fresh to the eye and brightening in the morning haze, came together like a picture in Takashi’s half-awake mind. Raising his head, he saw light from the electric lamp, now thin in the morning air, illuminate the face of a sleeping woman. (ibid.: 101) Unlike Akutagawa’s late writings, there is a narrative logic to follow here, albeit one requiring the reader’s full concentration; since the first woman had already left, this sleeping woman must be another prostitute. However, just as the writer unexpectedly shifted Takashi’s point of observation to a different room in the earlier passage, this literary use of surprise emphasizes Takashi’s experience of lived reality as fragments that do not easily fit together. In ‘Lemon’, the representation of an unstable self can allow for an almost playful escapism as the narrator articulates the possibility of slipping away from the reality of Kyoto. Walking the streets, he imagines himself in a city many miles away – he randomly suggests Sendai or Nagasaki – that offers greater potential for peace of mind. The narrator compares the street he is walking along to these cities: If only this place could instantly transform itself into that city! When my illusion finally began to take shape, I went on to apply pigments of my imagination. My illusion and the run-down street were completely fused together into one image, into which I happily watched myself as I really was disappear. (ibid.: 8)
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This constitutes a vision of co-existing selves that brings to mind the Doppelgänger, a concept taken up by Sigmund Freud in his highly influential essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (das Unheimliche, 1919 [1956]). Freud suggests a positive aspect to this phenomenon in the way it offers the prospect of ‘an insurance against the destruction of the ego’, the possibility that the self may continue to exist beyond the confines of the original self in another equally valid form. Read this way, the scene from ‘Lemon’ may be simply reflecting the narrator’s wishful longing to overcome and improve upon his present circumstances. Though he is far from happy with his life in Kyoto, his very unhappiness drives him to construct another more fortunate version of himself, albeit in the half-real streets of a fantasy city. On the other hand, Freud goes on to identify a negative aspect to the same phenomenon that provides further insight into the Japanese story. He suggests that the existence of a series of potential selves may also constitute ‘the uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 1956: 235). The implication is that the concept of an absolutely fixed and central self is ultimately diminished and devalued; the danger inherent in multiple selves is that each separate self becomes dispensable. In Japanese literature, there are certainly versions of such disturbing encounters with a double. For instance, in Sato¯ Haruo’s story, ‘Den’en no y uutsu’ ¯ (Rural Melancholy), published in 1919 – the very year that Freud wrote his essay – the mentally unstable protagonist walks his beloved dog one night and becomes aware of an apparently identical man calling from the distance. The uncanny element arises from the uncertainty about whether this is really happening or merely a delusion in the narrator’s mind, since the dog itself seems confused about which direction it should run. In ‘Lemon’, the main function of the double self is to provide an almost whimsical escape from mundane reality, but this darker aspect of the Doppelgänger cannot be discounted since the whole story speaks to the narrator’s deep anxiety about personal identity. Freud’s writings have had a huge impact in raising the question of how human consciousness engages with external phenomena, and this same theme has been the subject of much Modernist literature and critical discourse, particularly in relation to the urban environment. Kajii, too, reflects such ideas to the extent that his writing challenges the very notion of the stable self by casting a critical eye on apparently clear-cut boundaries between an internally contained self and the external world. Once again, ‘Landscapes of the Heart’ provides some pertinent examples. In the opening scene, where Takashi sits at his window lost in contemplation, he witnesses the sight of ‘houses rising faintly in the dark [that] emerged and dissolved before his very eyes’. Such impressions lead him to feel that [he] could not tell where his own thoughts ended and the town in deep night began. The oleander in the dark was in essence his very gloom. The shape of walls revealed in the electric light merged completely with the darkness to form a single shadow. At that point his ideas took on even more a solid (rittai-teki ) shape. (KMZ 1999: 94)
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Such scenes where an anxious centre of consciousness tentatively examines itself in the context of surrounding dark are not entirely new in modern Japanese literature; Shiga Naoya’s An’ya ko¯ro¯ (A Dark Night’s Passing, 1921–37 [1976]) described Kensaku’s encounter with a far more raw and frightening universal darkness when he stood at midnight on the deck of his boat as he journeyed from Tokyo to Osaka. Kajii, who is keener to investigate the actual process by which external stimuli and conscious intervention seem to spill into each other, goes further to provide a key to the ‘solid shape’ of the relationship between thoughts and the phenomenal world. This process is articulated most clearly later in the story when Takashi takes a desultory walk along the Kamo River, its bank littered with the detritus of modern life like piles of gravel and an abandoned surveyor’s measuring tape glittering in the afternoon sunshine. After watching a scrap of newspaper rustle by on the sharp wind, Takashi’s attention shifts again: A tall zelkova tree thick with leaves stood on this side of the riverbank. Takashi’s attention was drawn to the lofty treetop’s battle with the wind. As he gazed intently for some time, something within his own heart lodged in the treetop, and he felt himself sway with tiny leaves and bend with green branches in the high currents. ‘That’s what the feeling is’, Takashi thought. ‘Vision itself has become a thing of substance (miru koto , sore wa m o¯ nanika na no da). Part of my soul, maybe all of it, has possessed that tree.’ (KMZ 1999: 102) Reference to possession (noriutsuru), with its associations of religiosity, is not incidental since the author aims to depict a form of communion between Self and Other beyond rational explanation. In Takashi’s imagination at least, the tree’s bending and swaying are experienced as phenomena integral to his own consciousness. However, the very materiality of vision – or to directly translate Takashi’s words, the fact that it is something – hints that the act of looking constitutes, not so much a discrete activity as a concrete link between interior and external worlds; less a barrier than a point of connection. Seen this way, vision itself provides the tantalizing possibility of a more thorough interpenetration of Self and Other. The potential for vision as a porous boundary between consciousness and physical reality, specifically in terms of a two-way material link, is beautifully explored in ‘Lemon’ in the scene where the narrator encounters the greengrocer’s at night. The colourful fruit, set out on a black-varnished board, has a powerful effect on the narrator, and it is described through a musical analogy: The fruit on display seemed to have been coagulated into its present colour and volume by something like a Gorgon mask (with the power to turn those who looked on into stone) that had been thrust before the allegro flow of some gorgeously beautiful piece of music. (KMZ 1999: 9)
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It may be that the disaffected youth can no longer bear to sit in a friend’s house and listen to real music, but this does not stop him using it as an aesthetic metaphor (further enhanced with mythical significance drawn from the Greek tradition) in order to transform his experience of everyday reality. Put another way, vision may be understood as a kind of funnel for the narrator’s powerful imaginative forces, allowing him to reach out and reshape elements of the external world. On the other hand, vision also functions as a channel in the opposite direction, whereby elements of the external world have a transformative effect on the narrator’s internal consciousness, as shown when the narrator describes the overwhelming power of the brightly lit greengrocer’s surrounded by darkness: In this surround of total darkness, several electric lamps set up at the storefront lit the almost indulgently beautiful scene with a dazzling brilliance, unrivalled by anything around, and seemed to drench it like a shower. Standing on the road where the naked lamps cut their slender screws (rasenbo¯) of light deep into my eyes . . . even in Teramachi it was rare for anything to delight me as much as the sight of this greengrocer’s. (KMZ 1999: 10) Unlike the earlier passage, here it is the brightly lit scene itself that becomes an active, even eroticizing force, as it physically enters the observing self in the form of sharp light. Obviously, the freezing of colour by beautiful music and the penetration of the self by external stimuli are events that follow a poetic logic beyond common sense, but my point is that vision acts as a potent means to rupture clear boundaries between Self and Other. So far, I have examined Kajii’s articulation of the relationship between Self and Other in terms of the personal experience of a particular narrator/protagonist, but I would like to expand my discussion here to investigate how this relationship may be understood as part of the wider social environment in which individual characters played out their roles. In this connection, some recent comments by Harry Harootunian are useful in indicating that Kajii’s characters were certainly not alone in the manner of their engagement with the external world. For instance, he notes that post-World War I Japan witnessed a rapid increase in the availability of Western consumer commodities: The site of this explosion of modern life was the metropolitan centre, and its primary constituencies, especially after the earthquake of 1923, were the masses who worked in the urban industries, consumed its products, and played on its streets. In fact, the discourse on everyday modern life was really about life on the streets. (Harootunian 2000: 18) Kajii’s Kyoto-based stories may reflect urban life on a diminished scale, but even the streets of this city usually associated with ‘traditional’ Japanese culture were
106 Stephen Dodd not immune to signs of modern consumer life: the lemon encountered during a stroll was an import from California. But Harootunian goes further to show how Kajii’s writing reflects a more general conflict between the undeniable attraction of consumer goods and a perception that what he calls the ‘spiritual values’ of everyday Japanese life were being lost. Particularly after the earthquake, a national mood of self-reflection emerged in which ‘there was no lack of thoughtful and anxious concern for the growing importance of desire (materiality) and the eclipsing of spirituality’ (ibid.: 20). Of course, such unease was not entirely new; an anxiety that modern, largely imported values and goods threatened the ‘native spirit’ was a dominant theme at least from the beginning of Meiji, and early Taisho¯ literature was characterized by a great deal of soul-searching about an ‘authentic’ Japanese self, as exemplified in the philosophical musings of Abe Jiro¯’s best-selling Santaro¯ no nikki (Santaro¯’s Diary) published from 1914. However, what makes Kajii’s writing stand out is not so much his preoccupation with introverted speculation – in this he was simply reflecting the concerns of his own generation – but his literary attempt to break down these apparently clear-cut dichotomies. In order to examine how these categories were effectively blurred, it might be useful to stay for a moment with Harootunian’s concepts of materiality and spirituality in order to identify correspondences in Kajii’s writing. The critic sets the broader context by describing Japanese salary men of the 1920s as finding themselves in the awkward position of being ‘both intellectual producers whose skills and value were undermined by the market and custodians of culture who were losing their grip on cherished values’. Their response was to embrace a concept of culture associated with seishin (spirit) and ‘the world of nonmaterial values’ (Harootunian 2000: 208). A parallel process appears to be at work in ‘Lemon’ where the narrator recalls the pleasure that he once found in his visits to Maruzen. He describes the various goods he would see on display: Red and yellow eau de cologne and eau de quinine. Amber and jade green perfume bottles of tasteful cut-glass workmanship with elegant raised designs in rococo style. Pipes, daggers, soap, tobacco. At times, I would spend a good hour looking at such things. And, finally, my extravagance would run to the purchase of one first-class pencil. (KMZ 1999: 8–9) It is characteristic of Kajii’s writing that this list of desirable objects produces a predominantly visual impact, although additional olfactory impressions (of cologne, soap and tobacco) plus the rich green colours create an overwhelming feeling of the exotic and foreign. The inaccessibility of these commodities to everyday life is compounded by the fact that the narrator can merely afford a single pencil, so that they largely remain available only as a series of transitory sensory impressions. Moreover, still a student, the young man is even less likely than the typical salary man of the time to actually possess them. On the other hand, while the salary man’s perceived disengagement from his world led him to
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take refuge in ‘nonmaterial values’, in ‘Lemon’ the narrator’s equally powerful sense of loss finds comparable compensation by imaginatively translating consumer goods into aesthetic properties in order to reclaim them as his own. In this sense, Kajii re-engages with his surrounding environment by reformulating material goods into a distinctively literary version of the ‘spiritual life’. While the above observations relate to the content of the passage from ‘Lemon’, a consideration of the text’s formal properties may offer further insight into the relationship between Self and Other in terms of a broader social reality that incorporates, but also goes beyond, individual experience. Here is part of the passage in its original Japanese: Aka ya ki no o¯dokoron ya o¯dokinin. Shareta kiriko-zaiku ya tenga na rokoko shumi no uki-moyo¯ o motta kohaku-iro ya hisui-iro no ko¯sui-bin. Kiseru, sho¯to¯, sekken, tabako. The writing style impresses with its almost excessively pleasurable richness; less common kanji are used (for instance, Kajii uses the Chinese characters for ‘amber’ and ‘jade’, rather than using the more common hiragana (Japanese phonetic) transcription), while the term ko¯su i-bin (perfume bottles) is heavily loaded with a large cluster of preceding clauses. Moreover, the goods on display are described not through formal sentences but as a series of noun compounds punctuated with full stops and commas but without final verbs. The overall effect is to suggest a common approach between Kajii and the Aesthetic School (tanbiha) of writers such as Sato¯ and Tanizaki, who insisted on continuing to draw on earlier more lyrical literary forms as a sign of resistance to other calls – instigated principally by an earlier generation of Naturalist writers – to create a more straightforward and bare language in keeping with the practical needs of the modern age. Yet even here, Kajii’s incorporation of western exotic words into his list mitigates any easy retreat into ‘traditional’ writing. But this passage also addresses the writer’s relationship with his wider social context by hinting at a fundamental fragmentation and inability to connect. This is done specifically in the way it casts a critical light on the role of subjectivity as a fixed and central point of narrative consciousness. While I have argued that the mere enumeration of alluring consumer goods gives some degree of pleasure and control back to the narrator, this is undermined by the text’s grammatical structure that speaks of an unmistakable barrier between the objects of desire and the desiring subject. The items presented to the observing self, such as ‘pipes, daggers, soap, tobacco’, imply the promise of full ownership – this is, after all, a shop with goods for sale – but their very definition as objects outside the confines of the self consolidates a sense of separation between the two. It is perhaps for this reason that the narrator had come to find his visits to Maruzen unbearable. In other words, the very language of the text outlines a dynamic of unresolved desire whereby both subject and external objects remain forever fragmented and outside the possibility of re-integration. In short, Kajii’s writing may be seen to touch on the theme of Self and Other not only in terms of an individual’s
108 Stephen Dodd engagement with the external world but also in terms of a process fundamental to the emerging consumer society in which the individual is located. I hope to have shown that, though Kajii’s literary career was very brief, the quality of his writing and the themes he touches on are well worth further study. In particular, the relationship between Self and Other is a question that still resonates in our own age.
References Main text Kajii Motojiro¯ (1999) Kajii Motojiro¯ zensh¯u (KMZ), vol. 3, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯.
Other references Freud, Sigmund (1956) ‘The Uncanny’, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, pp. 219–52. Harootunian, Harold (2000) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kobayashi Hideo (1967–69) ‘Kokyo¯ o ushinatta bungaku’ (Literature of the Lost Home), in Kobayashi Hideo zensh¯u (The Complete Works of Kobayashi Hideo), vol. 3, Tokyo: Shincho¯ sha, pp. 29–37. Lippit, Seiji (1997) ‘Japanese Modernism and the Destruction of Literary Form: The Writings of Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, and Kawabata’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University. ——(2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press. Moretti, Franco (2002) ‘The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture’, in Michael McKeon (ed.) Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 554–65. ¯ gai ([1909] 1974) Vita Sexualis, trans. Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein, Mori O Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Natsume So¯seki ([1914] 1957) Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan, Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Ryan, M. (1967) Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei, New York: Columbia University Press. Shiga Naoya ([1921–37] 1976) A Dark Night’s Passing, trans. Edwin McClellan, Tokyo: Kodansha.
Further reading Kamakawa Katsuhiko (2000) Kajii Motojiro¯no¯ (On Kajii Motojiro¯), Tokyo: Kanrin shobo¯. Kodama de Larroche, Christine (1987) Les cercles d’un regard: Le monde de Kajii Motojiro¯, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Suzuki Sadami (2001) Kajii Motojiro¯ no sekai (The World of Kajii Motojiro¯), Tokyo: Sakuhinsha. Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ulmer, Robert (1982) ‘The Private World of Kajii Motojiro¯’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Yale University.
6
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others Paris and Shanghai Douglas Slaymaker
Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), for all his flaws, remains a central figure of twentieth-century intellectual life in Japan. By flaws, I refer to the critical weaknesses which overshadow the experimental sparkle of many works, particularly his later, longer works.1 Then there is the taint of wartime collaboration, hardly mitigated by the incontrovertible appeal that nationalistic essentialisms held for him. I would suggest, nonetheless, that the questions that inform his work plague us still: the origin and shape of national and ethnic identities; the gendered operations comprising those identities; and the colonial past that undergirds those identities (to enumerate but three). Many other aspects of his writing, such as stylistic and artistic concerns could be addressed as well, but I will concentrate here on the Others that structure two novels, Shanhai (Shanghai, 1927–31 [2001]) and Ryosh¯u (Travel Weariness, 1937–45 [1998]).2 These two novels marked significant changes in the direction of Yokomitsu’s writings: for one, they are longer in form than earlier works and, for another, they are located outside of Japan. Further, they form an apex that triangulates two key sites of otherness: the Other of foreign cities and the Other of woman. A variety of organizing themes lurk in the background of these works: modernity and an accompanying urbane vision; the nation in a time and place of colonial expansion; dread in the face of historical pressure; romantic and sexual attraction; and death. I will focus on the imagery of the city and explore how women, who are often a stand-in for home, because both ‘woman’ and ‘home’ represent the nation for Yokomitsu, form a subset of the city as Other. Yokomitsu’s choice of material highlights the importance of place where this Otherness is located: one novel contrasts Japan to the Other of Asia via the city of Shanghai (Shanghai ), the other contrasts it to the Other of Europe via the city of Paris (Travel Weariness). The specter of the Western Other haunts these novels – whether the internationalism of Shanghai, a city often referred to, in Japan, as the ‘Paris of the East’, in the early decades of the twentieth century, or Paris itself – because it forces characters to confront their ‘Japan’ within world systems of power.3 Yokomitsu’s characters quiver in ambiguity and anxiety as ‘Japanese’ at these various Other places;4 these Others include both the city and women because, as I shall develop below, both cities and women share imaginative space as the objects of desire in Yokomitsu’s novels and for many in 1930s and 1940s Japan. Further, Shanghai
110 Douglas Slaymaker correlated in many ways to Paris, and both Paris and Shanghai represented (was, in one instance) an artistic capital of the world. This was especially true in the pre-war Japanese imagination. These cities were metaphors for the worlds of artistry, of decadence, which meant, for many at the time, the allure of women. To speak of France, in Japan, was to evoke the cabaret revues, coffee shops, the demi-monde, and public sexuality introduced to Japan during the 1920s (i.e. of Taisho¯ Japan).5 The simultaneous attraction and fear that accompany the imagery of women in these two novels attend as well on the imagery of Paris (and again, in Yokomitsu’s case this is both the Paris of France and the ‘Paris of the East’, i.e. Shanghai). Women are consistently identified with, and in many ways overlap precisely with, these geographic locales. These various Others comprise but one half of an equation; the Self forms the complementary term. Thus, issues of individual identity motivate these characters, these works and, apparently, this writer. As Naoki Sakai has articulated in another context: The relation of the self cannot be determined unless the relation to the other has already been determined. Not to mention Hegel on self-consciousness, it is a rudimentary premise, when dealing with the problem of identity in cultural and social contexts, that the relation to the other logically precedes that to the self. What is at issue here, indeed, is not a dialectic of the self and the other for individual consciousness, but a process in which the comparative framework of Japan (the Self ) and the West (the Other) is installed. (1997: 51) It is now commonplace to posit the need for an Other when defining a Self. Yokomitsu’s choice of Others, and his descriptions of them, reveal the structure of his imaginative universe while elucidating the public imagination of his readership, which Sakai articulated as the ‘process in which the comparative framework of Japan . . . is installed’ (ibid.). That process can be seen in Shanghai, the novel, which, like Shanghai the city, embodies for Yokomitsu (and, it seems safe to assume, for his audience) the allure of risky high stakes and transgressive possibilities (freedoms) of capital and of sexuality. This city forms an Other to individuals and to the nation with which they identify; in this instance that Other is Japan. In 1930s imperialist Japan, for example, the movements of individuals overlapped with movements of capital, and Shanghai attracted both with its volatile markets and great riches. Further, not only was it one of the most ‘international’ cities in the world, it was an Asian city, which was far from insignificant in this time of imperialist fervor and Orientalist anxiety. Many of the artifacts of the time, such as these novels, reveal the anxiety of a culture engaged in fervid expansion on an imperialist model even as it feared being overtaken by the Western imperial nations from which it took clues. Shanghai may have seemed a middling place, not fully Asian but not quite Western; if so, it resonated with Japanese concerns that it too was caught in
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 111 a place between. Stated another way, contained in the allure of Shanghai, a product of successful enterprises of successful nations, were the anxietyproducing threats to colonial enterprises – passions and desires that might undermine those imperial advantages and reveal unseemly activities. That is, Japan oscillated between its identity as a colonizing imperial power even as it was a member of a subjugated, colonized Asia. The contradictions inherent in this position increase the level of anxiety contained in the colonial structure; these layers of anxiety become insistent as they pull Yokomitsu’s novels in contradictory directions. Shanghai was among the most contested of political areas early in the twentieth century. Sometimes a colony, at all times part of an ‘informal empire’,6 Shanghai would have been known to many Japanese readers as ‘sin city’(mato) in the pre-war years. ‘Mato’ was, for example, the title of a 1924 melodramatic short story by Muramatsu Sho¯fu, ¯ set in Shanghai and reinforcing many of the stereotypes associated with Shanghai, such as sex, violence, and danger. In this historical context, imaginative associations extend to the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) of Taisho¯ Japan and its themes of sexual license and free rein given to desire.7 In the case of Shanghai, however, the associative complex includes lawlessness, criminals, and political revolutionaries. Indeed, that this decadence was much more than that of desire and wealth, and was often tied to strong political passions and the threat of violence, gave Shanghai an edge attractive to many in Japan (and other countries); this set it apart, for Japanese in particular, from similar Western urban sites such as New York, London, or Paris. The allure of wealth formed but part of Shanghai’s attraction; politics and possibilities were equally integral to its appeal.8 Both of Yokomitsu’s novels reflect the political-historical moments of their writing: Japan, for example, intent on proving its place in the world, found in Shanghai a prime location to assert its political intent and international position and, again, a location in Asia. Japan’s jockeying for position was boosted with Europe’s First World War and the subsequent change in global demographics. As foreign nationals were repatriated to Britain, Germany, or France for war service, the Japanese population in Shanghai became second only to that of the British (in 1915). Shanghai, and the Japanese industries that were growing there, supplied war materiel and consumer goods in short supply in Europe, a situation enhanced by Japan’s relative non-involvement in the conflicts of WWI. The economic activity of Shanghai left a great impression on Yokomitsu when he visited in 1928: ‘Everything here flows on silver’, he exclaimed with both awe and disgust, going on to note how pawn shops stretched as far as he could see (Inoue 1994: 55–6). The increased politicization of the Chinese populace, many in resentment of the colonizers, both European and Japanese, meant the streets of Shanghai were becoming armed.9 A critical factor worth noting, however, is that there were no Japanese areas in the way that there were British, French, or German concessions in Shanghai. The sparks that would ignite Shanghai’s political powder keg flew from the May 30 incident of 1925,10 when British troops killed eleven protesters in Shanghai; demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts followed in
112 Douglas Slaymaker its wake, throughout China. This event, with its Chinese violence turned on Japanese factory owners, roots Yokomitsu’s imaginative vision for the novel. The incident began by pitting Japanese factory owners and Chinese workers against each other on the streets of Shanghai, and quickly spread to involve the other nations represented there, such as the British forces. This historical moment also ties to the literary record of other writers and their works that are located in Shanghai: with Yokomitsu’s writing vis-à-vis Japan forming one apex, we can consider the rich triangle formed by André Malraux’s tale of France’s Asian and colonial Other in his La condition humaine (1933), as characters move from the French colony in Vietnam to the political unrest of Shanghai, and by Mao Dun’s Midnight (1933), which focuses on the societal upheavals introduced to Chinese society at this time. Each of these three novels takes up China’s Others of capital, urbanity, and political revolution. They do so in close historical proximity, but focus on the issues from three different national perspectives. Shanghai roots the action of all these novels, and provides the prism that separates the strands of color comprising the different nations’ perceived stakes in these locales. International and capital exchange frame the novel Shanghai. For example, Sanki, a central character, converses comfortably with the white Russian prostitutes, so much a part of Shanghai’s contemporary allure. Seated by the Bund, with the water of the Huangpu river in the background (and water is richly symbolic in Yokomitsu’s Shanghai)11, Sanki and the prostitutes converse in English and they discuss monetary exchange, revealing Sanki’s command of the international idiom, English. The market for, and the exchange of, desire structures the work, and bodies and sex are sold at every level.12 The variety of prostitutes named reveals the layers of the bodily exchange: we see the one level that includes the white Russians, the destitute Japanese expatriate O-Sugi, and the flirtatious international sensation Miyako; we see it as well in other exchanges of bodies, such as the coolies selling their physical labor, and in the corpses that are being readied for the medical market. Related is the alluring Chinese woman who happens also to be a main political activist and romantic temptation for Sanki. She is dangerous and beautiful, the exotic woman who threatens home and homeland because she is not Japanese, transgressive, as she moves across the various political and ethnic borders thrown up before her. She also introduces another level of disequilibrium to Sanki, who is drawn to women in need of care, which seems to correspond to his associating these women with the homeland which he is to protect. At the same time, the Chinese activist Quilan promises the ecstasy of dissolution as she takes control of him and saves him in his helplessness. This woman offers another organization to the relationships of men and women, and the confusion this brings to the character reinforces the phantasmagoric confusion of the Shanghai streets through which he pursues her. Shanghai served as a no man’s land precisely because it was everyone’s land. Great possibility and fabulous opulence existed side by side with abject poverty, and no-one was concerned about the national origins of the individuals. The possibility of escaping national identities constantly appears as one source of
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 113 freedom for these characters. As Komori Yo¯ichi has noted, Shanghai was a place of nationless souls, many traveled there to escape their own countries and shady pasts, many with obscure and dubious travel papers, in a city with few administrators concerned about such details of legality (Komori 1988: 517ff.). This milieu generates the richly imaged statement concerning Sanki: ‘But because he was in Shanghai, the space his body took up was always a territory of Japan’ (Yokomitsu 2001: 45). Anxiety-filled imagery, in which body borders correlate to national borders, is consistent through this work; in this case, Sanki’s body is an occupied area, delimited by political boundaries. The exchange of bodies and capital is caught in the first paragraph when Sanki says to the Russian prostitutes (and I paraphrase) ‘Sorry ladies, but I’m broke’; to which they quip in reply: ‘No money? Hell, we don’t even have a country.’ Bodies, money, and politics are all quickly conflated on these streets. Yokomitsu had written in the preface to the first edition of Shanghai that ‘the impetus for writing this novel comes from a desire to know this pathetic East (To¯yo¯)’ (Yokomitsu 1987: 370). Yokomitsu had also described the colonialist projects of the Western powers as the ‘first battle between Europe (Yo¯roppa) and the East (To¯yo¯) in modern Asian history’ (ibid.) and he took away from his visit to Shanghai the strong impression of ‘the piteous East in which I live’, that is, the East controlled by the colonial powers (Inoue 1994: 54–5). Such equations replicate the Japanese imperial discourse which posited a Japanese identity as part of an Asian identity in a struggle against Western imperial domination, and which simultaneously (and contradictorily) offered imperial Japan as the savior from that dominating yoke. At the same time, Yokomitsu’s descriptions of other Asians contain all the paternal disdain of a European imperialist traveling in Asia: nationals become ‘foreigners’ in their own land before the othering gaze of the tourist-traveler. This is the site of one of Yokomitsu’s enduring issues – Japan’s positioning of itself in the world – because it supports the ideology in which Japan is a part of Asia unified against the West even as Japan sets itself up as the leader of Asia and, in so doing, takes on all the characteristics of an imperialist state lording it over colonies. In the context of these novels, such structures also, at the same time and by imperial structural necessity, invoke the ‘freedom’ to identify with the state, and the freedom to sacrifice oneself for a national/political identity. Self-identity in a political ethnicity, or political relegation of individual identity, occupied much of the intellectual discourse of pre-war Japan, and these discourses infuse Yokomitsu’s writings.13 Colonial fantasy resides alongside colonial anxieties in Shanghai; both are ratcheted up when Yokomitsu, and his characters, travel to the West. In this sense Travel Weariness, the second of the novels I am considering here, set in France and based on Yokomitsu’s European trip nine years after his stay in Shanghai, is tantamount to traveling behind the enemy lines of the Western powers which have rendered the East so pathetic in their powerlessness and loss of autonomy.14 Travel Weariness occupied the last decade of Yokomitsu’s life, but remained unfinished when Yokomitsu died in 1947, at age 50. It traces the experiences and crises of identity among an expatriate Japanese community in Paris during the
114 Douglas Slaymaker 1930s. Yokomitsu had traveled to Europe to report on the Olympic Games in Berlin, in 1936, a signal event in the history of colonizing and national aggression. In the following year, Japan invaded China, eventually to occupy Shanghai. In the words of Hosho¯ Masao, ‘The mood of the times progressed from un-usual (hijo¯ji ) to Super un-usual’ (Hosho¯ 1967: 544). The historical events that form the background of Yokomitsu’s Europe trip and their international ramifications unfold, almost in ‘real time’, behind the action of the novel and intrude more than once on the realm of the characters in Paris. In Travel Weariness, the Other that provides the imagery for such enunciation is France and the French experience. For example, Yashiro thinks only of Japan while in France; on the ship traveling to France, ‘Japan’ filled his thoughts in ways that increased in tandem to physical proximity to the port of Marseilles. Thus, when he actually arrives in Marseilles, he is reluctant to disembark. The Europe that he has never seen or experienced is now before him. He ‘desires to quickly plant his foot on the monster (kaibutsu) lying before him’ (Yokomitsu 1998 26), yet he stays on board ship, in his cabin, looking at the lights of the shore. Trapped behind its steel walls, frightened to venture out, for ‘in all the wide world only the interior of this ship preserved the stuffy air of Japan; he thought he would cry’ (ibid.: 38). The Other of France is more oppressive and frightening, when right before his eyes, than it had ever been before departure. Behind this immobilizing fear is an Orientalizing, and self-orientalizing, imagination which plays a key role in Yokomitsu’s imagination, in a manner reminiscent of the European writers analyzed by Edward Said: In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. (Said 1979: 177) Yokomitsu’s works occupy a different context than the Orientalists Said explicates, but the rhetorical structure is the same. Yokomitsu draws from an imaginative topos, a literary-cultural lineage which Said characterized, above, as a ‘congeries of characteristics’. While Said is charting the process among French and British artists of the nineteenth century, it seems to me that a similar structure was developed by Japanese writers on France. In particular, the ‘congeries of characteristics’ that formed the lineage from which Yokomitsu drew had been established by previous Japanese travelers (namely novelist Shimazaki To¯son (1872–1943) and artist Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968). Said’s explication of the process of European Orientalism seems replicated in the production of knowledge in Japan which also created a topos and a ‘set of references’ for the desired locale. France was not a Japanese colony, but it was an important imaginative Other that needed to be tamed. And Yokomitsu’s novels are but one example in a lineage that also includes the work of Shimazaki and Fujita – one a literary
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 115 artist, the other a visual artist – who were participant in these and established a landscape that reflects less of France and much more of Japan. That is, these other locales are described and negotiated in ways that speak to Japan. Yokomitsu, as Yashiro will do, also traveled on to Berlin and throughout Europe, but we hardly hear about any of it. Paris (which is to say ‘France’) stole center stage of his imagination. Much of Travel Weariness is taken up with discussions between Yashiro, the main narrator and something of a stand-in for Yokomitsu himself, and Kuji, his foil. (That the Chinese characters for his name are read ‘Yashiro’, with its associations with State Shinto shrines, hardly seems coincidental.)16 Kuji is an advocate of the rationalist scientific approaches he finds in the West, and argues for Rationalism and scientific supremacy. He wants to cast off any and all traces of ‘backward’ Japan and denies any value to the Japanese ethic and way of thinking. Yashiro, meanwhile, comes to stress the spiritual superiority of Japanese culture. He does not deny the value of Western scientific rationality, only decries it for vacuous soullessness. These two characters become ciphers in a dualistic argument, to borrow Dennis Keene’s phrasing (1980: 208–10). As Yashiro characterizes his ongoing argument with Kuji, for example, he and Kuji have been trying to weave two strands, the European and the Japanese, into a single rope. The argument turns on which should be placed in prominence at the head of that rope (Yokomitsu 1998 78). The struggle comes from trying to determine which should be at the top and assume the dominant position. They are unable to agree. While the May 30th incident anchors Shanghai, in many ways the activity of the Front Populaire, the Parisian labor strikes, and the dissolution of Blum’s cabinet in Paris, played out in tandem with the Japanese incursions into China in the 1930s, anchor major sections of Travel Weariness. Yashiro’s sense of cultural inferiority is exacerbated by the French lack of interest in these Asian events. News of these events plays out like grand theater to the café habitués, with these distant struggles for self-determination unfolding like a cycle of plays, further acts in a long and distant drama. To make matters worse, Parisians cannot even distinguish between the Chinese and Japanese among them. Yashiro takes this marginalization very much to heart. Kuji, by contrast, finds only shallowness in Japan, in sharp distinction to the depth he discovers in France; at the same time, he senses that what one sees in Paris is simply the surface of things behind which lies an unfathomable depth of tradition. This means that if, as is claimed, to know the past is to know the present, then given the depths of this past, Kuji has no idea of what the present is like, much less the future. Kuji continues his internal monologue in this direction and posits that history is tied to the issue of land. If one is removed from the land of one’s birth, which is the root of one’s identity, then one is assaulted by doubts and despair, he suggests. Land is the most basic issue. He looks at the ‘foreigners’ on the terrace of the café. He attributes the sadness he sees in all their faces to the fact that they are not in their homelands. Even so, Kuji does not wish to return to his own homeland. There is much here in France that he wants to research, yet the impossibility of his situation 15
116 Douglas Slaymaker persists, for even as he is burrowing into the rich mountain of jewels that houses the object of his research, he feels he has not even begun to research the land of his birth. Many say that in these modern times one must understand the West before understanding Asia, but this strikes him as specious. He realizes that he is searching for the jewel that is common throughout the world, the treasure that is consistent throughout all cultures in all lands, or the common thread that unites them all. At the same time, his anxieties are compounded when he finds that ‘civilized’ France also possesses a barbarous past with skeletons hidden in the sacred cathedral closets of its tradition, a tradition he had taken as being completely rational. The reader finds that, along with these characters, many of these issues come into focus when mail arrives from Japan. Every two weeks a ship arrives in Marseilles bearing letters from families left behind in Japan, and with it new groups of Japanese. These newcomers are given the cold shoulder by the oldtimers, those who have been in Paris for two or three years. These ‘old-timers’ are the most steeped in a ‘Europeanism’ that has them despise all that is Japanese. They sneer at the shallow attempts of the newcomers to ape European ways. Furthermore, from this European perspective they see only the many awful barbarisms of Japanese society (as they are catalogued at this point): the great numbers of poor among whom tuberculosis is rampant, the farming peasants who must sell their daughters into prostitution, and the many cheap prostitutes active in the areas marking the borders of economic progress. ‘Culture’ in Japan? It is no more than an amalgam of European and American practices, they jeer. As these despicable aspects of Japan are listed, Kuji wonders aloud if there is anything of value in Japan. Yashiro, for his part, recuperates Japanese culture by claiming that all these failings develop from beautiful aspects of Japanese society. For him, ‘more than all those so-called negative points, in the midst of a natureloving Japanese civilization (bunm e i ) there was the very positive aspect wherein the number of bad people was exceedingly small. This gave him more pleasure than anything else’ (Yokomitsu 1998 136). Yashiro is obviously the voice of essentialism, insisting that Japan is superior because of a spiritual tradition. Yet the dissonance he experiences in the ancient cathedrals of France vexes him greatly. France, as the center of Europe, occupies the center of civilization, rational thought, and scientific enquiry; the grotesque, tortured, bloodied, representations of the crucified Christ found in its cathedrals therefore take him by surprise, and he is confused about how the advanced civilization associated with France could have arisen from such expressions of barbarity. ‘So this country’s culture also had, at one time, barbarities as well’, Yashiro says to himself (ibid.: 32). This is a commonly expressed sentiment in the novel; the ‘as well’ is critical, for it reveals the common-sense ‘of course’ that Yashiro harbors concerning Japan’s barbarous past. Yashiro is not content with finding commonalities between the two cultures, however; he goes on to express, not just Japan’s equality in such shared aspects of history, but its superiority, because Japan’s culture had remained pure throughout such historical phases; these are his counter-arguments to his friend Kuji who would write off the whole
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 117 of Japan and wholeheartedly embrace the rationalistic scientific thinking of France (as he articulates it). This seems the same trajectory that Yokomitsu himself would ultimately follow: anxiety about the paucity of cultural capital in the Japanese tradition leads to an over-emphasis on a Japanese essential, spiritually superior tradition. This development of essentialist thinking also marks the characteristics where the Other of the foreign city overlaps with the Other of Woman. On the ship, Yashiro has met a young Japanese woman named Chizuko. He is too shy and intimidated to speak to her, partly because of their class differences but mostly because of his personality, but they become very close while in France. While on board ship to France, she and Kuji had seemed on the most intimate terms, complicating matters for Yashiro. This structure also introduces a triangulation, in the manner of René Girard, as Chizuko is an Other for each of the men, and their affection for her collapses into rivalry between them. As a result, they seem less interested in winning over Chizuko, more in winning over each other. The rivalry over this woman is not divorced from their rivalry over Japan: she is either an embodiment of spiritual purity to be embraced heartily, or a decadent temptation that draws one from the path of knowledge. Japan is often imagined as ‘woman’, and the rivalry over one woman often functions as a proxy for the rivalry over the other. Chizuko, like Yashiro, has a revelatory experience when she discovers the barbarous chapters in France’s history. She had gone from Marseilles to London to visit a brother in the diplomatic corps; she is now enjoying an extended stay in Paris before traveling home via the US. While sightseeing in Paris she discovers that, in the traditions of France, there are both admirable and frightening areas, and these together form the tradition of France. The issues surrounding tradition, given the questions foregrounded here, represent an enduring and compelling theme throughout Travel Weariness. On further reflection, Chizuko realizes that Japan too has both beautiful and frightening aspects to its tradition. Were this not the case, she comments to Yashiro, the encounter with French tradition would have been indescribably pathetic. Yashiro responds that Kuji would react violently to such a statement, for Kuji will not allow anything of value in the Japanese tradition, hardly even recognizing that Japan has a tradition of which to speak. Chizuko counters by pointing out that, actually, Kuji had commented just the other day that Paris was very fine, but that Japan was desirable as well. Indeed, he had made these statements while viewing paintings by Fujita Tsuguharu: ‘It was after coming to Paris that I first thought that Fujita was interesting (se goi ) . He [Fujita] sure stirred things up in this city!’ she reports him as saying.17 All in all, the relationship between Yashiro and Chizuko is one of the most exasperating aspects of the novel, for across pages and pages of narrative Yashiro is in internal agony over his desire to marry her and the possibility of losing her, yet he cannot bring himself to admit this, much less speak directly to her about it. Even so, after their friendship develops during her stay in Paris, they travel together through Europe and he constantly goes over a marriage scenario in his
118 Douglas Slaymaker mind, but never discusses it with her. In the context of the times and the narrative, the depiction of this man and woman traveling together is scandalously suggestive. His friend Kuji assumes they have entered a de facto engagement. Chizuko is an object of desire that remains unattainable because of Yashiro’s inability to express his thoughts. The barriers keeping him from her are similar to the barriers keeping him from France: any concession seems an insult to ‘Japan’. In this relationship, the Other of foreignness meets the Other of woman: when Yashiro thinks of Japan he thinks of marriage. As it plays out in his mind, he realizes he feels compelled to marry a Japanese woman. It is not that he loves Chizuko in this moment, he says to himself, simply that he finds Japan to be almost unbearably pathetic; associated with the feminine, they both need to be cared for. This begins a complex series of associations in which Japan is gendered female: Yashiro’s desire for Chizuko parallels his desire for Japan, and Chizuko turns, at times, into an embodiment of the traditional Japan. He acknowledges to himself that his desire to marry her really has little to do with marriage, but as he considers all the countries to which he will be traveling and the innumerable women as ‘enemies’ he will meet in those places, the only real choice seems to be Chizuko. This would only be laughable in the sight of another, but Yashiro, desirous as he was of the purity of blood, and aware of the pain it would cause to have his virginity taken by a foreign woman, wished to acknowledge the rightness of his choosing Chizuko. (Yokomitsu 1998: 45–6) Readers can be thankful that little of the novel reads this badly and, in general, Yashiro’s friendship and concern for Chizuko seem more believably genuine. But phrases like this call it all into doubt, not least for the way they play into, and support, the colonizing, militarist rhetoric of the Japan in which Yokomitsu was writing. So, while this phrasing hints at some critical distance by both author and character, melodramatic essentialism does weigh down much of this novel. There is some further novelistic subtlety added in the latter half of the novel, when all the characters return to Japan. Yashiro’s ship docks, but even before returning to his own home he goes out of his way to travel past Chizuko’s Tokyo home. He cannot enter, cannot even approach the imposing gate. That is, the gate to her home is a physical marker of their status differences in society and the class issues that he could suppress while overseas, but which now prevent him from approaching her in Japan. At the same time, however, this continual drawing close and pulling back conforms to what George Bataille leads us to expect as a response to the erotic (Chizuko as woman) and the sacred (Chizuko as Japan), both of which Chizuko represents. The important feature of this imaginary, as is consistent in tales displaying the push and pull of religious ecstasy that Bataille identified in eroticism, is her feminine embodiment of Japan. Bataille’s explanation of eroticism helps explain Yashiro’s obsession with making Chizuko his wife (it may also explain his fear of her). It means her character must
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 119 bear great weight in the ideological web of the novel, representing woman, and Japan, both of which are sacred and pure. Other imagery continues the Bataillian vacillation in the face of the overlapped sacred and sensual, as the sacred associations become more explicit in other contexts. For example, in a passage that introduces a Chinese national who has studied for a long period in Japan and who is now resident in Paris, one reads that when Chinese see Paris, they find it dead and empty. Yashiro responds that his association of Japan is in the beauty of emptiness, a now worn association that he develops with a confession: ‘Whenever I think of Japan, while here in France, I think of a place empty of people; the Ise Shrine comes to mind’ (ibid.: 235).18 The emptiness of the minimalist temple complex exudes for him a purity of love/affection (aijo¯ ) that is to be found in Japanese culture. Kuji ridicules him for this, but Yashiro is not to be dissuaded, continuing that this peaceful beauty resides, silently, within the people (minshu¯) of Japan. Kuji’s response is swift and cutting: he draws attention to the stones of the Ise complex, which brings him back to his favorite topic, the depth and splendor of France; he associates the stones of Ise with the stony heaviness of France’s streets and buildings: It lodged firmly in his breast with the heaviness of the stones of this city. One could poke at it, one could blow at it, but it gave no sign of being movable. Even the stone house in front of his eyes, now on its way to being a pauper’s dwelling, shored up with metal plates, stained with a rusty run-off, appears tinged with the sadness of blood. (ibid.: 236) At this moment he sees the softness of the muffler wrapped around Makiko’s neck, and this saves him from this oppressive heaviness. (Makiko often joins Yashiro, Kuji, and Chizuko in perambulations through Paris.) Blood, stones, salvation by the softness of a woman’s clothing: this series of images will quickly become a cliché when reiterated by postwar male writers. The dialectic of hard and soft, masculine and feminine, civilized and cultured that Yokomitsu develops here will quickly become entrenched in the Japanese literary heritage. One of the more prominent expressions, for example, is the iterations within Endo¯ Sh¯usaku’s Ry¯ugaku (Foreign Studies, 1965 [1989]). As a final point, I want to note the importance of Travel Weariness in the history of Japanese writing about France. The themes that Yokomitsu articulated in this work gained increasing importance in wartime Japan. The enduring obsession with tradition and purity is one; the importance of place is another. This articulation also contains a chronicle of the complex imagination of France within the Japanese tradition. Additionally, the conflation of Chizuko’s femininity with Japan is a rich one of great structural importance to the novel and also to the imagination of France within Japanese writing. When thinking historically, I am constantly reminded, as I read this work, how things have changed: Japan as economic powerhouse and threat in the 1960s through the 1980s, recognized as an important political, economic, and cultural entity throughout the world, was
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unimaginable in Yokomitsu’s time. France served as a powerful imaginative site for Japan throughout the twentieth century, often as the source of desire, but also as an example of problems to avoid. As Japan wrestled with modernization, many Japanese intellectuals found in France a culture that, like their own, boasted a long literary heritage wherein the meaning of being ‘French’ or ‘Japanese’ proceeded from self-identification with that heritage. France, with its otherness and exoticism, afforded for Yokomitsu a foil against which he could explore the meanings of being Japanese and the degree to which he and his cohorts should accommodate the West and become like the Frenchmen they saw. In his important history of interaction with this Other of France, Watanabe Kazutami has charted the changing imagery of France within Japanese writings (1995). The imagery of France within Japan remained relatively stable before and after the First World War; the imagery of Japanese within France, however, changed radically across those decades. As a result, many Japanese experienced those changes as personal dislocation. Watanabe finds that in the 1920s, Japanese were treated as embodiments of japonisme , as exotic beings from a vacuous, albeit artistic, culture, as individuals who could be blissfully self-absorbed and nonpolitical. (Fujita Tsuguharu, who figures in the pages of Travel Weariness, as I noted above, supported this mythologizing.) Jean Cocteau, when he visited Japan in 1936, seemed to seriously expect all the women to look like something from Utamaro, for example. By the time that Yokomitsu writes, however, those days are long past: the apolitical Japanese citizen is an impossible anachronism. Japan’s increasing bellicosity and its invasion of China in 1937 occur during the time Yokomitsu’s characters are in Paris. Japan is also host to rightist military plots in this period. All these events occur after Yashiro and the other characters have left home (an experience that parallels Yokomitsu’s own); and the international ramifications of these events prompt a querying (and confused) gaze from Europeans turned towards them and their country (albeit, as already noted, one that exasperates Yashiro because that gaze seems disinterested). At the same time, it is not at all clear to the characters themselves what is taking place at ‘home’. Individual Japanese must now explain the political significances of their nation’s actions. They represent, and must speak for, ‘Japan’, the country with which they have a confused, sometimes tenuous, and often anxiety-ridden relationship. Stated differently, Japan had become a country that fostered a wary awe where before it was ignored by all except for aesthetes. Japanese in Europe are no longer anonymous. Their relationship to Japan, and the accompanying associations among Europeans, have changed radically; that anxiety is reflected in this novel. Further, as Watanabe explores, Japanese intellectuals and Francophiles faced a real sense of crisis in the 1940s as France was divided and occupied, and they feared that France was going to be no more: ‘That is, the France that had been for Japanese intellectuals since the 1920s a utopia, the ancestral land (sokoku) of intellect and literature no longer exists in that way; the fact of France’s defeat enforced the turning of their eyes from France back to view Japan’ (Watanabe 1995: 193). Watanabe suggests in this an impetus for the looking back to Japan, a ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki ).
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 121 As suggested by the above, then, there are in Yokomitsu, especially in these two works, hints of what came to be a common development, the avant-garde modernist for whom traditionalist and essentialist cultural thinking develops deep and convincing resonances; whether or not this comprises a ‘return to Japan’ is an issue I will put off until another occasion. Travel Weariness exudes a nostalgia (as the title leads one to expect), a grumpiness and frustration that seep from the author and come through his characters. The most compelling antidote to the frustration and anxiety his characters feel is a greater identification with ‘Japan’. At the same time – and Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism (2002) reinvigorates this imagery – the sense of homelessness one finds in the writings of Kobayashi Hideo,19 which can be explained as a side effect of modernism and its phantasmal, spectral disruptions, is very much present in these works.20 Kobayashi is not the only intellectual to sense that ‘home’ has disappeared, and that the native looks as exotic as anything ‘foreign’. Nonetheless, what we find as a consistent driving force in these works is the Other of the foreign and of woman.
Notes 1 For representative assessments, see Keene (1980: 187); and Ban (1999: 217 ff. and esp. 221). 2 For details of the publication process of these two novels, see Inoue (1994: 106–7); Kindai Sakka Kenky¯u Jiten Kanko¯kukai (1983: 431).
3 The reader quickly realizes that ‘Japan’ serves as a marker of both ethnic identity and 4 5 6 7 8
political nation, and not simply as a signifier of geographic islands bearing that appellation. And likely Yokomitsu himself, given the overlaps one finds in his diaries and letters from this period. For an elaboration of this, see Wada (1994). See Duus (1989). ‘Sexual violence, perversion, and gender ambivalence were among the frequent themes of this genre’ (Mostow 2003: 49). In this environment, many of Yokomitsu’s characters exhibit the qualities of Walter Benjamin’s (1999) flâneur; their wanderings through the modern city associate a further association with Baudelaire’s urbane character strolling the streets of Paris (from which Benjamin drew his models), as an embodiment of the modern. In particular, in this context, the modernist lineage includes the meaninglessness of national origin in the modernist imagination. The contradictory tugs exhibited throughout these novels are also tethered to this spot, for at precisely the moment that nations and a national identity are foregrounded in imperial land-grabs and world wars, it seems that it is less the particular nation and more the idea of the international that comes to the fore in modernist imaginations: When literary history has stepped beyond national traditions, what it finds is not the history of cultural interchange between the English-speaking nations but a history of ‘cosmopolitanism’, of a culture which is ‘international’ rather than ‘inter-national.’ In particular, modernism, in poetry as in architecture, is represented as a movement no longer determined by local conditions but based on discovering ways in which a universal ‘technology’ – free verse, the ‘image’, the unconscious – could be applied everywhere the same. (Craig 2002: 199)
122 Douglas Slaymaker
9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20
Benjamin’s flâneur and Yokomitsu’s characters are all solitary characters negotiating the undulating terrain of possibilities and pace of the city, alone in the midst of urban masses, in ways parallel to the negotiations necessary for deciphering the meaning of the self. Shanghai conforms, in many ways, to Benjamin’s goal in the arcades project: ‘Our investigation proposes to show how . . . the new forms of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria.’ The flâneur lives through these phantasmagoria, ‘abandon[ing] himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace’ (Benjamin 1999: 14). In the frenetic swirls of bodies and commodities through streets and ubiquitous pawnshops/arcades, the characters of Shanghai experience the city as a surreal landscape replete with spirits and unsubstantial bodies. Theirs is the modernist experience of phantasmagoria. A sensibility captured in Kuroshima Denji’s (1930) novel, Buso¯seru shigai (The Armed Streets). For a detailed explanation of this event, see Clifford (1991), esp. Chapter 6, ‘China’s Bastille: May 30th and its Background’. The opening lines also refer to the water that constantly reappears, the river usually muddied and filled with filth, carrying the carcasses of animals, the detritus of commercial lives, of discarded babies even. This water is often not much like water but a living being in its own right as it bubbles up with a viscous oily life, tempting OSugi to abandon herself to its unknown depths. Komori Yo¯ichi has noted that none of Yokomitsu’s works have as much of the body in them as this one (1988: 507). See Sakai (2000), referenced above, for an essay that does much to unpack these issues. Such military imagery is found throughout Travel Weariness; Yashiro, the central character, for example, thinks of himself as a soldier who has readied for battle, i.e. prepared for travel abroad, and now fears the confrontation with the enemy. Indeed, Fujita provided the illustrations for the serialized newspaper version of Travel Weariness. Some are reproduced in Nihon kindai bungakukan (1994: 79). A sentiment corroborated in conversation with Watanabe Kazutami, 30 June 2003. One thinks as well of Yokomitsu’s later articulation of nationalist-tinged Shinto purification rites, such as misogi, cf. Nihon kindai bungakukan (1994: 83). Yokomitsu (1998 (1): 98–9). By introducing the historical figure of Fujita Tsuguharu at this point, Yokomitsu references a person (a spectacle, really) of multi-layered associations, one touched on above. Fujita was a well-respected artist in pre-war France; he is most likely the first Japanese painter to make his reputation entirely outside of Japan and to be able to live by his brush. He is noted in France for the ‘Japanese’ sensibility in the cats and milky-white women that characterized his œuvre. Fujita (or ‘Foujita,’ as he signed his work) appeared to have made the cross-over and to have become French. He was a central figure in the Parisian smart set, a regular feature of the gossip columns. (But his return to Japan during the war years and his production of war paintings have complicated estimations of his art.) This ability to become ‘French’ holds great appeal for Yashiro. In the context of Travel Weariness, the contrast with Shimazaki To¯son becomes more complicated as Shimazaki is the only other named Japanese expatriate to appear in the novel. Se g o i is appropriate in reference to Fujita; the appeal he has in the context of this novel is the focus of a future project. The Ise Shrine is the ancient temple complex associated with the founding myth/ goddess of Japan and thereby with the imperial family. For this essay and relevant criticism, see Anderer (1995). On the connection this has to Yokomitsu, see Lippit (2002), esp. Chapter 2. And this too takes us back to Benjamin’s (1999) flâneur.
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 123
References Main texts Yokomitsu Riichi (1998) Ryoshu¯ (Travel Weariness), 2 vols, Tokyo: Ko¯ dansha bungei bunko¯. ——(2001) Shanghai, trans. D. Washburn, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies.
Other references Anderer, Paul (1995) Literature of the Lost Home , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ban, Etsu (1999) Yokomitsu Riichi bungaku no seisei: owarinaki yo¯do¯ no g yo¯seki (Yokomitsu Riichi: ¯ fusha. The Origin of his Literature, a Site of Unending Activity), Tokyo: O ¯ Bataille, George (1986) Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. M. Dalwood, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Craig, Cairns (2002) ‘“Where is the Nation You Promised?”: American Voice in Modern Scottish and Irish Poetry’, in Andrew Michael Roberts and Jonathan Allison (eds) Poetry and Contemporary Culture: The Question of Value, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 185–207. Clifford, Nicholas R. (1991) Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s, Middlebury, VT: Middlebury College Press. Duus, Peter (1989) ‘Introduction: Japan’s Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937: An Overview’, in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds) The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. xxii–xxix. Girard, René (1965) Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Y. Freccero, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hosho¯ Masao (1967) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Yokomitsu Riichi, Ryosh u: ¯ Nihon bungaku zenshh¯u II, vol. 13: Yokomitsu Riichi-shh¯u (Travel Weariness: The Complete Works of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯, pp. 533–49. Inoue Ken (1994) ‘Hyo¯den Yokomitsu Riichi’ (Yokomitsu Riichi, A Biography), in Nihon Kindai Bungakukan (eds) Shincho¯ Nihon bungaku arubamu: Yokomitsu Riichi (The Shincho¯ Album of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, pp. 2–96. Keene, Dennis (1980) Yokomitsu Riichi, Modernist, New York: Columbia University Press. Kindai Sakka Kenkyu¯ Jiten Kanko¯ kai (ed.) (1983) Kindai sakka kenky¯u jiten (Dictionary of ¯ f¯usha. Contemporary Writers), Tokyo: O Komori Yo¯ichi (1988) Ko¯zo¯ to shite no katari (Narrative as Structure), Tokyo: Shin’yo¯sha. Lippit, Seiji M. (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press. Mostow, Joshua S. (ed.) (2003) The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Nihon Kindai Bungakukan (eds.) (1994) Shincho¯ Nihon bungaku arubamu: Yokomitsu Riichi (The Shincho¯ Album of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Shincho¯sha. Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, New York: Vintage Books. Sakai, Naoki (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ——(2000) ‘Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism’, Cultural Studies 14(3–4): 463–530.
124 Douglas Slaymaker Wada Hirofumi (1994) Gengo toshi, Pari, 1862–1945 (Paris, the City in Language, 1862– 1945), Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten. ——(1999) Gengo toshi, Shanhai, 1840–1945 (Shanghai, the City in Language, 1840–1945), Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten. Watanabe Kazutami (1995) Furansu no yuwaku: ¯ kindai Nihon seishinshi shiron (The Desire of France: A Treatise on the Spiritual History of Modern Japan), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Yokomitsu Riichi (1967) Ryoshh¯u: Nihon bungaku zenshh¯u II, vol. 13: Yokomitsu Riichi-shhu¯ (Travel Weariness: The Complete Works of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha. ——(1987) Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu¯ (The Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi: Definitive Edition), 16 vols, Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha.
Part II
Internal others
7
Passing Paradoxes of alterity in The Broken Commandment Mark Morris
[R]aces – these public fictions . . . race is not just a conception; it is also a perception. (Matthew Frye Jackobson, Whiteness of a Different Color) [T]heories of academic racism mimic scientific discursivity by basing themselves upon visible ‘evidence’ (whence the importance of the stigmata of race and in particular of bodily stigmata). (Etienne Balibar, ‘Is There a Neo-Racism?’) 1958 M. STEEN Phoenix Rising vii. 176 Those who succeed in ‘passing’ live their lives in mortal terror of being found out . . . 1961 Guardian 4 May 10/4 ‘Passing’, the word used to describe Negroes merging indistinguishably into a white community in America. 1973 G. D. BERRIMAN Caste in Mod World 10/2 The response of Burakumin to their birth-ascribed status is that common to all low castes: accommodation on the most part, and occasional ‘passing’. (Oxford English Dictionary s.v. passing 1.a.)
Passing might seem to be, here in a still new century, something of an historical relic of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, both as social fact and matter for cultural expression. For instance, William Faulkner’s Light in August – perhaps the classic tragedy of passing within the canon of American writing – was published more than seventy years ago, in 1932. Its protagonist, Joe Christmas, ‘initially fixed by the gazes’ of rural Southern whites for whom ‘perception is always linguistically mediated’ (Wittenberg 1995: 165) by the usual arsenal of racist labels, eventually dies as unsure as the novel’s readers as to whether he is black, white or mixed-race, pre-race, or post-race; Faulkner’s text seems never to allow public fiction to find hook or alibi in any concrete reality. Yet certainly as a theme in fiction and film, passing has yet to dislodge itself from the cultural imagination, as a variety of recent expressions testify. A theme, once a fiction enacted riskily as social fact, which once haunted Afro-American writers during the first decades of the twentieth century and challenged American and other film audiences from around the middle of the same century,1 just doesn’t want to go away. It may pop up in genre fiction or genre film, as in Walter Mosley’s gritty
128 Mark Morris classic Blue Dahlia (1990) – Hollywooded up only a bit in director Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). More controversial, no doubt, is Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). Coleman Silk, a ‘black’ man who for half a century has passed for ‘white’, manages to lose his academic post when a casual reference he makes to ‘spooks’ is misinterpreted as a racist epithet directed at Afro-American students. It would be pretentious to argue that Roth is no Faulkner, as though he had ever tried to be one. The problem with The Human Strain may be that in this bitter, self-indulgent work he is no Roth, either. In Japan, as well, the theme and fact of passing have a long history. The work I focus on in this chapter, Shimazaki To¯son’s Hakai (The Broken Commandment), was conceived during the years of the Russo-Japanese War and published in 1906 (trans. 1974). It is no doubt Japan’s best-known exploration of the suffering undergone by a member of the country’s invisible minority, the burakumin.2 Yet, as I will acknowledge below, even before To¯son, Japanese writers had made an effort to treat the experience of burakumin in fictional form. Passing has re-emerged in contemporary Japanese culture, this time from the perspective of artists of a different minority, the resident Korean or zainichi Korean community. Zainichi Korean author Kaneshiro Kazuki’s recent awardwinning story Go reached an even wider audience through an exhilarating film version, which itself won a number of awards and was voted best film of 2001 by the journal-of-record Kinema Junp¯o. The young protagonist, who passes under the Japanese surname Sugihara, waits until the last moment, when he and his Japanese girlfriend are about to consummate their affair; then a guilty conscience compels him to tell her that he isn’t Japanese. The whole thing is conducted with a lightness of touch that does not, even in a book and film aimed at the youth market, disown the seriousness of what is at stake for anyone who chooses to pass. Shimazaki To¯son once recalled, in an essay written several years after publication of The Broken Commandment, that while living in the mountains of Shinsh¯u, modern Nagano prefecture, teaching at the small school in the town of Komoro, and drafting the pages that became this, his first major work of fiction, the more attentive I was, the more I came to understand the characteristics of the burakumin; and in the space of living a good seven years in the mountains, I got so that I could distinguish burakumin even from among men and women simply passing by. (Shimazaki 1981: 152) Of course, even though a burakumin in origin, To¯son’s focal character Segawa Ushimatsu also passes – or seems to – right to the bitter end of his story. The very title of the book tells us that he will break his father’s commandment to conceal these origins; he will do so in a dramatic and troubling scene late in the work, after many efforts to emulate his mentor Inoko Rentaro¯ and openly declare his identity. Once that statement is finally made, arrives one of the weakest endings in novelistic history: a rich burakumin offers to make a home for Ushimatsu and loyal girlfriend in Texas. Exeunt.
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I don’t have room here to do justice to the fundamental problems posed in the act of stating ‘I am X’. I assume that any identity entered into via the pathways of speech and discourse – however motivated by the force of the imaginary and negotiated by historical contingency – is more or less a fiction. Some are better than others. Some you create or at least freely embrace, the worst take shape as the aftermath of real and/or symbolic violence. In this chapter I want more modestly to consider some of the difficulties this focal character Ushimatsu faced, particularly back in the Meiji period, in attempting to slip through the interstices of the social text of his era as ordinary, normal, same rather than as aberrant and other. In The Broken Commandment, the pressures of ideology seem constantly to inflect burakumin figures other than Ushimatsu and threaten to rebound upon him as well. Ushimatsu is a teacher at a school up in the mountains of Nagano. He is wracked from the outset of the book by anxiety and guilt. Anxiety at his possible exposure as ‘eta’; guilt at the desperate need, which grows more insistent with almost every scene, to reveal his origins and thereby break the commandment to silence imposed upon him by his father. The possibility of a surreptitious transition once gripped the imaginations of Afro-American authors like Charles Chesnutt (The House Behind the Cedars, 1900) and Nella Larsen (Passing, 1929); Philip Roth shows great ingenuity in detailing how Coleman Silk performed such a feat in his youth during the 1940s and 1950s. Kaneshiro’s Sugihara in Go finally puts a halt to his evasions, although neither story nor film ever has the confidence to confront an ultimately understanding girlfriend with his less than genteelly middle-class zainichi family. However, Ushimatsu’s has been no sort of gradual, almost casual slipping into a mainstream identity. Indeed, his father does not deal in the transitional: The only way – the only hope – for any eta who wanted to raise himself in the world was to conceal the secret of his birth. ‘No matter who you meet, no matter what happens to you, never reveal it! Forget this commandment just once, in a moment of anger or misery, and from that moment the world will have rejected you forever.’ (BC: 9–10) Ushimatsu’s father wills his son into a society from which he tries to efface all his own connections. He retreats high into the mountains and lives alone, tending cattle. Where Ushimatsu has been commanded to silence, however, the other main character in the story, Inoko Rentaro¯ , is compelled in the opposite direction, towards articulation and revelation. Ushimatsu is keenly aware of this burakumin intellectual who writes and campaigns against the injustices inflicted upon his people – their people. Ushimatsu opens Rentaro¯’s newly published book Confessions and is immediately confronted by what for him is the most dangerous short sentence in the whole language: ‘ware wa eta nari ’ (H: 15). ‘This new book began with the words, “I am an outcast (eta )”’ (BC : 11). The lines which follow
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show how deeply engaged Rentaro¯ is with the fate of what he embraces as his community: ‘A vivid account followed of the ignorance and squalor to which the eta had been reduced, with portraits of many fine eta men and women whom society had discarded merely because of their eta origin’ (BC: 11). And yet – and worse for Ushimatsu’s secret struggle – Rentaro¯ had been just like him. He had come from the same region of Shinsh¯u and like him had passed. He was teaching at the same teachers’ college that Ushimatsu later attended when he was outed by some students. ‘Many refused to believe it, though for differing reasons: a man of such character, they said – or a man of such looks, or such brains and education, according to the speaker – just couldn’t be an eta ’ (BC : 11–12). None of these fine opinions had saved Rentaro¯ from losing his job. The word, once pronounced and hurled at him with what To¯son characterises as ‘racial prejudice’ (BC : 12), had stigmatised him body and mind. What does it mean to ‘be’ an eta – or, to use the less abusive terms, a shinheimin or burakumin? This is a far more paradoxical proposition than To¯son and other writers who, before and after The Broken Commandment, have written about burakumin seem to have recognised. One aspect of the paradox concerns the social history which produced and regenerated the fictive identity of eta/shinheimin/burakumin. For example, Kenneth Strong added a note to his English translation at this point, observing ‘Shimazaki’s indiscriminate use of the terms “race” and “class” in relation to the eta’ (BC : 12, n. 6). To¯son does use both jinshu (race) and kaiky¯u (class), although the former is more common. Strong related the shift in terminology to matters internal to the text. Ushimatsu’s father sent him forth into Japanese society armed, and equally damned, by his commandment but also equipped with a myth of origins that explained as it explained away the history of these origins: he had told him about their ancestors: how they were not descended, like the many groups of eta who lived along the Eastern Highway, from foreign immigrants or castaways from China, Korea, Russia, and the nameless islands of the Pacific, but from runaway samurai of many generations back; that however poor they might be, their family had committed no crime, done nothing dishonourable. (BC: 9) Strong surmised that ‘foreign castaways’ might have been conceived in racial terms by the author, ‘runaway samurai’ in class terms (BC : 12). It is worth looking at this passage and what it says about Meiji era ideas concerning eta/shinheimin in some detail. The folk-theory of origins related by Ushimatsu’s father is not something To¯son invented or gleaned from written sources. It is, in the first instance, a product of his own fieldwork. As he recalled in ‘Yamaguni no shinheimin’ (New Commoners of Mountain Country, 1909), his most important essay dealing with the creation of The Broken Commandment, while some of his information
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concerning burakumin had been gathered via rumour and hearsay, To¯son had also relied upon friends in the area to guide him to two local buraku hamlets, one on the outskirts of Komoro, the other in the even smaller settlement of Nezu. It was, for instance, by way of a Komoro neighbour that he claims to have heard the story of a teacher at the teachers’ college in Nagano who had been chased from his position once his background had been revealed. ‘It’s said he was sensible, well-learned and also really an excellent character’ (Shimazaki 1981: 50). After passing through several teaching posts elsewhere in the country, the man had eventually become principal of a middle school. ‘I never met him but he was a most unusual person for a shinheimin; I was deeply moved that such a person had emerged from that sort of class’ (ibid.: 51). Here, as has been recognised by many interpreters, was one source for what would become Ushimatsu.3 His interest in the excluded minority now piqued, To¯son decided to find out more about the shinheimin of the region. A liberal-minded young resident of Komoro agreed to introduce him to the headman of the town’s own buraku, Yaemon. What Yaemon told To¯son is, at least as recorded in this essay, very close to the origin myth placed in the mouth of that fictional headman, Ushimatsu’s father. So to be a shinheimin/burakumin is not to be simply – historically and socially – one kind/race/class of humanity at all. Yaemon’s tale is fairly representative of the sort of origin theories which circulated among many halfway sympathetic Japanese people and literate burakumin in the Meiji period. It is clear that the story told by the old man works on one level as a myth of compensation, a kind of collective ‘family romance’, as if to say, We may be saddled with an ignominious label and identity, but we aren’t what they, mainstream society, say. We are different within our difference, special and distinct from those other others with their fishy origins and nasty ways. We have the blood of warriors in our veins.4 Such beliefs once circulated widely in burakumin communities (McCormack 2002: 25, 35, 55, 76, 111, n. 78, etc.) and in the 1970s and 1980s were reinvoked in the fiction of buraku-born Nakagami Kenji (Morris 1996: 45–8). It is significant that the above myth suggests that at least certain groups of Japan’s excluded minority are in fact foreign in origin. ‘In principle, (proto) “racial”, “national”, or “ethnic” considerations did not determine people’s worth in the Tokugawa system. The main Confucian-inspired criterion for moral consideration revolved around whether one was “civilized” or “barbarian”, (McCormack 2002: 92). Yet, within the Nativist thought of a scholar such as Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and with increasing urgency in the writings of Meiji nationalists, emerge the outlines of a wider ideological demotion of the foreign: the foreign as Other and as necessary foil for an incipient sense of Japanese identity forged against and in reaction to a variety of others: internal others such as the Ezo northern barbarians, or the external otherness of China and Korea. McCormack sketches the dialectic of alterity succinctly: By representing ‘e t a ’ status people to have ancestral ties with certain foreigners, these intellectuals placed those entities into a mutually supporting
132 Mark Morris and reinforcing relation . . . antipathy towards ‘eta’ status people was justified with reference to their ‘foreign origins’, and antipathy towards foreigners was simultaneously encouraged and justified with reference to their links to people of ‘eta’ status. (ibid.: 108) Perhaps more crucial for the cultural expression of burakumin as others are the pseudo-genetic, racial aspects of the myth and of To¯ son’s comprehension of it. Noah McCormack’s work on prejudice and nationalism also reminds us that the early-Meiji time of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ had not just been when Japanese elites adopted and propagated ideas such as equality and fraternity, but was also when scholars introduced Western scientific learning, including theories of evolution, heredity, genetics and racial hierarchy, into the Japanese intellectual sphere. (McCormack 2002: 59) The penetration of quasi-scientific notions about heredity and race is apparent in the passage cited above, although Strong’s translation blurs the picture. Ushimatsu’s father refers to ‘eta no shuzoku’ (H: 13): the phrase can be translated as ‘groups of eta’, yet the word denotes ‘ethnic’ (with all the contentiousness which even that term, to say nothing of ‘race’, may involve) rather than any other kind of small collectivity; the word itself is relatively specialised, often employed within early modern comparative linguistics and anthropology. Shuzoku also connotes a grouping close to that assumed by the word jinshu (race; the shu morpheme is the same: see the significant discussion of race in Morris-Suzuki 1998: 79–109 and Dikötter 1997). In To¯son’s text, the fictional headman speaks explicitly of ‘their bloodline (ketto¯) transmitted from runaway [i.e. surviving the aftermath of a lost battle] samurai’ (H: 13): Strong has chosen to finesse the matter. Blood and bloodline became key terms in the increasingly racialised discourse about eta/burakumin in this era.5 McCormack cites the case of a notorious law suit in 1902, only a few years before the publication of The Broken Commandment. The female plaintiff filed for divorce on the grounds of fraudulent misrepresentation: her husband had claimed to be from a ‘ketto¯ tadashiki ky uke ¯ go¯ no¯ ’, but turned out to be a poor burakumin. McCormack translates the Japanese as ‘venerable and wealthy peasant household’ (2002: 60), ‘venerable’ glossing the initial adjective phrase, literally ‘of proper bloodline’. The regional court concerned upheld her claim, and an appellate court rejected the husband’s appeal. One legal scholar, while hardly sympathetic to what he persisted in referring to as eta and labelling them ‘one of the lowest breeds (shuzoku)’, did fault the judicial process for having ‘distinguished “eta” status people from their occupations . . . and developed the idea that there existed an “eta” bloodline’ (ibid.: 61). Watanabe Naomi’s Nihon kindai bungaku to ‘sabetsu’ (Japanese Modern Literature and ‘Discrimination’, 1994) has been instrumental in foregrounding the symbolic
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violence inherent in the way many writers have represented burakumin from the Meiji to Sho¯wa periods. He notes bitterly that the main cause for the persistence, even in more recent times, of prejudice against burakumin has, from the late nineteenth century, been precisely the scientistic discourse concerning blood and bloodline. Where a key figure of the Meiji enlightenment such as Fukuzawa Yukichi might put the optimistic Encouragement to Learning before tens of thousands of equally optimistic readers in 1872, by 1894 the pervasive influence of social Darwinism would underwrite a text like Theory of Bloodlines (‘Ketto¯ron’) (Watanabe 1994: 23).6 One other strong point of Watanabe’s study has been his analysis of the shirushi (marks/signs/stigmata) by which many writers were content to mark off and render essential the alterity of burakumin characters. Some of these stigmata are pre-modern in origin, such as the inevitable beauty of female characters, or the gross physical nature of bodily or facial features of the men. Others more associated with the Meiji otherness machine include inexplicable wealth, the markers of illnesses such as tuberculosis or, in the case of female burakumin characters, madness (Watanabe 1994: 18–32), and signs of incest. A very old connection, one that stretches back to medieval tales like those concerning the legendary Oguri Hangan, was occasionally activated which associates the outsider/eta with leprosy. One academic specialist in ancient history, writing in 1905, managed to combine the worst of several symbolic worlds in asserting that ‘as a result of unhygienic living conditions and incestuous marriages within village communities . . . “e t a” (as well as beggars) were hereditarily afflicted by “leprous bloodlines”’ (McCormack 2002: 67). The discourse concerning blood is in itself a kind of intellectual marker of modernity and mechanism for national identity, yet the problem with blood as irrevocable origin of otherness is that it is invisible. Hence the way in which ideology in early modern Japan re-enacted elements of the founding racialist discourses of European, American and other earlier sites of nation formation, and rendered the unseen seen.7 Writers before To¯son had deployed the sort of markers suggested by Watanabe in various ways. Since the appearance of Watanabe’s work, several stories have entered the wider discourse of literary studies. Here, I should like to look briefly at three from among several dozen texts published in the decade preceding The Broken Commandment: a brief story by Tokuda Sh¯usei, ‘Yabuko¯ ji’ (Spearflower, 1896), Oguri F¯uyo¯ ’s ‘Neoshiroi’ (Make-up at Bedtime, 1896), and Shimizu Shikin’s ‘Imin gakuen’ (A School for Émigrés, 1899). The first two were by young writers just beginning their careers apprenticed to one of the main operators in the late nineteenth-century literary field, Ozaki Ko¯yo¯. Both stories were published in the same journal, Bungei Kurabu, in succeeding months – with the notable difference that the second, by F¯uyo¯, was pounced on by the censors for its titillating treatment of incest. ‘Spearflower’ deals melodramatically with the fate of Akagi Mokusai, a doctor of eta origins, and his marriageable daughter Orei. Their lives are disrupted, then undone, by the machinations of evil step-mother-like servant Omaki. The opening sketch of Mokusai is famously infamous:
134 Mark Morris Mokusai was a gentleman, so fair and tall of stature that you could not believe he was an eta. He was well fleshed, even his side whiskers were lush. His eyes with their greyish brown pupils were rather too large and frighteningly owl-like; beneath one of his huge, dangling earlobes was an ugly red birthmark, a mark (shirushi) of his inescapable bloodline (chisuji). (Tokuda 1937: 275) On the one hand, we are presented with a man with origins in the buraku who has managed to receive an education and achieve professional status, and even open his own clinic. He might well pass, fair and tall and gentlemanly as he seems to be. But local gossip fastens onto his facial stigmata and draws the lesson of the age: the mark of a defective bloodline cannot be concealed, bad blood will out. Later in the tale, when the awful Omaki tears into innocent Orei, she too will refer to the birthmark, and go on to liken the girl’s refined pallor to that displayed by one of Omaki’s friends, a victim of leprosy. Orei may be beautiful (a compliment perhaps, yet as noted above, also a clichéd mark of otherness), but as Omaki proclaims, ‘You can’t quarrel with the bloodline (chisuji)’ (ibid.: 292). Oguri F¯uyo¯’s ‘Make-up at Bedtime’ is equally melodramatic; the rococo flourishes of his style, once meant to compensate for thinness of plot and character, now make the story an exercise in tedium. The tale focuses on a brother and sister who run a tobacconist shop. Both are well into their eligible years, and local gossips find the younger sister especially odd. Hair style, bright clothing, too much make-up – Okei seems mutton determined to pass as lamb. And of course the narrator soon reveals what sort of passing lies behind the surface camouflage. The siblings had, it seems, moved a number of times before settling into the present central Tokyo neighbourhood. Okei’s older brother So¯taro¯ has been trying to protect her from the secret of their burakumin origins. More complicated still, So¯taro¯ has also been trying all along, and unbeknownst to her, to find Okei a suitable husband; yet each time talks seem on the verge of success, out comes their secret – still she remains in the dark – and kills any chance for the relationship. When Okei happens to meet and fall for the scion of a local merchant family, she doesn’t hesitate to seize the moment; she runs off to live with him, leaving big brother amazed and beside himself with jealousy. And so it melodramatically comes about that rather than allow Okei to enjoy whatever slim chance of happiness she might cling to, So¯taro¯ blunders off to the other man’s house and, as Okei listens in from behind a sliding door, blurts out the secret: ‘Because you know nothing, you’ve urged me to give her to you as your wife – but she and I are shinhei(min)! We’re eta! – with our polluted bloodline (kegareta chisuji)’ (Oguri 1968: 157). By story’s end, the gossiping chorus of neighbourhood voices returns and hints that Okei, now driven back into the exclusive company of her brother, shows all the signs of pregnancy (ibid: 159). It appears likely that this unpleasant little story was not in fact censored for the crude discriminatory treatment of shinheimin but rather for broaching the subject of incest in a work of fiction (Kitagawa 1985: 73–8).
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Not all representations of shinheimin/burakumin were as predictably derogatory as those noted above. Shimizu Shikin’s ‘A School for Émigrés’ may not itself be a stylistic success but it is upbeat. A young woman married to an up-andcoming government minister discovers, through a zigzag of plot surprises, that her late mother had been a shinheimin; her mother died giving birth to her whereupon her non-burakumin father had placed her with a respectable surrogate family and tried to hide himself away – anything, in order that she might pass. She herself feels none of the shame or turmoil about her origins of a character such as So¯taro¯ – or Ushimatsu – yet she does have a great sense of guilt towards her ambitious husband. Not to worry. The nice young gentleman refuses to reject her, resigns his government position, and happily agrees to head off with his spouse to Hokkaido where they will establish a school for shinheimin orphans. Rebecca Copeland, in her landmark study of Meiji women writers, has suggested the following: ‘Sh¯usei and F¯uyo¯ – both associated with the newly evolving Naturalist school – were responding to a recent trend in literary circles to focus on the way issues of heredity and environment influenced the formation of a person’s character’. This does not override the historical fact that they ‘were also intrigued by the more salacious aspects of the burakumin’s existence’ (Copeland 2000: 197). Further, it does seem plausible that Shikin’s heroine is more symbolic, in an important sense, than realistic: ‘she uses the image of marginalization metaphorically . . . to suggest her own position as a “new woman” in Meiji Japan’ (ibid.). Such a tactic was, we know, very much in To¯son’s mind as he created Ushimatsu as symbolic outsider rather than as focus for informed social criticism. However, even in Shikin’s relatively liberal-hearted narrative, the othering force of blood-ideology declares itself. Copeland observes that the heroine’s mother, dying, had implored her husband to ‘wash the filth from this baby’s blood’ (ibid.: 203). Of the different burakumin figures whom Ushimatsu encounters, none are more savagely marked with otherness than the young butcher’s assistants who loom up in the middle of the narrative. A bull has killed Ushimatsu’s father; the protagonist attends the slaughter along with Rentaro¯ . Working under the guidance of the head butcher are ‘ten young men, all of them obviously ‘new commoners’, and poor, brutish specimens at that, marked out by the colour of their skin. “Outcast” might have been branded on each coarse red face’ (BC: 109). This scene at the slaughterhouse reappears amid the pieces from To¯ son’s Komoro period notebooks he published as Chikuma River Sketchbook. In its patient description of terrified animals converted into lumps of meat, it is a justly famous exercise in lyrical horror (Shimazaki 1991). Yet not a word in this later version, supposedly based on pre-novel notes, describes the young butchers as anything but good at their job. In The Broken Commandment’s version of this scene, it is as though the full force of ideology wrenched human figures into inhuman form – as though one nightmarish suggestion of Tokugawa thinker Kaiho Seiryo¯ had become a discursive commonplace. Kaiho had imagined ‘eta’ as barbarian in origin, and regretted that they had acclimated to the point where ‘it is no longer possible to distinguish between good people and “eta”. In response to
136 Mark Morris this problem, Kaiho suggested tattooing some identifying marks on the foreheads of people of “eta” status’ (McCormack 2002: 101). ¯ hinata, a wealthy man who has At the very beginning of the story there is O come to Ushimatsu’s town for treatment at the local clinic. Rumour spreads that he is an eta, and the other patients demand he be expelled. ‘No amount of money can overcome prejudice of this kind’ (BC: 4). To¯son’s text is a bit more ¯ hinata is specific: the prejudice is ‘jinshu no henshu¯ ’ (H: 6), racial prejudice. O literally sent packing. He will return as deus ex machina at story’s end to offer Ushimatsu a way out of the dead-end in which his eventual breaking of his father’s commandment will leave him. This first irruption of social prejudice, however, is registered as such; it hardly prepares the reader for the clichés to come. ¯ hinata’s exit, we are immediately introduced to Ushimatsu. ‘Anyone After O could see that Ushimatsu was a typical product of northern Shinsh¯u, a well-built young man’ (BC: 4). Once again Kenneth Strong’s generally excellent translation seems slightly off target. In To¯son’s rather less declaratory grammar, ‘mita tokoro . . . dare no me ni mo uketoreru ’ (H: 6), is a phrase I take to indicate that ‘as far as visual judgment is concerned, anyone would take him to be’ a normal young man of the region. This is less than an assertion of fact. To¯son – and therefore Ushimatsu as well – is in an especially paradoxical position. We need to identify with this focal character. Certainly, one of the signal features of the work is ‘the remarkable intensity with which it narrated Ushimatsu’s inner life: the reader is powerfully solicited to identify with Ushimatsu and to see the world through his eyes’ (Bourdaghs 1998: 652). Yet Ushimatsu is not like ‘us’. Added to such a minor qualification as to Ushimatsu’s ‘normality’ as noted above is his equally oblique association with illness. Both Watanabe Naomi and, developing the former’s arguments further, Michael Bourdaghs have traced the role of illness as marker of otherness in the case of the reformer Rentaro¯ (Watanabe 1994: 33; Bourdaghs 1998: 647–53). He suffers from tuberculosis, and in associating closely with him, Ushimatsu risks perhaps real infection. Simple figural, metonymic contagion may be bad enough. ‘The concept of contagion . . . accompanies this marker; it’s not for nothing that his colleague and friend Ginnosuke, who fears Rentaro¯’s “bad influence”, wants all the time to link Ushimatsu’s troubled expression to illness’ (Watanabe 1994: 33). The last thing on earth Ushimatsu needs is the probing albeit sympathetic questioning of his one friend other than Rentaro¯. ‘You looked so preoccupied . . . There must be something . . . What on earth’s the matter?’ (BC: 34–5). So Ushimatsu is enough like us to allow for readerly sympathy and identification to function. But he is never identical to us. Bourdaghs has made clear the mechanism by which To¯son squared the circle of identity, and permitted Ushimatsu to pass and not quite pass. He looks back at that article by To¯son I have quoted from already, ‘Yamaguchi no shinheimin’. ‘After taking the care he had taken in studying buraku life and declaring that prejudice was in fact severe, he concludes by saying that there seem to be two kinds of shinheimin: “high class” and “low class” (he uses the English)’ (Bourdaghs 1998: 652).
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As I see it, I believe that one can divide the shinheimin around Shinshu¯ into roughly two types. There are the enlightened shinheimin – one might even call them ‘high class’ – and the ‘low class’, unenlightened shinheimin: those two types. I think that the enlightened shinheimin are, in facial features, character and speech, hardly different at all from ourselves . . . With the unenlightened ones, as even among savages, savagery appears in the faces of the lowest types, first of all their facial features are somehow crude . . . The bone structure of their faces appears to be different from ours. It is particularly striking how the colour of their skin differs. (Shimazaki 1981: 54) Ushimatsu therefore is not simply Other but rather the Others’ other, differing from the stereotypical eta/burakumin yet not like us. A double othering seems to work something like a double negation: it may produce a positivity but it is a deferred positivity, one on the rebound. The rhetorical hedging which runs through the text – ‘as I see it’, ‘appears to be’, etc. – repeats that used in the introduction of Ushimatsu. All this effort – not only To¯son’s but that of his era’s discourse of same and other – to generate perceivable difference in racialised terms, to convincingly hallucinate stigmata onto face and skin. Perhaps the hedging is almost a sign of a less than clear conscience, because where in The Broken Commandment similar sentiments are expressed in the mouth of Ginnosuke, they make him sound rather foolish: ‘I’ve seen plenty of eta. Their skin’s darker than ours – you can tell them at a glance’ (BC: 194). At which point in walks his friend Ushimatsu. Ushimatsu is by no means the only protagonist in Japanese fiction who passes for an ordinary, mainstream, run-of-the-mill, real, genuine – that is, invented – Japanese person. Among non-Japanese Japanese authors, passing is an especially important theme in the writing of zainichi Koreans. The Sugihara of Kaneshiro Kazuki’s Go, mentioned above, has numerous antecedents. For example, in a passage in Ri Kaisei’s ‘Mata futatabi no michi’ (Once Again on the Road, 1969) where his own young protagonist Chol-o reveals his ‘real’ Korean identity to his Japanese friend Saijo¯ , things turn, as they often have in zainichi life and literary expression, on the question of names – on the questions posed by names. Chol-o and his family have been passing under the ‘Japanese’ surname Chiyoda. ‘Saijo¯ – my real name is pronounced Cho. It’s Cho.’ Chol-o rolled the sound around in his mouth, and glared at Saijo¯. Met by Saijo¯’s puzzled look, Chol-o hurriedly took a scrap of paper and wrote down the two surnames ‘Chiyoda’ and ‘Cho’. ‘Understand? This one’s my real name.’ . . . Saijo¯ placed the scrap of paper on the apple crate between the two of them, thought a moment and asked, puzzled, ‘Yes but – what’s that s’posed to mean?’ ‘I’m a Korean!’
138 Mark Morris ‘So what’s the matter with that? It would be odder if you were hung up about it. Japanese, Korean – it doesn’t matter . . . ’ That Saijo¯ hadn’t in the least changed his attitude to him as Korean gave Chol-o a sharp momentary sense of joy. But at the same time, he felt compelled to get him to understand him further. ‘No. It does matter. I have to be Korean (‘Cho¯senjin de nakucha komaru nda yo’)!’ (Ri 1991: 119–20) Ri goes on in this, his first major work of fiction, to recount his protagonist’s encounter with The Broken Commandment in middle school. Chol-o recalls how moving he found Ushimatsu’s dilemma born of his father’s injunction never to reveal his origins. But he felt crushed by the final scene of abject confession. ‘Why did Ushimatsu have to go to Texas?’ He was assailed by a keen sadness, and hammered the book with his fist . . . ‘I don’t want to end up like Ushimatsu!’ How many times had he cried out those words within his heart? Overwhelmed with a desire to protest against the author, he’d felt the tears about to flow. (ibid.: 120–1) And years later while now openly active in a Korean association, Chol-o will still worry that he suffers from ‘an Ushimatsu consciousness’ (ibid.: 131). On the one hand, as John Lie has argued eloquently, ‘discrimination does not disappear by confining people to the closet. In fact, the acts of passing may reinforce discrimination’ (2001: 81). On the other, the position of the zainichi Korean who chooses not to pass would seem to be far less self-corrosive than what the fate of Ushimatsu, and other outed burakumin in fictional texts before and after, might suggest. There is, after all, a Korea to which one can claim to be attached as Korean, whereas the islands of abject discrimination associated with burakumin status offer little solid ground on which to found an identity. Yet where Korea ought to have been was, for several generations of zainichi Koreans, a southern fragment ruled by dictators supported in turn by liberators who subsequently treated the liberated (post-1945) much like an enemy population, while bestowing democracy and lucrative contacts on the old occupier, Japan. Up North, things were different. The passionate attachment to North Korea as utopia reached far beyond the boundaries of official affiliations with institutions of the North Korean-focused Chongryun. Sonia Ryang – who lived the experience along with her family – has painstakingly demonstrated the costs of this hopeful gaze North (Ryang 1997). Still, the assertion by Ri’s young character that his challenge is to be, to become, have to become Korean, in nuce announces the optimistic core project of the male zainichi writers of Ri’s generation. There is someplace to yearn for in order to shore up some sort of positive identity, and better the one that you yourself dream than one foisted upon you. I noted above that passing was a concept, an act, which engaged the writer Nakagami Kenji. He may only have outed himself publicly as burakumin late in
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his short life, yet he had acknowledged his origins rather openly in literary discussions from the late 1970s. His fiction also makes the connection clear, most straightforwardly in the last book of the ‘Akiyuki trilogy’ where the focal character Akiyuki claims that identity (Nakagami 1983 [1993b]). In its dangerous playing with blood, bloodlines, incest, clichés of male physical and sexual prowess and so on, Nakagami’s writing always risked re-invoking rather than subverting the language of otherness and discrimination. It seems to me, however, unwise to wish him and his fiction away, although this seems to have been the tactic of some intellectuals attached to the Buraku Liberation League and more recently at least one articulate fellow traveller (Fowler 2000). In a mémoire-travelogue-exploration-of-roots he published in 1978, Nakagami recalled one woman he had come across in a small town in Wakayama prefecture. She had successfully managed to have her children’s household (koseki) registration recorded as different from her own buraku-associated one. This has been one of the most significant dodges by which people from the buraku – urban or rural – have managed to pass into mainstream society. What mattered to Nakagami was her courage in concealment, in contrast to Ushimatsu’s tepid honesty. He wanted to make a point the opposite of John Lie’s: ‘Here is a story that’d bleed if you cut it’ (‘kitte chi no deru monogatari’), and he equated the vivid notion with ‘the effort made to wipe away the brand of discrimination from oneself and from the children of her womb’: While listening to her story, I thought about Segawa Ushimatsu in Shimazaki To¯son’s The Broken Commandment. If he’d been through a story that’d bleed if you cut it then, I thought, it wouldn’t matter if he’d passed (pasu suru), passed right along and lived with an innocent look on his face. And on second thought, that To¯son’s story book is definitely conventional is due to the fact that he makes him break the injunction and not pass all the way. (Nakagami 1983[1993b]: 162–3) In a critical essay appended to Nakagami’s text, journalist Senbon Ken’ichiro¯ recalled the Nakagami of the mid-1970s, right after winning the Akutagawa Prize for ‘Misaki’ (The Cape, 1976 [1999]) and just before his long road back to Wakayama. Nakagami told an anecdote about ‘a friend’, one whom the journalist recognised as Nakagami in third-person camouflage: There’s this guy, he writes fiction, he’s alright. The writing’s coming along but if he ever got into politics, he says he’d just have to use a bomb. Think about the discrimination – bomb – that’s all . . . His wife knows all about it, he told her when they got married and he’s just got to hide things. But, he’ll say, he’s got this feeling, like there’s something taboo. A feeling that he just doesn’t want to look at it – and so he’s halfway passing (out of the buraku). (ibid.: 333)
140 Mark Morris One could in fact make a rather good anthology out of the comments of other readers, real ones or literary characters, and their reactions to Ushimatsu: voices wondering, demanding to know why Ushimatsu had to go to Texas or why on earth he made such a grovelling confession. Let me conclude by looking at just one fictional critic, a boy named Seitaro¯ . He is a direct-method vicarious reader depicted in Sumii Sue’s sentimental classic, Hashi no nai kawa (River Without a Bridge, 1961–73 [1990]). He and friends Hideteru and Ko¯ ji, boys from a burakumin village in rural Nara prefecture, are discussing a book only Hideteru has actually read: ‘In the end, what happened to the teacher?’ ‘Oh, that teacher?’ Hideteru smiled at Ko¯ji’s surprising question. ‘In the end the teacher goes to America. He apologises to the students he’d taught and says he’s awfully sorry for having hidden till now his being an eta ’ . . . Hideteru repeated his answer. ‘Yes, he says he’s sorry and apologises, sort of rubbing his forehead on the desktop.’ At once, Seitaro¯ grabbed his geta and slammed them together like wood clackers . . . ‘He’s a useless bastard. Skip the apologies, better to knock the lights out of the lot of them calling you eta. If it was me, I’d do the lot of them.’ (Sumii 1961: 121) And so, finally, in front of a classroom full of adoring young teenagers, Ushimatsu breaks his vow and apologises for having passed. And being one of the ‘high class’ doesn’t spare him his moment in the sun of abjection. It is still a very moving passage, one too long to quote here. Strong’s translation conveys the original well (BC: 228–32). The climax: ‘When you get home today, tell your parents what I have said. Tell them that I confessed today, asking your forgiveness . . . I am an eta, an outcast, an unclean being!’ (BC: 230). Which is as much as to say, I am a fiction, I am the sedimented prejudice of my nation’s struggling modernity; I am, however, about as good, normal, same as my author was able to make me in this time and this place.
Notes 1 Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949) represents perhaps the first case of racial passing passing into mainstream entertainment. At the time of writing, there is a review website that almost makes up for the awfulness of the actual film: [http://www.angelfire.com/ film/robbed/pinky.htm] (last accessed Nov. 2004). 2 A note on terminology. In this chapter, I will generally use the word burakumin to refer to members of the minority communities referred to in earlier decades by the perjorative term eta or the Meiji era euphemisim shinheimin. The origins of the word eta are obscure, although it is commonly written with two characters meaning ‘much filth/great pollution’. It is one of several abusive pre-modern terms which
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outlived official Meiji appellations such as shinheimin, ‘new commoners’ and even the later term tokushu burakumin, ‘people of the special neighbourhoods/hamlets’. The latter is now commonly employed without the bitterly ironic ‘tokushu’ (special – compare ‘separate’, as in the segregationist mantra ‘separate but equal’, or the ‘apart’ of apartheid) simply as burakumin, with buraku the term for neighbourhood or settlement. While these are the terms I prefer to use, I will use both eta and shinheimin in quotations and in contexts where more neutral vocabulary would ring false to the language of particular authors and texts, and to the overall social context of lateMeiji Japan. Yanagita Kunio noted back in 1913 that, as soon as a new euphemism was introduced, it was rapidly recycled into a malediction. ‘As long as that general way of thinking persists which takes the buraku to be special, use a hundred different terms, it will be of no help’ (Yanagita 1913 [1964b]: 370). Our own societies offer abundant examples of how prejudice and discrimination leave their traces in messy, continually redefined and essentially contested fields of meaning and acts of naming. 3 See BC : xxi–xxiii on this and other, literary sources. 4 The British locus classicus concerning legends about burakumin is A.B. Mitford’s retelling of ‘The Eta Maiden and the Hatamoto’ (2000: 139–56). An equally classical family romance is located at the end of the tale, one based on a well-studied genealogy which attempted to anchor the lineage of the powerful boss of Edo eta and various occupational guilds, Danzaemon, all the way back to Minamoto Yoritomo (ibid.: 155– 6). It is not surprising to find similar compensatory legends among the minority pae kjong communites of Korea (Kim 2003: 18–19). 5 One variation on the theme of eta/burakumin as foreign other is found in theories which maintained that the excluded groups of burakumin were remnants of preJapanese peoples. One of the best-known advocates of this line of speculation, who only reluctantly recanted his views later on, was To¯son’s friend and future founder of Japanese folklore studies Yanagita Kunio. Yanagita seems to have been uneasy about the presence among what he would eventually formulate as the ‘jo¯min ’ – the ‘eternal’ Japanese peasantry – of the presence of a possibly alien, intractably different element among the variegated sameness of the Japanese (Iwamoto 1990: 181). In a detailed article published soon after the end of the Meiji era, Yanagita held onto the view that for all the traditional occupations and settled locations associated with eta or hinin (‘non-human’, another term used in the pre-modern era for low-caste, often nonsedentary groups), they were fundamentally wanderers. Theirs is a most thoroughly vagabond life; because the police are severe in pursuing them, they bear their children on the road, produce the homeless, and never can they become true citizens. And what I believe is that their wandering is by no means a phenomenon that began due to oppression in our new era; it in fact preserves the oldest form of special buraku life style. (Yanagita 1913 [1964b]: 380–1) Most startling may be the fact that at this stage in his thinking, he reckoned that out of his conservative estimate of an excluded population of some 700,000, at least 100,000 were inveterate criminals (ibid.: 371, 387). It is worth noting that the essay ‘Yamaguchi no shinheimin’ is both an apology concerning the writing of The Broken Commandment and a defence of it. Its author notes that his work had been criticised as flawed in the way it depicted discrimination against burakumin. All that was overdone and implausible, had been the complaint (Shimazaki 1981: 51). The critic he was replying to was Yanagita. Yanagita had written, not long after To¯son’s book appeared, that while he appreciated the scenic aspects of the style, it did read more like travelogue than novel. And there were many points he couldn’t comprehend.
142 Mark Morris For one, I find the conflict between new commoners and ordinary commoners far too dramatic. It’s not that I’ve especially studied the eta of Shinsh¯u, but from what I have observed in other different regions, this kind of awful dispute doesn’t take place. (Yanagita 1906 [1964a]: 413) On the relationship between Yanagita and To¯son, see the texts in volume 23 of Yanagita’s collected works (1906 [1964a]: 403–14) and Iwamoto (1990: 174–85). 6 On the conjuncture of race and nation, and the influence of social Darwinism in Japan, see Michael Weiner’s ‘The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-War Japan’ (1997: 96–117). There is no doubting the increasingly conservative trend in Fukuzawa’s thought. Yet the text of ‘Ketto¯ron’ is very short: a few pages summarizing a lecture. And it isn’t without humour, especially in noting how much more careful some Westerners are about the horses they breed than the people they marry. See Fukuzawa (1990). 7 As Etienne Balibar has formulated this intersection of race and nation in European experience: Race . . . inscribes itself in practices . . . in discourses and representations which are so many intellectual elaborations of the phantasm of prophylaxsis or segregation (the need to purify the social body, to preserve ‘one’s own’ or ‘our’ identity from all forms of mixing, interbreeding or invasion) and which are articulated around stigmata of otherness. (1991: 17–18)
References Main texts Shimazaki To¯son (1906 [1974]) The Broken Commandment (BC ), trans. Kenneth Strong, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. ——Hakai (H ) (1906 [1996]) Tokyo: Shincho¯bunko.
Other references Balibar, Etienne (1991) ‘Is There a Neo-Racism?’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, pp. 17–28. Bourdaghs, Michael (1998) ‘The Disease of Nationalism, the Empire of Hygiene: Reading Broken Commandment’, positions 6(3): 637–73. Copeland, Rebecca (2000) Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Dikötter, Frank (1997) ‘Introduction’, in F. Dikötter (ed.) The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, London: Hurst & Co., pp. 1–11. Fowler, Edward (2000) ‘The Buraku in Modern Japanese Fiction’, Journal of Japanese Studies 26(1): 1–39. Fujii, James (1992) Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1990) ‘Ketto¯ron’ (Theory of Bloodlines), in Hirota Masaki (ed.) Sabestu no shiso¯, Nihon kindai shiso¯ taikei (Collected Works of Japanese Modern Thought: The Ideology of Discrimination), vol. 22, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 260–3. Iwamoto Yoshiteru (1990) Yanagita Kunio o yominaosu (Re-reading Yanagita Kunio), Tokyo: Sekai Shiso¯sha. Kawabata Toshifusa (1993) ‘Hakai’ no yomikata (How to Read Hakai), Tokyo: Bunrikaku.
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Kim, Joong-Seop (2003) The Korean Paekjo ng under Japanese Rule: The Quest for Equality and Human Rights, London: Routledge Curzon. Kitagawa Tetsuo (1985) Buraku mondai o toriageta hyaku no sho¯setsu (One Hundred Novels dealing with the Buraku Issue), Tokyo: Buraku Mondai Kenky ujo ¯ ¯. Lie, John (2001) Multi-Ethnic Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McCormack, Noah (2002) ‘Prejudice and Nationalism: On the “buraku” Problem, 1868– 1912’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Australian National University. Mitford, A.B. (1871 [2000]) Tales of Old Japan, Ware: Wordsworth Edition. Morris, Mark (1996) ‘Gossip and History: Nakagami, Faulkner, García Márquez’, Japan Forum 8(1): 35–50. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (1998) Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Nakagami Kenji (1978 [1993a]) Kishu: ¯ Ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari (Ki Province: Tales from Tree Country, Root Country), Tokyo: Asahi Bungei bunko. ——(1983 [1993b]) Chi no hate, shijo¯ no toki (To the Ends of the Earth: A Time Supreme), Tokyo: Shincho¯ bunko. Oguri F¯uyo¯ (1896 [1968]) ‘Neoshiroi’ (Make-up at Bedtime), in Oguri F u¯yo¯, Kosugi Tengai, Goto¯ Ch¯ugai, Meiji bungaku taikei (Collected Works of Meiji Literature: Oguri F¯uyo¯, Kosugi Tengai, Goto¯ Chu¯ gai), vol. 65, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯, pp. 151–9. Ri Kaisei (1969 [1991]) ‘Mata futatabi no michi’, in Mata futatabi no michi, Kinuta o utsu onna (The Road Again, a Second Time; The Woman Fulling Clothes), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha. Roth, Philip (2000) The Human Stain, London: Vintage. Ryang, Sonia (1997) North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology and Identity, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Shimazaki To¯son (1909 [1981]) ‘Yamaguni no shinheimin’ (The Shinheimin of the Mountain Country), in Shimazaki To¯son zensh¯u (Collected Works of Shimazaki To¯son), vol. 10, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯, pp. 50–5. ——(1912 [1991]) Chikuma River Sketches, trans. William E. Naff, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Sumii Sue (1961) Hashi no nai kawa (The River with No Bridge), vol. 1, Tokyo: Shincho¯ bunko. Tokuda Sh¯usei (1896 [1937]) ‘Yabuko¯ji’ (Spearflower), in Shusei ¯ zenshu¯ (Collected Works of Tokuda Sh¯usei), vol. 1, Tokyo: Hibonkaku, pp. 271–93. Watanabe Naomi (1994) Nihon kindai bungaku to ‘sabetsu’ (Japanese Modern Literature and ¯ ta shuppan. ‘Discrimination’), Tokyo: O Weiner, Michael (1997) ‘The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-War Japan’, in Frank Dikötter (ed.) The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, London: Hurst & Co., pp. 96–117. Wittenberg, Judith Bryant (1995) ‘Race in Light in August: Wordsymbols and Obverse Reflections’, in Philip M. Weinstein (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yanagita Kunio (1906 [1964a]) ‘Hakai o hyo¯su’ (Reviewing Hakai), in Yanagita Kunio zenshu¯ (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 23, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯, pp. 413–14. ——(1913 [1964b]) ‘Iwayuru tokushu buraku no shurui’ (Varieties of the so-called buraku), in Yanagita Kunio zensh u¯ (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 27, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯, pp. 370–87.
Further reading An unrivalled short introduction to the topic of how burakumin have been represented in fiction is Fowler (2000). Probably the most interesting literary analysis
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of The Broken Commandment is that by James Fujii: see Chapter 3 of his Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative. Chikuma River Sketches (Shimazaki 1991) is an excellent companion to the novel. McCormack (2002) sets a new standard for cultural historical work on the ‘buraku problem’. Readers of Japanese may want to refer to the important paperback edition of Hakai listed in Main Texts. It includes a number of interpretive essays. Invaluable for the wider literary and social context is Watanabe (1994). Also useful, and representative of more liberal-minded Buraku Liberation League intellectual work, is Kawabata Toshifusa, ‘Hakai’ no yomikata (1993).
8
The Burakumin as ‘Other’ in Noma Hiroshi’s Circle of Youth James Raeside
One of the most vexed social issues of modern Japanese society is that of the socalled burakumin community: those who were, and continue to some extent to be, objects of discrimination because of their perceived descent from an inferior caste. In the domain of modern Japanese literature, the plight of the burakumin was famously depicted by Shimazaki To¯son (1872–1943) in his novel Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1904 [1974]); as well as by Sumii Sue (1902–97) in Hashi no nai kawa (The River with No Bridge, 1961–63 [1990]). To¯son’s work introduced the issue of the buraku to successive generations of Japanese, and is still frequently used as a text in Japanese junior and senior high schools; Sumii’s is also widely read, and both novels were made into successful films. However, given how long and how earnestly Noma Hiroshi (1915–91) was involved with the burakumin community and the cause of burakumin liberation, his name certainly deserves to be added to the list of authors who strove to bring this issue to the attention of the general public. Although none of these three writers were themselves of burakumin origin, all of them wrote out of a strong feeling of sympathy with members of the buraku groups and solidarity with their cause.1 The Broken Commandment depicts the plight of an individual member of the burakumin community who has, following his father’s instruction, left to work as a teacher, passing himself off as an ‘ordinary’ member of society; Sumii’s novel, by contrast, traces the history of a whole buraku village in the Nara region. The first volume begins just after the time of the Russo-Japanese War and ends with the rice riots of 1918, and the subsequent formation of the suiheisha.2 It could be said, in consequence, that these two novels cover the early history of the movement to liberate the burakumin from the stigma, or at least the disadvantageous conditions under which they lived; with To¯ son’s novel covering the Meiji era, and Sumii’s that of Taisho¯ and early Sho¯wa. Noma’s work, Seinen no wa (The Circle of Youth, 1947–71), set in the second decade of the Sho¯wa era (1935–45), leading into the Pacific War, could be said to continue that history further into the twentieth century. Noma’s novel is based in part on his own experiences of working for the social welfare department of Osaka City Council from April 1938 to October 1941. This was the period between his graduation from Kyoto University and being called up for military service, and one that, it need hardly be said, roughly
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brackets the interval between the opening of conflict in Europe and Japan’s entry into the larger theatre of world war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like all of Noma’s novels, Circle of Youth is set within a very restricted time frame: the whole action of the six parts unfolds during the two-month period between the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and the German invasion of Poland. Thus the dark cloud of political events hangs low across the horizon of the entire novel. What does mark this massive novel off from the majority of Noma’s other fictional works is the fact that it has two central protagonists. Beginning with his first and perhaps best-known novella ‘Kurai e’ (Dark Pictures, 1947 [2000]), the typical Noma hero is a young man agonizing between the twin poles of the private and the public, politics and love. Perhaps this dilemma could most accurately be represented as a choice between the development of the self and the devotion of the self to a general cause, namely that of political activism. In the case of Circle of Youth, these two identities are split between the two central characters, Daido¯ Izumi and Yabana Masayuki.3 The novel mainly consists of chapters told from the point of view of one or other of these young men, as they pursue their overlapping but nonetheless distinct adventures in the oppressive heat of Osaka in August and September of 1939. A third point of view is represented by Masayuki’s mother Yoshie, as she struggles to keep afloat her business selling discounted tickets, as well as ministering to the members of her Buddhist sect. In this brave and devout widow, striving to support her family, those familiar with Noma will recognize another frequently recurring character, and one based on Noma’s own mother.4 Circle of Youth is not only extremely long, but has a complex plot involving characters drawn from the whole spectrum of pre-war Japanese society. All this makes the task of reading it rather daunting, and the novel will probably be unfamiliar except by name even to those with an extensive knowledge of contemporary Japanese literature. Since the development of the plot and, in particular, the changing relationships between the principal characters bear directly on the theme of Otherness, it will be necessary to summarize the story at some length. Before doing so, however, a few initial reflections on the concept of the Other might be useful. All formulations involving the concept of the Other – notably those of Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, and Levinas – ultimately derive from the phenomenology of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), at least as it was so influentially explicated by Alexandre Kojève (1902–68). The popularity of the concept with cultural and literary critics, in particular, has caused it to spread over a very wide area. As Peter Osborne remarks: One particular cause of confusion has been a slippage between philosophically or psychoanalytically defined, internal symbolic conceptions of otherness, on the one hand, and a variety of phenomenological forms of recognition of actually historically existing differences between social groups, on the other. Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that use of Lacanianism in social
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and cultural theory is premised on a slippage between the socio-symbolic and the Lacanian Symbolic. (2000: 108) It is hard to disagree that the terms and concepts of Lacan, in particular, are often used in contemporary works of cultural criticism in ways that greatly change or simplify their original significance. Nonetheless, given the first occurrence of the idea of the Other in Hegel’s phenomenology, and its role in the explanation of human history via his master–slave paradigm, we might say that the use of Lacan’s psychoanalytical terminology in postcolonialist and other treatises demonstrates how long a shadow is cast by Hegel. Analyses of social and historical events are bolstered by the vocabulary of a philosophy that seeks to account for human behaviour at some fundamental level of identity. One of the things that is interesting about Noma’s work in the context of the discussion of Otherness, is that it engages so deliberately with both these internal and external aspects of the Other. Circle of Youth depicts an actual historical and social condition – that of the burakumin – while also engaging with the ‘internal’ drama of Otherness, in the attempt of individual beings to gain understanding of themselves through the figure of another, to whom they are bound in emulation and enmity. This second aspect is explored through the changing relationships between a number of paired characters, those who might, following the formula of René Girard, be described as ‘fr è re s en n em is’ (Girard 1972: 14). Finally, the link between these paired characters is itself crucially related to the existence of burakumin as a group, and the relation they have to the rest of society. To illustrate, however, let us first turn to the complexities of the narrative.
Brothers and enemies The closest parallel to the plot structure of Circle of Youth might well be that of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in which the two central characters, represented as symbolic father and son, move around the city during the same day. Although they only fleetingly encounter one other, their experiences and thoughts are strangely interlocked. As in Noma’s work, the narrative point of view enters deeply into the consciousness of both characters. There is a similarity, too, between the symbolism of their names. Whereas in Noma’s work a ‘straight course’ (Masayuki) is opposed to ‘jetting spring’ (Izumi), Joyce has an artificer (Daedalus) opposed to a natural growth (Bloom). On the other hand, Izumi’s family name, Daido¯, obviously sounds like Daedalus, while Bloom is echoed in Masayuki’s surname, Yabana (meadow flower).5 One clear difference between Noma’s novel and Joyce’s is that, in the former, the two young men know each other, and are aware of at least some of the links between them. Initially they were friends and fellow political activists at Kyoto University. Masayuki’s father, already long dead by the period of the novel, used to be an employee at the electricity generating company of which Izumi’s father is now the area director; at the same time, as we learn right from the opening
148 James Raeside chapter, Masayuki was for some time the lover of Izumi’s younger half-sister Yo¯ko. Thus they are linked right across the important high ground of human experience which Noma was so keen to include in what he described as his ‘absolute novel’ (zentai sh¯osetsu):6 they are connected on the intellectual, political, relational (family), and affective (sexual) levels. Both young men are intelligent, although it is clear that Izumi’s is the more quick and probing intelligence, whereas Masayuki’s tends to be more plodding and methodical. The major differences between the two derive from their family backgrounds. Although Izumi’s upbringing is economically privileged, it is also emotionally impoverished. With his father a rich and influential figure in the business world of Kansai, he has grown up in want of nothing materially. However, he found out in his early teens that he was not the true child of his father’s first wife, but the adopted child of one of his father’s mistresses. After confronting his father with his suspicions, he had felt for a time that he had let out all the skeletons in his family closet, but an essential element in the plot of the book is Izumi’s gradual uncovering of further secrets about his father – in brief, that he is a compulsive womanizer who has had a string of mistresses, and has even used his influence to marry off one of his recent mistresses to the son of a family acquaintance. Izumi discovers that there is a kind of moral vacuum at the heart of the Daido¯ household, which will eventually cause the whole structure of the family to implode. However, the biggest difference between the two men, and one that governs the nature of their behaviour throughout the book, is that Masayuki continues to be politically active both in the left-wing organizations of which he is a member, and through his official work for the Osaka City Office. Izumi, on the other hand, has given up all activism, after being picked up by the police for subversive activities while a student. Even this backsliding could be said to derive from his family origins. Izumi was released from interrogation through the intervention of his father, but he tells himself that his life might have gone very differently – in other words, that he might be still be politically engaged like Masayuki – if his privileged background had not offered him this way of escape. The thought has a specific application to another crucial difference between Masayuki and Izumi: Masayuki, whatever else, seems to be in radiant health, whereas Izumi has contracted an apparently untreatable form of syphilis and now believes himself to be degenerating towards insanity and death. The sense of disillusion and selfdislike caused by the end of his left-wing activities, it is suggested, caused him to plunge into a life of debauchery, which in turn exposed him to the disease. Thus, as we first encounter him wandering late at night around the entertainment district of Osaka, alternatively frightened and bitter, as well as being a frère ennemi to Masayuki, he is also playing out the role of poète maudit.7 At the end of the book the opposition between the two is characterized in symbolic terms by Izumi himself as the difference between life and death, sun and shadow: But it can truly be said that you are the day, bright noon. I am saying this without a trace of irony. I envy you, nay I envy thee Yabana Masayuki,
The Burakumin as Other 149 but . . . you aren’t able to see that there are people who are the opposite of you, people of the deep night, carrying disease. (NHZ 11: 625)8 This is also a comparison that Noma takes up himself in more than one commentary on his own work as, for example, in the following: Yabana Masayuki is a character who takes his stand in life, and Daido¯ Izumi stands within death. Yabana Masayuki is one of those who live in the bright noon; Daido¯ Izumi is of the party of night and contemplation. (NHS 10: 302) Since he is not only marked by disease, but suffers waking delusions of insects boring into his brain, or demons sitting on his shoulder, it is not difficult to see why Izumi should be thought of as a creature of night and death. Masayuki’s activities, as we learn from the description of his first day, seem to lie in the open air and the light. He moves from his place of work to a meeting with his left-wing friends, to one of the buraku districts of Osaka, and finally to his family home. Although they are often in each other’s thoughts, the two characters meet only three times during the course of the novel’s thousands of pages. The final and most significant meeting is in the last section of the volume ‘Honoo no basho (1)’ (The Place of Flame (1)). Although these two enemy brothers are so much in each other’s thoughts and are so well aware of the various links that join their past lives, to the end they remain unconscious of the fact that everything in which they are engaged during the period of the novel is linked through the hisabetsu burakumin. Masayuki’s involvement with the burakumin cause is open and averred. His job is precisely to meet and deal with the burakumin population of Osaka, officially to try and assist in the official government policy of integration (yuwa). ¯ In fact, as we realize from the first chapter set in the Osaka City Hall, ‘Entotsu’ (The Chimney),9 as far as his superiors are concerned, his real job is to do the minimum necessary to keep the burakumin areas peaceful and to stop the inhabitants from rising in revolt. In this chapter he is anxiously questioned by his immediate superior, Inoue, as to whether he thinks there will be an uprising in Osaka similar to a recent incident in Saitama, when the buraku community protested about prices and the unavailability of raw materials. However, because of his left-wing sympathies, Masayuki is a kind of double agent. He really hopes to foment the discontent that he is supposed to be working to avert, and the answers he gives to his superiors regarding the mood among the buraku community are often deliberately misleading. The burakumin with whom Masayuki principally deals are those engaged in shoe making and shoe repairing. They are currently greatly discontented because the supply of leather under wartime conditions has dried up to almost nothing, so that many of those in the trade have been idle for weeks. There are a number of different jobs that have been traditionally associated with the burakumin, but
150 James Raeside probably it is the handling of animal products that has remained the most strongly symbolic of a kind of physical pollution.10 In the situation in which the shoemakers find themselves in Noma’s novel, war profiteers are moving in to buy up all the remaining leather in order to force up the prices, much as happened with the rice riots earlier in the century. So the burakumin are in the doubly unfortunate position of being robbed of the labour that they have traditionally practised and which was the ostensible grounds for the discrimination against them, without seeing that discrimination itself being lessened. In this situation their only hope lies in unity of action, and the leaders of the burakumin community are mostly executives of the keizai ko¯seikai, or Economic Regeneration Association. Masayuki, caught in the traditional dilemma of the left-wing activist, reflects at one point that, by using what influence he has with the local government to ease the plight of the burakumin in the areas under his responsibility, he may be actually helping to delay or defuse the outburst of revolutionary anger that his political opinions ought to make him want to encourage. There is both within the novel and in historical fact, a considerable overlap between left-wing activity and the burakumin liberation movement, and several of the group to whom Masayuki feels closest, the keizai ko¯seikai of the Naniwa ward, were former activists in the suiheisha movement, regarded as ‘reds’ by a suspicious government and police force. However, it is made clear through a number of encounters that Masayuki has with other members of the buraku community during the course of the novel that burakumin are by no means all potential shock troops of a proletarian revolution. There are some, such as the community leader Kametada, who live quite comfortably by exploiting their fellow burakumin. Similarly, in the rural burakumin community, Masayuki hears of a local loan shark who obliges his debtors to sell their daughters into prostitution in order to pay him back (‘Koyodo’ (Koyodo ward), NHZ 9: 277–301). Perhaps even more representative of the way that the burakumin have come to be viewed in modern Japan is the curious figure of Hanegarasu. He is one of those who most unashamedly use the threat of burakumin pressure to extort money and favours from others. He carries round with him a well-used packet of anonymous hate mail directed against himself to shame and silence those with whom he comes into conflict. A figure out of Balzac or Dickens, his huge frame wrapped in a large black coat makes it clear that his unusual surname, meaning ‘crow-wing’, is meant to be symbolic. Like a crow he is bold and astute but essentially he is a scavenger. He openly admits to using the threat of burakumin censure to make a living, but does nothing to promote the cause of liberation and equality. The chapter in which Hanegarasu invades Masayuki’s place of work, discomforting his immediate superiors with his well-practised mixture of sentimental rhetoric and veiled threat, is a very effective illustration of the way certain burakumin groups worked, and also of the attitudes of those in ‘normal’ society who deal with them. The chapter is entitled ‘Y¯uwaya’, alluding to the fact that Hanegarasu is not concerned to actually achieve the yuwa ¯ or integration intended by the term, but to exploit society’s or the government’s stated desire to
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achieve integration to extort immediate benefits. As a method this works because of two levels of falsity. On the one hand, since the eras in which The Broken Commandment and The River with No Bridge are set, it had become more difficult to openly express prejudice against the burakumin in Japanese society. However, that prejudice still existed. As is clear from Hanegarasu’s tactics in the ‘Y¯uwaya’ chapter of the novel, those in officialdom, particularly those who are part of the government department that deals with the burakumin, cannot possibly admit to their prejudices, and it is because they secretly know that they do feel this kind of prejudice that they can easily be intimidated. It is when the mask of hypocrisy slips that pressure can be brought to bear particularly strongly. For example, it is because a kempeitai ( Japanese Military Police) sergeant makes a dismissive remark about the burakumin, before he realizes that he is in fact speaking to one of their number, that the former suiheisha activist Morimura is able to discomfort the officer on two separate occasions. The officer’s desperate attempts to assure Morimura that he has, in a now famous phrase, ‘misspoke himself ’, are narrated to some humorous effect, but this lapse on his part plays a crucial role in the burakumin’s successful defiance of the police at the end of the book. Normally those in official positions with whom Masayuki deals are more circumspect. When they refer to the burakumin, they usually employ the kind of allusive remarks that will prevent them being discomforted in this way. This is specifically stated by the head of a local citizen’s office: 11
Because this citizens office is right in the middle of the buraku, it’s not just social service work like that of other offices. We have to be absolutely sure not to make any mistakes . . . so for that reason we have to be ultra polite . . . It’s different here, you see. Right . . . they’re hard to handle . . . look what happens if anything at all goes wrong. It all gets very awkward, you see. (NHZ 7: 387) When the burakumin are not present, they are mostly referred to indirectly by means of such expressions as ‘muk¯o’ (over there) and ‘ano hitotachi’ (those people). Simply to name them may be to invite a charge of prejudice.
Taguchi Having come this far with the daylight or open encounter with the burakumin issue, we must turn to the other side: the hidden or crepuscular encounter with the burakumin. In other words, we must turn from Masayuki to Izumi. As a rich and handsome young man, Izumi still has a number of friends, but by the period in which the novel takes place, he has come to associate almost exclusively with one person, called Taguchi Yoshiki. At the beginning, this person fills a position halfway between a friend and a servant. He seems to be the kind of character frequently accompanying debauched and moneyed young men: the hanger-on, the favourite, always trying to think of ways to distract and entertain his richer and more socially elevated friend. Taguchi is Poins to Izumi’s Prince Hal, and
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yet, by the period at which the novel begins, Izumi has already begun to wonder if Taguchi is not Mephistopheles and he Faust. One immediate reason for associating him with the tempter of old is that he is lame; another, the fact that his physical disability is compensated for by a great nimbleness of tongue and a startling ability to read the minds and wishes of others.12 Izumi says it was sympathy for Taguchi’s lameness which first inspired their friendship and, when explaining this to Masayuki, he tells him that he has always felt a sympathy for people like Taguchi, recalling a boy he knew at school with a similar disability. He develops this into what Masayuki rather dismissively characterizes as a ‘Philosophy of the Cripple’ (chinba no tetsugaku): essentially the idea that those born with physical disadvantages engage more fully with life because of the hurdles they have had to overcome. Two things happen quite early in the account of Taguchi and Izumi’s relationship: one is that Izumi begins to suspect that Taguchi knows the secret of his syphilitic condition, the other that Taguchi expresses a strange agitation and almost fear when told that Masayuki is actively involved with the buraku community. At this point the astute reader may already guess that Taguchi himself has some secret link with the burakumin. From the moment when Taguchi openly begins to blackmail him over his illness, Izumi starts to see that, whereas before he has thought of him only as a ‘ko-akuto¯ ’ (little villain), Taguchi actually represents a much deeper-laid evil. Izumi begins to discover, in other words, that Taguchi is a master of extortion – one who specializes in getting close to his victims, humouring them, learning their secrets and then applying the vice of blackmail. He is, in fact, a much more sinister version of Hanegarasu, although in the early stages of the story any relationship between them may appear only typological. From the beginning of the third part of the novel, Izumi is in active pursuit of Taguchi who has somehow disappeared. After much difficulty he manages to track down Taguchi’s home and visits it to find to his surprise that Taguchi has a wife whom, in the three or more years of their association, Taguchi has never mentioned. The wife, Sakiko, after making a number of complaints about Taguchi’s manipulativeness and even physical cruelty, allows Izumi to look into a chest of drawers in the back room containing leather sports equipment and layers of uncut leather. At the end of Izumi’s visit she then offers to reveal something about Taguchi, adding that Taguchi would unquestionably kill her if he found out she had divulged it. Izumi refuses to listen. He tells himself that, whatever secrets Taguchi may have, he wants to confront him with them himself, to force him to confess to them from his own mouth. So he leaves without having heard the vital secret. These events are narrated in a chapter, placed roughly half-way through the novel, entitled ‘Omote to ura to omote’ (Front and Back and Front, NHZ 9: 144– 225). The reader, having been primed by the scenes set among the leather workers of the buraku districts in Masayuki’s tale, will probably think herself one jump ahead of Izumi at this point. Taken with Taguchi’s earlier dismay at hearing the buraku named, the presence of the leather in a chest belonging to his
The Burakumin as Other 153 father must suggest that Taguchi himself is of buraku origins. The reader may also jump to the conclusion that the secret which Taguchi’s wife wanted to tell Izumi was precisely this revelation about her husband’s ‘origins’. Izumi is finally enlightened during a conversation with his father’s friend and ¯ no Kinsh¯u. The vital passage reads as follows: business associate O ‘That man Taguchi, he’s . . . it’s like this OK: e, eta right!’ His left hand lay upon the table and, as he used that curious word ‘eta’, he drew it towards his chest as if it were something that must at all costs be kept hidden and, bending the thumb inwards, held the remaining four fingers together and waved them up and down. He waited, gazing fixedly into the other’s face for a reaction to the words that he had just uttered and the gesture he had used – and for a smile to pass between them. (NHZ 9: 482) The thumb bent inwards to leave the four fingers pressed together is the yottsu-ashi (four-legs) gesture, used to designate burakumin. It can be variously interpreted, but it clearly indicates that those so designated are not quite full human beings, are somehow closer to the beasts with which their trades are associated. Although Izumi understands what is intended and immediately thinks to himself that this must have been the secret that Sakiko had wanted to tell him, he reacts with cold ¯ no’s gesture, and to the implication that he will sympathize with this hostility to O ¯ no backtracks with a string kind of discriminatory treatment. Pressed by Izumi, O of evasive expressions, very similar in overall effect, if not exactly in tone, to the ¯ no’s position bluster and evasion of Sergeant Suzuki a little later in the novel. O has been made all the more embarrassing because, knowing he was dealing with someone who has no cause to love Taguchi, he thought it safe to express himself, for once, quite clearly. He had hoped that his gesture would be met with a knowing smile rather than this icy hostility. Thus, at the mid-point of the novel, things seem to have been made clear, and the link between the protagonists has been reforged through the issue of prejudice shown towards the burakumin. At this point, too, Izumi can be said to have caught up with the probable perception of the reader: he believes he now knows that Taguchi’s terrible secret relates to his birth. However, this discovery has the unfortunate effect of complicating, rather than clarifying the issue of Taguchi for ¯ no’s insinuation shows, he has no wish to assohim. As his stony rejection of O ¯ no; in fact, this piece ciate himself with the kind of discrimination displayed by O of information about Taguchi suggests that he himself might be primarily a victim rather a villain. Izumi is no longer inclined, as he was when he first began to hunt for Taguchi, to associate him with the evil dreams and demons brought to him by his disease. On the other hand, he knows that Taguchi has exploited more people than himself, including the friendless common law wife of a fellow syphilitic who has recently died. He also realizes he knows nothing about the burakumin issue and determines to research into it. By chance, practically the first ¯ no are a couple of street shoe repairers who people he meets after he has left O
154 James Raeside trick him into having his shoes repaired when it is not necessary. At this point he might have benefited from a little nugget of wisdom which Shimasaki, the chairman of the Naniwa keizai k¯oseikai, passes on to Masayuki a few pages later: In the buraku there are those who think they mustn’t do anything at all wrong, who are always looking round and worryin’ that folk might be watching; and then again there are those who are dead opposite, who plunge ahead and do all the wrong they want, piling it up wi’out thinking it’s wrong at all. Them are the two types. (NHZ 9: 551) Izumi does not want it to matter that Taguchi is from the burakumin, but he cannot see that it does not. This is also because he is still convinced that he now knows the great secret about Taguchi that his wife dared not tell him. He is so convinced of this, in fact, that when he goes to visit her for the second time and she again offers to tell him something about Taguchi that nobody else knows, once again he refuses to listen.
The double secret: father at the heart of darkness It is with the third stage of his investigations, described in the fifth and sixth parts of the novel, that Izumi finally realizes that Taguchi’s great secret has only indirectly to do with origins. The very heart of the darkness lies in his own father. Taguchi’s wife is a former mistress of his father’s whom he married off to Taguchi to get her out of the way. The second wife was aware of the arrangement at the time, and even attended the wedding, as did most of those people ¯ no who had taken such pains to warn him off Taguchi. All these people such as O around his father are now involved in a scheme to revive the fortunes of a sake brewery owned by Sakiko’s family, and Taguchi is blackmailing them into letting him in on the deal. Thus what is hidden, the secret about which no-one can speak, proves not just to be the stigmatized origins of one particular character, but layers of corruption – financial and moral – which run right through Japanese society. This makes it yet more obvious that the burakumin as a group are made to stand for, or rather mask, all the corruption and prejudice that are present in society. It is in a sense impossible to talk about removing them from society because, if they were so removed, society would no longer exist in its present form. They represent all the things that on the surface nobody wishes to discuss but everybody knows to exist, without which things could not function as they now do. These are also the things about which Taguchi, from his position as an outsider on the inside, can blackmail people: infidelity, disease, and fraud.13 Izumi says at the end of the book that he no longer feels his earlier murderous hatred towards Taguchi, because all that hatred is now directed towards his father. And yet, in the penultimate chapter of the book ‘Honoo no basho (2)’, he does in fact strangle Taguchi and then shoot himself. He has gone with the intention of simply forcing Taguchi to admit to the plots in which he has been
The Burakumin as Other 155 engaged, and then making him agree to give everything up and begin again. Taguchi, not unexpectedly, refuses and comes up with a counter-threat of his own, which finally closes the circle between himself, Izumi and Masayuki: Taguchi has been investigating Masayuki’s activities and now threatens to inform the secret police if Izumi does not let things drop. It is at this last provocation that Izumi strangles him.
Hegel and phenomenology Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a work that is dotted with conversations about history, the possibilities of revolution and the fate of democracy in Japan, the philosopher whose name appears most frequently in Circle of Youth is that of Hegel. In fact, two subsections of one chapter, ‘Kao-kao (face-face), consist of a discussion of Hegel between Izumi and one of his friends (NHZ 9: 395–418). At that time the friend, Saeki, remarks that Masayuki has moved on from the Philosophy of Right to the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it is probably the latter work of Hegel’s that has the most significance for the novel as a whole. Presumably because of his recent reading, the possibility of seeing the relationship between Izumi and Taguchi in terms of the master–slave theory presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology14 occurs to Masayuki in the final part of the book, when he has at last understood something of the history of their relationship from Izumi’s half-sister Yo¯ko: That’s it, Hegel’s Master and servant: a master and slave relationship is the only thing you can call it. However much Yo¯ko says that they are absolutely not linked together in some kind of scheme, there is a profound relation between them that goes much deeper than that. (NHZ 11: 254) Many of the characters in Noma’s fictions tend to think in Hegelian categories, especially the relationship between the universal and the particular. As discussed earlier, the theory of master and slave, from which ideas of the universal and particular are inseparable, underlies that of ‘the Other’ as later developed by Lacan, Foucault and others, at least as it was explained in Kojève’s hugely influential Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Wilden 1968: 192–3; Bowie 1991: 80). And yet Hegel’s optimistic belief in an ultimate Aufhebung, in which all opposition would be resolved and the yearning of both parties for recognition at last resolved, tended to disappear from the works of these later theorists. In the first chapter of the last part, ‘The Place of Flame (1)’, Masayuki and Izumi finally meet in one of the buraku districts of the city and talk about the burakumin issue in general, as well as about Taguchi and how criminal burakumin such as he ought to be viewed. This discussion naturally also widens out to the issue of the universal and the particular. Hegel’s idea was that the slave can think only in terms of the particular whereas the master can think only in terms of the universal. This is one reason that neither masters nor slaves feel that their being can be properly acknowledged. The master cannot acknowledge the slave, and
156 James Raeside because he does not accept the slave’s being, he can find no one to acknowledge him. The only way that this paradox can be resolved is when the slave finally rises up, abandons servitude and becomes both equal and free. In this way he will be both a universal and a distinct individual; yet to do this he must abandon faith in any god and confront his own fear of death. Hegel believed that this had happened in the French Revolution, and Masayuki obviously has this in mind when he talks about citizenship to Izumi: Today you went to the Naniwa Ward Citizen’s Office, right? The word ‘citizen’ that they use there is the ‘citizen’ as it arose in Europe, but they just took the name: even though they call it a citizen’s office it’s all for social work, integration work, ‘settlement’ work. If they were citizens in the European sense, none of that would be necessary. (NHZ 11: 628) Thus, the burakumin are still not citizens even in the limited sense that this might have in the context of Japanese society, not to mention the fuller meaning of citizenship which, again according to Hegel, became current in Europe after the French Revolution. The burakumin could be seen as the ultimate illustration of Hegel’s paradigm of master and slave, in the sense that they are those who labour but are not valued, are not recognized by their masters as equals. The fact that they labour would be a sign that they have at one time chosen to surrender themselves to the master group in order to survive. Of course, if applied literally to Japanese history or society, this would still require an explanation as to why there are those who also labour but are not outcastes. Nonetheless, the idea that humans in general can never know true freedom or equality until the slaves overcome their fear of death and fight to achieve freedom and equality is one that can be traced directly through Hegel to Marx and beyond, and explains why Marxist ideas might seem especially welcome and appropriate to the burakumin movement. In the discussion that he has with Masayuki before he goes off to meet Taguchi, Izumi convinces Masayuki that in the present state of capitalist Japan there is no jury which could be deemed competent to try Taguchi for his crimes, essentially because the discrimination he has undergone at the hands of society as a whole disqualifies society from judging him. Izumi then goes on to say that it is precisely by killing Taguchi, that he could strip himself of any prejudice: But I have come to think that I myself can kill Taguchi, and at that time I can rid myself of my prejudice. That’s right – through that I can rid myself of my prejudice and become the equal of Taguchi. Human beings are individual existences, but they also exist as a species. It is because humans exist as a species that it is possible to kill; and I am able to kill Taguchi. (NHZ 11: 641) To this Masayuki replies that, by this line of thought, one could justify war. Izumi, however replies, ‘Not war, revolution . . . Of course revolutions don’t
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massacre people in great numbers like wars. But it can’t be argued that revolutions don’t kill anybody at all’ (NHZ 11: 641–2). At this, Masayuki ripostes that, rather than revolution, Izumi is talking about suicide. From this they move to Hegel and his theory that consciousness derives from desire (for what is desired by the Other). Masayuki says that he is now preoccupied both with this and the Asiatic mode of production; in truth, these are the main issues for him now – together with that of the burakumin. Any suggestion that Japan was still at an Asiatic stage of development would be extremely dispiriting to people like Masayuki, but the very existence of the burakumin might be taken as an indication that something of these conditions still prevails in the narrative present, that the current state of society in Japan is very far from being ripe for a proletarian revolution, and may not even have moved beyond the stage of feudalism. This may be why Masayuki yokes together the burakumin and the Asian issue. Izumi replies again, in his usual style, half-teasing and half-serious: That’s right, you are the expert on the buraku, aren’t you? But it can be said, can’t it, that the expert doesn’t always know his own area. Why do such antisocial elements arise from those who are objects of discrimination? And not just that, how can those anti-social elements within the buraku be resolved? You aren’t able to put forward any concrete methods. Of course, in my opinion, that is not at all surprising. (NHZ 11: 642–3) Thus, by his talk of revolution, Izumi appears to be trying to justify his elimination of Taguchi as an individual by seeing him as representative of a type. Taguchi cannot be judged by Japan’s current laws, because the law, like his father, is steeped in ordure. It is only special circumstances that allow him to sacrifice Taguchi for the sake of the revolution, and only then at the further sacrifice of his own life. To this, Masayuki can only reply that he needs time, that in time such dilemmas must be resolved; but, as a man dying of syphilis, time is one thing that Izumi no longer has.
Conclusion Nothing more different than these two drops of blood – and yet nothing is more alike. (Girard 1972: 61)15
If we allow ourselves a fairly loose definition of the ‘Other’ as meaning an alternative version of the subject, a rival entity which is seen as being hostile, opposed and yet somehow closely related, Circle of Youth seems to offer a profusion of such oppositions. Thus, Izumi and Masayuki are alternative versions of the same intelligent youth, whose paths have crucially forked. By contrast, Izumi and
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Taguchi are like enemy brothers, who both stand in some kind of Oedipal relationship to Izumi’s father, while Izumi has come to see Taguchi and his own father as different facets of the same corrupt entity. All the burakumin, of whom we learn that Taguchi is a member, are the ‘Other’ in relation to mainstream Japanese society. The foregoing account of the plot of Circle of Youth, and in particular of its final chapters, should have shown how the novel strives to bring all aspects of the burakumin issue into its ambit. The division between night and day, Masayuki and Izumi, marks the distinction between the social and psychological aspects of burakumin identity. It is, as Izumi and Masayuki realize in their final debate, a question of the universal and the particular or, to put it in more contemporary terms, between history and the subject. Noma’s aim was clearly to bring these two major aspects together at the end and to show they were necessarily intertwined. Izumi, in search of a solution to his contest with Taguchi – the burakumin as rival and double – comes to where Masayuki sits in the centre of a buraku district awaiting a conflict with the power of the state: the burakumin as oppressed social minority. As we have seen, in Hegel’s Phenomenology there is an imagined primal scene where some humans agree to risk death and die and thus become masters, while others avoid combat and become enslaved. The slave is no longer considered by the master to be a subject – that is, an authentic, independent being worthy of recognition; and thus he becomes merely subject, eternally working for the master but never being recognized by him. Included in this idea already, therefore, is the notion that only through acceptance of death will one become an authentic, autonomous subject. The slave then has to try to find a way to win back his authenticity, to be acknowledged as a subject in his own right. For Hegel, the first attempt to resolve this problem was to propose a solution out of this world: jenseits (the beyond), or the heaven of Christian doctrine. It was a fallacious doctrine, but a necessary one that eventually led the slaves to understand that they could win their freedom by facing down their fear of death, rejecting the need for heaven, and attempting to achieve the same freedom and recognition by others here on earth. In some way or other, all those following after Hegel in the European philosophical tradition have had to produce their own account of the Other, one that focuses on the relationship between the subject or conscious self with other subjects. Lacan takes this to the point of arguing that the subject comes into existence already inhabited by otherness.16 For Lacan, there is no resolution to the problem of the self. One is left with an endless signifying chain, or the endless talk of those for whom there can never really be a cure. Another way of accounting for the seeming paradox of Self and Other, and one more closely focused on literary texts, is proffered by René Girard, in his analysis of the violence and the sacred, and what he also calls ‘mimetic rivalry’. The fundamental idea running through all his theories is that of displacing emotions from the original object onto a third party. The same process operates in the case of those seen as rivals in love, or sacrificial victims in the case of violent conflict. In the latter case, Girard offers a model of an act committed on one individual for the sake of the community as a whole. He cites a passage from Hubert and Mauss concerning the act of ritual sacrifice:
The Burakumin as Other 159 One excused oneself for the act one was about to commit, one groaned for the death of the beast, one wept for it like a relative. One asked pardon before striking. One addressed oneself to the others of the same species to which it belonged, as if to a vast family clan whom one was imploring not to avenge the hurt that it was about to suffer in the person of one of its members. Under the influence of these same ideas, the author of the murder was himself punished. He was beaten or exiled. (Girard 1972: 26, my emphasis)17 Here the idea of a whole species being avenged or satisfied through the death of an individual seems to throw light on Izumi’s assertion that Taguchi may be killed as the member of a species. This passage also contains the valuable insight that the executioner, the conductor of the sacrifice, may himself become this mixture of the polluted and holy and the ritual may require his punishment too. This presents us with the idea of the control of primal violence by a ritualized version of that violence, a ceremony in which that which is actually similar is simultaneously depicted as completely other. In other words, blood spilled in sacrifice is purifying and healing, in total contradistinction to the polluting substance (blood spilt in violent anger). In the case of the scapegoat, a community loads the beast symbolically with all its sins and then drives it out. By choosing such a beast and loading it with all they feel to be unclean and dangerous, they make it evil, profane; and yet by choosing it they make it special, and in another sense sacred. By driving it out, they emphasize it is not them, something Other, and yet by choosing it and loading it with something of theirs – their pollution – they paradoxically stress the relationship. In this sense, the burakumin can be – and frequently have been – seen as a kind of scapegoat for Japanese society, perhaps one that was necessary for society to create because it did not have a natural racial or religious minority of its own. (The theories that burakumin were originally Koreans or slaves, or indeed Koreans and slaves, are an example of retroactive racism.) As the whole structure of this huge novel attests, while we have the individual pairs of Others or frères ennemis represented by Izumi and Masayuki, Izumi and Taguchi, and also the Daido¯s (father and son), it is Taguchi who links these individual pairings with the wider theme of the buraku as an Other group within Japanese society as a whole. Taguchi represents a member of the buraku who does not seek freedom, but rather whose actions make the buraku less free, both by reinforcing the image of them as those who exploit and feed upon society and in the direct sense that he is hindering the possibility of social and political progress represented by Masayuki. Reverting to the final conversation between Izumi and Masayuki, Izumi asks whether it is acceptable to kill someone whom one sees as an enemy of society, even if one knows why they have become so. In other words, what about Taguchi? As a part of a generalized picture of social oppression and prejudice, his resentment and desire for revenge on society seem fully explicable from a psycho-social point of view. Yet, even having understood all that, even having said in the so-often parodied words of left-leaning sociologists that ‘society’s to blame’, what do you do about the actual living individual now
160 James Raeside threatening to cause more harm even to his fellow burakumin? To this Masayuki cannot provide an answer and Izumi goes off to his final interview with Taguchi, apparently hoping to try to force Taguchi to abandon his career of extortion. As noted, this does not work, but by threatening Masayuki and therefore the work that he is doing in support of the buraku movement, Taguchi apparently allows Izumi a way out of his moral impasse. Even so, Izumi can only kill Taguchi because he has fully accepted the imminence of his own death, and is willing for Taguchi’s death to be immediately followed by his own. If Taguchi were to be considered Izumi’s alter ego, in keeping with other Doppelgänger narratives such as Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray, this might be viewed as the normal fate of one who attempts to destroy the Other that is himself: the only way that one can resolve the split in one’s being/call back the projection of oneself, is in death. On the other hand, if one reverts to the frères ennemis of Girard who insisted that his version of the master–slave dialectic was essentially different from Hegel’s (Girard 1961: 129–30), then Taguchi would become the scapegoat sacrificed to assuage Izumi’s rage and resentment against another enemy brother, who could only be Masayuki: In the Old Testament and the Greek myths, brothers are almost always enemy brothers. The violence which they seemed to be called by fate to carry out against each other can only be dissipated on third-party victims: victims of sacrifice. The ‘jealousy’ that Cain feels towards his brother simply accords with that privation of some sacrificial outlet by which a character is defined. (Girard 1972: 14)18 As regards the origins of Izumi’s resentment, one possible answer, employing the Cain and Abel analogy invoked by Girard, would be that Masayuki’s endeavours seemed to have been acceptable in the eyes of the Lord and his were not. In other words, Masayuki’s success in holding to his principles, in becoming the person that Izumi wanted to be, causes his jealousy and resentment, and leads him to destroy, not himself, but the person he most feared becoming: Taguchi. Yet again, after Izumi has found out about Taguchi’s involvement with his family, he repeatedly says that the person he now really wants to kill is not Taguchi but his own father, who used Taguchi, and who is the source of the owai, the ‘muck’. Although not aware of the latter’s buraku origins, Izumi had long regarded Taguchi as not quite his equal. Then, when Taguchi began to threaten him, he started to regard him as something inhuman but powerful – a demon sitting on his shoulder. It is only paradoxically – by discovering that Taguchi is one of those who are looked upon by mainstream society as being precisely both those things, at once demonic and subhuman – that he sees to the heart of his own prejudice. One could say that Izumi can kill Taguchi because the latter has now become a kind of meta-scapegoat. Taguchi stands for the worst aspects of Izumi himself, as well as standing for Izumi’s father, and his father stands for the corruption and abuse of power in society, an abuse of power and corruption which in its turn has created
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a group such as the burakumin. Although Taguchi is himself from the buraku, he has turned his back on them, become one who sells out their cause for individual gain, so that, by sacrificing him, Izumi is committing a kind of deed of expiation for the bad side of the burakumin themselves. However, all this can only be done because Izumi, who sees his own participation in all these evils, consents to act as both executioner and victim. This is also accomplished through overcoming a fear of death. Whether what Izumi does offers any kind of solution for the problem of the buraku – or hope for Japanese society in general – is not answered. If it can be believed, again following the Hegelian model, that there will be a resolution after a revolution, then that would be one form of consolation; though not one offered explicitly in the novel itself. Girard, it is true, does offer a form of resolution that can take place within the novel. In certain works, he argues, the facing up to death by one protagonist is itself a sign that both the hero and the author have ‘been caught in the structure of desires and escaped from it’. He continues: The hero never frees himself until the end of the work, through a conversion in which he rejects mediated desire, i.e. death of the romantic self, and a resurrection in the true world of the novel. This is why death and disease are always physically present in the conclusion and why they always have the nature of a happy deliverance . . . the work is at once the narrative of, and the recompense for, spiritual metamorphosis. (Girard 1978: 4) However, Circle of Youth does not end with the deaths of Izumi and Taguchi. The final scene shows the withdrawal of the forces of oppression lined up against Masayuki, though at night and in a ‘place of flame’. These flames may straightforwardly symbolize further conflict – revolution or the imminent world war. However there is a final possibility: that they hint at Buddhist teaching – the burning house of the Lotus Sutra symbolizing human suffering in this world of illusion. In which case, the rejected jenseits of a Hegelian phenomenology might reappear in the guise of a Buddhist version of salvation, and Yoshie, Masayuki’s pious Buddhist mother, would have the last word after all.
Notes 1 Noma worked hardest for the burakumin cause during his involvement in the Sayama jiken (Sayama case), in which a member of the burakumin community was found guilty of murder on very questionable evidence (Noma 1976; Noma and Sayama 1997). 2 The suiheisha, whose name derives from the English Levellers, was an organization established to fight for the rights of the burakumin and to actively oppose prejudice wherever it was encountered. The first volume of Sumii’s novel ends with its formation, and a whole chapter of Noma’s book turns around it: ‘Keikanki’ (The Flag with the Crown of Thorns) (NHZ, vol. 9, pp. 537–75). 3 From this point I will refer to these two characters by their given names, Masayuki and Izumi. This is in line with Noma’s own practice in the novel: he consistently refers to
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4
5 6 7
8 9
10
11
12 13
14
them either just using the given name or the full name, and not by the family name. The various relatives of both young men figure so prominently in the book that referring to them by their family names alone would sometimes prove confusing. Moreover, as explained in this chapter, the given names of both characters clearly have a symbolic significance. In some of his comments on his own work, Noma talks in terms of the novel having a tripartite structure, cf., for example, ‘Seinen no wa no kansei’ (On Completing Circle of Youth), NHS, vol. 10, pp. 301–3. However, although this may have been the writer’s original intention, there is no question but that in terms of page length and narrative focus Masayuki and Izumi greatly predominate over Masayuki’s mother. The total number of pages recounting the experiences of Masayuki and Izumi both reach well over a thousand pages each in the collected works edition (vols 7–11) whereas Yoshie’s page count is only around 250. Noma frequently refers in his criticism to the works of Joyce, notably expressing the sense of liberation he received from reading Ulysses, for instance (NHZ, vol. 18, pp. 284–91). For Noma’s comments on the absolute novel see, for example, ‘Sho¯setsu no zentai to wa nanika’ (What is the Absolute Novel?) (NHZ, vol. 11, pp. 701–4). Izumi’s perception of the night-time city vomiting up its citizens in the first chapter in which he appears, ‘Honoo ni owarete’ (Pursued by Flame), has a quite evident Baudelairean ring (NHZ, vol. 7, p. 64). All translations of Noma’s works are my own. Circle of Youth is divided into six parts (bu), which are themselves each subdivided into three (sho¯ ), except for the shortest first part which only has two. Each sho¯ is then further subdivided into titled sections such as ‘Entotsu’. These titled sections are then usually further divided into anything from five to twelve subsections. Although the Japanese word sho¯ is generally translated as ‘chapter’, I will use the word ‘chapter’ to refer to the titled section, since this seems to fall more in line with common English usage. The sho¯ I will refer to as ‘sections’ and the bu as ‘parts’. The reason for not calling them ‘volumes’ is that, in the NHZ – the only readily available edition of Circle of Youth – the first two ‘parts’ are in the same volume (volume 7) while the following four parts appear in the four successive volumes. Thus volume 8 contains part three, volume 9 part four, etc. In a chapter entitled ‘Rekishi no Sh¯uki’ (The Stink of History) (NHZ, vol. 7, p. 363) Masayuki reflects to himself that people think the stink of leather is the stink of the burakumin themselves. For references to leather-making as a traditional buraku activity see, for example, Shimahara (1971: 15); Sabouret (1983: 24–5). The ‘ya’ is a suffix normally used in the same way as the modifier ‘er’ in English as in ‘tipster’, and might best be translated ‘scammer’, as in ‘he’s on the integration scam’. This corresponds to a whole range of semi-criminal activities of which Masayuki makes a mental list earlier in the novel, including, for example, the ‘sawariya’ (accident-scammers), who deliberately try to get hit by cars in order to extort immediate cash compensation from the driver. The association of lameness with the devil or the tempter exists in many traditions, in particular the ‘diable boiteux’ perhaps familiar to Noma through his reading of French literature. To the anglophone reader, this complex web of secrets may recall Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, where Izumi, playing Inspector Bucket for himself, is in the position of uncovering all the secrets that link society from top to bottom – just as it turns out, in Dickens’s novel, that disease and illicit sexual relations link everyone from the humble crossing sweeper Jo to the great house of Lord and Lady Dedlock. The relevant chapter in the Baillie translation is rendered as ‘Lordship and Bondage’ (Hegel 1949: 229–40), although it will be evident that the account of
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Hegel’s phenomenology given in this chapter largely follows Kojève’s interpretation. 15 ‘Rien de plus différent que ces deux gouttes de sang et pourtant rien n’est plus semblable.’ 16 Quoted in Bowie (1991: 81): The Other is, therefore, the locus, in which is constituted the I who speaks with him who hears, that which is said by the one being already the reply, the other deciding to hear it whether the one has or has not spoken.
References Main texts Noma Hiroshi (1970–71) Noma Hiroshi zensh¯u (NHZ ) (The Complete Works of Noma Hiroshi), 22 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯. ——(1987) Noma Hiroshi sakuhinshu¯ (NHS ) (The Works of Noma Hiroshi), 14 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Other references Bowie, Malcolm (1991) Lacan, London: Fontana. Girard, René (1961) Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Paris: Hachette Littéraire. ——(1972) Le violence et le sacré, Paris: Hachette Pluriel. ——(1978) To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1949) Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, London: Allen & Unwin. Kojève, Alexandre (1947 [1968]) Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard. Neary, Ian (1989) Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-war Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nichols, Jr., James H. (partial trans.) (1969) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Noma Hiroshi (1946) ‘Kurai e’ (Dark Pictures), NHS, vol. 1, pp. 11–84. ——(1947–71) ‘Seinen no wa’ (The Circle of Youth), NHZ, vols 6–11. ——(1955) ‘Joisu’ (Joyce), NHZ , vol. 18, pp. 284–91. ——(1970) ‘Sho¯setsu no zentai to wa nanika’ (What is the Absolute Novel?), NHZ, vol. 11, pp. 701–4. ——(1971) ‘Seinen no wa no kansei’ (On Completing The Circle of Youth ), NHS, vol. 10, pp. 301–3. ——(1976) Sayama saiban (The Sayama Trial), 2 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. ——(2000) Dark Pictures and Other Stories, trans. James Raeside, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Noma Hiroshi and Sayama saiban kanko¯ iinkai (eds) (1997) Sayama saiban: Kanpon (The Sayama Trial: The Complete Version), 3 vols, Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten. Osborne, Peter (2000) Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Sabouret, Jean-François (1983) L’autre japon: les burakumin (The Other Japan: The Burakumin), Paris: La découverte-maspéro. Shimahara Nobuo (1971) Burakumin: A Japanese Minority and Education, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Shimazaki To¯ son (1906 [1974]) The Broken Commandment, trans. Kenneth Strong, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
164 James Raeside Sumii Sue (1989) The River with No Bridge, trans. Susan Wilkinson, Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Tuttle. Wilden, Anthony (1968) The Language of the Self, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yoshino, I. Roger and Murakoshi Sueo (1977) The Invisible Visible Minority: Japan’s Burakumin, Osaka: Buraku kaiho¯ kenky ujo. ¯
9
Sincerely yours Uno Chiyo’s A Wife’s Letters as wartime subversion Rebecca L. Copeland
The back and forth of letters, their desire for reply, their incomplete ownership of information, their concomitant play on ideas of absence and presence, and their apparently personal and private nature, model an interactive openness (although one always knows, paradoxically, that this seeming openness can be used for manipulation and deception). (Bower 1997)
Ever since the twelfth-century woman warrior Tomoe quit the battlefield in obedience to her lord’s command to seek her place among the women at home, Japan has subscribed to the myth that severs the warlike man from the pacifist woman. Men are warriors; women are wives. Men bear arms; women children. Men are heroic; women self-effacing. War activates those gender distinctions that in moments of peace are open to contestation. Agitation for equal rights, for suffrage, and for liberated lifestyles is set aside out of respect for greater national (read patriarchal) interests. Feminist agendas become luxuries. Men and women pull together in the spirit of unification and strength, and the essentialization of male – female gender roles is not only intensified, it is justified. Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier, among others, note the collaborative partnership between love and war (Cooper et al. 1989a: xiii). If man is the warrior, then woman must signify that which is worth fighting for – the home, the nation, the future. The idealized ‘woman’ motivates the carnage that is established as her antithesis. Her placement at the ‘home front’, therefore, requires a dynamic complicity in war and is itself an active performance of a political position. Indeed, the rhetoric used to exhort her attention to her duties mimics that applied to men. She is asked to be loyal, stalwart, and courageous in her battles as a ‘home front warrior’. And yet, the very idealization of the home front, the insistence that it carry the values and promised comforts that the battlefront negates, disqualifies it from the rubric of war – and disqualifies home front stories from categorization as war literature. This chapter challenges the traditional presentation of war literature by reading home front stories as an integral and complementary component of the war narrative and thereby attributing to them the same degree of active politicization
166 Rebecca Copeland expected of their counterpart. The positioning of home front stories within narratives of war, moreover, legitimizes the female writing voice that has heretofore been sublimated and silenced as secondary. What I intend with the term ‘home front literature’ ( ju¯ go sho¯setsu) are those works written during periods of war that are centered in the home – as opposed to the battlefield.1 The latter includes the categories more commonly understood as ‘war literature’, such as ‘military campaign literature’ ( ju¯gun bungaku), ‘comfort literature’ (imon bungaku ), or literature written about or by natives of the Japanese colonies. ‘War literature’, in almost all cases, foregrounds the activities of men with particular focus on soldiers in distant or ‘other’ locales. ‘Home front literature’, by contrast, is intended primarily for women and meant to represent – if not to romanticize – the daily challenges that they face ‘behind the gun’.2 Expected to comfort and entertain those awaiting the return of their menfolk, stories in this category typically deal with contemporary, realistic situations and are required to provide appropriate role models for their generally female readership by featuring women who are resourceful, brave, and unwavering in their patriotic support of patriarchal structures. My discussion of jugo ¯ sho¯setsu will focus on the 1942 novella ‘Tsuma no tegami’ (A Wife’s Letters) by Uno Chiyo (1897–1996). Serialized in three installments in the mainstream journals C h uo ¯¯ k ¯oron (Central Review) and Bungakkai (Literary World), the story is presented as a series of letters by a wife to a husband off at war.3 Given the trend toward the autobiographical mode in Uno’s works, contemporary readers would have assumed the letters derived from real communication between the implied author and her husband, the writer Kitahara Takeo (1907–73), who had been conscripted by the Military Information Corps in 1941 and sent to Java the following year, just months before Uno’s story appeared.4 As soon as the serialization was complete, the story was bound in a black cloth cover with cherry blossom motif, and reportedly many a wife sent the book off with her soldier husband as a surrogate for her own love. While clearly meeting the expectations of a jugo ¯ sho¯setsu, the story nevertheless subverts contemporary gender codes and the militarist agenda. Offering a close reading of this work, I will examine the way Uno combines the formulaic features of epistolarity with the expectations of home front literature to unsettle gendered boundaries. In the process she opens within those boundaries a space for the creation of an individuated female voice, a voice that constantly resists – even as it appears to acquiesce to – the pull of a collective identity.
From modern girl to home front matron Prior to the outbreak of war with China in 1937, Uno Chiyo had enjoyed a life of casual decadence, occupying herself with dance parties, romantic trysts, and games of mah-jong. Known for her own highly publicized love affairs, her most successful work to date, Irozange (Confessions of Love, 1935 [1989]), had capitalized on the self-indulgent hedonism of the late 1920s by presenting the story
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of a Western-style artist who drifts aimlessly in and out of affairs with three modern girls. In addition to her success as a writer, Uno had also established herself as a shrewd entrepreneur and magazine editor, founding the women’s magazine Sutairu (Style) in 1936, which featured articles on Western fashion, dance, male–female relations, coiffures, and other ‘frivolous’ concerns. Uno’s carefree excesses could not go unchecked in a Japan now dedicated to total war. With all signs pointing toward moderation and self-denial, reprisals were harsh for any who attempted otherwise. A magazine like Style, which celebrated what was now considered enemy culture, was doomed. Even the title – derived from an English word – was traitorous. Worse still, the attention to female self-adornment and self-promotion was anathema to a nation now bent on pressing women into soldiers for its domestic austerity campaigns. ‘Extravagance is the Enemy!’ women were warned. Permanent waves, cosmetics, and Western clothes were banned. Even the Japanese kimono, if conspicuously elegant, could invite reprisals. Tsutsumi Chiyo (1917–55), a now forgotten woman writer of this period, depicts the way a sumptuously clad young woman is harassed on a streetcar by a drunken man who accuses her of compromising the national agenda with her costume.5 As the story concludes we learn that the woman’s motives for dressing as she did were pure – she was greeting a returning soldier – but the danger she invited nonetheless reflected the temper of the times. Uno would have to make adjustments if she were to continue her various public enterprises. In 1941, she changed the title of her magazine to the slightly more innocuous Josei seikatsu (Woman’s Life) and swapped her promotion of Western values with articles more suited to the home front warrior. Practical kimonos and cotton ‘farmer’s trousers’ now replaced her chic Parisian gowns, and Japanese models substituted for her vampish Western women. In her stories, matronly wives traded places with modern girls, and conversations with war veterans and venerable craftsmen drew her attention away from the salacious confessions of avant-garde artists. Uno’s modifications were subtle, seemingly natural, and failed to draw attention to themselves. Despite the overwhelming pressure on writers during this time to produce patriotic works, Uno claims to have had no interest in the political battles swirling around her. Unlike her many contemporaries, who traveled to the frontlines of battle in search of literary inspiration,6 Uno stayed home. In an interview she was to say: ‘Everyone went off [to the front] and I was left behind. I did not stay behind because I was against the war. I was neither for nor against it. It simply was not in my nature to do such things.’7 But nor did Uno let the ‘barren years’ of Japan’s wartime involvement force her to choose between silence and patriotic slaver. In fact, at a time when many writers were finding it difficult to gain access to print, Uno charted a creative path that saw her sustain and enhance the several narrative experiments she had begun in the 1930s. Most particularly, she continued working with genre forms that foregrounded narrative voice: interviews, narrative monologues, and in the case of ‘A Wife’s Letters’, the fictional missive.
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‘A Wife’s Letters’ The epistolary form was not a particularly unusual narrative choice for Uno. If one considers poetry exchanges as ‘letters’, then the epistolary mode had been prominent in the Japanese literary tradition for centuries. In more recent times, the letter – whether real or fictional – had become a prominent device for literary experimentation. Embedded in texts, framing texts, or functioning as texts, the letter was used creatively as both a literary and critical device by such literary luminaries as Natsume So¯seki, Kawabata Yasunari, and others. Uno had been experimenting with the form since very nearly her first literary efforts.8 The form became particularly relevant to wartime writing, with its preference for the immediacy of realistic modes of discourse (Cipris 1994: 27). Letters, with their assumption of distance and separation and their ability to traverse borders and enter realms beyond the reach of the sender, were an attractive medium for wartime expressions, and were employed equally by male and female writers.9 Naturally establishing binaries of self/other; near/far; home/foreign, letters nevertheless rebel against the borders they invent by attempting to bridge and break through – in short, to communicate. Letters open the self to the Other, make the far seem near, and bring the foreign home. The ‘epistolary contract’ assumes that letters will address a reader removed from the writer by time, place, or emotional difference and raises the expectations that the letters will function as intermediaries. It anticipates dialogue. Uno’s ‘A Wife’s Letters’, however, opens on a moment of failed communication: I am home now from Shinagawa. I reached the station after you had already left, and when it finally dawned on me that I would not be able after all to see you one last time, I was so overwhelmed that I came to a stop right there in the middle of the road. What had come over me? And here I had only minutes before been feeling such elation for this husband of mine whom I was sending off with magnificent resolve to a distant battlefield on behalf of our great country. (UCZ: 269) The opening paragraph establishes themes that will dominate the story: the gendering of realms, the fallibility of communication between those realms, and the profound sense of dislocation that the enforcement of these realms imposes. Less obvious in the English translation, but readily noticeable in the Japanese, is the force of the language selected for these letters. Deferential, gentle, uncertain – the hyperfeminine language provides an appropriate counterpoint to the presumably masculine soldier who decisively marches off in service to ‘our great country’. In keeping with the abstraction of realms and roles that the characters assume, they remain unnamed – identified only through their relations to each other as husband and wife. Soldier, war correspondent, military doctor . . . the man’s affiliation with war is left in ellipsis – as is the man himself. The title – the only marker in the text of the epistolary form – leaves us, therefore, with the woman, the wife, alone.
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Contrary to the epistolary contract that anticipates the to and fro of letters, of correspondence, these letters become exactly what the title reveals them to be: a wife’s letters. They are hers. And within the frame of the story they remain unanswered. We are not certain that they are read or even that they are sent. Serving as a therapeutic exercise, the letters evidence the process the wife undergoes as she adjusts – not to the man’s departure – but to her role as witness to his absence, as witness, more importantly to her newly evolving presence. Slowly, subtly the letters work to erase the husband from the wife’s text and to replace him with her own fulsomeness, as she begins to thrive in the literal ‘No Man’s Land’ behind the gun. The process is protracted. As the letters unfold, we see the wife grow from her shock over her husband’s absence, through her fetishization of that absence, and finally to her assertion of her own powerful presence.
The farewell formula The wife enters this space on a note of dereliction. She has failed to see her husband off. One of the important duties of women at this time, particularly of wives, was to participate in sending men off to war. Civic-minded women’s groups made a point of dispatching their members to stations and docks. Dressed in crisp white aprons, their breasts emblazoned with a sash, their sole purpose was to send soldiers and sailors off in glorious fashion (Wakita et al. 1987: 263). A formula for these farewells developed – propagated by repetition in newspaper accounts, stories, and films. Flags fluttered vigorously while choruses of banzai filled the air. Amidst the fanfare, women would steel themselves against their tears, and the departing soldier would not look back. The send-off ritual was important as it marked, physically, the distinction between spheres of home and battlefront and the separation of the man from his family, notably from his womenfolk but also from other men who, due to age or infirmity, were unable to heed the masculine call to arms. The moment the soldier set forth – his face toward battle, his back to his family – the home became, as the term jugo ¯ denotes, that which was left ‘behind the gun’. The departing soldier ceased to be an individual, to be someone’s son, father, and/or brother. He became instead a member of the glorious Japanese Imperial Forces – his transformation performed in front of his family. But Uno’s letter writer does not witness this metamorphosis first hand. Unable to visualize her separation from her husband, she is ill-prepared for her role as waiting wife. Rather than celebrating the departing soldier, the letters that ensue focus on the neglectful wife, foregrounding her emotions, her self-doubt. In questioning her ability to perform her role appropriately, she questions the role itself. And yet her letters, addressed to the departing soldier, present themselves as the very wifely solicitude she seems to doubt: Now I cannot understand how I could have left you the way I did this morning. I was certain that I’d see you again, immediately, at Shinagawa and so I said goodbye to you in front of the barracks without so much as a
170 Rebecca Copeland second thought. Surely I said something to you then? Some word of farewell? But now for the life of me I cannot remember . . . What had come over me? Here you, my husband, were leaving home and joining a host of other soldiers to board a train and then a ship that would carry you thousands and thousands of leagues to a distant battlefield . . . Even when I saw Mr. Yamauchi’s wife with her downcast eyes all I could think was ‘My, the poor dear is so worried!’ as if hers was a situation completely separate from my own! What on earth was I thinking? (UCZ: 269–70) The letter writer’s failure to recognize and respond appropriately to the momentousness of the occasion is reflected in the demeanor of the other wife. Mr Yamauchi’s wife serves as the perfect corrective to the letter writer’s negligence. Afraid of giving way to tears, she keeps her eyes downcast. Silent, impassive, she serves as a cipher for the unspoken sorrow that flows between herself and her husband. And yet her performance is so alien to the letter writer that she finds herself observing Mr Yamauchi’s wife from an outsider’s position ‘as if hers was a situation completely separate from my own’. Indeed it is, and only in hindsight does the letter writer realize that it should not have been. But by then, her husband has already left. As she watches him disappear into the barracks she realizes retrospectively that ‘that moment would stand between us like a great barrier, marking the point when you became the inhabitant of an entirely different world’ (UCZ: 270). Her letters teem with references to boundaries and barricades – the barracks that the wife cannot enter, the car that spirits her husband away, the phalanx of umbrellas that block her view of him, palisades, ropes, and gates. The separation of their worlds is intensified by the fact that there is no communication between them. The wife’s uneasiness is registered, not in the fact that the husband has left her – for they have parted before – but that his parting signals their enclosure in completely separate realms, realms that the letters do not seem to bridge. Her long, impassioned letters are not answered by anything more than a perfunctory postcard, if they are answered at all. As she says of one of the postcards she received ‘so clearly in your hand, it made me want more. I wanted to be able to see all of you before my eyes – to see the gentle expression on your face and to know what it was you were thinking at that very moment’ (UCZ: 290). The husband’s inarticulateness frustrates the wife, forcing her to invent answers he might have sent, and to read meaning into gestures and signs that earlier would have been meaningless. After she misses him at Shinagawa Station, a male friend who was more punctual telephones to tell her that he had caught a glimpse of her husband’s train. He recounts the scene to her: The soldiers were on board, and from where I was standing it was impossible to tell who was who. But when I rushed out onto the platform with shouts of ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ your husband must have spotted me because I
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saw a black gloved hand shoot up and wave in my direction. He was signaling to me. His face was plump, and he looked well. (UCZ: 280–1) Unable to communicate with her husband by more traditional means, the wife surrogates the interaction between the two men and reads the black-gloved gesture as a sign meant only for her: That’s when it occurred to me. That’s when I realized that even though you uttered not a single word – that gloved gesture exchanged with another person had been meant as a message to me. When I thought of it this way, I felt so very fortunate. True, I had not spoken to you personally, but here – through the voice of another – I learned you looked well and had set off safely and this knowledge filled me with joy. (UCZ: 281–2) But the process of communication only reiterates the barriers between husband and wife. He is now in a world of men, a world where women’s words hold no valence and are replaced instead by action. The stereotypical image of parting – the husband-turned-soldier marching silently away from his wife – has been replaced by the black-gloved salute exchanged between men. This gesture becomes the letter writer’s token of farewell – but only after she has rendered it so by imposing her own message upon this man-to-man exchange. Of note is the manner in which the wartime realms insist on the homosocial. In the retrospective images we have of the husband prior to the war, he is situated among women – his mother, his former wife, and the letter writer. Images of war present him with other men – on the train amidst a sea of men in soldiers’ uniforms, disappearing with other men into the barracks, climbing the gangplank to the transport boat, marching with his unit – always in the company of men. In her pre-war memories she and her husband conversed – about his mother, death, religion. Now she watches from a distance as her husband talks with other men – their voices just beyond reach. The husband’s new world is unfamiliar to the wife and she cannot easily accustom herself to it. A writer in his civilian guise, the wife packs a blank notebook into his rucksack – assuming he will want to keep a journal – only to have the notebook returned, unmarked. The husband’s softly draping kimono has been replaced by a military uniform replete with boots and shiny buttons. When the husband sends the wife a box from his new location containing the worn winter clothes that he no longer needs, she is startled by the fact that, though the clothes are familiar, the scent they carry is not. Nothing about him suggests even vestiges of the man she once knew. Reflecting on her failure to send him off, the wife notes: Can you possibly understand a woman’s feelings? The way her heart aches at the loss? Amidst the cries of ‘Banzai!’ the sound of boots, the scent of the earth, the glitter of swords, there you were marching away from me –
172 Rebecca Copeland immersed in thoughts as intangible as drifting sea grass. Why weren’t your soldier’s feelings conveyed to my heart with every step you took? It must be because you were no longer just the man I love, the man who belongs to one woman – to me. No. You were now that man – a man traveling to a distant land for the sake of his country, charged with an important mission. This realization carved itself into my heart so deeply no words could express it. (UCZ: 273) And yet, contrary to her instincts, and to her husband’s insistence, the wife’s desire for her husband remains particularized. Anonymous – unnamed but for the affectionate second-person pronoun the wife uses to address him, anata – he belongs to her. And she refuses to see him as anyone other than her husband. ‘You were wearing your military uniform for the first time, with your shiny boots and your sword at your side. I had not seen you so attired before, and yet I gazed after you as if you were the same husband I was accustomed to seeing day after day’ (UCZ: 271). She will not let him disappear into the national collective – the press of men marching off to war. She resists turning him into a heroic myth. Rather she clings to him as her own romanticized abstraction, making of him an embodiment of her desire. When she receives her first postcard from him, and realizes that he is still in Taiwan, she struggles to envision him. ‘I wanted nothing more than to know what you looked like right then and there, and the more I wanted this the less able I was to envision even vaguely the streets and towns of Taiwan where you now were. So what did I do? I imagined you stopping by the local seafood shop there and ordering some of the dried mullet roe that you so enjoy’ (UCZ: 290). The only way the wife can imagine her husband is to make him familiar to her, to domesticate his foreign setting. She strips him of his boots and sword and surrounds him, not with military men, but with the neighborhood fishmongers. She keeps him home. In that imaginary space where he sits before her at her writing desk, he belongs to her. She describes her first night alone, after the husband has departed for his military orientation: As the day drew to a close, I sat in the empty parlor and faced my dinner tray alone. I had just prepared the meal, and as I gazed at the teacup and chopsticks I was so used to seeing, I felt that you were still here with me and had only been called away on business. Suddenly my eyes opened to the reality of it all. You were gone to war. (UCZ: 282–3)
Absence embodied As the letters unfold, the husband’s absence becomes a palpable presence – weighing on the wife, taking on a near character quality in its own right. The absent soldier was more than a motif in home front literature: it was its origination. The home front comes to exist only when the soldier leaves for war. In Uno’s story, the letter-writing wife admits, in fact, that ‘this great war that has been
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raging for lo these many years’ (UCZ: 285) did not even exist for her until her husband was called to the front. Not only does the leave-taking, therefore, carry a profound ritualistic function, it marked a space in the home front for an enshrinement of the soldier’s absence. This absence was glorified in contemporary ceremonies marking the success of the holy soldier toiling on a distant and largely unseen battlefield for the preservation of the home front. Wakakuwa Midori has shown in her study of the illustrations from women’s wartime journals that the specter of the absent or sometimes unseen soldier dominates the domestic scene. Amidst the gathering at a shrine dedicated to war dead, for example, the eye of the viewer drifts over the bowed backs of the reverent masses and is drawn into the hidden (empty?) interior of the shrine. The absence of the war dead is palpable and centers the graphic moment, pulling all the other figures into their orbit. In illustrations of home life, the absent soldier is often represented through portraits or photographs that hang from walls. Off center, at times blurry, the soldier’s image nevertheless animates the activities foregrounded in the illustration. The ache his absence provokes is registered in the visage of those who face the viewer – the wives and mothers left behind. They, like Mr. Yamauchi’s wife in the scene recounted above, struggling to keep their emotions in check, operate as a canvas upon which we clearly see, not the face of the woman left behind, but the man she mourns. Absence becomes a near fetish in contemporary literary works as well. In the ¯ ba Sachiko, 1940 ‘Seisen no takaramono’ (Treasure from the Holy War) by O while visiting a shrine to pray for her brother at the warfront, a young woman encounters an older woman praying for her son. In an act of patriotic devotion, the young woman offers to marry the woman’s son, even though they have never met. When she learns that the soldier has already died in battle, she offers to marry his heroic spirit – pledging herself to an absence. The power of abstraction, the mythologizing force of war rhetoric, is so great that through it even emptiness is embodied. In ‘A Wife’s Letters’, the husband’s absence is represented through a number of provocative images. There is the empty station platform – an imposing rope strung across it – that confronts the wife when she arrives too late to see her husband off. The futility of her desire to exchange one last word with her husband is signified by the empty boxcars across the tracks, filling with snow. Then there are the empty estate grounds the wife views through a crack in the heavily bolted gate. This is where her husband and his company took lunch before departing. Scraps of paper and bamboo-leaf wrappers dance in the winter wind – fragile but taunting reminders of the men who gathered there but are now gone. At home the wife must learn to confront the empty seat across the dinner table; the writer’s silent study; the unmarked notebook the husband returns. Most striking, perhaps, are the worn winter clothes the husband ships home as his unit prepares to depart Taiwan for warmer climes: I refused to acknowledge that it would have been very unlikely for you to have slipped a special message into such a package, and I began to spread
174 Rebecca Copeland your clothes all about the room, determined to read in them some kind of sign, something that would serve as a missive in place of a written note, and then finally realizing my quest was futile, I buried my face in your clothes. These garments had been next to your body until just a day or two ago. But where was your scent? Why did it not cling to the fabric? All I could smell was the faint odor of earth and dust. Well, that’s it then. Knowing this package was sent to me from a great distance, I decided to accept its contents as a substitute for my husband. (UCZ: 292) The husband’s separation from the wife has been marked in stages by the clothes he has worn: the kimono of distant memory, the military uniform with its unfamiliar buttons, boots, and sword, and now the empty winter suit – a suit she had had tailored for him particularly for this journey. But now it is returned to her faded and frayed, barely recognizable as the same suit of clothing. The dried blades of grass that cling to the wool jacket, even the odor that wafts from the garments, are unfamiliar. Less than a treasured surrogate or katami of the distant beloved, the clothing, like the images of emptiness described above, only serve to underscore the fact of the husband’s missing. Letters, too, limn what is not there. They draw attention to the absence of the recipient – indeed, are necessitated by it. In writing letters the wife challenges the boundaries of war. She expects her letters to carry the home front into the warfront and in return to pull her husband’s realm back into hers. Through letters the wife aspires to a momentary dialogue with the departed, conjuring him before her, indulging in the illusion of his presence, breaking through the barriers that have kept him from her – the ropes and gates and oceans. In turn, the author of the story uses the epistolary style to challenge the dichotomies of private and public – indeed those very realms that held men and women in gendered counterpoint. The letter divulges the private in public.10 And yet, addressed to the absent soldier, it nevertheless foregrounds the home front author – the woman ‘behind the gun’, the writer with the pen.
An emerging presence Deprived of any real answer from the husband – other than what the wife conjures forth – the external readers of these letters are offered less an image of the absent man than that of the writing woman – a woman who is identified only by her relation to a man who is not there. The source of her identification becomes his absence. Just as the letter writer views Mr Yamauchi’s wife as someone completely unlike herself, so the absence of the husband in this story resists fetishization. It is already filled. Her letters to him frame his absence and in that space where he is not, she constructs herself. The wife’s act of self-construction is performed within and against contemporary expectations of what it meant to be ‘a wife’. Parallel to the man’s role in battle, tending to the man’s absence becomes, the wife soon learns, ‘the woman’s
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war’ (UCZ: 287). The wife accepts her role with composure. ‘I am a woman after all, and I have had to learn to steel my heart for our separation – knowing that I would be required to send to war the only person in the world I have – knowing that I have no power to control the inevitable’ (UCZ: 283–4). She resigns herself to the war on the home front, a war that for her did not begin until the day her husband left. For a nation immersed in ‘total war’, the participation of all its citizens in advancing the war cause was vital. In order to impress upon women their importance to and responsibility for the national agenda, the government established a variety of mobilization campaigns, such as the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement of 1937–40 that exhorted women to conform more readily to their ‘natural’ roles as wife and mother. National success depended on the vigilance and participation of the individual family unit – a unit now husbanded by women. Advised that ‘population is a military weapon’, women were encouraged to ‘marry early, give birth and support the nation!’ as one slogan had it. ‘Procreate! Multiply!’ another harangued (Wakita et al. 1987: 268). Matrimony and motherhood became such an important measure of citizenship for Japanese women that unmarried or late marrying women were tantamount to traitors (Suzuki 1990: 267). So as to impress women with the importance of their roles, the government co-opted battlefield discourse in its campaigns and applied it to women – turning them into economic warriors, birthing soldiers – and making motherhood and wifeliness a patriotic duty. Placing the housewife in visible public positions – at the train station in her apron, for example – served to make of her a national icon for female service. She thus became the lens through which all other female activity was reflected and judged. It is hardly surprising then that the female protagonist of ‘A Wife’s Letters’, written in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s entry into the Asia Pacific War, positions herself as just another housewife in a world without men. She attends soldier send-offs and participates in neighborhood associations. At home she busies herself with her wifely chores – planting a small vegetable garden and keeping her husband’s empty study clean and ready for his return. Really though, nothing has changed since you left. At night, I darn your socks and mend your clothes and think to myself that I really am a fortunate woman. When I remind myself that I am awaiting your return – even while I am enjoying such a peaceful life – I am filled with bright pride. (UCZ: 297) As her husband draws further and further away – noted in the letters by references to Kuala Lampur, Jahore, Java – the wife focuses less and less on him and her longing for him and more on her own activities. ‘By now, you know, I’ve grown rather used to your absence’, the wife writes. ‘Or perhaps I should say I’ve grown quite adept at tending to your absence’ (UCZ: 297). Other wives, other waiting women begin to fill the space he had vacated. In one particularly poignant scene towards the end of the story, the letter writer observes the death
176 Rebecca Copeland anniversary of her husband’s first wife. Had her husband been home, he would have undoubtedly seen to the necessary arrangements. But, in his absence, she and a neighbor woman call in a Buddhist priest and ensure that the proper rites are performed. ‘Today [my husband’s first wife] is attended by two women she never knew – the very thought was so profoundly touching that as I sat there thinking how our fates had intersected, the tears began to course down my cheeks’ (UCZ: 308). Behind the gun, the pen-wielding wife appropriates the husband’s role in an act that reinforces her own self-sufficiency, independence, and humanity. Even as the orchestration of war insisted that women return to ‘the restricted roles of childbearing and nursing and only the work that helps the war effort’ (Marcus 1989: 129), the space made available to women in the ‘No Man’s Land’ of the home front offered an ‘invigorating sense of revolution, release, reunion, and re-vision’ (Gilbert 1987: 201). While presenting her devotion to her husband – in the form of her impassioned letters – the wife nevertheless reveals her complete independence from him. His absence allows her growth, and her letters occasion a forum for the expression of her own subjectivity. Thus, although the wife positions herself in terms of national patriotism, her letters undermine this image by manifesting an individuated subject. Her ‘wifeliness’, it would seem, is but a performance.
Subversive acts To a large extent, all discursive acts are performative. But the epistolary – with its implicit audience (both internal and external) and assumed dialogism foregrounds the performance of self-presentation. The epistolary author ‘(A) must make his letter writer (B) speak to an addressee (C) in order to communicate with a reader (D) who overhears’ (Altman 1982: 210). The letter writer’s struggles to impersonate herself for an absent internal reader while a present external reader eavesdrops from the wings are intensely self-reflexive. It is precisely this selfconscious awareness of self-construction that opens up Uno’s work to subversion. The letter writer’s constant obsession with the suitability of her actions draws attention to their very unsuitability – even while she permits their continuation with her apologetic review of them. ‘What had come over me?’ she asks again and again in her letters. ‘How can I explain myself ?’ The wife’s self-interrogation, motivated by her failure to participate in the appropriate farewell rituals of the day, question not her inability to endure her husband’s absence but rather her ability to do so and to do so well. Her letters pulsate with pride as she marvels over her success. To endure – bravely but barely – a husband’s absence is, of course, the wifely thing to do. It is also the patriotic thing to do. But far from barely surviving, this wife thrives. She grows in the space her husband’s absence has created. To compensate for her unseemly success, the wife struggles to assume a stance of forlorn ‘wifeliness’. Her efforts are described so selfconsciously, her subterfuge slips through. For example, the day after her husband ships out, she stops by the Asakusa Kannon Temple and buys a good-luck
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charm. It was not an act she was accustomed to performing, but it seemed the appropriate thing to do given the circumstances. ‘When, I wondered, had I become a normal woman?’ (UCZ: 279), she asks herself. The answer, of course, is that she has not. Her presentation of herself as such is merely a performance, a performance that is strategically illuminated by reference to it. The letter writer’s gendered performance is flawed by its perfection. Her keen desire to place herself within the housewife fold is so sharp it draws attention to itself. By layering her ‘wifeliness’ on with such broad strokes, like an onnagata with his make-up, she signals its presence and thereby undercuts its authenticity. Elsewhere I have written of the way Uno Chiyo used the imagery of make-up in her texts to signify the hyperbolic performance of femininity that writing women were required to assume in order to render themselves acceptable to a maledominated literary world.11 Make-up served as a mask that reflected, not the woman’s innate interiority, but the internalized desires and wants of the male beholder. Yet, by applying her mask in public, and thereby drawing attention to its presence, Uno subtly challenged the system that would require it in the first place. That is, the self-consciousness of her performance – the ‘I-know-youknow-I-know’ circularity of knowledge that she presents – invites recognition of subversion. Of course, the production of subversion depends less on the writing than the readings. Texts are frequently determined as subversive in contradiction to authorial intent. I am not suggesting, therefore, that Uno Chiyo sat down with pen and paper intending to pull a fast one over the Japanese government. She herself denies any interest in political affairs. Moreover, her text was clearly received as politically benign – bound as it was in a cherry-blossom motif and packed off with departing soldiers as surrogates of love and loyalty. But Uno was, nevertheless, a writer adept at poses and performances. In an essay she wrote in 1936 ‘Moho¯ no tensai’ (A Genius of Imitation), she acknowledged the way she selfconsciously refashioned herself to meet and retain the gaze of whatever man was in a position to give her what she desired – be it money, literary recognition, or companionship. Her essay poignantly reveals the toll on women writers who feel obliged to submit to editorial expectations and then feel inauthentic when they do. Imitators, performers, wives. Someday when I am older, will I be able to get rid of this impulse, this wanting to be a ‘good wife’, without feeling lost? Would I then be able to write my own story? I don’t wish not to be a woman, but I’d certainly like to be a woman whose sense of purpose comes from within. (Uno 1987: 196) The impulse continues in ‘A Wife’s Letters’ where the female protagonist’s desire to receive the recognition and approval of a militarized masculinity is marked – not by powders and perfumes – but by the language she selects. Quintessentially ‘wifely’, the voice is nevertheless distinct, individuated by comparison to others in her periphery: the stuttering bean-curd seller, the no-nonsense neighbors. The
178 Rebecca Copeland performative quality of the wife’s ‘wifeliness’ is drawn sharper still by the reference Shinkichi, an incidental character, makes to a ‘love letter’ a country bumpkin has penned for his horse. In imitation of a To¯hoku dialect, Shinkichi reads: ‘Last year my horse got the call and I cried . . . Now I reckon he’s off on some battlefield . . . I worry about him awful . . . I wonder if he thinks of me . . . Now I’m working a two-man’s load for the sake of my country’ (UCZ: 300). Grieving for war horses was a stock motif in war literature at the time.12 David Rosenfeld, noting the prevalence of scenes depicting the plight of horses and mules in Hino Ashihei’s works, suggests that the animals were used as metaphors for the soldiers themselves.13 But in Uno’s story the use of the parodic voice in this scene shifts attention away from the equation of horse and soldier and centers it squarely on that of the bereft. The epistolary grief for the absent horse – off in service at the warfront – completely mimics that of our letterwriting wife. Moreover, the way the scene is presented in the story – as an intentional imitation of someone other – highlights the performative potential of the letter and the letter writer. Is Shinkichi’s voicing of the horse lover’s griefinscribed postcard any more exaggerated than that of the wife’s? She, too, has provided a parody – her hyperbolic rendition of wifely servitude no less a performance than Shinkichi’s playful pose: the countrified horse lover is as much an oddity to Shinkichi as the submissive wife is to the letter writer.
Conclusion ‘A Wife’s Letters’ presents a paradox. The letters the wife writes position her within the contemporary milieu of war – with its avowal of traditional roles for women and its denial of individual identities. And yet the very act of writing letters militates against the unspecified, collective consciousness the military state would foster. The letter writer, in challenging her husband’s absence, asserts her presence. She succeeds conversely in locating her own voice and demonstrating her own volition where she becomes ‘the agent of her own experience’ (Bower 1997: 24). She uses her pen not only to bridge the gap between herself and her husband, but to reaffirm, to rewrite herself. Linda Kauffmann notes: The narrating heroine is intensely, constantly present as analyst, catalyst, and creator of her own desire. Since every letter to the beloved is also selfaddressed . . . the heroine’s project – aided by her reading and her writing – also involves self-creation, self-invention . . . [S]he transforms herself from the archetypal Woman Who Waits into the Woman Who Writes. (1986: 25) In accord with the dictates of her time, Uno produces what appears to be a patriotic work. She writes of a wife who ‘steels her heart’ in dutiful attendance on a soldiering husband. She imbues her story with optimism as men are sent to the front with vigorous flag waving, and military victories are celebrated with rounds of banzai. But unlike Hino Ashihei, whose literate, sensitive persona
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wanted nothing more than to be just a common soldier – slogging through the mud like all the other men – Uno’s letter-writing wife maintains her difference from those around her and is proud of it. Distinct from Mr Yamauchi’s wife, as alien as Shinkichi’s horse lover – ‘I was special, quite unlike the normal women around me’ (UCZ: 299), she notes. Pushed behind umbrellas, barricaded, distant – the wife is constantly depicted in scenes that position her in solitude. But far from appearing lonely, the wife – by her own admission – grows adept in her singlehood, surrounding herself with her own thoughts, her own voice, her own desires. The letters, though addressed to a man, are hers. The celebration of the personal – in true feminist fashion – is decidedly political.
Notes 1 The term ‘j ugo’ ¯ might translate more literally as ‘behind the gun’ or ‘after the gun’,
2
3 4
5 6
7 8
9
Therefore, when guns are directed at the home front in Japan – during the intensive Allied bombings (which culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) the term ‘j ugo’ ¯ becomes fraught. There were occasions when ‘home front literature’ was purposefully supplied to soldiers. For example, in the Preface to Jory u¯ sakka jikkasen (Ten Selections from Women Writers), edited by Yoshiya Nobuko and published in 1940, Naval Commander Tashiro Kei notes that the ‘splendid and fine works collected herein . . . when sent overseas will serve to encourage the brave martial spirits of soldiers at the front’. One of the functions of home front literature was to remind the fighting man of the fidelity and perseverance of the women back home. The first installment appeared in the April issue of Chuo ¯¯ ko¯ron. The serialization was then moved to the August and September issues of Bungakkai. The Military Information Corps initiated a strategy of drafting writers and dispatching them to the warfronts where they were expected to file regular reports, journalistic pieces, and stories – all intended to celebrate the heroic bravery of the Japanese soldier. Kitahara was drafted in November 1941, just weeks prior to Pearl ¯ ya So¯ichi, Abe Tomoji, and Takeda Rintaro¯ , Harbor. His unit, which included O shipped out in early January of the following year. By March they reached Java, where he stayed until the following December. He returned to Tokyo in January 1943. ‘Ho¯kiki’ (An Account of Honorable Spirits) appeared in Yoshiya Nobuko (ed.) Joryu¯ sakka jikkasen (Ten masterworks by Women Writers) in 1940. Yoshiya Nobuko, the first woman to be dispatched to China as a professional writer, was a close friend of Uno’s, having served as a ‘go-between’ at her wedding to Kitahara in 1939. Among the other women writers to visit either the colonies or the ¯ ta Yo¯ko, and warfields were Hayashi Fumiko, Kubokawa (Sata) Ineko, Nogami Yaeko, O Masugi Shizue. Uno and her husband did travel to China in 1941. But their trip was motivated by tourism and cut short when Uno had to rush home to attend her fatally ill younger brother. As cited in Copeland (1992: 58). In 1924, she published ‘Imo¯to e no tegami’ (Letters to my Little Sister) and in 1927 ‘Sho¯jo kara no tegami’ (Letters from a Girl). In the early 1930s, in keeping with her experimentation with voice, she produced stories with an epistolary flavor narrated by a boy, etc. In 1938, she wrote ‘Koi no tegami’ (Love Letters), which approximates the same style and voice developed in ‘A Wife’s Letters’. Prominent examples of other epistolary-style works from this era include Hino Ashihei’s 1938 Tsuchi to heitai (Earth and Soldiers), written as letters by a soldier at the front to a younger brother back home; and Hayashi Fumiko’s Sensen (Battlefront), of the same year, addressed to her readers in the homeland.
180 Rebecca Copeland 10 With gratitude to Atsuko Sakaki for pointing this out at our June 2003 workshop in Leeds.
11 See Copeland (1994). 12 Joan Ericson notes that in Hayashi Fumiko’s (1939) Hokugan butai (Northern Bank Platoon) she embeds passages lifted from a soldier’s letter home in which he laments the loss of his beloved horse, killed in battle. Hayashi accompanies the passage with her own poem ‘celebrating the sacrifices of this noble steed’ (Ericson 1997: 81). 13 Far easier to escape the censor’s ire when bewailing the cruelty of an animal’s death than a human’s. Rosenfeld writes: ‘The sad ends of these beasts of burden convey the brutality of battlefield death without humanizing it too much’ (2002: 47).
References Main text Uno Chiyo (1978) ‘Tsuma no tegami’ (A Wife’s Letters), in Uno Chiyo zensh u- (UCZ) (The Collected Works of Uno Chiyo), vol. 4, Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ronsha, pp. 269–310: Rebecca Copeland (trans) in Van Gessell and Thomas Rimer (edo) (2005) Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: from Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 779-797.
Other references Altman, Janet Gurkin (1982) Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Bower, Anne (1997) Epistolary Responses: The Letter in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Criticism, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Cipris, Zeljko (1994) ‘Radiant Carnage: Japanese Writers on the War Against China’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University. Cooper, Helen, Munich, Adrienne Auslander and Squier, Susan Merrill (1989a) ‘Introduction’, in Helen Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier (eds) Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, pp. xiii–xx. Cooper, Helen, Munich, Adrienne Auslander and Squier, Susan Merrill (eds) (1989b) Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Copeland, Rebecca (1992) The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ——(1994) ‘The Made-Up Author: Writer as Woman in the Works of Uno Chiyo’, Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 29(1): 3–25. Ericson, Joan (1997) To Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Gilbert, Sandra (1987) ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’, in Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (eds) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 197–226. Havens, Thomas R.H. (1975) ‘Women and War in Japan, 1937–45’, The American Historical Review 80(4): 913–34. Katzoff, Beth Sara (2000) ‘For the Sake of the Nation, For the Sake of Women: The Pragmatism of Japanese Feminisms in the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945)’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University.
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Kauffmann, Linda (1986) Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keene, Donald (1978) ‘The Barren Years’, Monumenta Nipponica 33(Spring): 67–112. Marcus, Jane (1989) ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’, in Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier (eds) Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 124–67. ¯ ba Sachiko (1940) ‘Seisen no takaramono’ (Treasure from the Holy War), in Yoshiya O Nobuko (ed.) Jory sakka jikkasen (Ten Masterworks by Women Writers), Tokyo: Ko¯a Nipponsha, pp. 41–72. Reprinted in Hasegawa Kei (2002) ‘Senjika’ no josei bungaku (Women’s Writing ‘under War’), vol. 4, Tokyo: Yumani shobo¯. Rosenfeld, David (2002) Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature, Oxford: Lexington Books. Suzuki Yuko ¯ (ed.)(1990) Gendai feminizumu to Yamakawa Kikue (Yamakawa Kikue and Modern Feminism), Tokyo: Daiwa shobo¯. Tsutsumi Chiyo (1940) ‘Ho¯kiki’ (An Account of Honorable Spirits), in Yoshiya Nobuko (ed.) Jory u¯ sakka Jikkasen (Ten Masterworks by Women Writers), Tokyo: Ko¯a Nipponsha, pp. 95–122. Reprinted in Hasegawa Kei (2002) ‘Senjika’ no josei bungaku (Women’s Writing ‘under War’), vol. 4, Tokyo: Yumani shobo¯. Uno Chiyo (1987) ‘A Genius of Imitation’, in Yukiko Tanaka (trans. and ed.) To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913–1938, Seattle: Seal Press, pp. 189–96. Wakakuwa Midori (1995) Senso¯ ga tsukuru joseizo¯ : Dainiji sekai taisenka no Nihon josei do¯in no shikakuteki puropaganda (War and the Female Image: Imagistic Propaganda for the Mobilization of Japanese Women during World War II), Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯. Wakita Haruko, Hayashi Reiko, and Nagahara Kazuko (1987) Nihon josei-shi (A History of Japanese Women), Tokyo: Yoshikawa Hiroshi bunkan.
Further reading on Japanese literature of WWII Cook, Haruko Taya (2001) ‘The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzo¯ and Japan’s War in Asia’, in Marlene J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham (eds) War, Occupation and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 149–75. Frederick, Sarah (2002) ‘Bringing the Colonies “Home”: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Popular Fiction and Imperial Japan’, in Janice Brown and Sonja Artnzen (eds) Across Time and Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts, Conference Proceedings, Edmonton: University of Alberta, pp. 61–4. Hino Ashihei (1939) Wheat and Soldiers, trans. Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, New York, Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart. Keene, Donald (1964) ‘Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asian War’, Journal of Asian Studies 23(February): 209–25. Kleeman, Faye Yuan (2002) ‘What Did They See in the Tropics? Colonial Ethnography and Gender in Nogami Yaeko and Kubokawa (Sata) Ineko’s Travel Writing’, in Janice Brown and Sonja Artnzen (eds) Across Time and Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts, Conference Proceedings, Edmonton: University of Alberta, pp. 189–94. Lofgren, Erik Robert (1999) ‘Re/Configurations of the Self in the Early War Literature of ¯ oka Sho¯hei and Umezaki Haruo: Two Sengoha Authors’, unpublished PhD dissertation, O Stanford University, CA. Rubin, Jay (1984) Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
182 Rebecca Copeland ¯ oka Sho¯hei’s Writings on the Pacific War, Stahl, David C. (2003) The Burdens of Survival: O Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Further reading on Uno Chiyo Birnbaum, Phyllis (1999) Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women, New York: Columbia University Press. Copeland, Rebecca (1988) ‘Uno Chiyo: Not Just a Writer of “Illicit Love”’, Japan Quarterly 35(2): 176–82. ——(2001) ‘Needles, Knives, and Pens: Uno Chiyo and the Remembered Father’, in Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen (eds) The Father–Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 215–37. Uno Chiyo (1961) ‘Ohan’, in Donald Keene (trans. and ed.) The Old Woman, the Wife and the Archer, New York: Viking Press, pp. 51–118. ——(1982a) ‘Happiness’, in Phyllis Birnbaum (trans. and ed.) Rabbits, Crabs, Etc, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 133–47. ——(1982b) ‘To Stab’, trans. Kyoko Iriye Selden, in Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko. Iriye Selden (eds) Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers, New York: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 92–104. ——(1989) Confessions of Love, trans. Phyllis Birnbaum, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ——(1992) The Story of a Single Woman, trans. Rebecca Copeland. London: Peter Owen.
10 Foreign Sex, native politics Lady Chatterley’s Lover in postoccupation Japan Ann Sherif
A translation seduces the reader by its offer of an encounter with Otherness: scripts and texts, cultures and feelings, previously unseen, unknown, exotic. For some readers, the foreign language itself may be so unfamiliar that they can only fantasize about the appearance of a page of the original, or the book itself, or even more, the potentially strange body of literature written in that language. If the translated book not only claims foreign provenance, but also has the suggestive title of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the allure increases a thousand fold. The year is 1950. Translator Ito¯ Sei and publisher Oyama Hisajiro¯ collaborate in the production of a Japanese version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley. Even if Ito¯ ’s Japanese translation bore little resemblance to the English text on which it was based, most Japanese readers in 1950 could easily imagine the appearance, the typeface, at least, of Lawrence’s novel in English. Some readers would even have read Lawrence, before the war, when Anglo-European literature was being assimilated into the modern Japanese cultural canon. With the rise of militarism in the 1930s, however, the Imperial government rendered English an enemy language, and proscribed British literature, along with the writings of other Allied nations. After Japan’s defeat in WWII, English again become an insistently familiar presence, the tongue of the Allied Occupation forces. Readers in the 1950s could once again enjoy a veritable feast of translated literature and film – not only British novels, but Sartre, Norman Mailer, and Hollywood. Left to the readers, Ito¯’s translation of Lady Chatterley could have been a best seller in Japan, but it was not the prerogative of individual readers to decide what books from the outside would be accepted. Of the many foreign novels published in 1950s Japan, only Lady Chatterley ended up being confiscated by the Tokyo police and taken to court on obscenity charges. The prosecution and the defense, needless to say, differed in their appreciation of foreign sex and native sex, as well as of what constituted alien literature and native literature. Thus, a major subtext of the remarkable public spectacle that was the Tokyo trial was the changing vision of Otherness in literature, politics, law, and morality in the soon-to-be sovereign nation. In this chapter, I will examine the censorship court case spurred on by the Japanese version of Lady Chatterley, and also consider the concepts of pornography and its relationship to art in Modernism. The legal proceedings and the ensuing
184 Ann Sherif public debate unfolded as a process through which Japanese readers, critics, publishers, and the legal system sought to determine acceptable limits not only for the depiction of sexuality in literature, but also the standards for free speech, the new relationship between citizen and government, and the boundaries of Japanese literature and culture. Before examining the legal case, I will explore the reasons why this particular British novel rose to such public prominence in postwar Japan. By understanding the extent to which print culture under postwar capitalism was in flux around the world, we can also appreciate the Japanese court case as part of a broader interaction of Cold War literary culture, politics, and economy. This chapter does not aim at a re-reading of Lady Chatterley as a text. Instead, I am interested in the ways ‘a text becomes subject to the various, unstable forces that shape the public sphere’ and the ‘competing interests’ that arise as part of that sphere (McDonald 2003: 240). The trials offer us a rare, detailed view of the ways a group of varied readers interpreted Lady Chatterley, and the formation of meaning around this foreign (yet assimilated) text in post-Occupation Japan. Following Chartier (1989) and McDonald (2003), I treat Lady Chatterley here as a ‘mediated material artifact’ and not only as an ‘abstract linguistic form’.1
Lady Chatterley as part of global capitalist print culture English publishers urge me to make an expurgated edition, promising large returns . . . and insisting that I should show the public that here is a fine novel, apart from all the ‘purple’ and all ‘words.’ So I begin to be tempted and start to expurgate. But impossible! I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds . . . And in spite of all antagonism, I put forth this novel as an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today. The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while. (Lawrence 1959: 84)
Though D.H. Lawrence had in mind winning over an English readership with these assertions about the importance of his ‘shocking’ novel Lady Chatterley, his ideas would later have a great impact on Japanese readers in early postwar Japan. From the 1920s through the 1950s, mainstream publishers around the world viewed some of Lawrence’s novels as dwelling at the outer boundaries of respectable, canonical fictions, even as his status as a canonical writer was fast becoming institutionalized. In Japan, during the crucial transition from occupied to sovereign nation, Lawrence’s final novel Lady Chatterley became the focus of a legal and cultural debate concerning the Center and Other of literature, the mainstream and the fringes of political involvement, and the limits of freedom of speech. In the 1930 essay quoted above concerning the controversy over his most recent novel, Lady Chatterley, D.H. Lawrence explains his views on the importance of frankness in sexual matters, not only in the arts, but also in society.
Foreign Sex, native politics 185 Lawrence, of course, did not stand as a solitary advocate of open treatment of sexuality at that time – indeed, Freud and James Joyce can be seen as likeminded figures, and they, in turn, exemplify significant and widespread trends in twentieth-century culture. As we shall see, Lawrence’s outspokenness would eventually take discussion of the novel out of the relatively narrow realm of literary critical discourse and into the courts of law, thus rendering public and political the debate on morality and art that surrounded the novel. Along with other Modernist writers such as Joyce, Lawrence’s fiction enjoyed considerable media attention, and thus his books were ‘news that stayed news’ (McDonald 2003: 228). In legal venues around the world, Lawrence’s opinions and his fiction, as well as his status as a High Modernist novelist of ‘undoubted artistic integrity,’ came to be employed as a means of advocating for and legitimating sexual frankness in art.2 Significantly, the several landmark trials concerning Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley – all test cases for determining the parameters of obscenity in the postwar – came in the USA and its allies England and Japan during the 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, when the USA aimed at strengthening consumer markets at home and within its allies’ borders, as well as at offering evidence of a freedom superior to that of the Soviet foe. All the Lady Chatterley trials, whether in Japan, the USA, or Britain, showcased expert witnesses and defense attorneys who argued against the classification of Lawrence’s frank and detailed evocations of sexuality as obscene. Following the precedent set in the 1933 Ulysses obscenity trial in the USA, the defense labored to ‘consecrate’ the novel as a whole, and especially those passages deemed objectionable, by positioning them in the realm of art.3 Judges provided legal confirmation of the sanctity of the unity of the work of art, thus making respectable language in Joyce’s novel that had previously been considered pornographic.4 The work of naturalizing pornography took place partly in Joyce’s novels, and those of other High Modernists, but also in public and institutional contexts, such as the legal system, journalism, and academia. Yet it took decades for Lady Chatterley to gain the same acceptance as proper literature. The proliferation of expurgated versions of Lady Chatterley (many of them pirated) after the novel’s initial publication in 1929 had revealed that it was somehow possible to remove the twelve ‘objectionable’ passages, and still have some semblance of a novel.5 In contrast, Joyce’s highly unconventional and yet seamless narrative approach, as well as the allusive qualities of the novel, made it a notoriously difficult read, and thus more easily categorized as artistic (Brannon 2003: 12–19). In other words, the artistic merit of Lawrence’s novel was more difficult to establish than that of Joyce’s Ulysses. In contrast to the adulation accorded Joyce, an artist who could tame the obscene with his impressive formal control of language, critics varied widely in their estimation of Lawrence’s talents as a writer, describing him as a genius one moment and a sloppy, repetitive writer the next. A novel’s imagined reader also mattered: T.S. Eliot’s influential emphasis on the parallels to Homeric legend in Ulysses assumed an elite reader with a classical education, one who would not be
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considered a threat to the social order. In both cases, ‘censorship advertised the work of Joyce and Lawrence far beyond the avant-garde audience’, but it was Lawrence’s novel that the untutored reader found more accessible.6 Thus, criticism and reader reception are both essential mechanisms in the transformation from obscenity to art. The controversy over Lady Chatterley’s status continued for more than two decades after Lawrence’s death. This lack of generic clarity arose partly because Lawrence had understood writing as a means of expressing his controversial ideas, and was unwilling – and perhaps unable – to cloak himself with the mantle of pure Romantic genius and virtuosity. Lawrence’s strong objections to many facets of contemporary British society and morality, as well as his desire to improve his country, fueled his conviction that he must produce a contentious novel, one about which he felt certain that the censors would clamp down. In other words, Lawrence regarded his art as efficacious, as having the potential to effect needed changes in society – not, perhaps, as ameliorative of specific social problems, but with the potential for healing grander maladies from which English civilization suffers.7 It was precisely this combination of Lawrence’s fiery optimism about sexuality and concern for the nation’s future that attracted Oyama Hisajiro¯ (b. 1905), the publisher of the Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley, and Ito¯ Sei (1905–69), the translator. Having worked through the strict censorship system of Imperial Japan, as well as under contemporary Allied Occupation censors, Oyama was well aware of the risks inherent in issuing an unexpurgated version of a controversial novel. Lawrence’s message of hope for the future, as well as the chaos of print culture as the Occupation drew to an end, encouraged Oyama to take a chance. Translator Ito¯ Sei had studied European Modernism since the 1920s, and so he anticipated the safety offered by invoking the category of high art from the English-speaking world, no longer the enemy language. As it turned out, Lady Chatterley, far from providing the artistic safe haven hoped for, resulted in Oyama becoming one of the principal figures in the very first Lady Chatterley cases.8 Several aspects of the Japanese trial anticipate the later US and British trials of nearly a decade later. In all cases, the publisher stood as the accused. All of the trials received huge publicity, and signified legal confirmation of significant trends in capitalist cultural production. In the end, though, the Japanese case really took on a quite different meaning from the subsequent trials, one that, in the end, had little to do with the defining obscenity. Instead, the Tokyo Lady Chatterley trial was the first opportunity since Japan’s defeat in World War II for the literary community, publishers, the government, and intellectuals to debate, in a public forum, the means of determining the boundaries of respectability and morality, political authority, and the body.
The Tokyo case in brief Novelist and critic Ito¯ Sei first prepared a Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley in 1935, about seven years after the novel first appeared in Europe.9 Considering the extent of government censorship in 1930s Japan, it is not surprising that
Foreign Sex, native politics 187 Ito¯ published only an expurgated translation of the novel then. Only in 1949, four short years after Japan’s defeat in the war, did Ito¯ entertain the request of publisher Oyama shoten to produce an unexpurgated translation as the first volume in a collection of Lawrence’s best-known novels.10 During this period of Allied Occupation, publishers could not easily anticipate the police’s reaction to new publications. The initial release of the two-volume Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley in 1950 resulted in astonishing sales figures: volume 1 sold 80,029 copies, and volume 2, slightly fewer, with 69,545 copies. Ito¯’s translation enjoyed these tremendous sales in just two months, mid-April through late June, 1950 (Danto¯ 1957: 47). During the Occupation, texts concerning political thought, activism, Abombs, fraternization between GIs and Japanese, the image of the US and the Occupation, all had been strictly censored by the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of the Occupation. The CCD, however, made public its official policy that ‘it had no concern with material obscene or pornographic, providing that material was not detrimental to Occupation objectives’ (Rubin 1988: 170; see also Kockum 1984; Iida 1999: 233–54). In addition, the fact of the Allied victory and the Cold War agenda of the USA and its allies had a profound effect on political and artistic discourse (the Reverse Course crackdown on leftist writings comes to mind).11 Nonetheless, in contrast to Imperial practice, when ‘total state control of the arts was formed on a legal and organization-institutional basis’, Occupation era censorship left some areas of cultural production relatively untouched (Zuschlag 1997: 217). Thus, while the Lady Chatterley obscenity case took place during the Occupation, it was in fact a Japanese legal case, and not under the jurisdiction of SCAP. The Tokyo police invoked Article 175 of the ‘still-operative Meiji criminal code, which threatened purveyors of obscenity’ with a fine and, by postwar revision, a possible prison sentence (Rubin 1988: 170).12 On 26 June 1950, the Tokyo police made their first move in what promised to be a highly publicized prosecution. They confiscated the few copies of Ito¯’s translation that were still in circulation. The police charged both translator Ito¯ and publisher Oyama Hisajiro¯ with violation of Article 175. On 8 May 1951, the court of the first instance convened in Tokyo Municipal Court, with the trial not ending until 18 January of the following year, as the Occupation was drawing to a close.
Pornography as a process, as spectacle In 1951 Tokyo, where the ruins of the fire bombings still remained part of the cityscape, and reports of the Occupation’s Red Purge filled the newspapers, one exasperated witness in the Lady Chatterley trial burst out, ‘Doesn’t the government have more important things to do than talk about whether a single foreign book is pornographic or not?’ Why, so soon after its defeat in a traumatic and tremendously disruptive world war, did the courts have time to fuss about something as seemingly trivial as ‘the private morality of the middle-classes?’13 Far from irrelevant, the Lady Chatterley trial unfolded as a significant public debate over
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Japan’s Others (sexual, literary, and political). At this juncture between Occupied Japan and Independent Japan, the defense team insisted that the people, as readers and writers, have a proper role in defining concepts of art and obscenity, public and private, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens and the state. As Lynn Hunt and Walter Kendrick have argued, pornography is most fruitfully understood as naming ‘an argument, not a thing’, an argument over the divisions between public and private, as well as which forces within society have the authority to regulate the boundaries of morality.14 Furthermore, the idea of pornography has always been ‘historically shaped’ because its definition hinges on a society’s tolerance for the ‘physical, sexual reality of individual selfishness’, which, in turn, foregrounds a subject separate from ‘higher moral authority’. In postwar Japan, as elsewhere, the link between obscenity and the profound political implications of this understanding of the subject/citizen becomes complicated by the fact that sexually explicit materials also ‘provoke . . . commercial interest in the sense of profit’ (Pease 2000: 1–36). Not surprisingly, the trial about sex and censorship became a darling of the media. Newspapers effortlessly garnered attention by splashing the ‘obscenity or art?’ headline in large print as often as possible. Yet spectators and readers did not pay attention to the trial only because of the promise of titillation. Broad interest came from all sectors of society, as shown by the diversity of spectators, defenders, journalists, and witnesses. The nature and quantity of newspaper, radio, and newsreel coverage also confirm the urgency of many themes explored over the course of the trial. The literally hundreds of articles that appeared in national and regional newspapers often emphasized the ‘ghost of the prewar censorship system’, the ‘unfortunate bureaucratic spirit’ of the police, the ‘broad implications’ of the test case, the political and moral ‘responsibility of writers’, and a new ‘political consciousness’ evident in the process.15 Chief defense attorney Masaki Hiroshi made it publicly known that he agreed to represent Oyama and Ito¯ because he realized the trial would be a public forum for him and for like-minded people to express their opinions on the value of the new Constitution and freedom of speech. The trial, he pronounced with relish, would be a test case – not only about obscenity, but also an opportunity for the ‘citizen to judge the judges’ (Saiban: 27–30).16 Except for the translator Ito¯, who was surprised at the full courtroom and the flashing cameras of the newspaper reporters on the first day, most participants anticipated that the trial would constitute a venue where their voices would be heard by the broad public, constituting a potentially significant stage in the building of Japan’s new democratic capitalist culture and the articulation of new values. In postwar Japan, the trial marks the debut of the writer as activist, the writers who saw themselves as ‘an elite with an ability to create a following among the influential literate sector of society in a way that was unsettlingly similar to the ambitions of the state itself ’, to borrow Coetzee’s phrase (1996: 42). For the reading public, the Lady Chatterley trial came as a novelty, as the first big postwar ‘culture trial’ (bunka saiban) to focus on literature and politics.17 The question of whether the Constitution itself would survive the post-Occupation
Foreign Sex, native politics 189 era, given the weakening of progressive forces by the Reverse Course, the depurging of conservative forces by MacArthur, and Japan’s impending independence, loomed heavily. An open courtroom, where the judge did not simply dictate the state’s will, appeared in stark contrast to the pre-1945 system, when censorship of texts had been done by administrative means, and literary trials were extremely rare. Even when a censorship case did go to trial, the case would inevitably conclude with a guilty verdict, a warning to the heedless.18 For most of the nine-month trial, spectators crowded the seats in the cramped courtroom in central Tokyo, with many famous men and women among their numbers: novelists Kawabata Yasunari (then head of the Japan ¯ oka PEN Club), Hirabayashi Taiko, Sakaguchi Ango, Funahashi Sei’ichi, O Shohei, Niwa Fumio, critics Yoshida Ken’ichi (son of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru), Aono Suekichi, Nakamura Mitsuo, Usui Yoshimi, among others. The court permitted Oyama and Ito¯ to form an unusually large defense team, headed by the well-known and idiosyncratic lawyer Masaki Hiroshi, and including novelist Nakajima Kenzo¯ (who was also the head of the Japan Copyright Council and a leader in the Japan Writer’s Association), the Tamakis, two brothers who had both become lawyers, and English literature scholar Fukuda Tsuneari. Among those who eagerly participated as witnesses were social scientists, Christian activists, scholars, journalists, high-ranking police bureaucrats, critics, educators, professors, novelists, physicians, feminists, and grass-root activists. As if in direct fulfillment of Lawrence’s wish that young people read his novel in order to learn about sex correctly, the defense also called a 17-year-old high school girl named Sone Chiyoko, who spoke with great intelligence about Lawrence’s novels.19 A surprising array of people rallied to Lady Chatterley’s defense. Some, such as critic Aono Suekichi, had been persecuted by the militarists for their Leftist or liberal political beliefs. In contrast, Ito¯ Sei had employed pro-Imperial rhetoric during the war, and scholar Fukuda Tsuneari of the defense team, though known as a maverick intellectual, had publicly stated his critical views of Leftists.20 Perhaps some secretly saw participation in the trial as a form of penitence for the literary community’s lack of resistance during the 15 Year War.21 For others, the Occupation’s Reverse Course had blocked other avenues for activism. The identification of the free circulation of sexually explicit cultural products with the level of freedom and democracy depends on the framework of a free market, consumer-oriented capitalist society. The increasing importance of publishers and their business practices in a market economy also come into play, as censorship imparted an ‘aura’ to literary texts and increased their value as ‘symbolic capital’ (Ellis 1988: 35).22 In this context, the Japanese Lady Chatterley case differed from the later British and American cases because the publisher Oyama had no way of predicting the level of legal or financial risk involved, or the outcome of the trial. Until 1949, the police had focused their censorship efforts almost exclusively on the kasutori magazines (the ‘dregs’ or ‘pulp’, cheaply produced popular magazines on sexual
190 Ann Sherif themes that flooded the market in the immediate postwar period). Of late, Oyama knew that the police had met with considerable opposition when they tried to ban texts outside of the kasutori genre, specifically, two best-selling novels: Ishizaka Yo¯juro¯ ’s popular contemporary comic novel, and Norman Mailer’s current US hit about WWII, The Naked and the Dead. Though Lawrence’s work as a whole belonged to elite European literature, Lady Chatterley hovered on the edge of respectability.23 One suspects that Oyama’s decision to release Lady Chatterley, Lawrence’s last novel, as the first volume of a multi-volume edition of Lawrence’s selected works may have been motivated at least partly by desire for publicity and profit. Yet it is hard to find fault with the publisher, given the uncertainties he faced, especially in comparison with the situations of US and British publishers.24 The American publisher Grove Press proceeded with a complete Lady Chatterley only after the landmark Roth Supreme Court decision of 1957 had articulated the legal precedent that pornography and sexually explicit materials were, for the first time, protected under freedom of speech and the press. Similarly, the British Penguin publication followed closely on a change in obscenity laws. Therefore, both the US and English publishers issued unexpurgated editions of Lady Chatterley with a clear understanding that they would emerge victorious in major test cases of recently altered legislation, and that they could enjoy considerable profits as millions of readers were lured to the aura of the ‘freshly decensored’, yet now perfectly respectable, text.
The appeal of D.H. Lawrence in early postwar Japan That this crucial court case, on the crux of Japan’s independence in the Cold War world, had to do with D.H. Lawrence’s ideas about sex and representation is not entirely coincidental. During his lifetime, Lawrence (1885–1930) relentlessly voiced his opinions about morality, politics, modernity, and art, in both his literary works and criticism. He was aggressive, even abrasive, in anticipating his opposition, which, broadly defined was contemporary British society. He regarded the censor as an especially obnoxious symptom of the nation’s diseased state. By the 1920s, publishers had already pegged Lawrence as dangerous because of his early obscenity conviction for The Rainbow.25 Many generations of critics have analyzed Lawrence’s complex and often contradictory thinking about sexuality, Christianity, empire, and gender, and I will not survey his thought here.26 Several aspects of Lawrence’s thought and career are, however, relevant to understanding the nature of the novelist’s appeal to Japanese audiences soon after WWII. Lawrence was particularly outspoken about his views on the connection between national identity, morality, and sexuality. In the 1929 essay ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Lawrence analyzed the nature of that link: I cannot see any hope of regeneration for a sexless England. An England that has lost its sex seems to me nothing to feel very hopeful about . . . [T]he
Foreign Sex, native politics 191 warm blood-sex that establishes the living and re-vitalizing connection between man and woman, how are we to get that back? I don’t know. Yet get it back we must: or the younger ones must, or we are all lost. For the bridge to the future is the phallus, and there’s the end of it. But not the poor, nervous counterfeit phallus of modern ‘nervous’ love. Not that . . . If England is to be regenerated . . . it will be a phallic rather than a sexual regeneration. For the phallus is only the great old symbol of godly vitality in a man, and of immediate contact. (Lawrence 1959: 123) For Lawrence, then, his campaign about sex specifically had to do with saving England, healing England. But healing England of what? The ravages of the Great War, and the industrialization that had corrupted society and made possible in Europe the unprecedented horrors that defined that war? The sexlessness of England, for Lawrence, was symptomatic of the degeneration of the nation, and the failure to recover a right relationship with the life force in the aftermath of the tragedy of the war and of the age.27 Let us look at the opening passage of Lady Chatterley, the short first chapter of this novel about an upper-class woman’s relationship with her husband’s gamekeeper Mellors. This initial chapter begins thus: Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn. (Lady Chatterley: 3) And then the reader is introduced to Sir Clifford Chatterley: She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on leave. They had a month’s honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits. The gay excitement had gone out of the war . . . dead. Too much death and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife . . . But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child. (Lady Chatterley: 3, 14–15) In Lawrence, then, the idea of the body and sex as a means of salvation from the ravages of modern warfare/mass death comes in the aftermath (immediate or not) of WWI. The trope of the impotent, war-wounded English aristocrat and
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his wife who seeks solace and meaning in beautiful and potent relations with men, resonated with gendered metaphors of Japan’s defeat and recovery. In the 1929 essay, Lawrence makes grand claims about the power of sex: it will cure England of its ills, make England’s people whole again, save them from the fall.28 The defense team in the Tokyo trial correctly emphasized Lawrence’s views of healthy sex as sacred and beautiful. They also touched on what we can now see as Lawrence’s rather idiosyncratic understanding of what constitutes sex: he views the phallus as sacred, and, in a narrative of progress, as a means for England to move forward. Not only did Lawrence insist on the primacy of the heterosexual bond, but he even condemned masturbation, the ‘nervous’ love, partly because of the secrecy it demanded, and partly because the ‘grey’ and Puritan establishment and older generation condoned masturbation, because it could be made secret.29 Regardless of the national and psychological specificities of Lawrence’s claims about sex, his linking of the body, morality, and recovery from national trauma found a receptive audience in Japan, which was still reeling from the brutality of war and defeat. At the same time, the Lady Chatterley case spoke to much more than the spiritual war wounds of citizens. Locally, other factors contributed to the interest in the Lawrence novel. First, consider the translator of Lawrence’s novel, for his particular presence as a writer and a thinker undergoes interesting and important shifts over the course of his career. Like many aspiring novelists in the late 1920s, Ito¯ fell under the spell of Freud, Proust, and especially James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, and emulated Modernist writers in his own fiction. Although a prolific critic and author of novels and short stories, Ito¯’s most significant contributions lie perhaps in other areas. For example, Ito¯ worked as editor of a literary journal that introduced readers to the works of Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley. He also undertook the daunting task of translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Japanese during the early 1930s, and published an expurgated translation of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley in the mid-1930s. Whether we call Ito¯’s fervently nationalistic wartime writings in the 1940s opportunistic, unprincipled, or blindly conformist, one is not surprised to find that the man of letters happily rekindled his love for British Modernist literature after Japan’s defeat (Keene 1984: 676). Somehow – perhaps because of his Anglophilia – he escaped from being at the center of the discourse on war responsibility and complicity. By 1950, Ito¯ had already built a name for himself as a prolific and important postwar novelist and literary critic. But the Lady Chatterley trials, thanks to the mass media, propelled him to an even greater fame. After the 1951 trial ended and as the case was under appeal, Ito¯ Sei also published a ‘documentary novel’ called Saiban (The Trial, 1958), which explained in a style accessible to a broad readership, the workings of the legal process, and described in detail the court proceedings. He became, by the mid-1950s, one of the most frequently encountered voices in the literary world (Keene 1984: 683). Thus, at the Lady Chatterley trials in 1951–52, Ito¯ Sei certainly could speak with confidence, not only about the novel under dispute, but about Lawrence too, and
Foreign Sex, native politics 193 what we now call Modernism. The distinguished literary scholars and critics who came to the courtroom as special witnesses for the defense bolstered his authority as a critic. The Modernist artists in whom Ito¯ found inspiration as a young man also harbored a conviction that literature could benefit society: ‘the belief that the publication of a poem or the exhibition of a painting can so triumphantly confirm the creator and so decisively serve the culture’ (Levenson 1999: 5). Finally, Ito¯ found himself drawn to Lawrence’s ideas about sex: ‘I want men and women to be able to think about sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly’ (Lawrence 1959: 85). Lady Chatterley had gained an aura unusual even among maverick Modernist texts. In the Anglo-American countries, Ulysses, and other works that had initially shocked audiences and critics in Europe and the USA, had gathered what amounted to canonical status in the 1930s, when the Great Depression encouraged writers to seek the patronage of universities. In legal terms, as well, the courts in early 1930s recognized Joyce’s Ulysses as art, and denied that it was ‘dirt for dirt’s sake’. In Japan, in contrast, the canonization of Lawrence and other Modernist writers (and all English language writers!) had been deferred by the war. Though not the most highly regarded of Lawrence’s novels, Lady Chatterley was certainly the most controversial. One aspect of Lady Chatterley’s controversial identity lay in its status as a contested book for over twenty years in some part of the world or another, while other comparably explicit texts had gained legal sanction and were freely distributed in the marketplace. Finally, the literary marketplace, along with the increased scale of publishing in the postwar period, were also important factors in Lady Chatterley’s postwar fate. This novel was remarkable for the author’s high degree of involvement with all stages of production and marketing, and advocating for his works. From 1910 until the 1920s in Europe, a number of authors, such as Joyce and Eliot, sometimes used private publishers, and had intimate relationships with their patrons/investors (Rainey 1999: 35–62). Precisely because Lawrence, anticipating a battle with British censors, took the publication on himself (by publishing privately in Italy), he had a relationship to his novel that many of his peers did not. As Richard Ellis has pointed out, ‘censorship confrontations in the United Kingdom and the United States are publishers’ and booksellers’ battles and . . . characteristically . . . publishers were the main courtroom protagonists’ (1988: 27). Given the extent of Lawrence’s involvement in the actual production of the physical book called Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his personal and artistic belief in the importance of the novel, the book’s notoriety is not surprising, even after his death (Lawrence 1959: 83–4). In the Tokyo trial, the importance of the book as a commodity and cultural product was made clear when the publisher of the Japanese translation was found guilty of marketing the Japanese version of Lady Chatterley as if it were salacious material, while translator Ito¯ Sei was found innocent. In subsequent appeals, the guilt of the publisher was upheld, and Ito¯’s intent as translator was also found to be in violation of Article 175. 30
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Literary Others: pornography and art The Lady Chatterley case offered an opportunity for the literary community to reclaim, in a broad public forum, its ties with elite Anglo-European literature, and in particular Modernism, as an integral part of Japan’s cultural heritage, especially in the aftermath of the domestic turn inward (and expansionism abroad) forced by the 15 Year War. The defense accomplished this redefinition partly by identifying appreciation of Lawrence’s fiction as a gauge of the level of Japanese culture. No less than the nation’s pride was at stake if Japan, in a public forum, exposed itself as unappreciative of a European literary masterpiece. The defense team knew full well that the critical reception of Lady Chatterley had been mixed in the English-speaking world, but saw no advantage in sharing this nuanced understanding with the prosecution. Through the democratic forum that was the trial, a free press, and Ito¯’s book Saiban, the defense would share its knowledge of Lawrence’s art and thought with all citizens. In a strikingly original move, the defense skillfully employed social science methods as a tool to distinguish Lawrence’s text from pornography. The trial may have taught readers about democratic institutions, but Ito¯ Sei also held up the proceedings and his own journalistic novel about the trial as a means of introducing the people to a broad range of literary critical theories and their applications (Saiban: 5–6). Ito¯ specified, furthermore, that he imagined the ‘general reader’ as his audience, and, as proof, he stressed that even the pricing of the paperback edition of Saiban was intended to make the volume accessible to a mass audience, reaching as many fellow citizens as possible (ibid.: 5–7).31 His readers would learn about European-influenced literary criticism, but also ‘new, American-style approaches’ of literary criticism (bungaku hihyo¯), ones based on the disciplines of psychology and mass communication studies (ibid.: 6). Ito¯’s claim here is a bit disingenuous because, although social scientific data and method are frequently presented as evidence during the trial, it is not as part of a literary critical endeavor. Rather, the defense’s use of psychological method and mass communication studies had two purposes: first, to align the defense with a rational, scientific world-view (in opposition to the prosecutor’s subjectivity); and, second, to demarcate pornography from art. The defense did not have to try hard to maintain this alignment with rational, scientific scholars. As it turns out, the social scientists presented themselves to Oyama before anyone knew that the publication of Lady Chatterley would result in prosecution. As the second volume of the two-volume translation was going to press, a Tokyo University graduate student named Kido Ko¯taro¯ contacted Oyama and explained that he was doing research on sexual attitudes as part of his studies in social psychology. Specifically, Kido planned to study the extent to which Lady Chatterley would influence the attitudes of readers, and, to that end, requested that Oyama include a reader’s survey in the forthcoming book. Kido worked in collaboration with influential social psychologist Minami Hiroshi (Hitotsubashi University), who at the time was involved in a study of Japanese sexuality sponsored by the Democratic Scientists Association (Minshushugi kagakusha kyo¯kai).32 The survey addressed readers’ attitudes towards Lady
Foreign Sex, native politics 195 Chatterley’s behavior, romantic love, and the descriptions of sexual acts in the novel, as well as the issue of whether the book should be banned (or expurgated) (Saiban: 133, 220–3). Although Oyama initially objected to the question about banning the novel, in the end, he agreed to include surveys in 30,000 copies of the second volume (ibid.: 133). Readers were also asked for their age, occupation, and political party affiliation (interestingly, members of both the conservative Jiyu¯ Party and the Socialists and Communist Parties numbered high among respondents).33 As the trial progressed, both participants and the newspapers took frequent note of the survey as part of Lady Chatterley’s publication history. The vast majority of the 3,000 respondents found Lawrence’s description of sex ‘beautiful’, and opposed banning the book. The defense employed the results of this study of reader response as a means of distinguishing Lady Chatterley from the native kasutori magazines, and of positioning its clients on the side of science and rationality. For the most part, media coverage of the case also sided with the defense. Several newspapers, however, singled out the survey postcard as an instance of the publisher attempting to ‘flatter’ readers into thinking that he cared about their opinions. As a result of this upbraiding of Oyama as a greedy entrepreneur, one of the psychologists involved in developing the survey wrote an article in which he defended Oyama and explained that the goal of the survey was scientific (Saiban: 222). Despite the researcher’s clarification, the prosecution took full advantage of the ambiguity surrounding the survey in order to criticize Oyama’s motives for publishing the book in the first place, and for his decision to include the survey. In the verdict, the judge would also use the survey as evidence of Oyama’s pornographic intent in marketing the book. The guilty verdict did little, however, to sully enthusiasm for the aestheticization of sex, a lasting legacy of Lawrence and other Modernists.34 The combination of data from scientists, along with cultural legitimation in the form of praise for Lawrence’s art by prominent literary critics, further functioned to naturalize sexual explicitness in elite art. Throughout the trial, the defense relentlessly worked to disqualify the prosecution and the police from their assumed roles of cultural and moral arbiters. Repeatedly, Masaki Hiroshi and colleagues portrayed chief prosecutor Nakagome as uncultured, unable to string together a grammatical sentence, and a sloppy, inaccurate reader of fine literature. In the public’s mind, this strategy had the result of undercutting the prosecution’s attacks, and elevating the more literate and cultured defense, people worthy of distinguishing art from dirt.
The Other of the body and sex While the new Constitution promised salvation of Japan, D.H. Lawrence’s novel – regarded by some as ‘obscene’ – paradoxically suggested a means of redeeming the spirits and morals of the citizens. The defense sought to define as
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Other both the prosecution’s regressive values concerning sex and the libertarian attitudes toward sexuality that had sprung up in the atmosphere of liberation immediately after the defeat. Masaki Hiroshi of the defense team praised both publisher Oyama and translator Ito¯ Sei for the following lofty goal in publishing a Japanese version of the Lawrence novel: they had undertaken production of the unexpurgated translation because they were ‘overwhelmed by the decline in morality, the loss of the elevated human spirit, the self destructive, decadent trends, all of which are symptomatic of – or perhaps causes of – the spiritual and material poverty of this nation in near ruins’. As an antidote to this spiritual, decadent decline, Ito¯ and his publisher offered a work of art to stimulate citizens toward the recognition that human sexuality is ‘full of mystery, like the life of a flower’ and also ‘sacred’ (Saiban: 40–1). The defense team also placed considerable hope in the potential of the Japanese version of Lady Chatterley to help Japanese people ‘regard sexuality as a serious matter’ and, consequently, to raise the cultural standards of Japan. In contrast to the prosecution’s insistence that no Japanese readers had the capacity to read the novel intelligently, the defense offered the novel, with its pursuit of ‘beauty and truth’, as a means of elevating Japanese readers. In relation to Lawrence’s thinking, a similar optimistic view of the power of sex had been expressed by British critics in the early 1930s: ‘Lady Chatterley was to state a cause for millions who search for a solution of the world’s problems through normal sex’ (Pease 2000: 163). And, the defense pointed out, the prosecution had not raised charges of obscenity against the escapism and explicit sex evident in the wildly popular Japanese ‘entertainment novels’ (ko¯dan) (Saiban: 34). The defense’s focus on Lawrence’s linking of sex and the fate of the nation found a receptive audience in Japan for several reasons. The team had two versions of sexuality that it deemed worthy of ‘Othering’. First, Lawrence’s elevated vision of sexuality fitted with the aim of various constituents to find a positive alternative to the kasutori magazines and decadent literature that had dominated the market since the defeat. Lawrence’s linking of sex, tenderness and subjectivity also reinforced the postwar revulsion at the memory of the imperial regime’s conscription of bodies as well as its taboo on the senses. At a time when neither the old Imperial values nor the moral standards of the Occupier presented viable long-term models for sexuality, many trial participants referred to pressing contemporary social problems, such as prostitution, lack of sex education, and the morality of youth. Though not specifically articulated during the trial, there also looms the gendered anxieties about the imposition of the Occupier’s sexual desires and the mobilization of a segment of the female population as a ‘floodwall’ to protect the chastity of Japan’s woman (Dower 1999; Molasky 1999). It is tempting to view the trial as part of a linear narrative of modernity and progress, with the defense rejecting a feudal mindset that represses sex and advocating instead an open and enlightened freedom of sexual expression that affirms democracy.35 No one in the courtroom, however, advocated a libertarian-style, absolutely permissive print culture, and for good reason.36 And, even though Ito¯ Sei anticipated that some of the female witnesses would offer the sharpest condem-
Foreign Sex, native politics 197 nations of Lady Chatterley, none of them did. They did, however, raise important questions about sexuality and gender that most of the men did not. The testimony of Azuma Masa, head of a reform school for girls, highlighted significant class divisions between women. While praising the value of Lawrence’s ‘beautiful ideas’, Azuma confirmed that the delinquent girls at her school lacked the literary sophistication to read and appreciate Lady Chatterley. Their level of literacy limited them to women’s magazines such as Romance. The novel, therefore, was not within their grasp, either as civilizing or corrupting force (Saiban: 86–7). Even Etsuko Gantret, a Christian and head of an activist group that fought against prostitution and promoted prohibition, the purity of women, and world peace, refused to condemn Lawrence’s novel as the prosecution had hoped (partly because she would not evaluate something that she had not read). Masaki, Ito¯, and their team welcomed most of all the illuminating testimony of Kamichika Ichiko, a scholar of women’s social movements and head of the publication The Women’s Times (Fujin taimuzu). When asked whether she had read the novel, Kamichika responded that she had in fact borrowed the book from her daughter. She identified the ignorance of ‘more than half ’ of Japanese women about sex, as well as the imbalance between men’s excessive desire and women’s inadequate desire (born of this lack of knowledge), as impediments to women’s liberation. Praising Lawrence for writing clearly about sex, she declared the novel suitable and beneficial for young women aged 17 and over. Kamichika praised the use of ‘the power of literature’ to promote understanding of desire and sexuality. A forceful speaker, Kamichika came close to making Prosecutor Nakagome admit that the entire case was based on his woefully mistaken readings of Lawrence’s novel (Saiban: 97–9). Why were the police willing to place such great stakes in the Lady Chatterley trial? For the Japanese government officials and the police, SCAP’s relatively loose policy on sexually explicit materials meant that the local authorities could stand as ‘authorizer of discourse’ for at least one facet of society – the regulation of sexual expression in cultural production – while the Occupation had chosen to control nearly every other area of print culture.37 Lest their corner on power go unnoticed by the public, the police enlisted the media in order to publicize their efforts at banning books (Kerkham 2001). The police had employed the same legal statute (Article 175) to bring obscenity charges against Lady Chatterley as it had for the amorphous categories of kasutori magazines. Both the prosecution and the defense frequently offered the genre of the kasutori magazines as a negative domestic example of the representation of sexuality, even though the genre had started to decline by the time the Lady Chatterley trials proceeded.38 Prior to the trials, the police seemed not at all eager to invite debate about the standards for obscenity or the law itself. Instead, they handled all the obscenity accusations in a manner remarkably reminiscent of the Imperial era – out of court. The police expected a direct admission of guilt and an apology from publishers and writers. When those in the kasutori business obliged, matters were solved. When the police hauled in Oyama, however, he refused to agree to their definition of Lady Chatterley as obscene.39
198 Ann Sherif The police thus presented itself in the media as morally righteous because it worked to rid society of morally degraded texts, but would allow no one to dispute their interpretation of propriety. The police’s relationship with the kasutori industry, furthermore, proved more complicated than the rigorous enforcement of Article 175 suggested.40 During the trial, the defense managed to reveal that some police bureaucrats and prosecution witnesses had themselves published articles in kasutori magazines.41 The defense team followed a careful strategy of portraying the prosecution as ignorant heathens, offering as proof Chief Prosecutor Nakagome’s poor and incomprehensible writing, his mistaken readings of Lawrence’s literature, and his undisciplined body (specifically, his inability to maintain a poker face during the proceedings). The prosecution could not even read Lady Chatterley as intelligently as Sone Chiyoko, the 17-year-old high school student who had testified. Following from this characterization, Masaki and Fukuda Tsuneari also painted the prosecution as ‘sensual and subjective’ (kankakuteki, shukanteki) in its efforts, in contrast to the defense’s qualities of ‘seriousness, responsibility, and dignity’. Thus, many prominent men had sold articles to the kasutori magazines, but they did not have the same haze of sleaze hovering around them as the prosecution did.42 Far from protecting the ‘public welfare’ guaranteed by the Constitution, the police, through the act of accusation, had rendered a fine work of literature ‘pornographic’ (Saiban: 18, 22, 141, 406, 88).43 The world-view of the prosecution and its witnesses (identified with the Meiji Constitution) posited sex as entertainment, as dirty, as obscene. To make matters worse, the prosecution resorted to witnesses who lacked the mental capacity to conceive of sex as an ‘idea’ (shiso¯ ) (ibid.: 113–14). In his closing statement, Masaki dubs the aims of the police the ‘temptations of the devil that will destroy Japan for all eternity’ (ibid.: 406). In the late 1940s, political scientist and theorist Maruyama Masao envisioned the social sciences as bearer of enlightenment to the people, as the ‘guide to the democratization of knowledge in postwar Japan’ (Barshay 1992: 367). During the Lady Chatterley trial, Masaki and his peers demonstrated their superior understanding of the sexual morality of Lady Chatterley by offering ample empirical evidence gathered by social scientists, thus positioning themselves in opposition to the ‘sensual’ and illogical argument of the prosecutors. Thanks to the influence of social science – sociology and social psychology, in particular – they were able to offer statistical analyses of the appearance of sexually explicit situations in Lady Chatterley and those found in the ‘pulp fiction’ prevalent in the Occupation era. In addition, the defense included as evidence clinical studies comparing the quantifiable reactions of readers to such categories as ‘beauty of language’, ‘frankness of sexual description’, ‘value of the work as art’, and ‘degree of sexual stimulation’ in Lady Chatterley compared with contemporary Japanese erotic books (Saiban: 242). Although Lady Chatterley received occasional comparisons with texts such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Edo period erotic books, most frequently it was the contemporary, native kasutori magazine against which the British novel was obsessively measured. Most often during the trial, the kasutori genre was offered as a
Foreign Sex, native politics 199 monolithic entity, even when individual titles were given. The contemporary discourse on sexuality was much more diverse than this simple binarism suggests. The reading public could choose from kasutori that were pure pornography, but also had access to cheaply produced, yet educational and progressive magazines. They also could easily obtain the philosophical literary decadence of novelist Sakaguchi Ango and Dazai Osamu. Though Sakaguchi Ango attended the trial as a spectator, his ‘carnal’ writing was never specifically mentioned, perhaps because his harrowing tales show bodies too much in reaction to the trauma of war, without offering positive visions for the future. Yet Sakaguchi’s illuminating juxtaposition of the kokutai (national polity/body), as the state brutally regulated every life of the body (as soldier, as mother and wife to soldier, as productive worker), with nikutai (carnal body) resonated strongly with the defense’s arguments. But the latter also proposed an alternative. A new sexual morality must be part of the new democratic culture. The Occupation authority’s motives in placing the regulation of obscene and sexually explicit material in Japanese hands remain unclear. Certainly, it was not because SCAP regarded sex as unimportant. Rather, perhaps the puritanical Americans wished to avoid comment on the suppressed fact of extensive sexual relations between its personnel and the occupied people. Perhaps the strident and often hypocritical voices of the prewar US anti-vice societies still rang in their ears, reminding them that representations of sex, far from being so trivial, present a clear and present danger. To others, however, the Occupation authority’s decision not to place restrictions on obscene and sexually explicit material raised great concerns. Activist groups and publishers, whose motives were not necessarily regressive, also found alarming the rush of kasutori. Some women’s groups grappled with the authorities’ less than nuanced approach to monitoring publications pertaining to sexuality.44 Publishers’ organizations early on registered their concerns about the seemingly unchecked kasutori industry with the authorities. They may have considered the high volume kasutori business as a financial threat, because it sold hundreds of thousands of copies with low overheads. As Oyama Hisajiro¯ himself demonstrates, many publishers also wanted higher ethical and cultural standards for the industry (Oyama 1982: 241). What specifically did the defense want readers to learn about sexuality from Lady Chatterley? We have noted Ito¯’s praise of Lawrence’s consecration of sex, and Masaki’s regard for Lawrence’s desire to defeat the pornographic imagination, that sees sex as dirty, taboo. Lawrence wrote: The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world is grey . . . But even I would censor genuine pornography . . . you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex and to the human spirit. Pornography is an attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. (Moore 1959b: 69)
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The Other of politics If government regulation of obscenity only partly concerns sex, and can be more productively understood as a process of negotiating the locus of authority, as well as the boundaries of public and private, citizen and state, then the Japanese trial of Lady Chatterley was an instance of that very process made transparent. As if to emphasize the trial participants as democratic citizens, newspaper photographs of the trial show close-ups, not of book covers, but of Ito¯ and Oyama sitting on the wooden courtroom chairs, or crowded shots of spectators. As further evidence of the centrality of the process of the trial and its employment of the topic of pornography as a means of voicing many urgent national concerns unrelated to sexuality, I offer the fact that the verdict (guilty) ultimately had little influence on the representation of sexuality in subsequent literature, film, and art.45 In addition, public opinion was highly critical of the verdict. As Jay Rubin has eloquently demonstrated, the defense was determined [to] portray the prosecution as representative of the feudal, authoritarian, class-bound, anti-individualist, anti-human mentality that had suppressed thought and speech and the pursuit of individual happiness in prewar Japan and which had been, as they saw it, ultimately responsible for leading Japan into war. (1988: 171) Not only did the prosecution seek to deprive Ito¯ and his publisher Oyama shoten of their rights, the defense asserted, but the authorities exposed themselves as particularly authoritarian by expecting ‘the people to tremble with fear in their presence . . . Ito¯ protested that under the new Constitution a defendant was to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, not presumed guilty because he failed to go along with the prosecutor’ as defendants often ‘fearfully did in the prewar days . . . certain of the retribution if they did not confess guilt for a crime they had no intention of committing’ (ibid.: 171). The defense questioned whether those involved in the prosecution were, as people, capable of defending the newly guaranteed rights, or if they adhered too strongly to the ways of the past. Those advocating for Ito¯ and Oyama held up the postwar Constitution as the sole means of saving ‘this ruined nation’ (bo¯koku). In the later US and British trials, new legislation may have served as a catalyst for bringing Lady Chatterley to court, but neither the political systems, nor the relationship between the authorities and constituencies – those who made the decisions about boundaries – had changed radically. In Japan, by contrast, the Lady Chatterley case stands clearly as the first postwar literary trial conducted under an entirely new system of government, one imposed by the occupiers whose departure was imminent.46 To understand the extent to which Japanese democracy was then in a very early stage of ‘self-definition’, it is helpful to recall that Maruyama Masao wrote bitterly in 1950 that there was ‘no democracy worth defending in Japan’ at present.47
Foreign Sex, native politics 201 The trial therefore was a significant early opportunity for the diverse participants to present, in a public forum, their views on major distinctions between public and private and human rights and to define concepts that, until Japan’s recent past, had been distinct political Other: the sovereignty of the people, the sanctity of the citizen apart from a national family, the individual’s determination of the fate of her body, sexuality not in the service of strengthening the nation, an unrestricted press, and an open marketplace. The assembled also asserted the intellectual’s responsibility in setting moral standards for all of society. The new Constitution had already established the institutional framework for democracy. Democratic culture, however, took time to develop. In the early 1950s, the ‘normative core’ of democratic culture was ‘formed by social mobilization and broad political criticism’. After 1955, with Japan’s economic miracle, the stabilization of the LDP and the ongoing Cold War, this ‘normative core’ would instead involve ‘consumer participation in an expanding GNP’ (Barshay 1992: 394). The best-known text associated with the trial, Ito¯’s Saiban, states at the very beginning that the author wished to provide an ‘easy-to-understand explanation of the functioning of the law in postwar democracy’, as well as to clarify to the readers the many ways that the law affects their everyday lives (ibid.: 5–6). Ito¯ himself had gone through this same process of re-education at the start of the trial, as his knowledgeable defense team explained to him in detail the differences between the pre-1945 legal system and the present one, the new role of the prosecutors and the defense. Ito¯ attributed some of his knowledge of the democratic courtroom to an American movie in which a lawyer paces restlessly around the courtroom as he cross-examines a witness (ibid.: 211). In this trial, the defense admitted to only two possible political persuasions: on their side proudly stood the advocates of the new Constitution, happy to have sacrificed during the war to receive this gift from God (the postwar Constitution), supporters of human rights, and hopeful for a new elevated morality and culture for Japan. Only a few short years after the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Ito¯ and others who had in their writing supported the Imperial cause were doubtless relieved to be included without question in the enlightened camp. Ito¯ even rhetorically positions himself with those who had been politically persecuted by the Imperial government by comparing the present trial with those that had been conducted in the ‘name of the emperor’. How had the leftist writers felt when on trial, he wonders. He regrets that he never attended a trial of a leftist writer (but not that he had never taken an oppositional stance himself) (ibid.: 13). On the opposite side were the prosecution and the bureaucracy, still wallowing in the Imperial mindset and ignorantly and blindly looking at the world through the lens of the Meiji Constitution. Masaki leaped gleefully at the opportunity to cross-examine Watanabe Tetsuzo¯, the one witness who showed no shame as he praised the Imperial Rescript on Education, and further extolled the democratic virtues of the Meiji Constitution (ibid.: 109–13). A Diet member who served on multiple influential boards and committees, the reactionary Watanabe seemed positioned to influence many aspects of government policy and practice – a prospect that alarmed Masaki.
202 Ann Sherif In his closing statement, Masaki took the opportunity to blast the police by linking them with a name that was an easy symbol of the evils of the militarized state and the shame of Japan, former Prime Minister To¯jo¯ Hideki (who was a scapegoat during the War Crimes Trials, before MacArthur, in 1949, pardoned many others accused of Class A war crimes). The police, he said, had the same primitive ways of thinking as ‘that cruel To¯jo¯’ who had ‘whipped the Japanese people to the brink of extinction’ and who was ‘regarded as a barbarian by people the world over’. Even more insidious was the police’s desire to bind the Japanese people to propriety and custom in order to keep them in a ‘primitive spiritual state’ (ibid.: 396).48 Masaki took it upon himself to remind the prosecutors, with their outdated thought, that Article 21 of the new Constitution states ‘No censorship shall be maintained’ (ibid.: 32). In the defense team’s eyes, however, the prosecution’s worst crime was not its willingness to ignore the parts of the new Constitution that did not suit its purposes. Rather, the police and the prosecution suffered from the ‘sensual’ mode of thought that resisted rationality in political matters and, as we have seen, disinterest in aesthetic matters. In his 1949 essay, ‘From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics’, Maruyama Masao warned against the dangers of connecting desire with politics and art: Most of the writers who grind out carnal or sex-obsessed brands of literature do so knowing full well that what they write doesn’t spring from everyday events in the lives of ordinary people. And it’s the same for the reader. Isn’t it precisely because the circumstances depicted are remote from his actual life that he’s so attracted? In other words, literature constitutes a kind of ‘symbol’ of something he longs for. (Maruyama 1957: 419)49 As a prominent public intellectual, Maruyama’s despair over the future of Japan’s postwar democracy emanates from his reading of an unhealthy balance of the culture/nature binarism (Thomas 2001). For Maruyama, the postwar grounding of literature in desire, the body, and sensuality is potentially fertile ground for a fascist revival, and prevents Japanese writers from creativity based on ‘free flight of imagination’, which would be the appropriate creative basis for a literature of democracy: It’s just that such literature takes the most sordid moments of our sensual experience, multiplies the number, and, in doing so, magnifies them out of all proportion. An imagination capable of such exaggeration appeared to be soaring away in unhampered freedom, but actually it’s grubbing around on its hands and knees in quite a commonplace world. (1957: 250) Maruyama’s influential articulation of anxiety over the tyranny of the sensual and the body in Japanese literature helps us to understand why the defense of the
Foreign Sex, native politics 203 Lady Chatterley case might place considerable hope in the potential of the Japanese version of Lady Chatterley to raise the moral standards of Japanese people. Not only could the defense seek to assimilate a respect for sexuality as a ‘serious matter’, but they also insisted on taking a rigorous approach that differed from the sensuality (kankaku) in which fascism finds its basis, and with which, as we have seen, they associate the prosecution. The determination of whether the translated novel should be regarded as ‘art or pornography’ thus related to the goals of ‘civilizing’ a nation left bereft by defeat. The centrality of literature can also be seen in Maruyama’s linking of literature with political practice. Along with labor unions and other voluntary associations, however, the literary realm was still dominated by patterns of thought and social relations that Maruyama defines as pre-modern. Such emphasis on carnality would hamper the ‘founding of a [proper] new civic society on the ruins of the old order’, he argued (ibid.: 264, 252). One outcome of the Tokyo trial was the revelation of constituencies and individuals who had interest in gaining the authority needed to participate in the definition of a new morality in the framework of a representative democracy. From 1949, intellectuals and activists watched as the Occupation, with the help of conservative Japanese forces, pursued its anti-communist Reverse Course and purged labor activists, politicians, journalists and others. The trial thus became a safe venue for intellectuals and journalists who wanted to voice their political views, but who also feared a resurgent authoritarianism, especially given the ‘depurging’ that accompanied the Red Purge.50 With the economy finally rallying as Japan profited from the Korean War, publishers found paper more accessible and a larger potential audience for their publications. As the erotic magazines had shown, sex sells, but not all publishers shared the revelatory celebration of decadence evident in those titillating rags. Another outcome was the clarification of the means by which to participate in the public sphere; here we see that media spectacle was one means. In conclusion, the Tokyo Lady Chatterley obscenity trial was the first postwar public forum in which writers and citizens could openly debate political, literary, and sexual values. Although the trial was only one step in constructing a new vision of what constituted postwar Japan’s Others, the debate that took place in the courtroom and in the media mobilized rational thought and social scientific method as a means of battling the subjectivity, carnality, and lack of critical faculties of those representing the state. Despite the guilty verdict, the defense effectively confirmed the High Modernist assumptions that aesthetic response should encompass sexual response, and rejected the state’s unilateral attempt to posit subjectivity divorced from sexuality. In the realm of sexuality, the defense rejected the police’s cynical regard for sex as a dirty open secret, as well as the Occupation’s use of sex as a distraction from the Reverse Course, and instead advocated a dignified, informed approach to sex. Finally, in political terms, the defense team struggled to pull Japan out of the chaotic decadence and carnal politics upon which the regressive, recently depurged leaders might base their power. Instead, Masaki and others who participated in the trial tried to demonstrate democracy as lived
204 Ann Sherif democratic values and an evolving ‘political culture, not only as imposed institutions’ (Kersten 1996: 6). Japan’s Lady Chatterley case was thus instrumental in changing the centre and peripheries of postwar Japanese literature and politics, and also in integrating Japan into a broader global cultural framework.
Notes 1 See McDonald (2003: 231–2). My approach is indebted to the scholarship of Roger Chartier, Pierre Bourdieu, Maeda Ai, and Ko¯no Kensuke. See Bourdieu (1993); and Chartier (1989), Maeda (2001), Ko¯no (1992). 2 ‘Appendix: United States District Court Decision on Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. 3 Pierre Bourdieu uses the term ‘consecrate’ (1993: 75, 254). 4 Allison Pease, Lawrence Rainey, and Jay Gertzman establish the significant shift effected by the High Modernists in the generic categorization and aesthetic reception of words, rhetoric, style, titles, themes, and institutional settings of modes previously classified as pornography. 5 For a publication history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, see Moore (1959b). Moore takes note of the ‘recent Lady Chatterley trial in Japan’ and states ‘if the trial had its comic aspects, well, sex has always been a subject that has thrown people off center – even the poised ancients’ (ibid.: 26–7). Two delegates of the Japan PEN Club reported to an international PEN conference in Scotland about the trials during the 1950s, and the English press in Japan covered the trial as well. 6 Joyce Wexler (quoted in Brannon 2003: 32–3). Allison Pease notes that, between Ulysses and Lady Chatterley: Lawrence’s novel is more widely read outside of the university, distinctly because of its reputations as pornography. Both novels could be said to be equally pornographic in the sense that they position the reader as a voyeur to their representations of explicitly sexualized bodies engaged in sexual acts, and engage in equal amounts of historically accurate pornographic tropes and images . . . [Lawrence’s] alignment of sexuality with health, and with a new social order based on bodies as disinterested bearers of an unconstrained freedom, challenged his readers to agree. (2000: 192–3) 7 [Lawrence] effected the incorporation of pornographic vocabulary and actions into serious literature, high art, through attempting to reinscribe aesthetic disinterest as a mode of bodily being. He did this as an extension of the sexological project that equated bodily being with health, origins, and truth. Rewritten into the bourgeois ideology of self-knowledge tempered with cultural value . . . sexual representation in the novel, high and low, have become in the twentieth century the norm. (ibid.: 64) 8 For detailed accounts of the Japanese case, see Ito¯ (1958); Rubin (1985, 1988); Kockum (1984); and Beer (1984). On the history of prewar Japanese censorship, see Rubin (1984); Thompson and Harootunian (1991); and Screech (1999). 9 The first copies of Lady Chatterley entered Japan in the 1930s. One notable portrait of Ito¯ Sei is written by his son Ito¯ Rei, who is a Lawrence scholar and who also did a translation of Lady Chatterley (Ito¯ Rei 1985). 10 From its start in the late 1930s and even, surprisingly, during the height of the militarist period, Oyama shoten had always focused its list on junbungaku (‘pure literature’ as opposed to popular fiction). During the Occupation, Oyama’s president Oyama Hisajiro¯ (b. 1905) quickly expanded his list to include European and American novelists whom the militarist regime had banned.
Foreign Sex, native politics 205 11 See Dower (1999: 429–40, 432–3, 435). See also Braw (1991). 12 Rubin (1988) notes that early police use of Article 175 on a popular novel by Ishizaka Yojiro¯ resulted in public protest, and showed in a poor light the prosecutor’s attempt to censor sexually explicit material written by a Japanese author. Thus, the Tokyo police decided to use a translation of a novel by a non-Japanese author in order to assert to citizens their power to control publication of literary materials. 13 Anthony West, quoted in Ralph (1990). 14 Hunt (2000: 357–8). Hunt writes about the emergence of the concept of pornography as an aspect of Western modernity, but many of her insights also apply to twentieth-century Japan. See also Allison (1996). 15 An invaluable source for the newspaper coverage of the Lady Chatterley trials is the Nakajima Kenzo¯ Archives in the Nihon kindai bungakkan, Scrapbook #28471, and Newspaper Clippings #28465. Ito¯ also lists coverage in newspapers and magazines (Ito¯ 1958: 238–9). 16 Masaki had also taken part in the recent Mitaka trial concerning labor unions. 17 The Lady Chatterley trial was not, however, the first highly publicized legal case of the postwar era, but was the first to focus on literature or art. In 1949, the famous ‘political trial’ (seiji saiban) known as the Matsukawa Incident dominated the headlines. In the Matsukawa case, the prosecution attempted to blame labor union members for a train derailment. Novelist Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968) wrote the well-known book Matsukawa Saiban (Matsukawa trial, 1954–58). See also the special tenth anniversary issue of Chu¯¯o Ko¯ron: Matsukawa jiken tokushugo ¯ (13: 8460), 1959. 18 On the Imperial censorship system, see Jay Rubin’s definitive work (1984). 19 In contrast, the majority of witnesses in the British Regina v. Penguin Books trial were literary critics, literary scholars (including Raymond Williams), ministers, and also included the obligatory 17-year-old Roman Catholic girl. 20 Suga suggests that Ito¯ and Fukuda, known as conservatives, might have harbored deep suspicions about the ‘enlightenment project’ of the early postwar era, and that they only reluctantly advocated the trial as a challenge to reactionary forces that threatened to revive the thinking of the Meiji Constitution (Suga 1988: 180–1). In my opinion, despite Ito¯ ’s jingoistic pronouncements during the war, his youthful interest in Lawrence, his views expressed in detail in Saiban, and his agreement to translate Lady Chatterley in its entirety (at the risk of police reprisal) indicated that his belief in the progressive emphases of the defense team was not entirely self-serving or hypocritical. Kockum views the trials as a form of penance on the part of the literary community that had not resisted brutal imperial censorship (Kockum 1984: 275–6). For Fukuda as maverick, see Kersten (1996: 36). 21 Progressive historians employ the term 15 Year War, dating from Japan’s war with China until 1945, rather than Pacific War (which ignores the war on the Asian continent) or WWII (which omits the military ventures starting in the 1930s). 22 Pierre Bourdieu uses the term ‘symbolic capital’. Ellis’ article details the involvement of Grove Press and its owner Barney Rosset in publishing Lady Chatterley in the USA, for which it was charged with violating obscenity laws in the important 1959 legal case, as well as surveying the changes in the US publishing industry from the 1950s through the 1980s. Ellis contends that ‘the anti-censorship campaigns of Grove Press . . . and others need . . . to be placed in the context of publishing’s capitalisation dilemmas in the mid twentieth century, and need to be seen as cashing-in on the auratic authority of the freshly decensored’ (1988: 37). 23 Ishizaka later authored the wildly popular Aoi sanmyaku. SCAP refused to support the police’s attempted ban on Mailer’s debut novel, doubtless because they wanted to read about the experiences of US GIs fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. On kasutori magazines, see Dower (1999) and Rubin (1985). 24 Because of the bad press surrounding the prosecution’s accusation that Oyama had not obtained proper copyright permission from the Occupation authorities and Frieda
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25 26 27 28
29 30
31 32
33 34
35
36
37
Lawrence, Oyama shoten went out of business. Oyama Hisajiro¯ started another publishing company soon thereafter. Powerful anti-vice societies and their supporters in the USA, similarly, labeled Lawrence as ‘a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would even obscure the darkness of hell’ (Boyer 1968: 228). Of the huge scholarly literature on Lawrence, recent useful collections of essays on Lawrence include Fernihough (2001) and Poplawski (2001). I also recognize the importance of reading Lawrence’s linking of sex and the nation in relation to shifting social constructions of sexuality, narrative, and taboo. See Saunders (1992: 163). Lawrence’s hyperbolic claims about the power of sex reflect the extent to which the author had to battle for open representation of sex, among the many ideas he sought to communicate in his writing. It is also an index of the price he had paid by writing purposely provocative texts and publishing them privately, without copyright protection, which resulted in rampant piracy of Lady Chatterley and tremendous loss of income for Lawrence. Many scholars have explored Lawrence’s complex and often contradictory views about sex. What about Modernism in general and Lawrence in particular would Ito¯ have found so compelling? In his own fiction, Ito¯ had experimented extensively with different formal narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness. Much of AngloEuropean Modernist writing is characterized by ‘continually enacted negotiations between new formal strategies and the unprecedented social matter that [artists in the early twentieth century] sought to absorb’ (Levenson 1999: 3). The 1950s also saw the rise of the inexpensive mass paperback market, and thus publishers and authors could imagine a broader consumer base. Oyama Hisajiro¯ writes that the ‘Minshushugi kagakusha kyo¯kai’ had received a grant of 50,000 yen from the Ministry of Education to conduct the study on sexual attitudes. According to Oyama, he was reluctant, but was won over by Kido’s youthful enthusiasm, as well as his desire to help a ‘new scholarly discipline’ (Oyama 1982: 275–6). I am grateful to the Otaru Bungakukan for allowing me to study a copy of the survey and the original edition of Ito¯’s translation. Suga Hidemi notes the importance of the Lady Chatterley trial as the first big sex trial in the postwar era, but stresses that the sexual attitudes expressed in the later Sade and Yojohan trials differed considerably, in that they sought less to emphasize sexual explicitness as an integral aspect of transcendent art (as in Lady Chatterley) and focused more on affirming pornography itself (‘waisetsu, naze warui! ’) (Suga 1988: 180). As the culture of the Edo period shows, erotica and pornography and a vigorous public sphere can flourish even in an extraordinarily authoritarian regime. Elizabeth Berry points out the possibility of a vigorous public sphere in an authoritarian regime, predicated on severing the link between the ‘public sphere’ and the ‘telos of democracy’ (1998). Indeed, half a century after the Tokyo trial, many of the questions raised about representation and sex remain controversial: What are the differences between pornography, obscenity, erotica, and art? Is there a causal effect relationship between erotica/ pornography and social behavior? Is pornography especially harmful to women? While it is clear that women in particular have long been victimized by many varieties of sexual exploitation and violence, feminists of different persuasions disagree about the degree to which sexually frank texts and films deserve censorship. On the antipornography vs. anti-censorship debates, see Cornell (2000); Williams (1989); Burstyn (1985); and Cossman (1997). In contrast to the CCD’s ‘hands off salacious materials’ policy, the propaganda section of the Occupation, the Civil Information and Education (CIE), made public
Foreign Sex, native politics 207
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statements in 1950 encouraging a ‘purge’ of eroticism. Practically speaking, however, such statements served to encourage the Tokyo Police Department only, because the CCD had already ceased operation (Rubin 1985: 102–3). Barshay uses the term ‘authorizer of discourse’ (1992: 389). Kockum credits increased ‘control regarding the distribution’ of kasutori zasshi on the part of the Japanese police in 1947–48 for the decline of the genre. By contrast, Dower emphasizes the introduction of monthly magazines such as F¯ufu seikatsu that include serious ‘frank discussion of conjugal sex’ rather than lurid sexual liaisons and ‘emphasized that the family was the fundamental unit of society’ (although he recognizes that ‘Despite its serious objectives, Fufu ¯ seikatsu proved susceptible to the kasutori-magazine disease’) (Dower 1999: 164–5, 196). Given the historical circumstances of the kasutori’s flourishing, Fukushima J¯uro¯ insists that the genre differed from pornography. In other words, the thought of the immediate postwar, chaotic though it might have been, infused these texts and their uses of the body. A publishers’ association attempted to intercede on Oyama’s behalf, but the police would not back off. H. Eleanor Kerkham notes the publicity surrounding police efforts to control the production and circulation of ‘obscene books’ (2001: 358, n. 102). Masaki Hiroshi reveals that one of the prosecution’s witnesses contributed pieces to the scandalous Ningen tanky¯u magazine, and was hauled in by the police, who in turn used him as a witness (Saiban: 51–7). The prosecution pointed out that defense lawyer Masaki Hiroshi had also written an essay for the same Ningen tanky¯u. Masaki told Ito¯ that in that essay he condemned Prosecutor Nakagome. The attempt to sully Masaki passed unnoticed, while the exposé of the prosecution’s dubious morality remained vivid (Saiban : 60). In the British case, pornography ‘most certainly had corrupted those charged with enforcing the law against it’ as police accepted bribes and became involved in the ‘thriving pornographic marketplace’ (Rolph 1991: xx). Kerkham points out that ‘women’s groups were upset by the new freedom in this area of publishing [pornographic materials]’ (2001: 341). As Iida points out, for example, three other translators produced unexpurgated versions of Lady Chatterley in the 1960s, 1970s, and then again in 1996. This last translation was done by Ito¯ Sei’s son, Ito¯ Rei (Iida 1999: 234). Despite the 1950s US Supreme Court guilty verdict, no legal action was taken against the subsequent translators or publishers. From Meiji through to 1945, even taking into account the brief but vigorous flourishing of Taisho¯ democracy, the Imperial government had consistently been an authoritarian force that kept tight rein over cultural production, utilizing censorship by administrative means and without means of appeal as one of its primary tools. Such a high degree of regulation of cultural production by a central authority was, in turn, the legacy of the Edo/Tokugawa period. Kersten (1996: 269, 2). It is worth noting that Maruyama’s thought has heavily influenced Japanese Studies in the US writing on the Occupation period; Rubin, Gluck and Dower all use Maruyama’s readings of the early postwar period. Not all present viewed the present state of Japanese democracy in such dim terms. Oyama, for example, thought that the ‘postwar transformation’ had ‘given rise to conditions suitable for the reception of Lady Chatterley ’ in Japan (Oyama 1982: 29). Carol Gluck and John Dower also mention Maruyama’s essay in relation to the early postwar decadent/kasutori/carnal literature boom. See Dower (1999: 272–3).
208 Ann Sherif
References Main texts Ito¯ Sei (1958) Saiban (The Trial), Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯ (references in the text are given as Saiban ). Lawrence, D.H. (1993) Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New York: Random House/Modern Library (references in the text are given as Lady Chatterley).
Other references Allison, Anne (1996) Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics and Censorship in Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barshay, Andrew (1992) ‘Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Maruyama Masao and Modernism’, Journal of Japanese Studies 18(2): 365–406. Beer, Lawrence Ward (1984) Freedom of Expression in Japan: A Study in Comparative Law, Politics, and Society, New York: Kodansha International. Berry, Elizabeth (1998) ‘Public Life in Authoritarian Japan’, Daedalus 127(3): 133–65. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press. Boyer, Paul (1968) Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Brannon, Julie Sloan (2003) Who Reads Ulysses? The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader, New York: Routledge. Braw, Monica (1991) The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Burstyn, Varda (ed.) (1985) Women Against Censorship, Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre. Chartier, Roger (1989) ‘Texts, Printing, Readings’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 154–75. Coetzee, J.M. (1996) Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cornell, Drucilla (2000) Feminism and Pornography, New York: Oxford University Press. Cossman, Brenda et al. (1997) Bad Attitude/s on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler Decision, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Danto¯ Shigemitsu (1957) ‘Chatarei saiban no hihan’ (Criticism of the Chatterley Trial), Ch¯u¯o ko¯ron 72 (8): 45–56. Dower, John (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W.W. Norton. Ellis, Richard (1988) ‘Disseminating Desire: Grove Press and “The End[s] of Obscenity”’, in Gary Day and Clive Bloom (eds) Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature, New York: St Martin’s Press. Fernihough, Anne (ed.) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Lynn (2000) ‘Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800’, in Drucilla Cornell (ed.) Feminism and Pornography, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 355–80. Iida Takeo (ed.) (1999) The Reception of D.H. Lawrence Around the World, Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press. Ito¯ Rei (1985) Funto¯no sho¯gai: Ito¯ Sei-shi (A Life of Struggle: Ito¯ Sei), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha. Keene, Donald (1984) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era Fiction, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Kerkham, H. Eleanor (2001) ‘Pleading for the Body: Tamura Taijiro¯ ’s 1947 Korean Comfort Woman Story, Biography of a Prostitute’, in Marlene J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with Eleanor Kerkham (eds) War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Foreign Sex, native politics 209 Kersten, Rikki (1996) Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy, New York: Routledge. Kockum, Keiko (1984) Ito¯ Sei: Self-Analysis and the Modern Japanese Novel, Stockholm: University of Stockholm Press. Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kansho¯ (1995) ‘Ito¯ Sei to Nihon no modanizumu’ (Ito¯ Sei and Japanese Modernism) (1995) Special issue of Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kansho¯ 60 (11). Ko¯no Kensuke (1992) Shomotsu no kindai: media no bungakushi (The Modernity of the Book: A Literary History of the Media), Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯. Lawrence, D.H. (1959) ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Harry T. Moore (ed.) Sex, Literature, and Censorship: Essays, New York: Viking Press. Levenson, Michael (ed.) (1999) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, New York: Cambridge University Press. Maeda Ai (2001) Kindai dokusha no seiritsu (The Birth of the Modern Reader), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Maruyama Masao (1957) ‘Nikutai bungaku kara nikutai seiji made’ (From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics), in Gendai seiji no shiso¯ to ko¯ do¯ (Modern Political Thought and Behavior), vol. 2, Tokyo: Miraisha. ——(1963) ‘From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics’, trans. Barbara Ruch, in Ivan Morris (ed.) Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 268–89. McDonald, Peter D. (2003) ‘Modernist Publishing: Nomads and Mapmakers’, in David Bradshaw (ed.) A Concise Companion to Modernism, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Molasky, Michael (1999) The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, New York: Routledge. Moore, Harry T. (1959a) ‘D.H. Lawrence and the “Censor-Morons”’, in Harry T. Moore (ed.) Sex, Literature, and Censorship: Essays, New York: Viking Press, pp. 9–30. ——(ed.) (1959b) Sex, Literature, and Censorship: Essays, New York: Viking Press. Oyama, Hisajiro¯ (1982) Hitotsu no jidai: Oyama Shoten shishi (One Era: A Private History of Oyama Shoten), Tokyo: Rokko shuppan. Pease, Allison (2000) Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Poplawski, Paul (ed.) (2001) Writing the Body in D.H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rainey, Lawrence (1999) ‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism’, in Michael Levenson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–62. Rolph, C.H. (ed.) (1990) The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited, New York: Penguin Books. Rubin, Jay (1984) Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, Seattle: University of Washington Press. ——(1985) ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation’, Journal of Japanese Studies 1(1): 71–103. ——(1988) ‘The Impact of the Occupation on Literature or Lady Chatterley and Lt. Col. Verness’, in Thomas W. Burkman (ed.) The Occupation of Japan: Arts and Culture: The Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Sponsored by The MacArthur Memorial, Norfolk, VA: General Douglas MacArthur Foundation, pp. 167–88. Saunders, David (1992) ‘Victorian Obscenity Law: Negative Censorship or Positive Administration?’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (eds) Writing and Censorship in Britain, New York: Routledge.
210 Ann Sherif Screech, Timon (1999) Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan: 1700–1820, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Suga Hidemi (1988) ‘Yokuatsu no sochi ni tsuite: Chatarei saiban’ (The Apparatus of Oppression: the Chatterley Trial), Shincho¯ (12): 180–3. Thomas, Julia (2001) Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thompson, Sarah E. and Harootunian H.D. (1991) Undercurrents in the Floating World: Censorship and Japanese Prints, New York: Asia Society. Williams, Linda (1989) Hard-Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zuschlag, Christoph (1997) ‘Censorship in the Visual Arts in Nazi Germany’, in Elizabeth C. Childs (ed.) Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 210–34.
Further reading Clor, Harry M. (1969) Obscenity and Public Morality: Censorship in a Liberal Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, New York: Random House. Hunt, Lynn (1993) ‘Introduction’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, New York: Zone Books. Hyland, Paul and Sammells, Neil (eds) (1992) Writing and Censorship in Britain, New York: Routledge. Nixon, Cornelia (1986) Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
11 The way of the survivor ¯e Conversion and inversion in O Kenzaburo¯’s Hiroshima Notes David C. Stahl
In contemporary societies, identities and ideologies are constructed and reconstructed out of race, culture and history (Dower 1999: 558). How this is done, especially following major armed conflict, has significant ramifications for responsibility, atonement and nationalism. After Japan’s humiliating defeat in the Asia Pacific War, a master narrative of national victimization exemplified by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was formed, one that forestalled confrontation with collective war responsibility. By means of this formulation, the particular identity and victimhood of hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, were symbolically appropriated for and attributed to the Japanese populace as a whole. In ¯ e Kenzaburo¯ (b. 1935) underHiroshima no¯to (Hiroshima Notes, 1965 [1981]),1 O mines this problematic conflation of national Self and Hiroshima Other, and moves to replace it with a counternarrative urging the deliberate conversion of the compromised former to the more authentic ways of life pioneered by the latter (Kikuchi 1979: 102).2 ¯ e’s reconstitution of postwar identity vis-à-vis hibakusha is closely intertwined O with critique of Japanese wartime and postwar ideology and politics. Through inversion and decentering, he imaginatively reconstructs viable Hiroshima-based ¯ e 1981b: 113–4, 121–3; Isogai 1985: 140–2). Leading up to and alternatives (O during the war, absolute power and authority were concentrated in Tokyo, the geographical center of Japan, and incarnated in the emperor, who was situated at the top of the spiritual, ethical and political hierarchy. According to the te n no sei ¯ , or ‘emperor system,’ everything of importance and value symbolically centered on and radiated from the sovereign, while his subjects’ role was the ¯ e presents the peripheral city upholding of this structure. In Hiroshima Notes, O of Hiroshima as the legitimate postwar locus for serious consideration of issues long neglected by the central government. By basing his reconfigured hierarchy on humanism and ethics as opposed to political, military and economic power, he effectively inverts the tennosei ¯ hierarchy so that hibakusha, the ultimate domestic victims of imperial ideology and authority, rise to the top, and the emperor sinks to the bottom. Before turning attention to these and related matters, it will be ¯ e’s ambitious ethical project by considering the postwar useful to contextualize O myth of collective victimization.
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Hiroshima, Nagasaki and national victimization According to John Dower, ‘the preoccupation with regards to their own misery that led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others helps illuminate the ways in which victim consciousness colors the identities that all groups and peoples construct for themselves’ (1999: 29–30). Following total defeat and unconditional surrender, Japanese people naturally dwelled upon the hardships and losses they suffered when war ‘came home’ in the form of indiscriminate incendiary bombings on major cities throughout the country and nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In time, the latter came to be recalled in collective terms: More than battlefield casualties or the civilian deaths caused by conventional strategic bombing, these two cataclysmic moments of nuclear destruction solidified the Japanese sense of uniquely terrible victimization. The atomic bombs became the symbol for a special sort of suffering – much like the Holocaust for the Jews. (Dower 1996: 66) The foundation for the victimization narrative was put in place in Emperor Hirohito’s historic 15 August 1945 radio broadcast announcing acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration: ‘The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives’ (Orr 2001: 39). And the successful political campaign to exonerate the emperor of war responsibility by scapegoating prominent military leaders such as To¯jo¯ Hideki contributed substantially to the rise of higaisha ishiki (victim consciousness). If a small group of ‘gangster militarists’ were to blame for the national failure and disgrace, then the emperor and his loyal subjects had clearly been deceived, misled and betrayed by them (Dower 1999: 281). And ‘[f]rom this perspective, the people as a whole, and not just their “departed heroes,” were war victims’ (ibid.: 490). Nearly a decade would pass, however, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fully incorporated into the myth of national victimization. It wasn’t really until the Lucky Dragon Incident (1954)3 that Japanese people began to ‘remember’ these cities and identify themselves closely with hibakusha. As Orr explains: ‘by the end of the Occupation many . . . began to integrate the Hiroshima experience into their own identity as Japanese . . . Radioactive fallout from the Bikini tests helped all Japanese to experience the Hiroshima A-bomb victimhood as their own’ (2001: 65). This self-serving conflation of collective Self and Hiroshima Other was given direct expression in the Suginami Appeal, the manifesto of the nation-wide ban-the-bomb movement that emerged in the wake of the Lucky Dragon Incident: ‘Now we, the Japanese people . . . have suffered for the third time the egregious affliction of nuclear bombs’ (ibid.: 52). As Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and hibakusha became integral to the victimization narrative in general, and the burgeoning pacifist movement in particular, they were progressively reified and transformed into icons of exceptional suffering
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 213 O and victimization. Once abstracted (and depersonalized), they easily became objects ¯ e arrived in Hiroshima of political manipulation and contention. By the time O to report on the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in 1963, it was painfully obvious that political maneuvering would result in a major split in the ban-the-bomb movement (ibid.: 60–3). But Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained central to postwar ideology and collective identity: Japan’s unique experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave the Japanese an exclusive and seductive claim to leadership of the world antinuclear weapon movement. Although Gensuikyo¯ , the organizational center of the ban-the-bomb movement, was divided by political factionalism, all parties spoke of nuclear weapons with a sense of mission based on shared atomic victimhood. Cabinet ministers routinely declared Japan to be the ‘only country in the world to have suffered an atomic bombing (sekai yuiitsu no hibakukoku)’. (ibid.: 36–7) What is most striking and disturbing in all this is the virtual disappearance of Abomb survivors themselves. If hibakusha figure at all in such politicized discourses, they do so more as appropriated symbolic objects than individualized human subjects. And conspicuously absent from these partial formulations were not only hibakusha, but also their perspectives on their experience of the bomb, how they dealt with it and what they managed to make of it as they struggled to survive its ¯ e Kenzaburo¯ insidious after-effects. It is precisely to such neglected subjects that O directs attention in Hiroshima Notes.
Hiroshima ‘outsiders’, Hiroshima ‘insiders’ ¯ e himself was in the midst of a personal crisis when he accepted a request from O the literary journal Sekai to travel to Hiroshima to report on the Ninth World Conference. His son, Hikari, had been born with a serious brain abnormality, ¯ e had to decide whether to proceed with a risky operation that would leave and O him severely handicapped at best. To make matters worse, his editor and traveling companion Yasue Ryo¯suke had recently suffered the loss of his daughter, and both men had just learned that a mutual friend living in Paris had hung himself after becoming obsessed with the prospect of a global nuclear conflict that would destroy the world. This, combined with the anticipated disintegration ¯ e profoundly devitalized, depressed of the anti-nuclear peace movement, left O and melancholy (yu¯utsu ). After a week in Hiroshima, however, he encountered sources of hope and inspiration. The key to recovery and renewal was direct, personal interactions with A-bomb survivors.4 ¯ e takes pains to maintain a clear distinction between himself and hibakusha. O In the ‘Prologue’ to Hiroshima Notes, he introduces a letter he received from Matsusaka Yoshitaka:
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David Stahl People in Hiroshima prefer to remain silent until they face death. They want to have their own life and death . . . Almost all thinkers and writers have said that it is not good for the A-bomb survivors to remain silent; they encourage us to speak out. I detest those who fail to appreciate our feelings about silence . . . It is only natural, I think, that the anti-war people who spend only one day in Hiroshima on August 6 do not understand the survivors’ feelings. (pp. 4–5;19–20)5
¯ e’s Hiroshima essays were being serialized at the time he received this letter, O and he realized that he himself was the primary target of Matsusaka’s anger and ¯ e is quick to acknowledge the legitimacy of this frustration. Nonetheless, O Hiroshima ‘insider’s’ critique of himself as a Hiroshima ‘outsider’. ¯ e intentionally avoided conflating himself with hibakusha. His primary O concern was with intersubjectivity, with what they could teach him (and by extension other ‘outsiders’) about himself, his values and how he could live more genuinely and positively in the nuclear age, and what he could do to help assuage their suffering, contribute to their causes, and make their experience meaningful. Through close, interpersonal relations, he sought not only to become more critically self-aware, but also to reform himself by scrutinizing his own image as reflected in the ‘mirror’ of his Hiroshima Other: I was deeply impressed by the truly human way of life and thinking of the people of Hiroshima, and I was directly encouraged by them. In contrast, I experienced only pain upon exposing the roots of decadence and seeds of neurosis growing deep within me from my relationship with my son in the incubator. Thus it was that I came to want to employ Hiroshima and the truly human people who lived there as files (yasuri) to work on my inner hardness . . . I aspired to refine and reconsider my own thinking, sensibilities and morality by employing Hiroshima as both file and lens. ¯ e 1965: 3) (O The significance of this deliberate repositioning and reconsideration of Self vis-à-vis Hiroshima Other is best understood in terms of conversion. This, in ¯ e characterized his experience in the 1995 ‘Introduction’ fact, is exactly how O to the English translation: By the end of my first week in Hiroshima . . . my attitude toward my personal life had been fundamentally changed. The Hiroshima experience also completely altered my literary work. So in a single week a decisive turnabout took place in my life – eschewing all religious connotations, I would call it a conversion. (p. 8) ¯ e leaves little doubt that this reorientation Toward the end of Hiroshima Notes, O had significant implications for identity: ‘By taking Hiroshima as the fundamental
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 215 O focus of my thought, I want to confirm that I am, above all, a Japanese writer’ (pp. 182; 180).
Hibakusha experience and meaning ¯ e approaches hibakusha experience primarily in terms of profound, ongoing O suffering, silence and expression, despair and suicide, and survival and activism. The first of these aspects has not been adequately appreciated. Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ have been reluctant to face the cost, in human terms, of the use of atomic weapons. Fascination, even thralldom, with their incomprehensible power ¯e has greatly inhibited realization of the full extent of the suffering they inflict. O repeatedly returns to the fact that Hiroshima ‘insiders’ stress that people should not think of atomic bombs in an awed, detached and technical manner, but instead do so in terms of human misery. In the words of hibakusha poet Shoda Shinoe: ‘The atomic bomb is known to all the world, but only for its power. It still is not known what hell the Hiroshima people went through, nor how they continue to suffer from radiation illnesses even today, nineteen years after the bombing’ (pp. 168; 166). ¯e To enable a better sense of the existential experience of A-bomb survivors, O introduces a brief but poignant note composed by Miyamoto Sadao shortly before his death: ‘I appeal from Hiroshima, where mankind experienced the atomic bomb for the first time, for even today many people are suffering from leukemia, anemia, and liver disorders; and they are struggling toward a miserable death’ ¯ e interprets the last part of Miyamoto’s statement as follows: ‘this (pp. 51; 62). O does not mean to struggle in order to die, or to try to keep from dying or even to struggle to gain new life; it means to struggle along the way toward a miserable death, or until meeting a miserable death’ (pp. 87; 95). Once hibakusha develop symptoms of radiation sickness, they face a terrible decision. As Matsusaka explains: I’m not sure which is the better means for hibakusha to regain their humanity: doing everything they can to stay alive until the after-effects of the atomic bomb finally end their lives or cleanly taking their own lives like Haraguchi [Kikuya] and [another important survivor-writer] Hara Tamiki. (p. 8) ¯ e asserts that Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ have no right to judge those who would follow O the latter course. After describing how a young woman killed herself after seeing ‘myeloid leukemia’ written on her hospital chart, he states that: ‘None of us survivors can morally blame her. We have only the freedom to remember the existence of “people who do not kill themselves in spite of their misery”’ (pp. 76; 84). ¯ e is understanding of, and sympathetic toward, those who would act to bring O an end to their extraordinary suffering, but he is most strongly drawn to hibakusha who find ways of carrying on proactively. What he finds so impressive and
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inspiring is that, even after being subjected to one of the cruelest, most dehumanizing experiences in human history, they do not succumb to ‘victim ¯ e, the crucial factor in this regard is their consciousness’. According to O determination to make their traumatic experience meaningful (Lifton 1996: 176–7). Despite Matsusaka’s legitimate assertion concerning A-bomb survivors’ fundamental right to silence, one cannot help but notice that it is by breaking silence himself that he is able to effectively convey the feelings of fellow hibakusha and, in so doing, perhaps also give significance to his own A-bomb experience. Held in Hiroshima in 1955, the First World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs gave hibakusha an important opportunity for public expression. For Murato Yoshiko, it was a major turning point in her life. Exposed to the atomic blast as a child, she was left with unsightly keloid scars on her face. Like other ‘Hiroshima Maidens’, she stayed at home to conceal her disfigurement. The discovery that there were others who suffered as she did, however, enabled her to overcome her own shame and misery: After the long, dark, and silent days of intense, isolated, individual suffering, the First World Conference gave the people in Hiroshima their first chance to speak out, and with each other. How often I heard them refer to it as ‘an epoch-making event’. That conference not only gave direction to the peace movement in Japan and in the world; it also gave the A-bomb survivors an opportunity to regain their humanity . . . [it] occasioned a human revolution among [them]. (pp. 161; 159) ¯ e characterizes Murato as a ‘typical unsurrendered hibakusha’, and he goes on to O describe her experience specifically in terms of conversion: Grasping the opportunity afforded by the First World Conference, Miss Murato recovered from the neurotic condition which had made her turn toward the past and live in absolute privacy; she became capable of dealing with the present and the future . . . The disfigured young girls who endured the hot sun as they stood on the platform at the world conference, we must realize, were persons who had experienced a conversion (kaishin) that made it possible for them to admit openly their condition . . . Miss Murato spoke of the peace movement participants’ wish that ‘other people not be made to taste the same suffering’ as had the A-bomb maidens and other A-bomb survivors. (pp. 161–2; 160) After discussing the varied responses of young women disfigured by keloid scar¯ e reveals the inner dynamics of this selfring (seclusion, retaliatory wishes), O transformation: ‘They are people who take the misery inflicted upon them by the atomic bomb and convert it from a passive into an active force; they use their
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 217 O shame and humiliation as weapons in the movement against nuclear arms’ (pp. 100; 106). ¯e A similar process was at work in the conduct of Miyamoto Sadao. When O first traveled to Hiroshima in the summer of 1963, he watched Miyamoto emerge from the main entrance of the A-bomb Hospital to greet and encourage peace marchers. In a ‘mosquito-like voice’, with head held high and straight ‘like an Awa doll’ he made a simple statement: ‘I believe the Ninth World Conference ¯ e returned the following summer, will be a success’ (pp. 24; 37). By the time O ¯ Miyamoto had died of ‘general prostration’. Oe reflects that: Perhaps this small, zealous patient, at risk to his own already endangered life, had chosen to contribute to the anti-nuclear movement by speaking a few encouraging words; and thus he possibly hoped to cast away fear of his impending death and the anxiety that his life would end meaninglessly on a hospital bed. (pp. 49; 60) ¯ e subsequently elaborates on the significance and broader implications of O Miyamoto’s willingness to expend the last of his vital resources contributing to the ban-the-bomb movement: He dared to remember history’s worst human misery, and he wrote down his reflections on it . . . Rather than escape Hiroshima, he accepted it. For whose sake? For the sake of all other human beings, for all who would remain after he met his own miserable death. His passion stemmed from his frank recognition that his own death was inevitable . . . If survivors would overcome their fear of death, they too must see some way of giving meaning to their own deaths. Thus, the dead can survive as part of the lives of those who still live. (pp. 105–6; 111)
Ethics, dignity and responsibility ¯ e was deeply impressed, inspired and encouraged by hibakusha who coped with O their suffering and misery by working for the benefit of others. He believed that such exemplary Hiroshima ‘insiders’ were living repositories of the genuine humanism, ethics and responsibility woefully lacking in the populace and ¯ e treats hibakusha not as abstracted symbols of collective country as a whole. O victimization, but as positive, individualized role models for the nuclear age. This can be seen in his comments about Moritaki Ichiro¯, representative director of the Hiroshima Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and leader of the ¯ e characterizes Moritaki as an ‘old national organization of A-bomb survivors. O philosopher’ who, in the words of his wife, ‘simply devoted himself to the antinuclear movement and to the association of A-bomb survivors because . . . [he] thinks that to do so is the moral imperative of our time’ (pp. 40; 53). He adds that ‘There are those, then, who try to deal with these crucial problems in moral
218 David Stahl terms; and I find it most inspiring that those who do so are among the true Hiroshima people’ (pp. 55: 66). John Treat has correctly drawn attention to the fact that the ‘ideas contained ¯ e’s own, are phrased in a lexicon rather in [Hiroshima] Notes, while uniquely O starkly and conspicuously existentialist in character’ (Treat 1995: 231). This ¯ e’s work is readily apparent in his portrayal of an elderly important aspect of O woman involved in the Hiroshima Mother’s Group, and Dr Shigeto¯ Fumio, director of both the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital and A-bomb Hospital. After describing the former as one who ‘speaks her mind boldly’, he characterizes her as follows: Now, this old woman has no connection whatsoever with any authoritarian belief or value system. She is a stubborn, independent-minded person who bases her judgments on what she sees with her own eyes and hears with her own ears. She has no use for dogmatic or conventional ideas; she has seen too many people struggle to overcome difficulties which established ideas and norms could not have solved anyway. (pp. 73; 82) His comments concerning Dr Shigeto¯ are in a similar vein: ‘He strives to do his best, but he does not appeal to or rely on external authority’ (pp. 94; 101). Like other A-bomb survivors, Dr Shigeto¯ and the elderly activist in the Hiroshima Mother’s Group experienced the breakdown of external physical and internal symbolic worlds that abruptly placed them in a state of extremity from ¯ e, they did so in such which they had to rebuild starting from ‘ground zero’. To O immediate, concrete and personal ways that they became paragons of postwar humanism and morality: In talking with A-bomb survivors . . . and hearing about what they have been through and how they feel about things now, I have come to realize that they, one and all, possess unique powers of observation and expression concerning what it means to be human. I have noticed that they understand in very concrete ways such words as courage, hope, sincerity, and even ‘miserable death’. The way they use these terms makes them what in Japanese has traditionally been called ‘interpreters of human nature’, and what today would translate as ‘moralists’. The reason they became moralists is that they experienced the cruelest days in human history and have endured nineteen years since. (pp. 70; 78) ¯ e’s treatment of particular hibakusha groups and individuals Consideration of O facilitates understanding of why he would approach Hiroshima ‘insiders’ in this way. The doctors’ immediate response to the nuclear catastrophe is a good case in point. Their first thoughts upon realizing that they had survived themselves were of others:
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 219 O A handful of doctors, some of them injured and all surrounded by a city full of casualties, had the brute courage to care for over a hundred thousand injured people with only oil and mercurochrome. The very recklessness of the doctors’ courage was the first sign of hope in Hiroshima. (pp. 121; 124–5) ¯ e portrays Miyamoto Sadao and young hibakusha mothers in a similar light. O These individuals simply refused to allow their lives to be completely circumscribed by their exposure to the bomb. Eschewing the role of victim – the adoption of which would have been completely reasonable and understandable given the circumstances – they had the stoic fortitude to affirm themselves and actively seek to shape their own destinies (pp. 171; 169). As previously mentioned, Miyamoto Sadao dared to hope that the anti-nuclear movement would succeed, and he sought to contribute to it in his own modest way. Recalling his description, ‘people who go on struggling toward a miserable ¯ e writes: death’, O As I understand it, Mr. Miyamoto left this phrase with the strongest sense of humanism, for he did not himself lose courage even while struggling for nothing more than to give meaning to the time until his own death came. It is just this understanding that the existentialists first made clear. In this sense, Mr. Miyamoto is representative of the moralists of Hiroshima. (pp. 87; 95–6) ¯ e writes about were similar to Miyamoto in this regard. The young mothers O They dared hope that, despite irradiation, they might still be blessed with normal ¯ e recounts the stories of two Hiroshima mothers who suffered oppochildren. O site experiences. The first, exposed to the bomb as an infant, was symptom-free until diagnosed with leukemia about the time of her eighteenth birthday. Despite her serious illness, she fell in love, married and tried to have a baby. In ¯ e is deeply impressed by this young the end, however, she died during delivery. O woman’s way of living: ‘I think such courage in the face of desperate anxiety may be called truly human; it shows both human weakness and human strength. I pray that this mother’s new baby will grow up healthy as a sign of true hope’ (pp. 47: 58). ¯ e introduces survived delivery, her While the other young hibakusha mother O baby did not. Upon being informed that her child was stillborn, she asked if she could see it. When permission was denied, she lamented: ‘If only I could see my ¯ e is shocked and moved by this young baby, I would have courage’ (pp. 74: 83). O mother’s utterance: I was astonished by the word ‘courage’ in her otherwise grief-stricken and hopeless statement. The word belongs among those which have been given a new depth of meaning by the existentialists. The hospital policy of not showing deformed stillborn babies to their mothers is certainly humane. Limits need to be maintained on what we are allowed to see so that we will
220 David Stahl remain human. But if a mother wants to see her dead deformed child so as to regain her own courage, she is attempting to live at the minimum limit under which a human being can remain human. This may be interpreted as a valiant expression of humanism beyond popular humanism – a new humanism spouting from the misery of Hiroshima. (pp. 74–5; 83) ¯ e writes about here demands the fortitude to squarely The ‘new humanism’ O face, acknowledge and accept the consequences, in excruciatingly human terms, of the usage of nuclear arms. And the following question naturally comes to mind: If the ultimate victims of such atrocious attacks have the strength and courage to do so, how can Hiroshima ‘outsiders’, who in future could find themselves in similar straits, afford not to? ¯ e writes that dignity (igen) is the most important human quality he discovered O in Hiroshima (pp. 91; 98). This attribute, one shared by the hibakusha depicted in Hiroshima Notes , stems from refusal to submit to despair or self-pity, taking personal responsibility for their lives and acting in such a way as to make their terrible suffering and losses meaningful. It is the product, in short, of a conscious decision not to take on the role of passive victim or to blame others, but to live as fully and productively as humanly possible: People who continue to live in Hiroshima, instead of keeping silent or forgetting about the extreme tragedy of human history, are trying to speak out about it, study it and record it . . . Outsiders can hardly comprehend the scope and intensity of the Hiroshima people’s feelings – including the personal aversion to public exposure which they must conquer in order to carry out this task . . . how modest and restrained they are in making their testimony. It is by no means strange that all these Hiroshima people should possess an unmistakable dignity. Only through lives like theirs do dignified people emerge in our society. (pp. 107–8; 112–3) One clear indication of the presence of such dignity is the capacity to face and openly interact with Hiroshima ‘outsiders’. As implied in the discussion of ‘Hiroshima Maidens’, this posed special difficulties for disfigured A-bomb survivors. In order to appear calmly and confidently before people not directly affected by the bomb, they had to accept their present condition and overcome ¯ e, dignity and shame are two sides of the intense shame they felt about it. For O the same coin. His handling of the experience of an elderly, disabled A-bomb survivor who attempted to kill himself in front of the Memorial Cenotaph makes this clear. Hoping that the stir caused by his public self-sacrifice would help prevent the resumption of Soviet nuclear testing, he attempted, but failed to fully carry through with, ritual suicide (seppuku). He was subsequently tormented by a sense of failure and dishonor. His dignity, however, was substantiated by the extent of his shame (pp. 98; 104):
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 221 O [H]e surely had human dignity, despite his sense of failure. It is dignity like this that captivates my mind. To put it bluntly, he was left with nothing but human dignity. When I think of the old man’s failed suicide, his ignored protest, his long time abed in the hospital, and then try to identify what significance such a life had, the answer is clear: the value of his life lay precisely in the human dignity that he achieved in his miserable old age. Reduced to lying in a hospital bed with a big scar on his abdomen, still he could face with dignity all people without keloid scars, that is to say, all people everywhere who had no experience of the atomic bomb. (pp. 92; 99) ¯ e implicitly asks here, of course, is: Can Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ do The question O ¯ e subsequently addresses his readers the same for their hibakusha counterparts? O more directly: ‘How can we understand the sense of shame that the A-bomb survivors feel about their experiences, without also being ashamed of ourselves? What a frightening inversion (tento¯ ) of feeling!’ (pp. 99; 105). ¯ e’s reconstruction of ideology and its implicaIn preparation for turning to O tions for identity and action, it will be helpful to consider the crucial issue of responsibility. His treatment of the experience and conduct of a young male Abomb survivor and a young woman from Tokyo reveals much about the ¯e relationship between Hiroshima ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in this regard. When O revisited the A-bomb Hospital early in 1965, Dr Shigeto¯ told him about a youth who had recently died of leukemia. Much like the Hiroshima mother described earlier, he had been exposed to the atom bomb as a child, but had not developed symptoms of radiation sickness until coming of age. He, too, resolved to live out the time remaining to him as positively and proactively as he could. He found a job through the good offices of his doctors. He also fell in love and became engaged. Before long, however, his symptoms worsened, he was rehospitalized, and he died in agony. ¯ e reflects on this young man’s experience in terms of collective accountO ability: Only a child of four when exposed to the atomic bomb, the youngster had no responsibility for the war, nor could he have possibly comprehended the sudden, vicious atomic attack. Yet, twenty years later, he bore the nation’s responsibility in his own body. Even as a child of four he was a citizen of his country; thus, he was embroiled in the tragic consequences of his country’s worst decisions. (pp. 153; 152) These comments clearly suggest that while the young man in question did not view himself as such, he could justifiably be considered a ‘pure victim’. Indeed, ¯ e’s conviction that responsibility is ultihis very innocence serves to accentuate O mately a collective matter.
222 David Stahl ¯ e moves to bring this important point home through interpretation of the O actions of the young man’s fiancée: [She] was a child of the postwar era of peace. Yet she chose, of her own volition, to share the destiny of this young A-bomb survivor; and when death took him, she tried to assume full responsibility for him by taking her own life . . . By her action, this young girl overturned (gyakuten) the false values of the nation – specifically, the betrayal of the powerless persons who were sacrificed by the nation itself . . . She honored his death with the dignity of her own, choosing a death so completely individual as to exclude all trace of the nation that made her lover vulnerable when but a child to atomic attack and in adulthood to fatal illness . . . Her feelings could have been turned into bitter denunciation of us, the survivors and of our political values and system. But the young girl left in silence, without recrimination, as if to dismiss all charges against the world. (pp. 153–4; 152–3) The contrast between the conduct of this young woman and other Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ willing to symbolically appropriate hibakusha identity and victimhood in order to evade honest confrontation with issues of individual and collective ¯ e’s ethical war responsibility could hardly be more glaring. Conspicuous in O reading of this young woman’s behavior is indictment not only of the nation as a whole, but also of ‘us, the survivors’ and ‘our political values and system’. And it is telling that he writes about her behavior in terms of ‘inverting’ distorted ¯ e himself national and political values and structures; this is precisely what O subtly does in Hiroshima Notes.
The way of the survivor ¯ e was making his annual trips to Hiroshima between 1963–65, it must have As O seemed that there was a high probability that atomic weapons would again be used. He consequently sought to intervene and redirect his nation and people by impressing upon them the unconscionable human cost of nuclear arms, and by positing an alternative national ideology centered on Hiroshima. In contrast to the explicit wartime aim of forcibly bringing the ‘eight corners of the world’ ¯ e’s around to the particularistic Imperial Way (hakko¯ichiu ), the primary goal of O ideological campaign was to encourage people of themselves to take up the universalistic ‘Way of the Survivor’. ¯ e, the most appropriate locus for the crusade against nuclear According to O arms was not the Imperial Palace or Diet Building in Tokyo, but the A-bomb and Red Cross Hospitals in Hiroshima containing the ‘core of human misery’ the first use of such weapons had produced. And the legitimate leaders of this new postwar cause were not the emperor, neo-nationalist politicians or Self-Defense Force officers, but dedicated Japanese citizens working at the local, grass-roots ¯ e implicitly places Dr Shigeto¯ Fumio, and Chugoku level. O ¯ shinbun editorial writer
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 223 O and activist Kanai Toshihiro, at the top of this reconfigured hierarchy based on humanism, ethics and responsibility. ¯ e describes Dr Shigeto¯ as a ‘big-hearted man of action with simple, peasantO like features and a deep, frank voice’ (pp. 32; 45). He is ‘unadorned’, ‘unpretentious’, a ‘genuine humanist’, and a man of great dignity (pp. 94; 101). What makes this physician such an exemplary human being is his humanitarianism, ethics and sense of personal responsibility. He arrived in Hiroshima to take up his position as director of the Red Cross Hospital just days before the nuclear attack. He was near the Hiroshima Railroad Station when the atomic bomb exploded, and he was knocked to the ground and wounded. After struggling to his feet, he rushed to the Red Cross Hospital, where he immediately began to coordinate and take part in the relief effort. This experience ‘linked him to Hiroshima for life and made him a genuine Hiroshima man’ (pp. 125; 128). In contrast to the emperor, Dr Shigeto¯ took personal responsibility for Hiroshima and its tens of thousands of sick and wounded citizens: [He] took upon himself the misery of Hiroshima and has continued to do so for twenty years . . . Dr Shigeto¯ is, I think, typical of all the doctors of Hiroshima who have met the misery head on and have continued to struggle with it patiently. The battle, for Dr Shigeto¯, is not confined merely to the field of medical care; it is concerned with every difficult aspect of human society, including politics. (pp.132-3; 134) Dr. Shigeto¯ had the courage and fortitude to squarely face and fathom the depths of the human suffering he encountered without surrendering to despair. Perhaps the most difficult realities to contend with were the insidious after-effects of the ¯ e portrays Dr Shigeto¯ as the representative leader of a grounded, atomic bomb. O recentered movement against nuclear arms and a crusade against a formidable ¯ e notes that Dr Shigeto¯ rarely new enemy: leukemia. With regard to the former, O spoke of politics. When he did, however, he did not equivocate: ‘we must adhere strictly to our policy of not possessing, producing, or permitting the entry of nuclear weapons. And we must oppose their possession by other countries’ (pp. 168; 167). This statement amounts to a manifesto. Spoken as it was by a fundamentally apolitical A-bomb survivor who knew at first-hand the full human cost of nuclear weapons, it carries enormous moral weight. Dr Shigeto¯ also worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the battle against the terrible after-effects of the bomb. While directing two major hospitals, treating patients and working to reform the health care system to better serve his patients’ needs, he also personally supervised and engaged in ongoing research into radiation sickness. He was, in fact, one of the first to help establish the statis¯e tical correlation between radiation exposure and the incidence of leukemia. O praises Dr Shigeto¯ and his colleagues for their mental flexibility in discerning the true nature of their deadly foe. The ‘imaginative freedom’ characteristic of these exemplary Hiroshima doctors stands in stark contrast to the mentality of Japan’s
224 David Stahl wartime leaders who, in John Dower’s words, became ‘prisoners of their own war rhetoric . . . Long after it had become obvious that Japan was doomed, its leaders all the way up to the emperor remained unable to contemplate surrender. They were psychologically blocked, capable only of stumbling forward’ (1999: 22). Dr Shigeto¯ was unequalled in terms of accepting personal responsibility for Hiroshima and its survivors and facing up to and contending with the human miseries of atomic weapons without despairing or succumbing to ‘victim ¯ e refers to him as the ‘archetype of the authentic man’ consciousness’. In fact, O ¯ (Oe 1965: 147; 147). And the implications of his doing so should be clear; if Dr Shigeto¯ is the very incarnation of humane, moral, authentic living in the nuclear age, then it is only natural and proper for others to follow his lead. ¯ e also draws special attention to an exceptional Hiroshima ‘outsider’ O committed to championing hibakusha causes. Through his depiction of the activi¯ e identifies the ties of the impassioned editorial writer and activist Kanai Toshihiro, O concrete actions that follow from his inverted, recentered ideological construct. It ¯ e characterizes Kanai as a man with ‘the is significant in this connection that O bearing of a sober-minded, lower-ranking samurai at the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868’ (pp. 56; 66). Such samurai, or shishi, were loyalists committed to toppling the Tokugawa Shogunate and restoring the emperor to the center of politics and national identity. It was largely due to their efforts and sacrifices that the Meiji ‘revolution’ occurred. By associating Kanai with these men who played ¯e such a pivotal role at a major turning point in modern Japanese history, O suggests that he too was committed to reforming politics and society. The aim and means of Kanai’s mission, however, were different from those of his early modern counterparts. As with Dr Shigeto¯ , hibakush a were the focal points of Kanai’s concern, and ‘restoration’ for him meant repositioning them at the heart of the anti-nuclear peace movement and postwar national thinking. Rather than resorting to brute force of arms, moreover, he depended on the power of moral persuasion. At the conference of academics and other intellectuals held in Hiroshima in the summer of 1964, Kanai proposed the compilation of a ‘White Paper’ on Abomb survivors and damage. The aims of the White Paper were to educate the world about hibakusha experience survey their actual living conditions throughout the country, and provide them with adequate medical care and financial assistance. With regard to the first, he was intent on conveying ‘the moans of the surviving sufferers and the voiceless voices of the dead victims’ to both his fellow countrymen and the world (pp. 165; 163). Kanai elaborates on this point as follows: ‘The fervent desire of the A-bomb survivors now is, on behalf of all the dead and all survivors, to make sure that the peoples of the world fully understand the nature and extent of human misery, not just the destructive capacity, of an atomic bombing’ (pp. 57; 68). It was Kanai’s conviction that the compilation of a White Paper would not only enable the central government – and by extension Japanese people – to take more responsibility, and thereby begin to atone for the war, but also reunite and
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 225 O revitalize the national peace movement by recentering it on hibakusha, and on their experience and concerns: Clearly the government of Japan is controlled by the conservative party; but, just as clearly, the government does not exist solely for the conservative party. Let us try, therefore, to win both conservative and progressive support in the Diet for a law that affords adequate relief to the A-bomb survivors; and for that purpose, we must persuade the government of Japan – the first and only country to suffer atomic bombings – to prepare a White Paper . . . and make its contents known around the world through the agencies of the United Nations. In the pursuit of these goals lies hidden the potential for a nationwide peace movement, for an undivided peace movement. (pp. 59; 70) ¯ e draws special attention to Kanai’s White Paper proposal and to Dr Shigeto¯’s O call for a comprehensive medical survey of all second-generation children born in Hiroshima. He writes about both in terms of providing ‘common ground’, centered on Hiroshima, around which Japanese at the local and national level can come together in solidarity. This would open up distinct possibilities for alter¯ e’s comments on China’s first successful nuclear native forms of nationalism. O test serve to stake out this new territory: Until only yesterday, a great nation that had recently acquired the power to possess nuclear weapons, chose not to do so. So long as it could but did not, it projected an image of a nation that could take the lead in producing new political ideas and ideals in this nuclear age. But now, in October 1964, as I write this note, the People’s Republic of China no longer has that valuable image. (pp. 90; 97) It follows that being a country with the ability to possess nuclear arms which has refrained from so doing, Japan has the opportunity to press forward where its great neighbor failed. ¯ e outlines more explicitly the In the last paragraph of ‘An Authentic Man’, O central elements of his Hiroshima-based ideological construct and its ramifications for collective identity and direction: [T]he atomic bombing of Hiroshima is a symbol of negation – a symbol that negates the achievements of all present and future nuclear powers, including China. As a negative symbol, it also has a positive significance for the Japanese people: it signifies a new sense of nationalism that has emerged from the dedicated twenty-year struggle to survive all that Hiroshima means. And for me, the best representative of that symbol and that struggle is precisely the ‘authentic man of Hiroshima’. (pp. 147; 148)
226 David Stahl
Reconstituted identity, ideology and collective obligation ¯ e draws attention to the existence of hibakusha who In Hiroshima Notes, O consciously eschewed the role of passive victim, refused to submit to despair and self-pity, took personal responsibility for their lives and took up survivor missions aimed at sparing others the miserable experience to which they had been subjected. In so doing, he suggests that rather than anxiously maneuvering to conflate the individual and national Self with the discrete hibakusha Other, Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ should deliberately undergo a conversion to the authentically humanistic, dignified, responsible and viable ‘Way of the Survivor’. ¯ e’s Hiroshima and Certain duties and obligations naturally follow from O hibakusha-based reconstruction of postwar ideology and identity. First, the people of Japan have an outstanding moral obligation to A-bomb survivors and the dead to thoroughly learn and act in accordance with the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ¯ e 1981: 10). Internalizing these lessons necessitates honest, painful remem(O bering, and confrontation with and working through of their terrible human truths. ¯ e was well aware of the psychological and emotional challenges this posed: O We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible . . . We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind. (pp. 102; 107–8) While this tendency is understandable, people forget, deny, ignore, downplay and avoid the human consequences of nuclear arms at their own – and future generations’ – grave peril. In the opening passages of ‘On Human Dignity’, O¯e addresses this issue directly: In this age of nuclear weapons, when their power gets more attention than the misery they cause, and when human events increasingly revolve around their production and proliferation, what must we Japanese try to remember? . . . In such a time as this, I want to remember and keep on remembering, the thoughts of the people of Hiroshima – the first people and the first place to experience full force the world’s worst destructive capability. Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind. Like all wounds, this one also poses two potential outcomes: the hope of human recovery and the danger of fatal corruption. Unless we persevere in remembering the Hiroshima experience . . . the faint signs of recovery emerging from this place and people will begin to decay and real degeneration will set in. (pp. 90–1; 97–8) ¯ e introduces and builds upon Kanai’s views to In ‘Other Journeys to Hiroshima’, O identify the obligations of contemporary Japanese people. Kanai takes his compatriots to task for not facing up to the realities of the Asia Pacific War in general, or Hiroshima in particular. He suggests that the human misery caused by war is at
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 227 O the very heart of contemporary human affairs. Japanese people, however, have done everything they could to avoid it, a movement that initially led to a ‘doughnutshaped’ world-view. Subsequent economic growth and affluence added a vertical dimension to this figure, which in time resulted in a ‘pyramid-shaped’ world-view. According to Kanai, ‘the deep, dark cavern inside the pyramid . . . has never been filled. The human misery of Hiroshima continues to exist there’ (pp. 164; 162). ¯ e articulates the collective responsibilities of the Building on Kanai’s imagery, O Japanese people as well as the important ethical implications they have to hibakusha: The Japanese people, as a vital part of their evaluation of their own history and morality, must accept the duty of filling the empty cavern within the pyramid of their affluent consumer society. Unless we perform this duty, we shall not be able to prevent desperate people from committing suicide as their way of asserting there is no longer any hope or salvation. (pp. 164; 162) ¯ e’s view, the Japanese people have a solemn obligation to their hibakusha In O Others to help them give meaning to their exceptional suffering and victimization. As he forcefully asserts in ‘On Human Dignity’: Hiroshima as a whole must exert all its energy to articulate the essential intellectual grounds for abolishing all nuclear weapons in such a way that all of the survivors’ dehumanizing experiences – the misery, the shame and humiliation, the meanness and degradation – may be converted into things of worth so that the human dignity of the A-bomb survivors may be restored. All people with keloids and all without must together affirm this effort. What other human means can there be for liberating the A-bomb survivors from their tragic fear of a miserable death? (pp. 100; 106) ¯ e leaves no doubt that as far as honestly facing the terrible human costs of O nuclear arms, accepting personal responsibility, and taking up redemptive survivor missions is concerned, the Japanese people have excellent role models in the ‘moralists of Hiroshima’. All they need to do is remember and listen to them honestly and respectfully, and follow and help extend the paths toward recovery, atonement, reconciliation and renewal they have heretofore pioneered largely on their own. ¯ e considers the possibility that radioactive At the end of Hiroshima Notes, O fallout from nuclear war may alter our blood so radically that our very humanity itself might be lost. In light of this horrifying prospect, he unequivocally states that ‘it is no longer optional for us to be “comrades of the A-bomb survivors” . . . Being their comrades [is] the only way we can remain true human beings’ (pp. 185; 183). The choice of whether or not to side with A-bomb survivors in the interest of humanity, or with politicians, big business and the military in reinvigorated quests for global domination, control and exploitation, is still before the
228 David Stahl Japanese, and by extension other peoples, today, just as it was forty years ago ¯e first ventured to Hiroshima to report on the Ninth World Conference when O against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. Regrettably, the situation in Japan (and elsewhere) has changed little during the two decades and more that have passed ¯ e wrote as follows in his Preface to the 1981 English edition of Hiroshima since O Note s: In its Constitution, Japan has declared to its own people and to the whole world that it renounces war forever. Yet, today, in and around the ruling government party, there are movements afoot to revise the Constitution so as to permit rearmament, which could in time include nuclear arms. The critical moment of decision has arrived, when it will be possible to judge whether the Japanese have emerged from the tragic experience of ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nagasaki’ to become a new people who truly seek peace. In writing these essays it was my hope – indeed my faith – that the Japanese people who join the A-bomb survivors in pressing forward along the difficult and distant road toward eradicating all nuclear arms will win out over those Japanese who would revamp the Constitution and have our country turn back along the road toward becoming once again a military superpower. If the forces for peace do not win, then it will be clear that we failed to learn the bitter lessons of that tragic experience. And that failure would be a betrayal of those people who somehow maintained their human dignity amidst the most dreadful conditions ever suffered by humankind. (p. 16)
Notes 1 2
3
4
5
¯ e’s Hiroshima essays were published serially between October 1963 and March 1965 O in the literary journal Sekai (World). In June 1965, they were collected into a single volume under the title Hiroshima no¯to and published by Iwanami shinsho. ¯ e’s relationship to hibakusha, For a contrasting, existentialism-based interpretation of O see Treat (1995: 229–58). The Lucky Dragon Incident refers to deadly accident in which the crew members and catch of the Japanese tuna boat, Lucky Dragon 5, were inadvertently exposed to radioactive fallout from a hydrogen bomb test conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. The radio operator of the fishing vessel, Kuboyama Aikichi, died seven months later from radiation sickness. ¯ e initially went to Hiroshima to cover the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and O Hydrogen Bombs, but he quickly became disgusted by the ‘odor of politics’ surrounding the proceedings. He subsequently devoted most of his time and energy to meeting and speaking with, and listening to A-bomb survivors. The first set of page numbers reference the Japanese original used for this study, the second set the English translation. For reasons that will become clear in the chapter, when quoting directly from the latter, I have globally substituted the word ‘survivor’ for the word ‘victim’. In the absence of other indications, a single numerical reference means that I have done my own translating. I hasten to add, however, that when this is the case, I have done so with the benefit of comparisons with Swain and Yonezawa, to whom I hereby acknowledge my indebtedness and express my gratitude.
¯ e Kenzaburo¯ : The Way of the Survivor 229 O
References Main texts ¯ e Kenzaburo¯ (1965 [1970]) Hiroshima no¯to (Hiroshima Notes), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. O ——(1981 [1995]) Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa, New York: Grove Press.
Other references Dower, John W. (1996) ‘Three Narratives of Our Humanity’, in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt (eds) History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, New York: Henry Holt & Co., pp. 63–96. ——(1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: The New Press. Isogai Hideo (1985) ‘Hiroshima no¯to: so¯zo¯ryoku e no tabi’ (Hiroshima Notes: Journeys towards the Imagination), Kokubungaku kaishaku to kansho¯ 50(8): 138–42. Kikuchi Masanori (1979) ‘So¯zo¯ryoku ni okeru seiji: Hiroshima no¯to, Okinawa no¯to ochu ¯ shin ni’ (Politics in Imagination: Concerning Hiroshima Notes and Okinawa Notes), Kokubungaku 24(2): 102–9. Lifton, Robert J. (1996) The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. ¯ e Kenzaburo¯ (1981) ‘Kakujidai no Nihonjin to aidenteiteii’ (The Japanese and Identity O in the Nuclear Age), Sekai 422(1): 107–23. Orr, James (2001) The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Treat, John W. (1995) Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Further reading Davis, Walter A. (2000) The Holocaust Memorial: A Play About Hiroshima, Bloomington, IN: First Books. ——(2001) Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dower, John W. (1996) ‘The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory’, in Michael Hogan (ed.) Hiroshima in History and Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 116–42. ——(1997) ‘Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia’, in Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds) Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 37–51. Ibuse Masuji (1966 [1969]) Kuroi ame (Black Rain), trans. John Bester, Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International. Igarashi, Yoshikuni (2000) Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lifton, Robert Jay (1968 [1991]) Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Nagai Takashi (1949 [1984]) Nagasaki no kane (Bells of Nagasaki), trans. William Johnston, Tokyo: Kodansha International. Nornes, Abe Mark (1996) ‘The Body at the Center: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, in Mick Broderick (ed.) Hibakusha Cinema, London: Kegan Paul International, pp. 120–59. Yoneyama, Lisa (1999) Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
12 Free to write Confronting the present, and the past, in Shiina Rinzo¯’s The Beautiful Woman Mark Williams If his friend and eminent scholar Saito¯ Suehiro is to be believed, the author Shiina Rinzo¯ (1911–73) listened to the infamous imperial radio broadcast at noon on 15 August 1945 (in which the Japanese Emperor committed Japan to acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration) ‘with no deep sense of emotion’ (nan no kangai mo naku) (Saito¯ 1980: 254). In one sense, such a muted response need not detain us for long: Shiina would certainly have found himself in considerable company as he found himself too emotionally drained at the moment of defeat to feel anything but total exhaustion, both physical and mental. And yet, closer consideration of the details of Shiina’s war would suggest more to this than meets the eye. Even allowing for the fact that few emerged from the war in East Asia unscathed, the preceding fifteen years had been particularly traumatic for Shiina. Arrested at around the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 on suspicion of harbouring left-wing sympathies that were deemed to be in violation of the notorious Peace Preservation Law of 1925, Shiina endured months of torture before eventually succumbing to the pressure to secure his release by signing a document of tenko¯ (political apostasy). There followed years of mundane activity, closely controlled by the military police detailed to ensure that none of the converts (tenko¯sha) should contemplate any form of recantation, during which time Shiina found himself obliged to eke out a living engaged in a series of menial jobs secured for him by the authorities. At the same time, as the fighting intensified and escalated into war in the Pacific in the early 1940s, he was obliged to confront military reality – and on a couple of occasions he received a call-up, only to evade the draft through self-induced illness. By the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945, Shiina had abandoned all ideas of continued menial employment and was seeking to establish himself as the ‘literary voice of the masses’.1 In all of this, Shiina’s sense of self-identity as a tenko¯sha is crucial. As he himself admitted on numerous occasions, the stigma of having capitulated in the face of physical torture and, in so doing, of having betrayed his colleagues in the Communist Party was real. But, as Patricia Steinhoff has noted, for the vast majority of the tenko¯sha, the pressure to apostatise was as much psychological as it was physical: the ‘elemental desire to live’ may have been an important determining
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 231 factor, but so too were the ‘emotional ties which drew the tenk¯osha away from the Party and its ideology [and linked] that person to Japanese society’ (1988: 88). At the same time, Steinhoff reminds us that, for all too many of those tenko¯sha who subsequently turned to creative literature – and there were many – release from the physical shackles did not lead to ‘immediate reintegration back into society’; instead, all too frequently, ‘this type of tenko¯sha was left even more isolated and alone after his break with the Party’ (ibid.: 91). In keeping with the vast majority of his fellow citizens, therefore, Shiina found himself, in August 1945, confronting the uncertain future with considerable apprehension and misgivings. At the same time, however, when viewed in the context of his subsequent œuvre, in which references to the political temper of the times are conspicuous by their absence, Shiina’s lack of any ‘deep sense of emotion’ in the face of the tumultuous events of August 1945 leads one to question what had become of the political activism that had led to his arrest in 1931. From the outset in 1945, the US Occupation made much of its guarantees of freedom of speech and thought. And reading Shiina’s literature of the period, we are constantly reminded of the consequences of the war on the lives of the ‘ordinary citizen’ (the term ‘heibon na kokumin’ is a constant refrain). But these same works are characterized by a marked absence of consideration of the geopolitical issues of the day. The questions of war responsibility, of the role of the Emperor as orchestrator of events, the ‘Reverse Course’ policy implemented during the second half of the Occupation era: Shiina’s texts of the period remain remarkably reticent on such topics. But how are we to account for the apparent lack of engagement with the political upheavals of the day in his literature? As we begin the search for an answer to this question, we would do well to recall Edward Said’s portrayal of all texts as ‘protean things; they are tied to circumstances and to politics large and small, and these require attention and criticism’ (Said 1994: 385). Indeed, for all the considerable criticism and discussion of the relevance of Said to Japan or to East Asia, it is difficult to escape the basic tenet that no statement can be totally neutral; as Marlene Mayo suggests, ‘no art, however pure, can be created or understood apart from the politics of its time. Conversely, the real significance of those same politics, sometimes half-hidden, can often find distinctive and revealing reflections in the arts’ (Mayo and Rimer 2001: 1). During the course of the ensuing discussion, I shall be examining the extent to which ‘the politics of [the] time’ are reflected in the art of Shiina, traditionally cited as the representative writer of the Sengoha (après guerre) literary coterie. At the same time, I shall be considering the extent to which ‘these same politics . . . find distinctive and revealing reflections’ in the author’s art, even in those texts that appear, prima facie, far divorced from the politics issues and debates of the day. The primary focus to this end will be on the novel, Utsukushii onna (The Beautiful Woman, 1955), the work with which Shiina’s reputation as a writer ‘of and for the masses’ (Takado¯ 1989: 250) was finally acknowledged and for which he received the prestigious Ministry of Education Prize for the Arts. The novel was immediately hailed as a natural extension of the shisho¯setsu (Inovel) tradition, a fascinating subtext that illuminates Shiina’s life during his days
232 Mark Williams as a railway employee, one that ‘hints at the paradoxical sense of optimism’ that the author experienced in the midst of his mundane existence and that ‘sheds light on his decision to seek Christian baptism’ in 1950 (Saito¯ 1980: 54ff).2 We have, however, travelled a long way from the ‘purified I’ of the prewar tradition (as discussed in the Introduction to this volume), and there is a concomitant need to resist the autobiographical mode of reading that it typically engendered. Instead, building on the approach adopted by Reiko Auestad (2002) in her reading of the novel Goshaku no sake (Five Cups of Sake, 1947) by Shiina’s contemporary on the literary scene, Nakano Shigeharu, I shall be seeking to turn this around – seeking to deploy Shiina’s life as a subtext that can cast light on the novel. In so doing, in pursuing the ‘socially symbolic’3 and ideological dimension of the text that goes beyond the author’s life, an attempt will be made to restore to the surface of the text the repressed social and emotional reality surrounding the historical events of the day. In short, instead of seeking to re-establish the ties between author and his work, or of reconstituting Shiina’s thought and experience through a reading of his text, the focus here will be on the underlying structures of the work and its context – on what Michel Foucault describes as the ‘architechtonic forms’ that underpin all works of narrative fiction (1977: 118). In search of such ‘forms’, consideration must first be made of the three discrete time periods encompassed by the novel. The text itself was written in the early 1950s as the US Occupation was drawing to a close, and published in 1955. At the same time, for all the dearth of specific political contextualisation, there are nevertheless sufficient references to locate the narrative present of the text in the five-year period between 1937 (the novel begins with reference to the ‘China Incident’) and 1942 (towards the end, there is a solitary reference to the attack on Pearl Harbor, following which the protagonist, Kimura, receives two military summonses, both of which he succeeds in avoiding as a result of self-induced fevers). Such specific incidents clearly suggest a link – a true shisho¯setsu-style juxtaposition – between the specifics of the narrative and autobiographical detail from Shiina’s own past. But the situation is further complicated by the fact that much of the detail surrounding the portrayal of Kimura as an ‘ordinary’ (heibon na) railway employee is drawn from the author’s own time spent as an employee of Ujikawa Denki Densetsubu, a period that extended from June 1929 until his arrest in 1931.4 Given the momentous nature of global events in the years between the autobiographical detail in question, the narrative present, and the time of composition of The Beautiful Woman, a shisho¯setsu-style reading of the novel would seek to discern, at least in part, some evidence of the author’s evolving response to the rise and fall of militarism in Japan of the 1930 and 1940s. Instead, what initially strikes the reader is the seemingly deliberate effacement – by an apparently manipulative narrator – of all references to the author’s personal response and preferences with regard to burgeoning events and the controversies surrounding them. With the exception of the one or two solitary references to specific incidents as the war escalates, Kimura is portrayed as oblivious to the world beyond his immediate purview, the narrative focus seemingly uniquely
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 233 concerned with the protagonist’s increasingly desperate attempts to preserve his status as a ‘normal’ member of what the narrator insists on referring to as the ‘runpen puroru’ (lumpen proletariat). In the circumstances, one might well ask, should we not read the novel for the richness of what is there, rather than for what, if anything, has been excluded? It was, after all, this ‘uncomplicated plot’ and ‘simple style’ that was specifically commended by the Minister for Education in his citation for the Prize: ‘In The Beautiful Woman’, he suggested, ‘Shiina succeeds in portraying a model of an ordinary man, seeking to live with integrity amid the transitions in the social climate, thereby creating a new image of the individual in postwar literature’ (cited in Takado¯ 1989: 135). The question is one to which Said was particularly attuned. To be sure, he acknowledges, there can be no justification for a ‘reductive’ reading in which the ‘richness of the text’ is overlooked. But, as he continues, ‘it is a much graver mistake to read [such texts] stripped of their affiliations with the facts of power which informed and enabled them’ (Said 1994: 195). The war may, then, be conspicuous by its absence from Shiina’s text; it remains, nevertheless, an unstated theme throughout, an example of what Hijiya-Kirschnereit describes as ‘omission as unstated presence’ (Schlant and Rimer 1991: 24) – and, in keeping with all his fellow citizens in the wake of defeat in 1945 and of the end of the US Occupation of mainland Japan in 1952, Shiina was encumbered with considerable emotional and political baggage. Before moving on to a closer examination of Shiina’s literary depiction of the ruins of postwar Japan, therefore, let us briefly consider the power relationships at work within this topos, and the crucial developments by which these were affected in the years between the narrative present of the novel and the time of composition.
A unique experience of colonisation The landscape with which all Japanese were confronted as the US Occupation was formally concluded in 1952 was one born of a singular history of colonisation. On the one hand, for much of the preceding half century, Japan had acted as instigator of colonial policies, most notably in Manchukuo, Korea and Taiwan, that had only been brought to an end with defeat in 1945. At the same time, during the ensuing period, Japan had been under the yoke of what John Dower describes as a ‘neocolonial military dictatorship’ (1999: 81). The result was a generation that, while conforming closely with Said’s template for those subjected to colonial domination (they did, perforce, ‘bear their past within them – as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending towards a post-colonial future’ (Said 1994: 256), sought simultaneously to come to terms with its own history of aggression on the East Asian mainland. As Shiina’s early postwar fictions most graphically show, the years following defeat in 1945 were, for many, largely devoted to the daily struggle for survival amongst the ruins of Occupation Japan. At the same time, there was no escaping the constant reminders of Japan’s newfound status as occupied nation. There
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was, as Dower reminds us, ‘no historical precedent for this sort of relationship’; Japan was experiencing the ‘last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as the “white man’s burden”’ (1999: 23). And yet, once installed in Japan, the Occupation forces ‘set about doing what no other occupation force had done before: remaking the political, social, cultural, and economic fabric of a defeated nation and in the process changing the very way of thinking of its populace’ (ibid.: 78). For all this, as Dower is quick to caution, the Occupation represented a unique, lived Japanese experience, one that involved not merely reconstructing the physical infrastructure of the ruined nation, but ‘rethinking what it meant to speak of a good life and good society’ (ibid.: 25). The initial dream, shared by both the occupying forces and the defeated Japanese, may have been of a genuinely democratic revolution – and there can be little denying the widespread vision of the US forces as an ‘army of liberation’ (ibid.: 26). But still, in the aftermath of defeat, the immediate meaning of liberation – of freedom – was, for most Japanese, more psychological than political: part of Japan’s collective response to the traumatic events was to succumb to an exhaustion and despair that came to be known as the ‘kyodatsu condition’ (see ibid.: Chapter 3). But this is not the whole story. Locked in a symbiotic relationship with the misery, the resentment, the struggle for daily survival and purpose among the ruins were the hopes, the dreams, the visions of a brighter future and the new opportunities for liberation that, as Said is at pains to point out, often arise out of the anger engendered by such a relationship of domination. At this point, it is liberation and the pursuit of freedom, as opposed to nationalist independence, that comes to represent the new alternative, a ‘liberation which by its very nature involves . . . a transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness’ (Said 1994: 278). So where does this leave Japan in 1952? On the one hand, by the time of withdrawal of Occupation forces, some semblance of independence – a degree of cultural autonomy – had been acquired. Full democracy had not, however, been restored. The Occupation forces may have been largely withdrawn, but the ghost of empire and of complicity with the militarists had not been entirely laid, leaving the ‘ordinary citizens’ still to articulate the nature of the power relationship they shared with their new leaders. Japan remained, in short, a classic example of ‘democracy in a box’ (Dower 1999: 561); or, in the estimation of the New York Times, Japan was ‘free, yet not free’ (cited in ibid.: 553). To return to Said’s model, what was now required, in order to avoid the old orthodoxies and injustices, were ‘new and imaginative reconceptions of society and culture’ (Said 1994: 263). And it was here that Shiina and his contemporaries on the literary scene came into their own – as they rapidly brought to the terrain a new ‘intellectual and figurative energy’ (ibid.: 256), one that was ideally suited to the task of ‘repossession’ (ibid.) of their indigenous culture and of shaking off the sense of themselves as ‘prisoners in their own land’ (ibid.: 258). Said cites Yeats and Fanon as authors determined to give literary portrayal to the misery and wretchedness of the repressed, with both equally committed to
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 235 the struggle for liberation – of both nation and individual – that accompanies the process of decolonisation as a new political order comes to achieve moral hegemony. A similar interpretation can, however, be applied to the Sengoha authors writing in the immediate aftermath of the Occupation – and to Shiina in particular. As a writer with first-hand experience of political detention and of tenko¯ and who, in the evaluation of the critic Takado¯ Kaname, was ‘not just putting himself in the shoes of the masses as he wrote – but was one of them’ (1989: 250), here was an author ideally positioned to give expression to the long-suppressed voices. The discussion that ensues will focus on Shiina’s treatment of the various ‘Others’ encapsulated by these voices. On the one hand, it will address the Other represented by the marginalised masses, by those engaged in the delicate process of casting off the shackles of subjugation in their search for greater individual freedom. And, in view of Shiina’s background, who better to offer up a social articulation of difference from the perspective of the ‘normal’ labourer – to take what Foucault sees as ‘the first steps in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power’ (Foucault 1977: 214)? At the same time, however, Shiina was closely attuned to Japan’s own position of alterity, one born of its hybrid status as a recently defeated and occupied nation determined (and encouraged) to make rapid progress in the process of cultural ‘repossession’. Given such multivalency, the Other of Shiina’s œuvre is hard to pin down. Its manifestations are, however, never far beneath the surface. The discussion that follows will thus focus on the author’s deployment of the Self/Other dialectic in its varying guises and, in so doing, will emphasise the author’s powerful, yet rarely discussed, contribution to the contemporary debates concerning the nature of freedom in the particular circumstances of postwar Japan.
The Sengoha as articulators of Otherness As Ernestine Schlant notes in her survey of the artistic landscape of Japan in 1945, the literary scene was indeed lively, a phenomenon that she attributes less to ‘an expression of hope or confidence in a new beginning’, more to ‘the vast taking stock and sorting out of the war, the defeat and its consequences’ (Schlant and Rimer 1991: 11). And, as she continues, this was a task required at both the national and the individual level. On the one hand, there were those institutional questions – those concerning responsibility for the war of aggression, the role of the Emperor, etc. – that could not be avoided. At the same time, however, there was a moral responsibility on each individual, even those who had not seen active service (whether as a result of their age, health or for whatever reason), to reconsider their own personal experience of the war – to question their right to serve in some measure as the voice of the survivor, whilst simultaneously weighing up their own potential contribution to the process of postwar reconstruction that lay ahead. The two issues could never be seen in isolation, however: they were linked, inextricably, by fundamental questions regarding the nature of postwar freedom. The nation may have been offered the promise of genuine freedom – of democracy
236 Mark Williams (minshushugi, which, as Carol Gluck notes, rapidly became a buzzword, defined, not politically, but socially with the meaning of ‘freedom’ (ibid.: 69)), and there certainly was an intoxicating sense of freedom of intellectual access. But this was an enforced freedom, one that, while allowing for the dreams, nevertheless implied an alternative form of subordination. The question confronting all those seeking access to the literary stage in the aftermath of defeat was of how to evaluate, and to give representation to, the duality of this liberty – as representing both deliverance and subjugation – of how to depict the confusion, not only concerning what they were being delivered from, but of what they, as citizens of an occupied nation, were being subordinated to. The challenge was clearly not one to elicit a uniform response – and literary historians of the period have been meticulous in documenting the diverse paths trodden by the gamut of authors active at the time.5 Much of this diversity is of but tangential relevance to the issue at hand. What is of paramount relevance to any discussion of the politics of representation of Shiina and his peers in the Sengoha, however, is the split that emerged, within months of Japan’s defeat, between those descendants of the prewar proletarian literature movement who advocated, on the pages of their literary forum, Shin Nihon bungaku, retention of the ideological, political novel, and those, most of whom had earlier been equally vociferous in their support of leftist ideology and many of whom bore the same scars of prewar tenko¯ as their more activist cousins, who nevertheless signed up for the more artistic manifesto outlined by their spokesman, Honda Sh¯ugo, in his inaugural editorial for their literary journal, Kindai bungaku. At the vanguard of Honda’s principles was an insistence on those old chestnuts, ‘Art for art’s sake’ and ‘nobility of spirit’. Equally prominent, however, was the ‘guarantee of freedom from politics’ and a ‘quest for literary truth, unmarked by ideological coloring’ (cited in Keene 1984: 971). The division rapidly developed into literary warfare, one that has been closely analysed by J. Victor Koschmann (in e.g. Schlant and Rimer (eds) 1991: 163–86). At this point, let us focus on that element of this struggle most germane to discussion of Shiina: the call by Kurahara Korehito, the eminent Communist critic, for a literary voice for the masses. Kurahara’s plea was unequivocal: Writers must recover the element of reality that has been missing from literature, and reproduce within literary works the true circumstances and voice of the masses . . . To accomplish [this], it is first necessary that our writers should know reality, and in order to know reality, they must live, fight, and share happiness and misery with the masses. (cited in ibid.: 170) To Kurahara, the imperative for such writers was that they not only describe the masses ‘without deceit or contrivance’, but also that, in so doing, they show them ‘the way out of their predicament’ and ‘instruct’ them in ‘life’ (ibid.). Kurahara would here appear to be advocating nothing less than a return to social activism – and there is much in this with which Shiina and his peers in the
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 237 Sengoha would have found empathy. Problems arose, however, with Kurahara’s practical advice towards realising this goal: an author might strive to relate to the masses by always ‘making the standpoint of the masses his own’ and by being ‘keenly aware of their suffering and joy’ (ibid.: 174). But, as critics such as Ara Masato pointed out, most were not of working-class backgrounds – and were thus in no position to portray themselves faithfully whilst remaining true to the masses. To such authors, there could be no question of an unmediated literary representation of the working-class masses from the viewpoint of the masses; instead, insisted Ara, priority must be given to their own mediating presence: ‘To investigate oneself thoroughly – this should be the starting point of literature from this moment forward, and ultimately it is this endeavor which will connect us in a literary sense with the masses’ (ibid.). To Ara, there was little alternative. As individuals who had experienced the wave of militarism and war in the 1930s and early 1940s as well as the subsequent ignominy of occupation, all were only too well acquainted with ‘despair . . . the abyss, and . . . hell’ (ibid.: 176). But it was precisely on these grounds, as fellow sufferers, that they were best positioned to reach out in a gesture of affirmation of, and solidarity with, the masses. The lines of the argument had been drawn, the contribution of both sides offering much to the burgeoning shutaisei (subjectivity) debate concerning the most effective means available to the author to articulate, in meaningful manner, the requirements of individual behaviour in the new postwar Japan. The ensuing texts may have been dismissed by some as unmediated, as lacking in objective focus; there were even those, like the influential critic Nakamura Mitsuo, who were prepared to argue that nothing of literary merit emerged in Japan during the seven years of US Occupation (cited in Rubin 1985: 76). For all this, however, these debates and the literary texts they spawned did succeed in capturing the popular imagination – and in calling into question the techniques adopted by their prewar literary forebears in ways that were to exercise considerable influence on subsequent literary trends. As Dower suggests, ‘They may not have constituted the basis for a genuinely revolutionary transformation of Japan, but their challenge to old verities proved unforgettable’ (1999: 162). Dower’s assessment suggests a group of writers whose literary contribution was far more significant than Nakamura and some of his fellow critics were willing to concede. At the same time, the incessant focus of these texts was on the working-class masses – and it is in this sense, as voices of the marginalized and oppressed, that their legacy is perhaps best assessed. Here was a generation of authors committed to an activist stance in order to recover – and sometimes even to invent – the culturally authentic voice of those on the margins of society, those not actively involved in the process of implementing the democratic revolution that was being attempted around them. They represented, in short, the ‘voice of the Other’, determined to take advantage of their position on the periphery to create discourses that rejected the ‘hierarchical structures of power’, upon which critics such as Ashcroft et al. see societies with a colonial past as constructed (1989: 7–8).
238 Mark Williams Ashcroft et al. make much of the crucial and invaluable role exercised by this voice as counterbalance to that of mainstream society. And this same voice has been carefully analysed, in its specifically Japanese context, by John Clammer in his recent Japan and its Others. As Clammer reminds us, during the process of social construction, the very cultural logic that serves to inform the criteria of membership of mainstream society works equally against those who do not. There is, suggests Clammer, a ‘logic of difference’ (2001: 6), one that he sees as deliberately and consciously constructed by the ruling elite whose every action had been to ‘other’ (as Lacan would have it) those outside the mainstream and, by extension, to embroil those left outside in the asymmetric relationships that this entails. Throughout the period of war in East Asia, such construction had assumed the form of representations of the Japanese nation as ‘one nation under the Emperor’ (Dower 1999: 61ff.); those outside this embrace found little support, increasingly reduced to the status of ‘outcasts’ in a land that Dower has categorised as a ‘harsh, inhospitable place for anyone who did not fall into a “proper” social category’ (ibid.). Their status as outcasts, particularly in a society that has traditionally sought to obscure a fundamental social diversity through self-representations as ‘homogeneous’, is a recurrent trope in the literature of the Sengoha – and is responsible, in large measure, for the ubiquitous portrayals of this literature, by critics such as Nakamura Mitsuo, as overwhelmingly dark and pessimistic. The Occupation-era narratives of Shiina represent classic exemplars of this trait. Here, according to this logic, are the archetypal portrayals of the wretched and fallen, desperately seeking to eke out a semblance of existence among the ‘ruins’ of Japan in the immediate aftermath of defeat; it is in works such as Shin’ya no shuen (A Midnight Banquet, 1947 [1970]) and Eien naru josho (The Eternal Preface, 1948) with which Shiina announced his arrival on the literary scene, we are informed, that we can find those qualities of otherness as an unessential, negatively characterised object (cf. e.g. Takado¯ 1989 and Miyano 1989). What is missing from such evaluations, I would suggest, is the concomitant vision of otherness as a more positive element, as a liberating concept, one in which difference is celebrated and in which the existence of such an opposition can be used as a means of positive affirmation as opposed to negative rejection.6 Viewed thus, it is difficult to exaggerate the contribution of the Sengoha to the dominant discourses of the day. With the call for freedom a universal refrain, theirs was the voice of the ‘Other’ in which freedom was defined, not as the newfound liberty as delineated in the postwar Constitution, but as the right to be different, not from each other but from the impositions placed on them by outside models. And in an intellectual climate dedicated to finding ways of ‘overcoming the modern’ (kindai no cho¯koku), who was better positioned to assume the challenge that Clammer cites as integral to the postwar reconstruction effort in Japan, the necessity ‘not of disembedding the individual from the social matrix, but of creating a modernity based precisely upon the maintenance of the integrity of the “holistic” social structure’ (Clammer 2001: 86)?
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 239 The literary depictions of the masses offered by the Sengoha are clearly of intrinsic interest to historians of Occupation Japan. They also serve a more general function – for, as Homi Bhabha has argued, it is from just such people – from ‘those who have suffered the sentence of history’ – that ‘we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking’. For Bhabha, the case is clear-cut: There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of social marginality . . . transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to confront the concept of culture outside objets d’art or beyond the canonisation of the ‘idea’ of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival. (1994: 172) The issue lies at the heart of the case study that follows. In the analysis of The Beautiful Woman, particular attention will be paid to this ‘mode of representation of otherness’ (ibid.: 68). But to what extent, in his relentless focus on the narrow world of a solitary average (heibon na) worker, does Shiina succeed in drawing attention to this ‘logic of difference’? And, even more significantly, how is this logic maintained as Japan moves from its status as occupied nation to the burgeoning economic force of the 1950s? As noted already, in search of early literary considerations of the issue of ‘otherness’ in postwar Japanese literature one is inexorably drawn to the Occupation texts of Shiina, those penned quite literally, amongst the ruins, in which the paradox of despair and freedom is addressed in its most naked form. Such texts belong firmly in the first of the three discrete, albeit overlapping, stages of narrative development in postwar Japanese literature posited by Reiko Tachibana, a period roughly coterminous with the seven years of US Occupation, in which the primary concern of the Japanese literati was the ‘recreation of immediacy’ (Tachibana 1998: 7). One immediate consequence of this trend was the establishment of the tradition of the ‘othered’ protagonist, the alienated individual, engaged in a desperate, if ultimately forlorn, attempt to escape the margins of society. As with all such processes, however, development was inevitably gradual – and it was only really during the second of Tachibana’s developmental stages (approximating to the mid-1950s to late 1960s) that the tradition takes secure root. By this stage, suggests Tachibana, the search for a more detached perspective from which to reconsider recent experience served to create a response, ‘not of visceral engagement’, but of ‘grotesque estrangement, incongruity or ambiguity’ (ibid.: 8). Given the shish¯osetsu tradition of autobiographical, confessional literature, the emphasis in these texts may still be on individual actions and internal conflicts as opposed to larger questions of guilt and national culpability; in achieving a greater degree of detachment from their overwhelming wartime experiences, however, these authors succeeded in ‘reassess[ing] history in relation to present events’ (ibid.: 119) – and in assuming a more objective perspective on the issues of the day. Of these, most pressing to
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this group of authors was the nature of postwar democracy and freedom – and nowhere is this more significant as a developing trope than in Shiina’s œuvre. Let us continue, therefore, with a brief discussion of the concept of freedom as an emerging focus in Shiina’s art.
The taste of freedom For Shiina, the concept of freedom was integral to his art. As he acknowledged in his essay, ‘Bungaku to jiyu¯ no mondai’ (Literature and the Question of Freedom, 1952), ‘Literature is only literature if it speaks of human freedom. Without that, however skilfully narrated, it cannot exist as literature’ (SRZ 14: 365). And, as Shiina was the first to acknowledge, the determination to question the meaning of the amorphous concept of ‘true freedom’ was closely connected to his experience of being deprived of his physical liberty in the early 1930s. It was while in jail, as he read voraciously the literary treatments of the nature of human freedom by the likes of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, that he reflected at length on what he would subsequently describe as his ‘lifelong theme’ (Sato¯ 1973: 185). In this, he was clearly not alone: particularly amongst his fellow tenko¯sha, such considerations represented, not surprisingly, an overwhelming concern. Where Shiina does have a unique contribution to make, however, is in his treatment of this search for freedom at both the existential and the social level. The former, with its focus on freedom as liberation from death and the fear of death finds echoes throughout the literature of the tenko¯sha. Yet for Shiina, this could never be divorced from a vision of true freedom as liberation from misery and from the concomitant conviction that it is only through social activism that the individual can be relieved of the anguish and nihilism spawned by the war. His, then, was a search for freedom, not so much from the world, but a freedom in the world, one that is ultimately closely identified with the struggle for freedom of the masses – and firmly rooted in their daily lives. To Shiina, the former entailed a rejection of the world for its failure to fulfil his dreams and, as he continued in his article, ‘Literature and the Question of Freedom’: We have no choice but to solemnly deny such freedom . . . because, come what may, freedom from this world is an illusion, a fallacy. It opposes the reality that we all belong to this world and can never be free from this world. If we seek to brandish such freedom to rule the world, we aspire to absoluteness. (SRZ 14: 379–80) With this comment, Shiina was to establish a link, crucial to the reading of The Beautiful Woman that follows, between the pursuit of true freedom and a rejection of all absolutes (zettaisei ) – and he was to pursue this link in a series of articles written at the time. Most significant of these was ‘Jiy¯u to kyo¯zon’ (Freedom and Coexistence, 1962), in which he elaborated on his vision of true freedom as ‘both subjective and objective’, and concluded:
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 241 These two freedoms are of two differing dimensions and different quality and, as such, there is no way that they can be united. In other words, they can merely co-exist. But, in order for them to co-exist, there must be another freedom – a freedom that gives life to both my freedom and that of all people. (SRZ 19: 178) The author is here giving voice to the concept he defined as the ‘third freedom’, a ‘freedom which we, as humans, seek and in which we live, . . . a source of light’ (ibid.: 176). The ensuing state was ‘true freedom . . . the sine qua non for all human existence’ (ibid.: 181). Shiina’s personal identification with this struggle from the outset of his career is not in question. What we do see, as his literary career progresses and as Japan moves from the enforced liberty of the Occupation years to the first tentative steps towards democratic self-rule in the 1950s, is evidence of an author increasingly convinced of the attainability of such a dream. Before considering the more optimistic vision as personified in The Beautiful Woman, a brief consideration of this theme in Shiina’s earlier work is thus in order. To Sumaki, protagonist of The Midnight Banquet and its sequel, Omoki nagare no naka ni (In the Sluggish Stream, 1947), the search for freedom is all-consuming. Forced to endure life in the physical ruins of Occupied Tokyo, he recalls with nostalgia his days in prison, and confesses, Now, when it rains all day long, I feel stifled. Even when in prison, I could inhale the spray from the rain through the window and could watch thoughtfully as the tall, red brick wall gradually changed hue to an ugly mud colour. (SRZ 1: 4) Engaged in a struggle for his own physical survival, Sumaki searches desperately for liberation from the rigours of day-to-day existence – and from the everpresent fear of death – and chooses to do so by maintaining his distance from those around him and by masking his emotions with an enigmatic smile. He is ‘devoid of all memories’; nor can he embrace ‘dreams of a shining future . . . all that exists is the unendurable present’ (ibid.: 11). At this point, there would appear to be little relief from his abject despair and his only recourse is to resolve to ‘endure’ (taeru) his lot. Indeed, to Sumaki, ‘to endure is to live’; it is through endurance that he ‘gains release from all burdens’ (ibid.: 30). He is portrayed, in short, as desperate for liberation from what he perceives as the burdens of mundane existence, a haunting reminder of the author’s conviction, expressed in his diary of the time, that ‘the last freedom left to human beings is the freedom to die’ (SRZ 14: 36). As already noted, however, there is already evidence, even in these earliest Shiina narratives, of a light penetrating the darkness – of a protagonist struggling with the realisation that freedom is to be attained, not by divorcing himself from the rest of society, but through a sense of solidarity with society.
242 Mark Williams The transition is evidenced in Shiina’s next major novel, The Eternal Preface, in which the main focus lies in the inexplicable sense of optimism experienced by the protagonist, Yasuta, when confronted by his own impending death. Informed by his doctor that he has, at most, six months to live, Yasuta evidences a previously uncountenanced passion for life, one that leads him to question his earlier nihilism. Freed from the fear of death, Yasuta finds himself imbued with a new sense of hope and liberation: he feels ‘somehow free, albeit this was a chilly sense of freedom’ (ibid.: 334). Indeed, as Shiina acknowledged in his ‘Notes’ about the novel, Yasuta is the ‘embodiment of a range of freedoms’ that he was seeking to address in his literature: ‘freedom from emptiness, from death, from the sense of meaninglessness and despair he discerned all around’ him (cited in Kobayashi 1992: 92). For Yasuta, then, the key to true freedom lies in his determination to embrace life. In keeping with the times, however, he remains powerless in the face of the gulf between absolute freedom and the shackles of his own mundane existence – and it is to Shiina’s more mature works, written as the democratic institutions established during the US Occupation began to take hold, that one must turn for characters for whom freedom is perceived, not so much from any constraining influences, as in some broader principle. The template for Shiina’s revised perspective on freedom is provided by Yasushi, protagonist of the novel Kaiko¯ (The Encounter, 1952), a work that the author himself described as his ‘most persistent pursuit to date of human freedom’ (cited in SRZ bessatsu: 176). From the outset, Yasushi finds himself embroiled in a series of tragic circumstances and, as with the earlier Shiina protagonists, he initially suggests that it is ‘fear – the fear of death’ that remains the controlling factor in this world of ours’ (SRZ 4: 210). Yasushi is, however, blessed with an ability to smile on life and to pour scorn on those who threaten to succumb to emptiness and despair in a manner far removed from the earlier Shiina protagonists – and this is reflected in his definition of freedom: Freedom is a sense of happiness secured for us by some eternal being. Surely it is only through such freedom that, every day, I am able to accord with the time of this earth, with the world and its history. Thus, it is more important than my suffering, my happiness, even than the love I hold for a woman. (SRZ 4: 290) The Encounter was written in the immediate aftermath of Shiina’s baptism into the Protestant tradition and, particularly in view of the fact that each of the other characters in the novel appears to personify one particular form of freedom,7 Yasushi’s fixation on ‘some eternal being’ as representing a more transcendental form of freedom has led to widespread criticism of the novel as an overly subjective depiction of the author’s personal ‘encounter’ with the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel.8 To such critics, it is in Shiina’s next novel, The Beautiful Woman, that the author succeeds in achieving the critical distance between himself and his creation and, in the symbol of the ‘beautiful woman’, one of the
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 243 most arresting configurations of the concept of true freedom in Japanese literature of the period.
Free to write: The Beautiful Woman The Beautiful Woman was recognised, immediately upon publication as having ‘pursued the fundamental essence of human nature to a level more profound than any that Shiina had achieved to date’ (Togaeri Hajime, cited in Takado¯ 1989: 135). Here was the faithful and unadorned depiction of the mundane daily routine of the working classes that Shiina had struggled for so long to achieve; here an implicit attack on those whose attempts to re-establish the trend towards proletarian literature he saw as undermined by a preoccupation with ‘avantgarde ideals’ (cited in Sasaki 1968: 132). At the same time, however, the work represents no blind affirmation of the working classes. The ‘lumpen proletariat’ is here depicted with an unabashed candour, with the resulting vision by no means entirely positive; in addition to its degradation at the hands of the bourgeoisie, Shiina here reveals the misery, the cowardice and deceit of the working class, criticising it, not from any negative motivation, but in the hope that he can help thereby in leading its members towards greater freedom. Integral to this attempt is the portrayal of the protagonist, the train conductor Kimura, a man whose positive response to mundane reality is established, from the outset, as in sharp contradistinction to that of all the other characters. Superficially, all are immersed in lives that appear equally humdrum and tedious and, in this, Kimura is no exception: he views himself as ‘unintelligent, a simple, innocent man’,9 a ‘boring man, living quietly and in peace, totally unconnected with the great events of the world’ (p. 336). Indeed, so continuous has the monotony been that he comes to accept that he has ‘lived his life as precisely as a watch’ (p. 336). Kimura is, however, content – and he confesses, ‘Even were it clear that the world would be destroyed tomorrow, it is enough that I am on this train right now’ (p. 323). Throughout the novel, Kimura eschews anything that might disturb such contentment – and it is this that leads to his assertion, ‘Naturally enough, I loathe anything extraordinary. I hate excessive unhappiness, but equally, I hate excessive happiness. It’s fair to conclude that the devil dwells in every excess’ (p. 344). The result, for Kimura, is a belief that ‘the only thing that I can be absolutely certain about is that there is no single absolute – no one truth – in the world’ (p. 359), and it is to this conviction that he attributes his stubborn refusal to join the Communist Party, which he dismisses as a ‘group with a somewhat secretive and frightening façade’ (p. 293). To him, the Party ‘reeks of death and absolute power’ (p. 308), remaining totally oblivious to the inner truth and freedom of the individual. There remains, however, one element of his daily existence that is established as in danger of being rendered absolute by the protagonist: his love of work. From the outset, the narrative portrays a man whose raison d’être is derived from his job, a man seemingly capable of deriving absolute fulfilment from driving his train along the track beside the ocean. While all around him persist in their
244 Mark Williams search for release from their current mundane reality, Kimura rejects this posture of confrontation and escape, determined to accept such normality and to ‘continue living as the same me’ (p. 314). But Kimura is no mere Sumaki, determined simply to ‘endure’ his lot. As he himself acknowledges: Of course, I wish to improve my lot. But I wish to do this, not within some other context, but in the midst of my own current circumstances. This attitude towards life is the same in my relationship with my wife, Katsue. Rather than separating from her and seeking out new possibilities, I want to improve my situation within the framework of our existing relationship. (p. 374) As with other characters, Kimura, too, is dissatisfied with his current destiny; but, rather than seeking to escape, he attempts, through positive affirmation of his present circumstances, to effect an improvement from within. He seeks, in short, freedom, not from the world, but in the world – and it is this search that is the source of much of the pain that he experiences in his relationships with those around him. From the outset, for example, Kimura suffers anguish that no-one, not even his wife, can fully understand him – and all his attempts to come to terms with this distance, to accept that ‘it was hardly surprising that people couldn’t understand me; I couldn’t begin to understand for myself what it was within me that was making me so strange’ (p. 276), fail to resolve the uncertainty he experiences. The ensuing figure is one who feels ‘both saddened and overjoyed by myself who loved life, loved my wife and loved trains’ (p. 330). As with earlier Shiina protagonists, however, the mixed emotions which Kimura evidences are not merely the inevitable outcome for a protagonist pulled by conflicting forces; equally, they are portrayed as integral to the narrative technique of effecting a division between opposing aspects of Kimura’s being – of confronting him with a vision of his double, this in an attempt to highlight the ‘real being (honto¯ no shintai ) living quietly within him’ (p. 303). Kimura is keenly aware of these conflicting facets of his being and sees this symbolised in the way he is addressed in different ways by different people: On certain occasions, I have been accused by those with left-wing sympathies of being an unenlightened labourer, of living with a slave mentality, of being cowardly or mean. On other occasions, it has been those of right-wing persuasion accusing me of apathy, of a certain vagueness or of irresponsibility. At the moment, I am dismissed as conservative by the more active members within the labour unions. (p. 268) Given this confusion, Kimura struggles in vain to define his ‘true’ identity, and is ultimately forced to conclude:
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 245 I am in no way proud of the fact, but not once in my life have I been true to myself . . . Even while working as a conductor, I could not escape the feeling that I was never quite able to be myself. In particular, when announcing the name of the next station in a loud voice, I sensed that I was a cockerel proclaiming a new dawn. (p. 273) It is clear that, as a loyal worker, much of the protagonist’s self-concept is determined by his relationship with his employer. But the more the company comes to value his services, the more powerful grows his conviction that ‘I am not the sort of man the company thinks I am’ (p. 281). Already, there is a clear digression between the company’s favourable impression of its employee and Kimura’s view of himself. At the same time, however, there is evidence of a growing acceptance that the ‘self ’ he saw before him was as close to a composite subjectivity as he was ever likely to achieve: ‘It was true that I had never once been true to my real self. But, real self or not, I was the same person before and after my arrest. I was just a man who enjoyed work and who loved trains’ (p. 337). Significantly, moreover, this growing awareness is not limited to Kimura’s own self-assessment: on several occasions, the protagonist expresses doubt as to whether he will ever be able to fathom completely those with whom he comes into contact. Following one of several moments of reconciliation with his wife, for example, Kimura concludes, ‘I am proud to admit that I lacked the heart to believe in the figure of the woman before me as the real Katsue’ (p. 337). To the protagonist, therefore, ‘true’ identity remains as elusive as ‘true freedom’, and it is to highlight this realisation that Shiina incorporates the concept of the ‘beautiful woman’ as the pervading symbol within the novel. Let us turn, then, to consideration of the function of this complex signifier. During the course of the novel, Kimura is frequently confronted with the mental image of this ‘beautiful woman’ – significantly, always on those occasions when Kimura is most troubled by the shackles with which he perceives himself constrained by those around him. She remains, however, more than a mere symbol of dazzling freedom – and, as the novel progresses, so her function in encouraging Kimura to sweep away the sense of emptiness in his heart and to love his fellow human beings even more than freedom leads to increasing emphasis on the spiritual significance of this vision. In the initial stages of the narrative, therefore, she is variously described by the protagonist as ‘a being who rescues me from my own strange self ’ (p. 274); ‘a being who blows away those strange shadows and fills my heart with a sense of warmth and fulfillment’ (p. 279); ‘a being who provides me with my raison d’être and who allows me to experiences the fullness of life in its entirety’ (p. 280); ‘a being who renders the strangeness of nature and the strangeness of mankind into a powerful and brilliant existence’ (307); and as ‘a being who enables me to delight even in my misery’ (p. 350). She is, in short, a source of encouragement to Kimura as he seeks to assign meaning to the mundane and to restore a degree of normalcy to his life.
246 Mark Williams As the novel progresses, the ‘beautiful woman’ remains an enigma to the protagonist. Increasingly, however, as he comes to acknowledge that it was ‘only the laugh of that strangely beautiful woman’ that could ‘move’ him and allow him to ‘relax’ (p. 426), so the narrative focus shifts from the physical attributes that he has assigned to this image to her symbolic function – as representing a source of brilliant light and power, one that will ultimately secure for him that sense of freedom to develop as a more ‘human-like being’ (ningen-rashii ningen) (p. 359). The result is the most complex signifier within Shiina’s œuvre – one that has been subjected to widely differing interpretations by a variety of critics. To some, the signified is vague: for example, she is seen by Hirabayashi Taiko as ‘a dream of something’, and by Togaeri Hajime as ‘the beautiful woman who appears in the dreams of any working class being’. To others, however, the effect is more allembracing: she is viewed by Honda Sh¯ugo as ‘the symbol of the ideal of freedom, of the sense of harmony with one’s neighbour and of supreme bliss; at the same time, she is the symbol of that which alerts us to the fact that such ideals are ultimately unattainable within this world’. It is this same spiritual dimension that is emphasised by another critic, Sasabuchi Tomouchi, who defines her as ‘a being who somehow reminds me of the spotless Virgin of the Catholic tradition’ (all cited in Takado¯ 1989: 146). For all the spiritual dimension – and the biblical terminology which her portrayal is frequently couched – the ‘beautiful woman’ remains a classic symbol of the ability of the individual to overcome mundane reality through confrontation with what the narrator consistently depicts as ‘true freedom’ (honto¯ no jiy¯u) The effect is stressed in the following passage, in which the close relation between the beautiful woman and the protagonist’s daily routine is emphasised: Regardless of what others thought, I unfortunately had no choice but to continue to devote myself diligently to my job as a conductor. Diligently . . . I want my reader to realise how difficult it is to continue to work so diligently. But, though I realised it was slightly strange, I was easily able to continue this pattern I had set for myself. It is also fair to say that, in this, I was aided by the sho¯ch u¯ that I would drink on my way home from work. It was a store of meagre resources where employees of the company would charge drinks to their account. It stocked everything from lemon pops to Japanese-style rice cakes and one could obtain a modest meal there too. I used to drink there, but in this, too, I was extremely serious and always drank in moderation. As I sat there drinking, the vision of that beautiful woman always came to mind. It was she who could rescue me from my own strange self, but I had no idea what she looked like. All I know is that, whenever she came to mind, my heart would be filled with a certain dazzling light and a sense of power. (pp. 274–5) As a symbol of transcendence, therefore, the beautiful woman can be seen as having assisted the protagonist through more than thirty years of routine life as a
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 247 railway employee: through her, he is able to reappraise external reality. At the same time, as symbol of true freedom, she can also be viewed as representing the voice of the protagonist’s conscience in its interaction with his inner being. On frequent occasions, therefore, it is the beautiful woman who confronts the protagonist with an internal reality which, for whatever reason, he has been seeking to deny, and the tendency becomes increasingly pronounced as the novel progresses – as his marriage to Katsue is threatened and his relationships with the various other women in the narrative are rendered increasingly complex. The more the protagonist seeks to convince himself that he no longer loves Katsue, for example, the more he is struck by an awareness ‘deep within his inner being of that truly beautiful woman smiling at him in that strange manner of hers’ (p. 450). In similar manner, following the protagonist’s subsequent proposal of marriage to Hiroko, the woman to whom, on his own admission, he turns in times of trouble and despair ‘in search of salvation’ (p. 417) and who is able to assist him ‘as though she were the true beautiful woman’ (p. 417), the narrative concludes, ‘I felt the gentle gaze of that true beautiful woman in my heart. I was overwhelmed by that gaze – because it brought home to me that I did not really love Hiroko’ (p. 464). On these and other occasions, it is the beautiful woman who motivates Kimura and who heightens his awareness of his own true feelings; on others, she acts, almost literally, as his guiding hand. The fact is not lost on the protagonist, who is ultimately drawn to acknowledge that ‘if there were anything within me that could be called “true”, it was not part of me, but belonged to the beautiful woman’ (p. 442). Significantly, however, the appearances of the beautiful woman are restricted to those occasions when the protagonist is interacting, either physically or mentally, with the various female characters in the novel and this results, increasingly, in a confusion of the two, a fusion of the conscious and unconscious women in his life. At the outset of the novel, the distinction between the two is clearly delineated – in the depictions of Kurabayashi Kimi, a friend from Kimura’s childhood, whom he views as the ‘polar opposite (sei-hantai ) of the beautiful woman’ (p. 275) – and of whom he is led to conclude, ‘She certainly was a beautiful woman, but she was not the beautiful woman I was seeking’ (p. 285). As the novel progresses, however, such stark divisions are tempered to some extent as a fusion takes place between the women in Kimura’s life and the symbolic entity he has created, resulting, in most cases, in a straightforward juxtaposition of the two. The following example involving Hiroko is by no means an isolated example: In response to the pressure of Hiroko’s grip, I squeezed her hand. It was a warm hand. But, at the same time, I was painfully aware of the image of that truly beautiful woman . . . As I embraced her, I sensed that real woman laughing as though pitying me. (pp. 420, 463) By the latter stages of the novel, therefore, the beautiful woman represents a ubiquitous presence in all of Kimura’s relationships, the very vitality of these
248 Mark Williams seemingly dependent on the workings of this symbolic source of energy. That it is the latter who assumes the dominant role in such circumstances is, however, clear from the following assessment by the protagonist of his relationship with Hiroko: It is perfectly true that I loved Hiroko, but I had never once accepted that I loved her. And sadly, I was able to take delight from that. Why? Because, were I to feel love for anyone, that strangely real and beautiful woman of mine would start laughing . . . The only reason I could love Hiroko was because of the beautiful woman. (p. 426) The link between Hiroko and the beautiful woman thus lies at the core of the novel – to the extent that she is frequently seen intruding on the other relationships in which the protagonist finds himself embroiled, including that with his own wife, Katsue. Early in the novel, for example, as he embraces Katsue, the protagonist is obliged to admit, ‘[As I held Katsue], I recalled the round face of Hiroko as though she were the true beautiful woman’ (p. 386). Similarly, on rediscovering Katsue following a period when she has disappeared with her uncle, the narrative continues: Katsue burst into tears. At that point, I recalled Hiroko; it was almost as though betraying her were a point of honour to me. Needless to say, it was that true beautiful woman who supported me on that occasion. (p. 469) To the protagonist, therefore, all his relationships are tempered by thoughts of the beautiful woman – and this leads to her coming to assume a larger reality than the woman physically present in his life. Through her, Kimura is reinforced in his conviction that, given the nature of human freedom, none of these relationships is – or can be – perfect; equally, however, the beautiful woman represents a constant reminder to the protagonist that none of these is beyond redemption. It is, in short, as a result of her promptings that Kimura comes to reject all absolutes – to look on ‘non-absolutes’ (futettei ) as ‘one of the many virtues in the world’ (p. 397) – and, again, the issue is addressed in terms of the contrast delineated between Kimura and the three women most prominent in his life, each of whom is portrayed as the embodiment of an alternative vision of absolute freedom. First to influence the course of events is Kimi, who is now working as a prostitute and presented as symbol of absolute, anti-social freedom. To Kimi, life is seen in terms of black and white: she is ‘a woman who, when roused to hysteria, assumed a frightening expression as much as to say there is a simple choice – that between killing someone or succumbing to death oneself ’ (p. 289). In this, she resembles closely Shiina’s narrator’s archetypal worker for whom ‘the only issue is that between freedom and death’ (p. 296). In contrast to Kimi, and yet signifying
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 249 excess of a different nature, is Katsue, the protagonist’s wife and symbol of absolute social freedom. From the start, Katsue’s tendency towards excess is manifest in her frequent resort to the phrase ‘shinde mo’ (lit. ‘even were I to die’). But her disposition towards excess is subsequently reinforced, in the protagonist’s mind, by the rumours that start circulating about the couple: People kept telling me that my wife was too good for me, and such comments clearly incorporated a certain contempt towards me. But occasionally, I would imitate my colleagues and make comments such as, ‘My wife really is more than I deserve’. It was these various facets of Katsue’s personality, seen by everyone as excessive, that I was unable to forgive. (p. 329) Significantly, it is not Katsue’s entire being which the protagonist is rejecting – only the excesses which he perceives within her. He continues to love her in spite of such excess, but acknowledges: I continued to fight my wife because of the excess, which could even be called absolutism, which she embodied. Even were this a quality which she had acquired from the fascism currently in vogue or born of a fundamental human quality, I felt I could not forgive such excess in my wife. For to me, constantly striving to be a very human-like being, I realise that it is in such excess that man, regardless of his good intentions, transcends human consideration and assumes the face of the devil. (pp. 358–9) Hiroko, the third woman to be perceived by the protagonist as excessive, represents a freedom divorced from both of the above, a freedom which approximates more closely to the protagonist’s view of absolute liberation. Thus, while both Katsue and Kimi remain blissfully unaware of the qualities within themselves that Kimura dismisses as ‘excessive’, Hiroko is portrayed as empathising more immediately with Kimura, and as sharing with him a revulsion at excess, both in herself and in others. ‘Everything about me is excessive’ (p. 458), she concludes on one occasion as she examines her large breasts. But in contrast to Kimi and Katsue, she can at least be seen as striving to control the worst of her own excesses. The absolutes embodied in the three women may differ. But, in succumbing, albeit in varying degrees, to such excess, each stands opposed to the ‘true beautiful woman’. The distinction is marked and, in portraying the beautiful woman as the only woman capable of giving meaning to Kimura’s life, Shiina’s narrator succeeds in establishing her as a powerful symbol, one that serves as an accurate reflection of the nature of the freedom that remained an elusive dream in the Japan of the narrative present, but that, by the time of composition, following the withdrawal of the US Occupation forces, represented, in the public consciousness at least, a nascent, if complex, reality.
250 Mark Williams
Conclusion Several critics have commented on the carefully crafted distance between narrator and protagonist that Shiina guards jealously throughout the novel. But in this scrupulous delineation, there is another perspective – that of the author himself – one that is all too readily overlooked, and yet which, however effaced, nevertheless draws our attention to those ‘omissions as unstated presence’ with which we began this discussion. The perspective is never foregrounded; indeed, by this stage in his career, Shiina appears more concerned than the majority of his peers in the Sengoha to restrict the focus of his prose narratives to ‘faithful’ depictions of ‘ordinary’ citizens of postwar Japan unencumbered by personal ideology. As I have sought to show in the above discussion, however, these ‘omissions’ cannot be totally ignored – and it is only in displaying Shiina’s life as a subtext to the work that the ‘political’ significance of the novel is fully appreciated. Seen thus, as a literary portrayal of the renewed sense of freedom that coincided with the end of Pacific War hostilities and that was honed during the years of US Occupation, the significance of The Beautiful Woman is hard to exaggerate. Compared, both with the earlier Shiina texts written among the ruins, in which the visions of light attempting to penetrate the darkness ultimately emerge as mere illusions, and with the works of many of Shiina’s peers in the Sengoha in which protagonists experience an increasing sense of alienation from a society seemingly bent on economic progress at the expense of individual liberty, the light in The Beautiful Woman is of an altogether different dimension. Here is a light, symbolized in the all-pervasive presence of the ‘beautiful woman’, that enables Kimura to dwell more on the inherent goodness he has come to discern within the individual than had been possible to Sumaki and the other earlier Shiina protagonists. Here, as a consequence, is the light that enables him to experience freedom in society, by simultaneously mellowing his desire to seek freedom from its dictates. Shiina’s apparent determination, particularly in his later work, to focus on his former circumscribed self stranded, to cite the title of his 1953 novel, ‘on the other side of freedom’ (jiy¯u no kanata de), may have assured his reputation as a ‘master at portraying the ruins’ to which Occupation Japan had been reduced (Kamei Katsuichiro¯, cited in Takado¯ 1989: 8). With a closer reading of The Beautiful Woman, I would suggest, there emerges an author equally adept at giving literary voice to the renewed optimism of the ensuing era.
Notes 1 SRZ 14: 97. All translations from this text are my own. 2 Such a reading of the novel is prominent in the writings of Saito¯ (1980), Sasaki (1968), and on the pages of Shiina Rinzo¯ kenky¯u, the journal published by the Shiina Rinzo¯ kenky ukai ¯ (study group). 3 See Jameson’s (1981) notion of narrative as a ‘socially symbolic act’. 4 For such autobiographical detail, see the nenpu provided in Saito¯ (1980: 245–99), and Shiina’s own autobiographical account (1967). 5 See, for example, Keene (1984) and Koschmann in Schlant and Rimer (1991).
Shiina Rinzo¯ : Free to Write 251 6 For a discussion of this paradoxical vision of light in Shiina’s early work, see Williams (2003). 7 For a discussion of this aspect of the novel, see Hinuma Rintaro¯, ‘Do¯jisei no seiritsu’ (The Establishment of Synchronicity), in SRZ bessatsu: 181ff. 8 Cf. Takado¯ (1989) and Kobayashi (1992). For discussion of Shiina’s transition from Communist activist to baptised Christian, see Gessel (1982) and Saito¯ (1980). 9 SRZ 6: 337; all subsequent citations from the novel are taken from this edition and cited as page number only.
References Main text Shiina Rinzo¯ (1955 [1971]) Utsukushii onna (The Beautiful Woman), in Shiina Rinzo¯ zensh¯u (SRZ ) The Complete Works of Shiina Rinzo¯, vol. 6, Tokyo: To¯jusha.
Other references Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge. Auestad, Reiko (2002) ‘Nakano Shigeharu’s Goshaku no sake ’, Journal of Japanese Studies 28(1) (Winter): 79–107. Bhabha, Homi (ed.) (1990) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge. ——(1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Clammer, John (2001) Japan and its Others, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Dower, John (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, London: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gendai Nihon kirisutokyo¯ bungaku zenshu¯ (Anthology of Christian Literature in Contemporary Japan) (1972–74), Tokyo: Kyo¯bunkan. Gessel, Van C. (1982) ‘Voices in the Wilderness: Japanese Christian Authors’, Monumenta Nipponica 37(4): 437–57. Jameson, Frederic (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keene, Donald (1984) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, vol. 1, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Kobayashi Takayoshi (1992) Shiina Rinzo¯ -ron: Kaishin no shunkan (A Study of Shiina Rinzo¯: The Moment of Conversion), Tokyo: Seishido¯. Mayo, Marlene and Rimer, Thomas (eds) (2001) War, Occupation and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Miyano Ko¯o (1989) Katarienu mono e no tsubayaki: Shiina Rinzo¯ no bungaku (Hints of the Unutterable: The Literature of Shiina Rinzo¯), Tokyo: Yorudan-sha. Rubin, Jay (1985) ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation’, Journal of Japanese Studies 11(1): 71–103. Said, Edward (1994) Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage Press. Saito¯ Suehiro (1980) Shiina Rinzo¯ no bungaku (The Literature of Shiina Rinzo¯), Tokyo: ¯ fusha. O ¯ ¯ f¯usha. Sasaki Keiichi (1968) Shiina Rinzo¯ no bungaku (The Literature of Shiina Rinzo¯), Tokyo: O Sato¯ Jun’ichiro¯ (1973) ‘The Problem of Shiina Rinzo¯’, Japan Christian Quarterly (Autumn): 185–90.
252 Mark Williams Schlant, Ernestine and Rimer, Thomas (eds) (1991) Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Shiina Rinzo¯ (1967) Hito, seikatsu, dokusho: Watashi no seikatsu taiken (People, Life, Reading: My Life Experience), Tokyo: Futami shobo¯. ——(1970–79) Shiina Rinzo¯zensh u¯ (The Complete Works of Shiina Rinzo¯), 23 vols, Tokyo: To¯jusha. Steinhoff, Patricia (1988) ‘Tenko¯ and Thought Control’, in Gail Bernstein and Haruhiro Fukui (eds) Japan and the World: Essays on Japanese History and Politics in Honour of Ishida Takeshi, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 78–94. Tachibana, Reiko (1998) Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Takado¯ Kaname (1989) Shiina Rinzo¯ -ron: sono sakuhin ni miru (A Study of Shiina Rinzo¯: A Textual Perspective), Tokyo: Shinkyo¯ shuppan. Takeda Tomoju (1973) ‘Jiy u¯ no sho¯nin: Shiina Rinzo¯’ (Shiina Rinzo¯: Witness of Freedom), Seiki 272 (January): 68–77. Williams, Mark (2003) ‘Shiina Rinzo¯: Imaging Hope and Despair in Occupation Japan’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66(3): 442–55.
Further reading Buruma, Ian (1994) The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London: Phoenix. Gordon, Andrew (ed.) (1993) Postwar Japan as History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Koschmann, J. Victor (1996) Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Molasky, Michael (1999) The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, London: Routledge. Sasaki, Atsuko (1999) Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Slaymaker, Douglas (2004) The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction , London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Part III
Liminal sites
13 Yuta as the postcolonial Other in ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction O Leith Morton
Okinawan literature represents a conundrum when seen from the usual perspective of Japanese literature. The nature of this conundrum is easily apprehended when we consider the categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ proposed as the main themes of this volume. Where should Okinawan literature be located? This study attempts to answer this question by examining a collection of novellas written by the distinguished Okinawan ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro (b. 1925), which were published in a single volume in writer O 1992 under the title Gush¯o kara no koe (Voices from the Next World). The four novellas are: Meiro (Labyrinth), first published in 1991 in the literary journal Bungakkai; Mumy¯o no matsuri (The Dark Festival), first published in the same journal in 1981; Zushigame (The Funerary Urn), first published in Gunz¯o in 1986; and Fud¯o (The Shaman Way), first published in Bungakkai in 1992. Apart from Shaman Way, which is set in the past, the other stories are all set in contemporary Okinawa. However, all the novellas are concerned with yuta (shamans) and their ¯ shiro. impact on the various microcosms of Okinawan society described by O This study will concentrate on Labyrinth, while briefly considering the other two contemporary stories. Shaman Way will not be analysed here, because its setting in seventeenth-century Okinawa deserves a separate analysis.
The State of Okinawa To simply argue that the writing produced by Okinawans is but another example of a literature on the periphery is, in a sense, not only to deny subjectivity to the vast literary output of that island chain often called the Ryuky ¯ u¯ islands (for the purposes of this study, however, the appellation Okinawa will be used), but also to deny the history of Okinawa. Hokama Shuzen, who has been one of the leading authorities on Okinawan culture over the past fifty years or so, divides Okinawan literature into two separate categories: first, classical literature encompassing writing from the first centuries of the Christian era through to the nineteenth century. His second category of modern literature begins from the latter half of the nineteenth century. Further, this division is equally a linguistic one as classical Okinawan literature was written in the languages of the Ryu¯ kyu¯ islands while modern Okinawan
256 Leith Morton literature is written predominantly in the standard form of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect (Hokama 1986: 114). How can a body of literature that predates by a very large margin most national literatures of Europe be described as ‘peripheral’? Using such logic would condemn German literature, for example, to the periphery. As Hokama notes, postWorld War II Okinawan literature has, in some measure, reclaimed its linguistic subjectivity from standard Japanese, and continues to struggle with the problem of how to incorporate and utilize the languages of Okinawa into its writing (ibid.: 114). Modern Okinawan literature has had to deal with the consequences of the deliberate destruction of the hitherto independent kingdom of the Ryu¯ kyu¯ s, although that independence was always a matter of negotiation. Donald Keene, in his recent biography of the Emperor Meiji, observes: The status of [Okinawa] had long been ambiguous. In 1186 the shogunate had given the founder of the house of Satsuma the title of jito¯ (manor lord) of Okinawa . . . Internal warfare among the three kingdoms of Okinawa . . . led one of the kings to send a mission to the Ming Court in 1372, asking Chinese help in unifying the country; he also asked to become a feudatory. The Chinese agreed and gave the country the new name of Ry uky¯ ¯ u. This change in relations with China did not end the long-standing tributory relationship with Japan. (2002: 220) And, as Keene later concludes, ‘The Ryuky ¯ u¯ kingdom had for centuries served two masters, China and Satsuma, paying tribute to both. This was the only way a small country with few resources and no military strength could maintain its existence’ (ibid.: 302). However, in 1879, the kingdom was incorporated into the Japanese empire by force. Can this be interpreted as a kind of colonization? Many Okinawans have done so, and a significant portion of the literature of modern Okinawa has been devoted to describing this situation as a tragedy. It is also important to acknowledge that many Okinawans eventually came to have a more positive view of the absorption of their nation into the Japanese collectivity. The massive and heroic sacrifices Okinawans made in defence of the Japanese empire, specifically in the battle for Okinawa in 1945, have been widely recognized both within and outside Japan. Nevertheless, the fact remains that much prewar Okinawan writing dwells on the prejudices and inequalities that Okinawans suffered at the hands of the inhabitants of the Japanese mainland. As an example, I might cite a typical story by the famous Okinawan writer Yamanokuchi Baku (1903–63) called ‘Tengokubiru no Saito¯-san’ (Mr Saito of Heaven Building), written in 1938 and which was recently translated into English by Takagi Rie (Molasky and Rabson 2000: 85–96). The great ethnologist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) wrote his first significant study on Okinawa entitled Kainan sh¯oki (South Sea Notes, 1925) in part to counter the ‘historical prejudice’ against Okinawa held by mainlanders, and also to
Yuta as the postcolonial other 257 argue for the preservation of Okinawan languages or dialects (one definition of a language is ‘a dialect with an army’) in the face of the hostility of the prewar Japanese government that banned use of Okinawan languages in schools (Morton 2003: 66–9). Hokama Shuzen states that South Sea Notes played a vital role in fostering scholarship on Okinawa among native Okinawan scholars (Hokama 2002: 172–3). Yanagita’s study was the seed of the ‘discovery’ of Okinawa by mainland intellectuals which, in the postwar era and especially since the reversion of Okinawa from American to Japanese authority in 1972, blossomed into the great debate over the origins of the Japanese. This debate was fuelled by Yanagita’s seminal study Kaij¯o no michi (The Ocean Road, 1961) which argued for an alternative view of Japanese ethnicity arising in ¯e Okinawa. A mere nine years later, in 1970, the Nobel Prize-winning author O Kenzaburo¯ (b. 1935) published his Okinawa no¯to (Notes on Okinawa) in which he wrote that his journey to Okinawa was an attempt to ‘transform myself into an ¯ e 1970: 16). It is noticeable that this quotation comes from un-Japanese Japanese’ (O a chapter entitled ‘Nihon ga Okinawa ni zokusuru’ (Japan belongs to Okinawa). Other authors, like the novelist Shimao Toshio (1917–86) and his author-wife ¯shima, part of the Okinawan cultural sphere), also Shimao Miho (born in Amami O took up this theme, arguing for a new vision of Japan as a Pacific rather than an Asian culture, thus coining the word ‘Yaponesia’ (Morton 2003: 43–4; Clarke 1985: 7–21; Sparling 1985). In that sense, Okinawa and its culture became an ‘other’ inside Japan, a mirror in which the Japanese could re-envision and re-interpret their own cultural and literary tradition. Added to this already complex mixture of Japanese colonialism and postcolonial angst and re-interpretation (or is that re-appropriation?), the earlier American interregnum from 1951 to 1972, when Okinawa was administered by the USA, gave Okinawan citizens the dubious privilege of a second colonization of their culture. In the postwar era Okinawans had two postcolonial experiences to contend with. Thus modern Okinawan literature can be categorized along the lines summarized by Okamoto Keitoku in his work, Gendai bungaku ni miru Okinawa no jigazo¯ (the Image of Okinawa in Contemporary Literature, 1996), where Okinawan indigenous cultural influences, the shadow cast by America in the postwar era and the post-reversion rediscovery of an even more nuanced sense of Okinawan identity all combine to make hybridity the norm (Okamoto 1996). ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro Presently, I will examine the specific case of the novelist O whose own writing can be taken as emblematic of this hybridity and of the otherness that resides within modern Okinawa itself. But first let us consider briefly one of the most distinctive and celebrated characteristics of contemporary Okinawan religious culture: yuta, the mantic females who are the subjects ¯ shiro that form the focus of this investigation. of the stories by O
Yuta The authoritative, multi-volume Sho¯ gakkan Nihon kokugo daijiten (Dictionary of Japanese, vol. 13, 2nd edn, 2002) defines yuta as a word indicating a shaman
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¯ shima. The dictionary (kito¯shi), usually female, found in Okinawa and Amami O cites as a source Yanagita Kunio’s study Miko-ko¯ (On Mantic Females), published between March 1913 and March 1914 in his ethnological journal Kyo¯do kenky¯ ¯¯u (Local Studies). In On Mantic Females, Yanagita mentions Okinawa on occasion, but points out that the term was widely used from ancient times throughout Japan to mean female shamans, as well as women who perform sacral duties in shrines and a variety of related functions. He also mentions such cognate terms as ichi, ichiko, agata, itako, moriko, and so on. Despite their various functions, these words also refer to mediums (some female, some not) and shrine maidens and different kinds of mantic female. We can thus conclude that the term is of quite ancient origin and originally referred to shamans not only in Okinawa but in numerous other regions of Japan (Yanagita 1990: 305–417). But as the Sho¯gakkan dictionary entry notes, nowadays the word seems restricted in usage to Okinawa ¯ shima. and Amami O More recent research on yuta, such as that found in Takasaka Kaoru’s (1987) edited volume of essays Okinawa no saishi-jirei to kadai (Okinawan Rituals: Case Studies and Problems), presents a variety of perspectives that enrich and deepen Yanagita’s earlier study, with the added strength that the focus is exclusively on yuta in Okinawa. Takasaka himself argues that, unlike other more traditional village priestesses, yuta are women without any specialized training in rites who carry on this function because of the gradual disappearance of the older priestly class of women. He cites evidence that the ritualistic language used by yuta is borrowed from the rites intoned by older, more traditional sacral females (Takasaka 1987: 10, 22). For the purposes of this study, probably the most important evidence relating to the role yuta play in contemporary Okinawa is supplied by Tanigawa Ken’ichi, one of Yanagita’s most celebrated and distinguished successors, who established his own school of ethnology. Tanigawa is the author of numerous works on Okinawa. One of his most recent books, Kami ni o¯warete (Pursued by God, 2000), ¯ shiro in the fiction that I will directly addresses the same issues treated by O examine here. Tanigawa’s book is divided into four chapters or sections and an introduction. In the introduction titled ‘Tamashi no kiki’ (The Crisis of the Spirit), Tanigawa explains that his book is an account of the ‘religious experiences’ (shukyo ¯ ¯ taiken) of various Okinawan women (and a few men) who have become possessed by God. Glossing the word yuta as meaning ‘shaman’, he writes that his interest in Okinawan yuta was kindled by the knowledge that these women undergo terrible trials and tribulations and this is crucial in their development as yuta. The central person in these accounts is Nema Kana, a yuta who lives in Hirashi on Miyako Island, one of the many islands that make up Okinawa. Tanigawa describes the process of becoming a yuta, which is to be possessed by God. Tanigawa compares this experience to the ordeal of Jesus Christ during his forty days in the wilderness. Generally speaking, the women who are possessed do not seek this out; in fact, they see themselves as having been forcibly taken against their will by God. For example, on Ikema Island, women resisted this
Yuta as the postcolonial other 259 process for several years; thus, until 1996 when Kana’s daughter was selected as a tsukasa (celebrant) and accepted this burden, no yuta existed to perform the various religious rites normally celebrated by the islanders (Tanigawa 2000: 4–20, 183–9). In the Introduction, and at the end of the fourth chapter, Tanigawa writes in the first person, so it is clear that readers are meant to assume that he is relating real events. The accounts of the yuta are narrated in the third person, with personal and place names given freely. However, the normal apparatus of the ethnographer or cultural anthropologist, and the practice often adopted by Tanigawa in other books (interview dates, sources, footnotes, citations etc.), are absent. The book reads like a collection of stories. The incidents in Nema’s life bear a remarkable resemblance to many of the inci¯ shiro’s fiction. This is not because O ¯ shiro is dents and crises suffered by yuta in O acquainted with Nema (this seems altogether too improbable), but because of the common elements linking yuta together. Thus we are in a position to conclude ¯ shiro’s tales are indeed realthat, based on the evidence provided by Tanigawa, O istic, and very close to the actual life-histories of yuta themselves. In saying this, I am assuming that Nema actually exists and the yuta whose stories are recounted in Tanigawa’s volume are equally real. The similarity between Tanigawa’s real¯ shiro’s fictional yuta also indicates how much research O ¯ shiro life yuta and O himself may have done in creating his fictional accounts. This is not to argue that fidelity to factuality in itself is a necessary criterion of literary evaluation, but, ¯ shiro’s stories possess such factuality enriches and deepens appreknowing that O ciation of his technique, and further enhances readings of the stories.
¯ shiro Tatsuhiro, Okinawan dialects and yuta O ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro came to prominence on the Japanese mainland in 1967 when O he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his novella Kakuteru pa¯ tii (Cocktail Party). However, he had been well known in Okinawa for a much longer period. ¯ shiro was one of the central figures in the development and During the 1950s, O formation of postwar Okinawan literature, quite apart from the several posts he held in the government (often in positions relating to the preservation of ¯ shiro’s early fiction often Okinawan culture). Okamoto Keitoku argues that O took up autobiographical themes, a dominant strand of prewar and immediate postwar Okinawan fiction, but after the publication of Cocktail Party which dealt with Okinawan identity, US Occupation and the war (as Michael Molasky notes, the central theme in postwar Okinawan writing until the 1970s), his range as a ¯ shiro writer expanded considerably (Okamoto 1981: 101–2; Molasky 2001: 3). O maintained a keen interest in traditional Okinawan culture and this emerged as an important theme in his writing from 1960s onwards, especially in relation to the role women play in modern Okinawa in maintaining and passing on traditional cultural practices. His 1968 story ‘Kamishima’ (Divine Island), for instance, features a woman called Futenma Yae as the main character (Yae is a noro, a village priestess) and, the story deals in part with her religious responsibilities
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¯ shiro’s 1979 novel during the Asia Pacific War (Okamoto 1996: 64–7) Similarly, O Hanabanashiki utage no ato ni (After the Splendid Banquet) has another noro called Akamine Matsu as its chief protagonist (Okamoto 1996: 205). ¯ shiro has been at least as interested in yuta as noro. O ¯ shiro himself defines O yuta as female shamans who differ from the kinds of female mediums such as noro or itako (found in northern Japan), because they are quite ordinary people who, for the most part, live quite ordinary lives. This information is taken from ¯ shiro’s own essay on yuta first published in 1991 in the Nishi Nippon newspaper O ¯ shiro 1992: 272–6). I will not summarize the essay here, as I have done this (O elsewhere (Morton 1998: 65–78). Interestingly, Rabson who translated Cocktail ¯ shiro as saying that his 1966 story ‘Kame-no-ko¯ Baka’ Party into English quotes O (Turtleback Tombs) was more deserving of literary acclaim than Cocktail Party. Turtleback Tombs, also translated into English by Rabson, deals with ancestral graves, a matter closely related to the devotional duties of yuta, and yuta also appear in this story (Molasky and Rabson 2000: 112). Hokama Shuzen cited the sub-title of Turtleback Tombs, ‘jikken ho¯gen o motsu fudoki’ (a topography written in an experimental dialect), to argue that with this ¯ shiro gave a great boost to postwar Okinawan literature by attempting to novel, O develop an Okinawan dialect that could be understood by mainlanders, and thus could serve as a model for future writing in Okinawa. Hokama also draws atten¯ shiro’s radio drama performed in 1952 that was written in ‘Na¯fa tion to O Yamatoguchi’ (Naha-mainland mixed dialect). This was a pioneering attempt to realize a new approach to indigenous Okinawan culture (Hokama 2000: 89–91). ¯ shiro himself has spoken of his neologism ‘Yamato Uchina¯guchi’ (in standard O Japanese, ‘Nihon Okinawago’, or Japanese-Okinawan speech), which represents his own attempt to develop a mode of writing in dialect that clearly reveals its Okinawan origins while remaining intelligible to mainland Japanese readers. This then becomes, in the hands of contemporary Okinawan authors and speakers, ‘Uchina¯ Yamatoguchi’, a bastardized form of Okinawan dialect substi¯ shiro 2001: 203–9). tuting for the real thing (O Why do women feature so prominently in Okinawan culture? In a recent article, the historian Kawahashi Noriko summarizes neatly the nature and significance of the woman’s role in Okinawa. I will quote the relevant passage in full as an ¯ shiro’s fiction treating understanding of this issue is crucial to any reading of O women in general, and yuta in particular: One of the most striking characteristics of Okinawan religious culture is its gendered nature, and its allocation of authority to females. The complete domination by women in the rituals of the various Okinawan social institutions, such as household group, kin group, village community, and, formerly, the state, illustrates that women monopolize control of the religious sphere even when that sphere’s relevance extends to the whole society. As has been observed by many researchers, non-subordinate roles of women in the religio-cultural life of Okinawa significantly differ from those found in other cultures, where women are traditionally excluded from religious leadership.
Yuta as the postcolonial other 261 Ordinary Okinawan women serve conspicuous religious functions as sisters and daughters on the one hand, and as wives and mothers on the other. Okinawan women, regardless of the official priestesshood, are assigned a culturally recognized role as spiritual guardians. In general, while sisters are traditionally believed to fulfill the role of spiritual protector toward their brothers throughout their lives, married women are assumed to protect their household members as housewife-priestesses of the hearth deity. That is, Okinawan religious culture appears to have chosen a particular modality of sacred beings in which women in general are imbued with extraordinary strength. (Kawahashi 2000: 86) It is striking that Kawahashi offers this statement to argue against a 1990 book on Okinawan women by Horiba Kiyoko that puts the case that women are oppressed by men in Okinawa. In support of her thesis, Kawahashi cites the anthropologist Henrietta Moore who notes that ‘When researchers perceive the asymmetrical relations between women and men in other cultures, they assume such asymmetries to be analogous to their own cultural experience of the unequal and hierarchical nature of gender relations in the West’ (Kawahashi 2000: 91). This remark reminds us of the danger of simplistically and uncriti¯ shiro’s fiction cally assuming an easy identification of the gendered other in O with any putative equivalent in Western literature, whether textual or theoretical.
Three novellas ¯ shiro’s volume The Dark Festival is the longest of the four novellas contained in O Voices from the Next World and, in some ways, the most complex of the three stories set in present-day Okinawa (although it is not without its faults); consequently it deserves a much more extended treatment than is possible in this study. However, ¯ shiro’s themes in a particularly instructive manner, I as it illuminates many of O will refer to it often – and so will begin with a brief summary of the plot. Chapter 1 tells of a 39-year-old widow called Tawada Katsuko (her husband and son have recently died in accidents) who has gone to a remote mountain with an old yuta called Fukumoto Shizu to pray for her ancestors, descendants of the powerful Aji clan. According to Shizu, Katsuko has neglected her religious duties, and the implication is that this may lie behind the tragedies that have befallen her. The two women argue over which graves are those of Katsuko’s ancestors. Katsuko has the first of a number of increasingly violent (and at times, erotic) visions, and fears she is becoming a yuta herself. She decides to relocate her ancestor’s bones to the site nearby that, she has been informed by her vision, holds the correct grave. This leads Katsuko in the next chapter to relocate herself from her home in Kadena to the village of Hamasaki to be near her ancestors. This event triggers a series of political conflicts with an oil company as the villagers adopt Katsuko
262 Leith Morton as their yuta, and in Chapter 3, the village decides, on Katsuko’s advice, to build a magnificent tomb for the Aji on the mountain where, we later discover, an oil plant is to be built. Katsuko herself becomes embroiled in the villagers’ lives, and ¯ shiro 1992: 64–105). often doubts her visions (O Chapters 3 and 4 continue to explore the impact of Katsuko’s visions on the villagers and on Katsuko herself. Katsuko’s revelations, which lead her into competition with Shizu, become apocalyptic nightmares foretelling the end of the world, or at least the collapse of the ‘tomb’ mountain. They also enfold Katsuko in sexual dream fantasies where she has passionate sex with a god-like man. One remarkable scene in Chapter 4 recounts a vision where Japan is created: God dipped his staff in the lower world. Whereupon a dark grey colour resembling sea or mist formed and created a whirlpool. The staff stretched to infinity. God gently stirred the lower world with his staff, and then lifted it up. Drops fell from the tip of the staff. Katsuko seemed to have known from long ago that this was how the world was formed. As if she has always known it, the drops from the staff finally congealed and one island appeared. ¯ shiro 1992: 120) (O In this passage, Okinawan legend seems to appropriate the Japanese creation myth, as this description is very close to the Japanese myth of origin as recounted in the ancient mytho-historical document, the Kojiki. Finally, in the last chapter, Katsuko’s erotic fantasies take on material form with the appearance of a handsome young man, one of the leaders of the anti-oil plant movement. And in her visions he merges with her divine lover, or should that be succubus? Overcome by violent, sexual revelations or hallucinations, and also by the competing voices of her ancestors, Katsuko collapses on the mountain, and readers are left with the following enigmatic ending: ‘Will she be buried deep beneath the earth? How terrifying! Katsuko pressed her hands tightly ¯ shiro 1992: against her ears. The drone of the cicadas was suddenly stilled’ (O 146). In this short description, I have left out the many sub-plots contained in the villagers’ tales that Katsuko interprets as part of her duties as a yuta. However, to ¯ shiro almost mechanically counterbalance the rather obvious blemish of O linking Katsuko’s visions to her unassuaged grief and loneliness – joining her inner tormented psyche to the other-world of divine possession – the nightmarish, almost surreal quality of Katsuko’s revelations (we are never quite sure which is vision and which is non-vision, and neither is Katsuko) invests the character of Katsuko with great power. Indeed, of all the yuta portrayed in the three contemporary tales, Katsuko is the most impressive in the sheer incoherence and dynamism of her emotional self. She is a woman on the very edge of sanity and ¯ shiro has spared none of his considerable rhetorical or stylistic skill in allowing O his language to approach poetry in its extravagant imagery and disjointed rhythms.
Yuta as the postcolonial other 263 Elsewhere I have published a study of Funerary Urn, so I will summarize in just a few lines the plot of this work (Morton 1998). Funerary Urn deals with a woman called Maja Etsuko who is in the process of becoming a yuta, an event triggered by the revelation of her husband’s infidelity and the subsequent birth of a son to his mistress. In addition, the Maja household is also under attack by another yuta who demands that Etsuko find the resting place of her husband’s ancestors in order to give the spirits of the dead (who are, in one sense, alive) peace. The birth of the divine in Etsuko is the centrepiece of the novella, and the subsequent joining of ¯ shiro 1992: 147–209). the material world and the spiritual world in her psyche (O Labyrinth grapples with a similar theme. The chief protagonist of the story is a young woman called Matsuyo who is of mixed-blood ancestry but looks exactly like a typical blonde American girl. The irony is that Matsuyo was raised in rural Yomitan by her grandmother and doesn’t speak a word of any language other than her native Okinawan dialect. Matsuyo works in the evenings as a hostess in a bar but she is, like Katsuko and Etsuko, possessed by the divine. Matsuyo senses tragic events before they occur – of people about whom she has unhappy premonitions. As she whispers to her bargirl friend Sachi, ‘that person . . . his outline is ¯ shiro 1992: 14). Matsuyo had her first episode of divine possesstarting to blur’ (O sion (kamigakari) when she was seven. Sachi is in hospital with what appears to be bronchitis but her condition is steadily growing worse. Matsuyo dislikes the atmosphere at the hospital; she finds the hospital corridors treacherous in their uniformity, describing them as a ‘labyrinth’ (meiro) and she is convinced that unless she intercedes with Sachi’s ancestors by prayer, she will not recover. As Matsuyo’s grandmother told her, ‘Ugansu (gosenzo) ga miimante (mimamotte) kudasaru yo’ (your ancestors protect you) ¯ shiro 1992: 17). Although Matsuyo’s gifts differ somewhat from traditional yuta, (O she is often asked for advice and her reputation as a yuta is slowly spreading. Matsuyo grows increasingly concerned for Sachi. In the hospital, there is no hinukan (in standard Japanese hi no kami ) signifying the fire god or oven god, a fireplace where Okinawans place votive offerings to their ancestors on the ashes; this makes it all the more urgent for Matsuyo to find an appropriate spot for her prayers. From the beginning of the novella, Matsuyo’s beliefs and the modernity of contemporary Okinawa as symbolized by the uniform, modern corridors of the hospital (which lack a place where traditional Okinawan religion can be practised) come into conflict. Matsuyo asks Tamai Akira, a high official at the Prefectural Cultural Affairs ¯ shiro once headed), and her boyfriend of two years’ standing, for office (which O help to access the US military base at Kadena where a traditional site of worship is located. In a series of flashbacks, she recalls their first night together after she went to see him because she believed the Emperor of Japan was going to steal music from Okinawa. Explaining her anxieties to Tamai, she remarked that illogical fears come out of nowhere but, if she prays as instructed by god, then they disappear. She added: ‘I’m not a yuta . . . Despite the fact that people say I ¯ shiro 1992: 30–1). am . . . I just pray to rid myself of these anxieties’ (O However, in the present, she is stunned by Tamai’s refusal to help her gain entry to the base, even after she has repeated her grandmother’s words to him,
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‘Yuta banish the punishments that ordinary people endure’ (ibid.: 34–5). Visiting the hospital, Tamai even suggests she give up her advocacy of this issue with hospital staff: choose Christianity or Buddhism instead, he suggests. Not long after this conversation, Matsuyo has a vision of his death which is promptly realized when he is killed by a car directly outside the hospital. Her difficulties mount. Tamai’s successor says she is unlikely to gain permission from the Kadena base authorities as they would be shocked by the sight of a pretty blonde girl – whom they would take as American – performing Okinawan religious rituals in a military base. They may well arrest her as a spy, he warns her. Matsuyo begs him, ‘Inside the wire netting [at the base] the past is waiting’, she says. ‘If I can’t pray there, I have this feeling that lots of things will meet their doom’ (ibid.: 57). The official’s nonplussed reply is similar to Tamai’s: if she were performing Christian or Buddhist rites, then there would be no difficulty. In tears, Matsuyo leaves with Junko, her seamstress friend. But then she decides that if she wears a black robe like the Buddhist priests, she may be able to gain access to the base and save her friend. So she asks Junko to make her such a robe. Junko thinks the whole prospect of blonde, female Matsuyo robed in black priestly clothing is quite absurd and muses that she is witnessing a traffic accident between the past and the present, between Okinawa and the USA. However, in the end, she accedes to her friend’s wishes as she knows that Matsuyo truly is possessed by the divine, and there the novella ends. This long plot-summary leaves out many of the sub-plots concerning other men, Matsuyo’s rivalry with a nurse at the hospital and various recountings of her encounters with the divine in dreams, and in reality. Clearly, however, the tone is not as forbidding as in The Dark Festival and Funerary Urn and Matsuyo’s acceptance of her yuta nature is nowhere near as traumatic as Katsuko or Etsuko’s struggles against their eventual fate. Both Katsuko and Etsuko almost go mad with the pressure of the numinous upon their psyches but, in contrast, Matsuyo after hearing the official’s advice about turning to other religions thinks to herself, ‘when my god fills my head how can the Christian God or the Buddha ¯ shiro 1992: 57). come into me?’ (O The tone is, at times, whimsical, almost humorous, as in the bizarre vision of Matsuyo dolled up in a Buddhist priest’s gear performing religious rites in a US base. The whimsy is balanced by the utter powerlessness and frustration Matsuyo feels at her inability to convince the authorities of the reality of her visions and the urgency of her divine mission – though few doubt her sincerity. ¯ shiro conceives of Matsuyo’s character. The humour provides a key to how O Unlike Katsuko and Etsuko, she is not a tragic victim of circumstances or of her faith in the unseen. Rather, she triumphs over both to emerge as a striking, utterly self-possessed, and quite likeable individual. It appears that she recovers from her lover’s death in no time at all, yet this can be attributed not merely to her youthful ebullience but also to her abiding faith in whatever fate the gods have chosen for her or for Tamai. His death was divinely preordained – despite the warnings she gave him – and so nothing can be done about it.
Yuta as the postcolonial other 265
Yuta as the subject of resistance If Matsuyo is a representative of the ‘other’, then, it is also the ‘other’ of the revival of traditional Okinawan culture that occurred post-reversion in 1972 – a phenomenon documented by Kawahashi Noriko who writes how ‘some women of Okinawa are imputing new meanings to their cultural heritage by reinstating the significance of what was invisible through modernist eyes’ (Kawahashi 2000: 95). In this respect, Matsuyo actually fulfils the prescription of Yui Akiko, a contemporary journalist on the Okinawa Taimusu newspaper, who wrote in 1992 that ‘Okinawan women’s consciousness, which has been contradictory and fragmented, has started to look for a new direction’ (ibid.). The new direction that Yui ¯ shiro in this novella. foreshadows is the ‘magico-religious’ world explored by O This reading would see Matsuyo as signifying a retreat from the contemporary mainland abandonment of tradition, and a re-assertion of a singularly female expression of Okinawan religious identity. Thus the ‘other’ (a.k.a. Matsuyo) is standing on the edge of a new centre, which is the old centre of the Okinawan religious world-view. However, such a reading is necessarily an abstraction from the concrete particularity of the text. That particularity grounds the story in the lively, fresh, youthful personality of Matsuyo, who has deep roots in her country’s ¯ shiro is implying that, in some sense, tradition despite her appearance (unless O her appearance is pivotal to her yuta status). ¯ shiro himself wrote about his investigations of yuta, and about this novella in O particular, in his volume of autobiographical memoirs Ko¯gen o motomete (Seeking ¯ shiro revealed that the Out the Light-Source) published in 1997. For example, O scene in which Matsuyo claims that the emperor was trying to steal music from Okinawa is based upon a real incident reported to him in his capacity as a ¯ shiro 1997: 292). Further, he notes that ‘to try to describe government official (O the psychology of yuta was an entirely new, unprecedented venture for me and it ¯ shiro took me a considerable effort to do it’ (ibid.: 294). A few pages later, O states that Okinawan culture is originally a female culture – verified by Kawahashi Noriko’s observations cited earlier – and that he personally feels this strongly because of his upbringing (ibid.: 296). He elaborates upon the role of women in Okinawa: An important element of Okinawan female culture is yuta. I began to write a series [of stories] about yuta . . . My intention in writing Labyrinth was to use a mixed-blood woman with the mental abilities of a yuta as a symbol of Okinawan culture attempting to survive modern civilization and the system of US bases, all the while groaning in pain. The completed work is quite different from my first draft but my editor said that it was incomprehensible . . . Labyrinth was a finalist for the Kawabata Yasunari Prize but it didn’t win. Yet the comments by the judges sounded exactly like it had won. There was no resistance whatever to the [theme of] yuta and it was accepted by the bundan (literary world) . . . Nevertheless, while the existence of yuta was recognized, they were understood as something with a weird image – quite different from my own understanding of yuta . . . for us
266 Leith Morton Okinawans, yuta are remote from our daily lives but we feel they possess a taste of the unique nature of Okinawan culture. (ibid.: 297–8) ¯ shiro, in Apart from the difficulties of getting Labyrinth published, noted here by O other places in his memoir he speaks of the strong resistance by his Tokyo publishers to stories about yuta, and also the negative reactions of Tokyo-based critics (ibid.: 294). This issue is worth examining in a little more detail as it ¯ shiro connects directly with the notion of the colonial or postcolonial Other. O has, in some degree, as he admits in his comments about the rewriting of Labyrinth, had to subject his work to a process that can be described as a kind of ‘colonization’. Yuta in their raw particularity need an explanatory context before they are acceptable as literary subjects by mainland editors and critics. Without a detailed ¯ shiro’s publishers, it documentary examination of drafts and changes forced by O is impractical to do anything other than speculate about exactly what forms of textual accommodation Labyrinth has been subjected to. Yet the very fact that this ¯ shiro has made several references to this in his memoir, process occurred, and O allows one to conclude that the ‘colonial’ nexus historically existing between Okinawa and Japan has not entirely disappeared in the present, and that Okinawan literature in general may well be subject to this postcolonial process. The role of Matsuyo in respect of Okinawan and US culture adds a further twist ¯ shiro to speculation about postcolonial processes and Okinawan literature. First, O himself draws attention to this point in his memoir with his comment that Matsuyo is ‘a symbol of Okinawan culture attempting to survive modern civilization and the system of US bases’ (ibid.: 297). Is she such a symbol? Is the author’s intention realized by his text? These are issues I will now investigate.
Matsuyo as the postcolonial Other The first significant positioning of Matsuyo as a yuta in relation to the US occurs when she is 25. The passage reads: It happened on a fine day in the autumn in her 25th year. Matsuyo was suffering from a headache and so didn’t go to work and was at home when a small gasoline tank fell into the garden from a US plane flying above her head. It was about the size of a large refrigerator but the instant it dropped into the garden it looked bigger than the small shack with a corrugated iron roof. Matsuyo saw her grandmother crushed beneath it, struck by a sudden vision. Her grandmother was in the toilet at the time. Then, one morning a month later, without any warning, her grandmother died asleep in her bed. ¯ shiro 1992: 17) (O This passage has an almost comic tone as the humorous touches illustrate (e.g. the grandmother in the toilet when the gas tank hits the ground at exactly the same time Matsuyo has her vision); but these incongruities, and the vision
Yuta as the postcolonial other 267 which warns of her grandmother’s death, are predicated upon a gas tank falling from a US plane. As every Okinawan is aware, US planes form a large part of the make-up of the US bases that inhabit large chunks of various Okinawan locales, including a large area of Okinawa itself (the most populous of the islands that make up the island chain), and they constantly pass overhead and frequently disturb the peace of the people on the ground. These frequent US flights are one of the many irritants in the US-Okinawan relationship, and serve as a reminder of Okinawa’s unique and unenvied status as the host for the vast bulk of the US forces stationed in Japan. The next important reference to the USA comes in connection with Matsuyo’s attempts to gain permission to enter the US base at Kadena to worship. The passage reads: It took a surprisingly long time for Matsuyo to obtain the permission that allowed her to pray inside the wire-netting of the base. In the past she only had to receive permission from the US military authorities but now she had to gain permission from the Defence Agency of the Japanese government . . . after listening to Yona Hanjiro¯’s [the patron of Junko, Matsuyo’s seamstress friend] explanation, the Agency official indicated his understanding of the need for a yuta to pray there because of the existence of shell middens or relics. He understood but did not answer straight away because there was no precedent. ‘Since the propellers of the B52s and Phantoms make such a loud drone, will Matsuyo’s prayers be able to be heard by God?’ asked Yona on the phone to Junko. ¯ shiro 1992: 54) (O Actually, Yona had misunderstood the advice that he received: the issue was not the noise that the B52s made but rather the potential for military secrets, secret information regarding military technology, being stolen. Junko has another concern which the passage goes on to articulate: Junko felt, in contrast to this, that despite the fact that Matsuyo was half American, she was ignorant of things American and so inside the wire netting, she might end up being run over underneath the wheels of the B52s or being blown away by the jet-stream of the fighter planes. (ibid.: 55) ¯ shiro’s light touch, with the Here again, in Junko’s comic imaginings, we see O description of Matsuyo as a helpless victim of the giant B52s. Or is this stark realism? The other significant fact about this passage is that the Japanese military authorities – and also the Okinawan Cultural Affairs Agency in the person of Tamai, Matsuyo’s lover – act as agents of the American will, and perhaps, as the passage implies, go beyond the Americans’ own intentions in their zeal to act as colonial surrogates.
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¯ shiro thus allows us to view Matsuyo as a site of resistance both against the O American military occupation in its continuing role as a postwar colonial ruler, which in the passage quoted earlier is represented by the constant US air traffic, and also against mainland and Okinawan officialdom which perpetuates the colonial legacy. As a yuta, Matsuyo represents the ancestral Okinawa belief in a divinity that, despite its affiliation to various local religions on the mainland, is nonetheless firmly rooted in the specific religious history and experience of Okinawa. This is especially noticeable in the role that women play as yuta in the maintenance of those same beliefs. In this sense, the reference to ‘modern civilization’ as one of the forces that Matsuyo is resisting as a symbol of ¯ shiro in his memoirs, could signify some modern Okinawan culture, made by O Okinawans, such as those singled out in the passages cited above. Thus, Matsuyo’s role is complex and ambiguous; she does not represent polarized opposites so much as shifting currents within Okinawa’s exploration of its post-reversion status. Matsuyo is an appealing, at times comic figure, who in her innocence, essential goodness, and the steadfast nature of her very Okinawan faith as a yuta, becomes more than mere symbol. ¯ shiro alerts us to The sympathetic and vivid portrayal of her character by O the power of his art, and to the possibilities inherent in literature. While we may not share Matsuyo’s beliefs, nevertheless, the sympathy she evokes makes it possible for readers to enter, if only in their imagination, into the other world of a female shaman; her mantic nature is transformed by the power of language into yet another mirror of the enduring and still mysterious entity called human nature. ¯ shiro’s own stateFinally, has sufficient evidence been gathered to support O ments about his novella? Does Matsuyo exist as the woman the author would wish her to be? Two further quotations serve to confirm the strength of Matsuyo’s convictions and her character. First, the following passage illustrates the vitality of this extraordinary woman whose youth and energy represent a stark contrast to, for example, the character of Etsuko in The Funerary Urn: They came to Junko’s shop. While walking, unawares, Matsuyo took the lead and guided Junko to her business. Junko was entirely passive. Nor did she have any words in reply to Matsuyo’s declaration: ‘Make me priests’ robes. Black robes.’ Junko stared into Matsuyo’s gray eyes, then Matsuyo added, ‘I’m going shave my head. Really, I will. So I will go to prayer dressed in black robes. I will cure Sachi’s illness, you’ll see.’ ¯ shiro 1992: 59–60) (O In The Funerary Urn, Etsuko feels her head about to split open when confronted by the combined demands of her family and the numinous. Katsuko’s visions in The Dark Festival eventually appear to actually displace reality as she perceives it. Matsuyo’s anxieties, her divinely inspired visions, drive her, as they do Etsuko and Katsuko, to exercise her powers as a yuta. However, Etsuko’s ordeal threatens to kill her – readers are not sure whether she can survive the transformation her
Yuta as the postcolonial other 269 body is undergoing – and Katsuko’s visions drive her to the very borders of insanity. By contrast, in Labyrinth, written a number of years after the earlier two stories, Matsuyo’s contact with the divine simply hardens her determination, her energy, which has the power almost to enslave her cocky friend Junko to her will. ¯ shiro assures us in his final sentences of Matsuyo’s almost certain victory O over the forces that oppose her: The night turned to rain. In the half-darkness outside the window, one after another, reflections from car headlights flashed by, rain pelted down diffracting the gleaming light. No one can guarantee that an accident might not occur. Yet Matsuyo, her head shaved, garbed in black, may well boast nonchalantly that she could easily tell – better than before, dressed up like this – whether an accident was about to happen. ¯ shiro 1992: 61) (O In these last sentences, there is a gentle humour that consistently informs the novella from the first page. Not only does this comic element lighten the darkness of the trauma caused by divine possession, but it acts as an ironic counterpoint that allows the narrative voice (which fashions the expectations of the readers, playing the role of the invisible readers’ friend) to inject a charming, complex and mysterious distance into the portrait of Matsuyo, which deepens and enhances her personality. She is no mere puppet of the author, the narrator hints, because neither he nor we know exactly what she will do.
References Main texts O¯ shiro Tatsuhiro (1992) Gusho¯ kara no koe (Voices from the Next World), Tokyo: Bungei shunj¯u. ——(1997) Ko¯gen o motomete: sengo goj unen ¯ to watashi (Seeking out the Light-Source: The Fifty Postwar Years and Myself), Naha: Okinawa Taimuzusha.
Other references Clarke, Hugh (1985) ‘Japonesia, the Black Current and the Origins of the Japanese’, The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 17: 7–21. Hokama Shuzen (1986) Okinawa no rekishi to bunka (Okinawan History and Culture), Tokyo: Ch¯uko¯ shinsho. ——(2000) Okinawa no kotoba to rekishi (Okinawan Language and History), Tokyo: Ch¯uko¯ bunko. ——(2002) Okinawa-gaku e no michi (The Road to Okinawan Studies), Tokyo: Iwanami gendai bunko. Kawahashi, Noriko (2000) ‘Seven Hindrances of Women? A Popular Discourse on Okinawan Women and Religion’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 27(1/2): 86. Keene, Donald (2002) Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World 1853–1912, New York: Columbia University Press.
270 Leith Morton Molasky, Michael S. (2001) The American Occupation of Japan: Literature and Memory, London and New York: Routledge. Molasky, Michael and Rabson, Steve (eds) (2000) Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro’s Funerary Urn (1986)’, Journal of Morton, Leith (1998) ‘The Spirit Within: O the Oriental Society of Australia 30: 65–78. ——(2003) Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Nihon kokugo daijiten (2002) (Dictionary of Japanese), 2nd edn, vol. 13, Tokyo: Sho¯gakkan. ¯ e Kenzaburo¯ (1970) Okinawa no¯to (Notes on Okinawa), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho. O Okamoto Keitoku (1981) Okinawa bungaku no chihei (The Horizon of Okinawan Literature), Tokyo: San’ichi shobo¯. ——(1996) Gendai bungaku ni miru Okinawa no jigazo¯ (Okinawa in Contemporary Novels and Drama), Tokyo: Ko¯bunkan. ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro (2001) ‘Kindai Okinawa bungaku to ho¯gen’ (Modern Okinawan Literature O and Dialect), in Sekai ni tsunagu Okinawa kenky¯u (Okinawan Studies Linked to the World), Naha: Fukki 25-shu¯ nen dai-3 kai Okinawa kenky¯u kokusai shinpojium jikko¯iinkai, pp. 199–210. Sparling, Kathryn (1985) ‘The Sting of Death’ and Other Stories by Shimao Toshio, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies. Takagi Rie (2000) ‘Mr. Saito¯ of Heaven Building’, in Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson (eds) Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Takasaka Kaoru (ed.) (1987) Okinawa no saishi-jirei to kadai (Okinawan Rituals: Case Studies and Problems), Tokyo: Miyai shoten. Tanigawa Ken’ichi (2000) Kami ni ¯owarete (Pursued by God), Tokyo: Shincho¯sha. Watanabe Yoshio (1993) Sekai no naka no Okinawa bunka (Okinawan Culture and the World), Naha: Okinawa Taimuzusha. Yanagita Kunio (1990) Yanagita Kunio zenshu¯ (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 11, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯. ——(1997) Yanagita Kunio zenshu¯ (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 4, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯.
Further reading Blacker, Carmen (1975) The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, London: Allen & Unwin. Morton, Leith (2004) Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry , Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. George Allen & Unwin. Rabson, Steve (trans. and ed.) (1989) Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas, Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Weiner, Michael (ed.) (1997) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, London: Routledge.
14 Modernity, history, and the uncanny Colonial encounter and the epistemological gap Faye Yuan Kleeman Introduction What exactly is the Other and can one ever fully ‘know’ this Other? Is an Other that arose through the mediation of geopolitics, especially colonization, different from an internal Other like Japan’s zainichi (resident) Korean, burakumin, hibakusha (A-bomb victims), or Ainu communities? How about Others delineated by other factors, like gender (social), class (economic) or race (biological)? What happens when these categories overlap, reinforcing or canceling each other out? One distinguishing feature of the external Other as colonial or imperial subject is the necessity of incorporating him/her into the empire. This Other, so different from the Lacanian view of the Other as the ultimate signifier of everyone the subject is not, is an object to conquer, contain, know, incorporate and, eventually, assimilate. Since the subject is defined by what it is not, the ongoing process of incorporation and assimilation of the Other means that the ‘I’ is in a constant identity crisis, forced repeatedly to redefine itself on a broader canvas that can incorporate the former Other while seeking a yet more exotic Other through which to define its boundaries. In fact, this assimilation process often brought unintended consequences, as we see in the recent work of Leo Ching (2001), Oguma Eiji (1995, 1998), and Komagome Takeshi (1996). The asymmetrical structure of assimilation, with one side incorporating, absorbing, and reconfiguring the other’s pre-existent identity, posed special problems for the colonizer. Komori Yo¯ichi sees Japanese colonialism as caught between two views of colonialism. On the one hand, the Japanese largely ignored the external colonial pressures that led to Japan’s rapid modernization and social transformation, a state Komori characterizes as ‘colonial disregard’ (shokuminteki muishiki); on the other, Japan actively pursued the colonization and assimilation of Korea and Taiwan on the basis of what he terms ‘colonialist regard’ (shokuminchishugiteki ishiki). In other words, Japan suppressed the sense of crisis associated with the idea that Japan might have been colonized by the Western colonial powers and, instead, focused upon the discourse of modernity as manifest in the spontaneous, self-determined (jihatsuteki) mission of ‘bunmei kaika’ (civilization and enlightenment). ‘Colonial disregard’ was constructed through a process of erasure wherein the Japanese concealed their internalized self-colonization whereas ‘colonialist
272 Faye Kleeman regard’ was expressed through mimicry of the Western superpowers. Although most Western media of the day still considered Japan an ‘underdeveloped country’, the Meiji elite willingly accepted the mission of civilizing their fellow Asians as part of their destiny (Komori 2001b: 15). One way to assert one’s civilized status is to create a marginalized ‘primitiveness’ (yaban). Japanese colonialism is founded upon a Japanese brand of ‘Orientalism’ that turns against its Asian neighbors the superiority of a Western modernity that it had only recently acquired for itself. This dualistic discursive strategy, incorporating both assimilation and exclusion, was present throughout Japanese colonialism. Komori’s understanding leaves little room for individual agency because he insists that the emergence of the individual subject of modernity was quickly crushed and folded into the national (and imperial) projects of ‘enriching the nation and strengthening the military’(fukoku kyo¯hei ) and ‘escaping Asia to enter Europe’ (datsua nyuo ¯¯ ). Nevertheless, he succeeds in articulating the East/West schizophrenia that is Japanese modernity.1 Drawing upon Fanon (Black Skin, White Mask, 1952) and on Homi Bhabha’s psychoanalytical reading of colonial trauma and ambivalence, Komori succinctly summarizes the dilemma of Japan’s modernity: Japan’s blindness to its own internal colonization, and, as a compensatory measure to erase the trauma of being colonized, its decision to direct its gaze outward, toward external expansion and colonization. Unlike the gradual decolonization that characterized the end of the British and French colonial enterprises, the Japanese empire disintegrated at the end of the Asia Pacific War as quickly as it had been formed. The immediately ensuing American Occupation left no room for self-reflection upon the colonial experience; instead, a discursive stratagem of subjugated victimhood permeated the post-war discourse. Again, Komori refers to this phenomenon as neo-colonial disregard (shin-shokuminchiteki muishiki) and neo-colonialist regard (shin-shokuminshugiteki ishiki) manifested in Japan’s rapid economic expansion in Asia (2001b: 130). In this chapter I will examine the epistemological gap inherent in colonial encounters within the specific context of the emergence of the modern subject. I will use the writing of Sato¯ Haruo, focusing on the novella Jokaisen kidan (A Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan, hereafter referred to as the The Tale of the Fan, 1925) as well as a body of works produced after his trip to colonial Taiwan. Sato¯ Haruo was perhaps the last modern writer to embody the quintessential quality of a gentlemanly connoisseur or bunjin, a quality that exemplified his ¯ gai and Natsume So¯seki. Through a long and Meiji predecessors such as Mori O prolific career, Sato¯ exerted a literary influence on various genres and many later writers. At the forefront of experimental Taisho¯ modernism, he was also identified by the reading public as someone with close ties to the traditional literary heritages of both Japan and China. He personifies in his writing both Komori’s ‘colonial disregard’ and ‘colonialist regard’. These multiple positionings, at times progressive and reactionary, make Sato¯ a complex and intriguing writer. Sato¯ began his trip to the colonies with some hesitation, but it yielded a corpus of work that is both revealing and unsettling: revealing, in the sense that we see a
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 273 Taisho¯ liberal intellectual grappling with conflicts between his liberal humanist stance and the imperial agenda, and yet disquieting in that it also exposed the Orientalist limitations of Sato¯ and, to an extent, Japanese intellectuals in general. I will use Sato¯’s writings on Taiwan and southern China to explore issues such as the fluid boundary separating the civilized and the barbaric, the negotiation that ensued between the modernity of the colonizer and the native traditions of the colonized, and specifically, how the colonizer deals with pre-colonial native history in which the colonizer played no part while trying to forge a shared present, and ultimately craft a common historical narrative for the future. These colonial records (some eye-witness accounts, some adaptations of native tales, and some fictional creations) provide a fertile ground for examining the dynamic of what Mary Louise Pratt has called the ‘contact zone’ (1992: 13–15).
The dualistic positioning of Sato¯ Haruo Sato¯ Haruo (1892–1964) was one of the most prominent writers and poets of the first half of the twentieth century.2 His family maintained a tradition of Sinological scholarship, which he developed by gaining a wide familiarity with Western literature; he also published translations from a variety of foreign languages. Sato¯’s productive career spanned half a century from the late 1910s to the mid-1960s. From his earliest poetic debut in the literary journals Mita bungaku and Subaru and his first novel, the fashionably trendy Supein inu no ie (House of the Spanish Dog, 1918), to the lyric he wrote for the 1964 Olympic ceremony theme song, Sato¯ was an established authority on the Japanese literary scene. By serving on the selection board for the Akutagawa Prize from its creation in 1935 to 1962, he played a decisive role in shaping the direction of modern Japanese literature and he acquired a well-earned reputation for nurturing new writers. His house was a constant gathering place for many writers, new and old, and he was said to have trained three thousand disciples (mondei sanzen). An energetic author, Sato¯ excelled at fiction and is best known for his novels and short stories, but he wrote memorably in a variety of genres: poetry, literary criticism, travel journals, essays, drama, translations and adaptations (hon’an), biography,3 folk tales, and children’s tales. Nakamura Shin’ichiro¯ esteemed this versatility, saying of Sato Haruo: ‘he alone among all the contemporary writers explored the potential of literature from multiple viewpoints, carried this experiment through in his word, and left us with a most versatile oeuvre’.4 Born and raised in a prominent physician household with a tradition of Chinese learning (kangaku) in Shingu, Wakayama, Sato¯ made his name in the literary world with romantic early modernist depictions of pastoral and urban life, elegies strongly influenced by William Blake and Goethe such as Den’en no yuutsu ¯ (Gloom in the Country, 1918) and Tokai no y¯uutsu (Gloom in the City, 1922). Sato¯ was also known to be well versed in the Japanese and Chinese classics. His modern renditions of medieval essays like Ho¯jo¯ki and Tsurezuregusa as well as his special passion, Edo works like Ugetsu monogatari and Saikaku’s tales, are still preferred by discriminating readers. His comprehensive knowledge of the Chinese prose and poetic
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traditions is evident in his many translated collections of Chinese poetry, such as Shashinshu¯ (Carriage Dust Collection, 1929), Chinwai gaho¯ no¯ ryo¯ ki (A Chronicle of Cooling-off on Painted Boats on the Qin and Huai River, 1935), and the postwar Gyokutekifu (Melody for the Jade Flute, 1945). Translator of the beloved Italian children’s fable Pinocchio, he also compiled a Shina do¯wash¯u (Collection of Chinese Fairy Tales). For his adult readers, he translated Xiyouji (Journey to the West, SHZ 32), Shuihuzhuan (The Water Margin, SHZ 34), and Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenthcentury martial epic Pingyaozhuan (Chronicle of Taming the Demons).5 In the most recent version of Sato¯’s Complete Works (SHZ 1998), volumes 28 to 34 are devoted to his translated and adapted works. While roughly 20 percent are related to Japanese literature, less than 30 percent are of European literature, and more than half are materials based upon Chinese sources, an indication of the author’s commitment to continental culture. In the essay ‘Karamono no innen’ (My Affinity with Things Chinese), Sato¯ refers to himself mockingly as ‘the last Sinophile’ (Shina aiko¯ no saigo no hitori ).6
The reluctant traveler and the imperial eye Though the study of colonial policy had been established as an academic discipline and incorporated into the law school curriculum as early as 1909, it primarily drew the attention of the elite – scholars, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, and leaders of industry leaders – and had not yet penetrated the consciousness of everyday people.7 In the summer of 1920, Sato¯ made his first trip abroad, traveling to Taiwan and the southern coastal area of China. Much has been written about Sato¯’s reasons for taking the trip, focusing on his affair with Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s wife Chiyo, the later Mrs Sato¯ in the wife-swapping ‘Odawara Incident’.8 In his travelogue ‘Kano ichinatsu no ki ’ (A Record of That One Summer), he glossed over the affair and attributed his motivation to ‘some depressing matters’, ‘the friendship of an old buddy’, and ‘the phantom of the Southern country (nankoku) which I have yet to see’ (1936: 253). After his return to Japan, he wrote various pieces – fiction, essays, and travelogues – based on his experiences. The most famous work to come out of this was the The Tale of the Fan.9 It is often cited as an exemplary piece of exotic writing, and Sato¯ himself proclaimed the story one of his five favorites.10 As an established writer of the Taisho¯ Romantic movement, his story helped draw attention to the colony. Sato¯ Haruo’s writings on colonial Taiwan were not in the form of a casual travel journal like the more famous Mankan tokorodokoro (Here and There in Manchuria and Korea) by Natsume So¯seki or Shina yuki ¯ (Record of a Trip to China) by Akutagawa Ry¯unosuke.11 The first piece to appear was an account of a two-week side trip to south-east China (Amoy and Zhangzhou), entitled Nanp¯o kiko¯ (Record of a Journey to the South). Sato¯’s curiously harsh attitude toward what he saw in China is revealed in his complaints about the inattentive sloppiness of the bellboys, the filth and odor of the cities, and the anti-Japanese posters plastered throughout the city of Amoy. He also published some short stories inspired by his
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 275 experiences in China, such as ‘Ko¯ Gojo¯ ’ (Fifth-Daughter Huang) and ‘Hoshi’ (Star),12 but they are far outnumbered by works growing out of his stay in Taiwan, including travelogues, essays, and short stories. Compared to the critical and, at times, contemptuous gaze he directed at China, his depictions of the colony are more complex, studied, and subtle; often they reveal a measured sympathy toward the aboriginal peoples and native Taiwanese intellectuals. There was a sizable temporal gap between the publication of Sato¯’s writings on China, a foreign state and a former and future enemy, and those on Taiwan, reflecting the political sensitivity of writings relating to Japan’s colony. His first publications on Taiwan adapted local tales such as ‘Eagle Claw Blossom’,13 the children’s story, ‘Inago no dairyoko¯ ’ (The Locust’s Great Journey),14 and the indigenous legend, Macho¯ (Devilbird).15 His travel journal, which one might expect to be the first product of the trip to see the light of day, did not appear until five years later. The potential sensitivity of this material is evident in his record of his visit to the aboriginal village called Wushe (Japanese Musha).16 He visited shortly after the Saramao incident, a small-scale armed uprising by the indigenous people that foreshadowed a much larger, more brutal mutiny a decade later in the so-called ‘Musha Incident’. Though rumors claimed that more than one hundred Japanese had been killed, Sato¯’s sympathies clearly lay with the indigenous people. He notes the economic hardships suffered by the village and reveals a sense of ambivalence and regret upon seeing local schoolchildren struggling to grasp remote concepts such as metropolitan Tokyo and the Emperor. It is no wonder that when this travel account was reissued in book form in 1936, it was promptly banned. In 1932, a full twelve years after his journey and a year after the Manchuria Incident, Sato¯ published another travel account, Shokuminchi no tabi (Journey to the Colony),17 in which he recalled the various local elites he had met and his many conversations with them concerning issues such as modernity, colonization, and cultural identity. Sato¯ tried to maintain his position as a detached observer who would listen and provide a forum for the natives to express their views on various subjects. The careful selection of memories and the array of characters presented give this piece the feel of social science, as if he were laying out a taxonomy of the colonized, from the passive resistance of an old poet who refused to meet him to members of the younger generation who aggressively pursued news of new cultural trends in Japan. Sato¯ felt the need to tell a fuller story of the colony, not just to satisfy the metropolitan readers’ insatiable curiosity about the indigenous inhabitants, but to offer a more nuanced account that would encompass his encounters with Taiwanese intellectuals.18
From exotic text to colonial text: re-reading The Tale of the Fan Of the dozen works that resulted from Sato¯’s journey to the colony, The Tale of the Fan is the best known and artistically most accomplished piece. Structurally, The Tale of the Fan uses a multiple story-within-a-story structure, interweaving a frame story of the reminiscences of the narrator in the present time, with a main narrative depicting his encounter with a native youth some time earlier, and a retelling of
276 Faye Kleeman the native pioneer history in the past. Hailed as one of the top ten ‘exotic’ stories in modern Japanese literature, the story has been read as a pure romantic love story with a Chinese element. The critical terms most commonly associated with the work are exoticism (ikoku jo¯sho) and Chinoiserie (Shina shumi). The general tendency is to read the text in line with the generic category of works that include foreign subject matter in the narrative, such as Akutagawa’s Nagasaki Christian tales (kirishitan mono) or Kitahara Hakush¯u’s poetry on the southern barbarians (nanban), noted for portraying the exotic and the unfamiliar (Tsuboi 2002). Though ikoku bungaku as a literary critical term has lost its currency, it was a legitimate and often used term during the Taisho¯ and pre-war Sho¯wa eras. This categorization isolated the unknown, the ‘other’ factors, domesticated them through indigenous linguistic and artistic forms, and kept the unknown element at bay for a distant, but safe, aesthetic appreciation. The dominant reading of The Tale of the Fan, first published in 1925 in the journal Josei, has been as an exotic, romantic tale for the female reader, with enough uncanny twists and turns to chill their spines. What makes The Tale of the Fan a quintessential exotic text is its intertextual fusing of the Occidental and the Oriental. A contemporary critic, Shimada Kinji (1901–93), who was teaching at Taipei Imperial University at the time and later returned to found the Comparative Literature department at Tokyo University, promoted the piece as setting the standard for ikoku bungaku. Rather than focusing upon the obvious use of the Chinese ghost story, Shimada pointed out the influence of nineteenthcentury symbolism, noting similarities to Edgar Allen Poe’s eerie Fall of the House of Usher in its depiction of natural landscape and to Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan in leitmotif and plot construction (Shimada 1976: 220). Yoshida Seiichi locates Sato¯ in the Japanese Romantic school and groups him together with ‘decadent’ writers such as Izumi Kyo¯ka and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ (Yoshida 1979: 201–318). This aesthetic reading remained dominant through the pre-war and postwar period, with the main focus on the tangled love stories and scant attention paid to the story’s colonial setting.19 It is only recently that we begin to see the text being problematized and reconsidered as a piece of colonial literature (Izumi 2002; Yao Qiaomei 2000, 2001a, 2001b). By deconstructing a metropolitan narrative and displacing it with a reading that includes the margins of the empire, critics have sought to expand the potential significance of the text. This hermeneutic procedure begins with a close reading – founded upon the textual skills of literary interpretation – and then aims to go beyond the superficial influence of certain epistemological or narrative strategies (or in some more assured renditions, epistemology itself) to make evident the racialized and genderized justifications for colonialism implicit in the text.
The entanglement of culture and history The story begins with an excursion made by the unnamed protagonist and narrator, a Japanese journalist stationed in the colony who has befriended a
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 277 native youth called Segaimin (literally, ‘one who lives outside the world’)20 who writes classical Chinese poetry. After seeing the famous Red Hill Pavilion,21 the two wander into a desolate fishing village, where the narrator, a journalist with a sense of modern poetic sensibility, expounds upon his conception of the ‘beauty of the ruined’ (1966: 247). The theme of decaying beauty was already present in his first popular story, ‘House of the Spanish Dog’, in which the narrator wanders into a Maeterlinck-like woods with his dog, where he finds a mysterious, deserted Western-style house, a poetic glimpse of a European-inspired haven that would continue to haunt him. The focus of the story is the significance of the past to the present. Although the complex, multi-layered history of the fort and the seaport surrounding it is not lost on the narrator, he insists: The reason I was so moved by the beauty of Anping seaport was not necessarily its rich history. No matter who the person is or how much they know about this place, all one needs to do is set foot here to see the deterioration of this town. Anyone who has a heart would be aware of its melancholy beauty. (ibid.: 227) Segaimin’s enthusiastic commentary on prominent geographical features and historic sites falls on deaf ears: In fact, I was so young at the time that I was totally uninterested in history. When I saw my friend Segaimin who was, like me, an unattached young man, relating the past with such reverence, I could only come to the conclusion that a poet infused with Chinese blood is indeed a different breed. (ibid.: 229) The modernist narrator, a progressive intellectual with a passion for artistic pursuits, vehemently rejects history, both his own and the native history of Taiwan, and insists that such knowledge is unnecessary in order to be moved by the beauty of decay. This aestheticized understanding of material culture resonates with the roughly contemporary discourse of the arts and crafts movement (mingei undo¯ ), which Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) founded after ‘discovering’ the folk art of Korea and which, I have argued, Nishikawa Mitsuru (1908–99) pursued in Taiwan at about the same time.22 Much as in Yanagi’s discourse on rustic, utilitarian beauty (y¯o no bi), objects are decontextualized and dehistoricized in order to graft them onto a nostalgic imagination of a lost pastoral Japan, the modern aesthete protagonist of The Tale of the Fan divorces objects from their context and appreciates the ruin as a mere object of beauty. This disconnection of the object and its history, the colonial disregard and the colonialist regard, quickly yields to a racial discourse. The narrator attributes the native youth’s interest and his own disinterest to the racial difference between them.
278 Faye Kleeman The two protagonists, continuing their adventure, chance upon an abandoned mansion. Though it is old and dilapidated, the vestiges of past glory and extravagant luxury still captivate the narrator. The locals inform them that it had been the mansion of a local merchant named Shen, reputedly the richest man of his day in southern Taiwan. Although the gold and vermilion posts are tarnished with time, its original splendor can easily be seen. The protagonist reinforces the disjuncture in his mind between an object’s history and its aesthetic value. Were I a true connoisseur, I probably would have jeered at the dubious taste of this colonial nouveau riche. But exposure to wind and rain had given the place a rustic air and saved it from distasteful vulgarity. Further, since only a portion of the structure remained, it freed the imagination; before lamenting the elements of disharmony, one should delight in the exotic atmosphere. (ibid.: 236) The pair are astonished to hear a woman’s voice from upstairs. Having been stationed in the colony for three years, the narrator has acquired some familiarity with the native language, but this is clearly not the Amoy dialect spoken by most. His native companion, who hesitantly identifies it as Quanzhou dialect, thinks the voice is saying something like ‘Why? Why could you not have come earlier?’ Startled, the two quickly leave the ruins. An old lady, after hearing of their bizarre encounter, tells them the haunting story of the old manor. Shen, the last owner, was a fourth-generation immigrant from the south-east coast of China. His family had amassed great wealth through various devious and cunning methods, including cheating others out of their land. In karmic retribution for their outrageous behavior, the merchant fleet that had brought them handsome profit and an opulent mansion was destroyed overnight in a thunder storm, then misfortune continued as death claimed one member of the family after another. Eventually, Shen’s daughter was left alone, impoverished, and dependent on the charity of her neighbors for food. She grew despondent and then deranged, waiting for a fiancé whom she had never met but to whom she was nevertheless promised by her father. The fiancé and his ship never arrived and the locals recalled seeing her dressed in gorgeous wedding attire, talking to herself and to her imagined future husband. The narrator and his native friend disagree on how to interpret their spinechilling encounter. While Segaimin genuinely believes they had experienced something supernatural, the narrator dismisses it as superstition, observing: It seems that Segaimin truly feels there is something uncanny about the dilapidated mansion in Baldheaded Lane. Come to think of it, the story sounds so Chinese. A beautiful woman’s spirit left behind in an old abandoned house is a clichéd motif in Chinese literature. The Chinese people
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 279 must feel a particular affinity for this kind of story, but for me, it just won’t do. If I were attracted to anything in that house, it would be that everything in the house was large in scale with garish colors. If I could really convey what about it appealed to me, it might be something like a toned-down version of Ukiyoe master Yoshitoshi’s frenzied painting. The characters in his paintings are of the robust continental type, and there is a certain modernity in its barbaric character, in which the beauty of the subject coexists with ugliness. A ghost tale is usually set either on a moonless night or under the bright moon; that this one happened in the daylight, under the bright hot sun, is its only redeeming feature. Still, it is totally unpersuasive as a ghost story. In spite of this, Segaimin is totally fascinated by it. No, rather he is actually terrified by it! Perhaps he thinks he actually had a conversation with a ghost. (ibid.: 245) The journalist narrator puts on his detective’s hat and argues, over the protests of Segaimin, that the voice they heard must have come from a living woman and was directed toward someone other than themselves: ‘But what about all those people in the village who heard the same words uttered by the same voice through all these years?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Because I did not hear what they heard. It was probably people like you, who are fond of ghosts, who heard it. But for me, I don’t care a hoot about things that happened in a past that have nothing to do with me personally . . . Segaimin, you are just too much of a poet. It’s one thing for you to immerse yourself in old traditions, but remember, in the moonlight things reveal themselves vaguely. I can’t tell if it is beautiful or ugly, but one can see clearly under the sun!’ (ibid.: 246–7) Here, a casual conversation about apparitions between a rationalist Japanese journalist and a traditionalist native poet turns into a critical discourse on national culture and aestheticism. Contrasts are made, mostly by the narrator, between the old (belief in the old ghost tale) and the new (logical, scientific reasoning against it). By placing this seemingly innocent story within the colonial context, the text exposes its deep implications for imperialism and the colonial process. Thus a discussion of whether an ancient ghost exists suddenly takes an unexpected turn, from a casual conversation about the uncanny into a discursive explication of a much larger subject: the historiography of the past. Ghost stories are narratives bound by an unresolved past and a troubled present. Reading ghosts and specters as codified symbols gesturing to the past (history), the narrator (the colonizer) rejects, or perhaps is incapable of hearing, a voice from the past that spoke to the native people long before Japanese colonialists set foot on the island. The narrator repeatedly averts his eyes from the relics of the past (in this case, the ghost story and the dilapidated ruins) and attempts to
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neutralize history by redirecting his gaze to an apolitical, universalized aestheticism. The disparate perceptions of the ruins, what the narrator sees and what the native youth Segaimin sees, reflect a disparity in the interpretation of history, in this case the pre-colonial history of Taiwan. The aesthetic conception that something spiritual continues to live on in perished ruins is something rather traditionally Chinese. If I may say so, and don’t get angry with me, it seems the taste of a state that has perished (bo¯kokuteki shumi). How can something that has already perished still go on forever? Don’t we say it has perished precisely because it is no longer there? (ibid.: 247) The protagonist continued his speculation, again contrasting the cultural (i.e. Chinese) and scientific (i.e. a perished state ceases existence) rationales while Segaimin protested loudly against this view: ‘To have perished and to be in ruins are not the same, are they? Sure, something that has perished is indeed gone. But there remains a living spirit in ruins that is on the verge of perishing’ (ibid.). Here the discussion of aesthetics takes an ontological turn, and we are able to perceive an epistemological gap between the narrator and the native youth. Of course, the narrator and the native are both creations of the author, and Segaimin has been set up as a straw man to counter, however feebly, the narrator’s self-assured discourse on the history and culture of a conquered other. Sato¯ was careful not to create in the role of colonizer an insensitive, arrogant character. Rather, he portrayed a modern young man, attuned to an unusual aesthetic and impatient with the past, who on various occasions displayed an impatience toward the colonial authority and an admiration for his native friend. The protagonist repeatedly shifts the focus of his conversation with Segaimin from history to aesthetics, as when he dismisses the supernatural historiography of the site as an anachronistic feature of Chinese culture, and links the garish luxury of the abandoned mansion to the animated paintings of the artist Yoshitoshi. The question then is whether this erasing, or to be more precise, eliding of history by the narrator, is an intentional act, or an indication that he is incapable of perceiving a past that does not belong to him. A scene at the beginning of the narrative prefigures the impenetrability of the Other. When the two men have first arrived at the dilapidated Red Hill Pavilion and the history buff Segaimin is busily consulting an ancient map in order to identify various historically significant sites, the narrator, indifferent to the manmade architecture, instead gazes toward the ocean: Spreading out before my eyes was the muddy sea. It was yellowish brown in color and countless small waves rolled in, one row after another. There are words such as ‘ten layered’ and ‘twenty-layered’ (toe hatae) but nothing in our vocabulary could describe the layer upon layer of waves that rushed in then drew back. These waves stretched out to the horizon, and all were pushing in to the place where we stood . . . Even the tropical sun just before noon
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 281 would not reflect off the mucky surface of the waves. This strange sea without reflection . . . Burning white beneath the bright noon sun. A sea that absorbs all the light . . . Amidst this landscape of violent movement not a single sound reverberated. From time to time, a humid, dull breeze like the breath of a malaria patient would brush through. All these images congealed into an inner landscape. The symbols multiplied, filling me with an uneasy feeling like that aroused by a nightmare. No, it was not just the scene. After coming into contact with this seascape, there were two or three times when, recovering from a hard night of drinking, I was frightened by nightmares of dreary seashores. (ibid.: 229–30) This is not a casual observation by a random tourist. The disturbing seascape seems inhospitable and foreign to this stranger in a strange land. The dark water swallows up the light of the sun and a pall of silence hangs over the constant movement of the waves. The alien landscape of the colonial Other summons nightmarish visions of a terrifying inner landscape. On a conscious level, the narrator is able to dismiss the uncanny remnants of the past by resorting to his modern, rational world-view, but on a more visceral level they impact upon his unconscious and surface in his dreams. Despite their racial and cultural differences, the narrator and Segaimin share a certain aversion toward the colonial government. The native’s aversion is rooted in a nationalistic identification with his native culture (and history), whereas the Japanese narrator’s attitude has grown out of the anti-authoritarian instincts of a carefree young man. The dialogue between the two men reveals, not just the juxtaposition of colonial subject/object positions, but also the collision between modern rationalism and the pre-modern allure of fantasy and enchantment. The story seems to turn a corner and change its somber and pensive tone into a fast-paced detective tale.23 The urgent debate centering on national and cultural identity developed in the first part of the narrative turns into an exploration of ‘who did it?’
Genre and (colonial) modernity Here I will turn from a close reading of the story to consider some issues related to modernity and genre. Although the cultural discourse between the colonialist and the native is framed in a prototypical haunted house tale, the second half of the story takes a different direction. Sato¯ was well acquainted with Chinese collections of macabre tales such as Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales Told while Trimming the Lamp) and Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales of the Idle Chamber), which were immensely popular among Edo readers. On the other hand, he was also fascinated by the new literary forms available to him. The launching of the magazine Shinseinen by Morishita Uson and Edogawa Ranpo¯ in 1920 provided a public space for the new genre of mystery and detective stories and this newly imported genre became all the rage among an increasingly urbanized readership.
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Like his mentor Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, Sato¯ was greatly intrigued by this new type of storytelling. He wrote several short stories and a detective novel, Shanghai,24 in the format, and also authored a string of critical essays on the subject. In the essay ‘Tantei sho¯setsu to geijutsumi’ (Detective Novels and Artistry, SHZ 19: 340– 3), the author lists three reasons why it can be called a new artistic form: its unfailingly logical structure, the stimulating excitement of pursuit, and its evocation of the pleasure of the uncanny. For Sato¯, the detective story is the perfect form because it combines sensual pleasure (like Chinoiserie) and scientific logic.25 Ikeda Hiroshi, in his study of the detective genre and colonialism, makes a case for reading the introduction and development of both British and Japanese detective stories within the context of empire (1997: 6–45). He points to genre writers such as Oguri Mushitaro¯ (1901–46) and Kigi Ko¯taro¯ (1897–1969), exploring the way their wartime experiences outside of Japan shaped their detective writings. He focuses, in particular, on Hikage Jo¯kichi (1908–91),27 a popular mystery writer in the immediate post-war period who often set his gritty murder mysteries in Taiwan, where he had been stationed as an imperial soldier; his stories always involve sexual and cultural conflicts with the natives. Ikeda praises Hikage’s writing as the first to confront the reality of colonialism and first to rein in the ‘exotic’ (ikoku jo¯sho) reading of Japan’s colonies (2002: 52–3). The new genre also influenced more established mainstream authors. In a postcolonial reading of Natsume So¯seki’s Higan sugi made (After the Equinox, 1912 [1985]), Komori Yo¯ichi illustrates how the expansion of the empire broadened the imagination and possibilities of the young romantic protagonist Keitaro¯, who dreams of making it big either as an adventurer (to Manchuria), a plantation manager (in the South Seas), or a detective (all over the colonies).26 Komori sees such new professions as detective as non-productive pursuits for idle intellectuals who once had no place within the Japanese capitalist system but now found a way to survive in the newly acquired territories; by contrast, Ikeda argues that the investigation of the enigmatic unknown, encountered in the newly expanded empire, was central to the detective genre. In any case, both connect the growth of the genre not only to Western scientific discourse, but also to the expansion of both the geopolitical and mental boundaries of modern Japan, and to the insatiable appetite for the unfamiliar of a rapidly urbanizing domestic populace. In Civilization and Monsters, Gerald Figal (1999) persuasively argues that monsters, ghosts, the supernatural, the fantastic and the mysterious, which are not usually associated with modernity, were in fact essential elements in the construction of a modern world-view in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Examining the treatment of supernatural themes in a variety of media and genres, he reveals their role in the Meiji state’s attempt to incorporate folk beliefs into a new modern national culture defined by modern medicine, education, and the newly reconstituted imperial institution. The fantastic, as Figal asserts, is always present in Japanese modernity and has had an untold influence on its development. Figal focuses on the Meiji writer Izumi Kyo¯ ka and sheds light on his struggle with internal conflicts arising out of contesting traditional and modern world-views. Perhaps representing what Thomas Rimer has referred to as a ‘new
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 283 Taisho¯ mentality’, Sato¯’s cosmopolitan stance reflects the self-assured modern author’s freedom to appropriate the past, including the fantastic, traversing past and present and mixing old and new genres (Sato¯ 1993: 2–3). The problematic of the modern state – what to do about the past and how to tame it – that Figal brings out in his book was less a quandary for the Taisho¯ sensibility. The impasse perceived in The Tale of the Fan is simply overcome with the introduction of a new genre. Thus, the shift of narrative mode from Chinese ghost story (fantasy) to modern scientific inquiry into the truth (detective genre) can be seen as Sato¯ the modernist’s critique of colonial backwardness. With the narrator actively taking on the role of investigator, eager to solve the mystery, the dialogue is disrupted, Segaimin retreats to the background, and is rarely heard of again. The triumph of rationalism over the ancient superstitions elides the colonial reality and the subaltern Segaimin is thus rendered silent.
Gender, modernity, and colonialism I have so far focused on the issue of the incongruity of the national-cultural identity within the context of a specific colonial encounter. As we decipher the second half of the narrative, we shall see that the issue of gender looms large. As it turns out, the narrator was correct in identifying the voice they heard as that of a living woman, who was using the abandoned manor to rendezvous with her lover. He exults in the triumph of science and rationalism over irrational superstition, though his euphoria proves to be short-lived. The story quickly develops into a complicated detective novel full of intrigue involving the protagonist’s efforts to solve the mystery. To prove his theory that he had not encountered a ghost, the narrator drags the reluctant Segaimin back to the manor. This time they resolutely proceed upstairs and there find an ivory fan upon which is inscribed the Zhuanxin chapter of Ban Zhao’s ‘Precepts for Women’.28 This leads the narrator to speculate as to the original owner of the fan and its more recent use: The elaborate design was appropriate for something that a parent might give his beloved daughter when she becomes a bride – it must have been from the Shen family, that fan. Then I imagined that reckless, ignorant girl from a poor family in Baldheaded Alley. Guided by her instincts, she had no fear of a house associated with such gruesome legends. Oblivious to what sort of person had experienced what sort of death on it, she lay upon that stately bed, grasping that fan with its inscription on wifely virtues, playing with it, using it to blow cool air on her sweat-drenched lover. (Sato¯ 1966: 256) Not long after, a young man is found to have committed suicide in the abandoned manor. The narrator does some further digging and finds that the body was the lover of the maid of a local merchant. Her employer had betrothed her, against her will, to a Japanese national, and her native lover, out of desperation,
284 Faye Kleeman had hung himself above the ancient bed they had shared. It was this maid whom they had heard in the upper room several days earlier, awaiting her tardy lover. She is distraught at having been discovered and requests that the fan be returned to her. The narrator decides not to expose her affair to the public and terminates his detective work. A few days later, the maid follows her lover in death. While the dominant focus in the first part of the narrative is on a dialogue about the aesthetics and interpretation of history as mediated by different modern cultures, gender assumes an important role in the second half of the story, where Sato¯ shifts his attention to the female figures of the tale. The frame stories of the colonial encounter of two men, mediated by two colonial histories (the early history of immigration from China to Taiwan and the current Japanese colonial rule) that echo each other, serve to set up the real drama in the narrative: the two female figures and their actions that perpetuate the narrative movement. The inscription on the fan is an ancient code defining proper conduct for women. A fan, left by the deceased and perpetually waiting bride half a century ago and signifying unfailing chastity and virtue, now falls to another girl who carries out a secret rendezvous at the haunted mansion. The narrator is quite taken with the idea of an amorous couple using this abandoned mansion for their illicit trysts. The juxtaposition of modern (in the sense of pursuing free love), lower social class lovers occupying the same bed in which the elite Shen maiden had passed her days upholding the dictates of feudal ethics appealed to his fantasy and, while he did not believe in the ghost stories surrounding the manor, he enjoyed the air of precarious drama they imparted to the deserted building. Both the Shen maiden, determined to wait for her betrothed year after year, and the young maid who refused to accept an arranged marriage because she had already given herself to another, can be said to be following the spirit of The Tale of the Fan, if not their actual letter. A traditional conception of female virtues like chastity and loyalty to male relations links the two women in this tale. Sato¯ Haruo inscribes into their texts a conventional, Confucian view of gender. Although colonial subjects like Segaimin have undergone a profound transformation in their thinking (witness Segaimin’s feeble defense when faced with the protagonist’s contempt for Chinese culture and history), gender dynamics remain unchanged. In fact, the standard that applied to native women in the colonial situation, that ‘a chaste woman does not serve two husbands’ (zhennü bugeng erfu), comes from a larger quotation that also requires that ‘a man does not serve two masters’ – but Sato¯ never asks this loyalty of the native male characters in the story.29 The life of the two ill-fated women reveals a fundamental truth about the oppressed status of women within both the feudalistic order of traditional Taiwan and the colonial context. Within the patriarchal system of traditional Taiwanese society, women seldom had the freedom to determine their own fate. This tale of a maid who can only respond with suicide to the imposition of an undesired marriage could easily be cast as a modern protest against the feudalistic disenfranchisement of women. These two women, though clearly disparate
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 285 in social status, seem to be equally burdened by a centuries-old relic of patriarchal feudal society, which regulated women’s conduct with the Precepts encoded on this exquisitely carved ivory fan, an object loving parents passed on to their daughters to remind them of their daughterly and wifely obligations. Sato¯, however, withholds his judgment on these two female figures, idealizing Miss Shen as ‘a woman who eternally seeks for tomorrow, kept alive by her mad obsessions’ while romanticizing the maid as ‘a wild (yasei) young girl who defies convention’. For Sato¯ , the maid, then, is an unrealized and frustrated modern subject, who was aware enough to dare to challenge social rules in pursuing the love of her heart. By contrasting the chaste Ms Shen with the feral, passionate maid, the author seems again to distinguish the feudalistic and the modern. Nevertheless, both women are crushed by the burden of their female gender: one under the expectations of patriarchal/feudal society (her betrothal to a rich merchant in order to consolidate the family fortune); the other mediated by the colonial condition (betrothed to a Japanese by her boss). Many critics applauded Sato¯’s progressive stand on women’s issues as represented by this sympathetic depiction of Taiwanese women under feudalistic oppression.31 But the narrative strategy of mapping a fundamental gender injustice onto the modern ideal of free and passionate love is not dissimilar to Sato¯’ s displacement of history in favor of aestheticism in his dealings with Segaimin. The protagonist’s tightly guarded modern identity (entailing colonial regard) ruptures when he catches a glimpse into the lives of these two women. In sympathizing (identifying) with the colonial subject, he must confront the impact of Japanese colonialism upon the locals. In this empathetic moment colonizing subject and colonized object merge, boundaries of Self and Other blur, and a moment of crisis arises for his modern identity. The narrator knows that the more he looks into the death, the more he will have to confront the colonial reality that he has been avoiding so far. He abruptly terminates his investigation. Certainly, the young journalist is as frustrated with the colonial government as the unenlightened native. Having come into possession of the fan, the narrator holds the key to solving the case, but decides against it. The death of two contemporaries jars him. It is almost as if he finally perceives the implications of colonialism for the native lives that disrupt his heretofore unperturbed modernist outlook of the world. He seeks solace by returning to the metropole. 30
Conclusion I have been reading The Tale of the Fan mainly from the point of view of the Japanese protagonist, closely (perhaps too closely) aligning him with the author Sato¯’s metropolitan modes of representation.32 Certainly, the protagonist is not Sato¯, who, if anything, is as much Segaimin as he is the protagonist. The author also greatly identifies with the two female characters. But characters are nothing but creations of the author, who, combining an assortment of local tales he came to know on the trip with his own encounters with various native intellectuals, reconstructs an imagined encounter with the Other. On this journey to the colonial
286 Faye Kleeman South, Sato¯, like many writers and other visitors to that region, was intrigued by the indigenous people, who passed a primitive subsistence deep in the mountains. His documentary-style travel writings (kiko¯bun) on this subject were, and still are, the best of their kind. They are objective, dispassionate, and yet utterly empathetic toward these people located at the bottom of the colonial totem pole, enduring hardship from both their colonial rulers and the native Han inhabitants. In his Bunmeiron no gairyaku (Summary Discourse on Civilization), Fukuzawa Yukichi had categorized European nations and America as ‘civilized’ (kaika), Turkey, China, Japan, and other Asian states as ‘semi-civilized’ (hankai) nations, and Africa and Australia as ‘barbaric’ (yaban) realms. Sato¯ Haruo applied a similar taxonomy to Taiwan, with the Japanese colonizers as representatives of civilization, the ethnic Chinese inhabitants as the semi-civilized, and the aboriginal peoples as barbaric. This reflects a shift from a Meiji understanding of the world system to a Taisho¯ epistemology of the new world order. Seen in this light, the body of works produced by Sato¯ as a result of this trip does not, as many Japanese critics maintain, constitute a masterpiece of ikoku bungaku (literature on foreign lands), nor, as many Taiwanese critics like to proclaim, does it subtly promote an anti-colonial agenda, though in his criticism of some aspects of Japanese rule, he does advocate a sort of ‘benevolent colonialism’ as part of his modernist world-view (Izumi 2002). Rather, we see in these writings a young Sato¯ Haruo negotiating his own position among the influences of tradition (represented by Chinese fantastic beliefs that echo pre-modern Japanese beliefs), modernity (which entails a liberal world-view inconsistent with superstition, racial discrimination, or colonialism), and nationalism (which linked him to the Japanese imperial enterprise). The Tale of the Fan, like Sato¯’s other writings from this period, attempts to triangulate among these forces, one reason for its narrative complexity and lack of a single, unifying point of view. Sato¯ Haruo began his career as a passionate young poet. From his lament for ¯ ishi Seinosuke at the hands of the imperial state the unjust death of the activist O in Gusha no shi (Death of an Idiot, 1910)33 and his vision of a harmonious Utopia in Utsukushii machi (Beautiful Town, 1919) to his morally ambiguous ruminations on the colonies in the 1920s, Sato¯ Haruo’s writing set him apart from other Taisho¯ writers. His high-profile participation in the nationalistic Japan Romantic School beginning in the mid-1930s, and in particular his wartime writing on China, which supported the racist discourse of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, reflect a later stage in his intellectual development. But that’s another story.
Notes 1 There is an immense literature on modernity and the formation of the subject in Japan. The discourse on modernity has been pursued from various academic disciplines and has focused on features ranging from social and political history to literary and cultural domains such as the fantastic (Napier 1996), ethnography (Ivy 1995), folk belief (Kawamura Kunimitsu 1990), and madness (Matsuyama Iwao 1993). While a schema of east–west, modern–pre-modern dichotomies prevails in these critical engagements, the more recent trend is to avoid the binary construction of the two
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2 3 4 5
6
7 8
9 10 11
12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
elements and probe the complexity and complicity of the two sides. This more synthesized and integrated view can be seen, for example, in Kawamura’s take on the folksy fantastic as crucial to the ideological and institutional construction of ‘modern Japan’, or in Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters (1999), in which he asserts that a discourse on fantastic (fushigi) was at the heart of the historical configuration of Japanese modernity. I will come back to Figal’s line of reasoning later. On Sato¯ Haruo, see Hata Ko¯hei (1997: 22–6, 32–5); Keene (1984: 631–44); Oketani Hideaki (1987: 248–309); Sato¯ Haruo (1994). His biographies of Yosano Akiko, Kyoko mandara, and another Taisho¯ writer Nagai Kaf¯u, Sho¯setsuka Nagai Kaf u¯ , remain the most creative and readable biographies of the two authors. Cited at http://www.city.shingu.wakayama.jp/haruo1.htm, last accessed Nov. 2004. The translation was said to have been prompted by the Meiji author Ko¯da Rohan, who gave Sato¯ Haruo a copy of the book in the Chinese original. In the introduction to The Sick Rose, J. Thomas Rimer talks about So¯seki and Ogai’s influence on Sato¯, but this translation was Sato¯’s homage to the Meiji Sino-Japanese literary tradition espoused by Ko¯da Rohan, a writer with a similar kangaku background to Sato¯ Haruo himself. In Shina zakki (Miscellaneous Writings on China), Tokyo: Daido¯ shobo¯, 1941. Kang (1996: 92). In early 1920, Sato¯ Haruo, then an up-and-coming Romantic poet and writer, was suffering a bout of depression. He returned to his home in Shingu, Wakayama, for a rest and there met his childhood friend Higashi Kiichi, who was at the time practicing medicine in Takao (now Gaoxiong), Taiwan. At Higashi’s invitation, Sato¯ accompanied him on his return to Taiwan. They left Wakayama in June and arrived in the colony on July 5. Sato¯ returned on October 15th of the same year, extending an original short trip to more than three and a half months. His arrival was reported in the local newspaper and he was treated as a VIP by the colonial government throughout his stay. Some suggest the trip was prompted by the frustration he felt about his nascent romantic affair with Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s wife Chiyo and the subsequent discord with his live-in lover, the actress Maiya Kayoko. In fact, after his return from the trip, he quickly separated from Maiya Kayoko and the next year openly severed his ties with Tanizaki. For details of his trip to Taiwan, see Fujii Sho¯zo¯ (1998: 79–87) and Shimada Kinji (1976: 214–18); for the relationship with Tanizaki, see Oketani Hideaki (1987: 279–81) and Hata Ko¯hei (1997: 23–35). Translated into English by Edward Seidensticker as The Tale of the Bridal Fan in Japan Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1962). See Ito¯ Hideo (1991: 218–19). So¯seki traveled to Manchuria and returned to Japan via Korea in 1910. The six-week sojourn was recorded in Mankan tokorodokoro, which was serialized in Asahi shinbun, beginning shortly after his return. A decade after So¯seki’s expedition, Akutagawa took a four-month jaunt to China as an overseas observer for the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun in 1921. Kaizo¯ 3.3 (March, 1921); reprinted in Sato¯ Haruo (1998, 433–53). ‘Hoshi’ includes a story published separately in the January issue titled ‘Fifth-Daughter Huang’. Chuo ¯¯ ko¯ron 38.9 (August, 1923); reprinted in SHZ (19: 165–7). Do¯ wa (September, 1921). Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ron (October, 1923). Kaizo¯ 7.3 (March, 1925): 2–34. Chuo ¯¯ ko¯ron 47.9 (September, 1932): 92–132 and 47.10 (October, 1932): 1–14. For further discussion on ‘Journey to the Colony’, see Kawahara Isao (1997: 3–23). For a detailed account of the reception of the work during the colonial period, see Koizumi (2002) and Fujii (1998). The name means ‘person outside the world’, and clearly is something like a penname or ‘fancy name’ (hao). In fact, several articles were published under this name in
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21
22 23 24 25
26
27
28 29
30
31 32
33
various literary journals, leading to speculation as to the true identity of the author. The prevailing theory is that it is the penname of the writer Qiu Yonghan, but Qiu has denied it. A famous historical site in Taiwan, this red brick fort was built by the Dutch in the early sixteenth century. It was later the headquarters for the Ming loyalist army led by Zheng Chenggong (i.e. Coxinga). During the Japanese colonial period, it was used as an army hospital and colonial office building. The name Chikanlou ( J. Sekikanro¯), the Red Hill Pavilion, was said to be from a word pronounced ‘chakam’ in the local aboriginal dialect which referred to the coastal area where the fort was built. After the war, it was designated a national monument and the building itself has come to symbolize the multiple colonial histories overlaying the island since the fifteenth century. For the arts and crafts movement and Japanese colonialism, see Kleeman (2001a, 2001b). The story was included in Ito¯ Hideo’s Taisho¯ no tantei sho¯ setsu (1991) as one of the representative detective tales of the early Taisho¯ period. See Ito¯ Hideo (1991: 214–24). See SHZ (10: 239) for Shanghai. Other famous stories, such as ‘Nyonin funshi’ (A Burning Woman), were also framed in a detective narrative. See also Sato¯’s articles ‘Tantei sho¯setsu sakka no hyo¯genryoku’ (SHZ 24: 120–1) and ‘Tantei sho¯setsu sho¯ron’ (SHZ 19: 273–5). ¯ oke no hitobito Hikage’s Naibu no shinjitsu (The Internal Truth, Ko¯dansha, 1959) and O ¯ Family, To¯to shobo¯, 1961) are prime examples of his colonial (The People of the O mysteries. Hikage’s books are now rather hard to find and there is a reader-initiated reprint (fukkoku) movement to make more of his works available to the public. For discussion of the detective genre and Natsume So¯seki’s literature, see Komori Yo¯ichi (2001a: 57–62) and Uchida Ryuzo ¯ ¯ (2001: 1–66). On Ban Zhao (ca. 48–ca. 116) and her precepts, see Swann (1932); Chen (1996). The full quote, which makes clear the link between male and female conduct, is from the Record of the Historian (ca. 100 BCE): ‘A loyal vassal does not serve two lords, a chaste woman does not change to a second husband’. See Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju ed.) 82: 2457. Native Taiwanese society was highly stratified, with nine upper classes and nine lower classes being the general understanding. A household maid belonged to the lower seventh rank and was treated like property of the household who could be freely traded by her owner (Kataoka Gen 1913). Positive readings include also Taiwanese critics such as Yao Qiaomei (see Yao 2001a, 2001b) who sees the death of both the maid and the lover as ‘the birth of Taiwanese nationalism’. Certainly, for an author like Sato¯, who had studied in depth the literature and culture of the now colonized Chinese culture, questions of transculturation, such as how his constructions of subordinated others had been shaped by those others, needs further scrutiny. This is Sato¯’s first published work, published in Mita bungaku while attending Keio¯ Univer¯ ishi Seinosuke was an activist from his home town who, together with Ko¯toku sity. O Sh¯usui, was accused of plotting to assassinate the Meiji Emperor in the so-called ‘Great Treason Incident’.
References Main texts Sato¯ Haruo (1936) Musha (Wushe), Tokyo: Sho¯shinsha. ——(1966) Jokaisen kidan (Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan), in Sato¯ Haruo: Nihon bungaku zensh¯u , vol. 31, Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ ko¯ronsha, pp. 227–60. ——(1998) Teihon Sato¯ Haruo zensh¯u (SHZ) (Revised Complete Works of Sato¯ Haruo), 36 vols. with 2 vol. Bekkan, Ushiyama Yuriko et al. (eds), Tokyo: Rinsen shoten.
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 289 Other references Chen, Yu-shih (1996) ‘The Historical Template of Pan Chao’s Nü chieh’, T’oung Pao 82: 229–97. Ching, Leo T.S. (2001) Becoming ‘Japanese’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Figal, Gerald (1999) Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fujii Sho¯zo¯ (1998) Taiwan bungaku kono hyakunen (A Hundred Years of Taiwanese Literature), Tokyo: To¯ho¯ shoten. Hata Ko¯hei (1997) Sakka no hihyo¯ (On the Criticism of Writers), Tokyo: Shimizu shoin. Iijima Ko¯ichi (1988) ‘Nihon no beru epokkuu 13: Sato¯ Haruo no Jokaisen kidan’ (Japan’s Belle Epoque: Sato¯ Haruo¯’s Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan), Haiku 37(1): 168–71. Ikeda Hiroshi (1997) Kaigai shinshutsu bungaku-ron josetsu (An Introduction to Foreign Invasion Literature), Tokyo: Inpakuto shuppankai. ——(2002) ‘Kaigai shinshutsu to bungaku hyo¯gen no nazo’ (Foreign Invasion and the Riddle of the Literary Expression), in Fujii Shozo¯ et al. (eds) Taiwan no daito¯a senso¯: bungaku, media, bunka (Literature, Media and Culture in the Great East Asia War), Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, pp. 41–56. Ito¯ Hideo (1991) Taisho¯ no tantei sho¯se tsu (Taisho¯ Detective Novels), Tokyo: San’ichi shobo¯. Ivy, Marilyn (1995) Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Izumi Tsukasa (2002)‘Nihon to¯chiki Taiwan bundan ni okeru Jokaisen kidan juyo¯ no ikikata’ (The Reception of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan in the Taiwanese Literary Scene during the Japanese Occupation Period), Geibun kenky¯u 83: 20–42. Kang Sang-jung (1996) Orientarizumu no kanata e (Toward the Other Side of Orientalism), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Karatani Ko¯jin (1994) ‘Senzen’ no shiko¯ (Pre-war Thought), Tokyo: Bungei shunj¯u. Kataoka Gen (1913) Taiwan f uzokushi ¯ (A Record of Taiwanese Customs), Taipei: Taiwan nichinichi shinpo¯sha. Kawahara Isao (1997) Taiwan shinbungaku undo¯ no tenkai: Nihon bungaku to no setten (The Development of the Taiwan New Literature Movement: Points of Contact with Japanese Literature), Tokyo: Genbun shuppan. Kawamura Kunimitsu (1990) Genshi suru kindai k ukan ¯ (The Illusory Modern Space), Tokyo: Seiy¯usha. Kawasaki Kenko (1999) ‘Taish¯u bunka seiritsuki ni okeru “tantei sho¯setsu” ja¯nru no hen’yo¯’ (The Evolution of the Detective Novel Genre during the Formative Period of Mass Culture), in Akoi Tamotsu et al. (eds) Kindai Nihonbunka-ron, vol. 7, Taish¯u bunka to masumedia (A Treatise on Modern Japanese Culture, vol. 7: Taisho¯ Culture and the Mass Media), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 61–92. Keene, Donald (1984) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Kleeman, Faye Yuan (2001a) ‘Colonial Ethnography and the Writing of the Exotic: Nishikawa Mitsuru in Taiwan’, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 9: 355–77. ——(2001b) ‘Xichuang Man he Wenyi Taiwan: Dongfang zhuyi de shixian’ (Nishikawa Mitsuru and Bungei Taiwan: The Orientalist Gaze), Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu tongxun 11(1): 135–46. ——(2003) Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
290 Faye Kleeman Koizumi Tsukasa (2002) ‘Zai-Tai naichijin sakka no Jokaisen kidan juyo¯ ikikata: “Taiwan” o kataru fuan’ (The Reception of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan by Japanese Expatriate Writers in Taiwan: The Anxiety of Discoursing Taiwan), Nihon Taiwan gakkai gakujutsu ronbunshu¯ 4, pp. 53–64. Komagome Takeshi (1996) Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka to¯ go¯ (Cultural Unification by Colonialist Imperial Japan), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Komori Yo¯ichi (2001a) ‘So¯seki bungaku to shokuminchishugi’ (Natsume So¯seki’s Literature and Colonialism), Kokubungaku 46(1): 46–62. ——(2001b) Posutokoroniaru (Postcolonial), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Kurokawa So¯ (1996) Gaichi no Nihongo bungaku-sen (Selection of Japanese Language Literature of the Colonies), vol. 2, Tokyo: Shinjuku shobo¯, pp. 39–52. Matsuyama Iwao (1993) Uwasa no enkinho¯ (The Much Talked-About Perspective). Tokyo: Seido¯sha. Nakajima Toshio and Kawahara Isao (eds) (1998) Nihon to¯jiki Taiwan bungaku Nihonjin sakka sakuhinsh u¯, 6 vols, Tokyo: Ryokuin shobo¯. ——(1999) Nihon to¯jiki Taiwan bungaku Taiwanjin sakka sakuhinsh u¯ , 6 vols, Tokyo: Ryokuin shobo¯. Napier, Susan J. (1996) The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, London: Routledge. Oguma Eiji (1995) Tan’itsu minzoku no kigen (The Origins of the Unitary Race Theory), Tokyo: Shin’yo¯sha. ——(1998) Nihonjin no kyo¯kai (The Boundaries of Japaneseness), Tokyo: Shin’yo¯ sha. Oketani Hideaki (1987) Bunmei kaika to Nihonteki so¯zo¯ (The Cultural Enlightenment and the Japanese Imagination), Tokyo: Fukutake shoten. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, New York: Routledge. Sato¯ Haruo (1993) The Sick Rose: A Pastoral Elegy, trans. Francis B. Tenny, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ——(1994) Sato¯ Haruo, in Torii Kuniaki (ed.) Sakka no jiden (Authorial Lives), vol. 12, Tokyo: Nihon tosho senta¯. ——(1996a) ‘Macho¯’ (Devilbird), in Kurokawa So¯ (1996), pp. 39–52. ——(1996b) Beautiful Town: Stories and Essays by Sato¯ Haruo, trans. Francis B. Tenny, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ——(2000) ‘Musha’ (Wushe), Kawahara Isao (ed.), Nihon shokuminchi bungaku seisenshu: ¯ Taiwanhen (A Collection of Japanese Colonial Literature: Taiwan), Tokyo: Yumani shobo¯. Schwarz, Bill (1996) ‘Conquerors of Truth: Reflections on Postcolonial Theory’, in Bill Schwarz (ed.) The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 9–31. Shimada Kinji (1976) ‘Gaichiken bungaku no jisso¯’ (The True Condition of Literature in the External Territories), in Nihon ni okeru gaikoku hikaku bungaku kenkyu¯ (Comparative Studies of Foreign Literature in Japan), vol. 2, Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, pp. 112– 259. Suda Chisato (2001) ‘Sato¯ Haruo to Ch¯ugoku bungaku (jo¯)’ (Sato¯ Haruo and Chinese Literature, Part One), Bungaku 2(4): 176–93. ——(2002) ‘Sato¯ Haruo to Ch¯ugoku bungaku (ge)’ (Sato¯ Haruo and Chinese Literature, Part Two), Bungaku 3(3): 174–89. Sugimori Masaya (1964) ‘Jokaisen kidan-ron: Nihon kindai bungaku ni okeru Ch¯ugoku bungaku no zaigen’ (A Discussion of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan: Chinese Literary Source Material), Gogaku bungakkai kiyo¯ 2: 78–90. Swann, Nancy Lee (1932) Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China, New York: Russell.
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 291 Tsuboi Hideto (2002) ‘Hyo¯sho¯ to shite no shokuminchi’ (The Colonies as Symbol), in Komori Yo¯ichi et al. (eds) Iwanami ko¯za kindai Nihon no bunka-shi, vol. 5, Hensei sareru nashonarizumu 1920–30 (A Cultural History of Modern Japan, vol. 5: Changing Nationalism, 1920–30), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Uchida Ryuzo ¯ ¯ (2001) Tantei sho¯setsu no shakaigaku (The Sociology of Detective Novels), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Unami Akira (2003) ‘Teikoku-ron’ (Discourse on Empire), Gengo bunka 20: 3–10. Yao Qiaomei (2000) ‘Jokaisen kidan no hyo¯ka to Sato¯ Haruo bungaku no genjo¯’ (Evaluation of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan and the Current State of Sato¯ Haruo’s Literature), Shoko¯ 11: 100–15. ——(2001a) ‘Shokuminchi Taiwan ni miru joseizo¯ : Sato¯ Haruo Jokaisen kidan ni okeru chijo to gehi’ (The Image of Women in Colonial Taiwan: The Shen Daughter and the Maid in Sato¯ Haruo’s Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan), Shakai bungaku 17: 79–92. ——(2001b)’ ‘Jokaisen kidan no seiritsu o meguru shiron: so¯saku mochiifu o ch¯ushin ni’ (A Thesis on the Creation of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan: Focusing on Creative Motifs), Shoko¯ 12: 72–84. Yoshida Seiichi (1979) Tanbiha sakka-ron (Discourse on Decadent Authors), in Yoshida Seiichi ¯ f usha. chosakush u¯ (The Writings of Yoshida Seiichi), vol. 10, Tokyo: O ¯
Further reading Fulford, Tim, Kitson, Peter J. et al. (eds) (1998) Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iijima Ko¯ichi (1997) ‘Fushigi ni anakisuto to en no atta Sato¯ Haruo’ (Sato¯ Haruo and his Amazing Connection to Anarchism), in Nihon no beru epokku (Japan’s Belle Epoque), Tokyo: Ripp¯u shobo¯, pp. 141–57. Kang Sanjung (1996) ‘“To¯yo¯” no hakken to orientarizumu’ (The Discovery of the Orient and Orientalism), in Tabunkashugi no kigo¯ron (The Semiotics of Multiculturalism), Tokyo: To¯kai University Press, pp. 117–34. Kawamura Minato (1989) Ajia to iu kagami: kyokuto¯ no kindai: ‘Sho¯ wa’ no kuritikku (The Mirror called ‘Asia’: Modernity in the Far East: A Critique of ‘Sho¯wa’), Tokyo: Shincho¯sha. Kimura Kazuaki (1997) ‘Kieta “Niji” Sato¯ Haruo no Kanto¯ daishinsai’ (The Rainbow that Disappeared: Sato¯ Haruo’s Great Kanto¯ Earthquake), in Yukio Kurihara (ed.) Bungakushi o yomigaeru (Reviving Literary History), Tokyo: Inpakuto shuppankai, pp. 183–97. Shimomura Sakujiro¯ (1994) Bungaku de yomu Taiwan (Taiwan through its Literature), Tokyo: Tabata shoten. ——et al. (eds) (1995) Yomigaeru Taiwan bungaku (Recalling Taiwanese Literature), Tokyo: To¯ho¯ shoten. Tarumi Chie (1995) Taiwan no Nihongo bungaku (Taiwan’s Japanese-Language Literature), Tokyo: Goryu¯ ¯ u shoten.
15 ‘There’s no such place as home’ Goto¯ Meisei, or identity as alterity Atsuko Sakaki
‘I’ is already a relationship itself – nothing other than a relation; ‘I’ is selfconsciousness itself, and a relation is a product of the self-consciousness. (Goto¯ 1983: 168) First of all, I seek a world with a structure in which there are ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ who tries to prove that ‘I’ is only semantic. Then, I seek the reality of the following: lightness, if ‘I’ in such a world has lightness of being; humorousness, if ‘I’ is humorous; ambiguity, if ‘I’ is ambiguous. (Goto¯ 1972: 208) Perhaps what’s missing in action is your reality? (Goto¯ 1973b: 143).
Goto¯ Meisei (1932–99), like his world-famous contemporary Abe Ko¯ bo¯ (1924– 93), was a returnee from a former ‘colony’ of the Empire of Japan. For Abe, the original landscape was that of Manchuria. In Goto¯’s case it was the present-day North Korea where he was born and grew up. Having experienced the end of the Asia Pacific War at the age of thirteen, just as he planned to proceed to the Military Academy, Goto¯ hardly had any opportunity to develop a sense of belonging. The experience of living in an ethnically mixed environment and being forced to leave Korea, newly occupied by the Soviet Army, in order to ‘return’ to a Ky¯ush¯u which didn’t feel like home inspired him with the recognition that there is indeed no set originary ethnic identity that endures. This idea recurs throughout his fiction produced in many stages, most notably reincarnating in a cluster of stories on life in an apartment megaplex (danchi), a place that he views as an incidental destination of drifters, or the exile land. His studies of Nikolai Gogol (Warai no ho¯ho¯, aruiwa Nikorai Go¯gori (The Method of Laughter, or Nikolai Gogol), 1981), Dostoevsky (Dosutoefusukii no Peteruburugu (The St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky), 1987), Ueda Akinari (Ugetsu monogatari kiko¯ (Literary Travels to Sites in The Tales of the Rain and Moon), 1975), Franz Kafka (Kafuka no meikyo¯ : Akumu no ho¯ho¯ (Kafka’s Labyrinth: The Method of Nightmares), 1987), Nagai Kaf¯u (many essays over a course of time), Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o¯ (Kono hito o miyo (Ecce Homo), serialized in 1990) and other Japanese and non-Japanese
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writers are very effective in articulating the intangibility of one’s origin (and orientation). Overall, his case constitutes a valid antithesis to the theory of ‘Nihon kaiki’ or ‘the ultimate return to Japan’. In this chapter, I will center on one of the novels that suggest an autobiographical pretense, namely Hasamiuchi (Double Jeopardy, 1973), with some references to other writings by Goto¯, in order to substantiate this sense of home as an artificial concept, and the role that language plays in it.1 Goto¯’s musings come very close to those of Jacques Derrida at times, who might function as a potential frame-setter. Double Jeopardy consists of many storylines that are incidentally and intermittently recalled by the narrator-protagonist (‘I’) named Akaki Jiro¯, from the archive of his memory which is as fallible as that of anyone else. As we know empirically, an instance of the past may revisit us at any moment, triggered by an unexpected exposure to something (using the terminology of Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense (1990), I would like to describe this as a ‘fossil’). The narrative flow is constantly interrupted by such unpredictable arrivals of recollections. Or rather, to put it more precisely, the narrative itself is formed by a number of interruptions, which may discursively overlap each other, digress from each other, and subside into each other. In short, these storylines can begin without notice and may not end with closure. Each may even unfold concurrently with another storyline, alternating with or embedding within each other, and ending sooner or later than the other. A given story may be repeated or continued after an interval of something unrelated. Furthermore, each account of a given incident in the past may not be verified; in fact the narrator constantly admits to his inability to remember the circumstances (when, where, why, who, what, and how) correctly, and the attempted account itself is often replaced with the narrator’s self-questioning. Given the level of uncertainty as to a given incident’s time, place, and reason of occurrence, and any part that other individuals might have played in the incident, the being of ‘I’ seems vague and intangible to the extent that he may thwart the reader’s expectation in the narrator-protagonist of an autobiography. Nagashima Takayoshi, a literary critic who has written an inspiring essay on Goto¯, articulates and analyses the enigma of this novel as follows: The impossibility of the narrator ‘I’ and the scribbler ‘I’ as a stable and selfcontained entity coincides with the impossibility of narrativity of the question ‘What is “I”?’ and the impossibility of the novel based upon narrative time (or accountability). (Nagashima 1986: 97) This observation is profound, not only in terms of the nature of this particular novel, and the genre of the novel, but also in light of the theme of this volume. The narrative in a conventional sense is predicated upon the belief that the main character has his or her unique qualities of which he or she is aware and by which he or she abides, and thus has a distinct and discrete story to tell which the reader will find to be narrated in chronological order and in causal terms.
294 Atsuko Sakaki Nagashima points out that this belief is a myth, and that Goto¯’s narrative is precisely about both the impossibility of self-identification and the impossibility of the narrative which are, in fact, dependent upon each other. While many if not most of Goto¯’s stories share the same aim, Double Jeopardy is a prime example in its articulation of ambiguity and complexity of identity and narration. With the recognition of the novel’s resistance to accountability in mind, to summarize the plot briefly, it is about a middle-aged man, Akaki, who tries to remember, with the help of others, where, when and why he lost an overcoat he used to have when he was young and new to Tokyo. The overcoat, though bearing some historical and personal significance as we shall see later, does not seem to possess any mark of personal attachment or monetary value. Suddenly one day, the narrator-protagonist is seized by the question of how he lost it and, for inexplicable reasons, he begins an arduous search for it. In the process, the reader is taken to different stages of his life to date, consisting of his boyhood in North Korea back when it was occupied by the Japanese, and then by the Soviets, his high school days in Chikuzen, Ky¯uh¯u, his move to Tokyo to attend college, and his life with his own family in the suburbs of Tokyo in the present. Since the story takes many sudden turns into different side-stories and time spans, I shall not follow the story from beginning to end. Instead, I will order my chapter according to issues that I have set up for my analysis: naming, languages and relocations. By doing so, I will occasionally revert to the same segments in the story which make different points in light of different issues.
Relatively speaking: identity as dependent upon relations The narrative in question begins and ends with the narrator-protagonist standing on Ochanomizu Bridge and reflecting upon the bridge in a way that others who merely use it in order to walk across would not do. His reflections deserve our careful attention as they lead us to general considerations of the ways we might identify places: The bridge bypasses the railroad of the National Railway. What is the name of the bridge? Ochanomizu Bridge? Probably.2 But I am not one who is motivated enough to walk [up to the end of the bridge] from about the middle of the bridge where I stand, in order to verify the name. It is just that one day, I realized that I didn’t know the name of the bridge that I was standing on. Suddenly I muttered the name of Shirahige Bridge. Azuma Bridge, Komagata Bridge, and then . . . Genshin Bridge? Of course they are all from Nagai Kaf¯u ’s Bokuto¯ Kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River, 1937 [1972]). St. Isaac’s Bridge. This is from Gogol’s ‘The Nose’. It is the bridge to which Yakovlevich, the barber, sets out with his heart palpitating in order to discard the nose of the collegiate assessor, Kovalyov, which he discovered, that morning at breakfast, caught up in his slice of bread. Indeed, a bridge needs a name. It would not do if Kaf¯u, who chooses alleys
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and back streets in order to avoid encountering policemen as much as possible as he goes to Terashima, crosses ‘a certain bridge’ whose name he does not know. Yakovlevich, the barber, too, is afraid of police vigilance; after all what he hides in the rag in his pocket is the nose of the Collegiate Assessor. Given his state of mind, the bridge over which he was finally able to force himself to toss the nose still wrapped in the rag, had to be St. Isaac’s Bridge over the Neva, no other bridge. It should not be simply ‘a certain bridge’ in St. Petersburg – that would not do. It’s not only the case with bridges . . . However narrow and obscure, alleys [in A Strange Tale ] have their own names. At least Kaf¯u must have known them. Even if a given alley really did not have a name, the reader is left with the impression that at least Kaf¯u had known the name. This applies to the case of the barber with a nose in the rag hidden in his pocket. What enviable stories they are! I have to confess I wish I could write down the names of bridges, backstreets and alleys. I could not help but wish I could intersperse my fiction with those names, all through the text. However, the reality is that I do not even know the name of the bridge that I am standing upon. It is partly because I am a country bumpkin. A country bumpkin? Yes, let us put it that way for now. Indeed, it is not only this bridge whose name that I do not know. I do not even know Shirahige Bridge, Azuma Bridge, Komagata Bridge, or Genshin Bridge. It is not that I have never crossed them; probably I have not noticed even though I have crossed them. This is of course my own fault – it’s due to personal reasons. Yet, it is also true that Tokyo itself confuses me. To begin with, there are many bridges over no river. What would happen if we name all the pedestrian bridges over roads? Of course there would be someone who would remember the name of each and every bridge – surely there would be someone who would be determined to memorize all the names no matter what. But would Kaf u¯ write such a bridge name in his fiction? It is impossible to imagine Kaf¯u crossing a pedestrian bridge to visit Terashima district. It does not need me to say that it is impossible to write of Kaf¯u’s bridges. At least I am not qualified to imitate his practice. It is not only rivers that proliferate; an infinite number of unnamable bridges proliferate all over Tokyo. (Goto¯ 1998: 9–10) It is important to note that the narrator here is not being indulgently nostalgic, lamenting changes that have happened from Kaf¯u’s time till the narrative present. ‘I’ is not one who would dwell upon a nativistic glorification of the culture’s past. The persistent references to Gogol should be sufficient to resolve any misunderstanding of the narrator’s take on locality as geopolitically charged. As for his consciousness of temporality, the narrator goes beyond longing for ‘the good old days’ when things had appropriate names: Even though nameless, riverless bridges may have proliferated all over Tokyo, still the bridge upon which I now stand should be named one way or
296 Atsuko Sakaki the other. It is simply that I happen to be oblivious to the name of the bridge I am standing on. (Goto¯ 1998: 10) Thus, the narrator-protagonist realizes that he has not explored the possibility of finding such a discrete entity as the name of the bridge, a possibility that he could have explored. The oblivion, as well as his reluctance to go up to the post where the name of the bridge must be inscribed, suggests the irrelevance, if not insignificance, of the name to the narrator, and perhaps, by extension, to everyone. It is not that bridges do not have their names any longer; it is that a perceiving subject does not pay attention to names any longer. His circumstances do not let him accept as something of importance any stable relationship between a thing and its name. He is too keenly aware that names do not represent what the things are; the relationship between names and things is far more ambiguous and complex. As Tokuyoshi Atsuyori puts it: If the place where one’s identity exists is the place where one word certainly signifies one thing and vice versa, that is, where the signifier and signified correspond to each other in an elementary manner, then Goto¯ Meisei who lost his homeland . . . is thrown out of the place where the signifier matches the signified, as he comes to realize, by encountering a variety of languages, that a word can be incommensurate with a thing. (1979: 185) While this may be a ‘loss of innocence’, a sobering departure from the land of peaceful unity between things and names, it is an important step to take in realizing that the said unity is only an illusion. Names by no means represent things innocently. Naming is an act of possession, an exertion of authority and a claim to legitimacy, and thus always political: All culture is originarily colonial. In order to recall that, let us not simply rely on etymology. Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some ‘politics’ of language. Mastery begins, as we know, through the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations. (Derrida 1996: 39) The act of forgetting names and of not seeking to restore them, an act that we saw above as chosen by the narrator-protagonist of Double Jeopardy, then, may be deemed an inadvertent resistance to the coloniality of the naming in its legitimating function. That things are deprived of their names in the perceiving subject’s consciousness may liberate them from the imposing forces of definition. At least partly by virtue of losing the name of Ochanomizu Bridge (albeit for a moment and only in the consciousness of the narrator-protagonist), the bridge is freely connected to other bridges, namely literary precedents in Kaf¯u and Gogol. In other words, by not being identified metaphorically, the
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bridge earns a metonymical identity: it is defined in terms of its relation to others. The metonymical identification is the case with characters in Double Jeopardy as well. Soon after the text of Double Jeopardy opens, the narrator-protagonist introduces himself in probably the most succinct self-portrait in the entire novel, as follows: I am not a businessman who gets up early every morning. I am a man stuck at my desk throughout the night, night after night, as though I were a watchman in the apartment megaplex, in a corner of a three bedroom apartment in a five-storey building in the megaplex. It’s not that I have been asked to work as a watchman – it’s my own choice to stay awake all night. I am not a professional Russian-Japanese translator, working on Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’, either.3 Still, I have kept thinking to myself: ‘the overcoat . . . overcoat . . . overcoat’, over and over again, for twenty years straight, ever since I came to Tokyo out of a rustic town in Chikuzen in Ky¯ush¯u, wearing that former Japanese army infantryman’s khaki overcoat. I am one who has been longing to write my own ‘Overcoat,’ no matter what, even if it were an act of imitation. In short, I am I . . . in the original sense of the word. (Goto¯ 1998: 25)4 ‘I’ is ‘semantic’, as he puts it in the passage quoted as an epigraph to this essay – nothing more nor less than that. It cannot be defined in terms of employment, affiliation, or task, as one normally is in human society. The only way to define ‘I’ is as an agent of thought (obsessions, aspirations) and action (imagined or real), just as ‘I’ in any sentence constitutes the subject of the predicate. When we examine the nature of the narrator/protagonist’s thought and action, one thing becomes clear: his self-identification relies upon his relationship to Nikolai Gogol’s short story, ‘The Overcoat’. Obsessed with the story, he stays up all night, evidently writing something at his desk in his home. At least that is what he claims about himself. Hiraoka explains the constitution of ‘I’ in Double Jeopardy as follows: ‘I’ is a man of no quality, and thus has to be named after Akakii Akakiivich as Akaki Jiro¯. Hence, the novel about him has to be a parody of ‘The Overcoat’, and he [as the protagonist] has to go on hunting an overcoat in order to ‘write my own “Overcoat” no matter what’. (1979: 188) Hiraoka thus suggests that the focal point of the narrative is not biographical information that refers to some quality that the narrator-protagonist possesses, but his desire to correspond to ‘The Overcoat’. In other words, it is not one’s own essence, but the relationship to one’s literary predecessor, and a foreign one at that in this case, that establishes one’s identity, such as it is. In fact, this relation-orientedness itself is indebted to ‘The Overcoat’. The naming of Akakii
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Akakievitch is just as incidental; the name, meaning ‘Akakii, the son of Akakii’, is contingent upon the people’s inability to find an appropriate given name for him. In the end of a futile search for a name, his mother decides upon simply recycling the child’s father’s name, hence the identification between the given name and paternal name. Just as the name is handed down from father to son, it inspired the name of a literary descendant. The name in either case does not claim to represent any original quality of the character, but is meant to suggest whose trace he is. In short, ‘The Overcoat’ and Double Jeopardy are connected to each other in terms of the lack of essence in the protagonists. Each of them comes into being only as a trace of someone else, thus negating the notion of the Self as autonomous of the Other. One’s identity, if any, consists of the ‘différance’5 from a predecessor which itself is not to be called the original, as is manifest in this particular case with Akakii. Double Jeopardy is replete with such examples of identities as traces. Many of the characters are identified as slightly different from others, as names are misheard, coincided, or misunderstood. When Akaki pays a visit to the family of the landlady of a room that he used to rent as a student, he is greeted with the voice of the wife of her son, a woman whom he has never met, through the intercom outside the entrance. As the former landlady herself is out, Akaki asks for her daughter, Takako, to which the woman’s voice replies that she is Takako. In fact, it is not the same Takako; the landlady’s daughter and daughter-in-law happen to have the same name (though written with different Chinese characters). Since her face is invisible, he does not realize that it is a case of mistaken identity. The mistake is only possible through oral communication, in the absence of letters and faces. When Akaki mentions a friend from earlier days, Kuge, to the landlady who comes home, she mishears the name and refers to him as Koga, which happens to be the name of another friend of Akaki whom she knew. Then, when Akaki explains that he is looking for the overcoat – gait¯o in Japanese – she thinks that he is referring to another friend, in light of the context of the conversation up to that point, and says that it’s an unusual name, compared with ‘Naito¯’, a common surname. Names thus do not connote their bearers’ essences; names function as metonymies, in their relation to other names. The narrator-protagonist’s action, as Hiraoka suggests above, is not a manifestation of some internal volition, but a result of the plot’s requirement. Akaki has to be concerned with the overcoat, in order to be a trace of Akakii Akakiivich whose overcoat is the driving force of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’. As Hiraoka notes: The selfhood was formed in part by Gogol and yet has become something other than Gogol . . . Thus, to write of the present place of presence is to write a parody of Gogol . . . all the books read and all the knowledge acquired intersect with, and cancel out, each other . . . the place that has failed to form an original landscape, or the place where one’s identity was not lost but has never been formed, where the narrator-less speech echoes from somewhere and then dissipated. One’s own language, the language that alone is absolute to oneself, or the language that one should speak, has never
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been found. One’s own land where one should be has never been encountered. In just the same way, the place where the language of one’s own has not been owned echoes only the words of others. (1979: 194–5) Here, Hiraoka seems to come very close to Jacques Derrida. So does Nagashima in the following assertion: ‘I’ exists within the revolving language, as accumulation of différance of relations with others and relations with quoted/cited texts (Nagashima 1986: 97). Derrida expounds upon the theory of the monolingualism of the other, which means: that in any case we speak only one language – and that we do not own it. We only ever speak one language – and, since it returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining with the other, and returning to the other. (Derrida 1996: 40) There is no selfhood autonomous of the other. It is always already connected to the other, a thesis that texts embody most eloquently, as we saw above.
Languages of incidentality The narrator’s connection to the Russian language, however, is neither natural nor necessitated. It is incidental and arbitrary once again. He is ‘not a professional Russo-Japanese translator’. At one point in the narrative, out of context, he is suddenly visited by a speech he heard in the past, during the Soviet Army’s occupation of North Korea shortly after Japan’s surrender: ‘Japanese woman, give me that!’ ‘Give me the watch!’ . . . This was the first time I had ever heard Russian spoken – the first Russian speech that I had ever heard; never before had I heard of the first syllables of Pushkin, Gogol, or Dostoevski being uttered . . . The Russian names that I had known back then were only Pyotr and Nikolai. Pyotr, but not Pyotr the Great; of course not. Nikolai, but not Nikolai Gogol. They were White Russians who came to my father’s store to buy wheat and sugar. They didn’t speak in Russian; they spoke in broken Japanese. (Goto¯ 1998: 208–9) Note that the speech was overheard, not addressed toward the narrator himself. Hence, the first encounter with the language was doubly incidental. There is further complication of the language-based identity occurring here, on the site of translingual practices. The understanding of the phrases uttered by Soviet soldiers must have arrived at the narrator, either instinctively from the context
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(the Russians were snatching the Japanese woman’s watch), or retrospectively from the knowledge of the language later acquired. In short, the speech issued and speech received are not one, but are either hypothesized or imagined, distant or deferred. The narrator’s listing of the Russian authors also is telling of the mediation of the Japanese translation of Russian names: it is not the initial (‘P’, ‘G’ or ‘D’) but ‘the first syllable’ (in the Japanese syllabary, ‘Pu’, ‘Go’ or ‘Do’) that the narrator uses to represent the names of Pushkin, Gogol, or Dostoevski. The addition of vowels domesticates the foreign names, rendering them unrecognizable to native Russians. These names are originally Russian and yet no longer Russian, just as Double Jeopardy is inspired by ‘The Overcoat’ and yet is not ‘The Overcoat’. Furthermore, Pyotr and Nikolai are denied their respective identification with the historical figures who share their given names. The coincidence of Nikolai reconfirms the precedence of the name over any knowledge of Gogol that seems so essential to the present-day narrator. The Nikolai whom Akaki knew before learning of Gogol is to Akaki not the same as the Nikolai thereafter.6 The recognition of the difference (‘not Nikolai Gogol’) that comes after the acquisition of the knowledge has become a part of the identification of Nikolai that Akaki used to know. Thus, one is defined by what one is not. Also, what one is does not represent a constant entity, but rather a being susceptible to changes that may come about without reason to the person as in this case. The Pyotr and Nikolai that the narrator knew prior to 1945 are then introduced as customers of his father’s general store in North Korea: the Russians who have fled Russia and live in North Korea, buying essential commodities in a Japanese-owned store in North Korea where they speak in neither Russian (the language of the lost home) nor Korean (the language of the current home), but in Japanese, which they have not even mastered. The endless sequence of negativity and displacement verifies the hypothesis that it is impossible to define one’s identity in an affirmative and consistent way. One can only be defined by way of what one is not, or what one happens to be doing at a given moment. Another language that plays a formative part in theorization of languages as identity-makers in Double Jeopardy is Korean, the language of the territory that was ‘annexed’ to the Empire of Japan and in which Akaki – as well as Goto¯ – grew up. Even though he is not forced to learn the language, as the use of Japanese is legitimated, he acquires the language well enough to sing some songs in the language. Between Japan’s defeat and the communists’ takeover of those Japanese residents’ properties, the Akaki brothers do away with a large number of musical albums among other relics of the Japanese colonizer’s everyday life in Korea by burning and burying them in the backyard. Following the lead of his elder brother, Akaki sings those songs in Korean, knowing that the new lyrics are charged with anti-Japanese and/or anti-imperialist messages. These are songs that originally had Japanese lyrics to promote the spirit of the imperialist nation: ‘Hohei no honryu’ ¯ (The Essence of Infantry) and ‘Cho¯sen hokkyo¯ keibi no uta’ (Song of the Guards on the Northern Borders of Korea) survived Japan’s defeat and Korea’s independence, yet in a curious way: the lyrics were changed into
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those which are either derogatory of the Japanese or informed of communism, while the music remained the same. It is not as though the brothers sing the new versions in order to escape any censorship from Korean authorities; they are alone in the backyard, with no vigilance. It is a voluntary act, which complicates one’s sense of identity according to the nation and language. If anything, the message the elder brother tries to send is that one’s identity defined by nationality is arbitrary and fragile, and thus deserves to be mocked. The almost instinctive memorization of the Korean lyrics suggests how physically the protagonist and his brother had mastered the language, even though it is not exactly their ‘mother tongue’, undoubtedly with the help of music which is putatively universal. Upon his ‘return’ to Ky¯ush¯u, Akaki (the younger brother) realizes that the Japanese which he has been speaking is distinctly different from the dialect of his alleged homeland of Chikuzen, and he tries hard – and almost successfully – to master the Chikuzen dialect in order to ‘naturalize’ to his ‘native land’. However, he remains unable to master the inflection of ‘j’ for ‘z’: Having been born in North Korea and having since led my life using colonial Japanese until the first grade in high school, I lacked the ‘Chikujen’ accent. Of course I had acquired the Chikuzen dialect almost flawlessly in the six years in high school. I was able to quarrel or talk dirty in the dialect. But the ‘jenjen’ for ‘zenzen’ (meaning ‘absolutely not’) is something that I absolutely (‘jenjen’) could not handle. (Goto¯ 1998: 48)7 That he needs to try to acquire a native tongue which, as he aptly points out, ‘is not supposed to be acquired or mastered’ (ibid.: 200) calls into question the common belief that speech is a most intrinsic marker of one’s cultural identity. When he says, ‘I was a rustic fellow from Chikuzen, Ky¯ush¯u, without the “Chikujen” accent’ (ibid.: 48), it is not only his own regional identity, but the notion of identity itself that becomes questionable. Upon Akaki’s move to Tokyo, another language surfaces as a medium of further questioning of the role that languages play in the process of self-identification. The reason that the narrator goes to Tokyo for the first time is to take an entrance examination – to a school at which ‘Futabatei Shimei studied Russian’ (ibid.: 47).8 He fails the examination, because, he hypothesizes, he was not able to translate the Japanese idiom ‘Hayaoki wa sanmon no toku’ (literally meaning ‘An early riser earns three-mon more’) into English as ‘The early bird catches the worm’ (ibid.: 7). It is not as though he remained bitter about the failure, but the sentence (transcribed in katakana) recurs several times in the text, which confirms its significance other than in terms of the narrator’s career. The fact that one needs to be proficient in English in order to study Russian in college encapsulates an aspect of the cultural orientation of postwar Japan: English has become the primary foreign language in postwar Japan where pro-Americanism predominates. One’s position in postwar Japanese society depends partially on one’s command of, and position vis-à-vis English.
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Akaki’s elder brother embodies the ambiguity of the identity of the new Japanese, as he worked for a US Army base in Ky¯ush¯u: My elder brother was a watchman on the U.S. Army base in Kashii . . . From the molding of the six-mat room, the jeep-coloured, Occupational Army employee’s uniform was hung. A badge was sewn on top of the big chest pocket with a lid, with the logo of ‘Civilian Guard’. But then what was he to ‘guard’, exactly? The American families living inside the camp? Or the prostitutes swarming the camp? . . . Attired in the jeep-coloured US Army civilian guard’s uniform, my brother would commute from a house in the town that had formerly housed Japanese army officers’ families. (ibid.: 56) The location of the brother’s affiliation, or alleged loyalty, is rendered ambiguous, especially by introducing the definition of the area of his residence in the past. He does not seem to be concerned with the irony as much as is the narrator. The family of three (including the mother) discusses an overcoat that the mother had found for her younger son as he was about to leave for Tokyo for the examination. It was one of those overcoats made specifically for the former Japanese imperial army soldiers, leading him to ask: Which was more appropriate for the former Japanese army officers’ town, the former Japanese imperial army infantryman’s khaki overcoat, or the US Army civilian guard’s jeep-coloured uniform, hung from the molding? Regardless, either no doubt painted a vivid picture of a family in Japan after its defeat . . . ‘Oh well. You’d always wanted to become a soldier since you were a kid, so this may be just as well.’ (ibid.: 56–7) The coexistence of the two uniforms embodies the confluence of the past and the present, the imperial Japan and the military US in Japan of the early 1950s: Where on earth had my mother acquired this overcoat? It was not secondhand. The khaki overcoat was not of the officer’s kind, but brand new . . . I was looking at the overcoat, with a strange feeling hard to define. My brother seems to have seen through my thoughts. Without getting up from the floor, with his arm supporting his head, with a move of his chin, he gestured to the uniform of the US Army civilian guard, hung from the molding. ‘If you don’t like that overcoat, perhaps you could go to Tokyo in this?’ I suppose this is what my brother wanted to say: Are you still thinking of the old man? Time you had forgotten him! He’s nobody. (ibid.: 61–2)
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Wearing the infantryman’s uniform of a former Japanese imperial army after the dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the imperial army constitutes an instance of incongruity – displacement, deferral, différance – and results in irony. The elder brother suggests that, if Akaki minded the irony so much that he couldn’t wear it comfortably, he could get a second-hand American serviceman’s overcoat from the military base in Japan where he now works. He was sending a wake-up call to the protagonist who, he thought, was still entrapped in the old sense of loyalty to their father who had been an army officer, and to the nation that was no more. Instead, however, the protagonist – or the narrator, in retrospect – seems to be more concerned with the incongruity itself, the irony of inadvertently representing what he does not intend to represent by wearing the clothes that were unmistakably charged with specific meanings that he no longer endorses. It is not as though Akaki is firmly against, or for, a particular ideological/political position from which he views those who stand apart critically. Rather, he is a man who sees through contingencies of ideological/political constructs while admitting to their co-presence in the process of his self-identification. When the younger of the Koga brothers, acquaintances from Chikuzen who had lived in Tokyo longer and thus looked after Akaki who was new in town, suggested that Akaki should perhaps join him in practicing karate, the elder of the Koga brothers said in the Chikuzen dialect: ‘Bakarashika, chi!’ twice, once to his brother and again to Akaki, with a grin on his face. This led Akaki to the following reflection on the state of culture in Japan, in terms of language and ideology: Needless to say, ‘bakarashika, chi!’ is a Ky¯ush¯u idiom – unique to the Chikuzen region to be specific. It is extremely difficult to translate this phrase into standard Japanese. It is not only difficult, but next to impossible. The problem of course is with the last ‘chi!’ ‘Chi!’ is, first of all, emphatic. But that’s the easy part. ‘Chi!’ is also non-personal, plural. In other words, it connotes a self-explanatory logic: that is, it is pointless to even address it at this point. In addition, ‘chi!’ has a nuance of self-caricaturizing and, simultaneously, a nuance of disdain toward the listener. The grin Koga the elder sent to me must be a facial version of this nuance. It is not as though I would remain dissatisfied no matter what, until the Chikuzen idiom is grammatically anatomized, or until it is translated into standard Japanese. Still, it may not be entirely meaningless to approximate ‘chi!’ to a standard Japanese expression as much as possible. ‘How ridiculous! How could anyone, other than yourself, seriously devote oneself to karate, in this age of democracy? Right, Mr. Akaki?’ This is not perfect, but surely it is not inaccurate, either. It’s fair to expect to earn 85% for this liberal translation. Koga the elder graduated from Takushoku University during the war. Koga the younger is a member of the karate club at Takushoku University whose name was still banned [by GHQ , as it was invested with the right-wing nationalist ideology] after Japan’s defeat. (ibid.: 109-10)
304 Atsuko Sakaki The idiomatic expression in question is profoundly ironical: while it is unmistakably regional (hence, the narrator’s difficulty in translating it into standard Japanese), its ‘non-personal, plural’ subjectivity purports a commonality of perception. Thus, the expression thrives upon linguistic discrepancies while promoting cognitive universality. The purported universality is supported by the ideology of democracy which, under the circumstances of the postwar, US-occupied Japan, has to be accepted and applied by everyone – hence the ‘non-personal, plural’ address. It is not, however, as though everyone in Japan were a blank sheet on which democracy was drawn completely anew. In fact, anyone’s circumstances are ambiguous and complex with potentially contradictory ideological/social affiliations, as the narrator surmises in the following passage: Koga the younger did not insist on my taking up karate because of ‘bakarashika, chi!’ There is no question about it. He was as old as my elder brother who worked for the US army base in Kashii. My brother subscribed to the Akahata. Koga the younger is a member of the karate club at Takushoku University. As for me, I was neither. I was a man, who had come to Tokyo with the former Japanese infantryman’s khaki overcoat, who was formerly a prospective student at the Japanese Army Junior Academy . . . Who on earth was I? . . . I was indeed an ambiguous ‘young man’. (ibid.: 111) Dodging the fault lines of ideologies, ranging from Communism to the remnants of right-wing ultra-nationalism, Akaki stands apart – not aloof or in despair, but simply confused. Note the conversion of the past and the present in his selfportrayal: his current presence is anachronistic, as encapsulated in his attire, while his past presence was no less untimely, as he was never a student at the academy – his self-identification during the war hinged upon his aspiration to become a student there (and then an officer), and not upon what he was then and there. In short, the ambiguity about him is not to be attributed to the specific political circumstances into which postwar Japan was thrown: at any time, in any place, he cannot be identified by applying a single, homogeneous and straightforward standard. Being ambiguous is the status quo for him, and perhaps for anyone else, ‘non-personal and plural’. As these historical stages that Japan had gone through lend the backdrop for the protagonist’s endless process of self-identification, Goto¯ does not neglect to put in perspective the narrative present as well. Deducing from the fact that the narrator has lived in his current residence for about ten years since 1962, the frame of reference is around 1972. Even though Akaki is evidently living a stable life, financially secure enough to live comfortably with his wife and two children in an apartment near Tokyo, it does not mean that he has arrived at any conclusive definition of who he is. To limit the scope of his still on-going selfinquiry to reflections on national cultures, his ambiguity has, if anything, increased. As the narrator recalls the origin of the army overcoat which is now
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remembered as missing, he wears an overcoat ‘of pure wool of fine quality, manufactured in England . . . in a very subdued colour, between gray and blue’ (Goto¯ 1998: 17). This evidently bourgeois taste that the choice of fabric, colour and tailorship attests to suggests yet another context in which Japan revises its cultural identity: capitalist global trade relations that connect every part of the world as long as there is a flow of money. The new overcoat tailored in England and imported from England is an emblem of Japan’s wealth and willingness to embrace commodities from all over the world. It is not exactly oblivious to the commodities’ countries of origin as, in this instance, ‘England’ carries some weight as a marker of prestige in the tailoring industry, but the countries and areas are transformed into brands attached to manufactured goods. Japanese consumers are as much participants in this game of late capitalist global consumer culture as English or other manufacturers. The Japanese who wear the English overcoats are as culturally ambiguous as the English manufacturers who sell their products to Japan. Just as Double Jeopardy is dependent upon, and yet distinguished from, ‘The Overcoat’, the Japanese man’s identity is in part determined by the English overcoat that he wears, and yet he does not completely become an Englishman: he becomes something else, something yet different. Goto¯ maintains consistently in his numerous essays that Japan has neither a pure origin nor an essence to begin with, as Japan is culturally hybrid (konketsu) and torn apart from within (bunretsu), proposing as a metaphor for Japan the model of an oval (‘daen’, as opposed to a circle, or ‘en’) which has not one but two centers.9 His take is unique in that he questions the validity of the quest for cultural or ethnic identity itself which, in his opinion, is an illusion that is always already absent.
Itinerant life From this moment, the narrator is haunted by a question that suddenly hits him: when and where did he lose the overcoat? He launches an investigation. It is important to note that he is not in search of the overcoat itself: his question, and the subsequent quest, is thus abstract. He does not need the old overcoat now. Nor does he hold any grudge toward anyone who might be responsible for the loss. In fact, the whole reason that he decides he must reconstruct the circumstances of the loss of the overcoat may well be his desire to write his own ‘Overcoat’ à la Gogol, a desire that Hiraoka articulated as we saw above. Akaki’s wondering/wandering in order to identify the time and location of the loss, however, does yield a ramification that is important in our study of identity: preparation for the search leads him to a realization that he had relocated himself fourteen times since he first moved to Tokyo. Goto¯’s status quo is as a stranger, no matter where he may be, rather than being someone who belongs somewhere other than where he happens to inhabit at a given moment. Hiraoka extends Goto¯’s metaphor of Captain Gulliver as an incidental traveler as follows:
306 Atsuko Sakaki Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, one drifts away to a place not of one’s own choice, thrown into an unpredictable company of people . . . The place in which one happens to be is not the place that one is supposed to be. Still, one has no choice other than to be anchored in the present place of residence, as there is no place where one should be. (Hiraoka 1979: 177) What sets Goto¯ apart from those who dwell on the transience or impermanence of life as celebrated in classical Japanese literature is his tireless curiosity toward physical and mundane details of the lived space, and his commitment to comedy rather than to tragedy or lyricism. Goto¯ does not dismiss the temporary abode because it is not one’s home; rather, he suggests that the lack of belonging is the only status quo. With the understanding that the origin is not lost, but has never existed, he stays away from dramatizing the lives of city dwellers, for either aesthetic or social agendas, and instead investigates how the minutiae of life (e.g., floor plans, plumbing, vertical and horizontal compositions of apartment buildings, laundry and washing dishes) affect the course of life and the ways residents register events in their lives. His persistent attention to detail appears almost revealing of affection toward the place of residence. As Hiraoka puts it, he seems ‘determined to make the place that one happens to be in at the moment into the place that one is supposed to be in’ (1979: 179). Instead of indulging himself in nostalgia or romanticizing his status as a selfstyled wanderer, Goto¯ seems to be complacent with the lack (and not loss) of roots, and determined to paint a comical picture of human beings as intrinsically itinerant: Let me clarify: I am not being sentimental [about the loss of homeland]. On the contrary, it’s such an abstract business. It is true that Eikyo¯, my homeland, suddenly became ‘a foreign land’ upon the defeat of Japan. But it is not as though the land (mountains and rivers) had become extinct. What had become extinct is only the artifice that it was Japan. In short, I was able to learn of the artificiality of the nation, at the cost of the experience of loss of homeland. (Goto¯ 1973a: 16) As Nagashima puts it ‘[w]ithout privileging the consciousness of deracination as an experience, [Goto¯ ] abstracted it into the understanding of the world as an artifice and/or relation’ (1986: 92). Goto¯ ’s portrayals of ‘hikiage-sha’ (returnees from ‘colonial’ territories of the Empire of Japan, in his case, Korea), ‘tanshin funin sha’ (virtual bachelors; men temporarily relocated out of town on work assignments), and ‘danchi-zoku salariiman’ (businessmen commuting to work from apartment megaplexes in the suburbs), are not simply autobiographical, but rhetorical: these figures, obviously neither travelers nor natives, encapsulate the curiously ambiguous relationships that modern urban residents maintain with their own abodes. In ‘Mumeishi no
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hanashi’ (The Tale of Mr. No Name), Goto¯ inserts a short piece entitled ‘“K” to no musubitsuki’ (My Connection to ‘K’, 1970), a piece on his affinity for K of Franz Kafka’s The Castle. In this essay, he says that as a returnee from North Korea himself, he has written four or five pieces of fiction centering on a male returnee from North Korea. The narrator then has the following disclaimer to offer nonetheless: The most important thing is that they have begun to forget the fact they are returnees. Needless to say, it is not that they are trying to forget it. Neither is it that they have completely forgotten the fact. But they are not returnees who have been rooted in a certain part of their past, or their experience as returnees, or who act according to their identification as returnees. I, too, have not lived under the rubric of Goto¯ Meisei, a returnee . . . I suppose that kind of [self-identification] is articulate and persuasive. But I have not done so simply because, just like the male characters in my fiction, I have often forgotten this particular characteristic. (Goto¯ 1970: 167)10 This does not mean, however, that characters in Goto¯’s novels do not make any concerned effort to restore a lost part of their past or reflect upon its significance. Rather, it is precisely in the process of a search for one’s past that one realizes it does not exist as a continuous extension of time that in its entirety defines one’s identity. In a short story, ‘Musubitsukanu mono’ (Unrelatable Things), a chance encounter with a snake and the killing of it that the protagonist conducts reminds him of another, similar incident in the past, like a memory flash: The snake that the man encountered was the first one that he saw in Japan. It was a Japanese snake that the returnee to Japan saw face to face the first time in twenty-five years since his return. Therefore, we can deduce that the satisfaction that he experienced was due to the fact that the man who had killed the Korean snake and the man who lives in Japan in the present were connected to each other for the first time by the killing of the Japanese snake. (Goto¯ 1971b: 103) It is an incidental action that identifies a man in Japan with a man who was in Korea in the past. The continuity and homogeneity of identity are effectively dismissed, while two separate moments, each in a different country, are tied to deduce an identification of the agents of two actions that are analogous to each other. Indeed protagonists in Goto¯’s stories do reflect on lapses in memory that make it impossible to reconstruct one’s personal history based on chronology and the causality of past events. Encounters with people, places and moments in time are tangential and incidental, with the reasons behind them difficult to identify. In
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fact, these characters do not believe their questions will be answered in the first place. Still, they continue to ask questions, producing numerous possible answers without solving the questions. The title of one of his stories, ‘Gimonfu de owaru hanashi’ (A Tale That Ends with a Question Mark), speaks loudly of the orientation of Goto¯’s fiction: it concerns the unknowability, intangibility, and unidentifiability of human experience, and yet never disengages questions. Indeed, Goto¯’s characters are itinerant not only in a geographical sense but also in a cognitive sense: they never settle. Rather, they exist only in the process of searching for self-identification.
Conclusion It seems as though the following passage by Derrida lends itself well to my reading of Double Jeopardy in particular, and to Goto¯ Meisei’s writing in general: In its common concept, autobiographical anamnesis presupposes identification. And precisely not identity. No, an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process endures. Whatever the story of a return to oneself or to one’s home [chez-soi], into the ‘hut’ [casa] of one’s home (chez is the casa), no matter what an odyssey or Bildungsroman it might be, in whatever manner one invents the story of a construction of the self, the autos, or the ipse, it is always imagined that the one who writes should know how to say I. At any rate, the identificatory modality must already or henceforth be assured: assured of language and in its language. It is believed that the problem of the unity of language must be resolved, and that the One of language in the strict or broad sense be given – a broad sense that will be stretched till it includes all the models and identificatory modalities, all the poles of imaginary projection in social culture. (Derrida 1996: 28) As we have seen, Goto¯’s narrator-protagonist does not ‘know how to say I’ – let us recall that for him ‘I’ is only semantic – and yet he knows that he does not know. He also knows he is not ‘given’ any identity. Still, he cannot but place himself in an ‘interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process’ of identification. In this chapter, I have looked at references to some of the ‘identificatory modalities’ such as names, languages, nationhood, and places of residence, which all turn out to be ‘imaginary’ and yet ‘assured’ and ‘enduring’. While they all suffer twists, misplacements, misunderstandings, fallible memory, lack of motivation to resolve any mystery, coincidence and other complications, they do haunt us ‘phantasmatically’. Goto¯ demonstrates effectively the artificiality, the contingency and ambiguity of identity-makers, while showing how dependent we are upon these constructs in our own search for identity that is the obsession of our modern sensibility.
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Notes 1 Let me add a word of clarification as to the nature of the ‘autobiographical pretense’ that I here mention as shared in common by some of Goto¯’s works. They should be held as discrete from the body of works labelled ‘shisho¯setsu’ (I-novel) precisely in terms of the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘the Other’, even though Goto¯ knew and even expected his reader to draw parallels between events in his fiction and those in his life as publicized in his essays (a mechanism for which his stories might qualify for the genre of shisho¯setsu). In ‘Sanbun no mondai’, Goto¯ defines shisho¯setsu as ‘a world that has materialized by way of eliminating the Other altogether in order to express “I”’, while defining the world of his own fiction as ‘where the “Other” who ignores “I” matters – and where, inspite of that, “I” who cannot afford to ignore the “Other” of such an orientation matters’ (Goto¯ 1972: 204). Thus, the lack of ‘relation’ between ‘I’ and ‘the Other’ that Goto¯ sees as definitive of the shisho¯setsu is not relevant to Goto¯’s fiction. 2 The narrator has guessed right. Ken Tadashi O¯shima posts a photograph taken from Ochanomizubashi (which naturally does not show the bridge itself) in his architectural historical study of yet another bridge across the same river, Hijiribashi (Saint’s Bridge), named after the (Confucian) Yushima temple and the (Russian Orthodox) St ¯ shima 2001: 1). Incidentally, the narrator of Double Jeopardy fails to Nikolai’s church (O remember the name of Hijiribashi as well (Goto¯ 1998: 256). 3 In fact, Goto¯ himself published a translation of ‘The Overcoat’, a collaborative work with Yokota Mizuho, a scholar and translator of Russian Literature, in 1978. 4 Goto¯ differentiates himself from many others who left their respective hometowns for Tokyo in his essay, ‘Sanbun no mondai’, as follows: Needless to say, I was not a Tokyoite. However, neither was I a native of the countryside with a pride in the native land with which to confront and crush with Tokyo. I was deprived of all qualifications as a country bumpkin, too. (Goto¯ 1972: 206)
5 Derrida’s term, originating from Of Grammatology, connotes both ‘difference’ and ‘deferral’, thereby highlighting the centrality of a process in the constitution of a notion by way of comparison with another. The term is quite appropriate for Goto¯’s fiction as it concerns confluences of temporality and spatiality. 6 Given the significance that the name of Nikolai has earned since Akaki read Gogol, it seems rather odd that St Nikolai’s church in Ochanomizu, a cultural landmark in the vicinity of the bridge Akaki is standing on at the narrative present, is not recalled in this genealogy of the name. (I thank Nori Morita for pointing out this fact that originally had escaped my attention.) The building, famous and conspicuous with domes typical of the Russian Orthodox Church, is mentioned in the last pages of Double Jeopardy (pp. 243 and 253), as the narrator recalls a previous appointment with Yamakawa, whom he had met in a coffee shop near Hijiribashi from where the shrine is visible (see Oshima 2001: 13 for a photograph, and 14 for a woodblock print, of the shrine and the bridge). Neither is St Nikolai’s church ignored in Goto¯’s (1978) novel, Yume to yume no aida (Between Dreams). Connections between the two novels are obvious: Goto¯ ’s protagonist is called Yamakawa; he used to wear a Japanese army overcoat, and he is a teacher and translator of Russian literature; he is currently translating ‘The Overcoat’ into Japanese, a story after which he, like Akaki, wanted to model his own fiction. The lack of a mention of St Nikolai’s church, where the name of Nikolai is discussed, may thus be surmised as intentional, perhaps to the effect of further suggesting the narrator’s obliviousness and, by extension, the incidentality of memory which lets one overlook something obvious, relevant and present. 7 In ‘Sanbun no mondai’, Goto¯ speaks of ‘Hyo¯jungo-magai no shokuminchi Nihongo’ (Colonial Japanese as pseudo-standard Japanese) as follows:
310 Atsuko Sakaki [Colonial Japanese] was relativized in two senses. First, it was relativized vis-à-vis Korean. At the same time, it was a relative Japanese vis-à-vis dialects that were native languages of Japanese residents who gathered (in North Korea) from various regions of Japan. It was not an absolute Japanese at all. (Goto¯ 1972: 205) Goto¯ continues to relate his experience of moving from one version of Japanese to another – from colonial Japanese to the Chikuzen dialect to the Tokyo dialect, always finding the newer version as relative to the previous. 8 It was 1952 when Goto¯ took the entrance examination to Tokyo Gaigo daigaku or Tokyo College of Foreign Languages, Futabatei’s alma mater, at which he had intended to study Russian. Eventually, he went to Waseda University. 9 Hanada Kiyoteru reminds us that Futabatei Shimei, whom Goto¯ admired to the extent that he tried unsuccessfully to go to his alma mater (as did his protagonist, Akaki), also uses the metaphor of daen (oval) for a centreless being in ‘Sono omokage’. See Hanada (1959: 240–1). 10 Karatani Ko¯jin’s following observation is in keeping with Goto¯’s own: [Goto¯] does not give a special meaning to [the fact that he is a returnee]; one does not live treasuring such an experience, but rather one tries to forget it and indeed matures while forgetting it. Returnees are eager to ‘naturalize’ into mainland Japan – only literary men privilege such an experience. (Karatani 1974: 238)
References Main text Goto¯ Meisei (1998) Double Jeopardy, Tokyo: Ko¯dansha bungei bunko.
Other references Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, Constantin V. Boundas (eds), New York: Columbia University Press. ––––(1996) Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Genten (1986) Tokushu: ¯ Goto¯ Meisei (A Special Issue: Goto¯ Meisei), Genten: Gendai Nihon bungaku kenky¯u 7: 4–97. Gogol, Nikolai (1992a) ‘The Nose’, trans. Gleb and Mary Struve, in The Overcoat and Other Short Stories, New York: Dover, pp. 58–78. ––––(1992b) ‘The Overcoat’, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (originally as ‘The Cloak’), in The Overcoat and Other Short Stories, pp. 79–103. Goto¯ Meisei (1970) ‘“K” to no musubitsuki’ (My Connection with ‘K’), Shincho¯ 67 (10): 166–7. ——(1971a) ‘“Mumeishi” no ronri’ (The Logic of Mr. No Name), Tenbo¯ 152: 114–22. ——(1971b) ‘Musubitsukanu mono’ (Unconnected Things), in Kakarenai ho¯koku (The Unwritten Report), Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha. ——(1972) ‘Sanbun no mondai’ (The Problems of Prose), in Goto¯ Meisei sho¯, Shin’ei sakka so¯sho, Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha, pp. 204–8. ——(1973a) ‘Cho¯sen keikensha no kanso¯’ (Observations by a Returnee from Korea), in Tokush¯u: Nikkan kakuryo¯ kaigi e no ginen (Special issue: Concerning the Japan-Korea Ministerial Meeting), Asahi Jaanaru 15(51): 14–17.
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——(1973b) ‘Yukue fumei’ (Missing in Action), in Gimonfu de owaru hanashi (The Tale that Ends with a Question Mark), Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha. ——(1978a) Yume to yume no aida (Between Dreams), Tokyo: Sh¯ueisha. ——(1978b) ‘Hana’ (The Nose), in Go¯gori (Gogol), Sekai bungaku zenshu¯ (Collected Works of World Literature), vol. 35, Tokyo: Gakush¯u kenky¯usha, pp. 91–120. ——(1983) Sho¯setsu – ikani kaki, ikani yomu ka (The Novel: How to Write and How to Read It), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha gendai shinsho. Hanada Kiyoteru (1959) ‘Daen genso¯ : Viyon’ (The Oval Fantasy: Villon), in Fukko¯ki no seishin (The Spirit of Restoration), 2nd edn, Tokyo: Miraisha, pp. 237–46. Hiraoka Tokuyoshi (1979) Bungaku no do¯ki (The Incentive for Literature), Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha. Karatani Ko¯jin (1974) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Goto¯ Meisei, Pan nomi ni arazu (Not Only Bread), Tokyo: Kadokawa bunko, pp. 238–43. Nagai Kafu¯ (1972) ‘A Strange Tale from East of the River’, trans. Edward Seidensticker, in A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories, Tokyo and Vermont: Tuttle. Nagashima Takayoshi (1986) ‘Goto¯ Meisei ron: “watakushi” o meguru shudai’ (Goto¯ Meisei: Themes Surrounding ‘I’), in Genten (1986), pp. 84–97. Nakamura Shin’ichiro¯ (1994) ‘Akutagawa Ryunosuke ¯ no baai’ (The Case of Akutagawa Ry¯unosuke), in Nihon kindai bungaku o do¯ yomuka (How to Read Modern Japanese Literature), Subaru 16(12): 218–29. Nakano Ko¯ ji, Iijima Ko¯ichi and Goto¯ Meisei (1978) ‘Gaikoku bungaku to watakushi no kotoba’ (Foreign Literature and My Own Language), Waseda Bungaku (8th cycle) 23: 4– 17. Oketani Hideaki (1974) ‘Rekishi no bo¯ryoku ni aragau nama no kioku: Goto¯ Meisei Double Jeopardy’ (Raw Memory in Resistance to the Violence of History: Goto¯ Meisei’s Double Jeopardy), Subaru 15: 90–7. Oshima Ken Tadashi (2001) ‘Hijiribashi: Spanning Time and Crossing Place’, Architecture: Re-building the Future, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 8: 1–21. Yokota Mizuho and Goto¯ Meisei (trans.) (1978) ‘Gaito¯’ (The Overcoat), in Go¯gori (Gogol), Sekai bungaku zensh¯u (Collected Works of World Literature), vol. 35, Tokyo: Gakush¯u kenky¯usha, pp. 149–83.
16 Beyond language Embracing the figure of ‘the Other’ in Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi Catherine Ryu
Introduction: Koreans in Japan Since its creation in 1935, the Akutagawa Award has been regarded as one of the most prestigious literary recognitions in Japan.1 Of its recipients, there are four writers – Ri Kaisei (b. 1935), Yi Yang-ji (1955–92), Yu¯ Miri (b. 1968), and Gen Getsu (b. 1965) – who carry the label of ‘zainichi Korean’. Zainichi means ‘residing in Japan’, and the term ‘zainichi Korean’ refers to those Koreans who have established their residence in Japan. As an index of legal status, zainichi Korean is used specifically to identify Koreans in Japan as ‘aliens’. That is to say, zainichi Koreans are regarded as foreigners, even if they were born in Japan. While naturalization is a legal option available to them, this path has not been readily taken due to complicated reasons, political and otherwise.2 The particular shape and tone of zainichi Korean issues in contemporary Japan need to be situated in the unique modality of these two countries’ interactions, the origin of which lies far beyond their colonial encounter (1910–45). Culturally speaking, beginning from as far back as the sixth century, Korea, due to its proximity to China, served as a conduit of Buddhism and Confucianism to Japan, together with other attendant components of culture, such as art, literature, and architecture. Contemporary Korea and Japan still share the same Chinese cultural heritage, including Chinese characters known as hanja in Korean or kanji in Japanese. Linguistically, Korean and Japanese exhibit a striking degree of similarity. Ethnically, it is not always possible to differentiate Koreans from the Japanese based on physical appearance alone. Geographically, Korea and Japan lie, in global terms, a stone’s throw away. It takes less than two hours to fly from Tokyo to Seoul. Yet Koreans commonly refer to Japan as ‘a country that is simultaneously far and near’. This saying symbolically encapsulates the thorny relationship between these two nations. From the Korean perspective, Japan’s colonization of Korea is but the latest and most comprehensive expression of Japan’s long-cherished dream of taking over its neighbor and long-time cultural mentor. The Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideoyoshi (1536–98), for instance, launched an invasion of Korea, which was then called ‘Choson’ (1392–1910), as the pathway for his China campaign. This military aggression, which lasted for seven years from 1592 to 1598, was, in Peter
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Lee’s words, ‘unparalleled in its brutality, devastation, and hardship for the [Korean] people’ (2000: i). The infamous legacy of Hideyoshi’s war atrocities still remains in the form of the so-called ‘nose and ear mound’ (mimizuka), which was built solely of the severed noses and ears of the Koreans that the Japanese troops had brought back as evidence of their successful military campaigns (Lee 2000: 38). Moreover, during this invasion, 20,000 to 30,000 Koreans, including scholars, artisans, technicians and women, were forcibly taken to Japan.3 Japan’s modern colonization of Korea for over thirty-five years meant exploitation of much greater magnitude, especially during the intense military mobilization from 1941 to 1945. About 1.4 million Koreans were taken to Japan in the year 1941 alone for construction, manufacturing, mining, and agricultural work. By the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945, Koreans constituted one-third of Japan’s industrial labor (Cumings 1997: 177–9). Nearly two million Koreans remained in Japan after the war,4 and this group formed the initial nexus of today’s zainichi Koreans, approximately 700,000, that is, more than 0.5 percent of the Japanese population (Fukuoka 1996: 10). Even after more than half a century since Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945, the relationship between these two countries remains strained due to a set of complex factors such as the enduring political antagonism between Korea and Japan,5 South Korea’s newly emerging status as a major player in the international arena with initial financial and technological assistance from Japan, North Korea’s increasing isolation as a perverse communist nation,6 and Japan’s collective amnesia concerning its own history vis-à-vis Korea.7 Moreover, in Japan as well as in North and South Korea, the very existence of zainichi Koreans has been a major focus of hotly debated issues of nationhood and national identity, not to mention national pride and honor, as each government tries to deal with the questions of repatriation, legal protection, and human rights pertaining to this group – an ineradicable reminder/remainder of the colonial legacy. It is against such a complex political, economic, and historical backdrop that zainichi Korean issues have been debated and taken shape in Japan. At the same time, the impact of the physical presence of zainichi Koreans on Japan’s national consciousness cannot be overlooked. Policy-makers, scholars, critics, and zainichi Koreans themselves endeavor to define the significance of zainichi beyond its legal denotation, precisely because the term zainichi functions as more than a label of transparent marginality attached to Koreans in Japan. The presence of zainichi Koreans has necessitated a more finely calibrated notion of ‘Japaneseness’ than had they not existed at all. At the level of perception, zainichi Koreans confound the very physical and linguistic distinction between the Japanese Self and the Other. A great majority of zainichi Koreans, who were born and raised in Japan, can easily pass as Japanese, betraying no foreign inflection in speech and appearance. Consequently, only in the discursive field can the differentiation between the Japanese Self and zainichi Koreans be fully delineated and zealously guarded. The particular relation between zainichi Koreans and the notion of the Japanese Self can be further illuminated in terms of a ‘set theory’. To form a
314 Catherine Ryu finite set (as opposed to an infinite set), some elements must be excluded from it. In fact, what constitutes a set is not what is included, but rather what is excluded from it. The reified notion of the authentic Japanese Self is in effect a discursive form of a finite set. Some elements must be thrown out from this conceptual, and concrete, set of the Japanese Self in order to mark its boundaries, without which there would be no set at all. Zainichi Koreans function precisely as one such element – ‘the Japanized Other’ – that is thrown out so as to generate an exclusive set of the authentic Japanese. Zainichi Koreans thus exist outside the notion of the Japanese Self and are simultaneously an indispensable constituent of that very notion. As such, zainichi Koreans’ full assimilation of the Japanese language and culture does not necessarily destabilize the notion of the Japanese Self. Rather, Japanized zainichi Koreans serve as a concrete demonstration of what is indeed not the ‘authentic’ Japanese Self.8 The notion of zainichi Koreans as ‘the Other to the Japanese Self ’ is, however, problematic. The stability of the Japanese Self requires a stable presence of the Other, against which the myth of Japan’s homogeneity (i.e. mono-ethnic nation state based on a single blood/race) can be projected. Yet zainichi Koreans themselves do not form a homogeneous Other. The originary definition of this ethnic group as a diasporic community of people who were initially forced to migrate to the enemy’s territory can no longer generate a unifying force to harness the complex reality and the heterogeneity of zainichi Koreans. As the number of this group continues to grow (they now include second, third, and fourth generations), new generations, born and raised in Japan, hold less than tenuous links with what have been regarded as legal and cultural ethnic markers such as Korean names, Korean citizenship, and the ability to speak Korean or familiarity with Korean customs.9 That is to say, the reality of zainichi Koreans, with its growing diverse attitudes toward interracial marriage, naturalization, citizenship, homeland and Japan, cannot be dictated or contained by Japanese society’s desire to marginalize zainichi Koreans merely as an indispensable but static Japanized Other. Despite the growing gap between zainichi Koreans’ prescribed role as ‘the Other’ and the changing reality of this group, polyphonic literary voices of zainichi Koreans are still bound to the monolithic category of zainichi bungaku (zainichi literature). Canonized only as zainichi bungaku, this body of writing represents the voice of ‘a marginalized Other’ in Japanese national literature. Not surprisingly, zainichi bungaku has been interpreted mainly through a postcolonial or diasporic framework. Such a critical rigidity, and its subsequent theoretical marginalization of zainichi bungaku, only reproduce and reinforce the existing hierarchy between Japanese national literature and minority literature. The fact that some zainichi Korean authors have received such prestigious literary recognitions as the Akutagawa Award does not necessarily mean that Japanese society now recognizes and confers full membership on zainichi Koreans. Their literary productions are still read only as reflections of the lived experience of an ethnic minority in Japan. In short, current critical discourses on zainichi bungaku mirror and buttress the notion of zainichi Koreans as what I would term ‘a monolithic
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imaginary Other’. The main objective of this chapter is therefore to demonstrate how it is necessary and possible to theorize and articulate the complex psychological interiority of zainichi Koreans beyond the reductive binary paradigm of the Japanese Self and the contrastive Other. Specifically, this chapter offers, as a study case, a critical analysis of the 1988 novel Yuhi (Yuhi) by Yi Yang-ji, a second-generation zainichi Korean and the recipient of the 100th Akutagawa Award in 1988.
Re-reading Yuhi Yi’s award-winning novel Yuhi has been read as a classic instance of zainichi bungaku that deals with the psychological trauma unique to zainichi Koreans. This trauma is attributed to the linguistic and cultural oscillations between the two opposing poles of identity – Korean and Japanese – that zainichi Koreans presumably experience in the process of their search for identity. At first sight, the novel does seem to yield to such a reading, as it concerns a second-generation zainichi Korean woman named Yuhi, who, at the age of 27, goes to Korea to study Korean language and literature. Only one month before graduating from the prestigious S. University, however, Yuhi abruptly returns to Japan. Her sudden departure from Korea, together with her recurring linguistic escapes to the comfort of the Japanese language during her stay in Korea, has been interpreted not only by critics and scholars, but to a large degree by the Korean characters in the novel itself, as a sign of Yuhi’s failure to fully embrace the Korean aspect of her identity.10 The full import of the novel Yuhi, however, should not be drawn merely from its subject matter. That is, Yuhi’s return to Japan cannot be characterized as ‘a failure’, without an examination of its significance within the totality of the novel. By the time the novel begins, for instance, Yuhi has already returned to Japan, and the story is presented as the narrator’s self-analysis, as it were, of her past relationship with the absent Other. Through this act of self-analysis, the narrator – the niece of Yuhi’s landlady and the self-appointed manager of Yuhi’s Korean studies – gradually overcomes her initial disappointment with, and anger at, Yuhi’s apparent betrayal of Korea. Over a three- to four-hour period immediately following Yuhi’s departure, the narrator re-enacts and experiences Yuhi’s ‘agony of language’11 as if it were her own, and is able to traverse the linguistic divide that she herself has initially placed between herself and Yuhi. By the end of the novel, the narrator fully identifies herself with Yuhi through her visceral experience of Yuhi’s pain and dilemma in a form akin to spirit possession – a phenomenon beyond the realm of Language and the divide between Self and Other. The implication of the narrator’s change of heart vis-à-vis Yuhi and the particular channel through which it occurs is, in my view, the key to understanding Yi Yang-ji’s formulation of Self and Other. Since Yuhi is first and foremost a psychoanalytic drama of Language, I borrow, for my reading of the novel, critical insights and vocabulary developed by Lacanian psychoanalysis in which
316 Catherine Ryu Language is the focal point of both theoretical and clinical reflections.12 As will be seen in this chapter, the second half in particular, Lacanian illuminations on Language and Subjectivity can be productively employed to delineate Yi’s novelistic rendition of Self and Other, the theoretical significance of which lies beyond the relation between the Japanese Self and zainichi Koreans as the Japanized Other.
Mapping language matters in Yuhi The novel Yuhi is a monolingual text written mainly in Japanese with some highlighted Korean expressions. While the localized use of Korean expressions in the novel is significant in and of itself, its full significance can be revealed only in light of the author’s overall conceit of the novel. Specifically, the entire realm of Yuhi pivots on the reminiscing mind of the first-person narrator, an unnamed native Korean woman. She is what I would term an ‘exophone’ narrator – a narrator who is in the state of ‘exophony’, that is, ‘being outside of one’s mother tongue’.13 What is extraordinary about this exophone narrator is that she does not possess any Japanese language skills, despite the fact that she tells her story in Japanese. Through this narrator’s storytelling, the reader is thus forced to encounter and experience an alternate linguistic reality in which an assumed relation between national language and national identity turns into a logical and linguistic knot. To begin with, the reader is unexpectedly and belatedly informed of the narrator’s lack of Japanese language skills about seventeen pages into the novel. Her complete lack of Japanese proficiency is quietly revealed in her recollection of a conversation she had with Yuhi. In this conversation, Yuhi calls the narrator from the airport to mention that she is entrusting her journal to the narrator:14 ‘You said your departure was at four o’clock, right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s soon then.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘So, it’s in the dresser on the left side of your room, as you were saying.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I shouldn’t read it, though, right?’ ‘ . . . but, you probably won’t be able to understand it. It’s in Japanese.’ (Yi Yang-ji 1989:22)15 Just as the narrator’s newly gained knowledge of the existence of Yuhi’s writing in Japanese stirs her desire to take a look at it, the revelation of the narrator’s lack of Japanese ability compels the reader to take a second look at what has thus far been taken to be a transparent system of signification – that is, the Japanese language of the text as a direct reflection of the narrator’s thoughts. In Yuhi, the author has actually created the novel’s own particular system of signification based on the premise of the narrator’s language skills, or the lack
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thereof. The native Korean woman’s position as first-person narrator is plausible only if the reader makes a conscious mental leap over the received notion of national language and national identity. If the narrative consciousness (i.e. what is accessible to the reader) is constituted solely through the monolingual first-person Korean narrator’s thought, the Japanese language that the reader encounters and experiences in the novel must be figuratively understood as the narrator’s Korean language in disguise. Or the reader must assume that this Japanese novel is already a translation of the original text in Korean. In either case, what is ordinarily taken to be a transparent relation between one’s language and nationality is turned opaque with the reader’s recognition of the ‘translational and transnational’ undercurrents the Korean narrator brings to the Japanese language.16 This host language is now forged to echo and resonate with the language of the Other, Korean, thereby acquiring a porousness that it would not otherwise possess. The author, however, does more than merely replace the Korean narrator’s mother tongue with Japanese. Rather, Yi has generated a new link between the Japanese language and the mode of its inscription. In the entire novel, the narrator mentions a single instance of Yuhi’s spoken Japanese, ‘ii nioi’ (delicious smell), twice in the same paragraph (p. 53). As Ueda Atsuko rightly points out, this phrase is written in katakana, underscoring its ‘foreign origin’ (2000: 140–1). By transcribing Yuhi’s Japanese utterance in katakana, the narrator presents it as a foreign sound, rather than as an expression to which she can relate semantically. In other words, Yuhi’s spoken Japanese is inscribed in the novel as the language of the Other to the narrator. The narrator’s inscription of Yuhi’s written Japanese is unique in another way. Since the narrator’s Korean is already coded as Japanese, the author constitutes Yuhi’s ‘authentic’ Japanese as that which cannot be represented by the actual Japanese script, while it can be fully described in Japanese by the Korean narrator. In fact, not a single word of Yuhi’s Japanese journal of 448 pages is reproduced in the novel, even though the narrator’s knowledge of this writing, her desire to read it, and her act of reading it constitute the novel’s entire plot. That is to say, instead of leaving Yuhi’s Japanese as a complete void, Yi inscribes it in the narrative solely through the pressure that the presence of Yuhi’s writing exerts upon the Korean narrator’s mind. With such an unconventional method of inscribing Yuhi’s written Japanese, the author explores how the so-called ‘national language’ can be potentially transformed into an intensely personal means of veiling and unveiling individuals’ subjective truths and desires. To the Korean narrator who believes that Yuhi’s journal contains the secret reasons behind her sudden decision to return to Japan, the impenetrability of the Japanese language literally prevents the narrator from attaining what she desires the most – the key to the innermost chamber of Yuhi’s heart. Similarly, to Yuhi, her lengthy Japanese writing mirrors the inaccessibility of the Korean language she has personally encountered and experienced. Her Japanese writing expresses what is impossible for Yuhi to articulate in the Korean language. The complete textual omission of Yuhi’s Japanese journal thus symbolically represents the intersection between the Korean and Japanese languages in their mutual inability
318 Catherine Ryu to enunciate what both Yuhi and the narrator personally regard and desire as truths. In this way, the textual lacuna of Yuhi’s Japanese writing metaphorically embodies that which lies outside the purported ideological arena of national language and national identity. In the novel’s system of signification, the Korean language, too, performs multiple functions in various forms. Korean expressions are included, to a limited degree, in katakana, adding a new aural quality of ‘Otherness’ to both Korean and Japanese. Significantly, the only time the actual Korean script han’gul is employed in the novel is when the narrator recalls and mimics Yuhi’s fragmented and distorted speech in Korean. That is to say, when the narrator uses Korean, it is represented as the language of the Other. Since Yuhi is a zainichi Korean woman, Korean is her ‘supposed’ mother tongue in relation to Japanese, her ‘foreign’ mother tongue. To native Koreans like the narrator, Yuhi’s unnatural Korean is a telling sign of her Otherness, her Japanized Korean self. The Otherness of this foreign tongue in the narrative is not only visually amplified by the presence of the katakana reading written alongside the Korean letters, but also semantically layered with the accompanying Japanese translation. Moreover, the narrative tension coagulates around Yuhi’s Korean utterances, tugging, tearing the textual surface around them, and revealing an otherwise hidden psychological dimension of the narrator. When she mimics Yuhi’s Korean words, what the narrator actually hears is not necessarily Yuhi’s voice but her own. Such conflict-ridden Korean utterances as ‘This country’, ‘People of this country’, ‘I am a hypocrite’, ‘I’m a liar’, ‘Our country’, and ‘I can’t love our country’ (pp. 82–3)17 may seem to portend Yuhi’s eventual rejection of a Korean identity. However, it is important to keep in mind that these words have been filtered through the narrator’s reminiscing mind, while she physically moves toward, and finally interacts with, Yuhi’s writing in Japanese – a painful reminder of Yuhi’s absence in Korea. In other words, the resurfacing of the Korean language in the narrative signifies the return of what the narrator has repressed or disavowed – her perception of Yuhi’s negative reception of Korea, its language and its people. Precisely because the narrator retroactively recognizes Yuhi’s Korean words as the foretelling symptoms of her sudden decision to return to Japan, the narrator’s anxiety attaches itself to her recollection of Yuhi’s Korean expressions. Since what Yuhi truly meant to say remains unknowable, her Korean words actually function as newly discovered reminders of the narrator’s own unquestioned belief that Yuhi’s mastery of the Korean language is the only viable solution for her identity dilemma. These reminders reflect the narrator’s obsessive desire to completely expunge the Japanese language from Yuhi and make her wholly Korean, more like a mirror image of the narrator herself. Yuhi’s Korean words thus symbolically carry the psychological tension the narrator has brought to her relationship with Yuhi. That is to say, despite the fact that this exophone narrator’s mother tongue, Korean, is entirely erased in the narrative, she has retained her ideological ties with her national identity and national language. In short, she is first and foremost a postcolonial Korean national with strong anti-Japanese sentiments.18
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That is precisely why the implication of the narrator’s complete change of heart vis-à-vis Yuhi by the end of the novel is critical to our understanding of the author’s articulation of Self and Other, an issue to which I turn in the next section.
Beyond language: embracing ‘the real of Yuhi’ Yi Yang-ji’s engagement with the issue of Self and Other in Yuhi moves beyond destabilizing the received notion of national language and national identity by means of the exophone narrator. This explains why even an exhaustive mapping of the complex linguistic strategies deployed in the novel does not fully encompass the narrative reality of Yuhi. There exists yet another dimension to the narrator’s interactions with the absent Other Yuhi, which exceeds the very notion of Language, let alone that of national language, whether that national language be Korean, Japanese, or a combination of the two. Throughout the novel, the narrator speaks of what I would call her ‘visceral experience’ of Yuhi, which functions as the ultimate catalyst for this Korean woman’s complete identification with Yuhi.19 As will be seen, an in-depth analysis of the narrator’s bodily experience of the absent Other, in conjunction with the narrator’s self-analysis of her past relationship with Yuhi, sheds a new light on the author’s meditation on Self and Other. The Lacanian notion of ‘the real’ is particularly useful in analyzing the narrator’s visceral experience of Yuhi. The significance of the real emerges only in contrast to that of ‘the symbolic’, another major component of the Lacanian universe, which is founded on one’s relation to Language. As one learns to speak Language, one experiences it as ‘the Other’, that is, something other than oneself (Fink 1995: 5–7). Only by learning to express one’s self through Language can one enter the realm of ‘the symbolic’. For instance, when an infant learns to speak, that is, when it learns to coincide its desire with that of its parents by speaking their language, the infant can express its hunger by using a food-related word, which functions as a linguistic symbol for its urgent bodily need. This need may or may not be understood properly by the parental Other, if expressed only through the infant’s physical outburst, crying. ‘The symbolic’, put simply, is that which can be represented or symbolized by Language. More concretely, the symbolic can be understood as that which constitutes the governing orders and principles of what we generally refer to as social reality. Once one enters the symbolic, that which existed prior to this entry is retroactively conceptualized as ‘the real’. The real can be understood as that which cannot be represented or symbolized by Language, or as that which resists any symbolization via Language. The real, however, can still be encountered or experienced in the symbolic through its remainder or reminder, such as Freudian slips. These reminders are manifestations of one’s unconsciousness, the part of oneself (i.e. one’s desire as opposed to the Other’s desire) that has been repressed in the process of being constituted in and by Language, which Lacan views as the sole channel for entering the symbolic (Fink 1995: 24–31). The Lacanian notion of the real has direct relevance to the significance of the narrator’s visceral experience of Yuhi in the novel. The figure of Yuhi that the
320 Catherine Ryu Korean narrator retroactively constructs through her bodily recollection can be understood as what I would term ‘the real of Yuhi’, the Yuhi that cannot be represented by Language alone. Not surprisingly, the narrator’s experience of the real of Yuhi begins with her recollection of Yuhi’s voice, the unique essence of which cannot be mediated by Language, but must be directly experienced. The centrality of Yuhi’s voice to the narrator is evident from the beginning of the novel, which starts with: ‘Since Yuhi’s phone call, I have become restless’ (Yi Yang-ji 1989: 7). This call is later revealed to be the one Yuhi made at the airport concerning her journal written in Japanese. The disembodied voice of Yuhi over the phone is not only symbolic of Yuhi’s physical absence in the narrator’s life, but is also the last reminder of Yuhi’s desire to return to Japan, the polar opposite of the narrator’s wish to retain her in Korea. The narrator’s awareness of Yuhi’s ‘Otherness’ has become even more heightened with the unexpected emergence of Yuhi’s Japanese writing. It is in the midst of her emotional and psychological turmoil – disappointment, despair, and anger – that the narrator recalls Yuhi’s voice over the phone on her way home to retrieve the writing in question: An empty taxi sped toward me, and I flagged it down and got in. As soon as it started to move in the direction of the house, my restlessness returned with the swiftness of a forgotten thought suddenly resurfacing. Yuhi’s voice. The voice I heard over the phone. This voice pressed itself down upon me with such a sense of immediacy that I felt almost as if she were talking to me right now. Each time the taxi came to a sudden halt at a traffic light, Yuhi appeared behind my fluttering eyelids. No sooner had the taxi started to speed up again than her figure retreated. (p. 7) Here, the narrator experiences Yuhi’s voice as a separate living entity, apart from the narrator herself. It nevertheless exerts such power over her mind that she responds to it not merely as a disembodied voice, but as a physical being with agency of its own. With the figure of Yuhi appearing and disappearing before her mind’s eye, the narrator is forced to repeatedly experience, at each stop light on her way home, the anxiety of separation from Yuhi – the experience the narrator chose to avoid by breaking her promise to accompany Yuhi to the airport precisely because it would have been too painful. Thus, the narrator’s perception of, and response to, the figure of Yuhi, brought on by her recollection of Yuhi’s voice, embody this Korean woman’s unarticulated feelings of guilt and despair, as well as her desire to postpone an ultimate recognition of Yuhi’s absence in her life. By the time the narrator reaches home, Yuhi’s voice has grown more potent, generating an even more palpable presence of Yuhi in the narrator’s mind: Yuhi’s voice in my memory pierced right through my back. Along with the voice, too, appeared her gaze. I could feel the movement of Yuhi’s gaze in that voice. Led by her voice and gaze, I turned around. There stood Yuhi
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beside me. It then all came back to me with clarity – Yuhi’s profile as she had gazed up toward the top of the hill. Just like that day six months ago, I stood with Yuhi, looking up at the rocky mountain range in the distance. (pp. 8–9) The narrator now experiences Yuhi’s voice as a more invasive physical force than before, penetrating directly into her body. Moreover, this voice brings out another aspect of Yuhi, her gaze, which again cannot be represented by Language but must be experienced viscerally. With the combined force of Yuhi’s voice and gaze, the narrator begins to interact with the specter of Yuhi with a vividness and intensity akin to those of hallucination. Through her encounter with a briefly sustained illusion of Yuhi, the narrator can momentarily dissolve the temporal gap between the past and the present, the distinction between reality and memory, and the evidence of Yuhi’s presence and absence. Moreover, it soon becomes clear that the voice in question is not Yuhi’s voice over the phone but her voice from a more distant past, six months ago, when their relationship began: ‘Pa’ui’ (Rock).20 Recalling Yuhi’s voice, I whispered the word, trying to imitate her pronunciation as closely as possible. Yuhi’s voice came back to me – her voice that had sounded all the more awkward as she had tried to enunciate the word correctly by overemphasizing the vowel ‘ui’. (p. 9) The significance of Yuhi’s Korean utterance to the narrator is already apparent, even without the knowledge of Yuhi’s comments on the naked appearance of the rocky mountain range as a portrayal of the Korean people’s soul, which the narrator recalls toward the end of the novel (p. 122).21 ‘Pa’ui’ is the first Korean word in the novel to be transcribed in han’gul. Moreover, through this word, Yuhi’s voice has become particularized. No longer just a voice, it embodies a particular person. It is the voice of a shy zainichi Korean woman who is selfconscious about her Korean pronunciation. To the narrator, the Korean word ‘pa’ui’ is thus both a reminder of Yuhi and the embodiment of her Otherness evident in her foreign accent. Yet the narrator’s self-conscious act of enunciating the word ‘pa’ui’ in Yuhi’s particular manner erases this native Korean woman’s initial perception of Yuhi’s linguistic Otherness. In fact, the narrator’s act of imitating Yuhi’s pronunciation expresses her desperate attempt to fill Yuhi’s absence at least through an evocation of Yuhi’s unique voice. Significantly, by the time she reaches Yuhi’s room to retrieve the journal in question, the ephemeral presence of Yuhi’s voice and gaze has congealed into a physical body, ‘a small lump’, within the narrator: I let out a long sigh. My memories of Yuhi had turned into a small lump, and I could feel its movements in the deep recesses of my heart. Whenever
322 Catherine Ryu some happening of the past or a certain facial expression of Yuhi floated into my mind, this small lump would burst open, sending my heart into such a flutter. I looked around this quiet room, empty of Yuhi’s presence. The thick envelope still remained on my lap. While looking at it, I traced its surface with the tips of my fingers. ‘U.Ri.Na.Ra’ (Motherland).22 I wrote these four Korean letters, voicing each in a faint voice. Again, my anger rose and my body started to shake. Trying to suppress the trembling, I closed my eyes. Even so, the shaking wouldn’t stop. I stood up firmly and opened the window on the left side of the room. A cold wind swirled in little by little. I took a deep breath. I felt as if Yuhi were in the room, sitting at the desk. And I saw myself taking a deep breath, standing before the window, just as I had done once before when I opened the window and said to Yuhi, ‘How about some fresh air?’ (pp. 55–6) What the narrator identifies as ‘the small lump’ differs by nature from Yuhi’s voice and gaze. Unlike Yuhi’s voice and gaze, with which the narrator can interact or even imitate, a physical lump, a small foreign body lodged within the narrator, suggests the solid presence of Otherness and its impenetrability. Yet, not unlike Yuhi’s gaze and voice, it is not without agency. It is actually the narrator’s perception of the lump’s movements that further activates her reminiscences of Yuhi and generates the narrator’s involuntary physical responses to this Otherness within. Moreover, through her newly gained awareness of the Other’s presence within, the narrator begins to view herself from a different perspective. In the scene recollected in the passage above, the narrator’s present moment of taking a deep breath in Yuhi’s room does more than bring back a particular moment associated with her past action in connection with Yuhi. As if in an outof-body experience, the narrator’s own actions in the past and the present simultaneously appear before her eyes. It is as if the narrator’s ordinary perception of time and space had dissolved, situating her consciousness outside the confines of her ego and linear temporality. From this new vantage point, the narrator encounters and recognizes herself as ‘an other’ mirrored in the reflection of Yuhi, the absent Other. The closer the narrator physically approaches Yuhi’s writing in Japanese, the more strongly the narrator feels the unity between herself and the Otherness within: That day, nearly six months ago, I really should have paid closer attention to more things and done more for Yuhi. Realizing this only now, I felt a sensation of pain prickling the small lump named Yuhi that lodged in the recesses of my heart. Almost all my memories of Yuhi were made in this room around her desk, the one right here. It is as if the desk squarely lay on the core of the small lump, supporting Yuhi. I couldn’t help feeling that each
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memory came to be formed and written, one by one, on this very desk, to which I found myself irresistibly drawn. (p. 71) The small lump, which initially stood for Yuhi’s voice, her gaze, and then the narrator’s memories of Yuhi, is now explicitly identified as ‘Yuhi’. The physical and psychological barrier between the narrator and Yuhi, including Yuhi’s personal items such as her desk, has grown permeable and porous to a greater extent than before. The narrator thus feels what ‘the lump/Yuhi’ feels, which in turn makes it possible for the narrator to move beyond a mere visceral experience of Yuhi’s presence and pain. The narrator’s initial anger over Yuhi’s apparent betrayal is now transformed into a profound regret at not having cared sufficiently for Yuhi during her stay in Korea. In short, the narrator is better able to look at the past six months from Yuhi’s perspective, even though this Korean woman’s oscillations between anger and regret do not subside completely until the very end of the novel, that is, only after she has completed her slow ambulation through ‘the House of Memories’, as it were, visiting each niche associated with Yuhi. By the time the narrator finally begins to examine Yuhi’s writing in Japanese, on page 71 of the 126-page novel, the small lump has taken on a particular image of Yuhi in the mind of the narrator. This figure of Yuhi, which has emerged from the narrator’s recollection, exhibits a remarkable degree of consistency, even though that consistency lies precisely in contradictory complexity and ambiguity. For instance, Yuhi, at the age of 27, imparts the impression of being a small boy – awkward, unsteady, and frightened. Yuhi’s gaze is at once childlike and wise; she is vivacious and withdrawn by turns. Yuhi over-enunciates certain Korean sounds while swallowing others. Despite her astonishing power of memory, she makes simple grammatical mistakes. Through a series of recollections, the narrator has thus built a sense of complexity that Yuhi embodies as a person – a complexity, the scope of which can only be suggested by pointing out the binary qualities Yuhi manifests. She is, however, not merely an enigma created by blurring categories of identity such as gender, age, and personality types – all the categories that belong to ‘the symbolic’ in Lacanian parlance. Rather, the various aspects of Yuhi – the tone of her voice, her facial expressions, her gaze, her peculiar Korean pronunciation, and her study habits – are various expressions of the essential core of what the narrator perceives to be Yuhi as a unique individual. This figure is indeed ‘the real of Yuhi’ that the narrator has been able to recover retroactively in Yuhi’s absence. Finally, the author Yi’s notion of Self and Other is most clearly manifest in the unique way she deploys the real of Yuhi as the key to unlocking the meaning of Yuhi’s journal written in Japanese. As previously discussed, Yuhi’s writing in Japanese is featured as an ellipse in the narrative due to the exophone narrator’s particular relation to the Japanese language. Precisely because Yuhi’s Japanese cannot be symbolized by the Japanese script in the novel’s own system of signification, her journal can be viewed as ‘the real of the Japanese Language’. The
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narrator’s approach to this writing includes three different stages, the significance of which can be elucidated through the Lacanian notions of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, respectively. The first stage of the narrator’s reading occurs on the level of the imaginary, as she interacts with the text specifically as an image – the physicality and visuality of the text itself. Its thickness, the way it is bound, and its actual length (448 pages) communicate to the narrator the time Yuhi has put into the writing, the seriousness of her endeavors, and the exhaustive nature of her writing. The first stage is also the moment of visual recognition: the way it is bound looks just like other reports Yuhi has submitted to school. However, even before the narrator turns the front cover page, this sense of familiarity is assaulted by a manifestation of Yuhi’s ‘Japaneseness’. She used the regular lined stationery lengthwise – a clear sign of what it contains: Yuhi’s Japanese prose written vertically.23 The moment the narrator turns the front cover, her eyes are met with a text written entirely in Japanese – ‘from beginning to end, from the very first page’ (p. 72). Such a tangible expression of Yuhi’s ‘Otherness’, which the narrator truly did not wish to encounter or confirm, is overwhelming and forbidding precisely because of the narrator’s inability to penetrate it. Yuhi’s text, with its density and its length, is a veritable wall of the Japanese language behind which her private thoughts are safely hidden from the narrator’s reach, despite their skin-close proximity to her. The second stage of the narrator’s approach to the text occurs on the level of the symbolic, that is, through Language. She attempts to tap into the forbidden realm of Yuhi’s thought and mind through a small crack – the narrator’s knowledge of Chinese characters common to both Japanese and Korean written languages. However, this hermeneutic practice of interpreting the text based on abstract ideas represented by familiar Chinese characters proves to be hardly adequate. The failure of this particular method signifies that the ultimate meaning of Yuhi’s writing cannot be derived from the knowledge of shared abstract ideas, that is, the realm of the symbolic. Rather, the significance of the writing lies in the inaccessible subtlety of the Japanese language that contextualizes those recognizable abstract thoughts. The narrator’s perception of the real of Yuhi plays a central role in the third stage of her hermeneutic approach to Yuhi’s writing, the real of the Japanese language: I couldn’t read Japanese at all. The only part I could decipher was the Chinese characters I was familiar with. I tried to imagine the content of Yuhi’s writing by following and perusing these Chinese characters. Soon I gave up. It was fruitless. Still I couldn’t just look away from the writing. Yuhi’s words were breathing. They seemed to emit voices and stare back at me. Just by looking at them, I felt I was hearing Yuhi’s voices, piling up one after another in my head. I felt as though the thickness of these voices was coursing through my veins.
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Yuhi’s handwriting wasn’t exactly smooth. There was a hint of roundness to it, but somehow a touch of stiffness and angularity came with it. As such, her handwriting seemed to resemble the impression of Yuhi’s appearance. That uniqueness of impression – neither feminine nor masculine – was hard to characterize. I then recognized that the peculiarities of Yuhi’s Japanese handwriting were exactly the same as those I’d seen in her Korean handwriting. The impressions of the two different scripts Yuhi used to write, Korean and Japanese – they both suggested a practiced hand; they somehow seemed mature. Yet they appeared unstable as well – just like Yuhi herself. They couldn’t hide their anxious breathing, it seemed. (pp. 72–3) The narrator’s response to Yuhi’s handwriting echoes her earlier interactions with ‘the small lump named Yuhi’. Just as the narrator has involuntarily reacted to the stimuli activated by her memories of Yuhi, she now responds to the physical presence and power of Yuhi’s Japanese text. The narrator is moved by some power beyond her control – the voice of Yuhi’s writing that enters and takes possession of her. In her altered state, the narrator experiences Yuhi’s writing as a living body with a voice and a gaze, not unlike those of the real of Yuhi. The narrator now generates the meaning of the text through a dialogue of mutual gazes and recognitions, as if she were conversing with Yuhi face to face. Guided by Yuhi’s familiar voice, the narrator perceives her Japanese writing as a readable sign, the significance of which lies in its physical appearance, and not in the symbolic meaning conveyed through the Japanese script. Instead of struggling with Yuhi’s unintelligible Japanese text, the narrator interprets the visuality of Yuhi’s handwriting and its changing expressions. The narrator, an inept reader of the Japanese language, is thus transformed into a perceptive interpreter of the varying subtlety and tonality of Yuhi’s moods and feelings engraved in her Japanese handwriting. By the time the narrator leaves Yuhi’s room – the most sacred sanctuary of the narrator’s memory of Yuhi – to have dinner with her aunt, the narrator is more than a sensitive reader of Yuhi’s writing. A fluid sense of unity flows among the living body of Yuhi’s text, the small lump named Yuhi, and the narrator: The words from Yuhi’s writing were tied together in my heart. I felt like I was embracing Yuhi who had turned herself into those words. Strings of words – those words that had been burned and engraved into my eyes – passed before my eyes like strings of pictures. What I heard were the sounds of those words; the words themselves seemed to have turned into voices and reverberated. The sensation of holding Yuhi’s writing permeated my body, touching the small lump within the innermost reach of my heart. The sound of Yuhi resonated throughout my body. (p. 88)
326 Catherine Ryu What pervades this passage is a sense of the narrator’s newly gained affection for Yuhi as she holds the writing in Japanese, the very object that initially provoked in the narrator an irrepressible feeling of betrayal and anger. Now the narrator’s entire body houses the real of Yuhi, and not just ‘the small lump’ in her heart. It is as if the narrator had surrendered her entire being to the power of the Other, that is, the combined force of Yuhi’s voice, her gaze, her handwriting, and the small lump named Yuhi. The narrator’s warm embrace of the real of Yuhi paves the way for the climactic moment of the novel, its final scene. This scene captures what I would call a ‘moment of the real’ – a moment when the boundaries between the Korean and Japanese languages, and between Self and Other, are rendered irrelevant through the narrator’s complete identification with Yuhi: I slowly blinked and whispered – ‘Ah’. Yuhi’s writing appeared. Yuhi’s handwriting of han’gul, too, floated on top of her Japanese writing. Unable to walk, I stood paralyzed at the bottom of the stairs, as if someone had taken away my crutch of language. Yuhi’s two different writing scripts turned into fine needles, and these sharp needles pierced my eyes. I could not finish the rest. Only the lingering ‘Ah’ remained in my throat, and no further sound issued forth. Pricked by a bundle of wriggling needles, I felt a burning sensation in my throat, which was searching for the next sound and trying to voice it. (p. 126) What makes this particular textual moment so memorable is the sheer intensity of the narrator’s visceral experience of Yuhi in the form of acute pain. Throughout the novel, the narrator has experienced Yuhi’s voice and gaze as an external force that penetrates deeply into her body. However, this is the first time that the narrator actually experiences Yuhi’s perception of language – both Japanese and Korean languages and their scripts – as an instrument that inflicts pain. The final sound ‘Ah’ the narrator utters is in fact the crystallization of Yuhi’s agony of languages. Through this utterance, the narrator fully re-enacts and experiences Yuhi’s dilemma of not being able to determine to which language this sound belongs, the same sound ‘Ah’ being the first syllable of both the Korean and Japanese scripts. However, the irreducible sound ‘Ah’ is not bound to the realm of the symbolic. Rather, the sound that remains caught in the narrator’s throat is a fragment of the real – ‘a word that is not a word’ (kotoba ni naranai kotoba, p. 124). It is perhaps a voice, perhaps a breath, as Yuhi once explained to the narrator (p. 123). As such, it is that which resists any symbolization via Language. The novel thus comes to an end when it can no longer be written, since to do so would mean that the narrator must reinstate the divide between the Japanese and Korean languages, between a Korean national and a Japanized zainichi Korean Other, and finally between herself and Yuhi.
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Conclusion The novel Yuhi concerns, first and foremost, the narrator’s change of heart vis-àvis Yuhi. This change of heart is of great import because it has occurred through the narrator’s successful reading of Yuhi’s Japanese journal against her claim that the narrator cannot understand it. However, Yuhi did not say, ‘On’ni ni wa yomenai n da kara’ (because you can’t read it), but instead, ‘yomenai hazu da kara’ (because you probably won’t be able to read it). It is against the premises of hazu (i.e. one is not expected/not supposed to) that the narrator has carried out her hermeneutic enterprise, perhaps better than if she could actually read Japanese, but without being able to empathize with Yuhi’s personal pain. I take Yuhi’s words to mean that it is not entirely impossible for the narrator to read her journal written in Japanese, if the narrator is no longer who and what she has been. And this native Korean woman, the product of postcolonial Korea’s nationalistic ideology with its accompanying coercive and oppressive forces, did change. By the end of the novel, she has come to fully recognize and embrace Yuhi ‘as she is’24 – a unique being – an individual whose identity cannot be bound to a particular nation state and its associated language. In short, the narrator has come to embrace Yuhi’s Otherness, her irreducible difference, without judgment. In the final analysis, the novel Yuhi functions as a literary metaphor for what Bruce Fink terms ‘the Lacanian twist’ or ‘the ability to see something beyond the symbolic where philosophy and structuralism see nothing but the same old thing’ (1995: 123). In fact, the very conceit of the novel and the experience of reading Yuhi truly exceed the bounds of logic. Through the reminiscing mind of the exophone narrator, who does not speak any Japanese but nevertheless delivers her story in Japanese, the reader is able to share the narrator’s perception of the real of Yuhi. Even though this zainichi Korean woman exists only as a specter in the narrator’s mind, the reader comes to possess, by the end of the novel, an intimate knowledge of Yuhi as an individual, as if through a direct encounter with her. Yuhi’s physical presence in effect eclipses that of the narrator precisely because the narrator – a purely narrating voice without any specific physical features of her own – ultimately comes to take on the subjectivity of Yuhi, the absent Other. In this sense, the reader’s vivid encounter with Yuhi is an effect of the alternate virtual reality created by the author’s deployment of spirit possession as a means of blurring the ontological and linguistic sense of Self and Other. Through such Lacanian twists, Yi Yang-ji expands the theoretical horizons for the ongoing critical discourse on the Japanese Self and the contrastive Other by pointing to ‘something Real’ beyond Language, that is, beyond the distinctions of Self and Other.
Notes 1 The Akutagawa Award for fiction was established to commemorate Akutagawa Ryunosuke ¯ (1892–1927), one of the most influential authors of modern Japanese literature. The award is given biannually. Ri Kaisei (Yi Hoeso ng) became the first zainichi
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9
10
Korean recipient for Kinuta o utsu onna (The Woman Who Fulled Clothes, 1971 [1986]), followed by Yang-ji for Yuhi (Yuhi, 1988), Y¯u Miri for Kazoku shinema (The Family Cinema, 1996), and Gen Getsu for Kage no sumika (A Dwelling in the Shade, 1999). In this chapter, I use ‘zainichi Korean’ as an inclusive term for all Koreans who have established their residence in Japan, including those who have become naturalized. A slightly lengthier and more descriptive term, ‘Resident Koreans in Japan’, is commonly used for Koreans in Japan since Norma Field’s first coinage of the term (1993: 640–70). The Japanese nomenclature zainichi Kankokujin refers only to Koreans and Korean descendants who have self-identified as South Korean nationals. Those Koreans whose political affiliations lie with North Korea remain as stateless subjects, and are identified with another term, ‘Cho¯sen’, as in zainichi Cho¯senjin. As Sonia Ryang (2005: xviii) points out, ‘Cho¯sen’ does not indicate any nationality. The word ‘Cho¯sen’, however, carries derogatory connotations. For a survey of the historical development of the zainichi identity and its legal, political, and cultural implications for zainichi Koreans and Japanese government policies, see Fukuoka (1996: 1–15), Kashiwazaki (2000: 13–31), and Tai (2004: 355–82). Lee (2000) points out that Kitajima Manji (1982) regards the number of captives given by Naito¯ Shunpo as ‘a drop in the ocean’ (1976: 171, n.100). Kim (1997), cited in Tai (2004: 357). For instance, the dispute between Korea and Japan over the territorial sovereignty of Dokdo, or Takeshima, has flared up again as recently as April 2005. North Korea’s recurring nuclear posturing, not to mention this regime’s infamous abduction of Japanese nationals, has been viewed as one of the many reasons behind North Korea’s negative publicity in Japan and the country’s increasing marginalization in the global arena. The Japanese textbook controversy over Japan’s colonial aggression and comfort women issues is symptomatic of the unresolved tension and problems between Korea and its former colonizer. Tai (2004: 355–82). My view of the relationship between zainichi Koreans and the authentic Japanese Self coincides with Tai’s argument that current Japanese government policies, which are designed to encourage zainichi Koreans to take ‘the Korean Japanese option’ (i.e. Japanese nationals who possess Korean ethnic background), in effect reproduce Japan’s earlier colonial discourse of ‘ethnic hierarchy and assimilation’ between Japanese nationals and colonial subjects. Kashiwazaki (2002: 1–21). Given the demographic shift among zainichi Koreans themselves, and the recognized practical merits and demerits of possessing a particular passport (i.e. a Japanese or a South Korean passport as opposed to a North Korean passport), zainichi Koreans’ act of choosing Japanese citizenship, once regarded as a cardinal sin, can no longer be condemned simply in reductive binary terms such as political loyalty or disloyalty to homeland or to the colonizer. Since Yuhi began to receive critical attention, Yuhi’s ‘failure’ has been a major focus of orthodox readings of this novel both in Japanese and Western scholarship. For instance, Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke (1988, cited in Ueda 2000: 128), one of the selection committee members for the Akutagawa Award, speaks of the story in terms of Yuhi’s disappointment with Korea and her return to Japan. Aoyama Minami (1994: 118) introduces Yuhi in a similar vein, focusing on the heroine’s disillusionment (genmetsu) with her ‘homeland’. Likewise, Carol Hayes (2000: 126) states that ‘[T]he main focus of Yuhi is the failure of Yuhi’s return to her motherland as seen through her inability to settle the linguistic dispute raging within her.’ John Lie (2001: 350) views Yuhi’s return as ‘a sign of defeat’, thus echoing again conventional readings of the novel. Sonia Ryang (2005: xx) summarizes the novel as ‘the story of a zainichi Korean girl studying in South Korea, a story that doubles with her [Yi Yang-ji] own, as Yi herself went to South Korea to study, only to be spurned by her fellow Koreans for being too Japanised’.
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11 Glissant (1990 [1997]: 107). To describe the narrator’s perception of Yuhi’s tormented
12 13 14
15 16
17
18
19 20 21
relationship with the Korean language, I am borrowing the Martinician writer Édouard Glissant’s phrase, ‘an agony of language’, which he uses in the context of Crèole languages and cultures. My Lacanian analysis of Yuhi in this chapter is a further critical elaboration of my previous reading of the novel (Ryu 2004), which focused mainly on the feasibility of a Lacanian approach to zainichi bungaku. Tawada (2003). The term ‘exophone’ is my neologism, which is based on Tawada Yo¯ko’s notion of ‘exophony’. I would like to thank Suga Keijiro¯ for introducing me to Tawada’s idea and her literary practice of exophony. The nature of Yuhi’s writing in question is not explicitly stated in the novel, but I refer to it as Yuhi’s ‘journal’ based on her own description: ‘a collection of writings I have done since I came to live in the house’ (p. 21). I also regard her writing as a journal in the sense that it is a record of Yuhi’s private moments. Even the narrator has been completely unaware of the existence of this personal production of Yuhi. I use the Kodansha publication of Yuhi (1989) as the main text for my analysis of the novel. The English translations of the original text cited in this chapter are my own. The complex linguistic effect generated by the author’s use of an exophone narrator is not simply that of polyphony, heteroglossia, or multilingualism. To indicate how the Japanese and Korean languages permeate and echo each other in the novel, I am borrowing the notion of omniphony as articulated by Suga (2005). Suga describes omniphony as the conception that language is ‘a porous, multilayered body that is constantly shot through by transnational, translational flows’. Nearly all Yuhi’s Korean utterances are linked to the narrator’s memories of Yuhi’s traumatic experiences during her stay in Korea. While Yuhi’s Korean key utterances listed in my discussion appear one by one throughout the narrator’s recollection of Yuhi, they all recur in the same textual space (pp. 82–3), as the narrator remembers Yuhi’s most serious mental breakdown – her late night drinking episode – prior to her decision to return to Japan. This particular reminiscence occurs while the narrator looks around the room, after having finished examining Yuhi’s writing. Shortly afterwards, the narrator goes downstairs to have dinner with her aunt. Yuhi features a limited number of native Korean characters, including the narrator, her aunt, and the real estate agent who initially introduced Yuhi to the family. Another Korean character is the narrator’s cousin, that is, Yuhi’s landlady’s married daughter whose room Yuhi is renting. This daughter, who now resides with her husband in the USA, is symbolically present in the novel. Only toward the end of the novel does the landlady’s one-sided phone conversation with her daughter appear after dinner on the evening of Yuhi’s departure (pp. 116–17). Yet another symbolic Korean character is the aunt’s late husband whose function is to embody Korea’s anti-Japanese sentiments. The reader learns about his thoughts and speeches only through the aunt’s incessant recollections of his life. Significantly, the narrator’s aunt once observes that the narrator is very much a nationalist, like her late husband who came from one of the leading families of anti-Japanese movements during the colonial era (p. 95). To fully illuminate the narrator’s relationship to the Korean language and its connection to postcolonial Korean national ideology, a separate analysis is necessary. As far as I am aware, the visceral aspect of the narrator’s recollection of Yuhi has received no critical attention, even though I believe it to be the most critical component of the entire novel. In the original text, the translation of the Korean term is given with the Chinese character for iwa (rock). Before revealing Yuhi’s comments on the naked appearance of the rocky mountain range, the narrator has made several allusions to Yuhi’s references to the same mountain range (pp. 9, 55, 85, 117).
330 Catherine Ryu 22 In the original text, this Korean term is written in han’gul accompanied by a katakana gloss. The significance of the term urinara is given with a two-Chinese character compound, meaning ‘mother’ (haha) and ‘country’ (kuni ). However, a literal translation of urinara would be ‘our country’. 23 Nowadays Korean, not unlike English, is conventionally written horizontally. To the Korean narrator, the altered orientation of the regular stationery signals that Yuhi used it for her writing in Japanese. 24 Yi (1993a: 665). The author Yi Yang-ji herself speaks of how writing the novel Yuhi helped her see that the zainichi struggle between Korea and Japan, or homeland and mother tongue, ultimately intersects with none other than the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the courage and power to embrace reality ‘as is’.
References Main text Yi Yang-ji (1989) Yuhi (Yuhi), Tokyo: Kodansha.
Other references Aoyama Minami (1994) ‘Eigo ni natta Nippon no sho¯setsu: Yi Yang-ji no Yuhi’ (Japanese Novels in English Translation: Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi ), Subaru 16(5): 118–23. Cumings, Bruce (1997) Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: Norton. Field, Norma (1993) ‘Beyond Envy, Boredom, and Suffering: Toward an Emancipatory Politics for Resident Koreans and Other Japanese’, positions 1(3)(Winter): 640–70. Fink, Bruce (1995) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fukuoka, Yasunari (1996) ‘Koreans in Japan: Past and Present’, Saitama University Review 31(1): 1–15. Glissant, Édouard (1990 [1997]) Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation), trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hayes, Carol (2000) ‘The Cultural Identity in the Work of Yi Yang-ji’, in Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge. Kashiwazaki, Chikako (2000) ‘Politics of Legal Status: The Equation of Nationality with Ethnonational Identity’, in Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge, pp. 13–31. ——(2002) ‘The Diasporic Experience of “Zainichi” (chaeil): Changes and Challenges in Comparative Perspective’, paper presented at the International Conference on the Korean Diaspora and Strategies of Global Network, Korea University, Seoul, Korea, 11 October. Kawamura Minato (1989) ‘“Zainichi” sakka to Nihon bungaku: so no kadai to genzai’ (‘Zainichi’ Authors and Japanese Literature: Issues and the Current Situation), in Ko¯za Sho¯ wa bungakushi, vol. 5, Tokyo: Y¯useido¯, pp. 25–34. Kim Tae-gi (1997) Sengo Nihon seiji to zainichi Cho¯senjin mondai (Postwar Japanese Politics and the Issue of Koreans in Japan), Tokyo: Keiso¯ shobo¯. Kitajima Manji (1982) Cho¯ sen nichinichiki, K o¯ rai nikki: Hideyoshi no Cho¯sen shinryaku to sono rekishiteki kokuhatsu (Cho¯sen nichinichiki, Ko¯rai nikki: Hideyoshi’s Invasion of Korea and Historical Indictment), Tokyo: Soshiete. Lee, Peter H. (ed.) (1986) Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ——(2000) The Record of the Black Dragon Year, Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai’i.
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Lie, John (2001) ‘Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland in Contemporary Korean Japanese Writings’, in Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak and Poshek Fu (eds) Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 343–58. Naito¯ Shunpo (1976) Bunroku Keicho¯ -eki ni okeru hirojin no kenky¯u (A Study of Korean Captives during the 1592–8 Wars), Tokyo: Tokyo University Press. Ri Kaisei (1972) Kinuta o utsu onna (The Woman Who Fulled Clothes), Tokyo: Bungei Shunj¯u. ——(1986) The Woman Who Fulled Clothes, trans. Beverly Nelson, in Peter H. Lee (ed.) Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ryang, Sonia (ed.) (2000) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge. ——(2005) ‘On Korean Women in Japan: Past and Present’, in Jackie J. Kim (ed.) Hidden Treasures, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. xiii–xxvii. Ryu, Catherine (2004) ‘Zainichi Literature through a Lacanian Gaze: The Case of Yi Yang-Ji’s Yuhi’, in Michael F. Marra (ed.) Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 5, pp. 95–107. Suga Keijiro¯ (2005) ‘Writing Omniphone in Japanese’, paper presented at the 2005 Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, 31 March. Tai, Eika (2004) ‘“Korean Japanese”: A New Identity Option for Resident Koreans in Japan’, Critical Asian Studies 36(3): 355–82. Takeda Seiji (1983) ‘Zainichi’ to iu konkyo: Ri Kaisei, Kin Sekihan, Kin Kakuei (‘Zainichi’ Evidence: Ri Kaisei, Kin Sekihan, Kin Kakuei), Tokyo: Kokubunsha. Tawada Yo¯ko (2003) Exofonii: bogo no soto ni deru tabi (Exophony: Traveling Outward from One’s Mother Tongue), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Ueda Atsuko (2000) ‘“Moji” to iu “kotoba”: Yi Yang-ji [no] Yuhi o megutte’ (The Word ‘Moji’ (character): On Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi), Nihon kindai bungaku 62: 128–43. Yi Yang-ji (1993a) ‘Watakushi ni totte no bokoku to Nihon’ (What Motherland and Japan Mean to Me), trans. An U-shik, in Yi Yang -ji zensh¯u (Collected Works of Yi Yang-ji), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, pp. 648–68. ——(1993b) Yi Yang-ji zensh¯u (Collected Works of Yi Yang-ji), Tokyo: Ko¯dansha. Y¯u Miri (1997) Kazoku Shinema (The Family Cinema), Gunzo¯ (December): 7–48.
Further reading Fukuoka, Yasunari (2000) Lives of Young Koreans in Japan, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Nelson, Beverly (1977) ‘Korean Literature in Japan, A Case Study: Ri Kai Sei’, in David McCann, John Middleton and Edward J. Shults (eds) Studies on Korea in Transition, Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai’i, pp. 126–59. Wender, Melissa (1999a) ‘Broken Pasts, Uncomfortable Presents: Tales of Y¯u Miri and “Comfort Women”’, in Eiji Sekine (ed.) Love and Sexuality in Japanese Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 5, pp. 321–33. ——(2000) ‘Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965 – 2000’, PhD thesis, Chicago University. Yoneyama, Lisa (2000) ‘Reading against the Bourgeois and National Bodies: Transcultural Body-politics in Y¯u Miri’s Textual Representations’, in Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge, pp. 103–18. Yu¯ Miri (1998 [2002]) Go¯rudo russhu (Gold Rush), trans. Stephen Snyder, New York: Welcome Rain Publishers.
Index
A-bomb survivors: disappearance of 212; ethics, dignity and responsibility 217–22; experience and meaning 215–17; as Other 271; overview 12, 13, 211; reconstituted identity 211, 226–8; silence of 214–5, 216; as symbol 212–3; way of the survivor 222–5 Abe Jiro¯ 106 Abe Ko¯bo¯ 292 absence 13, 169, 172–6, 178, 318, 320–2, 327 Africa 286 African Americans 25–6, 74n.18, 127–129; black/white 66–70; see also slavery ‘Against Rhetoric’ (Greenlaw) 34 Ainu 271 Akutagawa Award 139, 259, 273, 312, 315, 329n.1, 330n.10 Akutagawa Ryunosuke ¯ 25, 45, 101, 274, 276 aliens 22, 312 alterity 71, 127, 131, 133, 292 Amami Oshima 257 America 10, 20, 24, 46, 286; colonial past 68–70; direct contrast 59–63; external observation 66–70; freedom of speech 190; inversion 63–6; liberated America/repressed Japan 59–60, 63, 66, 71, 74n.11, 74n.15; see also Occupation, USA American Hijiki (Nosaka) 24 American lifestyle 28–30, 62 American Other 59, 63, 66, 70–1
‘Americanness’ 68, 263–4 anarchist poetry 97 And Then (Natsume) 51 Anglo-European literature 183, 194 Anti-Western critique 78–9 anxiety 45, 99, 101, 103, 106, 109–11, 113, 117, 120–1, 202, 211, 219, 320 après guerre 235–40, 250; see also The Beautiful Woman (Shiina); Sengoha Ara Masato 237 architechtonic forms 232 art, politics and 231 art/pornography 194–5, 203 arts and crafts movement 277 Ashcroft, Bill 237–8 Asia, Japan’s positioning in 113 Asia, as construct 5, 20; as Other 14–15, 109, 113 Asia Pacific War 2, 175, 211, 238, 230, 260, 272, 292 assimilation 26, 30, 271–2, 314 audience 33, 66, 84–5, 166, 183, 184, 188, 193–6, 281 Auestad, Reiko 232 Aufhebung 155 Australia 286 authenticity 106, 158, 177 autobiography 232, 239, 259, 265, 293, 308 Balibar, Etienne 127 ban-the-bomb movements 212–13, 216, 217, 219, 223, 228 Bataille, George 118–19
Index 333 Baudelaire, Charles 27, 122n.8 Balzac 27 Beardsley, A.V. 94n.10 Beasley, W.G. 17n.3 The Beautiful Woman (Shiina): free to write 243–9; mode of representation 239; overview 13, 231–3; significance of 250; beautiful woman symbolism 246–7, 250 beauty: and decay 277; mermaids as beautiful 87–8; myth and 81; race and 74n.15, 84–5 Bedtime Eyes (Yamada) 24 Benjamin, Walter 122n.8 Berry, Elizabeth 209n.35 Between Dreams (Goto¯) 311n.6, Bhabha, Homi 7, 8, 239, 272 Bikini tests 212 Bildungsroman (Moretti) 99 binary structure models: abandoning 14, 46, 199, 315, 327; direct contrast 59–63; external observation 66–70; inversion 63–6; overview 11; phenomenology and 3–5; semantics 22–3 black/white 10, 66–70 Blake, William 273 bloodlines 13, 68, 132–4, 139, 157, 227, 263, 277, 314 Blue Dahlia (Mosley) 128 the body 13, 76, 81, 84, 195–9, 113, 186, 201, 202, 319–23, 325 boundaries: expansion of 2, 11; fluidity of 25–6, 42, 96, 104, 273, 285, 326; permeability 47, 52 Bourdaghs, Michael 136–7 Bower, Anne 165 Bowie, M. 164n.16 British Empire 42, 70, 272, 282 The Broken Commandment (Shimazaki) 12, 128–30, 135–8, 140, 145 brothers and enemies 147–51, 157–8, 160 Buddhism 47, 48–9, 161, 264, 312 Bungakkai (journal) 80, 255 bunmei-kaika 57, 71 buraku 142n.2
Buraku Liberation League 139 burakumin: distinguishing 127–8; gestures 153; hidden encounters 151–4; history of 145; liberation movement 149–50; numbers of 143n.5; open prejudice 150–1; origins of 130–1; as Other 271; overview 11, 12, 13; phenomenology 155–7; rights of 162n.2; as scapegoats 159; suffering of 128; use of term 142n.2 Bushido¯ 61–2, 79–80 cafés 25, 115 canon 27–8, 184, 193 capital exchange 112 Carrier, James 3 The Castle (Kafka) 307 censorship 60, 77, 183, 185–8, 189–90, 199, 202 centre/periphery 11, 13, 14–5, 23, 184, 204, 211, 237, 255–6, 265 Chandos letter 31–2, 34 Chartier, Roger 184 chastity 283–5 Chesnutt, Charles 129 Chiba Shunji 87 children’s self-image 6 China: as construct 19–20, 131; cultural heritage 82, 86, 272, 273–4, 312; exoticism 75–6, 83, 84–5, 276; France and 119; influence of 19–21; invasion of 114, 115, 120; nuclear tests 225; Okinawa and 256; Others 43, 112; Representation 93n.2, 93n.3, 274–5, 286; taste for 93n.3; violence against Japanese 111–12 Chinese language 20, 324 Ching, Leo 271 Chinoiserie 276, 282 chivalry 79 Christianity 20–1, 76, 77–8, 116, 158, 190, 232, 242, 246, 258, 264 cinema 100 Circle of Youth (Noma): brothers and enemies 147–51; double secret 154–5;
334 Index Hegel 155–7; hidden encounters 151–4; internal/external others 147; overview 12, 145–6, 157–61; resolution 161; sections 163n.9; tripartite structure 163n.4 citizenship, choosing 330n.9 Civil Information and Education 209n.37 Civilization and Monsters (Figal) 282 civilized/barbarian 116, 131, 272, 273, 286 Clammer, John 238 Clark, John 89 ¯ shiro) 259–60 Cocktail Party (O Cocteau, Jean 120 Cold War 184, 185 collective responsibilities 221, 227 colonialism: anxiety and 110–11, 113, 272; and identity 2, 7, 256, 271–2, 296, 312; as compensation 21; exoticism and 93n.3, 275–6, 282; genre and 281–3; overview 2, 8, 12–15; power 71; unique colonization 233–5; views of 271–2 comfort literature 166 Communist Party 195, 230–1, 243, 304 concentric circles: dialectics of difference 21–3; Kyo¯ko no ie case study 26–34; liminalities and practicalities 23–6; otherness formed and formulated 19–21; overview 5 La Condition Humaine (Malraux) 112 Confessions of Love (Uno) 166–7 Confucianism 59–60, 61–2, 74n11, 76, 79, 131, 284, 312 consciousness 103–4 Constitution, postwar Japanese 188–9, 198, 200–4, 228, 238 consumerism 105–8 conversion 2, 12, 214, 230–1, 236 see also tenko ‘contact zone’ 273 ‘Cool’ (Tanikawa) 25 Cooper, Helen 165 cosmopolitanism 122n.8 Craig, Cairns 122n.8 ‘critical approach’ 7–8
cuisine 60, 61–2 cultural inferiority 115–16; see also inferiority complex culture/nature 202 Dadaism 97 ¯ ba) 24 Dance, Snail, Dance (O ¯ The Dark Festival (Oshiro) 255, 261–2, 269 Davis, Miles 25 Dazai Osamu 199 Death in Venice (Mann) 27, 36n.11 Decadent fantasy 82–3, 86, 94n.7, 94n.10 decay, beauty of 277 democracy 59–60, 68, 71, 188, 196, 199, 200–4, 234, 236, 241, 242, 304 Derrida, Jacques 5, 293, 296, 299, 308, 310n.5 desire 10, 17n.10, 58–9, 76, 80, 84, 85–6, 87, 109, 118, 172, 197, 319 detective stories 281–3 Devil in a Blue Dress (film) 128 dialect: see Japanese language dialectics of difference 3, 6, 19, 21–3, 110, 119, 238 Diary of a Vagabond (Hayashi) 25 diaspora works 23–4 Dickens, Charles 163n.13 difference 4–6, 21–3, 71, 76, 80–1, 102, 131, 133, 147–8, 238 dignity 220–1, 226 direct contrast 59–63 Discourses of the Vanishing (Ivy) 45 discrimination 66, 68–70, 75, 133, 134–5, 138, 145, 150–4, 156, 256–7 ‘discursive act’ 6 disfigurement 12, 216, 220–1 distances 6, 26, 36n.6, 58 ¯ shiro) 259–60 Divine Island (O Doppelganger 47, 50, 52, 103, 160, 244 Double Jeopardy (Goto¯): itinerant life 305–8; languages of incidentality 299–305; overview 293, 294; relations 294–9 Dostoevsky 240, 292, 299, 300 Dower, John 209n.38, 212, 233–4, 237 dreams 49–51, 262, 264, 280–1
Index 335 Drifting in Space (Natsume) 46 East Asian Other 44, 113 East/West 10, 272 economic status 1, 11, 119, 148, 197, 271 Edo period 77, 209n.35, 198, 273 Edogawa Ranpo 281 Egypt 70 Eliot, T.S. 185–6 emperor system 211, 238 empire, definition of 17n.3 empire, expansion of 2, 13–5, 222, 256, 271 The Encounter (Shiina) 242 endlessness 158 Endo¯ Sh¯usaku 24, 119 England 190–2 English history 47–9 English language 45, 9, 61, 183, 301 English Romantic influence 46, 56n.1 English tailoring 305 enlightenment 37n.19 , 57, 132, 198, 208n.20; experience 33–4 entertainment novels 196 epistolary form 168–9, 176, 182n.9 equality 59, 62, 71, 116, 132, 150, 156 Ericson, Joan 182n.12 eroticism 78, 118–19 essentialisation 3, 7, 8 essentialism 109, 116–17, 118 eta 129–30, 132, 142n.2 The Eternal Preface (Shiina) 242 ethics, dignity and responsibility 217–22 ethnicity 11, 12, 113, 251 Eurocentrism 84 Europe 10, 20, 25, 46, 57, 70, 77–8, 81, 109, 114–5, 286 European canon 27–8, 256 Europeans 9, 84–6 evolution 133 exile 292 existentialism 32, 240–2 exophony 316, 330n.13, 331n.16 exoticism 93n.3, 275–6 expatriate Japanese: in New York 59–60, 62–3; in Paris 113–4, 116
external others, overview 9–11, 147; see also Other The Faint Smiles of the Gods (Akutagawa) 45 fantasy 42, 76, 81–3, 89, 97, 99, 101, 262, 283 Fanon, Frantz 234, 272 farewell formula 169–72 father figure 60–1, 129, 145, 147–8 Faulkner, William 127 feminised Other 9–10, 44–5, 51, 17, 118 feminism 165, 179, 189 ‘A Few Hours in Singapore’ (Nagai) 70 Fifteen-year war 194, 230 Figal, Gerald 282–3 fin de siècle 11, 27, 30, 33–4, 83 Fink, Bruce 327 First World Conference 216 First World War 111 Five Cups of Sake (Nakano) 232 flagellation 80 flame symbolism 161 fluidity 5, 11, 22, 42, 99–100 ‘A Fool’s Life’ (Akutagawa) 101 Forbidden Colors (Mishima) 27 ‘foreign’: as Other 109, 117, 131, 183, 312, 317, 318, 321; foreign castaways 130–2; foreign delegations 20, 36n.1, 58; foreign languages 20; foreign literature 12, 23–4,183, 276, 286; foreign objects 24–5, 28, 106; foreigner, image of 2, 26, 28, 58, 84, 89, 115 Foucault, Michel 6–8, 76, 146, 155, 232, 235 France: and theory 8; external others 70, 112; French colonialism 272; history 115–16, 117; as imaginative site 120; Japanese within 120; as Other 113–15; streets and buildings 119 freedom: duality of 236; and slavery 156; liberated America/repressed Japan 59–60, 66, 71, 74n.11, 74n.15; meaning of 234–5; in Shiina 240–3 freedom of speech 184, 188, 231 French Revolution 156
336 Index Freud, Sigmund 103, 192 ‘From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics’ (Maruyama) 202 Frosh, Stephen 42 Fujii, James 46 Fujita Eichi 46 Fujita Tsuguharu 114, 123n.17 Fukuzawa Yukichi 57, 286 ¯ shiro) 255, 263, 269 Funerary Urn (O Futabatei Shimei 58 Futon (Tayama) 79, 82 gap theory 7, 57, 58, 70, 71 Gardner, William 25 genbun itchi 100 Gen Getsu 312 gender: gender distinctions 165; gender dynamics 59, 62, 63–6; gender politics 12; gender, race and 71, 76; gender roles 61, 62, 64–5, 66, 76, 165, 178, 259, 283–4; gendered Other 9–10, 12, 14, 47, 271; male/female 10, 44–5, 50–2, 63, 66, 80, 119, 165, 261; performance of gender 76–7, 176–7 genres 23, 281–3 German research 22, 36n.4 The German Spy (Tanizaki) 24 ghosts 44, 48, 50–1, 279, 282 Girard, René 58, 72n.3, 147, 157, 158–9, 160 Glissant, Edouard 330n.11 Gluck, Carol 236 Go (Kaneshiro) 128, 129, 137–8 Goethe 273 Gogol, Nikolai 292, 294, 297, 298, 299–300 Goossen, Ted 25–6 Goto¯ Meisei 14–15, 292–308, 310n.1; see also Double Jeopardy (Goto¯) Gray, David 38, 41, 51 Great Kanto Earthquake 96 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 286 Greek classics 27, 51, 81, 105, 160 Greenlaw, Lavinia 34
Guests from Afar (Sono) 24 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 305–6 Gunzo¯ (journal) 255 Haga To¯ru 95n.12 hard/soft 119 Harootunian, Harry 105–6 Harris, Richard 25 Hashikawa Bunzo¯ 27 Hayashi Fumiko 25 Hazama Kafumi 46 heaven 158 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 146–7, 155–7, 158, 161 Heian period 80 heredity 132, 133 hibakusha: see A-bomb survivors hierarchical structures 3–4, 211, 222–4, 261 high culture 25 High Modernism 185, 203, 206n.4 Hikage Jo¯kichi 282 Hino Ashihei 178–9 Hirabayashi Taiko 246 Hiraoka Atsuyori 296–9, 305–6 Hirohito, Emperor 212 Hiroshima: destruction of 211, 212, 226; Hiroshima Maidens 216–7, 220; Hiroshima Mother’s Group 218, 219; Hiroshima Other 211, 214, 226; insiders/outsiders 213–5, 217, 220–1, 222, 224, 226; see also victimization narrative, ‘victim consciousness’ ¯ e): ethics, dignity and Hiroshima Notes (O responsibility 217–22, 226–7; experience; and meaning 215–17; national victimization 212–13; overview 12, 211; reconstituted identity 226–8; way of the survivor 222–5 historical approach: see concentric circles historical Other 44 history: critique of 59, 68, 277, 279–80 history and memory 212, 226–7, 255, 279–80, 307–8 history, neutralizing 276–81 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 31–2
Index 337 Holland 85 Hokama Shuzen 255, 256, 257, 260 home, as construct 98, 168, 169, 293, 306, 314, 322 home front stories 165–6, 181n.2 homelessness 98, 115, 121, 292, 296, 306 homosocial 171 homosexuality 76 Honda Sh¯ugo 236, 246 Horiba Kiyoko 261 horse symbolism 178, 182n.12 Hosho¯ Masao 114 human rights 201, 313 The Human Stain (Roth) 128 humanism 218–20, 223, 227–8 Hunt, Lynn 188, 207n.14 hybridity 15, 20, 87, 235, 257, 305 ‘I’ 1–2, 292, 293, 297, 308 I-novels 1–2, 17n.1, 32–3, 97, 100–1, 231 Ibsen 27 identification 120, 285, 308, 319 identity: and nation 1–3, 13–5, 57, 63, 106, 112–3, 120, 215, 224, 256–7, 283, 313, 317–8; and blood 13, 132–3; and language 255–6, 312–5; and memory 293–4, 307–8; and place 98–9, 296, 298–9; and relations 294–9; appropriation of 211, 222, 271; as construct 129, 308 identity crisis 2, 7, 13, 100–1, 113, 271–2, 285, 315, 318 Ikeda Hiroshi 282 illness 133, 136 illustrations of war 173 imagination 114–15 Imperial Rescript on Education 201 implicit readers 27–8 ‘In Praise of Shadows’ (Tanizaki) 24, 84 ‘In the Forest’ (Nagai) 66–70 incest 133, 134–5 India 70, 84 individual and society 1–2, 12, 107–8, 241, 272, 327 inferiority complex 46, 57, 58
installments 26 institutions as Other 25 see also Other interliterary references 25 internal others 11–13, 147 intertextuality 45 inversion 63–6, 211, 222, 224 Ise Shrine 119, 124n.18 Iser, Wolfgang 27 Ishizaka Yo¯juro¯ 190 Ito, Ken 58, 73n.3 Ito¯ Sei: documentary novel 192, 194, 201; high art 186; Modernism 208n.30; translated text 183; trial outcome 193 Ivy, Marilyn 42 Izumi Kyo¯ka 42, 43, 276, 282 Jackobson, Matthew Frye 127 ‘January First’ (Nagai) 59–63 ‘Japan’: as construct 4–5, 10, 20, 238, 306, 314; definition of 2–3, 11, 13–4, 23, 57, 58, 113, 257, 286 Japanese language 9, 15, 17n.7, 255–7, 299–301, 303, 312, 314, 315, 316–9, 323–7 Japanese literary theory 8, 75, 194 Japanese militarists 89, 118, 120, 169, 183, 212, 224, 234, 237 Japanese Self 5, 7, 13–5, 23, 58, 59, 106, 110, 111, 116, 118, 226, 313–4, 316, 327 Japanese values 61–2, 76, 115–6, 222 Japaneseness 4–5, 13–5, 23–6, 120, 257, 272, 313, 324; see also essentialism Japanization 13–5, 314, 316, 318, 326 japonisme 120 jazz 25 Jekyll and Hyde 160 Joyce, James 147, 163n.5, 185–6, 192 Kafka, Franz 292, 307 Kajii Motojiro¯ 9, 10, 11, 96–108 kakioroshi sho¯setsu 26, 36n.8 Kanai Toshihiro 223, 224–5, 227 kanbun 20
338 Index Kaneshiro Kazuki 128, 129, 137–8 Karatani Ko¯jin 8, 311n.10 Kauffmann, Linda 178 Kawabata Yasunari 97 Kawabata Yasunari Prize 266 Kawahashi Noriko 260–1, 265 Keene, Dennis 115 Keene, Donald 20, 256 Kelsky, Karen 17n.9 Kendrick, Walter 188 Ken’y¯usha 80 Kerkham, H. Eleanor 209n.40, 210n.44 The Key (Tanizaki) 94n.11 Kigi Ko¯taro¯ 282 kimono 61, 167, 171, 174 Kindai bungaku (journal) 236 Kinya Tsuruta 89 Kipling, Rudyard 10 Kitahara Hakushu 276 Kitahara Takeo 166 Kobayashi Hideo 1–2, 98, 121 Kockum, Keiko 209n.38 Kojève, Alexandre 146, 155 Komagome Takeshi 271 Komori Yo¯ichi 8, 14, 21, 113, 271–2, 282 Korea, as colony 2, 17n.3, 233, 312–3, 327; as Other 131, 313–4, 317–8, 326, 327; invasion of 312–13 Korean–Japanese writers 9, 11, 24, 128, 137, 312, 314–5 Korean language 17n.7, 300–1, 312, 314, 315, 317–9, 321, 323–6 Korean passing 137–8, 313 Koreans in Japan 312–15 Koschmann, J. Victor 236 Koyano Atsushi 77 Kurahara Korehito 236–7 Kurahashi Yumiko 43 kyodatsu condition 234 Kyoko no ie case study 26–34 Kyushu 292, 297, 301 ¯ shiro) 255, 263–5; postcolonial Labyrinth (O other 266–9 see also Other; yuta as subject of resistance 265–6 see also yuta
Lacan, Jacques: endlessness 158; languages 15, 315–16; mirror stage 6, 46; overview 6, 7–8; symbolism146–7, 155, 158, 271, 319, 327; ‘the real’ 319, 323–4 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence): body and sex 195–9; capitalist print culture and 184–6; court case 183–4, 186–7; overview 12; politics 200–4; pornography and art 194–5; publication history 206n.5; translation 183; war and salvation 191–2 Lady Windemere’s Fan (Wilde) 276 lameness 152, 163n.12 Landscapes of the Heart (Kajii) 96, 101, 103 languages 20, 17n.7, 312; and identity 298–9, 301, 303–4, 315; beyond language 319–26; of incidentality 299–305; Koreans in Japan 316–19 Larsen, Nella 129 Latin American magic realism 44 Lawrence, D.H.: appeal of 190–3; expurgation 184–5; national identity and morality 190–1; overview 12; power of sex 208n.28; sex stimuli 199 Lee, Peter 312–13 ‘Lemon’ (Kajii) 96–108 letters 165, 168–9, 176 Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 146 Lie, John 2, 17n.8, 138 life/death symbolism 148–9, 158 Light in August (Faulkner) 127 liminal sites 9, 11, 13–15, 23–6 Lippit, Seji M. 40–1, 100–1, 121 ‘Literature and the Question of Freedom’ (Shiina) 240 ‘Literature of the Lost Home’ (Kobayashi) 98 London 41, 43, 44–6, 57, 111 ‘Long Hair’ (Nagai) 63–6 Loti, Pierre 10 Love 78, 80, 119, 165, 191, 195 Lucky Dragon Incident 212 McCormack, Noah 131–2
Index 339 McDonald, Peter D. 184 McGrane, Bernard 21 magazines 189–90, 196, 197–9, 209n.38 magic realism 44 The Magician (Tanizaki) 94n.10 Maher, John C. 17n.7 Mailer, Norman 184 Mainland 255–7, 259, 260, 268 ‘mainstream’ Japanese 9, 11, 158, 238; and passing 12, 131 ‘Make-up at Bedtime’ (Oguri) 133, 134–5 The Makioka Sisters (Tanizaki) 24 male/female 10, 44–5, 50–2, 63, 66, 80, 119, 165, 261 Malraux, André 112 Manchuria 2, 52–3, 230, 233, 275, 282, 292 Mann, Thomas 27, 36n.11, 37n.18 On Mantic Females (Yanagita) 258 Mao Dun 112 marginalisation 66–70 marks/signs/stigmata 133 marriage 175 Maruyama Masao 198, 202–3 Marxism 20–21, 156 Masayuki Akiyama 60 masochism 64–6, 82 mass communication studies 194 masses, representing 235, 236–9, 243 master/slave 147, 155–6, 158 materialism 105–8 maternal servitude 60–3 Matsukawa Incident 207n.17 May 30 incident 111–12 Mayo, Marlene 231 Meiji, Emperor 256 Meiji literature 9, 10, 57, 58 Meiji period 1, 10, 14, 17n.9, 57, 76–7, 129, 132, 145, 272 Meiji Restoration 45, 77, 224 Meiji-Taisho shift 286 Meirokusha 57, 71, 73n.1 memories 97, 98–9, 293, 307, 321, 325, 327 mermaids 87–8, 95n.12 The Mermaid’s Lament (Tanizaki) 76, 82–9
Micronesia 2, 16n.3 The Midnight Banquet (Shiina) 241 Midnight (Mao) 112 military campaign literature 166 Military Information Corps 166, 181n.4 military symbolism 113, 123n.14 mimetic rivalry 158–9 Minami Hiroshi 194 minimalism 119 minority 9, 26, 128, 131, 158, 159, 314 mirror stage 6; see also Lacan Mishima Yukio 5, 24, 26–34 missions to the West 20 Mita bungaku (journal) 273 Mitford, A.B. 143n.3 Miyamoto Sadao 215, 217, 219 mobility/fluidity 99 modern girls 82, 94n.8, 166 Modernism 10, 43, 97, 121, 185–6, 192–3, 194, 195, 272 modernity: dilemma of 272; gender 283–5; genre and 281–3; literature of 290n.1; youth and 99–100 montage 101 Moore, Henrietta 261 Moretti, Franco 99 ¯ gai 57, 58, 77, 79, 100, 272 Mori O Morishita Uson 281 Moritaki Ichiro¯ 217–18 Mosley, Walter 128 mother 6, 60–3, 78, 171, 175 motherland see home Motoori Norinaga 131 muko¯ gawa (the other side) 41–2 multiple realities 100, 101–4 Munich, Adrienne 165 Murakami Haruki 39–52; Natsume and 45–51 Muramatsu Sho¯fu¯ 111 Murato Yoshiko 216 Musha Incident 275 Myers, Ramon H. 17n.3 Myojo (journal) 80 mystery stories 281–3
340 Index mythic references 51 Nagai Kaf¯u: 9, 292, 294–5; gap theory 57–71; ‘In the Forest’ 66–70; ‘January First’ 59–63; ‘Long Hair’ 63–6; ‘Orient’ 17n.11; overview 10, 11 Nagasaki, destruction of 211, 212, 226 Nagashima Takayoshi 293–4, 306 Nakagami Kenji 139 Nakamura Mitsuo 31–2, 237 Nakamura Shin’ichiro¯ 273 Nakano Shigeharu 232 The Naked and the Dead (Mailer) 190 Naoki Sakai 110 Narcissus 31, 37n.18 narrative development stages 239 ‘nation’ 23, 65, 68, 71 National Spiritual Mobilization Movement 175 national victimization 212–13 nationalism 75, 132, 192, 286, 304 nationalist versions 43 ‘nationality’ 13–4, 23 Natsume So¯seki: 9, 39–52, 57, 58, 272, 274; ghosts 52–3; mermaids 87–8; Murakami and 45–51; new women 79–81; Otherness 24; postcolonialism 282; youth 100 naturalism 80, 135 Negro 25, 127 Nema Kana 258–9 neo-colonialism 272 Neo-Sensationalism 96–7 A New Day at Midnight (Gray) 38 new women 79–80, 82, 94n.8, 135–6 New York 29, 63, 111 Nietzsche 27, 240 night/day symbolism 148–9, 158 see also symbolism Nihon e no kaiki 1, 15, 21, 120, 293 Nihonjinron 4–5, 13 nikutai bungaku (carnal literature) 13 Ninth World Conference 213, 217 Nishihara Daisuke 93n.3 Nishikawa Mitsuru 277
Nitobe Inazo¯ 78–9 Noma Hiroshi 12, 145–61, 162n.1; see also Circle of Youth (Noma) non-‘Nihonjin’ 9 normative structures 59–63 noro 259–60 North Korea 14, 138, 292, 294, 299, 300, 313, 330n.6 Nosaka Akiyui 24 ¯ e) 257 Notes on Okinawa (O ‘Nothingness and Substance’ (Nakamura) 31–3 nuclear bombs 212, 215 nudity 76 ¯ ba Minako 24 O ¯ ba Sachiko 173 O objects as Other 24–6 see also Other obscenity trials 184–5, 189–90, 203 Occident 21 Occident/Orient 57, 276 Occidentalism 3, 74n.13 Occupied Japan: 183–4, 272; and Okinawa 257, 259, 266–8; freedom of speech 187–90, 197, 199, 231; identity crisis 2; morality 196, 199, 203; narrative development stages 239; overview 13–14, 233; pessimism 238; unique colonisation 233–5; victimhood 212, 272 The Ocean Road (Yanagita) 257 ¯ e Kenzaburo¯: 9, 211–28; existentialism O 218; humanism 219–20; ideology 222–5; melancholy 213–15; overview 12; postwar identity 211; reconstituted identity 226–8; transformation 257; see also ¯ e); ‘Prize Stock’ (O ¯ e) Hiroshima Notes (O Oedipal stage 6 Ogawa Yo¯ko 25 Oguma Eiji 271 Oguri F¯uyo 133, 134 Oguri Hangan 133 Oguri Mushitaro¯ 282 Okakura Tenshin, 77–8, 257 Okinawa: 14, 267; battle of 256; as colony 256, 257, 259, 266–8
Index 341 Okinawan language 257, 260 Okinawan literature 255–9, 266 Okinawan minority 9 Okinawan Other 257, 265 Okinawan Rituals (Takasaka) 258 ‘Orient’ 10, 70, 114 Oriental Other 70 Orientalism 3, 8, 10, 58, 75–6, 82, 84–5, 93n.3, 272–3; and gender 9–10; and race 88–9 Orientalism (Said) 75 origins, myth of 153, 160, 257, 262 Orr, James 212 Osborne, Peter 146–7 ¯ shiro Tatsuhiro 9, 14, 255, 259, 259–69; O ¯ shiro); Labyrinth see also Cocktail Party (O ¯ ¯ (Oshiro); Voices from the Next World (O shiro) Other: and sex 12, 195–6; as construct 5–7, 14, 23, 71, 158, 238; colonial Other 13–5, 271, 280–1, 285–6; definition of 97, 157, 195–6, 271; Edo Other 77; external Others, overview 9–11, 147; conceptions of 3, 5, 19–22, 39, 146–7, 155, 271, 280, 319; feminised Other 9–10, 41–2, 51, 17, 118; Hiroshima Other 211, 214, 226; historical Other 44; institutions as Other 25; internal others 11–13, 147; Korean Other 131, 313–4, 317–8, 326, 327; objects as Other 24–6; Okinawan Other 257, 265; phantasmic Other 42, 43, 46; postcolonial other 266–9; representation of 3, 6, 238, 239; types of 8–9, 21–2, 24, 51, 183, 188, 314; Western Other 40, 41–2 other side 38–9, 44 Othering 49, 70, 71, 135, 137, 196, 238 outcasts 238, 239 Oyama Hisajiro¯ 186, 189–90, 194–5, 209n.32, 210n.48 Oyama shoten 207n.10, 208n.24 Ozaki Ko¯yo¯ 80–1 Pacific War 145, 175, 230, 250
pacifism 212–3, 217, 223, 228 Paris 109–10, 113–5, 119 passing: black/white 127–8; burakumin 28–30, 133–6, 154; as entertainment 142n.1; ideology 129; Japanese/ Korean 128, 137–8, 312, 313; overview 12 passports 330n.9 Pater, Walter 27 patriarchy 60–3, 165–6, 284–5 Peace Preservation Law 230 Pearl Harbour 146 Pease, Allison 207n.6 Peattie, Mark R. 17n.3 peripheral literature 256 permeability 5, 42, 47, 52 Persia 70 phantasmic Other 40–1, 43 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 155 The Picture of Dorian Grey (Wilde) 27, 82, 160 Plato 27 Poe, Edgar Allen 276 poetry 42, 97 police 197–8, 207n.12, 208n.23 politics 2, 12, 68, 200–4, 231, 236 Pollack, David 19 pornography 185, 188, 194–5, 199, 203 possession 104, 263, 315, 327 postcolonialism 8, 257, 266–9, 282 postmodernism 41 Potsdam Declaration 212, 230 power 6–7, 66–71 The Power of Form (Rose) 39 Pratt, Mary Louise 273 pre-Raphaelilte influence 43, 45, 51, 52n.1 prejudice 132–3; see also discrimination private publishers 193 ¯ e) 26, 40 ‘Prize Stock’ (O Proletarian Literature 96–7, 101, 236 prostitutes 58, 71, 76, 102, 112–3, 116, 248–9 Protestantism 21, 242 Proust 192 purified ‘I’ 1–2, 232
342 Index Puritanism 59–60, 192 Pursued by God (Tanigawa) 258–9 Pushkin 299, 300 Rabson, Steve 25, 260 race: as construct 127; beauty and 74n.15, 84–5; and nation 68, 69, 132–3, 143n.6, 144n.7; in America 66, 67–70; notions about 132; sexuality and 76; sympathetic portraits 89; racial difference 4, 11, 84, 115, 271, 277 Racine 27 racism 25–6, 66–70, 128, 136, 286 radiation 212, 215, 219, 223–4, 227 readers see audience ‘the real’ 319, 323, 326 reality 39, 100–1, 236–7, 259, 327 rearmament 228 reconstruction 238 Record of a Voyage (Kurahashi) 40 Red Purge 187–8, 203 religion 77, 258–9, 260–1; and identity 265, 268 repatriation 1, 9, 11, 313; see also returnee representation 3, 6, 7, 15, 190, 200, 238, 239, 285 responsibility 221, 227; see also war complicity, war responsibility Return to Japan 1, 21, 120–1, 293, 306–8, 311n.10; see also Nihon e no kaiki returnee 292, 301, 306–7, 315 Reverse Course 189, 203, 231 revolution 156, 161 Ri Kaisei 312 Rimer, Thomas 282–3 ritual sacrifice 159 The River with No Bridge (Sumii) 140, 145 romantic fiction 78, 80 Romanticism 46, 274, 276, 286 Rose, Gilbert 39 Rosenfeld, David 178 Roth, Philip 128, 129 Rousseau, Jacques 25 Rubin, Jay 44, 51, 200, 207n.12 Rushdie, Salman 41
Russian language 299–300 Russians 112, 113, 299–300 Russo–Japanese War 57, 71, 77–8, 128, 145 Ryuk ¯ yu¯ islands 255–6 sadism 65–6, 80 Said, Edward: 10, 13;authority of 93n.3; Orientalism 114; overview 7, 8; power 233–4; reception of work 75; reconceptualizing society 234–5; text and context 231, 233; Western perceptions 93n.2 Saint of Mount Koya (Izumi) 39, 40 Sakagami Hiroichi 69 Sakaguchi Ango 199 Sakhalin 2, 15n.3 Salome (Wilde) 86 samurai 79 Sanshiro¯ (Natsume) 24, 79–80, 81, 87–8 Santaro¯’s Diary (Abe) 106 Saramao incident 275 Sartre 146 Sasabuchi Tomouchi 246 Sato¯ Haruo 9, 14, 103, 107, 272–5; see also The Tale of the Fan (Sato¯) satori (enlightenment) 33–4, 35n.19 Satsuma, house of 256 SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces) 187, 197, 199; see also Occupation scapegoat 158–9, 161, 212 Schlant, Ernestine 235 ‘School for Foreigners’ (Shimizu) 133, 135 scientific learning 132 Second World War 1, 145–6, 167, 181n.1, 181n.4; 183, 190–2 Seidensticker, Edward 58 Self: and the body 10–11, 13; definition of 1, 23, 59, 97, 174, 297, 308; problematisation of 2–3 Self/Other contrast 2, 3–5, 11, 71, 110, 168, 211, 212, 235, 315–6 Self/Other relationship 5–7, 12, 14, 15, 21, 25, 34, 39, 42, 48, 52, 96, 99, 104–5,
Index 343 107, 110, 158–60, 255, 285, 292, 299, 319, 323, 326, 327; see also boundaries self-sacrifice 78 Senbon Ken’ichiro¯ 139 Sengoha 231, 235–40, 250 Senuma Shigeki 46 set theory 313–14 settings, categories of 23–4 sex, power of 59, 191–2, 196 sexology 76 sexual deviancy 63, 76, 192 sexuality: body and sex 195–9; competing sexualities 76–7; liberation of 64, 66, 80–1, b 184–5, 191–2; inversion 63–6; race and 76; ambivalent sexuality 11, 39 shaman 254–69 The Shaman Way (Oshiro) 255 Shanghai (Sato) 282 Shanghai (Yokomitsu) 109–13 Shiga Naoya 25, 32, 104 Shigeto¯ Fumio 218, 221, 223–4 Shiina Rinzo¯ 230–50; as convert 230–1; and freedom 240–3; ordinary citizens 250; overview 13; pessimism 238; see also The Beautiful Woman (Shiina) Shimada Kinji 276 Shimao Miho 257 Shimao Toshio 257 Shimazaki To¯son 57, 114, 127–40, 145; foreign castaways 130; new women 135–6; overview 12, 145; research 130–1; shinheimin 137; see also The Broken Commandment (Shimazaki) Shimizu Shikin 133, 135 Shin Nihon bungaku (journal) 236 shinheimin 142n.2 Shinseinen (journal) 281 shisho¯setsu (I-novel) 1–2, 17n.1, 32–3, 97, 100–1, 231, 232, 239 shizenshugi 80 Shoda Shinoe 215 Sho¯wa period 96, 145 showing/seeing 13 shukusei 44
shuzoku 132 side/other side 5, 15, 38–9 Silence of the Lambs (Harris) 25 Sin City (Muramatsu) 111 slavery 66, 68–70 Smith, Zadie 41 Snyder, Stephen 66 Social Darwinism 57, 133, 143n.6 social sciences, enlightenment and 198 Socialist Party 195 soldiers 40, 52–3, 67, 68–9, 165–6, 169–75, 178–9, 302–3 Some Prefer Nettles (Tanizaki) 89 Sono Ayako 24 South Korea 313; see also Korea South Sea Notes (Yanagita) 256–7 ‘Spearflower’ (Tokuda) 133–4 Specimen of a Ring-finger (Ogawa) 25 spiritual values 106 Spivak, Gayatri 7, 8 Squier, Susan 165 St Nikolai’s church 310n.6 Stagl, Justin 36n.6 state power 6, 67, 68, 69, 71 Steinhoff, Patricia 230–1 stereotypes 25–6 stigmata 133 Strong, Kenneth 130 Style (magazine) 167 Subaru (journal) 273 subject 100, 107, 272, 281–2, 285, 297 substance/nothingness 31–3 Suga Hidemi 209n.34 suiheisha 145, 150, 162n.2 Sumii Sue 140, 145 Summary Discourse on Civilization (Fukuzawa) 286 supernatural see uncanny symbolism 29–31, 146–7, 319, 327; atomic symbols 212, 217, 225; beautiful woman symbolism 246–7, 250; flame symbolism 161; flower symbolism 30–1; horse symbolism 178, 182n.12; lameness symbolism 152, 163n.12; national symbols 60, 266; night/day symbolism
344 Index 148–9, 158; water symbolism 112, 123n.11 Tachibana, Reiko 239 Taisho¯ period 17n.9, 21, 25, 76, 82, 96, 111, 145, 272 Taiwan 2, 14, 17n.3, 173, 233, 272, 273, 274–5, 277; indigenous people 275, 286 Takado¯ Kaname 235 Takamiya Toshiyuki 95n.12 Takasaka Kaoru 258 The Tale of the Fan (Sato¯) 274; culture and history 276–81; gender 283–5; rereading 275–6 Tales of America (Nagai): conclusion 70–1; ‘In the Forest’ 66–70; ‘January First’ 59–63; ‘Long Hair’ 63–6; overview 10; Western modernity 57–9 Tales of France (Nagai) 70 Tanigawa Ken’ichi 258–9 Tanikawa Shuntaro¯ 24, 25 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ 9, 10, 24, 39, 75–89, 96, 100, 107, 274, 276, 282, 292; see also The Mermaid’s Lament (Tanizaki) Tawada Yo¯ko 330n.13 Tayama Katai 79 technology 99 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Mishima) 24, 26–7 Ten Nights of Dream (Natsume) 46–8 tenko¯ (political conversion) 2, 12, 21, 230, 236 Toby, Ronald 36n.1 Togaeri Hajime 246 To¯jo¯ Hideki 202, 212 Tokuda Sh¯usei 133 Tokugawa period 80, 131, 224 Tokyo as home 98 Tokyo War Crimes Trials 201–2 Topographies of Japanese Modernism (Lippit) 121 The Tower of London (Natsume) 44–6, 51 Toyotomi Hideoyoshi 312–13 tradition 117, 119 translation 9, 12, 20, 43, 130, 183, 193, 273–4
Travel Weariness (Yokomitsu) 109, 113–20 travel writing 57, 58, 71, 274–5, 285–6 Treat, John 218 The Trial (Ito¯) 192, 194 triangular desire 58, 73n.3, 117 Tsuboi Shigeji 97 Tsuruta Kinya 38–9, 35n.5 Tsutsumi Chiyo 167 tuberculosis 96, 97, 99, 116, 136 Turkey 286 ¯ shiro) 260 Turtleback Tombs (O Ueda Akinari 292 Ueda Atsuko 317 ukiyo-e 80 Ulysses (Joyce) 147, 185–6, 192, 193, 163n.5, 207n.6 uncanny 39, 40, 41, 44–6, 103, 271, 278–9, 281, 282 Uno Chiyo 9, 12, 165–79; see also ‘A Wife’s Letters’ (Uno) unstable self 102–4 urban space 98 USA: and Okinawa 257; Chinese/Japanese representation 93n.2; US military 67–8, 263–4, 265, 266–8, 302, 304; obscenity trials 185; see also America, Occupation vengeance 158–60 ‘victim consciousness’ 211, 216, 219, 220, 221–2, 224, 226 victimization narrative 212–13, 216, 227, 272 violence/sacred 158–9 virginity 76, 77, 118 visibility 13, 69–70, 127–8, 137, 212, 216 visions 104–5, 261–2 Vita Sexualis (Mori) 77, 79, 100 ¯ shiro) 255, 261 Voices from the Next World (O Wakakuwa Midori 173 war: war atrocity 313; war complicity 2, 7, 49, 51, 75, 109, 165, 200, 226–7, 234; war dead 51, 173; war horses 178,
Index 345 182n.12; war literature 50, 165–6, 169–72; war responsibility 2, 211, 212, 221, 224–5, 227, 231, 233 warlike men 165 Watanabe Kazutami 120, 123n.16 Watanabe Naomi 133, 136 water, symbolism of 112, 123n.11 see also symbolism wealth 133 Weiner, Michael 4, 143n.6 West: as construct 5, 9, 10, 20, 57; as model 57, 58, 75, 76–7, 80, 116–7, 272; delegations to 20 Western colonialism 113 Western objects 24–5, 28–9, 167, 277 Western Other 40, 41–2, 47–8, 58–9, 70–71, 82, 88, 109–10 Western thought 61, 76–7, 80, 115, 261, 282 Westernization 58 “white man’s burden” 234 White Teeth (Smith) 41 whiteness 68, 84, 85–6 ‘A Wife’s Letters’ (Uno) 168–9; absence embodied 172–4; emerging presence 174–6; farewell formula 169–72; paradox 178–9; subversive acts 176–8 Wilde, Oscar 10, 27, 82, 86, 276 The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami) 48–52 women: as Other 10, 12, 53, 109–10, 117, 118, 121, 166; class 197; double standards 76; erotic/sacred 118–19, 196; home and 109; home front 165–75; homeland and 112; marriage and 117–19, 283–5; natural roles 62, 165, 175; new women 79–80, 82, 94n.8, 135–6; in Okinawan culture 257–61; physique 74n15, 81; respect for 63, 77–8; rivals for 117; suppression of
284–5; Western woman 63–4, 66, 79; see also yuta women as writers 11, 12, 17n.9, 135, 165–6, 174–6, 177–9 women’s rights 78 Wonderful Fool (Endo¯) 24 working-class, representing 236–9, 243 world literature 27–8 xenology 22 Yamada Eimi 24, 26 Yamanokuchi Baku 256 Yanagi Muneyoshi 277 Yanagita Kunio 142n.2, 143n.5, 256–7, 258 ‘Yaponesia’ 257 Yi Yang-ji 9, 15, 312, 315, 331n.24 Yokomitsu Riichi 10, 43, 109–21 Yoshida Seiichi 276 Yoshimoto Banana 43 Yoshiya Nobuko 181n.6 Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke 330n.10 youth, modernity and 99–100 Y¯u Miri 312 Yuhi (Yi): language matters 316–19; overview 15; re-reading 315–16; ‘the real’ 319–26 Yui Akiko 265 yuta (female shaman) 14, 255, 257–9, 265–9; yuta as subject of resistance 265–6 zainichi bungaku see Korean–Japanese writers ‘zainichi Korean’ 11, 128, 137, 271, 312, 314, 326, 327, 329n.2 see also Korean– Japanese writers, Koreans in Japan Zamora, Lois Parkinson 44 Zola, Emile 25
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