Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Chinese Studies Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies

Editors

Glen Dudbridge Frank Pieke

VOLUME 11

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990

By

Margaret Hillenbrand

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Detailed Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available on the Internet at http://catalog.loc.gov

ISSN: 1570-1344 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15478 0 ISBN-10: 90 04 15478 7 Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlalds

To my parents, Robert and Carole Hillenbrand

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .........................................................................

xi

Introduction .................................................................................... The regional imperative ............................................................. Interregional, interdisciplinary .................................................. Literatures of disenchantment ................................................... The outline of the book .............................................................

1 1 4 6 7

Chapter One: The Scope of the Enquiry .....................................

15

Regionalism in practice: cultural convergence in post Cold-War East Asia ............................................................. Regionalism and ‘alternative modernities’: towards a fruitful intersection ................................................................. Literary studies and the resistance to regionalism .................... Contemporary East Asian comparative literature: an embattled discipline .......................................................... Old-school comparativism: a compromised practice ............... The theory conundrum: promise and pitfalls ........................... Towards an intraregional comparative practice ....................... The dystopian impulse: roots, targets, and terminology .......... Western modernism: borrowing and beyond ........................... Japan and Taiwan: the background to comparison ................. Time-frame, themes, and tropes ................................................ Writers .........................................................................................

15 23 29 34 35 39 46 53 62 69 82 92

Chapter Two: Rest & Recreation in the City: Dystopian Visions of US power in Cold War East Asia ............................ 105 US hegemony in Cold War East Asia ...................................... The US and its East Asian allies: the background to literary dissent ......................................................................... Triangular paradigms for the geopolitical world ...................... Politics and sexuality: “Leap Before You Look” and the occupation narratives of Ôe Kenzaburô ..............................

105 110 125 134

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The past in the present: Nosaka Akiyuki’s “American Hijiki ” ................................................................... Huang Chunming’s Young Widows: Vietnam, R&R, and the entertainment boom ............................................................... Pimping on the grand scale: Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose, I Love You .................................................................................. Conclusion ..................................................................................

146 153 161 169

Chapter Three: Discord at Home: The Ruptured Family in Postwar Fiction ....................................................................... 173 Transformations in the family: basic themes ............................ Kinship change: the socio-cultural background to literary opposition ................................................................................ The city and sexuality: the circuit of loss and substitution .............................................................................. Wang Wenxing’s “Mother”: modernity, neurosis, and the incest taboo ............................................................................. Paternalism and patriarchy in Bai Xianyong’s Cursed Sons ....... Tokyo in apocalypse: Murakami Ryû’s Coin Locker Babies ......... A fake fairytale of the consumer family: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto ............................................................................... Conclusion ..................................................................................

173 175 187 193 199 208 218 228

Chapter Four: Sex and the City: Commodities of Choice .......... 232 Consumption in East Asia: general remarks ............................. The cult of consumerism in contemporary East Asia: the socio-economic background to literary opposition ........ The urban marketplace: city and sexuality ............................... Mishima Yukio’s “The Million Yen”: income-doubling, ‘the three imperial regalia’, and consumption as sexual labor ........................................................................................ Journeys through the consumer maze: Murakami Haruki’s Dance, Dance, Dance .................................................................. Closed circuits of consumption: Dark Nights by Li Ang ............ KTV city: Zhu Tianwen’s “Red Rose is Paging You” ............. Conclusion ..................................................................................

232 235 250

257 265 275 284 293

Conclusion ...................................................................................... 299

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ix

Glossary ........................................................................................... 313 Japanese section .......................................................................... 313 Chinese section ........................................................................... 322 Bibliography .................................................................................... 333 Index ...........................................................................................

355

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to those who have guided and supported me in the writing of this book. I would like rst of all to thank my D. Phil. supervisor, Tao Tao Liu, for her kindness and wise counsel throughout the writing of earlier drafts of the manuscript. I am also grateful to Brian Powell for providing valuable advice in more informal ways. Steve Tsang, Laura Newby, Irena Powell, and Philip Harries all read parts of the manuscript during my time as a postgraduate at Oxford and commented sagely on it. I received endless assistance in bibliography from Tony and Margaret Hyder, former librarians at the Institute for Chinese Studies, who were models of how to support research students. I also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Dame Jessica Rawson for her support over the years, and also to Bonnie McDougall, from whose critical insights I beneted at an earlier stage. My rst academic post, as a research fellow in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, provided the ideal environment in which to develop the project in new directions. My colleagues Susan Daruvala and Joe MacDermott both read the manuscript, either partially or in its entirety, and were generous with their insights. David McMullen was constantly on hand to offer encouragement, kindness, and moral support, and has been a steady inspiration to me since my days as an undergraduate. I am extremely grateful, too, for the warmth shown to me by Sir Roger Tomkys and the Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who provided both a physical and an intellectual home for my research. The core work on the completion of this book was undertaken after I joined the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2003, and here too I have incurred debts of gratitude. Bernhard Fuehrer has been exemplary in his support, ensuring in particular that I was given sufcient time to pursue my research at the same time as fullling my departmental duties. Michel Hockx has been an inspiring mentor from the start, providing continuous intellectual and practical support, and examining the manuscript with an extremely keen eye. Other colleagues and friends have proved invaluable as I have brought this project to completion. Harriet Evans provided the impetus for a

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crucial broadening of my research horizons by giving me the opportunity to teach at the University of Westminster in 2002, and has been a very supportive colleague in the years since. Wada Masanori has been a valued friend and ally for much of the time that I have been writing this book, and has also helped greatly in the gathering of research materials in Japanese. Chloë Starr read the manuscript with the greatest care and insight, spotting countless aws from the conceptual to the typographic. Thanks are also due to Patricia Radder and Renee Otto, my editors at Brill, who have shepherded the book through to publication with expertise and patience. I am grateful, too, to Alice Chan for designing the cover illustration. I would also like to express my thanks to various institutions for their nancial and material support. The Gen Foundation and Dr Shimizu Takashige gave timely and much-needed help in the nal year of my doctoral thesis, and thereafter supported research trips to Japan and Taiwan. These trips enabled me to make valuable contacts and visit research libraries whose holdings contained much material not available in the UK. The Academia Sinica in Taiwan warmly welcomed me as a visiting scholar, providing a research ofce and a free run of its superb libraries. I owe a further debt of gratitude to the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, who made me a recipient of their inaugural Taiwan fellowship award in 2004. I am also grateful to SOAS for giving me a grant to cover the expenses of converting the completed manuscript into camera-ready copy. Finally, I owe profound thanks to the trustees of the Chuan Lyu Foundation—Hwa-lin Lee, Sue Liu and Darrell Liu—for graciously supporting my appointment as the rst Chuan Lyu fellow in Taiwanese studies at Cambridge University, and for opening up new avenues for my research into Taiwanese literature. They have been exceptional patrons. The greatest debt of gratitude must, however, go to my family. My sister Ruth Maxey provided a constant listening ear during the writing of this book, along with bibliographical help and a ready willingness to read the manuscript. My son Sam was born during the nal stages of the revisions, and he has transformed these last few months with his smile, his zest for life, and his ability to re-order my priorities. My husband Tom Elgar has been my best friend and companion as I have grappled with this project. His humour has kept me buoyed up, and his condence in me has helped to dispel the feelings of doubt and frustration that inevitably loom during a longterm project of this kind. Finally, my deepest thanks of all go to my parents Robert and Carole,

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xiii

whose support has always been unconditional and to whom this book is dedicated. Their love, advice, and encouragement have sustained me over the years, and they have given of their time and knowledge in the most unstinting ways. My father, in particular, has helped me more than I can say.

An earlier version of part of Chapter Two appeared as “GIs and the City: Images of Urbanization in Some Post-War Taiwanese Fiction”, in Asian Studies Review 25 (2001), 403–21. All translations of Japanese and Chinese texts are my own, unless otherwise stated.

INTRODUCTION

The regional imperative Regionalism is transforming East Asian studies. Terms such as the Pacic Rim, Greater China, ‘little dragons’, and ‘Asian tigers’ have long since entered the popular lexicon and imaginary; and the sense of commonality—of experience, identity, even purpose—that underlies these new idioms is compelling scholars across the spectrum to think and work in increasingly synoptic ways. Technological borderlessness has combined with more permeable political frontiers to create a space of mutual awareness and interaction in East Asia which those who study the region, whether locally or abroad, must both inhabit and describe. And while the discrete specialisms of Chinese, Japanese or Korean studies remain as core as ever, the regional episteme is commanding, and receiving, dedicated attention in journals, scholarly presses, and campuses across the world. The elds of developmental economics and international relations arguably blazed the trail here, but in recent years scholars working in the disciplines of sociology, political science, anthropology, popular culture, and cultural studies have been coming to terms with the complex changes that state-led economism have wrought on East Asia, not just as a group of geographically proximate nations but as a region, a power bloc, and an increasingly integrated entity. Indeed, it has been accepted for some time that, when viewed as an experiential whole, the region of industrialized East Asia presents paradigms of modernity, and postmodernity, that diverge from those of the West and must be theorized on their own terms. In many ways, therefore, this growth of the pan-Asian episteme shares sizeable discursive ground with the broader concept of ‘alternative modernities’. This notion of alternative modernities—which describe different arcs of change and challenge the idea that the West is the sole crucible of ‘progress’, theory, and knowledge invention—has been taking both politics and the academy by storm in recent years. In the political realm, the vogue for asserting difference—from ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, to the so-called ‘three pillars’ of Japanese-style capitalism, to ‘Asian values’—has been readily converted into hard capital by governments keen to bolster the legitimacy of their

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mandates. In academia, meanwhile, many seize upon this discourse for its counter-hegemonic potential, as notions of literary modernity in Japan, gendered modernity in China, or postcolonial modernity in East Asia generally have given scholars a platform from which to challenge the Euroamerican rhetoric of universals. Valuable as the notion of ‘alternative modernities’ is, however, one sometimes senses that it is the rst term in the phrase—‘alternative’—that is the chief driver of this discursive mode. Difference and differentiation take natural pride of place here; and the almost inevitable result is that the West remains the explicit or implicit comparator. Again and again, occidental experiences of change haunt the study of their non-Western counterparts, directing the course and form of the critical proceedings from the sidelines, or acting as an almost inescapable Other in a process whereby East Asian modernities are ‘explained’ using tools and terminologies that originate in the West. Up to a point, of course, the bald facts of history and imperialism give this process a certain measure of credibility. Yet what can often be lost in studies which seek to ‘prove’ the intrinsic difference of alternative modernities in East Asia is a proper sense of their commonality with one another—and of the possibilities this commonality harbors for new and more self-referential ways of theorizing about nonWestern experience. In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that the regional episteme is the pre-eminent mode through which to explore these possibilities. This is because, through its very name and nature, regionalism succeeds in concentrating the main thrust of its energy on East Asia, rather than being continually pulled back into the gravitational eld of Euroamerican epistemologies. The goal of regionalism is not, of course, some antediluvian, prelapsarian theoretical state untainted by Marx, Freud, Derrida and the vast body of Western thought—if such a state were ever possible. Rather, regionalism of the kind that is fast gaining currency in East Asian studies seeks—or at least should seek—to construct theories of post/modernity which, although they interact with Western theory, are rooted in the local and draw strength in numbers from precisely the kind of assumed commonality of experience that is a key factor in the dominance of the ‘West’ as a system of thought at the present time. Better still, at the same time as it resists the homogenizing pull of the West, regionalism also works as a ballast against the excesses of local particularism—whether this takes the form of emotive ethnonationalism (in the political realm) or turf-protecting territorialism (in the academic one). All in all, the regional mode allows us to uncover

introduction

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parallels, reveal overlapping histories and experiences, and shed light on the solidarities that are so often occluded when we consider modernity either from the vantage-point of a single nation-state or with the West as our chief discursive antagonist. Regionalism as it is now being pursued in several areas of East Asian studies promises new ways of imagining the eld, in which cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches rewrite the positivist quest for knowledge which has been the traditional hallmark of the subject. Some areas of East Asian studies are, however, not as amenable to the regional mode as others—and the resistance to more panoramic ways of interpreting modern and contemporary East Asian experience is perhaps nowhere more ingrained than in literary studies. This point nds its obvious illustration in the eld of comparative literature, the natural home of the regional perspective on literary practice and production. In plain terms, the discipline which we might reasonably term ‘intraregional comparativism’ is scarcely in its infancy. Indeed, so far is it from any meaningful maturity that even at the beginning of the twenty-rst century, and despite the sometimes radical interventions of theory, comparative literature in East Asian studies continues to operate almost exclusively on the East-West axis. What is more, this generalization holds true right across the scholarly range. Old-school comparativism—of the kind which traces the inuence of Graham Greene on Endô Shûsaku, or contrasts the use of temporal motifs in Elizabethan and Northern Song poetry—has always been unapologetic about its binary orientation. At its best, of course, such work can be illuminating on the grand theme of civilizational difference. Yet as a critical practice, it holds out little hope for those who wish to read the literary texts of contemporary Japan, China, and Korea comparatively—not least since its practitioners so often, and so unconsciously, read rigidly from West to East and exoticize all that diverges from Euroamerican ‘norms’. More recent years have seen the theory revolution transform the reading of East Asian texts, and dangle the promise of a comparativism that goes beyond the ‘compare and contrast’ of earlier praxis to offer more sophisticated interpretive strategies. Theory, so the thinking goes, can rescue the East Asian text from the cultural margins and re-position it in the ‘center’ where it rightfully belongs; and once ‘globalized’ in this way, the Japanese, Chinese, or Korean text can stand alongside the literatures of the West in a comparativism of equals. Yet even if we nesse for the moment the complex question of the validity of, say, a Bakhtinian reading of Mo Yan (What about China’s own

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carnivalesque? Can theories really travel cleanly across time and space? What happens when they are misunderstood—or willfully misappropriated?), the deeper problem of orientation persists. Indeed, whilst an engagement with Western theory is less an option than a necessity in an intellectual world as porous and cross-fertilized as our own, the fact remains that in practice many comparatists adhere to a paradigm of Western theory/East Asian text in which the text serves the theory, sometimes to the point of unhealthy subjugation. In other words, East Asian comparativism—whether old-school or new—tends to remain anchored in a single Far Eastern language, whilst looking westwards for the methods or material of its comparanda. In so doing, the discipline squanders the potential it harbors—as an intercultural, boundary-crossing practice—to intervene in the re-writings of East Asian studies that are being undertaken at present.

Interregional, interdisciplinary By contrast, this book attempts to formulate a practice of comparativism which can assess the literatures of recent and contemporary East Asia within the regional context. More precisely, it explores intellectual responses to the new modernities that have emerged in these two East Asian societies during the years 1960 and 1990, and it organizes its argument around case studies of paradigmatic literary texts and the complex social, historical, and ideological contexts which have brought these narratives into being. Japan and Taiwan present themselves as among the most obvious candidates for an intraregional comparative practice of this kind. The history that they share as satellite states within the Chinese cultural zone, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan from 1895–1945, and the almost articially swift transition from backwater to economic superpower that both countries have made in the postwar period, have created the kind of proximity that typically yields the most fruitful comparative enquiry. Indeed, this contention is amply borne out by the dense trafc in ideas and cultural products that circulates at a brisk rate between the two nations today. All in all, it is remarkable, given the parallels which link these two societies not just during the years 1960–1990 but throughout the post-traditional period, that no major scholarly monograph has yet appeared which engages in sustained fashion with the notion that Japan and Taiwan might be companions, and comparators, in cultural modernity. My approach in this

introduction

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book focuses on literature, and encompasses diverse texts by a catholic range of writers: Ôe Kenzaburô, Nosaka Akiyuki, Mishima Yukio, Yoshimoto Banana, Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryû, Bai Xianyong, Wang Zhenhe, Huang Chunming, Wang Wenxing, Li Ang, and Zhu Tianwen gure most prominently, although the work of many other authors is referenced throughout the chapters that follow. At the same time, and as suggested above, my approach in this book reads this cultural modernity in terms of both text and context, balancing its inquiry between literature and what Bourdieu would call the ‘habitus’ within which writers live and their literary production takes place. Thus the ambient intellectual culture within which literature is sited and—at one further remove—the social context in which this intellectual culture germinates, are as integral to the present book as its close readings of key texts. Certainly, my approach remains alert to the longstanding positivist tendencies in East Asian literary studies, where texts are all too often ‘raided’ for socio-historical information as if they were supplementary databanks to research in other areas of the humanities. Yet at the same time, this book is committed to the intimate interrelation between literature and society. And for this reason, its readings of specic narratives are deeply embedded in the ‘lifeworld’ within which these works nd their being, crossing freely between the disciplines of history, sociology, politics, and international relations as they explore the interaction between modernity and literary practice. The study proper is extensively contextualised in a scene-setting rst chapter, and each of the following chapters—which center on seminal aspects of modernity common to Taiwan and Japan during the years 1960–1990—ground their textual analyses in the particular matrix of realities that, in part at least, generated the will to write. The result is a discursive framework in which text and context, close reading and milieu analysis, are held in continual balance, and each is allowed to speak its relevance to the other. In other words, this is both a literary study and an inquiry into the mutually inected relationship that literature maintains with the open elds of culture and society. And its ultimate objective is to read this relationship cross-culturally in terms of what it reveals about the form and function of literary practice in the miracle societies of industrialized East Asia.

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introduction Literatures of disenchantment

In this regard, the principal contention of this book is that many writers from Japan and Taiwan have adopted postures ranging from strong ambivalence to entrenched resistance to the notion of ‘modernity-asprogress’ that has ruled as dominant discourse in both societies during the years 1960–1990. The narratives explored here form a series of often arrestingly dystopian tableaux which seek to subvert local forces—both state and societal—and their diktats about the modern. In the chapters which form the bulk of this book, I argue that many Japanese and Taiwanese writers atly contradict prevailing notions on the imperative of economic growth, the wisdom of alliance with the US, and the pleasures of prosperity. Put simply, a moral impulse animates many ctional narratives from both societies; and an intraregional comparative approach allows us to reect on the possibility that the origins and outworkings of this moral impulse might be revelatory of a broader literary practice within industrialized East Asia. The present study locates this moral impulse at the reactive interface between the venerable East Asian tradition of remonstrance and the so-called ‘soft totalitarianism’ of the postwar state in Japan and Taiwan, and it argues that the result is a literature of disenchantment in which modernity is not simply ‘incomplete’—to quote Habermas’ famous dictum—but also traumatic and dysfunctional. In narrative after narrative, this posture of resistance expresses itself through a carefully modulated practice of alterity—a judicious use of Verfremdungseffekt or defamiliarization—in which reality is made suggestively unrecognizable within the text. These strategies of defamiliarization create a mood of otherness in which various anti-realist signatures collide with the major mode of realism as writers strive for a narrative form that can capture the doubt and dismay they feel at ofcial projects of modernity, and provoke a more robust reaction from readers. Given the broad scope of such a project, I have found it necessary to telescope my enquiry by conducting it within certain thematic and analytic bounds. First of all, the study focuses its exploration of literary responses to modernity on three major aspects of postwar change. These are US geopolitical and cultural hegemony, the breakdown of traditional kinship patterns, and the emergence of a highly commodied society—three topics which have a richness of detail and a pressing relevance to the two societies under consideration here that immediately recommend them for scrutiny. Secondly, in its analysis of these

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three themes, each of which is explored in a separate chapter, the book focuses on two recurrent leitmotifs—the city and sexuality—which have been deployed by numerous Japanese and Taiwanese writers in their attempts to delineate the disturbing contours of the postwar world. These two tropes, both time-honored metaphors for social and spiritual malaise, surface repeatedly in the work of a wide range of otherwise quite disparate writers, who mobilise them as oating signiers of dysfunction in projects of morally-motivated critique. Comparativism allows us to interpret this critique not just intertextually, but also interculturally—indeed, as a phenomenon that stems from the afnities which link the societies of industrialized East Asia on the regional plane.

The Outline of the Book This book divides into two parts: the rst consists of a brief introduction and an extended opening chapter; and the second of three chapters, followed by a conclusion. The rst chapter, ‘The Scope of the Enquiry’, sets out the methodological framework for the study and elaborates the notions of regionalism, comparative literature, interdisciplinary analysis and aesthetic dissent that have been sketched in principle above. This opening chapter also makes the specic case for comparison between Japan and Taiwan, and concludes with a rationale for the selection of themes, tropes, authors, texts, and time-frame. The three core chapters in part two all begin with contextual analysis, in which each of the seminal aspects of modernity referred to above are respectively introduced and then glossed for their impact on literary creativity and production. Next, each core chapter turns to the role that the city and sexuality play as metaphoric modes for authors as they set out to ‘write’ these modern contexts, and explores the reasons why so many choose to frame their critiques of state-sponsored progress around these interlinked topoi. The bulk of each chapter then moves on to examine four paradigmatic texts—two from Japan, and two from Taiwan—which articulate a range of interlinked literary responses to the specic aspect of modernity under analysis. Chapter two, ‘Rest and Recreation in the City’, explores literary representations of the geopolitical hegemony exercised by the US in Cold War East Asia, and focuses closely on writings by Ôe Kenzaburô, Nosaka Akiyuki, Huang Chunming, and Wang Zhenhe. For both Japan

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and Taiwan, diplomatic alignment within the so-called ‘Great Crescent’ of US-orchestrated anti-Communist containment has entailed continuous and high-level exposure to American power and inuence throughout the period examined in this book. And whilst benets have accrued to both countries through their alliance with America, the perils of US patronage have, in some ways, marked themselves more permanently on the cultural imaginary. Both Japan and Taiwan have been co-opted into the military mission of the US in the Asia Pacic region, and have found themselves carefully integrated into complex structures of economic and strategic dependence. Both have also suffered the vagaries of US foreign policy, and experienced at rst hand how this policy can be as unreliable as it is ostensibly paternalistic. And both have played host on their native soil to tens of thousands of American military personnel, army sojourns that have impacted on the two societies in closely parallel ways. Indeed, the encounter with America, both institutional and personal, has brought with it a range of high-speed socio-cultural transformations, many of which have brusquely unsettled—or even displaced—older habits of living and being. Not surprisingly, US hegemony has provoked forceful opposition among many writers and intellectuals in Japan and Taiwan. Dissonant voices in both societies have reacted with hostility not only to the Pax Americana, but also—and just as signicantly—to the all-too-ready acquiescence with which their respective governments and societies have become a part of it. Here, as elsewhere in this book, we nd that a broad cross-section of writers choose to frame and develop their critique within a metaphoric structure centered on the two rhetorical gures of the city and sexuality. More precisely, these ctional narratives take American military patronage of the urban sex trade in East Asia as the prism through which a range of international and domestic concerns are viewed. For many writers, the notion of GIs let loose in the red-light districts of urban Japan and Taiwan summons up the ageold linkage between imperialism, fraternization and prostitution, and their work recongures the tripartite relationship between US military clientele, local pimps and prostitutes into an apt metaphor for contemporary realities. These ctional critiques of alliance with the US create dystopian visions of Cold War life which run deantly counter to the formulas for progress and national security prescribed by the state and espoused by mainstream society.

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The third chapter, ‘Domestic Discord: the Ruptured Family in Postwar Fiction’, investigates ctional treatments of the dislocation of traditional kinship patterns that has taken place in Japan and Taiwan during the period 1960–1990. It focuses on narratives by Wang Wenxing, Bai Xianyong, Murakami Ryû, and Yoshimoto Banana, and argues that many writers share an attitude of settled resistance to the conventional discourse on the modern family that has held sway during the later postwar era. Most obviously, of course, a great many writers depict the family as the chief casualty of the much-lauded economic progress that has been brought to bear on Japanese and Taiwanese society during this time-frame. Yet perhaps more pertinently, these narratives of family life desolated by the forces of change ask to be read as ironic counternarratives to ofcial and semi-ofcial discourses on the family. In both societies, the state has promoted domestic dogmas which stress stability, good lial conduct, monogamy, procreation, self-sacrice and gendered behavior. All stipulate the robust health and discipline of the household as an ideological microcosm of the ‘family state’. By conscious contrast, the texts I analyze in this chapter turn obsessively on themes of disintegration, failed liality, promiscuity, non-procreativity, individualism, and the transgression of conventional gender roles. These writings explore the gap between state ideologies of family stability and actual practices of family destabilization, and satirize the policy of putting tradition to work in the service of an aggressively transformative modernity. Here, once again, we nd that the literary critique of modernity circulates around the twin topoi of the city and sexuality; and in the narratives considered here the two tropes operate in a circular framework of cause and effect. Throughout these texts the metropolis is made synonymous with all the changes that attend runaway modernization, a conation of signs which allows the city to emerge as the rhetorical cause of unraveling family ties. Real kinship is impossible in these urban worlds, and city images become the medium through which literary hostility towards the macrocosmic forces—political, bureaucratic, and corporate—that have transformed family life is refracted. Sexuality, meanwhile, functions as the substitutive medium through which city-dwelling protagonists try— and fail—to recreate the kinship bonds that have been destroyed by the modern metropolis. All these texts are barely disguised quests for lost fathers, mothers, siblings, or children; and the sexual images described

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within them are generally more poignant than erotic. Writers deploy the tropes of the city and sexuality as pivots in a circular, self-replicating narrative movement, designed to disclose the hidden patterns of lost and simulated affect that emerge in tandem with the miracle of statesponsored economism. The nal chapter, ‘Sex and the City: Commodities of Choice’, investigates the representation in Japanese and Taiwanese literary narratives of the growth of consumerism and the emergence of a highly commodied society, and it presents close readings of texts by Mishima Yukio, Murakami Haruki, Li Ang, and Zhu Tianwen. The ascendancy of the consumer lifestyle in both Japan and Taiwan is commonly viewed as the culmination of long years of developmental toil, and, as part of the same logic, the pleasures of shopping, leisure, travel, and mass entertainment are glossed as the reward for frugality and discipline during the ordeal in which the economic miracle was forged. Both societies provide telling case studies of the Baudrillardian notion of consumption as ‘the citizen’s duty’, and incitements to consume—often issuing forth from the highest levels of government—have found compliant audiences throughout the later postwar period. The texts considered in this chapter, however, present a vision of the commodied society which gives the lie to ofcial wisdom on the pleasures of afuence and the pride of place it occupies within the framework of late modernity. In particular, they parody the implicit coalition between the state, business interests, and the consuming public that has enabled consumption to become the dominant social force in contemporary East Asia. At the same time, this satirical design also operates in the spheres of the psyche and of emotion; and many writers seek to show that the surface abundance of consumer Japan and Taiwan is hollowed out by a psychological penury which undermines the ideologies of plenty. In framing their opposition to the consumer creed, many writers from Japan and Taiwan organize the metropolis and sexuality as the symbolic axis around which ambivalence and anxiety can freely circulate. In simple terms, the city offers the place, and sexuality the means, for consumption of a balefully conspicuous kind. The texts analyzed in this chapter all elaborate the notion of the metropolis as a ubiquitous market-place, and use images of barter, trading, competition, and claustrophobia to suggest both the aggressive character of late twentieth-century capitalism and its physical inescapability. Just as the city is imagined as a dense conglomeration of arcades, malls, and shop

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windows, so is sexuality construed as chief among the wares displayed in this consumer hub. Across this corpus of narratives, eroticism acts as the rhetorical means through which writers make their most telling points about the reication of human relations in late capitalist society. Bought, sold, and entirely subordinated to the laws of economics, sexuality in these narratives becomes irreconcilably dissociated from love and desire, and is reduced, instead, to the status of yet another item in the complex consumer code which urbanites use to compete with one another. In a range of texts from both literary cultures, this debasement of intimacy by capital works as an extended trope through which writers critique the primacy of the economic mode within contemporary East Asian society. The book’s Conclusion reects on the literary responses to modernity analyzed in the preceding chapters, and argues that these literatures of disenchantment form an intertext of ethically engagé writings that demand interpretation on their own regional terms. Although both rebellious and politicized, these texts are neither clones of earlier modernist revolts nor expressly postcolonial works which preach a politics of independence on the global stage. Rather, the crux of their singular narrative identity lies in the way they fuse realist and anti-realist modes to write the modern, and, more critically, in the borderline reactionary ideologies that can be couched within this compound ctional practice. State-sponsored modernity is roundly discredited in these texts, both overtly and by more circuitous means; yet the antidote to contemporary ills seems all too often to be nothing other than a return to the moral sureties of a lost past, a place of plenitude in which the fractured present is magically put back together again. All the writers considered in this book nd themselves in wistful retreat to some distinctively congured space in which culture, family and society are whole and healthy, and where modernity can be escaped for a while. The problem, of course, is that these private havens are imagined too rosily—with such determined nostalgia, in fact, that writers’ romanticized visions of the past can sometimes cross the line into veiled, possibly even inadvertent critiques of some of the liberations that have accompanied the general ux and ow of modernity. Female emancipation, social mobility, expanding political freedoms, the dissolving of quasi-Confucian social bonds, and gradual inroads into racial homogeneity and monoculturalist control become zones of ambiguity in these texts, if not targets for a vaguely adumbrated censure.

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The question of why these East Asian writers choose to write impassionedly against modernity and—more intriguingly—to do so in so retrogressive a manner is one which opens itself up revealingly under the scrutiny of comparativism. Certainly, the reactive interface between friendly authoritarianism, a subdued or stied opposition, and a long local tradition of literati who remonstrate goes some way towards answering this question; and scholars of both literatures who work within the ‘national literature’ paradigm have drawn attention to this equation. Valuable as such work is, however, a close focus on the local articulations of this three-way encounter can end up dealing more in specic contexts and conicts than in the underlying patterns that structure such phenomena. Indeed, it is a short step from particularism of this kind to the notion that native experiences of modernity are inalienably unique, and that the wellspring for literary invention is as much a province of nationalism as ags and anthems. Comparativism, by contrast, homes in on precisely these sorts of ‘underlying patterns’, largely because its transnational purview forces a shift from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. More precisely, its meta-theoretical potential allows us to speculate about the extent to which the three-way encounter described above—between friendly authoritarianism, a subdued opposition, and the long legacy of remonstrance—is as much regional in nature as it is fomented within specic nation-states. Perhaps the most obvious thesis to put forward here is the ‘conservative’ one: the notion that the societies of industrialized East Asia are à fond traditionalist, despite their progressive economism, and that this dyed-in-the-wool traditionalism has seeped into cultural practice to the extent that even the most mutinous of writers are tinged by it. Culturalist arguments of this kind are, however, riddled with a slew of familiar problems: totalizing, orientalizing, and prone to a strong positivist streak, they belong to the East Asianist ‘ghetto’ of the past. A more plausible approach might base itself on the effects of extended one-party rule on mechanisms of resistance (of which ctional practice is one), and the notion that—within a regulated or at least lackluster public sphere—the function of the alternative voice may lie more in the act of its utterance than in the details of its message. More pertinently, when protest itself is something of a subversive act, and the dominant discourse against which it remonstrates is so skillfully entrenched, writers can all too readily nd themselves thrown back into a reactive position in which the will to object consumes their energies and more liberatory ideas are hard to muster. Over time, this reactive position can, in its turn, become entrenched (nostalgia creeps in, and

introduction

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the future seems impossible)—before it makes the nal crossover into the realm of the reactionary. It is precisely the comparativist mode that allows us to view this reactionary bent not simply in terms of the nationstate and its contingent practices, but as a structural phenomenon that is rooted in the various kinships that East Asia shares as a region.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SCOPE OF THE ENQUIRY

Regionalism in practice: cultural convergence in post Cold-War East Asia The core premise of this book is that literary studies constitute a major anomaly in the general shift within the academy towards more inclusionary and panoramic ways of interpreting contemporary East Asia. Whilst academic presses now routinely run series on the Greater East Asian zone, institutes of Asia Pacic studies are springing up on campuses across the world, and specialists in assorted disciplines are pondering the origins and fallout of multiple miracle economies,1 scholars of the region’s literatures continue for the most part to work inside the sealed-off spaces of the nation-state. Particularly disheartening here is the reluctance in certain quarters to pick up on the possibilities that Cultural Studies offer for liberating new takes on the literary spaces of East Asia. This mobile and uidly-dened eld—in which literature, theory, lm studies, sociology and cultural anthropology all interact—is nudging its way into East Asian studies; but progress is slow, and even those who have proved hospitable to the Cultural Studies philosophy have tended to so within the relative safety of their old institutional homes of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean literature. The tacit rationale for this continuing insularity centers, naturally enough, on the difculty of the languages—particularly the literary languages—of East Asia, and on the supposed uniqueness of the cultural elds to which Japanese, Chinese, and Korean literature belong. In other words, the regional episteme may be a manageable prospect for the rational worlds of economics and political science, but literature—with its privileged access to the national soul and its complex debt to the national heritage—is perhaps not the place for wider-range perspectives. Plausible as this rationale may seem,

1 See, for example, Gordon White (ed.), Developmental States in East Asia (London, 1988); Frederic C. Deyo (ed.), The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism (Ithaca, 1987); Gary Geref (ed.), Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton, 1990); and Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, 1990).

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it does not augur well for our understanding of contemporary East Asian literary practice. And whilst some might dispute the very notion of a ‘contemporary East Asian literary practice’ or argue, perhaps more reasonably, that intense regional hostilities over many decades have militated against the kind of interchange upon which such a practice surely depends, it is becoming apparent that a new kind of cultural eld is fast emerging in East Asia—one that is porous, hybrid, and highly amenable to interactive interpretation. This point is illustrated in graphic localized form by the trafc in music, media, lm, and ction that has owed between Japan and Taiwan—the two comparators explored in this study—since the late 1980s and early 1990s. The green light for this two-way interaction was, of course, provided by the liberalization of the Taiwanese polity that began in the early to mid-1980s and reached its formal culmination with the lifting of martial law in 1987. With this watershed came a waning of neo-traditional, strong-arm ideology, and the quick spread of political and cultural pluralism of a kind that would have been unthinkable even a few short years earlier.2 In particular, the freeing up of print media, publishing houses, radio, and television unleashed a ood of cultural energy,3 whilst the repeal of tight restrictions on the importation of Japanese cultural commodities in 1993 opened the door to an inux of new inuences. This emerging market has since been skillfully tapped by cultural producers in Japan, as Taiwan (and especially its young people) has been drawn into the provocatively named ‘Common Sphere of Japanese modus vivendi’,4 a cultural domain covering more or the less the same expanse of territory as the notorious Co-Prosperity Sphere of Japan’s imperial heyday.5 Japanese pop songs, 2 For political pluralism, see Alan M. Wachman, Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization (London, 1994); for cultural pluralism, see Edwin A. Winckler, “Cultural Policy on Postwar Taiwan”, in Stevan Harrell and Huang Chun-chieh (eds.), Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan (Boulder, 1994), 22–46. 3 As Hung-mao Tien and Yun-han Chu have noted, however, the lifting of ofcial controls over print media was not immediately followed by the extension of such freedoms to radio and television, which were still subject to KMT control well into the 1990s. See Tien and Chu, “Building Democracy in Taiwan”, in David Shambaugh (ed.), Contemporary Taiwan (Oxford, 1998), 110–11. 4 Quoted in Leo Ching, “Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun. Japanese Mass Culture in Asia”, in John Whittier Treat (ed.), Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (Richmond, Surrey, 1996), 181. 5 For discussions of whether this inuence should be understood as a hangover of colonialism, see Ping-hui Liao, “Image Consumption and Trans-local Discursive Practice: Decoding Advertisements in the Taipei MRT Mall”, Postcolonial Studies 6/2 (2003), 170.

the scope of the enquiry

17

popular idols (aidoru/ouxiang), musical extravaganzas, martial arts lms, soap operas, advertisements, language lessons, romantic ction, décor, fashion, design, and leisure pursuits are consumed hungrily within this domain—and are aggressively marketed by local middlemen.6 The rage for Japan is embodied in most passionate fashion by the harizu, a tribe who religiously ape everything Japanese from the latest platform shoes to the modish kissaten (coffee shop) and karaoke lifestyle.7 Recent developments suggest, moreover, that this cultural trafc is far from uni-directional. In particular, the success of Taiwanese lmmakers such as Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Hou Hsiao-hsien has sparked something of a Taiwan vogue among fashionable young Japanese whose foreign tastes extend beyond the offerings of Western mass culture.8 According to a recent report in the Ziyou shibao, this is a ‘covert subculture’ ( yinxing de ciwenhua) that exists alongside the more mainstream tendency to venerate the West (chongyang),9 and it consists of a passion for Taiwanese lm, puppet theatre, Mandarin language schools, and culinary culture.10 In addition to ocking to Taiwan, many of the hataizu— as they are known—engage in Taiwanophilia at home, frequenting the Taiwanese teashops that now do a busy trade in Tokyo’s Shinjuku and

6 Indeed, such is the kinetic nature of this cultural trafc that the consumption of Japanese popular culture across East Asia is now emerging as a distinct eld of academic study. Perhaps the leading light of this new scholarly domain is Koichi Iwabuchi, whose recent work explores the phenomenon in all its dimensions. See Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization. Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham and London, 2002), particularly pages 121–57. 7 Other examples of Japanophilia include the vogues for ramen noodles and ‘Hello Kitty’ (kaidi mao)—the feline protagonist of a popular Japanese anime—that have swept Taiwan in recent years. For the latter, see Yu-fen Kuo, “Consuming Differences: ‘Hello Kitty’ and the Identity Crisis in Taiwan”, Postcolonial Studies 6/2 (2003), 175–89. 8 Whilst Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang were the initial draw, the turn of the century has seen this cinematic enthusiasm expand to encompass lms such as Lin Zhengsheng’s Tianma chafang (March of Happiness, 1999), Zhang Zhiyong’s Shahe beige (Lament of the Sand River, 2000)—and Yang’s Yi yi (A One and a Two, 2000)—all of which enjoyed reasonable runs in Japan movie theaters. 9 See http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2001/new/jul/24/life/fashion-2.htm, accessed September 26, 2004. 10 Popular foods include xiaolongbao (small steamed meat-lled buns), chou doufu (stinky tofu), luroufan (spicy ground meat on rice), danzi mian (Tainan-style noodles), and, of course, tea of different varieties. Amongst the most notable representatives of the selftermed hataizu (typically pronounced in Chinese) is Watanabe Marina, a media celebrity whose book Marina no tabibukure—tawawa Taiwan (Marina’s Food-Finding Trip—Taiwan’s Rich Pickings, 1999), an epicure’s guide to Taiwan, was reprinted four times in a single month in 1999.

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Shibuya districts, and attending Taiwanese lm fairs.11 Just as relevant, moreover, is the fashion for Taiwan among modish Hong Kongers, many of whom y to Taipei for a weekend of culture and gastronomy. Snacks in the night markets, hysterical electioneering, the mini-theatre movement (xiaojuchang yundong), Eslite’s bookstores, and the opportunity to walk the streets of ‘Hou Hsiao-hsien’s city’ are some of the draws for Hong Kong’s ‘Taiwan-lovers’ (aihao Taiwanzhe). And if we bring South Korea into the equation, this sense of a complex cultural circuitry grows still stronger. In Taiwan, the ‘Japan-worship’ (chong-Ri ) that dominated the media scene from the mid-1990s has recently yielded some ground to a craze for all things Korean (chong-Han), as kimchee and subtitled teen TV dramas have acquired new devotees on the island. A urry of cultural exchange and interchange between Japan and Korea completes the triangle, from the Japanese anime and manga that occupy as much as 80% of the Korean market share to the ever-growing presence commanded in Japan by Korean stars such as Bae Yong-joon, the photogenic idol whose simpatico appeal has struck a chord with many Japanese women. Just as importantly, this intensive cultural interaction is not simply restricted to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but enfolds a range of other East Asian locales and nation-states in its sweep. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Japan remains the clear market leader, and critics such as Leo Ching have drawn attention to its role as chief disseminator of cultural and consumer inuence right across the NIEs (Newly Industrialized Economies) of East Asia.12 Yet at the same time, China commentators have also noted the inux of so-called Gangtai ( Japan-inuenced Hong Kong and Taiwanese) popular culture into the cosmopolitan coastal 11 Not all this cultural interchange is of a positive nature, however, as is shown by the uproar that accompanied the publication in Taiwan of Shin gômanizumu sengen. Taiwan ron (A New Declaration of Arrogance. On Taiwan), a history of modern Taiwan in comic book format by the controversial right-wing cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori. Kobayashi made his name in a series of manga that explore issues of Japanese colonialism and war guilt from a highly revisionist perspective, and in Taiwan ron, he exploits recent Japanese interest in its former colony to carry out a contentious re-writing of the island’s history and cultural identity. Structured around ‘interviews’ with Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shuibian, the book stresses the persistence of a Japanese spirit in Taiwan’s ruling structure, and is distinctly neo-imperialist in tone. Taiwanese readers were particularly incensed by Kobayashi’s claims that the Taiwanese comfort women ‘volunteered’ their services to the imperial army. See Kobayashi Yoshinori, Shin gômanizumu sengen. Taiwan ron (A New Declaration of Arrogance. On Taiwan) (Tokyo, 2000). 12 See Ching, op. cit. For analyses of Japan’s role in East Asian integration from an environmental, human rights, and international relations perspective, see the essays collected in S. Javed Maswood (ed.), Japan and East Asian Regionalism (London, 2001).

the scope of the enquiry

19

hubs of the post-Mao mainland.13 If not quite a chain of cultural command, what we observe here can justiably be called a conveyor belt of media and other commodities that stretches right across the region. The result, as Thomas Gold has noted, is that the cultural products circulating in Japan and South Korea are more or less identical (apart from language) to those consumed in Taiwan, Hong Kong and, increasingly, mainland China.14 It is, of course, tempting to herald all this as the dawn of a new era, in which communality replaces the hostilities of the past for the sake of an overriding consumerist ethic. Certainly, it is undeniable that teenage Taiwanese followers of Japanophilia display scant concern for the island’s history of colonial subjugation, just as their entrepreneurial compatriots who set up karaoke bars in Guangdong and Fujian are now crossing the former cold-war battle lines without a backward glance.15 This boom in culture as business across East Asia is best understood as one strand within a more complex regional network which draws these separate national entities into a web of interaction, even international integration.16 Collectively, this brisk cultural and economic trade suggests that a new cultural axis is emerging, which pivots on the urban

13 See Thomas Gold, “‘Go with your feelings’: Hong Kong and Taiwan popular culture in Greater China”, The China Quarterly 136 (1993), 907–25; Geremie Barmé, In the Red. On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York, 1999), 122–7, and 219–24; Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis”, in Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (eds.), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York, 1998), 287–319. 14 See Gold, op. cit., 913. This circulation of cultural products does not always proceed smoothly, however. A case in point is the recent proscription in mainland China of the Taiwanese soap opera, Meteor Garden (Liuxing huayuan) which, despite being a huge hit across the rest of East and South East Asia, was vetoed on the grounds of the deleterious effect it would have on mainland youth. After all, as Harry Harding has observed, the popular Chinese culture “produced outside the mainland is primarily individualistic, materialistic or even hedonistic in character”. See Harding, “The Concept of Greater China: Themes, Variations and Reservations”, The China Quarterly 136 (1993), 676. 15 As Lynn White and Li Cheng have noted, the role of Guangdong as an ‘alloy culture’ (hejin wenhua) or ‘window culture’ (chuangkou wenhua) is key here. They quote the claim of the mainland scholar Wu Ying that “Hainan is Taiwanized, Shenzhen is Hongkongized, Guangdong is Shenzhenized, and the whole country is Guangdongized”. See White and Li, “China Coast Identities: Regional, National, and Global”, in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim (eds.), China’s Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, 1993), 181–2. 16 Any discussion of international integration in East Asia must, of course, engage with the recent discourses on Greater China (dazhonghua) and Cultural China. For treatments of both, see Harding, op. cit.; and Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center”, in Tu Wei-ming (ed.), The Living Tree (Stanford, 1994), 1–34.

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centers of Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and the Eastern seaboard of mainland China. Scholars are now beginning to claim the global status of cities such as Tokyo,17 Hong Kong, and even Taipei;18 and in ways that are commensurate with such a status, these sophisticated metropoles have become new centers of intellectual and cultural production, generating distinct forms of literature, lm, print media, and popular culture. Still more signicantly, these new ‘cultural ecumenes’ interact intensively, even pre-eminently, with one another, rather than with the Western world. This common praxis, although it is inuenced by American mass culture, remains nonetheless distinctively regional in tone, management, and constituency. Insofar as this praxis is of recent origin, its direct effects can best be discerned in ctional works from Japan and Taiwan that were written towards the end of the thirty-year period considered in this book.19 Yet despite its recent advent, this burgeoning regionalism traces its genesis back to conditions that are the stuff of all the texts analyzed here. American geopolitical hegemony in the Pacic, shifts in kinship structure and meaning, and rampant consumerism—the themes of the three chapters that follow—have each been instrumental in creating this new regional axis. And as this regionalism continues to spread and proliferate, the need for panoptic studies of East Asian literature and culture will correspondingly intensify. All in all, it seems reasonable to suggest that—at the very least—the future of East Asian comparative literature lies in the exploration of the literary products that are generated and consumed within this nascent zone of inuence, investment and interaction. An intriguing case study for this contention can be found in the panAsian vogue for contemporary Japanese writing that has emerged since the early 1990s. Here, Japanophilia takes the form of an avid appetite for the works of Yoshimoto Banana, Yamada Eimi, and—most prominently—Murakami Haruki, who is the best-selling translated author in 17 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, “The Global City”, in Susan S. Fainstein and Scott Campbell (eds.), Readings in Urban Theory (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 61–71. 18 Leo Ou-fan Lee has recently referred to Taipei as an ‘international metropolis’ ( guoji daduhui). See Lee, Dushi manyouzhe. Wenhua guancha (The Flâneur in the City. Reections on Urban Culture) (Hong Kong, 2002), 21. 19 Recent Taiwanese texts which explore Japanese cultural inuence include Zhu Tianwen’s short stories “Chai Shifu” (“Master Chai”) and “Hong meigui hujiao ni” (“Red Rose is Calling You”), collected in her anthology Shijimo de huali (Fin-de-siècle Splendor) (Taipei, 1990); and Zhu Tianxin’s more recent novel Gudu (Ancient Capitals) (Taipei, 1997).

the scope of the enquiry

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Taiwan,20 and enjoys a similarly cult following in South Korea, where 50 volumes of his work have appeared in translation, including novels, short stories, travel writings, and essays. In more recent years, Murakami has even inltrated the Chinese market, and young urbanites in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing now read Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood, Nuowei de senlin in Chinese) alongside Harry Potter and business self-help books. Just as pertinently, the Murakami phenomenon has spawned a rash of imitators and interpreters—the former jumping on the bandwagon of the author’s success, and the latter striving to dissect the allure of the all-conquering Murakami brand.21 At the core of this impressive allure, it seems reasonable to suggest, is the transnational yet recognizably East Asian persona who inhabits many of Murakami’s texts—and who appeals to the desire for a transregional identity shared by many East Asian consumers. Unlike Japan’s most prominent literary exports of earlier years—Kawabata Yasunari and Mishima Yukio—who in their very different ways fetishized notions of the ‘Japanese spirit’ (Yamatodamashii), Murakami goes some way towards de-nationalizing notions of Japanese identity. Consumer culture is the major conduit through which this is accomplished. Murakami’s protagonists listen to American music, travel to Europe, eat Chinese food, watch Japanese TV dramas—and thereby strike a chord with their newly afuent counterparts across East Asia who ingest a similarly varied consumer diet. Indeed, although Hollywood and MTV remain staple fare, Murakami and his ‘children’—as the writer’s impersonators are sometimes known—offset these Western borrowings with a rm rootedness in popular culture as it is produced and pursued across the East Asian zone. The Murakami phenomenon, both in the scope of its appeal and the inuence it has exerted, suggests that a new kind of literary space is opening up in East Asia—one in which both writing and reading can bring membership of an imagined community that encompasses large tracts of the region. And the more interactive this new literary space becomes, the more

20

See Shao Yujuan, “Kuaguo wenhua shangpin xianxing ji: cong Cunshang Chunshu yu harizu tan shangpin lianwu yu zhuti jiushu” (“Transnational Cultural Commodities: A Discussion of Commodity Fetishism and the Redemption of the Subject from the Perspective of Murakami Haruki and the Japanophiles”), Zhongwai wenxue (Chung-wai Literary Monthly) 29/7 (2000), 41–65. 21 Murakami imitators in Taiwan (sometimes dubbed ‘Cunshangliu zuojia’) include Chen Huilong and Cai Kangyong; and a useful example of the effort to interpret Murakami’s popularity can be found in the essays collected in Zheng Li’er (ed.), Yujian 100% Murakami (100% Murakami) (Taipei, 1998).

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it will require interpretive methodologies that view it on its own selfreferential terms rather than via continual recourse to the West and Euroamerican epistemologies. Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this new regionalism is the challenge it mounts to received wisdom in the West about the transition to modernity, the nature of postmodernity, and the genesis of so-called global culture. In recent years, critics and commentators have been quick to probe the interaction between global and local (glocalism), and to assess how new transnational forms are appropriated, assimilated, and adapted by the non-West. The local transformations that have occurred under this onslaught have become the focus of keen debate, as scholars ponder the possibility of a Japanese or Taiwanese postmodern, mull over issues of co-option and resistance, and assess the relative meanings of the Big Mac across time and space. Yet despite its professed interest in the West’s Others, much critical theorizing about modernity, postmodernity, and globalization remains prone to a glib and unreective bias. The rhetoric of universals continues to hold sway in some quarters; and the key terms that drive discourses of this kind belong to a cultural logic that traces its origins back to the West. As Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini have noted, many commentators tend to take as universal the culturally distinct experiences of America and Europe as they have made the transition from Fordism to exible accumulation or from modernity to postmodernity . . . [and to] refer to the confrontations between local cultural forms and the global forces associated with capitalism as the reworking of ‘multiple modernities’ . . . their approach seems to suggest that modernities in non-Western countries are only reactive formations or resistances to Euroamerican capitalism . . .22

Contemporary East Asia presents a challenge to this bias, and seems to offer clear proof that the modern, the postmodern, and the global are less successive and derivative synonyms for Euroamerican experience than polycentric phenomena that issue forth from multiple nodes of geopolitical, economic, and cultural power.23 22 Donald M. Nonini and Aihwa Ong, “Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity”, in Ong and Nonini, op. cit., 15. 23 As Leo Ching puts it, “the geopolitical and geocultural ‘interconnectedness’ generated by the process of globalism does not, and cannot, necessarily result in a homogeneity of a world space without differentiations. On the contrary, globalism has entailed a variation of supranational and subnational interactions that seem to have invented or reinforced more differences and multiplicities”. See Ching, op. cit., 190.

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Regionalism and ‘alternative modernities’: towards a fruitful intersection The links between this emerging pan-Asianism and the wider discourse of ‘alternative modernities’ are, therefore, both clear to see and potentially productive. In recent years, the notion that the non-West has brought forth paradigms of transformation that follow their own distinctive trajectories has garnered growing interest. Commentators have begun to acknowledge and elaborate in earnest Arjun Appadurai’s observation that modernity is “decisively at large, irregularly self-conscious, and unevenly experienced”.24 Many of them adopt what may usefully be termed an interventionist approach, in which the concept of alternative modernities is mobilized as a tool for challenging Western approaches to the pursuit and production of knowledge in academic institutions. In fact, common to virtually all discourses on alternative modernities is a mission to articulate regional histories, memories, identities, and agendas—and assert their difference from those of the dominant West. The aim here, naturally enough, is to challenge longstanding assumptions that the West is the sole crucible of modernity by painstakingly chronicling other journeys to the modern. S.N. Eisenstadt is exemplary here when he writes that . . . actual developments in modernizing societies have refuted the homogenizing and hegemonic assumptions of [the] Western program of modernity. While a general trend towards structural differentiation developed across a range of institutions in most of these societies . . . the ways in which these arenas were dened and organized varied greatly, in different periods of their development, giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns. Such patterns were distinctively modern, though greatly inuenced by specic cultural premises, traditions, and historical experiences.25

In many ways, the present book sits squarely within this discursive framework. It proceeds from the notion that modernities in Japan and Taiwan are composed of deep and multiple genealogies that owe only

24 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1998), 3. 25 S.N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities”, in Daedalus 129/1 (2000), 1–2. Homi Bhabha, meanwhile, argues for the intervention that postcoloniality offers into theories of modernity in “Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity” in his The Location of Culture (London and New York, 1994), 236–56.

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a partial debt to the Western model, and further explores the relationship between these modernities and the processes of literary narrative. Yet certain pitfalls await the study of modernities in the non-Western world. Chief among these is the deep structural importance accorded to the West within these scholarly discourses, in spite of (or perhaps, indeed, because of ) their professed mission to upset old hierarchies. To be more precise, many studies of alternative modernities still operate on the familiar Occidental-Oriental axis.26 And as a result, they remain locked in a circuit of logic that continually measures local experiences against those of the West even at the very moment when difference is being most loudly proclaimed.27 Regardless of whether cross-cultural parallels are drawn or denied, the integral process of comparison tends to operate between the two opposing vectors of this old axis; and so long as the West remains the nal referent in this way, its hegemonic status, far from being threatened, is paradoxically reafrmed. A notable example of this tendency can be found in the theories of ‘Japanese-style capitalism’ that began to proliferate during the high bubble era. Such theories turned on the notion that Japan’s miracle economy was a unique edice, propped up vertically by the so-called ‘three pillars’—big business, the bureaucracy, and the LDP—and given lateral support by business practices such as lifetime employment (shûshin koyô), the seniority-based wage system (nenkô joretsu seido), and enterprise unionism (kigyônai kumiai). The result was a model of neo-mercantilism that succeeded in nudging the old European nations out of the way and made Japan the world’s second largest economy only three short decades after disastrous defeat and surrender. The ‘art of Japanese management’ rapidly became business lore, practiced and preached far beyond Japan’s shores as an ‘alternative modernity’ that not only differed from the Western model but seemed on the verge of beating the latter at its own game. Empowering as the discourse of Japanese capitalism might seem, however, its various rhetorical ourishes belie a mode of apprehending otherness that seeks less to illuminate than to dene in mastering terms. Quite apart from the fact that ‘learning from Japan’ 26 An inammatory variation on this theme is the recent tendency of politicians—on both sides—to pit Islamic fundamentalism against US neo-imperialism in a crude Jihad versus McDonalds formula. For a more measured approach, see Nilufer Gole, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities”, in Daedalus 129/1 (2000), 91–117. 27 Eisenstadt makes this point explicitly when he observes that “Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others”. See Eisenstadt, op. cit., 3.

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was predicated on the pragmatic notion of ‘know thine enemy’,28 and was embraced largely as a means of halting the Japanese juggernaut in its tracks, the key problem with interpretations of this ‘alternative modernity’ is that they tend to proceed on the assumption of a baseline Western prototype from which Japan ‘diverges’—albeit with some considerable success. Studies of Japanese-style capitalism, even those by such weighty Japanologists as Ezra Vogel, typically operate on these unquestioned principles of prototype and divergence.29 And although Japan’s post-Meiji borrowings from the West lend this view some credibility, the fact remains that the Japanese experience is systemically shortchanged by an interpretive mode that persists in reading East in terms of West. The strategies of othering that shape discourses of this kind, while initially useful as a means of gaining purchase on difference, can all too quickly retreat into a kind of revamped Orientalism that reinforces the West’s ideas about itself far more than it reveals East Asian realities.30 By contrast, therefore, the recent academic discourse that links patterns of modernity in the East Asian region to so-called ‘Asian values’ seems at rst sight to present itself as a more fruitful intersection between the discursive terrains of regionalism and alternative modernities. Asia, and its values, are the stated focus here; and this notion of a self-contained regional bloc that is more or less unied in moral temperament promises the possibility of theories about non-Western modernity that proceed more condently on their own terms. Although this discourse

28 According to Harootunian and Sakai, the origins of this dictum in area studies can be traced back to WWII, when prociency in the tongues of the enemy was required for military interrogations and “to secure the necessary data to carry on a successful war”. See Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai, “Dialogue. Japan Studies and Cultural Studies”, positions 7/2 (1999), 596–7. 29 As Naoki Sakai has observed, this principle is by no means restricted to Western commentators, but also underlies that seemingly most Japanese of discourses, the Nihonjinron: “It is no accident that the discourse on Japanese uniqueness (Nihonjinron) mentions innumerable cases of Japan’s difference from the West, thereby dening Japan’s identity in terms of deviations from the West. Its insistence on Japan’s peculiarity and difference from the West embodies a nagging urge to see the self from the viewpoint of the other. But this is nothing but the positing of Japan’s identity in Western terms which in return establishes the centrality of the West as the universal point of reference”. See Sakai, “Modernity and its Critique: the Problem of Universalism and Particularism”, in Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian (eds.), Postmodernism and Japan (Durham N.C., 1989), 105. 30 Predictably enough, these selfsame principles of ‘Japanese management’ were gleefully trotted out by commentators in the Western media as the culprits behind Japan’s downfall after the bubble eventually burst.

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adheres by and large to the standard Western postwar formula for technocratic progress, it seeks principally to claim the uniqueness of East Asian experience through a triumphalist invocation of homegrown, region-wide values. Derived very loosely from the tenets of Confucianism, these values can broadly be enumerated as paternalistic government, a strong and stable family unit, loyalty to elders, commitment to education, social civility, a disciplined work ethic, frugality, high savings, home ownership, and a tendency towards clean living. According to champions of this discourse, these core values work to mediate Westernstyle development at the local level; and the social, political, economic and cultural formations that result collectively constitute an ‘alternative vision of modernity’. As Tu Wei-ming, a major spokesman for this view, puts it The broad picture that emerges . . . is, in Jürgen Habermas’s expression, a lifeworld, signicantly different from our own in the West . . . and yet modern in every sense of the word. Once we begin to acknowledge the compatibility of a market economy and an authoritarian state, recognize the centrality of family virtues to social solidarity, appreciate the fruitful interplay between group consensus and personal independence, construct ideas of civil society based on indigenous categories, and employ new conceptual apparatuses such as network capitalism to understand a different kind of economic dynamics, we are well on our way to an alternative vision of modernity.31

Although much of the content of this passage is insightful—and its surface logic persuasive—in the nal analysis, Tu Wei-ming’s mission statement does little more than illustrate in still more eloquent terms the coercive circuit of logic described above. A preoccupation with dening East Asian modernity in contradistinction to that of the West, whilst rhetorically coherent, robs this ‘vision’ of much of its counterhegemonic force at the deeper epistemological level—which remains structured along familiar East/West lines. Indeed, at the very moment that this discourse declares itself to be challenging the Western prototype, it is, in fact, tacitly deferring to it; and by making the West the signicant other of East Asia, it perpetuates a perceptual mode that is as old as imperial conquest itself. Despite its rooted regionalism, the ‘Asian values’ discourse is fundamentally at one with the vogue for ‘learning from Japan’ mentioned earlier, since both are predicated on compari31 Tu Wei-ming, “Introduction”, in Tu Wei-ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 7.

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son with the West for their very existence as discursive entities. And as Ashis Nandy has observed, this process of comparison all too readily descends into a kind of kneejerk one-upmanship. In his words, it is essential that we . . . jettison the nineteenth-century evangelist legacy of comparative studies which offsets the practices of one civilization against the philosophical or normative concerns of another. Colonial literature is full of comparisons between the obscenities of the caste system in practice in South Asia and the superior humanistic values of Europe articulated in the Biblical texts or, for that matter, even in the rules of cricket. In reaction, many defensive Indians compared the moral universe of the Vedas and the Upanishads with the violence, greed and ruthless statecraft practiced by the Europeans in the Southern world, to establish the moral bankruptcy of the West. The time has come to take a less reactive position, one that will allow us to enrich ourselves through a cultural conversation of equals.32

More damaging still, perhaps, than this “reactive position” is the way in which an almost defensive need to demonstrate absolute difference from the West can on occasion cause the proponents of the Asian way to step over the line into self-Orientalization. This is a rich irony indeed, given the proud liberatory fanfare which typically attends the ‘Asian values’ manifesto. In fact, it is surely fair to observe that the moralizing, even sanctimonious, tone that can often inform this discourse stems from the imperative to achieve a perceptible distance (ideological, political, cultural) from the West. And this need for distance reects a basic ontological insecurity that only serves to underscore the West’s ongoing dominance—at the same time, of course, as making the non-West party to precisely those same processes of othering that Orientalists have been using to ‘understand’ the ‘East’ for centuries. In other words, so long as the intersection between ‘alternative modernities’ and ‘regionalism’ derives it most basic intellectual energy from the process of contrast and comparison with the West, these habits of tacit or unconscious deference will remain. Surely, a more effective strategy is to gain a secure distance from the powerful gravitational eld of the West in a lateral move that safeguards such study against having 32 Ashis Nandy, “A New Cosmopolitanism. Towards a Dialogue of Asian Civilizations”, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London and New York, 1998), 147. Ien Ang makes a related point in the same volume when she writes, “In such discursive assaults (on the injustices of Eurocentrism) a militant, self-righteous, hyper-oppositional stance serves only to deate itself through the unproductive demonization of a grandiose, abstract, Euro-Other”. See Ang, “Eurocentric Reluctance. Notes for a Cultural Studies of ‘The New Europe’ ”, in Kuan-Hsing Chen, op. cit., 87.

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its energies absorbed, neutralized, or deected. Exploring alternative modernities within East Asia on their own self-sufcient terms is one solid means of ensuring that these energies remain better intact. This is not to say, of course, that Western theories and methodologies are naively eschewed in this book—if such a move were practical or even possible. Rather, an intraregional study of the kind undertaken here allows the basic structure upon which analysis operates to remain rmly grounded in East Asia, even when Western theory is referenced or deployed. In other words, the analytical thrust is orientated less towards ‘proving’ difference than towards using comparative practice as a means of illumination within the regional frame. In methodological terms alone, this approach constitutes a clear break from Western-dominated deadlock; but in its application, too, it proves effective as a means of unsettling old habits of thinking. This is chiey because a genuine intersection between alternative modernities and regionalism brings a set of discoveries that, in the very nature of things, is inaccessible to scholars who continue to make the West their stated or implied discursive antagonist. Such an approach can track down inuences, uncover similarities, and reveal grander patterns within culturally proximate nations whose transitions to the modern have proceeded, if not in tandem, then in highly analogous ways. At the very least, such ndings work to illuminate East Asian experience from novel and counter-intuitive angles. At best, they can shed light on features that might otherwise be occluded altogether in scholarly elds which sometimes lean towards the parochial. This is not to say that the objective here is to nesse local difference, still less to impose some totalizing schema on Japanese and Taiwanese modernities in their complex multiplicity. Yet at the same time as it resists Western dominance, an intraregional approach to East Asia can also assist in managing some of the coercive tendencies harbored within the very constructs of ‘nation’ and ‘national culture’—particularly at a time when ethnonationalisms in the region are on the rise and cultural producers often play to their agenda. Even today, exclusionary notions of ‘uniqueness’ still insinuate their way into East Asian studies, and the regional episteme is perhaps our best ballast against the conscious or unconscious downplaying of broader afnities in favor of a potentially divisive particularism.

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Literary studies and the resistance to regionalism The tenacious grip still exercised by the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘national culture’ becomes transparently clear when we examine the state of the comparative eld in modern East Asian literary studies. This eld, which in all expectation should be the natural home of the regional approach to literature, tends instead to play host to a set of comparative practices that work a narrow furrow between the respective nation-states of East Asia and the distant West. The regional episteme seems to have impacted scarcely at all on East Asian comparative literature, despite the growing enthusiasm with which it has been embraced in other disciplines. And in a lacuna that is almost mystifying, sustained comparativism between modern and contemporary East Asian literatures remains scarce to the point of non-existence. Yet despite this lack of enthusiasm for the broader picture, there can be little brooking the argument that East Asian literature requires a comparative practice that allows for the kind of insights that cognate scholarly modes have been providing for the region’s economic, political, and socio-anthropological life for some years now. And this obvious truism immediately begs the question: why is such a comparative practice so conspicuous by its absence, especially since such a strategy is an almost self-evident strike against the Euroamerican chauvinism against which so many East Asianists rail? The taxonomical and territorial tendencies of Sinology and Japanology are, of course, notorious—whatever the discipline. For Western scholars in these elds, it is doubtless the long, hard years of language acquisition that breed habits of intellectual ringfencing and insularity. These habits are further exacerbated by the pedagogy of language learning, which tends to train Asian studies students in the language of a particular nation rather than the literature and culture of a region. For scholars native to East Asia, meanwhile, it is perhaps the tense combination of political barriers and historical grudges that has rendered the theory and practice of regionalism problematic until very recent times. Yet as I have already suggested, scholars outside the domain of literary studies have been responding to the challenge of the new East Asian episteme with gusto over the last fteen years or more, and it is largely scholars in the contemporary literary eld who seem content to continue business as usual. Perhaps, therefore, literature and literary studies are themselves part of the problem. For a start, literature’s intimate links with philology— the philosophical study of language—inevitably tie the literary critic closer to the language in which he works. Literature’s relationship to the

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linguistic, most particularly in the form of so-called ‘literary language’, involves an attunement on the part of the scholar to rhythms, cadences, and word-play—to the process whereby thought is transgured into word—which can forge a quasi-emotional attachment to language that nds few parallels in the harder social sciences. And when the languages in question are as rich and complex as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, it is easy to see how the nature of the work itself might produce scholars who, in Pauline Yu’s words, are “content to remain within the safe connes of a single dynasty, genre or botanical species”.33 For certain scholars such as these, the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and pluralistic thrust of comparativism is unsettling, if not downright heretical; and insofar as they view the project of intraregional comparative literature as a threat to the old taxonomies of learning, such scholars may even muster their considerable intellectual and institutional resources to resist it. Either way, an attachment to literature-as-language is arguably one explanation for why even scholars who are well versed in more than one East Asian language seem reluctant to deploy their skills within a wider regional frame. Yet in many ways, the evidence of history refutes this notion that East Asian literatures and intraregional comparativism are inherently incompatible. Indeed, the current resistance to regionalism takes on something of an ironic cast when we consider the long and vibrant tradition of local literary interchange that has enriched the East Asian region throughout its history. Whilst much of this trafc traveled centrifugally from China to its cultural satellites during the pre-modern period, the legacy of this past—as I shall discuss in detail later—is an obvious cultural congruence in East Asia. This has proved a boon to pre-modern comparatists and allowed intraregional comparison within the classical branch of the discipline to prosper.34 What is more, Japan’s embrace of change from the Meiji Restoration onwards led to a reversal of this 33 Pauline Yu, “Alienation Effects: Comparative Literature and the Chinese Tradition”, in Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (eds.), The Comparative Perspective on Literature (Ithaca and London, 1998), 162. 34 A recent example is Hamase Hiroshi, Nichi, Chû, Chô no hikaku bungaku kenkyû ( Japanese, Chinese and Korean Comparative Literature Studies) (Osaka, 1989). This volume contains essays ranging from a discussion of the inuence of Chinese poetics on Fujiwara Hamanari’s Kakyô Hyôshiki (A Formulary for Verse Based on the Canons of Poetry) to an analysis of the genealogy of Japanese, Chinese and Korean poems composed at the hour of death. For an English-language study—of which there are markedly fewer—see Dominic Cheung, “The ‘Ghost-wife’ Theme in China, Japan, and Korea: New Tales of the Trimmed Lamp, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, and New Tales of the Golden Carp”, Tamkang Review 15/1–4 (1984–5), 151–74.

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earlier uni-directionality, and prompted elite Chinese and Taiwanese to study literature and literary practice, amongst other things, from their near neighbor.35 Disappointingly, however, this heritage of comparativism and cultural interchange has not generated the lively tradition of intraregional comparative study in modern literature that one might expect.36 Instead, comparatists in East Asia and abroad have axiomatically looked westwards, and seldom queried either the appropriateness of the binary East-West logic that both governs and problematizes so much of their work—or the lost opportunities that this logic has cost them. As John Deeney aptly puts it: One of the strangest things in the modern history of comparative literature studies is that Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese should have persisted in traveling so far aeld Westward when there are acres of more fruitful comparative work to be found in their own backyards.37

Perhaps, therefore, we need to turn to questions of literary production and reception in the modern era to uncover a more satisfactory 35 For a study of the inuence of Japanese literature on Lu Xun, the most prominent Chinese intellectual to study in Japan, see Cheng Ma, Goutong yu gengxin: Lu Xun yu Riben wenxue guanxi fawei (Linkage and Renewal: Exploring Lu Xun’s Relationship with Japanese Literature) (Beijing, 1990). In the case of Taiwan, Japan’s role as modern literary mentor was, of course, complicated by its harsh colonial policies. As the occupation progressed, however, and the colonial administration increasingly turned its attentions to educating Taiwanese in the language and culture of the occupiers, large numbers of Taiwanese went to study at higher institutions in Japan. Some encountered well-known Japanese writers there, whose inuence then made itself felt in the burgeoning new literature movement (Taiwan xin wenxue yundong). Moreover, a number of key writers during the Japanese colonial period, such as Yang Kui and Wang Changxiong, found that their resentment of the colonial authorities co-existed with feelings of admiration and attachment towards Japanese culture—which took on the role of lodestar once played by China. For detailed discussions, see Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, “Taiwanese New Literature and the Colonial Context: A Historical Survey”, in Murray Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan. A New History (Armonk, 1999), 261–74; and Angelina C. Yee, “Constructing a Nativist Consciousness: Taiwan Literature in the Twentieth Century”, in Richard Louis Edmonds and Steven M. Goldstein (eds.), Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View (Cambridge, 2001), 83–101. 36 Rare exceptions to this rule include Lucien Miller, “Occidentalism and Alterity: Native Self and Foreign Other in Chen Yingzhen and Shûsaku Endô”, Chinoperl Papers 20–22 (1997–99), 197–218; Hiroko Willcock, “Meiji Japan and the Late Qing Political Novel, Journal of Oriental Studies, 33/1 (1997), 1–28; Kurt W. Radtke, “Concepts in Literary Criticism: Problems in the Comparative Study of Japanese, Chinese and Western Literature”, Oriens Extremus, 28/1 (1981), 107–23; Kurt W. Radtke, “Chaos and Coherence? Satô Haruo’s Novel Den’en no Yû’utsu and Yu Dafu’s trilogy Chenlun”, in Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti, and Massimo Raveri (eds.), Rethinking Japan (New York,1985), 86–101; and Jennifer Putin, Yu Dafu: Explorations of the Self, unpublished doctoral thesis (Oxford, 1992), which also examines the inuence of Satô on Yu Dafu. 37 John Deeney, “Chinese-Eastern Comparative Literature Studies: The Case of China-Korea-Japan”, Tamkang Review 15/1–4 (1984–5), 187.

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explanation for the stunted growth of regionalism in contemporary East Asian literary studies. To be more precise, at least part of the answer may lie in the twinning of literature with the national imaginary that has recurred across modernizing East Asian over the last century or so, and the emotional investments in the notion of ‘national literature’ that this linkage has generated. Ever since Tôkai Sanshi and Liang Qichao began to tout the merits of the political novel as a means of mass moral edication, literature has been linked with national rejuvenation in the East Asian cultural imagination. This linkage grew tighter over time, as Japan, China, and Korea each forged a ‘modern language for literature’ (genbun-itchi, baihua, hangul), which a modern literary ‘grandfather’ (Futabatei Shimei, Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu) used to pen the ‘rst modern novel/short story’ (Ukigumo, “Kuangren riji”, Mujong). This was then duly read by the ‘new modern citizen’ before being ultimately enshrined as a metaphor of sorts for the ‘new modern nation’. Rather than explore these parallel processes—and what they reveal about the emergence of a ‘modern East Asian literature’—in broad and lateral ways, it is the linear relationship between writing and specic nationhoods that successive generations of literary producers and commentators have foregrounded. And the inevitable result of this seamless connection between literature and the imagined community has been an approach to the literary endeavor which is steeped in ‘nation-ness’, from the ‘obsession with China’ diagnosed by C.T. Hsia as the malaise of modern Chinese writing to the Zen nationalism propounded in Kawabata Yasunari’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1968. Hsia’s critique notwithstanding, many critics both East Asian and Western have conspired with writers to propagate the legend and mystique of national literature. And in an academic context such as this, intraregional comparativism has scarcely ranked as a priority. Indeed, for some scholars, the notion of a regional literary practice is a straight betrayal of the cultural ‘uniqueness’ that drives their love for the subject; and although the issue of difference will always remain a pertinent one, a labored insistence on its sacrosanct status can all too easily start to smack of essentialism. In ways that recall Stephen Owen’s attack on the so-called banal translatability of Bei Dao’s Chinese poetry (its careful weeding out of any cultural markers which might ummox the untrained eye or force the insertion of an ungainly translator’s footnote),38 this kind of rationale implies that comparativism irons out all that is special 38

See Stephen Owen, “What is World Poetry: The Anxiety of Global Inuence”, New Republic (November 19, 1990), 28–32.

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and sacred about the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text, seeking instead to reduce East Asian literature to predictable cookie-cutter patterns. In many ways, intraregional comparativism is a clear assertion that the hard-won knowledge of China, Japan, or Korea specialists can be made to carry meaning outside the sequestered domains of elds which, in many cases, these same specialists have helped to dene and demarcate—sometimes over and against one another. Whilst for some such a notion is surely liberating, for others it represents a potential loss of ownership which must be resisted jealously. Lastly, and perhaps most signicantly, the regional approach must also contend with the formidable forces of Western academe—or, more precisely, the habitual indifference with which those forces greet the notion of non-Western literary study. As Yingjin Zhang puts it, Western theorists “have never ceased to astound China scholars with their undisguised Eurocentrism”,39 and his observation holds equally true for Japanologists, Indologists, South East Asianists, and scholars of the Near and Middle East. Such Eurocentrism is damaging precisely because it is undisguised, and—we can therefore assume—largely unabashed. Even in today’s world of postcolonial, postmodernist discourses, there is still insufcient recognition in many quarters that the preponderance of Western language and literature departments in Euroamerican academe is a disturbingly skewed reection of the contours of the contemporary world. Not surprisingly, this institutional bias shapes the ways in which comparativism is both pursued and received in universities across the board. Even on those rare occasions when East Asian comparative literature has managed to fence off some small space for itself within the Western academy, its presence has remained embarrassingly tokenistic, tolerated rather than enthusiastically endorsed. Over time, this very visual marginalization has led to a general perception that multicultural comparativism will win a Euroamerican audience only so long as one of its constituent parts is Western—a point to which we will shortly return.40 Given this complex set of pressures, it is perhaps less than surprising that regionalism has failed to prosper. 39 Yingjin Zhang, “Introduction. Engaging Chinese Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies”, in Yingjin Zhang (ed.), China in a Polycentric World (Stanford, 1998), 9. 40 Yet in a twist of irony, those few Euroamerican theorists who brave the West-East crossover and engage exclusively with East Asian texts are usually attacked for their presumptuousness. An example of this, as Yingjin Zhang also notes, is the telling case of Fredric Jameson and his attempts to interpret Lu Xun and Lao She without knowledge of Chinese. This is nothing less than the same process in reverse, with the East Asia specialists sometimes aggressively guarding their turf against perceived outsiders.

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chapter one Contemporary East Asian comparative literature: an embattled discipline

Unsurprising though it may be, it seems likely that this failure of the regional episteme accounts for many of the problems that East Asian comparative literature has encountered in establishing a secure niche for itself within the academy. It is, of course, worth recalling at this juncture that comparative literature has always struggled for space and denition—whatever its province. In a telling irony, perhaps the most damning criticism of the discipline was rst advanced by one of its foremost practitioners, René Wellek, who remarked in 1958 that “The most serious sign of the precarious state of our study is the fact that it has not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a specic methodology”.41 Yet such problems, endemic as they are, pale before the predicament of contemporary East Asian comparative literature: as many have noted, this is a eld beset by difculties. A closer look at this eld reveals, however, that virtually all of its difculties nd their ultimate point of origin in the almost exclusively East-West orientation that has dominated the practice of comparativism across the East Asian literary eld in recent years. This cognitive mode has privileged narrowly formalist rather than more inclusive contextual approaches to literary comparison, and has led to a comparative practice that reads Sôseki alongside Henry James, the Shanghai modernists in terms of European décadence, or South Korean poetry as ‘postmodern’—but only occasionally explores these literatures in connection with one another. And the sheer dominance of the West as an epistemological nexus means that comparativism of this kind tends to box the East Asian text into a position of almost inescapable marginalization. This marginalization becomes obvious when we examine the problems germane to East Asian comparativism, and its persistent East-West orientation, in greater detail. At rst sight, the East Asian comparative eld seems divided into two camps. The practitioners of old-school EastJameson’s most notorious contribution to East Asian studies is his theory of the ‘national allegory’, which he applies to Lu Xun’s “Kuangren riji” (“Diary of a Madman”, 1918) as well as other non-Western texts. Aijaz Ahmad’s riposte, published a year later, is particularly thoroughgoing; but sinologists such as Rey Chow have also quarreled with his interpretation. See Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital”, Social Text, 15 (1986), 65–88; Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’ ”, Social Text, 17 (1987), 3–25; and Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora (Bloomington, 1993), 109–10. 41 René Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative Literature”, in Stephen G. Nichols (ed.), Concepts of Criticism (New Haven and London, 1963), 282.

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West comparativism form one group, whilst the other is composed of a newer breed of comparatists who mobilize a range of Western theories in their efforts to demystify ‘Orientalized’ East Asian literary practice, draw it into the scholarly mainstream, and thus challenge the norms and forms of Eurocentrism. Up to a point, the divide between these two camps is as deep and emotive as any chasm created by the theory revolution; and in many ways, it exemplies the tendency whereby the fervor with which theory is embraced in some quarters is matched only by the visceral resistance that it encounters in others. Yet at the more pragmatic level of epistemological orientation, the two schools are fundamentally alike. Both look westwards for the materials and/or methods of their comparanda; and as the inevitable corollary to this, both nd themselves engaging in a comparative practice that must square up directly to the continuing hegemony of the Western philosophicoliterary system. Not surprisingly, East-West comparativism, whether old-school or new, often nds itself overpowered by this epistemological encounter. In all but the deftest of hands, it can end up either literally playing the role of comparative subaltern, or deferring in ways explicit or implicit to the wisdom and omniscience of Western philosophy. A closer look at both practices makes this problematic clear.

Old-school comparativism: a compromised practice Old-school East-West comparativism, whether it is practiced by East Asia specialists or by scholars of Western literatures, usually advances via a process of what we may call literary sleuthing. This mode of comparative work tracks inuences and traces parallels, eagerly seizing upon proofs that literary inspiration and practice can cross the bounds of time and space.42 Through this process, it seeks to create a literary commonwealth in which marginalized traditions, too, are permitted their place. Old-school East-West comparativism of this kind traces its history back

42 Useful examples of this kind of comparative approach are contained in William Tay, Ying-hsiung Chou, and Heh-hsiang Yuan (eds.), China and the West: Comparative Literature Studies (Hong Kong, 1980); and Yoshida Seiichi (ed.), Nihon kindai bungaku no hikaku bungakuteki kenkyû (Comparative Literary Studies in Modern Japanese Literature) (Tokyo, 1971). This latter volume typies the inuence-driven strategies of East-West comparativism, and traces the links between Nagai Kafû and Emile Zola, Tanizaki Junichirô and Oscar Wilde, Mori Ôgai and the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, Mishima Yukio and the Hellenistic spirit, and—perhaps inevitably—Endô Shûsaku and Catholicism.

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to the earliest days of the discipline, when utopian and universalizing notions of Weltliteratur were the stock-in-trade of the European comparatist. The Western ‘discovery’ of East Asian literature created whole new vistas for this global project, and texts from the Orient were mined for what they revealed about the apparent commensurability of genres, motifs, and imagery across the cultural divide. Yet tantalizing as the links between Elizabethan and Northern Song poetry may be, comparativism of this kind has always suffered under the sometimes insupportable burden of cultural difference. Difference problematizes the literary sleuthing referred to earlier, making it look more like inspired guesswork than genuine detection; and even when the effort pays off, the results of this kind of comparativism can still have a whiff of serendipity or the ‘one-off ’ about them. Indeed, the conundrum of cultural difference suggests one explanation for the marked prevalence of scholarly article and edited volume over full-length monograph in the eld of old-school East-West comparativism. Whilst dilettantism would be an unfair charge, this kind of comparative work sometimes has the feel of occasional music—well-made and diverting but lacking the methodology and objectives that would lift it beyond the merely contingent. All in all, the problems of difference are such that, as Pauline Yu has noted, they can even be used as a rationale for dismissing such study all together: The excuse, and it is a good one, is that the linguistic and cultural differences are so profound as to render futile or meaningless any attempts at serious comparative study.43

Yet perhaps more troubling still is the kind of scholarship that sometimes ensues when these problematics of difference are simply overridden. Or, to put things rather more plainly, there is a strong case for arguing that the ghost of Weltliteratur still haunts old-school East-West comparativism (although in forms more covert than its early Goethian manifestation); and its homogenizing drive does East Asian literature few favors. Indeed, despite its apparently inclusionist intentions, this mode of comparativism often reinforces more than it disrupts the center-periphery paradigm that continues to govern the West’s thinking about its literary Others. Problems of this kind are especially pronounced when scholars of the dominant Euroamerican tradition take up the East Asian text. In such studies, the Western text is typically made the de facto departure 43

Yu, op. cit., 162.

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point of analysis, whilst its East Asian comparator is scanned for its points of similarity with, or divergence from, this original benchmark.44 Where similarities are found, they furnish proofs of a ‘universal’ human condition that transcends temporal and territorial boundaries45—and yet which just happens to nd its rst manifestation in the West. Divergences, meanwhile, are left to do little more than cosily restate cultural difference. The precise nature of this difference remains, by and large, an extratextual concern to be pursued by the area specialist using his local expertise. It certainly falls outside the remit of the Western comparatist, whose quarry is the ‘bigger’ picture of literary universals and grand civilizational patterns. Up to a point, of course, there is a case for arguing that the Weltliteratur paradigm—despite its quintessentially European provenance and Eurocentric mindset—presents itself as a more valid prospect for twentieth-century texts, in which Occidental and Oriental inuences regularly commingle and literary interchange has become one of many currents within increasing global ow. Yet even when it is applied to the most recent of texts, this paradigm still tends to read ‘world’ in terms of ‘West’, and the mainstream text and its minority counterpart all too often stand in a subject-object relationship. This is by no means to say, however, that comparative work of this kind appeals only to those scholars who nd themselves occupying the dominant position in this critical liaison. On the contrary, and despite the fundamentally inequitable dynamic, old-school East-West comparativism exerts a lure over the

44 An essay by A. Owen Aldridge on Natsume Sôseki’s Kokoro provides an intriguing example of this tendency. In this piece, Aldridge undertakes a comparison between Kokoro and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, drawing out various structural and thematic parallels. Despite Aldridge’s perhaps justiable claim that Sôseki had read and been inuenced by Goethe’s earlier work, the general thrust of the essay is disturbing in that it consistently reads Kokoro in terms of Werther, whilst paying little attention to those aspects of the novel which mark it out denitively as a product of post-Meiji Japan. See Aldridge, “The Japanese Werther of the Twentieth Century”, in Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (eds.), The Comparative Perspective on Literature (Ithaca and London, 1998), 75–92. Terry Siu-han Yip’s study of the reception of Werther in China, on the other hand, dwells more on the ways in which writers such as Guo Morou and Zhang Yiping adapted the ideas they gleaned from Goethe to their own socio-cultural context. See Yip, “The Reception of Werther and the Rise of the Epistolary Novel in China”, Tamkang Review 22/1–4 (1991–2), 287–304. 45 As Susan Bassnett has observed of an earlier generation of comparatists—perhaps most notably François Jost—“the underlying assumption is that all cultural differences disappear when readers take up great works; art is seen as an instrument of universal harmony and the comparatist is one who facilitates the spread of that harmony”. See Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 3–4.

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other side of the comparative equation too. Indeed, for some comparatists in the East Asian eld (a place prone to territorialism and fetishized ‘uniqueness’, as has already been suggested), old-school comparativism remains the preferred option. After all, this tried-and-tested mode of scholarship keeps difference in the hands of the dedicated Orientalist, unlike a border-crossing regional approach which might well upset such notions of epistemological ownership. Ultimately, however, the end result of most old-school East-West comparativism is that East Asian literature suffers a double relegation, and is made complicit in a critical exercise that re-afrms the place of the West as fons et origo of literary inspiration, practice, and critique. And in an ironic twist, this ethnocentric illogicality is made all the more pernicious by the fact that its exponents often believe that they are striking out in the name of difference simply by considering minority texts in the rst place—whilst in reality, of course, their efforts merely conrm the ascendancy of the Western canon via an alternate route. Indeed, it is far too easy a step from all this to internalize—almost without conscious design—the belief that Western literature exists as the natural touchstone of quality, a belief which leads in its logical turn to an inevitable downgrading of the non-Western literary product. And as Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd observe in their analysis of minority discourse, this downgrading can in its own turn work as a convenient and entirely self-referential rationale for the oft-heard claim that “the objective grounds for marginalization can be read in the inadequacy or underdevelopment of ‘minority’ work”.46 This is a vicious circle indeed, and one made all the more insidious by the collaboration it has succeeded in eliciting from a good number of area specialists. In other words, then, old-school comparativism is compromised on two counts, which are at once separate and perniciously interlinked: the Eurocentrism with which it invites collusion, and the self-Orientalizing tendencies which a good many of its practitioners exhibit quite happily of their own accord. And it is precisely in this context of a doubly compromised comparative practice that Western theory has emerged as so seductive a proposition in recent years. It is surely no exaggeration to state that the advent of this vast body of new epistemologies has brought about a grand re-writing of the rules of comparativism in East Asian studies, a

46 Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Minority Discourse”, Cultural Critique 6 (Spring, 1987), 10.

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re-writing which seems to proffer the possibility of a comparativism free of compromise—on both counts.47

The theory conundrum: promise and pitfalls First and foremost, theory dangles the promise of escape from the Eurocentric deadlock outlined above, in which East Asian comparative literature nds itself forever shortchanged by the Occidental-Oriental paradigm. Theory allows for a new mode of comparativism that reads the East Asian text more readily on its own terms, and releases it from older practices that either falter on the grounds of cultural difference or cower before entrenched Western bias. At its best, this is a comparativism apparently unfreighted by the anxiety of inuence, the burden to prove authenticity, and the looming menace of unschooled Western value judgments. Just as crucially, if more pragmatically, theory is the rst language of the Euroamerican academy. It follows, therefore, that uency in it is a natural means through which to secure the East Asian comparatist a wider and more receptive external audience for his or her work. More subversively, the theory revolution offers East Asianists rich opportunities to counter Eurocentrism on its own epistemological turf and in its own epistemological language; and recent years have provided us with a number of nicely judged case studies of resistance on the ground which would make Foucault himself proud. Scholars regularly argue that theoretical engagements with East Asian texts are free to do with Western thought and philosophy what they wish, and they prove the point by reworking the insights of thinkers from Lacan to Lyotard in innovative, even counter-intuitive ways. As part of this same reexive process, theory also opens up myriad new vistas for the interpretation of literary East Asia, both comparative and otherwise, thus ‘rescuing’ the eld from the prescriptive reading habits of the past. The openly positivist tendencies that have characterized literary studies in the East Asian eld over many decades are well known. Assigned the task of ‘explaining’ Japanese or Chinese difference to Western students of the ‘Orient’, professional Japanologists and Sinologists have frequently turned to literature as a repository of hard information—albeit attractively attired in cultural garb—about matters 47 Pioneering examples of the use of theory can be found in John Deeney (ed.), Chinese-Western Comparative Literature. Theory and Strategy (Hong Kong, 1980).

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ranging from history and politics to society and anthropology. The long-standing, and ongoing, policy of using literary texts as tools for language pedagogy in East Asian studies departments in the West has contributed to this utilitarian bent and aura, as successive generations of Japan and China scholars have unconsciously imbibed the lesson that the text is an expedient means to some extraneous end. Far from being challenged by scholars and critics in East Asia itself, this utilitarian mode has intersected in comfortable ways with the tendencies towards empirical scholarship and biographism—manifested in forms as diverse as the shi-shôsetsu cult of personal authenticity and the Communist canonization of Lu Xun—that have long held sway in the study of literatures locally. Indeed, it is fair to assume that the readiness with which old-school comparativism takes to the East-West ‘literary sleuthing’ referred to earlier stems, at least in part, from a long familiarity with the notion of literary scholarship as something of a fact-nding mission. Few would dispute that theory has the potential to radicalize these reading practices in almost headily liberating ways—the most heady of all being the notion that the ‘reality’ which positivist critics hunt down in the literary text is nothing other than an effect of language. Relatedly, and just as importantly, theory-driven comparativism threatens to ring the nal death knell for the kind of literary scholarship that willingly sequesters itself in what Zhang Longxi has called the ‘cultural ghetto’, a place where scholars orientalize their specialties—or at the very least are happy to pursue them a long way from the academic mainstream. As Zhang succinctly puts it of Chinese literary studies, theory offers an opportunity for us to open up the self-enclosure of specialization and make the study of Chinese literature relevant to the interest and concerns of people outside the narrow circle of China specialists.48

And in recent years, many comparatists in East Asian studies have risen ably to this challenge, producing work which seeks in unprecedented ways to claim its place in the world beyond the raried climes of Sinolology, Japanology, and Korean studies. A useful case study is this regard is Yingjin Zhang’s edited volume China in a Polycentric World. The essays assembled in this collection mount an assault on old-school East-West comparativism that is both radical and suitably modulated in its use of 48 Zhang Longxi, Mighty Dichotomies: from Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), 125.

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Western theory, and aims specically to use these imported methodologies as a means of re-centering Chinese literary practice and positioning it squarely within the global eld. As the editor puts it, the focus is on [the] Chinese experience as inscribed in a variety of texts and practices in literature and culture . . . Subject to such a critical reading, the ‘Chineseness’ of these texts is historicized and becomes relational to the outside world.49

Throughout this volume, comparative practice operates as an admixture of Western theory and Chinese text; and the result, we are encouraged to believe, is a process whereby Chinese studies steps out of the past, and marginalized practices deploy the tools of the mainstream to reverse their minority status—thus bringing us neatly back to the revolt against Eurocentrism once again. Given the potential power of this two-pronged assault, it is less than surprising that recent years have witnessed a ood of theoretical engagements with East Asian texts, perhaps the most striking of which is the postmodernist wave which hit Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China in quick succession during the 1980s.50 Landmark volumes such as Postmodernism and Japan and its companion volume Postmodernism and China, both of which collate essays by scholars from the West and East Asia, testify to the speed and scope of this inux, and work as clear indices of the transguring effects that theory has wrought across the eld.51 All in all, theory in its ever-changing guises is revolutionizing the study of East Asian comparative literature, both locally and in the West, spawning articles, books, dedicated journals, and entire university departments.52 49 Yingjin Zhang, “Introduction. Engaging Chinese Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies”, in Yingjin Zhang, op. cit., 8. 50 For Japan, see Miyoshi and Harootunian, op. cit.; for Taiwan and mainland China, see Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (eds.), Postmodernism and China (Durham, N.C., 1997). 51 Equally stimulating are the essays collected in Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits (eds.), Reading East Asian Writing. The Limits of Theory (London and New York, 2003). This volume takes the application of theory a stage further by exploring it comparatively through engaged readings of Chinese and Japanese literature. 52 A signicant development here is the emergence of the Chinese school of comparative literature (Bijiao wenxue Zhongguo xuepai) during the 1970s. Although there is little consensus on the precise theoretical underpinnings of this school, its debt to the theory revolution is clear. For analyses, see John Deeney, “Modern Developments in Chinese-Western Comparative Literature Studies: A Golden Decade (1977–1987) for the ‘Chinese School’ ”, Tamkang Review 18/1–4 (1987–8), 39–64; and Chen Pengxiang, “Jianli bijiao wenxue Zhongguo xuepai de lilun he buzhou” (“Theories and Measures for Building the Chinese School of Comparative Literature”), Zhongwai wenxue 19/1 ( June, 1990), 103–21.

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Indeed, these developments attest in general terms to a shift from textto-text comparison to a mode of scholarship based on the theory-to-text paradigm that has occurred in every corner of the eld over the last couple of decades. And this shift, in its turn, bears upon one of the most striking, yet least remarked-upon, consequences of the theory revolution right across East Asian studies—namely that Western theory, thanks to its origins outside East Asia, has made at least nominal comparatists of all those who employ it in their work. This in itself is no matter for concern. On the contrary, it is perhaps more properly a cause for celebration, since the synoptic perspective inherent to comparativism can serve only to enrich a traditionally taxonomical eld such as ‘East Asia’. Yet despite all this, the need for caveats remains, and all the more so since the theory revolution has created these new constituencies of comparatists, regardless of whether they choose to classify themselves as such. The dangers that theory poses for the comparatist are, of course, almost as well known as its lures—and, in a gentle irony, the two are closely entwined. Predictably enough, the rst and most conspicuous problematic brings us straight back to the redoubtable inequities of East-West literary relations, and the real efcacy of theory as a tool for dismantling these old structures of knowledge and power. Regrettably, and despite their loud disavowal of traditional East-West comparativism, it remains the case that theory-driven studies in the eld of East Asian comparative literature do not always succeed in challenging the Occidental-Oriental binary as radically as their authors might perhaps intend. The key problem here is that theory’s status as an intellectual product that travels from West to East arguably puts it on a par with other patterns of commodity transfer that make this same journey— from Starbucks to Star Wars—thus inevitably raising the dread specter of cultural neo-imperialism for those sensitive to such apparitions. And even when scholars in East Asia are eager consumers, rather than ‘colonized’ victims, of these intellectual products, the underlying sense of imperialist déjà vu may linger on—and this has obvious implications for the counter-hegemonic thrust of theory-driven comparativism. Indeed, wherever one stands on the global/local debate, it is easy to see how the rhetorical charge of any attack on Eurocentrism might backre—at least at the deep structural level—when it is articulated in terms originally coined by French postmodernism, American New Criticism, or German historicism. Chung-hsuan Tung makes this point still more bluntly when he observes of latter-day scholars of comparative litera-

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ture in Taiwan that these “followers of Western literary theories . . . seldom, if ever, postulate theories of their own”.53 All in all, the sometimes blithe importation of Euroamerican theory into the postcolonial and non-Western world has been troubling scholars across the humanities for some years now; and it is a sharp eye for the pitfalls which drives Zhang Longxi’s argument that meaningful theoretical engagement is not simply to accept whatever concepts or methodologies Western theories have to offer and mechanically apply them to the reading of Chinese texts. To take a truly theoretical position . . . means rst and foremost to think critically of theory itself.

The wisdom of this is impossible to dispute; yet equally indisputable is the faintly wistful tone which informs Zhang’s plea for reason. Zhang’s tone is hopeful rather than assured precisely because the project of Western theory-meets-East Asian studies is a utopian one, and harbors—like so many other utopian projects—the potential for depressing malfunction. At its worst, theory-driven comparativism can execute ugly distortions of the East Asian literary product, reducing the text—in the words of David Palumbo-Liu—“to the status of mere allegory for some Western cultural phenomena, bracketing out historical materiality . . . in order to work such tropological transformations”.54 Every scholar working in the eld of contemporary East Asian literature has encountered studies in which the theory/text balance is thrown seriously off-kilter, and where the text serves the theory rather than the other way round. And as Western theory continues to sweep across East Asian literary studies, even strategies of resistance or reappropriation—such as Yingjin Zhang’s policy of mobilizing theory to carry out decentering maneuvers on behalf of the marginalized text—may nd themselves false-starting. Instead of proving malleable to the best efforts of East Asianists, Western theory, through its sheer size and scope, can all too easily end up re-centering itself at the heart of the analysis, from where it sets about nessing ‘historical materiality’ and remaking East Asian texts in its own image in precisely the way that Palumbo-Liu nds so disturbing. Despite

53 Chung-hsuan Tung, “When Comparative Literature Ceases to Compare”, Tamkang Review 17/2 (1986), 110. 54 David Palumbo-Liu, “The Utopias of Discourse: On the Impossibility of Chinese Comparative Literature”, in Yingjin Zhang, op. cit., 48.

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its promise, the comparative paradigm of Western theory/East Asian text remains a risky one for the simple reason that the bilateral structure of this paradigm—in which the Western component plays the ‘meta’ role—slides too readily into an intellectual hierarchy that accords theory favored status. Thus even in the most adept of hands, theory-driven analysis of East Asian literature can still leave a ank open and exposed to the accusation that it is locked in a relationship of intellectual dependency with the West. Indeed, there is a case for viewing theory as a kind of epistemological Trojan horse which promises the world, only to open the gates to more sophisticated impositions of the Western way. Not surprisingly, therefore, some have argued that rather than discarding the practices of the past, scholars should rehabilitate empirical substance— cold hard facts about East Asia—as our best defense against these new intellectual technologies. This brings us naturally to a second core problem within the theory debate: the backlash it has provoked in more conservative quarters. Put simply, the ‘tropological transformations’ wrought on East Asian texts by those who practice theory not wisely but too well play straight into the hands of those cloistered within the ‘cultural ghetto’ who see no place for Western theory in the study of East Asia, ancient or modern. Whether debated in web communities, discussed in faculty commonrooms, or expressed openly in print, the resistance to theory—both in East Asian comparative literature and in East Asian literary studies more generally—is a formidable force that cannot simply be dismissed as the grousing of the old guard. Certainly, reactionary tendencies manifest themselves in the anti-theory discourse. Chief among these is an emotionalist call to ‘protect’ literature and its ne pleasures from the boorish depredations of theory, a call to arms which has summoned followers across the eld. A useful example of this can be found in John M. Roseneld’s recent and highly dubious linkage between positivist study and literary authenticity. After conceding the ‘ghettoized’ nature of Japanese studies in rueful tones, Roseneld then goes on to warn against theory in the following terms: If we lose ourselves in theoretical concerns and ignore the positivist, empirical basis of Japanese studies, we run the risk of repeating one of the most agrant crimes of Orientalism: applying Western standards and principles of analysis without a deep understanding of the Eastern subject. Moreover, if we lose ourselves in the dense thickets of theory, we run the danger of ‘substituting poetics for poetry’, of ignoring the expressive properties of works of art—the vital expression, the felt excitement—that

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should serve as the prime focus of our efforts. When we lose sight of that we surrender the most powerful resource of our profession.55

Positions such as these are easy enough to critique. Yet rather than simply bashing the anti-theory lobby as an antiquated and renegade force whose inuence will naturally recede as the lobbyists themselves retire, a more seasoned approach is surely to read this resistance in the context of its place within the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ of East Asian literary studies. Gloria Davies does precisely this in a recent article, in which she claims that theory and Chinese literary studies (for which we can easily substitute ‘Japanese’ or ‘Korean’) struggle to rub along well together because the kind of positivist scholarship to which theory is so inimical is, in fact, the ongoing institutional rationale of East Asian studies departments across the West. These departments are essentially thinktanks and data-banks about our ‘others in the Orient’; and theory, insofar as it recongures the study of East Asian texts and seeks to relocate East Asian literary studies within the mainstream, is a direct threat to these academies of difference. In blunt terms, the boldness of a scholar’s use of theory exists in direct proportion to its capacity to rattle the foundations of that same selfsame scholar’s institutional place in the world, with obvious implications for peer review, tenure, and so forth. The result is that many theoretically-engaged critics pursue their interventions with a light touch, in the hope that they can submit their chosen texts to theory’s transformative potential whilst remaining professionally unchanged themselves. The difculty here is that moderate approaches of this kind end up betraying theory’s original intent—which, according to Davies at least, is to probe the philosophy of language and stir up just the sort of ‘untroubled relation of language to thought’ that is assumed by so many traditional East Asianists.56 Instead of what Zhang Longxi 55 See John M. Roseneld, “Japanese Art Studies in America in 1945”, in Helen Hardacre (ed.), The Postwar Developments of Japanese Studies in the United States (Leiden, 1998), 189. Michael Duke moreover, issues a well-nigh identical warning to the advocates of Western theory within Chinese studies: “Theory is secondary. Theory is the servant of literature. We always learn more about ourselves and others as individual human beings from literature than from theory. Theories are ne as long as we recognize that literature is ner. If we study Western theory, we will learn a great deal about what Western academics think. But only if we read modern and contemporary Chinese literature itself will we know what modern and contemporary Chinese people are”. Quoted in Gloria Davies, “Theory, Professionalism, and Chinese Studies”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12/1 (Spring, 2000), 12. 56 Ibid.

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calls a ‘truly theoretical position’—one that would inquire deeply into the very impulse of othering—theory-driven work in East Asian studies can often become simply a more modish way of explaining Japan or China and their respective ‘difference’. So long as theory is made to serve the eld in the latter’s own self-referential ways, East Asian studies will continue to languish outside the mainstream—at the same time, of course, as existing in a relationship of increasing tension and estrangement with its former home in the ghetto.

Towards an intraregional comparative practice Gloria Davies’ outlook on the eld is on occasion bleak, and despite its sharp acumen, the essay is happier outlining difculties than it is prescribing remedies. And given that theory remains a reality for East Asian literary studies, however intractable its problems, then solutions— or at least paths round the pitfalls—are what the eld requires most urgently at present. Certainly, it is by no means the intention of this study to argue prescriptively against the application of Western theories to non-Western texts. After all, it is something of a scholarly truism that the level of inltration by Western inuences which we observe in the contemporary East Asian socio-cultural scene is such that some limited recourse to Western theory is not just permissible but almost mandatory if we are to make better sense of literary practice in the region. Given the inevitability of theory as a presence in the eld, the debate over its application becomes less a question of either/or, but rather a delicate weighing up of checks and balances. And the key conundrum is as follows: how should scholars strike a fair path between using theory to attack the sometimes retrogressive nature of ‘oriental studies’—and allowing servant to turn master by applying theory in ways that are immoderate or disrespectful of the local context? Or to rephrase matters in comparativist terms, how best can theoretically-driven comparativism recongure its old-school predecessor without simply replicating in slightly different form the latter’s habits of deference to the West? Ironically enough, one of Davies’ more gloomy conclusions points the way towards the beginnings of a route around the impasse. At a later point in her essay, Davies writes the core knowledge of the humanities and social sciences is European and Anglo-American, and no amount of rallying to the cause of mainstream-

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ing the non-West can alter the well-entrenched structure of the knowledge economy in our universities except at a glacial pace.57

Reality-checks of this kind are without question a useful ballast against the more utopian ights of the theory camp. Yet in the very terminology used to articulate this thought lies, perhaps, not just the genesis of the theory conundrum but also its potential resolution. Expressions such as ‘Western theory’, ‘Eurocentrism’ or—as Davies puts it—‘European and Anglo-American’ knowledge are such familiar xtures in the scholarship of East Asianists that the monolithic implications of these denitions are rarely cross-examined. Thus whilst everyone knows that a sizeable portion of Western Anglophone theory is originally the work of the Tel Quel group, few in East Asian studies ponder the signicance for their own work of the ease and speed with which the Francophone philosophy of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Lacan came to be known under the all-purpose heading of ‘Western’ theory. More pertinently, the salient connection between ‘all-purpose’ and ‘all-powerful’ is seldom subjected to lateral thinking. Just as knowledge equals power, so does more integrated knowledge equal more integrated power, and in many ways it is the cohesive, interlocking nature of Western theory—its capacity to assume the appearance of a monolithic bloc despite its actual diversity—that underlies its success as a global export. Ultimately, it was porous intellectual boundaries, clear paths for ‘technological transfer’, busy translation routes, and energized circuits of exchange that allowed the ideas of Tel Quel to be so readily received and elaborated by thinkers and scholars across the West. In more recent years, meanwhile, it is just these same kinds of networks that have allowed postcolonialism to harness the poststructuralist bandwagon and steer it in a range of new and counter-hegemonic directions. Indeed, it is not simply the dominance of the West according to the classic determinants of hegemony that accounts for the ascendancy of ‘Western theory’ (the standard explanation inside East Asian studies), but also the willingness with which Western intellectuals have interacted with each other—both harmoniously and, of course, with varying degrees of invigorating rancor. Over time, these processes of interaction have been critically instrumental in allowing ‘Western theory’ to consolidate and entrench itself as a thoroughgoing ‘system of knowledge’.

57

Ibid., 19.

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Rather than applying Western theory to East Asian texts in what are essentially updated versions of the wakon yôsai ( Japanese spirit, Western technology) or zhongti xiyong (Chinese essence, Western application) paradigm, the zoned-off elds of Japanese and Chinese literature might do well to absorb these lessons of academic solidarity on the regional plane. Indeed, perhaps what the Western knowledge system has to ‘teach’ East Asian studies is less a matter of complex intellectual theory than one of basic academic practice. After all, the most fundamental underpinning of the dialogue between Derrida from his base at the Ecole Normale Superieure and de Man from his at Yale was not so much a shared commitment to deconstruction as an urge to participate in the centuries-long tradition of cultural exchange in the West. This point may seem absurdly self-evident, but for all its obviousness, it has proved oddly ungraspable in the academic community that is contemporary East Asian literary studies. And to underscore the point, what scant solidarity does exist here is often somewhat parochial in nature. Thus a smallish band of Japanologists undertake research on the cultural practices of Japan’s former colonies, while a similarly-sized minority of Sinologists explore points of commonality between the literary products of Greater China.58 And the chastening consequence of all this is that we are more likely to nd Karatani Kôjin and Dai Jinhua in conversation with Fredric Jameson than with each other.59 At the very least, an increased volume of local dialogue—between writers, thinkers, and critics who work in and on East Asia—would work towards a general rehabilitation of these ‘marginalized’ literatures. Strength in numbers is the ethos here—or, to quote Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, a solidarity in “the form of similarities which all minorities separately experience, and experience precisely as minorities . . .”60 They expand on this same point elsewhere, stating that

58 Key gures here are Fujii Shôzô, Ozaki Hotsuki, and Faye Kleeman; examples of work on the literature of Greater China include Wang Dewei, Yuedu dangdai xiaoshuo. Taiwan, Dalu, Xianggang, Haiwai (Reading Contemporary Fiction. Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Abroad) (Taipei, 1991); and Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (eds.), Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century (Bloomington, 2000). 59 Ashis Nandy takes this point several steps further when he argues that “All such dialogues today (between non-Western cultures) are mediated by the West as an unrecognized third participant. For each culture in Asia today, while trying to talk to another Asia culture, uses as its reference point not merely the West outside, but also its own version of an ahistorical, internalized West, which may or may not have anything to do with the empirical or geographical West”. See Nandy, op. cit., 144. 60 Jan Mohamed and Lloyd, op. cit., 11.

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. . . therein, precisely, lies the basis of a broad minority coalition: in spite of the enormous differences between various minority cultures . . . all of them occupy the same oppressed and ‘inferior’ cultural . . . position in relation to Western hegemony . . . [and as a result] minority groups need constantly to form and re-form ever more inclusive solidarities . . .61

At its best, moreover, such interaction might yield a body of theory about East Asian cultural practice—a regional meta-text, as it were— which is capable of interpreting East Asian cultural products in much the same way that Western theory has functioned as an authoritative set of reading strategies for Western culture. Thus instead of a David and Goliath-style encounter in which, for example, contemporary Japanese literature meets Western theories of postmodernism (and is often worsted in various ways), the works of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana et al. could seek their primary interpretive mode in a theoretical nexus much closer to home. Naturally, this ‘East Asian theory’ would be as inected by the West as the culture on which it commentates. Yet the more seminal point is that these very processes of inection at the local level would be a core focus of the meta-text, rather than at best a peripheral concern which the Western version addresses only sporadically, if at all. In this sense, the East Asian meta-text could become the pre-eminent place for the kind of local re-writings of Western theory that many see as so potentially emancipatory, but which so few actually accomplish. Just as critically, this notion of a regional meta-text would, by its very nature, guard against the cultural essentialism and fetishized authenticity that so often complicate attempts to theorize specic national literatures on the grounds, of course, that these literatures are so radically other as to require an interpretive model all their own. Best of all, the notion of ‘East Asian theory’ provides a solution to the problems of eld and professionalism so astutely raised by Gloria Davies. A regional meta-text would allow Japanese, Chinese, and Korean literary studies to behave theoretically without compromising their institutional status because, rather than moving these elds away from their moorings and into the rapid ows of the mainstream, ‘East Asian theory’ would create a strong counter-current in which such departments could ‘do’ theory from the safety of home. Indeed, perhaps it is not too idealistic

61 Jan Mohamed and Lloyd, “Introduction: Minority Discourse—What is to Be Done?”, Cultural Critique 6 (Fall, 1987), 11–14.

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to suggest that a putative practice of this kind might allow East Asianists to attain the goal which has been something of an academic Grail in recent years. This goal is, of course, the achievement of an equitable, truly dialogic encounter between cultural difference and Western theory, between hard-won positivist knowledge and the deployment of that knowledge towards more metaphysical ends, and between East Asian studies and the rest of the academic world. Clearly, there is something of the pipe dream about this project, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that it is likely to be realized in the immediate future. Yet a number of recent developments in the emerging eld of East Asian cultural studies suggest that this notion of a regional meta-text is more than just another utopian ight of fancy. Of key relevance here is the establishment of journals such as positions: east asian cultures critique (launched in 1993), Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (launched in 2000), and International Journal of Asian Studies (launched in 2004). Most paradigmatic of all in some ways is Traces, a cultural studies and translation journal founded by a coalition of academics led by Naoki Sakai. Published in four languages—Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese—Traces seeks to provide a forum for precisely the kind of intellectual conversations that will yield, or are already yielding, an East Asia meta-text. As Sakai puts it in a recent interview: Customarily, most of the academic publishing companies in the United States do not include the translation into English of works in languages other than Western European languages . . . in their business of theoretical writing publication. American academic publishers are interested in translating classics or contemporary literature of those languages from Asia, Africa and Latin America into English, but they normally do not regard them as literature of a theoretical nature. I believe this is because the prevailing view of the global circulation of information makes a hierarchical distinction between ows of factual data from peripheral cultures to metropolitan centers and ows of theory from ‘the West’ to ‘the rest of the world’ . . . (This) denition of theory is inadequate in view of the academic conversation going on between various locations in the world, particularly around Pacic Asia.62

In their interlinked ways, these journals seek to elaborate a ‘critical inter-Asia subjectivity’, a transnational critical identity which links the local, the regional, and the global. The work accomplished by these journals (as institutional pathbreakers) and by their contributors (as campaigners for the regional epis62

Interview with Naoki Sakai, Cornell Chronicle 33/14 (November 15, 2001).

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teme) is already bringing about real shifts in the way that ‘East Asia’ is imagined. Yet it remains the case that the journal format through which these interventions are staged has its own inbuilt limitations. The chief of these is, of course, the constraint of space, which connes critical discussions to word limits that can militate against the complexities of cross-cultural reading. As a result of this constraint, the regionalism in a good number of articles tends to operate less at the level of the discrete scholarly article than at that of the journal and its evangelically panAsian ethos. In other words, publication outlet, rather than raw research material, becomes the conduit through which many of the contributors speak to their colleagues working in and on the wider Asian zone. What is more, even those contributions which do look to the region as a whole are inevitably bound by the inherent limitations of the scholarly essay, and choose appropriately-sized vehicles for their interventions. Yet if the self-referential study of East Asia is to make real inroads into the global knowledge economy, it requires not just conferences and journals, but university departments and dedicated monographs in which the subject can move and grow more freely. This book is, therefore, an attempt to read regionally in a more extended manner, and it uses intraregional comparative literature between Japan and Taiwan as its chief disciplinary medium. From this it should be immediately clear that the present study does not t squarely inside the kind of cultural studies framework described above. And for some, a comparative approach of this kind is inherently problematic. Gayatri Spivak, for one, argues that A transnational study of culture will not neutralize or disciplinarize the problem by dening it as ‘comparative’ work . . . the point is to negotiate between the national, the global, and the historical . . .63

Spivak’s point is, in many ways, a valid one. If the ultimate objective of a ‘transnational study of culture’ is to erase the arbitrary nature of the boundaries that currently partition our elds of knowledge about the non-West, then the very use of a term such as ‘comparative literature’ might seem ominously retrogressive. For a start, ‘comparative literature’—as has been discussed at length above—is a eld compromised by its associations of Weltliteratur, Oriental-Occidental binary thinking, and a sometimes deferential attitude to Western theory. Just as relevantly, its 63 Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London, 1993), 262–78.

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single disciplinary allegiance runs counter to the credo of cultural studies which is, of course, that ‘culture’ is an open space and thus requires interdisciplinary interpretation. Yet at the same time, it would perhaps be equally reactionary to assume that the regional episteme should be advanced along exclusively ‘cultural studies’ lines. Indeed, if cultural studies in the East Asian eld works, either consciously or otherwise, towards replacing the hegemony of the discipline with the hegemony of the anti-discipline, then it too will become a practice that sooner or later incites ‘reaction’. This study, therefore, operates in the bridging space between cultural studies and comparative literature. It interacts with the elds of urban studies, sexuality, sociology, consumption, postcolonialism, and, of course, literary theory; but at the same time it contends that the practice of literary criticism—in the form of close textual analysis—is an equally fruitful means through which to develop the regional episteme. To rephrase things slightly, this book grounds itself in both text and context, siting its interpretations between literature and the ‘habitus’ within which writers live and their writing takes place. As the ‘lifeworld’ of these writers is sketched in the core chapters that follow, history, sociology, politics, and international relations are referenced in free and extensive fashion; but this milieu analysis is designed to segue naturally into the close readings of literature for which it provides contextual illumination. This is not to say, of course, that this book lapses back into the kind of positivism critiqued above, in which literary texts are combed for quasi-empirical evidence about the East Asian ‘nation’ and its ‘difference’. Yet at the same time, if the East Asian meta-text is to announce itself as a forceful, and plausible, theoretical presence on the wider stage, it must remain rooted in precisely those complex genealogies that make it East Asian. It must, in other words, commit itself to the interlinkage between context, text, and theory, and to the mutually inected relationship between literature and the social, cultural, ideological elds that surround it. This meta-text should also—pace Spivak—remain focused on the intercultural nature of its endeavor; and as an integral part of this process, my approach attempts to rehabilitate the somewhat discredited practice of hands-on text to text comparison. Long viewed as an indissociable part of old-style reading ‘West to East’, text to text comparison has fallen precipitously from vogue in recent years right across East Asian studies. In terms of East Asia’s literary relations with the West, this shift is probably a welcome one. Yet within the context of an

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intraregional—as opposed to inter-regional—approach, many of the vexed moments which have traditionally attended this practice evaporate. Indeed, both the text to text paradigm and East Asian comparative literature more generally harbor the potential to transform themselves from codewords for orientalizing discourse into reading practices which move in precisely the opposite epistemological direction. This transformation manifests itself in a number of ways. First of all, intraregional comparativism provides a means through which the long heritage of interchange, intertextuality, and interpretation that ourished between the cultures of East Asia throughout the pre-modern period can be brought up to date. Secondly, an intraregional approach offers a more viable version of the old Weltliteratur mission to uncover hidden paths of literary inuence and afnity. The historical, cultural, geographical, and economic links that exist between the nations of East Asia are such that their respective literatures more than repay close text to text comparative analysis. Thus they present an effective rebuttal against those detractors who still use the hoary issue of cultural difference as a stick with which to beat the entire project of non-Western comparative literature. No sleight of hand or technical wizardry is required to carry off a comparison of these literatures; and any similarities uncovered have, therefore, a life outside the realm of literary serendipity. Lastly, and of course most importantly, intraregional comparativism opens up a space within which we can begin to ponder the notion of a meta-theory for the literatures of contemporary East Asia.

The dystopian impulse: roots, targets, and terminology This brings us naturally to the core theme of this study, which centers on the revelations that responses to modernity amongst writers from Japan and Taiwan offer into the form and function of literary practice in industrialized East Asia. The chief contention of the book in this regard is that a great mass of otherwise disparate writers from both countries choose to pit themselves against the technocratic, rational, and progressive discourse of the modern that constitutes the local orthodoxy. Modernity is harrowing in these texts, and literary tableaux of chaos, social decay, lost affect, and spiritual hollowness seem to succeed one another in a morbidly uninterrupted sequence across the range of ction produced between 1960–1990. Culture is colonized, the familial nexus is dislocated, sexuality is devoid of pleasure, and stable selfhood

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exists only as an illusion to be shattered—sorrows that political stability, the cult of entertainment, and endless consumer opportunity intensify more than they ever console. Together, these texts write powerfully against the notion of ‘an alternative vision of modernity’ in East Asia as Tu Wei-ming and others have dened it, rebuking not only the selfcongratulatory tones of the Asian values discourse and its preachy challenge to the West but the very nature of local regimes of power. Key commonalities in socio-political background have provoked these postures of resistance. As is well known, both Japan and Taiwan have experienced several decades of single-party domination since WWII, and the political tenor of the two societies, although unquestionably different, has veered towards the conservatism and conformism that often accompany one-party rule. In the case of Japan, the LDP exercised a virtually unbroken hold on the political mandate from 1955 to 1993, whilst the KMT ruled Taiwan from 1945 to 1987 under martial law, and also thereafter—in an increasingly liberalized polity64—until the accession to the presidency of Chen Shuibian in March, 2000. Unsurprisingly, the long decades of single-party domination have impacted in decisive ways on society, economy, and culture in both countries. Any attempt to compare the respective political systems of postwar Japan and Taiwan must, of course, remain a cautious one, qualied by many caveats and sensitive to the great divide that separates these two political cultures. After all, the decades-long supremacy enjoyed by the democraticallyelected LDP and its allies in the bureaucracy and big business is a far cry from KMT-style martial law and the sometimes bloody suppression of dissent that continued on Taiwan until 1987.65 Yet at the same time, it remains undeniable that Japan and Taiwan share wide areas of overlap in their experience of paternalistic government. In particular, although single-party domination in the two countries was maintained through radically different strategies, its broader effects on society—and on literary expression—conform to a more analogous pattern.

64 The election to the presidency of Lee Teng-hui in 1996 marked Taiwan’s transition to a full democracy. 65 Japan’s status as a fully-functioning democracy is, of course, a famously moot point. Distortions of the (Western) democratic ideal—some of them extreme—are visible across the board, from the framework of the constitution to the treatment of Japan’s minorities. For a stringent and comprehensive critique, see Peter J. Herzog, Japan’s Pseudo-Democracy (Folkestone, Kent, 1993).

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In both Japan and Taiwan during the time-frame in question, political stability was touted by the state as the sine qua non of lasting economic success, and, in a neat circular movement, this economic success in its turn worked as the chief legitimizing prop for the continuation of the ruling status quo.66 As a result, economic success and political stability proved mutually reinforcing, and this self-reexive link between stability and success bred habits of conservatism that continue to hold a certain sway in both societies today. This neo-traditionalist orthodoxy nds its clearest expression in the long hegemony enjoyed by the LDP and KMT throughout much of the postwar period, yet its effects percolated far beyond politics. Throughout the period examined here, powerful state ideologies in Japan and Taiwan stressed social conformity, ethnonationalism, geopolitical alliance with the US, and the absolute primacy of economic growth. Moreover, they attempted—with some considerable success—to mould national subjects who would assist in these modernizing projects. This socio-political orthodoxy articulated itself in practices as varied as the socialization of children in schools and the conduct of big business. But ultimately it was, and is, the praxis of orthodoxy itself that drives the dystopian impulse shared by many writers. Stage-managed by a state apparatus that in both nations—if for rather different reasons—exercised extremely wide-ranging powers, this praxis comes under assault in a broad cross-section of ctional narratives. Ultimately, of course, what is at issue here is modernity itself, and the ercely contested struggle in both societies over what form it should most properly take. State power in Japan and Taiwan throughout the high postwar period glossed modernity as progress in an equation which was as nominally self-evident as it was intensely problematic for many writers. As Carol Gluck remarks of Japan, this equation dates back to the nation’s earliest experiments with modernity:

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In the case of Taiwan, this equation between political stability and economic growth came rather later. Indeed, during the early and middle years of Chiang Kaishek’s rule, the mandate for rm rule was provided not by issues of economics so much as by the exigencies of national security and the need to stand rm against the threat of Communist invasion. Alice H. Amsden provides a useful analysis of why and how the KMT shifted from an exclusively military and geopolitical focus to its later commitment to economic growth in “The State and Taiwan’s Economic Development”, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), 78–106.

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chapter one Perhaps the oldest modern story of them all, the belief in progress as the telos of history established itself early and deeply in Meiji Japan, as it did elsewhere. In the twentieth century, whether the forward momentum was thought to be linear or dialectical, successful or failed, the directionality of history was seldom doubted. To the question ‘progress of and towards what?’ the answer since Meiji had been, tautologically, ‘the modern’.67

Gluck’s reference to modernity/progress as ‘successful or failed’ leads us to a less commonly noted observation about postwar Japan and Taiwan and the role of the state in overseeing societal transformation. In both cases, the postwar period saw the state embarking on a conscious mission to ensure that a modernity which had backred catastrophically was set back on track again. For Chiang Kai-shek and the disarrayed remnants of the KMT, decampment to Taiwan offered one last chance to get ‘Chinese’ modernity right, and to correct the disastrous errors that had allowed Communist victory on the mainland. The cherished dream of ‘retaking the mainland’ ( fangong dalu) beckoned as the nal prize of this reworked modernity, at least in the early postwar decades, and it gave state programs of developmental growth an additional edge and zeal.68 In Japan, meanwhile, the modernity that had begun in Meiji had been devastatingly humbled by war, defeat and occupation, and a similar sense of the ‘second chance’ prevailed among power-holders in the early to-mid postwar period. In both cases, this desire to convert failed modernity into speedy visible success led, predictably enough, to a privileging of progress in its obvious and tangible economic manifestations. As Gluck puts it of Japan, The transition to modernity is usually told either as a tale of emancipation, as in France, where liberty was the idealized goal, or as a tale of development, as in most of the later modernizing countries, where economic, and then political, change was the objective. Japan had some of both, but in the main, development proved the stronger theme.69

67 Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present”, in Andrew Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 79. 68 As Yun-han Chu and Jih-wen Lin have pointed out, however, the imperatives of anti-Communist containment gradually displaced plans for a Taiwan-launched invasion of the mainland towards the end of the 1950s, and “building the anti-communist bastion (Taiwan)” became the regime’s chief priority. See Chu and Lin, “Political Development in 20th-Century Taiwan: State-Building, Regime Transformation and the Construction of National Identity”, in Richard Louis Edmonds and Steven M. Goldstein (eds.), Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View (Cambridge, 2001), 117. 69 Gluck, op. cit.

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If anything, Gluck’s comments pertain even more directly to Taiwan, where political development of the kind most commonly associated with modernity—namely democracy—has come a very late second to sustained economic growth. For many writers, however, the crudely teleological character of postwar development in Japan and Taiwan is nothing other than a second foundering of the modern project. It is capitalist modernization unchecked—“rational, multinational, acultural, emotionless, valueless, (and) innitely relativist”70—and many narratives make this gap between economic functionality and socio-cultural dysfunctionality their implicit subject. Indeed, the dystopian impulse draws much of its drive and legitimacy from subversive gestures of revelation, as writers probe ssures that lie beneath the surface of the region’s high-speed economic miracle, and that are typically papered over by local panegyrics to progress and prosperity. State discourses keep silent on issues that Aihwa Ong, for one, has enumerated as . . . social upheaval, exploitation of Asian labor, women, and children, rampant consumerism, public incivility, cutthroat individualistic competition, rising divorce rates, and the cultural hollowness that ourishes in South China and the other Asian tigers as much as in other places undergoing rapid capitalist development.71

The authors examined in this book make it their mission to write this sub-reality, creating ctional landscapes which, in their divergent ways, work to subvert the near-monopolistic discourse of the state and its agencies. This suggestion of ‘mission’—of a writerly responsibility of some kind—is a response to state stewardship of the modern project that traces its lineage back to well-attested older habits of intellectual remonstrance. More precisely, the special place accorded to the literati in many East Asian societies, where they have traditionally acted as mouthpiece and custodian of public conscience, provides a critical historical context for literary discontent and opposition during the period 1960–1990. As is well known, the antecedents of this notion of the intelligentsia as ‘secular priesthood of the national spirit’72 are to be found in China, 70

See Jeffrey Kinkley, “From Oppression to Dependency. Two Stages in the Fiction of Chen Yingzhen”, Modern China, 16/3 (1990), 258. 71 Aihwa Ong, “Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and Capitalism”, in Ong and Nonini, op. cit., 192. 72 The phrase belongs to Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim. See Dittmer and Kim, “In Search of a Theory of National Identity”, in Dittmer and Kim, op. cit., 20.

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where the tradition of remonstrance stretches in a more or less unbroken line from Qu Yuan in the fourth century B.C. to the student protesters at Tiananmen.73 Ultimately, this perceived duty to protest against the infractions of the state nds its roots in the mutual interpenetration of ethics and politics that has traditionally marked the Chinese world-view, and which has led intellectuals to dedicate themselves to serving tianxia (all under heaven) whatever the cost.74 In the modern and contemporary eras, remonstrance has been most frequently associated with mainland China, where the errors and betrayals of the Communist regime have prompted a succession of passionate but doomed pleas from the remonstrating classes. Yet a comparative exploration of the broader East Asian literary canvas suggests that the impulse to remonstrate, and to do so through the medium of literature, reaches right across the region. Postwar Taiwan provides us with a paradigmatic example of this interplay between literature and a politics of moral protest in the nativist literature movement (xiangtu wenxue yundong) that began in the early 1970s. Although this movement started out as a literary reaction to the socially disengaged posture of the modernist clique (xiandaipai), it transformed itself over time into a politicized counter-hegemonic attack on repressive mainlander rule and its effects on Taiwanese society.75 Indeed, many of the littérateurs who published in those early days went on to form the bedrock of the Democratic Progressive Party, just as the credo of nativization (bentuhua) which they espoused as a radical literary alternative in the 1970s had entrenched itself as the dominant political discourse in Taiwan by the turn of the century.76 Postwar Japan sheds 73 For a discussion of the role of Qu Yuan’s legacy in Chinese democracy movements, see Andrew Nathan, China’s Crisis. Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy (New York, 1990), 183. Laurence A. Schneider, meanwhile, gives a fascinating account of how the lore of Qu Yuan was deployed during the Maoist era. See Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u (Berkeley, 1980), 158–199. 74 Yu Ying-shih provides an extended analysis of the role played by the literati in Chinese culture in his Shi yu Zhongguo wenhua (The Literatus and Chinese Culture) (Shanghai, 1987). 75 See Anke Pieper, “Xiangtu wenxue: eine literarische Gattung im Zentrum des Diskurses über nationale Identität”, in Eberhard Sandschneider and Helmut Martin (eds.), Interdisziplinäre Aspekte deutscher Taiwan-Forschung (Dortmund, 1994), 83. According to Pieper, the xiangtu movement since the 1970s has referred to a literary genre, a social movement, and a political position. 76 For an analysis of the politicization (zhengzhihua) of literary nativism in the early 1980s—a process which occurred as literary gures such as Song Zelai and Wang Tuo joined the ranks of the political opposition (dangwai)—see You Shengguan, Taiwan wenxue bentulun de xingqi yu fazhan (The Emergence and Development of the Nativist Debates on

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further light on the ethico-political burden borne by the committed literatus. Here, writers and intellectuals have both challenged state power and attempted to give voice to a public conscience that—without determined spokespeople—might have become still more worryingly muted. Dissidence in the decades since the war has been spearheaded by the progressive (shinpoteki) intellectuals, who, in the absence of a parliamentary presence capable of taking on the LDP, have played a role tantamount to that of a ‘surrogate opposition’.77 Firmly anti-establishment in their bent, Japan’s progressives have not just opposed authoritarian state power and its allies, but have also sought to galvanize the nation’s famously compliant middle-mass into resisting, or at least questioning, the dominant discourse. In more general terms, too, literary practice in both Japan and Taiwan demonstrates an anti-authoritarian and counter-cultural drive which invokes the spirit of remonstrance in both subtle and unmediated ways. Indeed, this book argues that the impact of soft totalitarianism and the legacy of this spirit have combined reactively across the literary cultures of both societies during the period 1960 to 1990 to create ctional writings which impugn the establishment on issues of sage and ethical governance. In many ways, this suggestion of a remonstrating spirit contradicts certain received notions about both Japanese and Taiwanese ction. Whilst few would argue that a strong moral sensibility informs the work of writers such as Ôe Kenzaburô and Chen Yingzhen, for example, it is perhaps courting controversy to claim that anti-establishment mavericks such as Nosaka Akiyuki or even Wang Zhenhe write to any kind of visible moral code. This suggestion becomes still more contentious when it is applied to younger writers such as Murakami Haruki and Zhu Tianwen, whose works are often seen as showcases for postmodernism East Asian style, and who generally prefer playing with codes to endorsing them. Yet when the works of all these writers are examined more closely, their anti-authoritarian avor emerges unmistakably, and it functions as a unifying thread across a range of highly diverse narratives. Not surprisingly, the sheer scope of this critique precludes the application of any kind of facile generic label to the corpus of texts explored in this book. One might well expect narratives so imbued with the spirit Taiwanese Literature) (Taipei, 1996), 401–6. For an account in English, see A-chin Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (London and New York, 2000), 90–102. 77 The phrase is Carol Gluck’s. See Gluck, op. cit., 70.

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of anti-authoritarian protest to t the designation of ‘political ction’ (seiji shôsetsu/zhengzhi xiaoshuo), not least since so many specic state policies are denounced either overtly or by implication within their pages. Certainly, political ction is a well-established literary mode in East Asia, from the translations of Disraeli’s Coningsby that inspired Meiji literati to Liang Qichao’s conviction that such novels had the power to conjure up China’s hitherto elusive imagined community. At the furthest end of this generic spectrum are, of course, the samizdat texts of the region—with China and its dixia wenxue (underground literature) presenting perhaps the most striking example. Ideologically-committed political writing has also appeared in both Taiwan and Japan during the later postwar decades, ranging from the sub-genre of works from Taiwan which probe the February 28th incident (Ererba xiaoshuo)78 to the openly political writings of Mishima Yukio and Ôe Kenzaburô.79 Yet it would be misleading to claim either a unied character or a single genre for the counter-cultural narratives analyzed in this book. Blatant politicking is present in some texts, whilst others are discreet romans-à-thèse, and others still meditate in highly abstruse ways on the outworkings of the dominant discourse. As a rule, all of these texts nd their most natural place within the broad bracket of mainstream ctional writing; and rather than ‘political ction’, with its nuances of factionalism and blunt allegory, they are perhaps best understood as belonging to a literature of subversion and disenchantment. Indeed, it is through these linked moods of subversion and disenchantment that the spirit of remonstrance nds its most telling expression in Japanese and Taiwanese ction. Remonstrance, or the desire to 78

For an analysis of recent Taiwanese political ction, see Ying-hsiung Chou, “Imaginary Homeland: Postwar Taiwan in Contemporary Political Fiction”, Modern Chinese Literature 6 (1992), 23–38; Wang Dewei (David Der-wei Wang), Xiaoshuo Zhongguo. Wan Qing dao dangdai de Zhongwen xiaoshuo (Narrating China: Chinese Fiction from the Late Qing to the Contemporary Era) (Taipei, 1993), 95–102; and the essays collected in Zheng Mingli, Dangdai Taiwan zhengzhi wenxue lun (Political Literature in Contemporary Taiwan) (Taipei, 1994). 79 Examples include Mishima’s short story “Aikoku” (“Patriotism”, 1960), in Mishima Yukio tanpen zenshû (The Collected Shorter Works of Mishima Yukio) (Tokyo, 1964), 1011–28; and Homba (Runaway Horses) (Tokyo, 1969), the second novel of his nal tetralogy Hôjô no umi (The Sea of Fertility, 1968–71). Both of these right-wing texts recreate the political events of the 1930s as a way of critiquing what Mishima saw as the postwar decline of the emperor system (tennôsei ). Ôe has also produced political ction on the subject of the emperor, this time from a resolutely left-wing perspective. Examples are the short stories such as “Sebuntin” (“Seventeen”, 1961), in Ôe Kenzaburô zensakuhin (The Collected Works of Ôe Kenzaburô) vol. 3 (Tokyo, 1966), 261–304, and “Seiji shônen shisu” (“A Political Youth Dies”, 1961), Bungakkai 1 (1961), 8–48; and the novella Mizukara waga namida o nuguitamau hi (The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away Our Tears) (Tokyo, 1972).

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engage with authority on moral terms, seldom takes the form of overt prescriptions on statecraft or rosy musings on a more ‘complete’ modernity. Rather, it proceeds through the creation of literary dystopias, which challenge the truth-claims of the myth of progress propagated by the establishment by presenting stylized portraits of difference or dysfunction. Ôe Kenzaburô’s sealed-off, semi-primitive Shikoku valley, Murakami Haruki’s phantasmagorical parallel universes, and the almost absurdly fractured families that populate Yoshimoto Banana’s ction provide useful examples of this desire to write against the sanitized story of progressive modernity. And in Taiwan, the same unsettling drive is illustrated by the topsy-turvy world of Wang Zhenhe’s Meigui, meigui wo ai ni (Rose, Rose, I Love You), the subcultures of drugs, geomancy and MTV that enthrall denizens of Taipei in Zhu Tianwen’s Shijimo de huali (Fin-de-siècle Splendor), and the outcast gay community described in Bai Xianyong’s Niezi (Cursed Sons). Yet whilst these writers may construct alternative realms that confound the conservatism of the world around them—and in which sometimes radically transgressive behaviors are granted full naturalization—their intentions are a long way from anarchical. Rather, they are paradoxically moral and engagé; and a dystopian mood is evoked as a conscious counterpoint to the utopian tones of the dominant discourse. This relationship between text and context, in which the former discloses the hidden truths of the latter in subversive ways, is mediated through the basic narratology shared by all the texts examined in this book. These ctional landscapes are alike in that they bear closely enough on the world outside the text to be recognizably mimetic, but use strategies of imaginative distancing to lead readers into different modes of seeing and understanding the society they inhabit. In other words, Verfremdungseffekt, or defamiliarization, is the signature mood of all these narratives, and it takes a variety of forms. Magical realism, fantasy, science ction, farce, non-linearity, pastiche, allegory, stream of consciousness, montage, and kitsch all occur across these texts as writers work to summon up a determined sense of otherness within the processes of narrative. Yet equally germane to this narratology is a solid anchoring in conventional realism, and few of the writers under consideration here break from its moorings completely. In this sense, these literatures of disenchantment are reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s dictum that “true realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing”. A fusion of forms is crucial to these narratives, as the practice of alterity meshes with a sometimes

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gritty, kitchen-sink realism to create an emotive anti-discourse which aligns itself against the discourse of state-sponsored modernity.

Western modernism: borrowing and beyond The relationship between dissidence, dystopia, and the literary imagination sketched above has, of course, attended other transitions to modernity. From the modernist movement in metropolitan Europe and America to the assault of the new as it has been experienced by the postcolonial nations, modernity has always been dogged by its discontents. Writers and intellectuals since Baudelaire and Marx have preoccupied themselves with the dark side of the modern, with what Marshall Berman has called “the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruction, the shattering and swallowing up of life, the heart of darkness, the horror”.80 And these literary protests, whatever their time and place of origin, share a readiness to identify the capitalist order—rational, pragmatic, soulless—as the chief agent of their estrangement. In particular, Euroamerican modernism of the canonical variety (Eliot, Woolf, Pound et al.), with its contempt for the grands récits of teleological progress that led Europe into the catastrophe of World War I, seems in many ways a natural antecedent for the counter-narratives under analysis here. Indeed, the question of literary debt is a crucial and complex one—particularly when we consider that many postwar writers in both Japan and Taiwan have borrowed in liberal and open ways from the West. At the very least, there is little doubt that Western modernism offers an interpretive introit into the literatures of disenchantment that have emerged in the wake of ‘miraculous’ East Asian modernities. Of key signicance here is the fact that these narratives, just like their earlier counterparts in the West, are deeply riven in their simultaneous embrace and rebuff of the modern. On the one hand, the weight of literary tradition is regularly shrugged off in postwar ction from Japan and Taiwan, and writers show a real hunger for new aesthetic modes. When viewed as a whole, their innovations are reminiscent of Matei Calinescu’s well-known ‘physiognomy’ of aesthetic modernity in the West, in which modernism, the avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism are the ‘ve faces’ through which the modern reveals 80 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982), 102.

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itself within the cultural realm.81 Thus if Wang Wenxing’s novels are modernist, then Abe Kôbô’s endless technocratic nightmares are surely avant-garde, just as Zhu Tianwen’s n-de-siècle ction is decadent, Wang Zhenhe’s later work is kitsch, and Takahashi Gen’ichirô’s writing is demonstrably postmodern. The various writers considered in this book are frequently experimental, and their appetite for novelty manifests itself in a narrative texture which cannot but recall the innovations of Western modernism. Famous modernist signatures—unreliable narrators, blurred genres, fragmented forms, self-reexive tendencies—are here in abundance, and work to interrupt the smooth, orthodox tale of state-sponsored modernization. As part of this same process, many Japanese and Taiwanese writers, like the Western modernists before them, treat art and literature as the last refuge from the depredations of a progressive establishment. The great losses suffered by the modern world—unied subjectivity, coherence, meaning—nd some kind of restitution in these texts, or at the very least are mourned with the requisite grief and indignation. In fact, it is in this awareness of loss that both the Western modernists and the authors from Japan and Taiwan examined here reveal what is so paradoxical and Janus-faced about their vision of the modern. Despite their enthusiasm for literary newness, all these writers decry the doctrine of modernity-as-progress—and as a logical extension of this, they are united in their kneejerk distrust of the anonymous structures of power that push the bourgeois machine forwards. Moreover, not only is modernity outside the purview of aesthetic practice reviled, but it is precisely through the kind of generic and formal innovations described above that this revulsion nds articulation. In other words, different visions of the modern—one artistic, the other pragmatic—exist in irreconcilable tension with one another in these narratives from Japan and Taiwan, just as they did within Western modernism. Yet the literatures of disenchantment from Japan and Taiwan that I examine in this book are by no means mere bastardized offshoots of the ‘modernism’ long familiar to us from Euroamerican culture. Some remarks by Fredric Jameson on what he terms ‘Third-World cinema’ provide a useful point of departure here—at the same time as drawing notions of postmodernism into the equation in provocative ways. In his famous essay “Remapping Taipei”, in which he explores Edward Yang’s 81 See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham N.C., 1987).

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lm Kongbufenzi (The Terrorizers, 1986), Jameson argues that both modernism and postmodernism “arrive in the eld of production (of Third World culture) with a certain chronological simultaneity in full postwar modernization”.82 This simultaneity occurs because so-called ‘ThirdWorld’ lms emerge from “traditions in which neither modernist nor postmodern impulses are internally generated”,83 but are instead simply imported wholesale from the West as and when the processes of modernization (also, according to Jameson, an entirely Western export) have advanced sufciently to play host to them. The result is a curious mishmash of cultural moods in which the modernist search for meaning coexists with the postmodern urge to debunk it. For some scholars of the non-West, Jameson’s claim may seem a contentious one, not least since it is so implicitly adamant on issues of cultural origin and ownership. Whilst few would dispute that Western (post)modernism constitutes a set of intellectual and literary resources upon which many East Asian writers and lmmakers have drawn throughout the postwar period, the notion that only Western experiences can call forth modernist and postmodernist ‘impulses’ might strike those who work on the cultures of the region as quite arresting in its unembarrassed bias. As far as the rst of these impulses—modernism—is concerned, the sternly pragmatic nature of state-sponsored modernization across industrialized East Asia might, if anything, be expected to generate cultural reactions just as oppositional as their counterparts in the West. Indeed, an approach less encumbered by the Euroamerican tradition might reason that it is the experience of capitalist modernization itself, rather than ‘acquired’ aesthetic responses to it, that it is the chief driver of the dystopian anti-discourse so visible in Yang’s lm. A ‘modernist’ spirit in the arts is arguably the axiomatic corollary of a hardline modernizing program in the nation-state, as different groups claim their right to dene the meaning of progress and choose cultural practice as their arena of debate. And if, as Jameson himself has more recently put it, “modernity is not a concept, but rather a narrative category”84—a series of stories we tell ourselves and others—then modernism, or aesthetic responses to these tales of the modern, is simply a further set of stories, equally free of hard-and-fast provenance or denition. In other 82 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington and London, 1992), 151. 83 Ibid. 84 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (New York, 2002), 94.

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words, although the artistic innovations that have come to be known as ‘Western modernism’ constitute a seminal inuence on East Asian literatures of disenchantment, the impulse to artistic protest—what Lionel Trilling calls the ‘adversary culture’ of modernism—is inevitably as heterogeneous as the modernities by which, to borrow Jameson’s term, it is duly ‘generated’. This point becomes clearer when we return to the rst part of Jameson’s claim—namely, that modernism and postmodernism ‘arrive’ in non-Western culture at the same time during ‘full postwar modernization’. However one chooses to assess the reasons posited by Jameson for this simultaneity, there can be little disputing his claim that the contemporary East Asian cultural scene plays host to multiple moods, in which synchronized, as opposed to temporally successive, cultural moments co-exist and compete. This notion of a ‘premature’ postmodernity that displaces modern forms that have yet to run their course has troubled a number of critics in recent years. Rey Chow, for one, after arguing à la Jameson that modernism is “the sign of an alien imprint on indigenous traditions”, goes on to claim that If the rst world has rejected modernism, such rejection is not so easy for the world which is still living through it as cultural trauma and devastation.85

Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian continue the lament in their introduction to Postmodernism and Japan, and suggest that while postmodernism ostensibly critiques the ‘Western, male, bourgeois domination’ that was a key subtext of modernism, in many ways it is complicit with the “rst world economic domination that persists in exploiting the wretched of the earth”.86 As such, and despite its huge emancipatory potential, the postmodern can sometimes be a risky discourse for cultural producers in the non-West. Despite their differences, all these critics apparently share a tendency to read both modernism and postmodernism in terms of a quasi-imperialist assault of ideas that leaves the ‘third world’ and the ‘wretched of the earth’ reeling. Regardless of whether one deems such terminology appropriate for the advanced industrialized nations of East Asia, perhaps the key issue here is the passive victimhood to which a loosely

85

Rey Chow, op. cit., 57. Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian, “Introduction”, in Miyoshi and Harootunian, op. cit., viii. 86

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dened non-West is habitually consigned in analyses of this kind. The underlying assumption throughout is that the cultural turns of modernism and postmodernism constitute menace for cultural producers in East Asia, who must grapple with these ‘alien imprints’ and the ‘cultural trauma and devastation’ that they cause. Once again, grand cultural change is construed as the monopoly of the West, with East Asia continually thrown back into the reactive position of catch-up, adjustment, and enforced assimilation. The problem with this postmodernism-asneo-imperialist paradigm is the slightly staid reading of power relations between East and West that informs its rhetoric—even to the point that the very desire for political correctness which drives these commentators to critique postmodernism as it ‘travels eastwards’ can prove disempowering in and of itself. The desire to write against cultural imperialism can be such that the various strategic (mis)appropriations that occur when cultural producers in East Asia encounter Western post/modernism are either sidelined in the clamor to issue caveats, or interpreted as forms of resistance which merely serve to reinstate the West in its position as ultimate referent. More seriously, perhaps, this notion of crusading cultures which set out to convert the non-West leaves little room for the question of locally generated post/modern impulses. Not surprisingly, therefore, other scholars have elaborated different conceptual frameworks for the interpretation of post/modernism in East Asia. One paradigm is expertly realized in Shu-mei Shih’s study The Lure of the Modern, an exploration of pre-war Chinese modernism which deconstructs the appropriation of foreign forms in the domestic context. Here, Shih shows that even when East Asian literatures consciously borrow themes, motifs, and narratologies from Western modernism—from alienation to kinetic movement to stream-of-consciousness—this process of importation proceeds within a context steeped in local concerns and traditions which inevitably recongure the original source. Others, such as Henry Y.H. Zhao, treat issues of studied misappropriation. Whilst Western theories may have played the role of a counter-discourse which challenged CCP hegemony on the Chinese mainland in the heady utopian days of the 1980s, the tables turned in the post-Tiananmen fear and tristresse; and according to Zhao, both postmodernism and postcolonialism are now put to work in the service of conservative ideologies which are ultimately supportive of the regime. To be more precise, many Chinese intellectuals have seized on the leveling rhetoric of Western postmodernism as a rationale for abandoning ‘elitist’ aesthetic protest and embracing China’s tacky mass culture instead. Unsurprisingly,

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‘government art ofcers’ are all too happy to allow the irksome intellectual opposition of yesteryear to drown in the morass of the popular; and thus the state and its reactionary intellectuals have formed an unholy alliance against the adversary, and redemptive, potential of modernism.87 Although Zhao’s article is chiey a gauntlet thrown down to neo-conservative Chinese intellectuals, it also has a good deal to say to Western observers who have yet to learn that postmodernism is as postmodernism does. Karatani Kôjin, meanwhile, moves from misappropriation to positive expropriation when he claims that “the postmodern sense of meaninglessness that is considered new and radical in the West is old stuff to the Japanese”,88 and, furthermore, that deconstruction is impossible in a space as already and utterly decentered as Japan. In ways that are imaginatively diverse, these critics—and many others—have gone some way towards writing East Asian texts and textual producers into the subject-position of modernist and postmodernist thought. Yet in ways that by now sound familiar, their critique remains context-specic, conned to the time and space to which it refers: Republican China, the post-Tiananmen mainland, or contemporary post-postmodern Japan. Indeed, counterstrokes such as these can hit only fairly prescribed targets for the simple reason that their own frame of reference is bounded by the categories of nation and national culture. And while the counter-strokes themselves may be cleverly executed, they exist principally as exceptions to the ‘universally’ acknowledged rule about what does, or does not, constitute a post/modern impulse. In other words, the specter of particularism haunts these efforts to reclaim post/modernism, and, as Naoki Sakai has observed, particularism is less a challenge to the Western dogma of universalism than an intrinsic part of it: Contrary to what has been advertised by both sides, universalism and particularism reinforce and supplement each other; they are never in real conict; they need each other and have to seek to form a symmetrical, mutually supporting relationship by every means in order to avoid a dialogic encounter which would necessarily jeopardize their reputedly secure and harmonized monologic worlds. Universalism and particularism endorse each other’s defect in order to conceal their own; they are 87 As Zhao puts it, postmodernism “has actually turned itself into a conformist theory in China which serves to justify the institutionalized mainstream culture”. See Zhao, “Post-isms and Chinese New Conservatism”, New Literary History 28/1 (1997), 42. 88 Quoted in Joseph J. Tobin, “Introduction”, in Joseph J. Tobin (ed.), Re-Made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society (New Haven, 1992), 7.

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chapter one intimately tied to each other in their complicity. In this respect, a particularism such as nationalism can never be a serious critique of universalism, for it is an accomplice thereof.89

Put simply, in the knowledge economy of today a Japanese modern or a Taiwanese postmodern still lives only through its difference from the West, and most emphatically not on its own self-sustaining terms. A more robust challenge to the ‘universal’ discourse on post/modernism needs, therefore, to proceed on the premise of what Sakai terms a more conictual, dialogic encounter between Western impulses and those generated elsewhere. This book argues that comparative literature within contemporary industrialized East Asia constitutes a space in which such a challenge can be mounted. To be more precise, an intraregional reading reveals a series of aesthetic responses to post/modernity—a cluster of cognate ‘post/modernisms’—that are as amenable to cross-cultural study as the Euroamerican heavyweights whose work sustains the academic industries of post/modernism in the West. These aesthetic responses require their own interpretive industry, one which reads Wang Wenxing’s modernist experiments with literary form (wenti ) alongside the assaults that Ôe Kenzaburô has made on buntai in Japan, and that considers the plangent nostalgia that cuts away at Murakami Ryû’s postmodernism in the light of Zhu Tianwen’s fake surrender to the joys of consumer Taipei. Intraregional readings of this kind enable us to transcend the particularism which is merely the inverse image of Western universalist credos, and move towards theoretical modes which can actually do battle with the notion of literary absolutes. In concrete terms, this book argues that aesthetic responses to modernity in Japan and Taiwan are an open eld in which the revolt against state-steered dirigiste modernization interacts with traditional ethics of engagement to produce a corpus of texts which are at once transgressive and morally high-minded. Naturally, the norms and forms of Western post/modernism impact on these texts in both eeting and more tangible ways. Yet they function less as an aesthetic model than as a cultural resource upon which writers draw as they articulate a local aesthetic of the modern in their ction. The regional episteme allows us to ‘rescue’ this local aesthetic from the realm of the particular and secure it in a discursive space that it is not demarcated by Western desires for reassuringly recognizable Others. 89 Naoki Sakai, “Modernity and its Critique: the Problem of Universalism and Particularism”, 105.

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Japan and Taiwan: the background to comparison 1. The Chinese backdrop Although the subject of this book is literary responses to modernity during the period 1960–1990, earlier phases of experiential overlap and mutual interaction between Japan and Taiwan form a critical backdrop to the elaboration of the local aesthetic referred to above. In particular, the history that the two societies share as satellite states within the Chinese cultural zone and the Japanese occupation of Taiwan from 1895–1945 have impacted in telling ways on cultural practice, and this impact requires some contextualization here. To begin with, no selfrespecting comparative study of the literatures of Japan and Taiwan can proceed without acknowledgement of the role Chinese civilization and Confucianism have played in both their remote and recent histories. It may at rst sight seem anachronistic to hark back to China, Confucianism, and the age of antiquity in the context of a study that takes modernity—with all its well-worn claims of rupture—as its organizing and overarching theme. Yet China remains the clear point of departure for a series of linked reasons. Most obviously, China is the local political and cultural colossus under whose dwarng shadow the other states of East Asia lay until the arrival of the West. Taiwan’s status as a Chinese possession—if only a remote and often neglected one—xed it immovably within the Chinese orbit from the sixteenth century onwards; and for Japan, too, close proximity to the continent has meant centuries of exposure to sinifying inuences. This point may seem so self-evident that it scarcely requires making—and it would certainly be otiose here to dwell on the vastness of China’s territories, the eminence of its culture, the reach of its political power, and the lasting effect of these facts on its neighbors and outlying possessions. Yet to read contemporary Japanese and Taiwanese literature comparatively and gloss over China and Confucianism would be equivalent to approaching the modern European novel without implicit allusion to the Greco-Roman classics or the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This is not to say that these literatures are steeped in learned references to China and the Confucian heritage—on the contrary, the deliberate turning away from the sinic past and the search for new mentors is a key and recognized constituent of literary modernity in both countries. Nevertheless, China and its legacy are engrained in ways that defy complete eradication. Just as in the case of Europe and its cultural antecedents,

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this legacy consists of inuences which have accumulated steadily over time to form the basic material of a common cultural bedrock so solid that it is more or less taken for granted. And although these inuences are, of course, attenuated by local differences, the basic conguration remains. Traditionally, this bedrock took as its principal features the shared use of Chinese characters, a reverence for the Chinese classics, an esteem for literati culture as expressed in poetry and other ancient arts, such as qin qi shu hua (music, chess, calligraphy, and painting), and above all an espousal of the precepts of Confucianism. Although this Chinese world-view dominated the landscape throughout the region, it asserted itself most visibly in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.90 This all-encompassing Chinese worldview to which both Japan and Taiwan subscribed in the pre-modern era has now, of course, been supplanted by other habits of thought. Yet its legacy, and in particular the Confucian ethico-political system, are deep-rooted enough to have withstood both the thrashing that China’s prestige suffered at the hands of the West in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century collapse of the traditional order in mainland China. Indeed, numerous elements of the Chinese Weltanschauung have endured into the modern period in both Japan and Taiwan, and bulk large among the composite of inuences that make up contemporary socio-cultural life in both countries. This persistence of tradition is, of course, entirely to be expected— inconvenient as it is to iconoclasts and cultural commissars. It is now a truism to note that tradition lives on vividly in the modern moment— indeed, the suggestion that any absolute break divides past and present has been decried by Arjun Appadurai as “one of the most problematic legacies of grand Western social science”.91 Notions of rupture seem especially malapropos in the East Asian context, where the Confucian tradition in particular has not only demonstrated fortitude in its survival but has been frequently deployed as a symbolic resource by governments, scholars, and writers throughout the postwar period.92 And whilst 90 For an analysis of economic and socio-cultural manifestations of the Confucian legacy in modern China, Japan, Taiwan, North and South Korea, and Vietnam, see Léon Vandermeersch, Le Nouveau Monde Sinisé (Paris, 1986), 152–203. 91 Appadurai, op. cit., 2. 92 Perhaps the most decisive proof of Confucianism’s ability to weather almost any ideological storm can be found in the rise to prominence of the New Confucianists (xinruxuejia) on the Chinese mainland since the passing of ultra-leftism. From Hu Shi’s May Fourth slogan ‘Down with the House of Confucius’ to the ‘Criticize Confucius’ ( pi-Kong) campaign of the Cultural Revolution, Confucianism had sustained decades of battering on the mainland, and seemed so defunct as to be almost beyond resuscitation.

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many would dispute the sweep of Tu Wei-ming’s claim that Confucian inuence can be seen in contemporary phenomena as varied as . . . the core curriculum in moral education, ancestral veneration in family ritual, styles of protest among the intelligentsia, the formation of a political ideology, and networking in economic behavior and organization . . . and the family’s supreme role in capital formation, power politics, social stability, and moral education . . .93

there can be little doubt that the study of modernities in East Asia demands an attunement to the Confucian legacy. This resilient tradition, and the supporting role that it has played in regional transformation, both bear signicantly on the comparative study of literatures in East Asia. First of all, the discernibly Confucian cast of many East Asian modernities suggests a continuity with the common cultural habitus described above which, although it is neither linear nor seamless, allows us to extend ideas about pre-modern cultural afnity between Japan and Taiwan into the contemporary era and beyond. Secondly, this continuing Confucian legacy provides not just a rationale but also a context and a vocabulary for the comparative project. To cite just one example, the analysis of unraveling kinship ties in Japanese and Taiwanese postwar ction undertaken in chapter three of this book would make scant sense without reference to the Confucian tenets of paternalistic rule, family morality, and lial piety. These ctional treatments of family breakdown observe the Confucian ethical system as it is drawn into the force-eld of the modern, and they derive their power from the portrayal of both exibility and, more often, dislocation. In writings such as these, Confucianism is as fundamental to the texture of modernity as any disruptive technology imported from the West. Yet at the same time, interpretations of the power and reach of the Confucian legacy differ widely, and catch-all theories of the role that Confucian ethics have played in the evolution of East Asian moderni-

Yet inspired by the work of earlier twentieth-century thinkers such as Liang Shuming and Xiong Shili, and by interaction with overseas scholars such as Tu Wei-ming and Yu Ying-shi, China’s New Confucianists have brought the ancient discourse back to life in both philosophical and politico-cultural terms. See John Makeham (ed.), New Confucianism: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2003). 93 Tu Wei-ming, “Introduction”, in Tu Wei-ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, 5.

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ties can often prove a liability. After all, even Tu Wei-ming concedes that “there is as much contested interpretation as there is ‘fusion of horizons’ on virtually all aspects of the Confucian thesis”.94 Signicantly, this contestation is at its most heated on the subject of Japan. Whilst there is broad consensus that the Four Mini-Dragons—Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore—belong within the Confucian zone, the inclusion of postwar Japan is a moot point for some. As Robert Smith puts it, a prevalent view in Japan is that . . . one’s grandfather or great-grandfather may have been taught Confucian ethics and might even have internalized them, but in 1945 the Japanese consigned Confucianism to the dustbin of history.95

At the heart of this debate stands the old stalwart of Japanese uniqueness; and it is, perhaps, an over-veneration of this myth that accounts for the reluctance of some to admit that Japanese modernity might comprise several genealogies. Indeed, although this debate underscores the need for a measured approach when working with the Confucian thesis, the proofs of residual Confucian inuence in Japan—with its government leadership, traditional education system, managed work force, habits of social civility, and ideological emphasis on the family unit—are ultimately too compelling to discount. Still more germane, perhaps, is the issue of sinocentrism. The concern here is that sweeping invocations of the Confucian legacy can all too easily breed a cultural essentialism which seeks to reinstate China and its traditions in their old position of hegemonic centrality. It is a short step from sinocentrism of this kind to the patently untenable view that the growth, stability, and prosperity that much of East Asia has achieved in recent decades are all attributable, in the nal analysis, to some kind of immutable and reied sinic essence which has diffused itself across the region.96 Quite apart from the inammatory issue of Chinese cultural chauvinism, essentialist arguments of this kind are dangerous because—just like the discourses of ‘Asian values’ and ‘Japanese-style capitalism’ referred to earlier—they all too often limn Confucian China

94

Ibid., 2. Robert J. Smith, “The Japanese (Confucian) Family: The Tradition from the Bottom Up”, in Tu Wei-ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, 155–174. 96 Examples include the culturalist arguments adopted in Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism (Berlin, 1990), and Nakajima Mineo, “Economic Development in East Asia and Confucian Ethics”, Social Compass 41/1 (1994), 113–9. 95

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as an experiential other whose difference allows the West a better understanding of itself and its own march to progress. At any rate, the notion of a sinocentric East Asia rankles for some; and it is perhaps less than surprising that both Japan and Taiwan not only claim their successes as their own, but have also used them quite pointedly—though at different times—to show up the poverty, backwardness and chaos of the Chinese mainland.97 Indeed, despite the ongoing inuence of Confucianism, both Japan and Taiwan have found it necessary to cut the cord that ties them to their historical mentor as they have practiced the politics of national identity and fashioned functioning modern societies. In Japan, the deliberate disavowal of China began in the Meiji period, and found graphic expression in the destruction perpetrated on China by its former pupil throughout the rst half of the last century. For Taiwan, meanwhile, disassociation from China has been far more problematic, bound up as it is with complex issues of cultural nationalism that remain unresolved to this day. Yet parallels exist nonetheless. Chief among these is the fact that for both Japan and Taiwan, conscious emancipation from China and its tutelage has been a critical staging-post on the road to modernity and a commensurately modern identity. In both cases, China has been the rst point of reference—and resistance—for the edgling nationstate; and although many decades separate these distinct processes, both societies have at some stage felt an acute need to dene their identity over and against that of China. On Taiwan, this is evident in the recent emergence of so-called Taiwanese consciousness (Taiwan yishi), which consciously pits itself against the mainlander rhetoric of zhongyuan zhongxin zhuyi (central plain centrism).98 The increasing use of Minnanyu, 97 In the case of Japan, this sense of superiority emerged starkly during the SinoJapanese war, when the political and military bankruptcy of the Qing dynasty served to throw Japan’s modernizing successes into clear relief. See Donald Keene, “The SinoJapanese War of 1894–95 and its Cultural Effects in Japan”, in Donald H. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton, 1971), 121–175. For many Taiwanese, meanwhile, this process has occurred in the post-martial law era, and is a direct result of the lifting of restrictions on travel to the Chinese mainland. As Joseph Bosco observes, the mainland fever (dalu re) that erupted in the late 1980s has subsided somewhat as Taiwanese witness the privation and corruption of China at close quarters, and nd their feelings of national pride and loyalty to Taiwan strengthened as a result. See Bosco, “The Emergence of a Taiwanese Popular Culture”, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), The Other Taiwan (Armonk, 1994), 392–3. 98 For a specic discussion of the debate between the China complex (Zhongguo qingjie) and the Taiwan complex (Taiwan qingjie) that occurred in the early 1980s, see Peng Ruijin, Taiwan xinwenxue yundong 40 nian (Forty Years in the Taiwan New Literature Movement)

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the resurgence of indigenous folk arts and religion, and the sway of local popular culture on the island all testify to a cultural impulse which takes both mainland China and KMT sinocentrism as its other.99 Moreover, it is at least plausible to argue that the looming presence of China helps to explain not only ‘Taiwanization’—that much is obvious—but also the long-standing obsession with identity that we nd in Japan, home of ethnic purity, creation myths, Nihonjinron, and other emotive paeans to national uniqueness.100 Finally, the Chinese experience of Communism as a way of life and a political system has widened the gulf between the Middle Kingdom and its former satellites, who have simultaneously found themselves drawn into a different orbit of inuence during the postwar period. As the CCP tightened its ideological grip during the early to mid- postwar period and rebaptized its subjects as children of the party, allegiances to old-style Chinese culture were stigmatized and a nebulously dened ‘tradition’ was pushed further and further beyond the pale. Communist iconoclasm reached its apogee during the Cultural Revolution, when the orchestrated assault on the so-called ‘four olds’ (sijiu)—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking—led to a violent despoliation of the cultural world on the mainland. This destruction created a considerable barrier to identication, particularly in Taiwan, and intensied the sense of cultural slippage between China and the East Asian nations that surround it. This sense of a regional ‘us and them’ has been stronger still in the realm of politics. Here, Communism has made American allies of Japan and Taiwan at the same time as it has turned China into their major geopolitical and ideological adversary. This embattled stance is especially true of Taiwan, of course, for whom Communist China is a baleful threat to continuing sovereignty. Yet for Japan, too, co-opted since 1945 into the Pax Americana, China has played the role of chief bête noire in East Asia and Sino-Japanese relations remain beleaguered by problems—despite the easing effects of Dengist reform and the implementation of China’s ‘open-door’ policy.101 In other words, (Gaoxiong, 1997), 213–19. Peng traces the origins of the furor back to the late 1970s, and the exchanges between Ye Shitao and Chen Yingzhen. 99 For the burgeoning of popular culture on Taiwan, see Bosco, op. cit., 392–403. 100 Peter N. Dale presents an incisive critique of Nihonjinron in his The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London, 1990). 101 The continuing pendulum swings are well-illustrated by the events of the last few years. The moves towards genuine Sino-Japanese rapprochement that were initiated in 2003—and given China’s academic imprimatur by a series of articles published in the state-run journal Zhanlüe yu guanli (Strategy and Management)—have been promptly

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China has bequeathed Japan and Taiwan not only an enduring cultural proximity, but also a shared mentor to outgrow and a common foe to resist; and China past and present continues as a core constituent of the genealogy and imagination of the modern in both societies. 2. The Japanese occupation of Taiwan and its enduring legacy The Japanese occupation of Taiwan, which lasted from 1895 to 1945, gave a new set of meanings to this notion of proximity, forcing a closeness in culture between Japan and Taiwan that built, sometimes expediently, on their common past as satellites of China. Indeed, the fact that Japan, Taiwan and Korea all shared a cultural baseline was crucial to Japan’s success in subjugating the latter two countries within its pre-war Asian empire. As Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig put it: Chinese characters . . . provided a common medium of communication, so that a literate Korean or Taiwanese could understand a Japanese ofcial’s orders written in classical Chinese. The devices of indirect rule, which blunted the efcacy of other colonial regimes, were thus less necessary. Moreover, the traditional phraseology and concepts of traditional Confucianism . . . could be utilized by the new masters, who by the same token were not imbued with alien ideas like individualism, the rights of man, or the White Man’s Burden . . . Japan could thus work from the inside . . .102

Yet helpful as it was in the management of Japan’s new possessions, this cultural baseline was deployed less as a means of perpetuating the ageold sinic order than as a ground-level tool for the implementation of a new Pax Nipponica. Indeed, in its latter phase particularly, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan proved to be not merely a colonial annexation but an exercise in cultural assimilation whose effects were not readily undone.103 followed by the depressing relapse in bilateral relations that has held the region transxed since 2004. 102 John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia. The Modern Transformation (Boston, 1965), 756. 103 Christopher Hughes refers to the program of ‘Nipponisation’ adopted by the colonizers, a view corroborated by Mark R. Peattie, who writes that “The central purpose behind the Japanese version of assimilation was . . . ‘Japanization’ of her colonial subjects, Taiwanese and Koreans in particular, and their transformation into diligent, loyal, law-abiding ‘imperial peoples’ (kômin), imbued with the same values, bearing the same responsibilities, and sharing the same lifestyles as Japanese”. See Christopher Hughes, Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism. National Identity and Status in International Society (London and New York, 1997), 22; and Mark R. Peattie, “Introduction”, in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton, 1984), 40–2.

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Taiwan’s colonizers began to pursue sustained and aggressive policies of assimilation (dôka) on the island during the 1920s, policies which intensied as the occupation continued. To quote Taiwan historian Harry J. Lamley, assimilation was premised on the notion that the naichijin [ Japanese residents] were bearers of a superior culture to be imparted to the hontôjin [local islanders] . . . who . . . were expected to give up not only many of their customs and usages but, ultimately, their Chinese heritage as well.104

This program of ‘Nipponisation’ gathered momentum throughout the 1920s and 30s, and had ambitious goals. In addition to the root and branch extirpation of local customs, colonial ofcials also sought to propagate Japanization in the classroom, and beyond, via policies of acculturation (kyôka).105 Acculturation here approximated to politico-cultural reprogramming, and aimed at recasting Japan’s colonial subjects in the image of their conquerors through rapid instruction in Japanese language (kokugo) and lifestyle.106 Later, with the rise of the militarists at home and preparations for full-scale war on the continent, dôka and kyôka gave way in their turn to imperialization (kôminka), a still more complete and rigorous system of ideological indoctrination.107 The colonial population now became imperial subjects (kômin), who pledged absolute allegiance to the Japanese emperor and were subsumed into Japan’s national polity (kokutai). This policy of ‘loyalty to the emperor and patriotism’ (chûkun aikoku) was deemed imperative since only fully assimilated subjects could be relied upon to make the sacrices needed to execute Japan’s empire-building designs. From 1937 onwards, various ‘imperialization’ measures were introduced, including a national language program, Japanese nomenclature (kaiseimei), further proscrip104 Harry J. Lamley, “Taiwan under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945: The Vicissitudes of Colonialism”, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan. A New History, 204. 105 For a detailed discussion of the educational policies pursued by the colonizers, see E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan”, in Myers and Peattie, op. cit., 275–311. François Godement, meanwhile, argues for the long-term economic benets of the mass education system instituted by the Japanese. See Godement, The New Asian Renaissance, tr. Elizabeth J. Parcell (London and New York, 1997), 67. 106 As Eika Tai puts it, “Kokugo provided a scheme for the linguistic assimilation of subjugated people into the Japanese nation . . . (and) suggested that any person who mastered Kokugo could become Japanese”. See Tai, “Kokugo and Colonial Education in Taiwan”, positions 7/2 (1999), 504. 107 Leo Ching provides an illuminating discussion of kôminka and its critical difference from the policies of dôka which prevailed during earlier years in his Becoming “Japanese”. Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001), 89–132.

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tion of local cultural practices, patriotic propaganda campaigns, and the enforcement of Shintoism.108 The result was that by the time of Japan’s surrender and the island’s retrocession to China, the colonial population on Taiwan had undergone decades of moderate or low-level assimilation, culminating in a shorter period of intense and heavy-handed indoctrination. The actual efcacy of these ‘heart and mind’ campaigns is, of course, rather more difcult to gauge. For a start, resistance to the Japanese occupiers—both armed and peaceful—was a constant throughout the colonial period, despite systematic and brutal containment.109 And even among Japan’s more acquiescent subjects, assimilation was often rather less than thoroughgoing. According to Lamley, the Taiwanese were “rapidly acculturated rather than completely assimilated”; and he argues that only a few of their number were transformed into bona de Japanese subjects who identied themselves unambiguously with Japan.110 Yet despite this gap between assimilation and acculturation, the effects of the program remained palpable, particularly among those who came of age during the high tide of the kôminka movement. This view is largely corroborated by Mark R. Peattie, who argues that In Taiwan, the Japanese came the closest to their objectives and attained a modest progress in shaping the values and loyalties of the colonial population.111

Thus when the KMT arrived in Taiwan in 1945, they encountered a population in whom ‘imperial subject consciousness’ (huangmin yishi) had been painstakingly instilled; and the new rulers made it their immediate priority to re-sinicize cultural practice on the island. This program of

108 For a comparison of kôminka policies in Taiwan and Korea, see Wan-yao Chou, “The Kôminka Movement in Taiwan and Korea: Comparisons and Interpretations”, in Peter Duus, Mark Peattie and Ramon H. Myers (eds.), The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton, 1996), 40–68. 109 For a study of political resistance to Japanese rule, see Edward I-te Chen, “Formosan Political Movements Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1914–1937”, Journal of Asian Studies 31/3 (1972), 477–97. Chen focuses in particular on the inuence of Taisho-era liberalism on home rule and racial equality movements. For a study that also examines the earlier period of Japanese rule, and gives a full account of armed resistance movements (kônichi undo) and the activities of the anti-imperial forces (kônichigun) during the years when Japan consolidated its hold over Taiwan, see Kyo Sekai (Xu Shikai), Nihon tôchika no Taiwan. Teikô to dan’atsu (Taiwan under Japanese Rule. Resistance and Suppression) (Tokyo, 1972), particularly pages 9–159. 110 Lamley, op. cit., 242. 111 Peattie, op. cit., 42.

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cultural reconstruction (wenhua chongjian) sought to reverse fty years of Japanization (Ribenhua)—which the KMT saw as tantamount to enslavement (nuhua) and ethnic deracination112—and it moved quickly and comprehensively to bring Taiwan back into the Chinese fold. The use of kokugo was proscribed in favor of the ideographically identical guoyu (here, Mandarin), and Chinese gentry culture as it had been cultivated on the pre-Communist mainland was energetically promoted as the new national norm. In the years that followed the mainlander takeover, tight control was exercised over the importation of Japanese cultural products into Taiwan as the KMT worked to reinstate the discourse of sinocentrism.113 Popular antipathy towards Japan sharpened, moreover, when Tokyo followed the US in boarding the China bus and established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1972, a move that pushed Taiwan deeper into geopolitical crisis. Yet despite this deliberate turning away from Japan after 1945, traces of the past could not be effaced overnight; and unlearning acculturated habits, even when they had been acquired under duress, sometimes proved problematic. Particularly for those Taiwanese who were schoolchildren during the most intense phase of the assimilation program—some of whom were more comfortable in Japanese than the local dialects of Hakka and Hokkien, let alone Mandarin—memories and loyalties lingered.114 And while the islanders were initially jubilant to 112 Huang Yingzhe presents a detailed discussion of wenhua chongjian in his “Lu Xun sixiang zai Taiwan de chuanbo, 1945–9. Shilun zhanhou chuqi Taiwan de wenhua chongjian yu guojia rentong” (“The Propagation of Lu Xun’s Thought on Taiwan, 1945–9. A Discussion of Cultural Reconstruction and National Identity in Early Postwar Taiwan”), in Rentong yu guojia: jindai Zhong-xi lishi de bijiao (Identity and the Nation-state: A Comparison of Chinese and Western history in the Modern Era) (Taipei, 1994), 301–321. Huang aptly points out that the Nationalists demanded not just sinication (Zhongguohua) from the Taiwanese, but also KMT-ization (Guomindanghua). In other words, the nation-state with which the KMT wanted Taiwanese to identify was “the ‘nation-state as ruled by the KMT’ and not the ‘nation-state as ruled by the Communists’”. 113 Amongst other propaganda techniques, this ‘invention of tradition’ involved the chronicling of mainland history in school textbooks, the invoking of potent symbols of Han nationalism—such as the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, the Great Wall, and the notion that all Han people are ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor’ (huangdi zisun)—the construction of memorial halls and monuments to Chinese heroes, and the institution of Chinese public holidays. Particularly vivid examples of sinication (Zhongguohua) can be found in the KMT renaming of Taipei’s streets after retrocession. Terms were borrowed either from mainland geography (Wenzhou Street), or from the orthodoxy of traditional or Republican China (Zhongxiao East Road, Zhongshan North Road) in an attempt to impart a new Chinese ambience to the capital. 114 Xu Xueji provides an extended analysis of language issues in the aftermath of reunication in his “Taiwan guangfu chuqi de yuwen wenti” (“Language Problems in early post-retrocession Taiwan”), Si yu yan (Thought and Word), 29/4 (Dec., 1991), 155–84.

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have been delivered from colonial rule, the cultural changeover did not necessarily bring the hoped-for new order.115 The KMT’s often botched handling of the takeover—corruption, ination and food shortages were endemic—led to an invidious culture of comparison in which Nationalist misrule bred a quasi-nostalgia for the regimented order of the Japanese imperium. Indeed, for many Taiwanese an ambivalent attachment to Japan was the natural corollary of disenchantment with the results of turbulent regime change. Clearly, then, it would be misleading to see 1945 as year zero, after which tabula rasa in the political, cultural and linguistic elds was quickly accomplished. In some cases, this Japanese legacy makes itself manifest in minor and cosmetic ways, such as references to geta and tatami in postwar Taiwanese literature, for example, or the use of Japanese forms of address, obasan being perhaps the most frequent instance.116 Many more texts, however, make scant allusion to the colonial period, or reference it only in passing—not least, perhaps, because the occupation was deemed a politically sensitive issue by the martial law authorities. Yet the legacy of occupation has endured; and the experience of enforced acculturation, even if many of its effects were either resisted at the time or rescinded later, has left imprints on cultural memory. This is evinced by the steady rise of ‘colonial’ ction since the later years of the martial law era and beyond. Zhong Zhaozheng’s Taiwanren sanbuqu (Taiwanese trilogy, 1976) a roman euve which recounts Taiwan’s fty-year ordeal under the Japanese, is perhaps the locus classicus of post-facto renderings of the imperial interlude. The trilogy builds on Wu Zhuoliu’s earlier Yaxiya de gu’er (Orphan of Asia, 1946), originally written in Japanese under the title Ajia no koji, and explores themes of identity and resistance in ways that resonate with Wu’s seminal text. Zhong’s epic went on to inspire Li Qiao’s Hanye sanbuqu (Wintry Night Trilogy, 1980), another inter-generational

115 As Chang Chun-hung, former Secretary-General of the DPP, has commented: “. . . although we genuinely accepted the mainland takeover, we immediately began to sense the conict of culture. Moreover, that conict of culture was extremely intense. It was discovered that the Japanese culture which we originally loathed was, as compared to the culture of our fatherland, a strong culture, a superior culture. And the culture of the rulers (the KMT) is a worthless, inferior—an inferior kind of barbaric culture . . . That kind of conict was extremely intense and transformed us from the heights of identication to the heights of hostility”. Quoted in Alan Wachman, “Competing Identities in Taiwan”, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), The Other Taiwan, 45. 116 Usages of this kind are literally too numerous to cite; more signicant, perhaps, is the fact that they continue to appear even in ction of the 1990s.

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family saga which charts the struggles waged between pioneering Hakka settlers and the Japanese authorities. The pull of the colonial past is just as palpable in an earlier story by Li, entitled “Xunguiji” (“Ghosthunting”, 1978), which revisits the Davani uprising of 1915 and uses spectral motifs to suggest the unforgettability of empire. This fascination with the Japanese era shows little sign of abating. Indeed, texts such as Wu He’s recent novel Yusheng (Remains of Life, 1999)—an exploration of the Musha Incident of 1930, in which aboriginal tribesmen rebelled violently against Japanese rule before being crushed with even greater ferocity—suggest that the literary excavation of colonial Taiwan is, if anything, expanding in its scope.117 And in a rather different vein, Huang Chunming’s short story “Shayaonala, Zaijian” (“Sayonara, Zaijian”, 1978), a satire of salarymen and sex tourism set in miracle-era Taiwan, shows that writers are all too aware that colonialism can continue in the economic domain long after the armies of conquest have ofcially been demobbed.118 This sense of the past persisting into the present is just as strong when we shift focus to examine the institutional structures that were put in place during the Occupation period, structures which have acted as foundation and mainstay of Taiwan’s accelerated economic growth over the last decades. During a period of fty years, the Japanese colonialists built roads and railway lines, dredged harbors, set up postal and tele117 Even Taiwan’s kôminka literature, traditionally a source of embarrassment, is now being extensively reassessed. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang presents a critique of the nationalist agenda that can sometimes inform these ‘reassessments’ in her “Beyond Cultural and National Identities: Current Re-evaluation of the Kôminka Literature from Taiwan’s Japanese Period”, in Rey Chow (ed.), Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory (Durham, N.C. and London, 2000), 99–126. 118 Particularly striking here are Huang’s veiled references to the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Nanking massacre, and the comfort women. The seven Japanese sex tourists at the centre of the story travel Japan’s former colonies, and belong to a ‘Thousand Beheadings Club’ which requires each of its members to sleep with a thousand different women in his lifetime. The club grimly recalls the killing sprees indulged in by Japanese ofcers stationed at Nanking, two of whom actually held a well-documented race to see who could behead a hundred Chinese citizens rst. According to club lore, moreover, the pubic hair of female conquests has talismanic properties—a fetish which also dates back to the conduct of the Japanese military in the battleelds of East Asia. In his study of the wartime comfort women, George Hicks notes the superstitious folklore which surrounded the sexual act in the consciousness of Japanese soldiery: “. . . sex before going into battle worked as a charm against injury. Amulets could be made from the pubic hair of comfort women, or from something belonging to them”. See Huang Chunming, “Shayaonala, Zaijian” (Sayonara, Zaijian), in Huang Chunming, Shayaonala, Zaijian (Taipei, 1978); and George Hicks, The Comfort Women. Sex Slaves of the Japanese Imperial Forces (London, 1995), 6.

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phone facilities, instituted banking systems and corporate enterprises, and established modern newspapers.119 In the words of Thomas Gold, Taiwan’s Japanese rulers took the lead in creating what today would be called a good investment climate on the island . . . enforcing law and order, unifying weights, measures, and currency; guaranteeing private property rights; building a modern infrastructure; mobilizing natural resources; increasing agricultural productivity; making investment capital available; and developing human capital. In the process, the Japanese removed bureaucratic, legal, and social impediments to the development of capitalism and demonstrated to the Taiwanese the potential of capitalist industrialization . . . [Furthermore] the infrastructure and factories built by the Japanese were dispersed throughout the island, thus avoiding the common phenomenon of a tiny modern channel in a sea of traditional society.120

Such is the compelling weight of this legacy, in fact, that even Taiwanese scholars who previously stressed the exclusively oppressive nature of colonial rule now concede that the Japanese occupation has played a critical role in Taiwan’s postwar transformation from neglected province to edging island democracy.121 Moreover, the Japanese policy of installing domestic institutional structures within colonized nations has meant that over the past fortyodd years Japan and Taiwan have followed a similar, if not directly simultaneous, trajectory in their transformation into huge economic powers.122 Indeed, whilst it is undeniable that Japan learnt its rst lessons in industrialization from the West, the role it played subsequently as bridge and broker of these new technologies in agrarian Taiwan has inevitably brought the island’s experience of modernity closer in line with that of Japan than would have been the case if the Great Powers had seized Taiwan rst. And as Philip Huang reminds us, Japanese thinkers frequently altered “the very substance, or at least the emphasis, 119 For a comprehensive analysis, see Samuel P.S. Ho, “Colonialism and Development: Korea, Taiwan, and Kwantung”, in Myers and Peattie, op. cit., 347–98. 120 Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk, 1986), 44–5. 121 It remains true, however, that Taiwanese assessments of colonial rule tend to foreground the suffering visited on the Taiwanese people by their Japanese occupiers. See, for example, Chen Haoyang, Taiwan sibai nian shumin shi (Four Hundred Years in the History of the Common People on Taiwan) (Taipei, 1992), 268–71. 122 To quote Gold again: “Unlike the experience of Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia, it was not the advanced industrial powers of the West that brought capitalism to Taiwan . . . Rather, the Japanese, themselves the victims of Western imperialism, performed the service of getting capitalist development underway in Taiwan”. Gold, op. cit., 32.

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of . . . Western ideas”.123 At least in part because of the colonial intervention, Taiwan has followed Japan in experiencing an almost articially swift transition from backwater to economic superpower; and the sheer speed of this transition has, in its turn, meant that the two societies have been recongured in ways that are as parallel as they are cognitively disorientating. In both countries, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and market-led development have created lifeworlds that would have been literally unimaginable fty years ago. And it is these brave new worlds, with their ruptures and hasty dislocations, that the writers investigated in this book critique.

Time, themes, and tropes: generalities 1. Time-frame Some rationale is now needed for the choice of time-frame that brackets the investigations conducted in this book. The thirty-year period under exploration here commends itself for a number of reasons. First of all, three decades is the approximate span of a generation; and whilst the writers analysed here may belong to differing age cohorts, this thirtyyear interval allows the transformations of modernity to be tracked along a trajectory that has a certain xed resonance. This point is borne out by the degree to which many of these transformations were ‘born’ and grew to full ‘maturity’ during this time-frame—from Cold War politics to economic growth. For a start, the advent of the 1960s marked a watershed in relations with the US for both Japan and Taiwan, drawing them closer into the American orbit and xing their role as satellites of the superpower. On the one hand, 1960 saw Kishi Nobusuke’s government railroad popular opposition, and succeed in ratifying a revised version of the US-Japan Security Treaty which cemented bilateral relations and twinned Japan’s fate with that of its protector. And on the other, October 1958 witnessed the US-ROC joint communiqué which reafrmed alliance between the two countries in the aftermath of armed clashes with the PRC in the Taiwan Strait. As chapter two of 123 Philip Huang, “Liang Ch’i-chao: The Idea of the New Citizen and the Inuence of Meiji Japan”, in David C. Buxbaum and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), Transition and Permanence: Chinese History and Culture, A Festschrift in Honor of Dr. Hsiao Kung-chuan (Hong Kong, 1972), 75.

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this study demonstrates, the co-option into the Pax Americana that was re-signed and re-sealed as the 1950s yielded to the 1960s impacted in almost immeasurable ways on the modernities of both countries. The beginning of the 1960s also emerges as an apposite point of departure when we turn to the equally seminal question of economic growth. December 1960 saw the formal launch of Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato’s Income-Doubling policy, the famously bold strategy that sought to reprogram the national mindset and transform the populace into the ‘economic animals’ later so disparaged by the Japan-bashers. The shift from the 1950s to the 1960s was just as pivotal to state-led economic development in Taiwan. It was around 1960 that the ‘import substitution’ policy pursued by the KMT in the 1950s began to be bolstered by a complementary strategy of ‘export promotion’—a two-pronged line of attack that proved as transformative as Income-Doubling for the nation’s economic growth. And in tandem with the institution of GNPism as a macrocosmic modus vivendi in both countries came many of the other changes—industrialization, mass rural exodus, and what Koji Taira has called the ‘slash and burn’ of rapid urbanization124—that are associated with modernity in the powerhouses of East Asia. As chapters three and four of this book show, both the shift to full-blown economism that occurred circa 1960, and the socio-cultural fall-out that trailed in its wake, became the matrix for new modes of life—and the genesis for literary dissent. In other words, then, the approximate date of 1960 stands as either the point of origin, or the point of critical take-off, for many of the state-stewarded transformations that provoke the literatures of disenchantment explored in this book. In many ways, the import of this date—both politically and economically—stems from its status as endpoint in the arc of postwar recovery. While Japanese ofcialdom may have declared as early as 1956 that the ‘postwar is now over’ (mohaya sengo de wa nai), the evidence of policy would seem to suggest that 1960 marked a rmer caesura with the immediate postwar period—whether this was due to the deaththroes of the defeat mentality ( Japan), or the condent consolidation of KMT power in the aftermath of successful land reform (Taiwan). Either way, the new decade seemed to bring both a certain closure and a re-orientation towards the future. And in much

124 Koji Taira, “Dialectics of Economic Growth, National Power, and Distributive Struggles”, in Gordon, op. cit., 170.

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the same way—although, of course, in reverse—the end of the 1980s marks a natural coda to the era inaugurated by the triumphal end of the ‘postwar’. Indeed, both in terms of politics and economics, the close of the 1980s brought a pattern of changeover, realignment, rupture and winding down that was in every way as epoch-making as the late fties and early sixties. The most momentous changing of the political guard occurred, of course, in Taiwan, where the lifting of martial law in 1987 ushered in a new order so transformative that the ‘Taiwan’ with which writers such as Wang Zhenhe, Bai Xianyong, and even Zhu Tianwen grappled seems almost another country now. Certainly, the ction that has appeared over the last fteen years testies to an unquestionable ‘before and after’, a rupture that Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang for one terms the ‘great divide’.125 Yet in Japan, too, the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s brought a petering out of the old political monologic, a process which culminated in 1993 when the LDP lost its parliamentary majority for the rst time in 38 years and was forced to form a coalition government. More cataclysmic by far, however, was the bursting of the Japanese bubble in 1990, a grave downturn that began in the economy but led to a more endemic crisis of condence across the body politic. As a result, Japanese state and society in the 1990s bore little resemblance to either the political highhandedness critiqued in Ôe Kenzaburô’s Ampo era allegories, or the bubble satires of Murakami Haruki in which expense accounts are limitless and yet no-one picks up the nal bill. In sum, the time-frame that begins circa 1960 and ends circa 1990 is both intensive and self-contained, a chronological block in which both vertiginous change and the agency of the state were conspicuous in ways as likely unrepeatable as they were unpalatable to many writers of imaginative ction. 2. Thematic concerns The question now presents itself of why three particular themes—US geopolitical and cultural hegemony, the breakdown of traditional kinship patterns, and the emergence of a highly commodied society—are the primary focus of this book and its study of literary responses to the modern. After all, modernity in Japan and Taiwan has fuelled prolic 125 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan. Martial Law to Market Law (New York, 2004), 7.

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literary output during the years 1960–1990, as writers have confronted the technological revolution, new responses to spirituality, the disintegration of the traditional moral order, globalization and the growth of multinational corporations, the rise of feminism, environmental despoliation, the emergence of a mass popular culture, diasporic experience, intensifying ethnonationalism, and the impact of democratic ideas on public life.126 Yet practicality and the constraints of space demand some paring down of themes; and to avoid a sense of topics plucked out at random, this study selects a three-way thematic framework that is both inherently inclusive and evokes a broad range of reference. Just as importantly, almost every major writer during the period 1960–1990 has engaged with these themes—in some cases to the point of near-obsession. Thus we nd Ôe Kenzaburô’s extended series of narratives on Occupied Japan, in which the author compulsively revisits the theme of US hegemony in ve interlinked texts written at speed during a period of little more than a year. Li Ang’s consecutive novels Anye (Dark Nights, 1985) and Miyuan (Labyrinthine Garden, 1991), meanwhile, examine the commodication of contemporary Taiwanese life through depictions of sexual mores in wealthy Taipei circles, and are similarly intent in purpose. Yoshimoto Banana’s fascination with the post-family is more pronounced still, and has functioned as the motive force of her ction since her paradigmatic debut, Kitchin (Kitchen), in 1987. Evidently, these themes exercise a potent appeal over the literary imagination—not least because they deal with some of the most emotive transformations of the period and are possessed of a grainy human immediacy which makes them a natural gift to the writer of ction. 3. Perennial tropes: the city and sexuality If these three themes constitute the warp of the narratives examined in this book, then the leitmotifs of the city and sexuality provide their weft, operating as the metaphoric mode through which the spirit of remonstrance nds expression. The city in literature is, of course, a venerable topos that has weathered numerous shifts in critical theory, and inspired 126 Examples include Abe Kôbô’s surreal critiques of science, medicine, and technocracy in Japan, such as Daiyon kanpyôki (Inter Ice Age 4) (Tokyo, 1959); Tanin no kao (The Face of Another) (Tokyo, 1964), and Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous) (Tokyo, 1977); the proto-feminist writings of Japanese women authors such as Kôno Taeko, Tomioka Taeko and Takahashi Takako; and the rise of so-called ecology writers (shengtai zuojia), environmental protection literature (huanbao wenxue), and nature writing (ziran xiezuo) in Taiwan.

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shelves of scholarship. Successive generations in the West seem inclined to test their mettle on the topic of the city’s relationship to aesthetic production, from Lewis Mumford through Raymond Williams to the postmodernists; and each interpretation is heavily scored with the cultural traces of the time.127 Writings on sexuality are just as profuse, not least because the latter has become a force almost on a par with gender for the re-writing of canons and the rehabilitation of lost or banished meanings. Needless to say, erotic ‘wrongdoing’—violation of the established moral order and the latter’s various idiosyncrasies—occupies a special pride of place. Obviously, the present study references this body of scholarship; but its chief concern is to explore the tropes of the city and sexuality in the specic context of the role they play as oating and protean signiers of the resistance harbored by many East Asian writers towards state-sponsored programs of modernity. In this literary milieu, the leitmotifs of the city and sexuality recur insistently because they are powerful instruments, with long pedigrees, for the expression of ambivalence and moral opposition. It is by no means the intention of this book to imply in any prescriptive way that these twin tropes are the sole recurrent metaphors in narratives of modernity from Japan and Taiwan. Naturally, other constellations of metaphor and motif abound—not least in representations of the three core themes that form the backbone of this study. Thus Wang Wenxing’s pioneering novel Jiabian (A Change in the Family, 1973) explores the unraveling of the nuclear family unit as an extended meditation on the Confucian precept of xiao (lial piety); Ôe Kenzaburô’s novella “Shiiku” (“The Catch”, 1959) probes the impact of American power through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a remote valley community in Shikoku; and Tanaka Yasuo’s novel Nantonaku kurisutaru (Somehow, Crystal, 1980) analyses consumer Japan as a riotous semiotic play on the brand name. None of these texts mobilizes the tropes of the city and sexuality in their ctional projects to any notable extent—if at

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More recently, East Asian studies has seen a surge of interest in the metropolis, and a growing number of studies have explored its role as the site and signier of modernity within literary discourse. 1930s Shanghai has become a particular locus for research during the last decade or so, and several monographs on the subject have appeared in English, most notably those by Zhang Yingjin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Shu Mei-shih, together with a spate of scholarly articles. See Zhang Yingjin, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Congurations of Space, Time and Gender (Stanford, 1996); Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); and Shu-mei Shih, op. cit.

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all. Yet even a cursory appraisal of these two literary cultures reveals that a striking number of Japanese and Taiwanese writers do return again and again to the topoi of the metropolis and sexuality when they ‘write’ modernity. In fact, such a critical mass of literary energy expends itself on these two tropes that we can almost speak in terms of synergy, of a collective concentration of purpose that creates, over time, an intertext of cognate writings. The city as trope: mise-en-scène of modernity As many have observed, the city ranks amongst the most suggestive of all literary topoi, largely because it operates as a portmanteau concept whose presence in a given text triggers a chain of interlinked associations, both conscious and subliminal. Urban narratives are by their very nature intertextual, working as palimpsests in which the traces of older tales lie faintly visible below the surface of the story that we read in the here and now. This allows the city as topos to harbor an almost innite multiplicity of meaning, as present and past interact within the text to evoke both the immediate moment and the weighty resonances of the city across cultural time. More pertinently, the role the metropolis has played across history as a ‘scene of sin’—cosmopolitan eshpot, breeding ground for political unrest, home of industrial blight, seat of dictatorial power, and natural habitat for criminality—means that urban images present themselves forcefully to writers of ction for whom the present is a place of disenchantment. And nowhere is this signicatory potential more expedient than in the word-city’s capacity to congure both modernity and the sometimes suppressed feelings of ambivalence that attend it. In simple terms, the literary city provides a single imagistic framework within which writers can simultaneously represent and critique the process of modernity. In many ways, the links between the city and modernity—both in life and literature—are so self-evident as to be almost axiomatic. The living city, as most famously observed by Baudelaire, Benjamin and Simmel, is the prime matrix of modernity—the site, catalyst and direct agent of unsettling change; and by logical extension, modernity and change are the implied, or baseline, subjects of most urban narrative. Writers who explore social change nd themselves gravitating, almost irresistibly, towards the city as the scene or subject of their ction, for the simple reason that the city condenses the full gamut of changes associated with modernity into a single, highly charged, and allusive metaphor. Yet at the same time, and just as importantly, the city possesses an almost

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unique capacity to suggest antinomy and ambivalence. As Burton Pike notes Ambivalence, the inability of strong negative and positive impulses toward a totemic object to resolve themselves . . . [is] the most powerful constant associated with the idea of the city . . . the image of the city stands as the great reication of ambivalence, embodying a complex of contradictory forces in both the individual and the collective . . . minds . . .128

What is more, the city works as an apposite metaphor not just for ambivalence, but also for more potent feelings of resistance—symbolizing, in fact, the rooted antipathy that philosophical man feels about the nonnatural world that progress has created. The metropolis acts as lightning rod for collective fears ranging from plague all the way to nuclear holocaust, and in Pike’s words, is often the “image through which a culture is judged and found wanting”.129 More particularly, the associations of the city with alienation, exile, corruption, sin, perversion, the death of compassion, and the worship of money suggest why writers are drawn to it as they paint the darker colors of the modern. This double signicatory power becomes still clearer when we examine more closely how the image of the city functions within literary representation. The city in literature lives what can justly be called a double life, and its representional power is split across two distinct axes: the mimetic and the imaginative. On the one hand, the mimetic aspect of the literary city anchors it in the rational, glass and concrete material world, investing its descriptions of the reality that surrounds the urban reader with an authority derived from verisimilitude. This mimetic city, described in neon, high-rises, trafc and noise, speaks to the urbandweller in an idiom culled from the modern moment which he or she immediately understands. In this sense, the mimetic city runs along the horizontal and synchronic axis of the here and now, depicting modernity as and when it happens. The imaginative city, by contrast, tends to operate vertically and diachronically, stretching back into history and reaching deep into the cultural unconscious. It plays on the doubt, fear, superstition, myth, intuition, and buried memories associated with the idea of metropolis, and freely cross-references the long genealogy of the city in literature.130 As a result, the store of attitudes it draws upon 128

Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, 1981), xii–8. Ibid., 30. 130 For a study of evolving attitudes to the city in twentieth-century mainland Chinese and Taiwanese literature, see Ma Sen, “Chengshi zhi zui. Lun xiandangdai xiaoshuo de 129

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remains remarkably constant over time and space, unlike the mimetic mode, which typically records the breakneck speed of urban change. In contrast to the easy-to-read street-grid that is the mimetic city, the imaginative city is a labyrinth, a place—as suggested above—of exile, vice, and inhumanity. The image of the city in literature, then, is the meeting of these mimetic and imaginative modes. And the sense of representational duality that they create—at once rational and emotional, empirical and instinctual, quotidian and dream-like, contemporary and timeless—is exploited to consistently powerful effect in the literatures of disenchantment explored here. Sexuality and the discourse of deviance The trope of sexuality in the narratives considered in this study works principally to intensify this effort of socio-cultural critique. Viewed as a piece, the portrait of human sexuality that emerges from the texts explored here, and from numerous others written during the same period, is dark and carefully stylized.131 For a start, sexual behavior of a kind deemed non-normative or aberrant by the social majority—antiprocreativity, autoeroticism, homosexuality, transsexuality, voyeurism, promiscuity, prostitution, ménages-à-trois, adultery, nymphomania, sexual violence, rape, sadism, and various other kinds of so-called ‘deviant’ activity—features with an almost disproportionate regularity in these writings.132 More conspicuous still, however, is the lack of self-conscious fanfare with which these behaviors are represented. Indeed, rather than a crude urge to épater les bourgeois, it is the drive to represent ‘deviance’ as straight mimesis—as the norm—that gives these texts their subversive

shuxie xintai” (“The Sin of the City. A Discussion of Attitudes to Writing in Modern and Contemporary Fiction”), in Zheng Mingli (ed.), Dangdai Taiwan dushi wenxue lun (Urban Literature in Contemporary Taiwan) (Taipei, 1995), 179–209. Ma argues that agricultural production, familial ethics, and a belief in the innate goodness of man formed the key cultural axis in traditional China, and identies the advent of Western imperialism as the historical moment at which the city—previously part of this continuum—acquired its insidious character in the Chinese cultural imaginary. From this point onwards, the city becomes the site of sin in an exhaustive range of ctional writings. 131 Other examples of dystopian visions of sexuality are contained in the work of writers such as Nakagami Kenji, Abe Kôbô, Kôno Taeko, Ouyang Zi, Huang Fan, and Xiao Sa. 132 It is certainly not my intention to suggest here that a focus on sexual transgression is exclusive to ctional writing from Japan and Taiwan. After all, it is a patent truism that this theme has a genuinely global application. Rather, my concern in this book is with the intersection between authoritarian states, engagé writers, and a literary mission focused on the sexual image.

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character. Whilst unquestionably a rhetorical strategy, this inversion of the mainstream/marginal hierarchy tends to be carried out in deliberately unrhetorical ways, and with a patina of blasé naturalness cast over taboo or stigmatized proceedings that is ultimately more shocking to readers than any sensationalism. Yet despite the truism that sex sells, and the more risqué the better, titillation is scarcely the primary objective here. Indeed, in most cases, the illicit sexual act occurs off-screen or is shrouded decently from readerly view, and eroticism functions as a symbolic motif in these texts rather than as a descriptive subject. Perhaps, in fact, eroticism itself is a misnomer here, since right across these texts the discourse of deviance works chiey as a strategy of defamiliarization— a tool within projects of anti-establishment socio-cultural critique—and writers use the sexual subcultures listed above as signs within the text of dysfunctionality in the social world that it represents. More specically, writers from Japan and Taiwan deploy the motif of transgressive sexuality to signify the decay in human relations that has followed in the wake of their respective miracle economies.133 Although a sense of transgression is palpable across the inventory of practices listed above, two common denominators form the baseline subtext of the discourse of deviance. The rst of these is the more or less absolute disavowal of reproductive sexuality. This strategic denial of reproduction is at rst sight surprising, given that the family is so insistent a theme of Japanese and Taiwanese ction during this timeframe; yet in practice, the family haunts these texts as a ghost rather than inhabiting them as a esh-and-blood reality. When familial relations are described, they are either in full meltdown or exist in the realm of invented nostalgia. Sexuality as life-force has little place in this apocalyptic vision, and on the rare occasions when procreation does occur, it is almost always subverted in some way—hence the references to sterility, abortion, miscarriage, infant mortality, foundlings, orphans, and the gross maltreatment of children that abound in this body of ction. In fact, it is mortality, rather than procreation, that accompanies sexuality

133 Susan Napier’s comments on Ôe and Mishima are of relevance here. She writes that many works by these two writers share “two important common factors: First, to capture the fragmentation of the postwar world, they overtly depict non-procreative and illicit sexual behaviors—autoeroticism, homosexuality, voyeurism, adultery, rape, and sadism. Second, to probe the relations and connections that do operate in society, they make sexuality itself a key theme in narrative after narrative”. See Napier, Escape from the Wasteland. Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Ôe Kenzaburô (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 44.

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most naturally in these writings: sex culminates directly in death in several texts, and in many others it is a codeword for destruction, suffering, and personality disorder. Murder, suicide, self-immolation, physical violence, criminality, exploitation, exile, mania, clinical depression, disease, alcoholism, and drug abuse all nd their origin in sexuality in these writings, and there is scant jouissance to lighten the load of suffering. This relates, in its turn, to the second salient marker of transgression in these texts: the rarity of desire. Sexual relations in these texts are alienating, impersonal, and, most importantly, dulled by a sense of ennui and meaninglessness. This dearth of narratives which depict libidinous energy as pleasure, passion, or symbolic exchange is remarkable, particularly given the almost encyclopedic variety of the erotic behavior described. This lack is still more surprising when we recall that sexuality is twinned with suffering, violence, and death in these texts in ways that at rst seem all too familiar: after all, the notion that desire is intimately linked to thanatos, and that eros ends in death, has a long literary lineage in both East and West. In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont speaks of the “dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with death, and involves the destruction of any one yielding himself up to it with all his strength”.134 Death as the ultimate measure of passionate attachment is an equally time-honored theme in the classical literatures of China and Japan, from the legend of Yang Guifei to Chikamatsu’s Sonezaki shinjû (Love Suicides at Sonezaki, 1703). Yet what we observe in these texts from contemporary Japan and Taiwan is repeated death and dysfunction within a libidinal economy almost entirely devoid of desire. And it is in this sense that the disappearance of desire becomes actively transgressive: sexuality, however depraved or violent its appearance, can at least carry meaning for its actors when it is driven by desire. Unmediated by desire, on the other hand, eroticism is soon emptied of meaning, and its ‘deviance’ becomes less an issue of private versus public morality than a metonym for the far broader issue of lost affect and the mortication of human bonds. As Tony Tanner observed of the nineteenth-century European novel, the disappearance of pleasure from ctional narrative occurs in tandem with the growth of industrialized society, working as a signier for the atrophy that begins to afict human interaction under the march

134 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, tr. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, 1983), 4.

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of progress.135 Thus in novels such as Madame Bovary, failed intimacy is used to point up the wider sense of exile that attends the transition to modernity and the mechanized age. Desire itself is the lack which, in Lacanian terms, works to drive the text forwards. Narratives from Japan and Taiwan both echo and deviate from this paradigm of mortied desire. In these texts, too, we nd the death of jouissance acting as a metaphor for the deadening of human relations. Yet industrialization has been compressed into a few intense decades in these two societies, and the lost pleasures that still beckon on the horizon for Emma Bovary in mid-nineteenth century France have vanished entirely from view here. In sum, desire is not just absent from these texts, but degraded to the point where it is displaced altogether. In its place we nd the various sociopathic disorders cited above, which combine with the mise-en-scène of the city to create ctional visions which are sometimes unremittingly dystopian.

Writers At rst sight, the authors explored here may seem so disparate as to render problematic any attempt to group them together under a common rubric. After all, they are divided not only by nationality and language, but also by conspicuous differences in age, political orientation, and literary approach. Certainly, few would dispute that the selection of writers always constitutes a core methodological challenge for comparative work. Predictably enough, this challenge turns on the search for that elusive balance—between breadth and depth, generality and particularity—which is the prerequisite for a comparativism that avoids the lures of tendentious scholarship. One obvious way around the dilemma is to opt for the trusty survey-style method. This approach scours the literary archive for texts which write the chosen theme (however eeting or tangential their concern, and however obscure their author) and strives for an exhaustive overview of the eld. At the other end of the spectrum lies the closer focus—a method that isolates a few key writers for intensive study, and seeks to extrapolate broad conclusions from small but telling samples. Neither approach, however, seems tting to the case in hand, not least because the subject of comparison concerns two separate literary 135

Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1979), 91.

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traditions stretching over a thirty-year time-span. Both methods militate against balance and engender an asymmetry of analysis, with surveys running the risk of skimming the surface and privileging information over interpretation, and narrower parameters failing to yield ndings that hold true over the broader span. This book, therefore, adopts a combined approach. It examines a range of authors who, although they are relatively limited in number, are both sufciently different from one another and distinguished in their own right to provide a useful cross-section of the literary eld as it has developed in Japan and Taiwan during the period 1960 to 1990. The work of these writers is, moreover, highly paradigmatic in nature, and encompasses most of the major trends that have shaped literary production in both nations. To add greater breadth, the book also refers regularly, both en passant and in greater detail, to numerous other authors who write modernity, but whose works cannot be placed at center-stage for reasons of space. Diversity of this kind is crucial, not simply because it serves the demands of balance, but because the selection of a catholic range of writers is integral to the very logic of comparativism. If comparativism simply concerns itself with an assortment of like-minded writers from Japan and Taiwan, akin to one another in age, politics, and literary approach, then the discovery that they write modernity using identical themes and tropes would hardly substantiate the fellowship of literary dissent that is being mooted here. This sense of large-scale opposition can be satisfactorily demonstrated only through recourse to writers as different from one another as Ôe Kenzaburô and Murakami Haruki, Bai Xianyong and Huang Chunming. After all, it is precisely the much-touted differences between these writers that make their underlying fellowship intriguing. Nevertheless, broad-based comparison remains a potentially risky enterprise. Crossing over the boundaries of the nation-state in order to identify common themes, draw out shared motifs, and argue that a nexus of shared preoccupations binds together otherwise heterogeneous writers is a legitimate exercise only so long as the integrity of texts is upheld. As Shelley Wong has aptly put it, broad-based work of this kind can quite easily degenerate into ‘literary strip-mining’,136 a process whereby multi-voiced, culturally-specic narratives are reduced to lifeless, deracinated artifacts that serve a prescriptive reading strategy. Honoring the polysemic nature of texts, and giving due space to alternative 136 Quoted in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian-American Literature (Princeton, 1993), 17.

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interpretations, is perhaps the most obvious safeguard against this kind of interpretive exploitation. The elision of difference—if not its outright denial—is just as deep a pitfall for intertextual, cross-cultural work that searches for commonality across borders. The danger here, of course, is that commonality comes at the price of a homelessness in which the ‘nationality’ of a literary text is sacriced so that its ‘international’—or at least regional—character can be displayed to good effect. Yet underlying this dilemma is the more vexed question of what constitutes ‘nationality’ in a literary text, and, just as relevantly, who qualies for the tag of ‘national’ writer. A comparative practice that explores a catholic range of authors presents, perhaps, the best answer to the challenges of difference. This is because the very catholicity of the writers goes some way towards keeping the relationship between literature and specic nationhood—Japaneseness, Taiwaneseness—sealed off from the vagaries of subjective critical judgment: thus when comparison occurs, it does so on the basis of a difference that is broadly and inclusively dened. 1. Japan In the case of Japan, this notion of inclusive difference requires the selection of authors who represent the sometimes striking heterogeneity of literary practice in Japan during the latter part of the twentieth century. The chief issue here is the generation gap that subdivides later postwar writers into two distinct groups. While Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), Nosaka Akiyuki (1930–), and Ôe Kenzaburô (1935–), belong to the rst generation of postwar authors, Murakami Haruki (1949–), Murakami Ryû (1952–), and Yoshimoto Banana (1964–) are representative of a younger crop of contemporary writers, to whom Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel have applied the term ‘post-postwar generation’.137 There can be little disputing the fact that important differences, even sharp personal rifts, exist between individual writers who nd themselves on the same side of this generational gap.138 Yet

137 Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel, “Introduction”, in Snyder and Gabriel, Ôe and Beyond (Honolulu, 1999), 3. 138 This point cannot be made too clearly. Perhaps the most notorious example of intra-generational antagonism is provided by Ôe and Mishima, whose highly divergent political views led Ôe to lambast Mishima in print after the latter’s suicide. See Ôe, “Shishatachi no saishû no buijon to warera ikinobitsuzukeru mono” (“The Final Vision of the Dead and Those of Us Who Live On”, in Ôe Kenzaburô dojidaironshû (The Contemporary Essays of Ôe Kenzaburô) vol. 6 (Tokyo, 1981), 198–248.

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it remains true that this chronological divide is the most useful marker which the critic has at his or her disposal when attempting to map the literary topography of postwar Japan. This is because the differences in mood, style, and politics that have generated factions among writers of the same peer group are, for the most part, eclipsed by the major shift in literary temper that occurs with the passing of rst postwar generation and the advent of the second. Consequently, it has become something of a critical commonplace—especially in Japan, where literary nomenclature is a long-entrenched tradition—to rely on the category of generation as the overarching organizational strategy for postwar writing. To attempt a loose generalization, the earlier generation of authors tend to be practitioners of jun bungaku (pure literature), for whom writing is an intellectual and often political mission pursued without undue concern for popularity and market forces. As is to be expected, the work of these writers grapples with thorny and complex questions, paramount among which is the representation of the self and its relationship with a postwar Japanese society that is seen as increasingly soulless and estranging. Despite their many differences, these authors are united in their horror at the wholesale commodication of Japanese life, and at the spiritual void that gapes beneath the surface of the ‘managed society’ (kanri shakai). Consequently, a basic seriousness of purpose informs virtually all their writings—even the riotous comic prose of Nosaka Akiyuki—and many of their works are counter-narratives which stress the ways and means of marginality, otherness, and resistance. What is more, the war casts a long shadow over the works of these writers, all of whom lived through the ‘dark valley’ (kurai tani) of Japan’s defeat and postwar despair. As Ôe Kenzaburô puts it in an essay entitled “Japan’s Dual Identity: A Writer’s Dilemma”, . . . the preoccupation of postwar writers was to examine, with all the force of their imagination, what, in the pursuit of modernization, Japan had done to Asia and to the vulnerable elements in its own society, how the impasse could only have led to its defeat, and what means of resuscitation were possible for the nation after its death as a state.139

Indeed, it is all too tempting to identify this historical experience of war and its immediate aftermath as the root cause of the attitudinal gulf that separates these writers from their successors of the post-postwar

139 Ôe Kenzaburô, “Japan’s Dual Identity: A Writer’s Dilemma”, in Ôe, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, tr. Yunioki Yanagishita (Tokyo, 1994), 74.

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generation. Equally common, however, is a more deliberately literary schema that uses the modernist/postmodernist dialectic as a means of glossing the change in tenor that occurs as postwar gives way to contemporary. At any rate, and whatever logic one uses to explain this shift, it remains undeniable that the rst wave of postwar authors—and this designation includes writers such as Abe Kôbô, Endô Shûsaku, Kojima Nobuo, Tomioka Taeko, and Ôba Minako, as well as the authors cited above— all display an engagé spirit which, according to many, has somehow failed to transmit itself to the younger generation. To quote Ôe again: . . . although Mishima and his literary counterparts were moving in opposite ideological directions, in their common desire for moral values to take precedence over material ones they together reveal a distinguishing trait in the writing of those years [the rst postwar generation], a characteristic of serious literature going back to Sôseki.140

Ôe is referring specically here to the chasm in political ideology that opened up between himself and Mishima during the protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty during the early 1960s; but this statement, with a little ne-tuning, could just as easily be brought to bear on the full range of writers discussed here. In short, almost every writer of this rst postwar generation can trace a literary lineage not just back to Sôseki, but even as far into the past as the Meiji Restoration, when literature was harnessed to the project of nation-building for the rst time, and imbued with moral gravitas as a result.141 Something of a sea change occurs, however, from the latter half of the 1970s onwards with the steady rise to prominence of writers such as the two Murakamis, Yamada Eimi, and Yoshimoto Banana. Highminded critics and intellectuals typically excoriate this literature, claiming that it has all but killed off the practice of jun bungaku, and replaced it with a mode of writing that is merely another simulacrum of what Ôe has called “Japan’s grotesquely bloated consumer society”. Up to a point, these critiques are grounded in fact. The works of the postpostwar generation display a promiscuity of style and genre—raiding manga, sci-, and even advertising copy for their material and inspira140 Ôe Kenzaburô, “On Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature”, in Ôe, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, 48. 141 James Fujii delineates an intriguing picture of the complex relationship between state authority, modernization, and literary practice during the Meiji era in his Complicit Fictions. The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993).

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tion—which, quite understandably, sends the literary purist reeling. Mixing codes and breaking down the boundaries between high and mass culture, new ction ranges freely over the contemporary cultural scene, but seems to prefer this mobility to the grim rootedness in social reality that is almost a badge of honor for the rst postwar generation. It is also extraordinarily popular, a fact that lends a sharper edge to critical dismay. Indeed, just as the literary magazines that have traditionally nurtured edgling talent are being steadily squeezed out of the market, Murakami Inc.—as I have already discussed—is fast becoming a global brand with fans and franchises everywhere. Perhaps the most scathing critic of the new wave is Masao Miyoshi, who has this to say about its leading exponents: [Murakami Haruki’s] tales . . . are ‘pick-uppable’ on any page, and that means an entirely easy read—a smooth, popular item of consumption . . . only a very few would be silly enough to get interested in deep reading . . . [yet] Murakami’s work looks learned and profound alongside Banana Yoshimoto’s books. Her output is entirely couched in baby talk, uninterrupted by humor, emotion, idea, not to say irony or intelligence.142

Miyoshi, along with Ôe, seeks to rally what he considers to be the last remnants of jun bungaku, writers such as Nakagami Kenji, Tsushima Yûko, Kôno Taeko, and even Shimada Masahiko, who enjoy high critical favor but suffer ever-dwindling readerships. The last few years, however, have seen a movement to rehabilitate Murakami, Yoshimoto Banana et al., and works of scholarship have appeared which seek to explore their populist aesthetic. Some critics, including John Whittier Treat, Matthew Strecher, and Yoshida Haruo, claim the presence of counter-cultural, oppositionalist elements in the new ction that are indignant enough to stand comparison with the remonstrance of older writers.143 The present book positions itself 142 Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 234–6. 143 See Treat, “Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen, or the Cultural Logic of Japanese Consumerism”, in Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (eds.), Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (Richmond, Surrey, 1995), 276–98; Strecher, “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki”, Journal of Japanese Studies 25/2 (1999), 263–98; and Yoshida Haruo, Murakami Haruki to Amerika. Bôryokusei no yûrai (Murakami Haruki and America. The Origin of Violence) (Tokyo, 2001). The critical seriousness with which Murakami is now treated is also evinced by the recent publication of a vevolume series of essays exploring his work. See Kuritsubo Yoshiki and Tsuge Teruhiko (eds.), Murakami Haruki sutadîzu (Studies on Murakami Haruki) vols. 1–5 (Tokyo, 1999).

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within this latter movement, and argues that, although much of the post-postwar generation may eschew the kind of highly-wrought ‘literariness’ prized by Japan’s intellectual establishment, their works engage with the practice of alterity in ways that it would be unwise to dismiss out of hand. More than this, their ction presents a critique of state and society that is all the more potent and beguiling for its refusal to embrace the classic modernist forms of literary dissent. Whilst apparently subsumed within Japan’s “grotesquely bloated consumer society”—one is reminded here of Yoshimoto Banana’s disingenuous claim that she would just as happily have become an air-hostess as a writer144—the new ction frequently feeds on its host and uses its facility with Japan’s ambient culture to create ambivalent texts in which conspicuous consumers yearn for an undened prelapsarian world. 2. Taiwan A different set of issues comes into play when we consider the Taiwanese authors examined in this book. First of all, the generation gap that is so germane to postwar Japanese ction is comparatively blurred in the Taiwanese context. While nearly forty years separate the births of Mishima Yukio and Yoshimoto Banana (the rst- and last-born Japanese writers analyzed in this study), less than twenty divide Bai Xianyong and Zhu Tianwen. Indeed, when viewed collectively, this sequence of authors—namely Bai Xianyong (1937–), Wang Wenxing (1939–), Huang Chunming (1939–), Wang Zhenhe (1940–1990), Li Ang (1952–), and Zhu Tianwen (1956–)—suggests more of an even continuum than a chronology that sub-divides into temporally distinct phases. The reasons for this difference are largely historical. After Taiwan was returned to mainland Chinese rule in 1945, Mandarin Chinese became the ofcial language of the island, replacing Japanese altogether and pushing the Taiwanese dialect out of the higher discursive realm. For native Taiwanese writers—who had previously written either in Japanese, or, less commonly, in transcriptions of local dialect—this linguistic shift meant that access to literary expression was abruptly foreclosed.145 Simultaneously, the efforts of the KMT to consolidate their grip on the island led 144

See Treat, op. cit., 283. For a discussion of the linguistic difculties faced by Taiwanese writers in their struggle for self-expression, see Ozaki Hotsuki, Kindai bungaku no kizuato. Kyû shokuminchi bungakuron (The Scars of Modern Literature. On the Literature of the Former Colonies) (Tokyo, 1991), 105–6. 145

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to the persecution of many prominent Taiwanese writers and intellectuals, particularly during and after the February 28 Incident (Ererba shijian) of 1947.146 Together, these events wrought havoc on the local literary scene, creating a vacuum that was lled, after a fashion, by the various mainlander littérateurs who accompanied the Nationalist decampment to Taiwan in 1949. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these often army-based authors ( junren zuojia) tended towards a literature of anti-Communist sentiment ( fan-gong wenxue), and their writings were steeped in a plaintive nostalgia for the lost mainland rather than any local taste or color.147 As a result, such works sit uncomfortably within the corpus of postwar ‘Taiwanese’ literature, however loosely one might choose to dene the latter; and it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s—when native writers began to achieve mastery of Mandarin and the Taiwan-born children of mainlanders to reach maturity—that a more recognizably Taiwanese literature emerged. Yet while the Taiwanese writers considered in this study may be closer to each other in age than their Japanese counterparts, the political and literary differences that separate them appear just as pronounced. The rst major issue here is the ideological ssure that opened up between the proponents of modernist literature and their rivals in the nativist literary movement, who came to prominence later and aligned themselves aggressively against the earlier clique. The modernists (xiandaipai) emerged during the 1960s, and mostly comprised young intellectuals and writers of rst and second-generation Mainlander stock—although some important gures were native Taiwanese. Luminaries of the movement include Wang Wenxing, Bai Xianyong, Chen Ruoxi, Qi Dengsheng, and Ouyang Zi; and from their stronghold within the elite universities of Taipei, these young literati launched an iconoclastic project to 146 Sparked by the arrest of a local woman selling cigarettes without a license, the February 28th Incident was an impassioned reaction to the KMT’s botched integration policies after 1945. Public protests ared up across the island, taking the form of a spontaneous uprising that caught the new government unawares. Yet as local élites made increasingly strident demands of the Nationalist authorities—and proclaimed their dissatisfaction at KMT rule since 1945 with more fervor than caution—the government took violent measures to suppress dissent. Thousands were executed in the crackdown that followed, and the intelligentsia, in particular, was ruthlessly culled. Scholars, students, and educated professionals were hunted down and either killed or sentenced to lengthy incarceration. For a detailed account, see Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou, A Tragic Beginning. The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford, 1991). 147 For a more sympathetic treatment of this group, see Pang-yuan Chi, “Taiwan Literature, 1945–1999” in Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (eds.), Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century (Bloomington, 2000), 15–19.

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reanimate literature and thought on Taiwan. Using techniques adapted from Western modernism, they produced experimentalist pieces which propounded the imported ideals of liberalism and artistic freedom, and were usually published in their agship journal Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature).148 Assessments of the xiandaipai typically explore their political disengagement, their debt to Western modes of theme and narratology, or their concern with the iconoclastic individual psyche as it grapples for self-expression in a stiing traditionalist society.149 As the 1970s arrived and Taiwan entered a period of international diplomatic crisis, however, the solipsistic focus of this modernist ction began to provoke a backlash among more politicized native Taiwanese intellectuals. Key gures here are Chen Yingzhen, Wang Tuo, Song Zelai, Lin Shuangbu, Huang Chunming, and Wang Zhenhe. Their critique, moreover, was focused not just on the mainlander-dominated xiandaipai but also on repressive KMT rule in Taiwan, and the transformations it had imposed on the island in the name of progress. In contrast to the Western-inuenced literature of the modernists, nativist ction was pastoral and nostalgic, rooted in the native soil (bentu) and often expressed in local dialect. Operating on a system of binary oppositions—pre-eminent among which were city/country, nationalism/imperialism and agriculture/industry—this literature described the devastation that modernization had brought to a largely agrarian society.150 Almost as a mantra, it stressed loyalty to Taiwan—as opposed to what the nativists saw as the transit passenger mentality of the KMT, whose focus on ‘retaking the mainland’ suggested an attitude of ‘used toothbrushism’ ( yashuazhuyi) towards the island. The intensely politicized character of nativism set it off sharply from the aestheticallyoriented modernist movement which had dominated Taiwanese wentan (literary circles) during the 1960s; and over time, this palpable gulf has led to the widely-held view that modernism and nativism lie at irreconcilably opposed ends of the literary spectrum. This view has been

148

Xiandai wenxue ran from 1960 to 1973. For examples of each approach, see Lü Zhenghui, Zhanhou Taiwan wenxue jingyan (The Experience of Postwar Taiwanese Literature) (Taipei, 1995), 14–20; Peng, op. cit., 111–20; and James C.T. Shu, “Iconoclasm in Taiwan Literature: ‘A Change in the Family’ ”, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 2/1 (1980), 73–85. 150 As Jing Wang puts it, nativist literature is best dened in the ‘idiom of dichotomy’. See Wang, “Taiwan Hsiang-t’u Literature: Perspectives in the Evolution of a Literary Movement”, in Jeanette L. Faurot (ed.), Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Bloomington, 1980), 62. 149

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abetted by the often vitriolic insults that were swapped between the two groups, particularly during the mid- to late 1970s.151 Yet when we examine modernism and nativism more closely, it becomes clear that the similarities that underlie the two movements are in many ways greater than the sum of their differences. Borrowing her terminology from Raymond Williams, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang has described the former group as ‘alternative’ and the latter as ‘oppositional’, and her schematic framework opens up the possibility for a re-appraisal of literary factionalism on Taiwan since 1960.152 More specically, although the modernists and nativists may have squabbled amongst themselves over issues of form, thematics, and language, the two groups remain conspicuously alike in their kneejerk distrust of state power in postwar Taiwan. Thus the same modernists whom nativist writers chastised for their interiority of focus were, in many cases, using the motif of the troubled bourgeois psyche to carry out a critique of the neo-traditionalist state and its ideological interventionism. And the more accomplished nativists, for their part, were not averse to borrowing Western techniques as part of their project to register disaffection at Taiwan’s state-run modernization.153 As this study shows, both groups wrote against the same implied antagonist, and both elaborated a practice of alterity to create landscapes which are unrecognizably ‘other’ to the vision of Taiwan enshrined within state discourses on the modern. This emphasis on antagonism is by no means to deny the other kind of impact that friendly authoritarianism can exert over literature. In addition to intellectual indignation, this mechanism of control may also foster co-option, as cultural producers, cultural bureaucrats, and cultural overseers nd themselves locked in a close and sometimes willing embrace. In its most extreme form, this pact becomes Faustian, and produces what the Hungarian dissident Miklos Haraszti has called ‘progressive censorship’, a process whereby censors and artists work together in the setting of boundaries. Cultural ‘teamwork’ of this kind is of particular relevance in the case of Taiwan—where, of course, authoritarianism was a good deal less amiable than in Japan during the period under discussion here. As Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang has observed, the 151 Joseph S.M. Lau provides some choice examples of the furor in his “The Tropics Mythopoetized: The Extraterritorial Writing of Li Yung-p’ing in the Context of the Hsiang-t’u Movement”, Tamkang Review 12/1 (Fall, 1981), especially pp. 1–5. 152 See Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance. Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Durham, N.C., and London, 1993), 2. 153 As Chang has noted, these borrowings typically took the form of a nativist appropriation of socialist realism.

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top-down control that the monopolistic state wielded over cultural production, most particularly in the years immediately after retrocession, impacted potently on the eld of literature. Governmental power was typically brokered by cultural commissars of mainlander origin, who mediated between the KMT and the literary community, and translated state policy into aesthetic guidelines. Over time this three-way relationship became more recognizably collaborative: as Chang puts it the Nationalists’ cultural policy gradually shifted from ‘coercion’ to ‘hegemony’, from heavy censorship and frequent incarceration of cultural agents to tactful engineering of broad-based voluntary support . . . (and) a benign patron-client relationship was consciously cultivated among the government, mainlanders, and native Taiwanese cultural producers.154

The result was a literary practice whose “language, style, and thematic and generic conventions” bore the imprint of KMT doctrine, reecting the Nationalist preoccupation with the lost motherland and reproducing its taste for ‘nationalist-moralist’ values. Up to a point, ‘progressive censorship’ of this kind gestures towards a different kind of interplay between literature and ‘miraculous modernity’ than that posited in the present study. Rather than opposing the dominant socio-cultural discourse, the collaborative paradigm suggests a literary practice that is itself dened by that discourse and which ultimately cleaves to its diktats. Certainly, it is undeniable that what Chang terms a ‘Sinocentric’ rhetoric—encoded by the Nationalist government and propagated by its agents—imbued the literature of the 1950s and beyond. As a result, any analysis of resistance should stay sensitive to the presence of powerful elements in the literary eld that were, by contrast, professionally and emotionally invested in the state program for progress. Yet it remains true that the period 1960–1990 saw continuous challenges to what Haraszti called the ‘velvet prison’ of co-operative censorship. Indeed, whilst an attachment to China may have persisted amongst many writers, it would be a mistake to conate their cultural nostalgia with full-blooded support for the regime as the KMT settled into their rule, and newer, younger writers began to appear. Useful

154 Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan, 76–7. Chang presents a similar argument elsewhere, and cites Lin Haiyin and Zhu Xining, amongst others, as examples of cultural conservatives who used their institutional power as “literary editors, publishers, and literary bureaucrats” to support their own agendas. See Chang, “Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Chang among Taiwan’s Feminine Writers”, Modern Chinese Literature 4, 1/2 (1988), 202.

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examples here are Bai Xianyong and Zhu Tianwen. Few could dispute that Bai’s two masterworks, Taibei ren (Tales of Taipei People) and Niezi (Cursed Sons), manifest an aesthetic fascination with ‘China’ and its cultural heritage; and Zhu Tianwen’s passion for the same motherland of inherited memory is equally evident across her early writings. Despite impeccable mainlander pedigrees, however—Bai is the son of Nationalist general Bai Chongxi, and Zhu the daughter of the prominent army writer and cultural mandarin Zhu Xining—the two authors combined a wistfulness for China with daring critiques of Nationalist rule on Taiwan during the period under analysis here. As will be discussed at length in chapters three and four of this book, both writers found their natural allegiance to ‘nationalist-moralism’-KMT style increasingly tested as disillusionment with the quotidian reality of state policy set in. By the early to mid-1980s, moreover, the erce dichotomy between modernism and nativism that had dominated literature on Taiwan gave way to a scene characterized by ux, freedom—and an even greater disregard for the ‘rules’ of cultural practice. A cohort of new voices emerged, including Zhang Dachun, Xiao Sa, the aforementioned Zhu Tianwen and her sister Zhu Tianxin, Li Yongping, Huang Fan, and Su Weizhen. To match the liberalizing temper of the times, these writers gave free rein to cosmopolitanism in their ction, and wrote with a relaxed indifference towards the aesthetic and political imperatives which had driven their predecessors. In this sense, the literary scene in 1980s Taiwan invites parallels with that of Japan during the same general time-frame. Recent writers from both literary cultures share an irreverent eclecticism, a tendency to irt more or less casually with the postmodern, and a deep-seated reluctance to be tied down to genres, factions, and even the practice of literature itself. Zhang Dachun and Murakami Ryû are useful comparators here—their career paths demonstrate a striking degree of overlap and, between them, they have worked variously as talk-show hosts, newspaper columnists, editors, best-selling writers, media pundits, and lm directors.155 These professional similarities stem, of course, from the incursions of commercialism into the once hallowed space of literature; and some commentators have concluded from this that the Taiwanese literary

155 Ping-hui Liao cites this kind of professional heterogeneity as a symptom of Taiwan’s postmodern condition. See Liao, “Postmodern Literary Discourse and Public Culture in Taiwan”, in Dirlik and Zhang, op. cit., 76–7.

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scene has suffered a waning of quality and prestige since the heyday of the modernist-nativist debate.156 Certainly, a sizeable contingent of writers have shown themselves willing to publish ction tailored specically to the tastes of the reading public.157 Yet many others—Zhang Dachun and the Zhu sisters among them158—have noticeably raised their game, and produced works that demand a committed and intellectually adventurous audience. Perhaps more importantly, critique of the state has by no means been laid to rest in the pluralist and free-for-all atmosphere of Taiwanese literary culture both before and after the lifting of martial law in 1987. In particular, political liberalization since the early to mid-1980s has allowed writers to excavate long-buried memories, and drag taboo subjects—such as the February 28th Incident159—out of hiding and into the contested terrain of public consciousness. Indeed, as the state’s hold over literary praxis has lessened, many writers have responded by producing retrospective critiques of its oppressive control over Taiwanese society in earlier postwar decades. Furthermore, a number of writers in the 1980s made it their mission to satirize the very market forces that had brought liberalization in their train, and, as later chapters of this book demonstrate, their works implicate rampant state economism in the atrophying of social and spiritual life. In common with their literary counterparts in Japan, therefore, Taiwanese writers in the 1980s have both partaken of the logic of consumerism and used it as the framework for incisive social commentary and critique. 156 A strident articulation of this view can be found in Ma Sen, “Thoughts on the Current Literary Scene”, tr. Janice Wickeri, Renditions 35–36 (1991), 290–3. 157 The so-called ‘middle-brow’ works of Yuan Qiongqiong, Su Weizhen, and Xiao Sa arguably t into this category. Tumultuous events in the political realm have, however, added edge and depth to this genre of ction during the 1980s and 1990s, as Kuei-fen Chiu convincingly demonstrates of Su Weizhen in a recent article. See Chiu, “Identity Politics in Contemporary Women’s Novels in Taiwan”, Tamkang Review 30/2 (1999), 27–54. 158 This is particularly true of their output in the 1990s, during which period these three writers have produced a number of highly sophisticated narratives. Examples are Zhang Dachun’s Da shuohuangjia (The Big Liar) (Taipei, 1995); Zhu Tianwen’s Huangren shouji (Notes of a Desolate Man) (Taipei, 1997), and Zhu Tianxin’s above-mentioned Ancient Capitals. 159 A useful example of literature which memorializes the February 28th incident is Li Qiao’s “Taimushan ji” (“The Story of Mount Taimu”) in Li Qiao ji (The Collected Works of Li Qiao) (Taipei, 1993). This short story ctionalizes the efforts of the noted Taiwanese writer Lü Heruo to elude KMT forces in the aftermath of the massacre. For an analysis of this text, and other examples of “February 28th ction,” see Margaret Hillenbrand, “Trauma and the Politics of Identity: Form and Function in Fictional Narratives of the February 28th Incident”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17/2 (2005), 49–89.

CHAPTER TWO

REST & RECREATION IN THE CITY

US hegemony in Cold War East Asia This chapter explores literary responses in Japan and Taiwan to the geopolitical hegemony exercised by the US in East Asia throughout the time-frame under analysis here. Whilst it is now a crude truism to observe that scarcely a corner of the globe has remained untouched by the military, economic, and cultural clout of the US in the decades since WWII, the case of America’s client states in East Asia and the Pacic Rim arguably belongs under its own separate rubric. Indeed, many of the observations made about Japan and Taiwan in the pages that follow hold equally true for the other East Asian societies which have found ‘shelter’ under the American umbrella—in particular South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Thailand. Diplomatic alignment within this zone—the so-called ‘Great Crescent’ of US-orchestrated anti-Communist containment—entailed continuous and high-level exposure to American power and inuence throughout the postwar years for all these nation-states; and this exposure, in its turn, has given a discernible shape and contour to their respective modernities. In the case of Japan and Taiwan, the Pax Americana has signied on multiple levels. Few could argue, for example, that both societies owe their postwar economic dynamism, increasing democratization, national security, and greater cultural pluralism in some measure at least to US inuence and intervention. Yet it is equally undeniable that the role of protectorate—some might say vassal state—is a compromised, even subaltern position that is freighted with both risk and anxiety. To be more precise, both Japan and Taiwan have been aligned as co-operative partners in US Cold War strategy within the Asia Pacic Region, an alliance which nds its root structure in patterns of economic and military dependency. These patterns have left both Japan and Taiwan vulnerable to the vagaries of US foreign policy, and the two societies have intimate experience of Uncle Sam as a sometimes more capricious than avuncular guardian. Examples of this are the ‘reverse current’ undertaken by the MacArthur administration during the Allied

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occupation of Japan, and the frequent and painful voltes-face that the US has performed in its stance toward Red China and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Both countries, moreover, have been required to welcome tens of thousands of American military personnel on their shores; and whilst these hospitality stints have varied greatly in length and number, their impact on the domestic sphere has been strikingly analogous. Indeed, the encounter with America, both long-range and at close quarters, has been instrumental in the emergence of new modernities—ranging across politics, economics, and culture—in both societies throughout the span of the later Cold War era. These modernities, and the structures of unequal co-dependency on which they are predicated, have inevitably bred their discontents. Writers and intellectuals in Japan and Taiwan have responded with visceral fear and anger to the diminished sense of sovereignty that is the quid pro quo for American protection. What is more, their protests have extended beyond the easy and obvious foil of the US to encompass more sensitive targets at home: their respective governments and societies—and the willingness with which both have accommodated to the American way. Indeed, although a pronounced critique of US military adventurism and Coca Cola culture runs through the literary narratives examined in this chapter, their ultimate concerns tend to lie at home. In text after text, writers direct their most pointed criticism at the local state regimes that have sanctioned alliance with the superpower, and at those elements of mainstream society which have happily complied and even collaborated with the Pax Americana. Their critiques articulate anxieties about the loss of political autonomy, economic selfsufciency, and cultural identity in the face of American domination; and they typically operate through extended allegorical structures in which politics, economics, and culture are pushed into highly stylized interaction. Diverse writers from both Japan and Taiwan locate their critiques of the US order within a metaphoric pattern that pivots on the two rhetorical gures of the city and sexuality. This metaphor, repeated across a signicant body of texts, reads American military patronage of the urban sex trade in East Asia as a densely detailed microcosm of the crisis of sovereignty referred to above. The texts explored here use the theme of GIs let loose in the red-light districts of urban Japan and Taiwan to question the military mission of the US in the region, the attitudes of compliance adopted by state and society in both countries towards the outworkings of American power, and the rapid changes

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that the encounter with the US has brought in its wake. The dealings of US military personnel with local pimps and prostitutes lie at the core of these texts; and writers use this tripartite structure—and its redolent suggestions of old empire—to explore wider issues of neo-imperialism, collaboration, and cultural loss. These satirical representations of alliance with the superpower limn life within the Pax Americana in terms of anxiety and impotence, and thereby deliberately mark themselves as counter-narratives to the formulas for progress and national security touted by the state and mainstream society. Although various works will be cited in this chapter, my argument will focus in detail on four core texts: “Miru mae ni tobe” (“Leap Before You Look”, 1958) by Ôe Kenzaburô; “Amerika hijiki” (“American Hijiki ”, 1967) by Nosaka Akiyuki; Xiao guafu (Young Widows, 1975) by Huang Chunming; and Meigui meigui wo ai ni (Rose, Rose, I Love You, 1984) by Wang Zhenhe. Before embarking on this argument, however, some brief qualifying remarks are in order. Firstly, there is no intention here to nesse the differences that lie between Japanese and Taiwanese experiences of US hegemony in order to create a neat but misleading symmetry of argument. Whilst the postwar histories of Japan and Taiwan both demonstrate the strong steering hand of the United States, it is arguable that the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945–52 and its long aftermath imprinted itself on Japanese memory in ways that go beyond the impact dealt by America’s Pacic Rim policies on the Taiwanese consciousness. These differences are at their most obvious, of course, in matters of political sovereignty and military presence. As is well known, the Ryukyu islands were returned to Japanese rule only in 1972, and the Japanese archipelago is still, to this day, dotted with numerous American bases. By contrast, the Taiwanese experience of US hegemony, despite its incalculable importance to the island throughout the thirty-year period considered here, has been less physically sustained and intrusive. Yet some might argue that Taiwan’s dependence on the US is ultimately more absolute and unforgiving than that of Japan—indeed, that despite a less conspicuous presence on the ground, a collective awareness that the US has mediated the tense space between Taiwan and the PRC has bred still more entrenched habits of reliance. Either way, and although sensitivity must be maintained à propos these gradations of experience, the fact remains that alliance has opened up a eld of fraught and complex power relations between the US and its client states to which writers from both Japan and Taiwan vehemently object. In this respect, their experiences tally almost exactly.

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Secondly, some reference must be made to the fact that all the works discussed in this chapter are written by men. To a large extent, this preponderance of male authors is dictated by the scarcity of women’s writing which takes issues of American hegemony as its overt and professed theme.1 Few texts by Japanese women which broach the dilemmas of occupation and the Pax Americana have secured a niche in the postwar literary canon,2 and writings by Taiwanese female authors on this topic are more elusive still. By comparison, a rich and prolix seam of male narratives explores power relations in the Pacic Rim. Each of the male authors under exploration here has written elsewhere in his oeuvre—in some cases voluminously—of the dilemmas of dependency and cultural inltration; and a string of other male writers from both countries, such as Kojima Nobuo, Ôshiro Tatsuhiro, Murakami Ryû, Mishima Yukio, Higashi Mineo, Zhang Xiguo, and Chen Yingzhen have pursued this agenda in a range of cognate narratives.3 This male fascination with the US as hegemon also recurs across cinematic narratives from both societies, from Ôshima Nagisa’s trilogy on the 1960 Ampo demonstrations4 to Wu Nianzhen’s Buddha Bless America (Taiping tianguo, 1996).5 Yet despite the undeniable paucity of treatments by female cultural producers on this theme, perhaps more relevant than volume is the fact that the scant work by women which does explore the exercise of US hegemony in East Asia is only tangentially concerned with neo-imperialist critique.

1 Texts which explore the subject include Nakamoto Takako’s “Kichi no onna” (“Women in a Base-town”, 1953) translated as “The Only One” in Jay Gluck (ed.), Stories of the ‘Floating World’ of Postwar Japan (Tokyo, 1983), 171–184; and Hiroike Akiko’s “Onrîtachi” (“The Only Ones”, 1953). Michael S. Molasky provides an illuminating discussion of these texts—and other female writings—in Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa (London and New York, 1999), 130–156. 2 As Molasky puts it, “Women have . . . written ctional accounts of the era, and if one scours the archives it is possible to uncover stories that, while long-forgotten by general readers and scholars alike, offer provocative views . . .” See Molasky, op. cit., 131. 3 Examples which use a triangular sexual relationship to express the dynamics of American power include Mishima Yukio, Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) (Tokyo, 1956); Kojima Nobuo, “Amerikan sukûru” (“The American School”, 1954) in Kojima Nobuo shû (A Collection of Kojima Nobuo’s Works) (Tokyo, 1972); Murakami Ryû, Kagirinaku tômei ni chikai bûru (Almost Transparent Blue) (Tokyo, 1978); Higashi Mineo, Okinawa no shônen (Okinawan Boy) (Tokyo, 1980); Ôshiro Tatsuhiro, “Kakuteru pâti” (“The Cocktail Party”, 1982), in Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas, tr. Steve Rabson (Berkeley, 1989), 35–80; and Chen Yingzhen, “Liuyueli de meiguihua” (“Roses in June”, 1967), in Chen Yingzhen xiaoshuoji (The Fictional Works of Chen Yingzhen) vol. 3 (Taipei, 2001), 1–31. 4 See note 14 below. 5 For an analysis of Wu’s lm, see Tonglin Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge, 2002), 191–205.

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As will become plain in the analyses that follow, women’s bodies are contested terrain in male narratives of US power. Access to female sexuality is mediated by men for men and through men in a process that mirrors precisely the distributions of power that obtain in the wider world which the text critiques; and this mirrored process leaves little room for the notion that women are more than just the eroticized objects of history. Renderings of contemporary geopolitical reality by Japanese female authors write against this masculinist metaphor, and strive to reinstate women within the subject-position of stories that concern them so intimately.6 In their more than legitimate desire to reclaim the female body from the nullications of male writing—where it functions as little more than a trope for the suffering of politically disenfranchised men—Japanese women writers interiorize the narrative process within a consciously expressive realm of female subjectivity. This realignment of focus leads, as part of the same process, to an almost deliberate dehistoricization in women’s writing that explores the impact of US power. Thus instead of national allegories rooted in the contemporary moment of Japan’s domination by the US, female authors use notions of subjugation to comment on the timeless, boundless nature of patriarchy, and to suggest—by implication—that a surfeit of American power means nothing other than that there are additional masters to serve. In other words, issues of American military adventurism, state and societal collaboration, and dysfunction in the socio-cultural realm are sidelined in favor of gender struggles that carry transcendent resonance. Rather than a critique of modernity, we nd a critique of patriarchy in the modern world; and although this issue is germane to the articulation of

6 Of relevance in this connection are Yamada Eimi’s more recent explorations of the relationship between women and the US bases, most notably Beddotaimu aizu (Bedtime Eyes) (Tokyo, 1985). This novel describes the affair between a Japanese women and an African-American GI, and sets out to shock with its stark sexual explicitness. John G. Russell has justiably critiqued Yamada’s work for its racist undertones, and for the way in which her sexual representations deny the black male any autonomous identity. As he puts it, “the Japanese woman emerges from the chrysalis of her Japanese identity transformed by the encounter, while the Black Male Other remains static, forever a symbol of desire whose worth . . . is measured in phallic centimeters”. This point can scarcely be denied; yet in many ways, Yamada’s work represents the apotheosis of the efforts made by female authors to write themselves back into the subject position. Overturning male national allegories in which, to borrow Luce Irigaray’s term, women function as little more than “use-value” amongst men, Yamada’s characters operate in a world where Japanese women can turn the agents of US power into sex objects. See Russell, “Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transformation, and the Commodication of Blackness in Japan”, positions 6/1 (1998), 124.

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modernity in postwar East Asia, constraints of time make a thorough treatment of it here impossible. For these reasons, then, this chapter, and this chapter alone, will focus exclusively on writings by male authors.

The US and its East Asian allies: the background to literary dissent 1. Japan The literary texts explored in this chapter are deeply embedded in postwar history, referencing it implicitly and explicitly, and in many ways consciously re-writing it within the ctional mode as a gesture of protest or alarm. For this reason, a historical introduction is necessary here, and one with a particular emphasis on those aspects of alliance with the US which have impacted powerfully on narrative practice. In the case of Japan, any examination of the impact of US hegemony on writers of ction during the postwar period must take the Allied occupation of 1945–52 as its natural point of departure. This may at rst appear somewhat anachronistic, particularly given that the two narratives considered in this chapter were written long after the Allied occupation of mainland Japan had come to a formal end. Up to a point, this timelag stems from historical necessity: the policies of censorship implemented by the MacArthur administration made it difcult to write the occupation whilst it was ongoing, with the result that many stories suppressed at the time could only nd a proper outlet some years after the event.7 Far more pertinent, however, is the fact that the occupation was a devastatingly formative experience, embedded so deeply in national memory that it has continued to surface again and again in ctional writings about Japan’s relationship with the US. Indeed, there is a case for claiming that, in the psyche of some writers at least, the occupation created the unerasable blueprint for Japan’s later relationship with US hegemony. Stark images of American wealth and power, as contrasted with the desperate privation of the Japanese they governed, stamped themselves on a generation of Japanese and proved difcult to dislodge, even after kôdo seichô (high-speed economic growth) had begun in ear-

7 For a detailed discussion of censorship during the Allied occupation, see Jay Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation”, Journal of Japanese Studies 11/1 (1985), 71–103.

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nest. This tendency is particularly apparent among the so-called Showa single-digit (Shôwa hitoketa) generation. Born between 1926 and 1934, these men and women reached impressionable adolescence and early adulthood during the occupation period; and for many of them, memories of the immediate postwar era continued to loom large long after the occupation had been ofcially consigned to history.8 As I will discuss later with reference to Nosaka Akiyuki—a paradigmatic member of this generational cohort—the legacy of occupation was often a debilitating inferiority complex vis-à-vis the US which proved doggedly resistant to reprogramming. Running in tandem with this psychological legacy was a more overtly politicized resentment towards the US that also found its origins in the immediate postwar period. As mentioned earlier, rewrites of American policy on Japan during the later years of the MacArthur administration led to the so-called ‘reverse course’—an attitudinal shift in which the ideals of democratization and demilitarization that had formed the cornerstone of Japan’s postwar constitution were suddenly subjected to pragmatic revision. As the contours of Cold War bipolarity grew clearer in the late 1940s, the US began to reconsider Japan and its role, and judged it expedient to shape the former enemy into a more useful and amenable ally. The result was a range of reactionary measures designed to ensure the ‘manageability’ of Japan: pro-labor legislation was modied, red purges conducted, war criminals rehabilitated, rearmament launched, and the democratization of economic and institutional structures abandoned midway. This ‘reverse course’ laid the ideological foundation for US-Japan relations in the post-occupation period, a new era which was heralded internationally by the San Francisco peace settlement of 1951.9 Formal peace was accompanied by the promulgation of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Nichibei anzen hoshô jôyaku), known more commonly as Ampo, which perpetuated US control in various spheres and, in the opinion of progressive elements, was merely vassaldom 8 Nosaka Akiyuki has written of the intense bond of solidarity that links members of the Shôwa hitoketa generation, a bond that is based on the sheer diversity of the traumatic experiences that they shared in youth. His observations are quoted in Kikuchi Masanori, “Nosaka Akiyuki: Shôwa hitoketa sedai no han-kokka genkei” (“Nosaka Akiyuki: Anti-state Prototype for the Shôwa Single-digit Generation”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû (National Literature. Studies in Interpretation and Teaching Materials) 19/15 (1974), 55–6. 9 For a review of postwar Western and Japanese scholarship on the ‘reverse course’ and its complex politico-economic motivations, see Ray A. Moore, “The Occupation of Japan as History. Some Recent Research”, Monumenta Nipponica 36/3 (1981), 317–28.

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under a different name.10 Indeed, the San Francisco system, as it came to be called, spelled the co-option of Japan into an alliance that reproduced the ‘reverse current’ in more codied form and formalized the nation’s subordination to the US. Not surprisingly, opposition to bilateral relations began to harden from the fties onwards, as left-wing intellectuals and others protested against the international and domestic consequences of Japan’s status as an outpost of US power in the Far East. Indeed, as John Dower has observed, the San Francisco system had both structural and psychological effects, and “ate at Japanese pride, year after year, like slow-working acid”.11 Concerted opposition to the system and all it entailed was consolidated at the end of the decade, when Kishi Nobusuke’s conservative cabinet began to push for the ratication of a revised version of the Security Treaty. This new version sought radically to reinscribe the essence of its predecessor so that Japan could speed up remilitarization and enter into a more equal alliance with its American ally. Leftist intellectuals and politicians, however, saw this move as both a violation of the pacist postwar constitution and a fatal step towards mortgaging Japan’s freedom of maneuver. Japan would become hostage to the whims of American foreign policy in East Asia, whilst the reactionaries at home buried the spirit of the postwar in the ideologies of the past. Yet despite fervent leftist agitation, ultimately it was Kishi’s undemocratic bulldozing of the revised treaty through the Diet in May 1960 that gave the crucial spur to mass popular opposition. The Ampo protests, as they came to be known, united diverse constituencies in Japanese society in a way that was unprecedented, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against the Treaty and its conservative proponents. Insofar as Kishi’s resignation was eventually secured and his cabinet fell, the protests worked. Yet ultimately, these moves were little more than a sop to popular feeling: the pro-US conservative government which Kishi had fronted remained in the political driving seat

10

The Japanese left found an ironic spokesman in John Foster Dulles, whose observation that US-Japanese bilateral relations “amounted to a voluntary continuation of the Occupation” encapsulated the prevailing fears about national sovereignty. Quoted in Roger Buckley, US-Japan Alliance Diplomacy 1945–1990 (Cambridge, 1992), 78. For the reactions of Socialists, Communists, and progressive intellectuals to the Treaty, see George Packard, Protest in Tokyo. The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, 1966), 16–31. 11 John Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems. External Policy and Internal Conict”, in Gordon, op. cit., 11.

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for many years to come, and the relationship with the US retained its underlying logic.12 This longterm failure of participatory democracy proved as much a psychological watershed to many writers and intellectuals as the earlier Allied occupation had been. The LDP’s railroading of both public opinion and elected ofcialdom demonstrated in transparent terms that alliance with the US was placed above the principles enshrined in the national constitution—which, in a notorious irony, had been designed by the Americans occupiers in the rst place. Not surprisingly, Ampo and the cluster of issues surrounding it became a focal point for intellectual and literary opposition. This opposition was essentially two-edged, targeting both American Cold War militarism, and the Japanese political establishment which had conspired to sell the postwar spirit out. In some cases, resistance took the form of active participation in the demonstrations,13 whilst in others, cultural production from ction and poetry to theatre and lm became the medium through which an often agonized dismay at the failure of postwar idealism was articulated.14 And although these productions often included US policy within the sweep of their criticism, far greater animus was directed at the local socio-political order. This literature of political outrage and disenchantment nds, perhaps, its artistic high-point in the string of linked narratives written by Ôe Kenzaburô that I examine later in this chapter. All were written during the fraught prelude to the Ampo period, and all are imbued with its spirit. Two closely-related provisions of the revised Security Treaty continued to fuel literary opposition to governmental handling of bilateral relations long after popular fury over Ampo had abated, and the nation’s attentions had been tactically diverted to the pursuit of economic 12

For a detailed analysis of politics during this period, see Packard, op. cit., 300–31. For a discussion of political engagement by intellectuals during the Ampo movement, see J. Victor Koschmann, “Intellectuals and Politics” in Gordon, op. cit., 402–14. 14 Examples from ction include the two linked short stories by Ôe Kenzaburô on the subject of right-wing fanaticism cited in the previous chapter (“Seventeen” and “A Political Youth Dies”). Cinematic versions are provided by the early work of Ôshima Nagisa. As part of his experimentation with New Wave (nuberu bâgu) cinema, Ôshima directed a trio of lms during the 1960 Ampo demonstrations: Seishun zankoku monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth, 1960), Taiyô no hakaba (The Sun’s Burial, 1960), and Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, 1960). Although Night and Fog in Japan constitutes Ôshima’s most direct portrayal of the demonstrations, all three lms are harsh critiques of Japan’s new postwar order. For a discussion of Night and Fog in Japan, see Max Tessier, “Ôshima Nagisa, or the Battered Energy of Desire”, in Arthur Nolletti Jr., and David Desser (eds.), Reframing Japanese Cinema. Authorship, Genre, History (Bloomington, 1992), 71–4. 13

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growth. The rst was the right exercised by the US to install and maintain military bases across the Japanese islands, and the second was continuing American dominion over Okinawa. Opposition to the US bases (Beigun kichi) had both political and socio-cultural aspects. On the political side, the issues were clear-cut and unambiguous: the bases were the principal mechanism through which Japanese co-operation with strongarm anti-Communist containment in East Asia was guaranteed and managed, and thus they functioned as a natural ashpoint for dissent. The grim implications of kichi became all too apparent during the Vietnam War, when American installations throughout the Japanese islands acted as launching pads for a military campaign that many Japanese found abhorrent. In the most obvious sense, the campaign in Indochina was ideologically intolerable to Japan’s many pacists; yet perhaps more insidiously, it shook still further the nation’s condence in the way that America dened its hegemony. That the US, military colossus and supposed bastion of liberal democracy, could conduct a war of this kind against a edgling third-world nation-state made a mockery of the postwar constitution that SCAP had instructed Japan to honor and obey only a few years earlier. In a further dimension, Japan’s complicity in the conict resurrected anxieties in some quarters over war guilt and the atrocities committed by the imperial army on the Asian continent—not least since the home economy was beneting directly from the killing elds, just as it had done in the early fties during America’s war with Korea. Euphemistically named ‘special procurements’ (tokuju)15 pepped up economic performance, but for many they failed to cast a conciliatory golden gleam over the various ethical problems. In this sense, the war in Vietnam seemed to corroborate the ideas of left-wing intellectuals such as Takeuchi Yoshimi, who had argued in earlier years that Japan played slave to the US only to turn brutal master in its dealings with the rest of Asia.16 Not surprisingly, a large-scale protest movement17—in which 15 For a discussion of the income generated for the Japanese economy through procurement of various kinds, see Thomas R.H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea. The Vietnam War and Japan 1965–1975 (Princeton, 1987), 92–106. Havens also draws attention to the opportunity that Vietnam gave Japan and its businesses to inltrate South-East Asian markets. 16 Lawrence Olson provides a useful analysis of Takeuchi’s ideological stance on Japan and its relationship with Communist China, in particular, in his Ambivalent Moderns. Portraits of Japanese Cultural Identity (Lanham, 1992), 43–77. 17 The anti-Vietnam War protest movement, or Beheiren as it was known, met with considerable popular support; yet as Tsurumi Shunsuke has observed, the attachment that ordinary citizens ( futsû no shimin) felt towards the citizens’ movements (shimin undô)

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writers such as Oda Makoto, Ôe Kenzaburô, and Kaikô Takeshi took part18—was formed to oppose the war, and, by logical extension, the military bases that sustained it. The socio-cultural concerns that have fuelled opposition to the US bases are more complex, touching as they do on emotive issues of ethnic purity, cultural identity, inter-racial violence, organized crime, sexuality, gender politics, and unpolicable social change. This is because in Japan, as elsewhere in East Asia, the bases have functioned not simply as fortied military encampments, but as key nodes within a wider civilian context. At issue here, in short, is the notion of ‘base-town’, the often rough-and-tumble settlements that fan out from the barbed-wire military installations they support, and stand as the fraught threshold between American power and local life. Engines for economic activity, conduits of external inuence, and catalysts for socio-demographic change, the base-towns have exercised a peculiar fascination over Japanese writers since their emergence in the immediate postwar years. Much of this fascination has assumed hostile form, and writers have been quick to render the base-town as a symbolically unclean site within the topography of postwar Japan. The sense in which the base-town has become a point of convergence for the critique of US-Japan relations—encapsulating all that was injurious to national pride and identity about the San Francisco system—is captured in the following excerpt from an article by Murakami Ryû that appeared in the Asahi shimbun in August, 1985. The paradigmatic nature of this passage repays some brief commentary. In it, Murakami, a leading exponent of ‘base-town ction’ (kichi shôsetsu),19 records his early recollections of growing up in Sasebo, a base-town in north-west Kyushu: that supposedly represented them was subject to a gradual diminution throughout the period 1960–1980. See Tsurumi, Sengo Nihon no taishû bunka shi (A History of Postwar Japanese Popular Culture) (Tokyo, 1984), 182–3. 18 Kaikô worked as a journalist in Vietnam during the mid-sixties, and ctionalized its impact on him in the novels Kagayakeru yami (Into a Black Sun, 1968), tr. Cecilia Segawa Seigle (London, 1990), and Natsu no yami (Darkness in Summer, 1972), tr. Cecilia Segawa Seigle (London, 1988). For an analysis of Kaikô’s Vietnam ction, see Irena Powell, “A Japanese Literary Response to the Vietnam War”, Nissan Occasional Papers Series 24 (1995). In particular, Powell argues that Kaikô’s impressions of the Vietnam conict were ltered through the prism of his painful memories of the Pacic War. 19 Perhaps the earliest example of the genre is Tamura Taijirô’s 1947 novel Nikutai no mon (Gate of Flesh). Later made into a well-regarded lm directed by Suzuki Seijun, the novel depicts prostitution in a GI context in the bombed-out ruins of Tokyo. In another novel also published in 1947, Shunpuden (Biography of a Prostitute), Tamura depicts the lives of Korean comfort women in a Manchurian ‘comfort station’. For an insightful interpretation of Biography a Prostitute, see H. Eleanor Kerkham, “Pleading for the

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chapter two During class at primary school, American servicemen and panpan [prostitutes who catered to US servicemen], could be seen kissing outside the window. The teacher would hurriedly draw the curtain. A classmate of mine at junior high was a well-behaved girl, but when she got to high school, she started slapping on gaudy make-up and walking around arm in arm with GIs. This was Sasebo, a harbor town with onrî [prostitutes kept by a single GI client], US servicemen and mixed-race children [konketsuji ] swaggering on its streets. This was an army-occupied town. Morning and night, the Stars and Stripes uttered in time to the American national anthem . . . (M)y grandfather, rented a house out to an onrî. My grandmother listened to naniwabushi recitals, my grandfather sat in front of the family Buddhist altar (butsudan), and my father worked hard at his teaching. Parties were held every night at the onrî’s house; the strong, yet soft voice of Elvis Presley could be heard echoing out, and there was jiving to the beat of St. Louis’ blues. The bright house formed a striking contrast with our own dark home. I was peeping out of the window at all this before I’d even started primary school. There was Coca-Cola, there were hamburgers. I was the rst generation to witness “Our countrywomen being kept by armed foreigners”.20

Murakami’s use of base-town argot (panpan, onrî) is instantly striking here, as is his easy familiarity with American cultural codewords (the Stars and Stripes, Elvis Presley, St. Louis’ blues), and the blasé ubiquity of American commodities (Coca-Cola, hamburgers). Together, these socio-linguistic signiers imply a kind of third space—neither American nor Japanese—that the peculiar conditions of kichi have called into being. This sense of hybridity nds its human embodiment in the mixed-race children—obvious affronts to the myth of ethnic homogeneity—whose ‘contamination’ is set off against the old-style Japaneseness of Murakami’s grandparents, devotees of naniwa-bushi recitals and butsudan. And while Murakami lives in a ‘home’ (i.e.), the residence of the onrî is described, in the katakana that bets a foreign loanword, as a ‘house’ (hausu). Above all, there is the loss of childhood innocence, conveyed by the make-up and precocious promiscuity of Murakami’s former school-

Body: Tamura Taijirô’s 1947 Korean Comfort Woman Story, Biography of a Prostitute”, in Marlene J. Mayo and Thomas J. Rimer (eds.), War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960 (Honolulu, 2001), 310–59. 20 Quoted in Komori Yôichi, “Kichi, sensô, yokubô no vijon” (“The bases, the war, a vision of desire”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû, 38/3 (Special issue devoted to Murakami Ryû) (1995), 39.

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mate, and by the pre-school voyeurism of the author himself. Indeed, as Murakami’s memoir makes all too clear, the base-town symbolizes unregulated female sexuality, miscegenation, the threat to traditional family life, the subversion of ‘Japaneseness’, and the contamination of indigenous cultural space with Hollywood and hamburgers.21 Lastly, there is the history of postwar Okinawa, where many of the issues sketched above have found their most intense and enduring expression. As is well known, the American presence in the Ryukyus has been sustained, invasive, and heavy-handed, a situation that the government on the mainland has done little to regulate.22 Long seen as second-class citizens by policy-makers in metropolitan Japan (with even their claim to ethnic Japaneseness queried in some quarters), Okinawans were left to bear the burden of the US military presence after 1952—in much the same way as they had been made the expendable rst rampart of defense in the desperate closing stages of the Pacic War seven years earlier. Inevitably, perhaps, many on the island sense a pattern to these enforced sacrices. Fury at the treatment meted out to the islanders by both the US and mainland Japan reached a peak during the Vietnam War, a campaign to which Okinawans made a massive and sometimes painful contribution. Oda Makoto refers, for example, to the fact that many islanders were “forced by economic circumstance to help load the very bombs that were to be dropped on Vietnam”.23 Ultimately, it was the combined pressure of these various anti-war protest movements, both in Okinawa and on the mainland, that forced the reversion of the Ryukyus to Japanese control in 1972. Yet the bases have remained, and despite intensifying protests by the Okinawans, no date has been set for their withdrawal.24 21 For a discussion of Korean kijich’on ction, a direct counterpart of kichi shôsetsu, see Bruce Fulton, “Kijich’on Fiction”, in Hyung Il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherlini (eds.), Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity (Berkeley, 1998), 198–213. 22 To quote Michael Molasky: “[As late as December 1998] approximately 75 percent of the land occupied by US military installations throughout Japan remains concentrated on the island of Okinawa, which constitutes a mere 0.6 percent of the nation’s land mass and is home to only 1 percent of its population. These military facilities consume 24.5 percent of the island’s land. Roughly 27,000 United States military personnel and 28,000 military dependants are stationed in Okinawa”. Molasky, op. cit., 22. 23 Oda Makoto, “A Writer in the Present World: A Japanese Case History”, in Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer (eds.), Legacies and Ambiguities. Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan (Baltimore, 1991), 263–77. 24 Resistance has been sharpened by US admissions that nuclear weapons have been stored at various times on the island chain, prompting fears that Okinawa is an exposed “Nuclear Bull’s-eye”, and may once again become “the battleground for someone else’s

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The issues are not purely political, moreover. The US military presence has had devastating social and cultural effects, demonstrated most painfully perhaps by the notorious abduction and rape of a twelveyear old Okinawan schoolgirl by three American servicemen in 1995. Far from being an isolated atrocity, this act of violence takes its place within a long postwar continuum of domination by the bases, and it illustrates in poignant terms the problems of the sub-cultures that have sprung up around them. Most obviously, perhaps, the sheer size of the American presence has required the conversion of large tracts of arable land into military installations, resulting in ecological despoliation and large-scale rural unemployment.25 Almost inevitably, Okinawans left disenfranchised by these land expropriations have been absorbed into a service economy centered on the bases. Largely given over to the ‘entertainment’ industry, the basetowns of Okinawa are a vulgar mix of cultural imperialism and sexual exploitation, and they engender economic distortions that lock the islanders still more tightly into their subaltern status. Perhaps the single most telling statistic that can be cited in this regard is the fact that in the early 1970s female sexual labor constituted Okinawa’s largest industry, surpassing even sugar-cane and pineapple production in the prots it generated.26 Fiction from Okinawa has charted this reality, and texts such as Higashi Mineo’s novella Okinawa no shônen (Okinawan Boy, 1971) read the Ryukyus less as a US protectorate than as a latterday colony. 2. Taiwan The client-patron nature of Taiwan’s relationship with the US since 1949 has elicited a range of reactions from local writers and intellectuals which, in many core ways, mirrors anti-establishment dissent in postwar Japan. Just as with Japan, the alliance with the US has constituted Taiwan’s dominant foreign policy concern throughout the period

war”. See Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll (New York, 1992), 248. 25 For a discussion of the land expropriations conducted by the American military occupiers, see Ota Masahide, “The US Occupation of Okinawa and Postwar Reforms in Japan Proper”, in Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu (eds.), Democratizing Japan (Honolulu, 1987), 293–4. Ota refers to the fact that many of these expropriations were carried out at “bayonet point”. 26 Statistic quoted in Takazato Suzuyo, Okinawa no onnatachi: josei no jinken to kichi, guntai (The Women of Okinawa: the Bases, the Army and Women’s Rights) (Tokyo, 1996), 98.

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examined in this book—indeed, John F. Copper goes so far as to claim that bilateral relations with America “may be more important than all (the) others combined”.27 Ramon H. Myers eshes out this contention when he states that it was Taiwan’s status as a de facto American protectorate that “allowed the ROC to survive and build a modern economy with gradual democratization”.28 Strong words, indeed; and whilst many Taiwanese may wish to keep the credit for transforming the last bastion of the KMT into the ‘rst Chinese democracy’, it seems indisputable that Taiwan would neither have existed as the Republic of China nor developed into a rst-tier economic dynamo without long-term US aid and intervention. Probably, therefore, there is a certain ineluctable logic to the privileged, even aspirational space that America has long occupied in the Taiwanese imaginary. Yet perhaps equally in-evitable is the inverse of this longing: a resentment at the metropolitan-colonial tones that have colored the relationship, and a distrust at the impact on Taiwan as a place and a people that co-option into the Pax Americana has taken as its corollary. In the early postwar years, however, the dynamics of the relationship were relatively free of this awkward ambivalence. Convinced of the political bankruptcy of the KMT, the US had withdrawn support for Chiang Kai-shek and his scattered cohorts as they evacuated the mainland for Taiwan, and Truman had few qualms about abandoning the island to a well-nigh inevitable fate of Communist invasion and takeover.29 With the outbreak of war in Korea, however, American policy underwent its famously abrupt turnaround, as almost overnight Taiwan’s security became pivotal to the containment of the Red threat in the Pacic basin. In the fteen years that followed, America formalized Taiwan’s position within its pro-US, anti-Communist (qin-Mei fan-gong) buffer zone, and pledged to safeguard its territorial integrity against the claims of the PRC. This strategic alliance was consolidated by almost a mini-Marshall Plan of economic aid, in which the US handed out approximately 1.5 billion dollars to Taiwan during the period 1952 to

27

John F. Copper, Taiwan. Nation State or Province? (Boulder, 1999), 172. Ramon H. Myers, “Introduction: A Unique Relationship”, in Myers (ed.), A Unique Relationship: the United States and the Republic of China under the Taiwan Relations Act (Stanford, 1989), 2. 29 For an in-depth discussion of US attitudes towards Taiwan before the Korean War, see Robert Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment. United States Policy toward Taiwan, 1950–1955 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 3–17. 28

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1968—a gure that excludes large-scale military provisioning.30 Even after economic aid came to an ofcial end in 1964, the bounty continued in alternative form as the US maintained its role as both Taiwan’s major trading partner and its largest source of foreign investment capital.31 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, moreover, the US acted as something of a lodestar for developing Taiwan. America provided the obvious prototype for successful capitalist transformation, and both the island’s most gifted students and its wealthiest economic migrants ocked there to pursue higher education and/or a new life in diaspora. By the same token, Taiwan’s prodigious success in transforming itself into an export-led and highly competitive economy redounded to the glory of US paternalism, and Taiwan was proudly showcased as a model for the American way abroad. Yet as time passed, Taiwan’s relationship with the US became increasingly riven by tensions and ambiguities. Most obviously, these assumed geopolitical form, as it grew apparent from the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s onwards that US hegemonic interests would be better served by courting the PRC than by continuing to extend largesse and protection Taiwan’s way. The string of devastating diplomatic setbacks that Taiwan suffered during the 1970s as the US began to play the ‘China card’ in earnest is well-known: rst came expulsion from the UN and Nixon’s initiation of Sino-American rapprochement in 1971, then the faceto-face meeting of Nixon, Kissinger, Mao Zedong, and Zhou Enlai in 1972 with its resultant Shanghai communiqué, and nally diplomatic derecognition of Taiwan in favor of the PRC in 1978.32 The loss of morale—and face—that followed these successive reversals was given a sharper edge by the fact that Taiwanese élites had invested considerable energy and resources in their efforts to maintain formal alliance. Although the post-derecognition Taiwan Relations Act went some way towards mitigating the shock felt by the Taiwanese over their desertion by the US, the stark truth of the island’s perilous international isolation remained.33 Indeed, despite the fact that high Taiwanese ofcials 30

Myers, op. cit. See Jan S. Prybyla, “United States’ Trade Relations with the Republic of China”, in Steven W. Mosher (ed.), The United States and the Republic of China. Democratic Friends, Strategic Allies, and Economic Partners (New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 1992), 51–71. 32 For a summary of these diplomatic wranglings, see John F. Copper, China Diplomacy: the Washington-Taipei-Beijing Triangle (Boulder, 1992), 1–46. 33 For analyses of the ROC-US relations after derecognition, see the essays collected in King-yuh Chang, ROC-US Relations under the Taiwan Relations Act: Practice and Prospects (Taipei, 1988). 31

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had understood ever since the eleventh-hour decision to protect Taiwan in 1950 that US policy would always t itself around the main theme of Red China, their sense of abandonment was intense. And despite unofcial ties, it was not until the disintegration of the Cold War Soviet empire in the late 1980s—together with US revulsion at the Tiananmen massacre and approval of Taiwan’s simultaneous moves towards democratization—that the island began to claw back at least a modicum of its former favored status from the PRC. Demoralization over America’s ‘defection’ to the PRC was heightened by anxiety in some quarters over the transformations that Taiwanese society had undergone as a direct result of US patronage. Some felt that the transition from agrarian society to economic powerhouse that Taiwan was undergoing whilst it sheltered under the (now leaky) American umbrella was precipitously swift; and tensions over the fallout of runaway modernization came increasingly to the fore from the mid-seventies onwards. These tensions articulated themselves along lines that are all too familiar to observers of later-developing nations. Concerned parties watched as urban space expanded, consuming the countryside in its path, and consigning age-old patterns of work and community to further and further distant backwaters. Just as pernicious for many intellectuals was the global capitalist system which the megalopolis housed and nourished—and all its deathly implications for the forms and products of indigenous culture. Certainly, anxiety over the various socio-cultural corollaries of Taiwan’s postwar transformation under the American aegis had been brewing for some time; but the loss of formal US support in the 1970s provided a timely rationale for this oating anxiety to harden into xed resentment.34 Just as relevantly, the Sino-American détente and the train of diplomatic setbacks that it had inicted on Taiwan exposed a chink in the KMT armor which a key constituency of native Taiwanese intellectuals lost no time in exploiting. Effectively silenced since the bloody February 28 incident of 1947, politicized benshengren (native Taiwanese) seized on Taiwan’s crisis as means of simultaneously impugning monopolistic KMT power and its weighty US backers.35 Two decades of political

34

Ralph Clough, Island China (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 25. Joseph S.M. Lau refers to intellectual hostility towards “the demoralization of Taiwan life through American and Japanese economic-cultural inltration”. See Lau, “Echoes of the May Fourth Movement in Hsiang-t’u Fiction”, in Hung-mao Tien, Mainland China, Taiwan, and U.S. Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 139. 35

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stability and economic growth had kept a tight lid on dissenting voices, with the result that the overspilling of protest, when it came, was an energetic one. As discussed in the previous chapter, these energies found their outlet in the xiangtu wenxue (nativist literature) movement, which began to gather momentum from the early 1970s onwards.36 The texts by Huang Chunming and Wang Zhenhe discussed in this chapter can be broadly situated within this movement, which pitted discontented intellectuals against the state and reached its apogee in the late seventies.37 A complex amalgam of forces, this oppositional movement sat at the intersection between literature and politics, nationalism and nativism; and its literary productions were charged with indignation both at the US and at the subaltern mentality that alliance with the superpower was fostering. For a number of key writers—and specically the two examined here—this nexus of interlinked concerns found a natural point of convergence in the Vietnam War.38 Indeed, the war in Vietnam and the part that Taiwan played in it could be worked into a useful symbol for all that was disturbing about the American hegemonic order, Taiwan’s place within it, and the socio-cultural transformations which this Cold War alliance had brought in its train. Along with America’s other East Asian client states, Taiwan served the US well during the Vietnam War. Operating principally as a back-up military installation neatly positioned between Indochina and the larger bases on the Japanese archipelago, Taiwan more than validated MacArthur’s famous dictum that the island was an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”.39 This extensive logistical support involved Taiwan in the stationing, overhauling and refueling of US ghter planes, as well as in playing host to tens of thousands of 36

See pp. 100–1. Although the two writers I look at here self-consciously resisted being tagged with the nativist label and being co-opted into the political struggle that eventually overtook the literary aspects of the movement, the general thrust of their work is recognizably in sympathy with the nativist agenda. For a detailed discussion of whether Huang Chunming and Wang Zhenhe are rightly labeled as nativists, see Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 153–4. 38 The other major writer to have explored Taiwan’s involvement in the Vietnam War is Chen Yingzhen. In his “Roses in June”, he uses the relationship between a black GI and a Taiwanese bargirl to explore similar issues of war, race, and national sovereignty. For a critical study which views the three narratives as an interrelated set, see Dong Nian, “Meiguo Meiguo wo ai ni. Naoju Meigui meigui wo ai ni de huangmiu yuyi” (“America, America, I Love You. Absurdist Meaning in the Farce Rose, Rose, I Love You”) in Lianhe wenxue (Unitas), 74 (1995), 24–37. 39 Quoted in Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions. Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Durham, N.C., and London, 1999), 166. 37

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US servicemen.40 An integral part of this hospitality program was, of course, the provision of entertainment facilities for GIs on leave from the theatre of war. The result, needless to say, was a boom in the euphemistically termed ‘recreation’ industry, not just in Taipei, but in smaller urban centers throughout the island.41 The most obvious target for discontented writers and intellectuals presented by the Vietnam War was, of course, armed US interventionism. Whilst Taiwanese of divergent political stripe had ample reason to support the agenda of anti-Communist containment that pushed the US into war with North Vietnam, doubts remained about the war and the manner of its prosecution. The heavy-handed application of US power rankled, to the extent that even some conservative high ofcials went on record expressing their reservations about America’s arrogance in assuming that it could transplant its home-grown political solutions onto Asian soil.42 The critique of US strong-arm military tactics combined, moreover, with growing doubts over America’s reliability as an ally in the Taiwan Strait. This imminent sense of unease was intensied by approximate parallels on the Asian continent, where America had championed the cause of South Vietnam—Taiwan’s comrade-in-arms against the communist threat—only to abandon it to the North a few years later. This sense of ‘the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away’, of paternalism giving way without notice to Realpolitik, reached something of a peak in 1975—the year the rst of the Taiwanese texts examined here was published—as circumstances conspired to make the withdrawal of American troops from Taiwan look all too similar to the disengagement policy the US was concurrently pursuing in Vietnam. Worse still, just as the war in Vietnam had intensied hostilities between the US and mainland China, thus enhancing Taiwan’s strategic importance once again, the eventual cessation of US involvement in Indochina (and its de facto defeat there) reversed this equation—and sharpened Taiwan’s sense of expendability.

40 See Ray Cline, “Introduction”, in King-yuh Chang, op. cit., 5–6. Dong Nian states that Taiwan admitted 20,079 American soldiers in the years 1965–6, and another 170,311 during the period 1967–70. He notes, moreover, that these vacationers made a “billion dollar” contribution to Taiwan’s continuing economic miracle. See Dong Nian, “Meiguo Meiguo wo ai ni”, 26. 41 See Lin Ruiming, Taiwan wenxue de bentu guancha (A Nativist Survey of Taiwanese Literature) (Taipei, 1996), 144. 42 John W. Garver, The Sino-American Alliance (Armonk and London, 1997), 211–2.

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The Vietnam War also spawned criticism of Taiwan’s domestic scene.43 For a start, the desperate nature of the attempts made by the KMT to second-guess, forestall or accommodate oscillations in US policy throughout the 1960s and 70s was highlighted once again by the war in Vietnam. Indeed, Taiwan’s co-option into the conict could be seen as another instance of the perceived servility of KMT attitudes towards US power, attitudes that looked still more embarrassing after the US shifted its attentions to the PRC in the early 1970s.44 Furthermore, whilst conservative élites and business interests rejoiced that Taiwan’s role as springboard and support system for the American war in continental Asia was breathing life into various branches of the local economy, progressive writers and intellectuals saw things rather differently. In their view, the ‘war boom’ phenomenon was distasteful on several counts. Firstly, Pacic Rim societies such as Taiwan—and for that matter Japan—who beneted from the war booms of the fties and sixties could justiably be accused of battening on the misery of neighboring nations as a means of sustaining American-sponsored high economic growth. Secondly, the war boom itself, with its natural focus on the trade in weaponry and sex, was objectionable to some on moral grounds. More generally, the war boom presented itself as a catch-all symbol of the so-called ‘comprador culture’ that was spreading outwards across the island from American-backed multi-national corporations based in Taiwan’s larger cities.45 And in keeping with this symbolism, the two

43 As Joyce Kallgren noted as early as 1966, “The Vietnam crisis . . . will serve to reinforce those factions on Taiwan who oppose the mounting costs of an ongoing modernization program on the island”. See Kallgren, “Vietnam and Politics in Taiwan”, Asian Survey, 6/1 ( Jan., 1966), 28. 44 As Chiao Chiao Hsieh has observed, the eagerness of the Nationalist government to become implicated in the Vietnam conict stemmed from their belief that war in Indochina could be used as a launching pad for the recovery of mainland China; and many KMT ofcials were even keen for Taiwanese troops to be deployed on the Asian continent. America’s rejection of this latter plan, together with its readiness to use Taiwan as a way station for troops, materiel, and ghter planes, highlighted the basic inequalities of the ROC-US alliance still more starkly. See Hsieh, Strategy for Survival. The Foreign Policy and External Relations of the Republic of China on Taiwan, 1949–79 (London, 1985), 140–5. 45 The comprador culture comes under bitter literary attack in the stories which comprise Chen Yingzhen’s Huashengdun dalou (Washington Building) series. In “Yexing huoche” (“Night Freight”, 1978), “Shangbanzu de yiri” (“A Day in the Life of a White-Collar Worker”, 1978), “Yun” (“Clouds”, 1980), and “Wanshang dijun” (“The All-incorporating Business God”, 1982), Chen uses metaphors of consumption to critique Taiwan’s incorporation into the global capitalist system.

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texts discussed here use the war to explore themes of uncontrolled capitalism and consumerism, the degradation of local tradition, and, above all, the march of urban forces into Taiwan’s rural hinterland. Through this exploration, they make an explicit connection between US alliance and the emergence of a failed, dystopian modernity.

Triangular paradigms for the geopolitical world Each of the texts explored in this chapter is rooted in the postwar histories sketched above; yet as literary narratives, they aim less at a mirror-like mimesis of the effects of US alliance than at a more charged re-presentation of life under the Pax Americana in which extended, highly stylized metaphors carry the weight of an often erce and tendentious critique. And it is precisely this need for loaded metaphors that explains the persistent presence of the trope of the urban esh trade— and, in particular, the tripartite relationship between GIs, pimps, and prostitutes—across ctional treatments of US hegemony. Indeed, this trope works as the foundational metaphor not just in the work of Ôe Kenzaburô, Nosaka Akiyuki, Huang Chunming and Wang Zhenhe, but also in that of a range of other writers, including Murakami Ryû, Tamura Taijirô, Higashi Mineo, and Chen Yingzhen. Fraternization and the economies—both nancial and libidinal—that it brings into being prove an almost endlessly emotive metaphor in the hands of disaffected writers. Pre-eminently, perhaps, the theme enables a reconguring of remote geopolitical dilemmas in sexual, and therefore highly personal, terms; and this reconguration, in its turn, accesses both colonial memories and contemporary fears to create a rich matrix for antiestablishment critique. 1. Sex and imperialism Most obviously, the metaphor of fraternization plays on age-old associations between the conquest of empires and the conquest of local women—and as such presents an expedient means for intimating the neo-imperialist nature of US foreign policy in East Asia. The link between the imposition and maintenance of imperialist rule and the securing of unmediated access to ‘native’ bodies is, of course, as old as empire itself. Indeed, so rooted is this association in the logic of empire-building that colonized territory has traditionally assumed

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the lineaments of a woman’s body within the imperial imagination. As Anne McClintock puts it: Sailors bound wooden female gures to their ships’ prows and baptized their ships . . . with female names. Cartographers lled the blank seas of their maps with mermaids and sirens. Explorers called unknown lands ‘virgin’ territory.46

This eroticization of alien territory—and the sexual rewards implied therein—is a useful spur to the would-be conqueror as he sets out from home, just as the services of esh-and-blood local women are essential for keeping the occupying presence happy. After all, as the Raj historian Ronald Hyam remarks dryly, Running the Victorian empire would have probably been intolerable without resort to sexual relaxation.47

In other words, the connection between sex and imperialism is sufciently time-honored and self-evident for literary texts about GI fraternization to elicit a reaction of knee-jerk alarm among readers, particularly male ones. It is, of course, a common gripe among feminists that male accounts of colonization and foreign occupation write out female victimhood in their efforts to appropriate the constituencies of suffering and disempowerment for themselves.48 Yet at the same time, it can scarcely be denied—pace the feminist perspective for now—that fraternization involves the sexual humbling of local men. This sense of injury occurs because liaisons between occupier and occupied extend the political emasculation already suffered by the colonized male into the previously safe and sequestered domains of the home and sexuality. Local males are sidelined, ousted not just from the seat of political power but also from the bedroom. This sense of marginalization is often compounded by the trauma of witnessing the co-option, if not downright subversion, of female procreativity by these occupiers through the birth of offspring whose mixed descent ‘contaminates’ age-old blood46

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (New York and London, 1995), 24. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality (Manchester, 1990), 89. 48 An excellent critique of this tendency within East Asian studies can be found in Lydia Liu’s reading of Xiao Hong’s novel Shengsi chang (The Field of Life and Death, 1935), a representation of life in North-East China during the Japanese occupation told from the female perspective. See Lydia Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: ‘The Field of Life and Death’ Revisited”, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds.), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis, Min., 1994), 37–62. 47

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lines. Further added to this is the prevailing sense that it is the duty of men to protect their womenfolk from the ‘depredations’ of the occupiers—even when these attentions might be welcome, if not actively solicited. Failure to discharge this duty can, in its due turn, be construed as yet another token of lost manhood. In this sense, the decision to explore American encroachment through stories of fraternization—which feature female promiscuity, mixed-race children, lusty and violent GIs, strained relationships between local men and women, and male sexual dysfunction49—can be understood as a considered strategy for activating resistance to the national relationship with the US. The subject matter of these texts is, moreover, not simply fraternization, but rather the more specic contractual relationships that are undertaken between American military personnel and Japanese and Taiwanese sex workers. Far from being accidental, the inclusion of prostitutes in these narratives of neo-imperialism is of a piece with their general design; and it occurs because the motif of sexual labor lends depth and weight to the discourse of resistance. The issue of sexual labor and imperialism has, of course, a particular signicance for many people in East Asia, for whom it is linked indissolubly to the history of the ‘comfort women’ (ianfu).50 Both émigrés and indigenous Taiwanese could bear witness to the policies of procurement, kidnap and sexual enslavement that the Japanese government had pursued in its East Asian wartime colonies in order to staff the ‘facilities of sexual comfort’ in mainland China.51 And despite the efforts of Japanese ofcialdom

49

This connection between impotence and the colonized man is, of course, a welldocumented phenomenon. In Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the psychological ailments that trouble colonized people, his very rst case study examines the impotence suffered by an Algerian resistance ghter after his wife was raped by French soldiers, who then shouted, “If ever you see your lthy husband again don’t forget to tell him what we did to you”. The texts discussed here not only corroborate Fanon’s medical ndings about the causes of the subject’s impotence, but also suggest the agenda of male humiliation that prompted the soldiers to rape his wife in the rst place. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (London, 1967), 204–8. 50 For analyses of the legacy of the comfort women issue throughout postwar East Asia, see positions 5/1 (Spring, 1997) (special issue devoted to the comfort women). This volume contains the transcript of a conversation between Ôe Kenzaburô and the dissident South Korean intellectual Kim Chi-ha which discusses the topic. See Ôe Kenzaburô and Kim Chi-ha, “Conversation: An Autonomous Subject’s Long Waiting, Coexistence”, 285–314. 51 For an account of the experience of Taiwanese comfort women, see George Hicks, The Comfort Women. Sex Slaves of the Japanese Imperial Forces (London, 1995), 198–201.

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literally to write this episode out of history,52 its percolation into popular consciousness—indirectly evinced by the fear shared by many Japanese that the occupying American troops would terrorize Japanese women with similar ferocity—was more difcult to police. Underlying these remembered fears, and the literary texts that reference them either directly or subliminally, is an awareness that the sexual labor of local women is often not simply a corollary of imperialist policy, but one of its covert stratagems. These links between prostitution and imperialism have continued unbroken throughout the postwar era. And although the GIs stationed up and down the Pacic Rim since WWII are a far cry from the armies of imperialist Japan, memories of the comfort station system are fresh enough for the very notion of prostitution in a military context to remain freighted with tense connotations. More pertinently, perhaps, the connection between GIs and the comfort women is far from merely associative. Testimonials by Korean prostitutes who serviced GIs during the Korean War suggest that some among their number had actually worked as comfort women before being repatriated from mainland China.53 In recent years both Japanese and Western feminists have picked up this point once again and posited an explicit link between the ‘comfort women problem’ (ianfu mondai) and sexual abuse committed by US servicemen around military bases in Japan, particularly in the wake of the Okinawa rape case in 1995.54 Few could dispute, moreover, that the sex industry which has sprung up to cater to the extensive US presence throughout East Asia during the postwar era reveals quite clearly that ongoing patterns of military, economic and even national subordination continue to converge in the gure of the prostitute. The exponential growth of recreational sex tourism in the region, typically from the West and Japan to the poorer nations of South-East Asia, provides further proofs of this point.55 As early as the 1950s, Frantz Fanon observed 52 The most notorious example of this is, of course, the representation of Japanese history in school textbooks. The blend of omission and fabrication that characterizes the Ministry of Education’s policy on the transmission of the past to younger generations has provoked an international furor, particularly amongst those nations formerly subjugated within the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere (Daitôa kyôeiken). 53 See Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations (New York, 1997), 46. 54 See, for example, Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: the International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley and London, 2000), 111–23. 55 The same process also operates in reverse, as is shown by the destitute sexual labor drafted in from the Philippines to work on the American bases in Japan now that fewer and fewer local women are prepared to seek employment there. This, in its turn, is

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grimly that newly independent regimes regularly set themselves up as “centers of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie”;56 and although his polemic was originally aimed at the nation states of South America, it holds up equally well for America’s allies in East Asia. Cynthia Enloe goes further, and suggests a cause and effect relation between the militarization of the Pacic Rim and the growth of international sex tourism, in which the US bases are held responsible for inaugurating such trends as the eroticization of local economies and the exploitative use of female sexual labor to augment GNP.57 2. Pimping: an all-purpose metaphor for collaboration with US power This redolent historical backdrop leads, perhaps predictably, to a recurrent rhetorical design in which the client/prostitute relationship is used to signify the unequal balance of power between the US and its East Asian protectorates. A clear conation occurs in these texts between the sex worker who caters to foreign patrons and the motherland that is made vassal to the US in return for nancial aid and/or military protection. This sexual brokerage brings us, in its turn, to the second dimension of the triangular paradigm. Put at its simplest, if the prostitute represents the motherland sold in service to the US, then those members of society who collude with American hegemony—rather than actively defying part of a wider phenomenon in which large numbers of South-East Asian women are recruited for service in the Japanese ‘entertainment’ industry. For analyses, see Yayori Matsui, “The Plight of Asian Migrant Women Working in Japan’s Sex Industry”, in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda, Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (New York, 1995), 309–19; and Iyori Naoko, “The Trafc in Japayuki-san”, Japan Quarterly 34/1 ( Jan–Mar, 1987), 84–8. These sex-workers are themselves latter-day equivalents of the karayuki, destitute Japanese women sent out to service brothels on the Asian continent during the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa eras. For an extended treatment, see James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san. Prostitution in Singapore 1870 –1940 (Oxford, 1993). In her analysis, Iyori claims that—like the karayuki before them—migrant sexual laborers bound for Japan are forced into prostitution by local poverty and the decimation of rural life. This view is given an additional twist by Takazato Suzuyo, who develops the homophonic pun on prostitution (baishun) and procurement (baishun) to argue that, instead of focusing our attention on those who sell their sexual labor, we should question the macrocosmic economic disparities between Japan and the nations of Asia that enable the purchase of foreign sexual labor. See Takazato, op. cit., 97. 56 Fanon, op. cit., 123. 57 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases. Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London, 1989), 85–7; and her Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London, 1983), 41–2.

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it—become the ‘pimps’ who prot from this metaphorical transaction. In virtually all of the texts discussed here, this pimping is literal and immediate—so much so, in fact, that it is tempting to dismiss the motif as little more than an expedient literary conceit which writers twist and tweak to self-referential and purely rhetorical ends. Yet just as with the motif of sexual labor, it is salutary to remember that lived and often vividly remembered history is perhaps the key context for these representations of the Cold War present. It is, of course, well understood all over the colonized world that imperial lust requires more or less ofcial managing. Bureaucracy on both sides traditionally understood that such lust was a menace which required channeling; and for this reason, the establishment of imperial outposts was almost invariably followed by a swift proliferation of brothels and organized prostitution. To quote Hyam on the Raj again, The empire was as much a system of prostitution networks as it was (in Kipling’s famous phrase) a web of submarine cables.58

Both imperial and local interests were served by the mission to conne fraternization to the red-light district, since this tactic allowed the efcient and regulated handling of colonial appetites at the same time as protecting most of the nation’s virtue from what might be termed foreign interference. The pragmatic value of such arrangements was certainly not lost on those East Asian governments who found themselves playing host to the armies of American ‘neo-imperialism’. Indeed, the postwar history of the region is footnoted by episodes in which prostitutes were systematically pimped to US servicemen by a ‘Confucian’ state keen to cordon off the problem within certain already stigmatized social zones.59 The policies of the Japanese government during the Allied occupation provide an example of this trend in highly institutionalized form. In the run-up to the arrival of the occupying troops, various government ministries joined forces with local police and brothel operators to create the short-lived Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), an umbrella organization charged with accommodating the sexual needs 58

Hyam, op. cit., 212. Far from being a phenomenon of the postwar period, this trade in women—often aided and abetted by state sanction—nds its roots in the pre-modern and wartime past. For a detailed analysis, see Ichiben Kim, Nihon josei aishi: yûjo, jorô, karayuki, ianfu no keifu (The Sad History of Japanese Women: The Genealogy of Yûjo, Jorô, Karayuki, and Comfort Women) (Tokyo, 1980). 59

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of GIs. In addition to containing sexually-transmitted disease within the brothel quarter, those in charge sought to ensure that the concerted recruitment drive for this organization expressly targeted those lowerclass women already engaged in the various branches of the ‘mizu shôbai’ (water trade), such as geisha, prostitutes, bargirls and waitresses. In this way, a ‘female oodwall’ (onna no bôhatei) was created, in which these women on the margins played the role of sacricial lamb, and protected the chaste and well-heeled masses from the sexual depredations of GIs.60 And even after MacArthur’s administration abolished the RAA in 1946, a esh trade catering specically to the occupying forces—and often staffed by veterans of the earlier syndicate—continued to ourish apace. Studies of US military prostitution in Korea, where arguably an even higher premium is placed on female chastity, tell the same story of carefully ghettoized fraternization. Katherine Moon has demonstrated that the regulation of prostitution was a key plank of ROK-US interstate relations, and that the ofcial line on prostitution—which raised its ag on the moral high ground—was consistently contradicted by policies in practice. In particular, the use-value of local women as sexual rewards for disgruntled, homesick servicemen was internalized as truth by both the ROK government and their American guests, and prostitutes were made to stand at the sometimes dangerous interface of ‘troopcommunity relations’.61 Archival evidence of the kind historians have drawn upon in studies of the RAA is not so ready to hand in the case of Taiwan; yet the fact that both Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose I Love You and Huang Chunming’s Young Widows take as their premise the establishment of ofcially sanctioned brothel syndicates, which pool their resources to cope with the inux of GIs from Vietnam, suggests that a similarly pragmatic approach was applied to the problem in Taiwan, too. Both these texts depict a brothel culture that, on a commensurately smaller scale, replicates the manner in which semi-ofcial prostitution has been used in both Japan and Korea to broker relations between client nation and patron without infringing on society as a whole. In other words, this notion of the state as mediator between imperialist desire and local women provides a further context for the texts explored here that interlocks emotively with the realities—both past and 60 See Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds. The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, 1997), 197–200. 61 See Moon, op. cit., 39–47.

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present—of the comfort women, R&R, and sex tourism. In these texts, however, historically documented collusion at the governmental level is extrapolated into a far wider collaborative net. Naturally enough, the seedy underworld operators that the reader expects in stories of the esh trade are here in abundance; but at the same time these texts continuously (and without serious authorial comment) implicate the chattering classes in the procuring and management of sexual labor. Teachers, university students, successful businessmen, doctors, and local politicians all play the pimp in these texts, and, moreover, frequently fall over themselves in their desire to run the trade and turn geopolitical alliance with the US into hard economic prot. The most striking example of this is to be found in Wang Zhenhe’s novel Rose, Rose, I Love You, in which the entire town of Hualian, from high ofcialdom down to the criminal classes, is united in the campaign to ‘entertain’ three hundred GIs on leave from Vietnam. Clearly, the motif of pimping is being exploited here for its symbolic rather than strictly mimetic value. Yet Wang’s text remains paradigmatic in the urge it displays to encompass a complete society within the orbit of its critique. Across the board, in fact, these texts concern themselves with the networks of collusion, both vertical and horizontal, which transect the social world and draw otherwise disparate constituencies into unholy alliance. In this sense, pimping—a fusion of the mercenary with the sordid—becomes an apt and broad-based metaphor for the distaste these writers feel both at the sheer scale of failed patriotism, and at the invasiveness of the American presence. 3. Domestic transformations Finally, the triangular paradigm of GIs, pimps and prostitutes allows writers to throw into relief the darker side of the socio-cultural transformations that have attended national alliance with the US. Female sexual labor, organized crime, drug and alcohol abuse, inter-racial violence, and the McDonaldization of cultural life dominate the thematic plane of these texts; and to a greater or lesser extent, all depict US inuence as a virus that infects and destroys its host.62 These specic social patholo62 As Dong Nian puts it of Taiwan, “Quite apart from sex itself, the arrival of large numbers of American soldiery in Taiwan caused the island to become enveloped in social problems rooted in drugs, sexually-transmitted disease, miscegenation, and the Western culture which takes US culture as its dominant. All this came as a corollary to political and economic inltration. Amongst the younger generation, (the American

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gies are also invested with broader symbolic meaning, and are linked by means of synecdoche to the desecration of the countryside, mass rural exodus, uncontrolled capitalism, and other ruptures of the modern. In other words, these writers subvert the dominant state and societal discourse—which, accurately enough, links the US alliance with military protection, economic aid, and the spread of liberal ideologies—through representations of the American epoch which tie alliance intimately to a deep and wide span of dysfunctionality. At the core of this drive to represent dysfunction is the linking of the tripartite sexual paradigm to the leitmotif of the city, either in the straightforward guise of urban eshpots, or in the form of the base-town—a close proxy of the metropolis—and the eroticized economy that this transitional locale engenders. Indeed, although the outworkings of this representational strategy may shift from text to text, the underlying linkage between the two rhetorical gures remains consistently intact across this body of narratives. In some texts, for example, the interaction is implied as writers make GI-oriented sexual labor synonymous with the practice and proliferation of recognizably urban subcultures. Through their association with US servicemen, the prostitutes in these narratives acquire a hard-won grasp of gutter English, a taste for American consumer goods, and an exposure to recreational behaviors—often centering on night-clubs, alcohol and drugs—that are unmistakably metropolitan in avor and origin. In other words, the sex worker and the city perform analogous and complementary functions: just as the city is the crucible for new cultural forms and entrepôt for external cultural currents, so is the prostitute the conduit through which these ideas are ltered through to the wider community. In other texts, this notion of complementarity is taken a stage further: the city and the esh trade are glossed as one and the same, and made to stand for postwar Japan and Taiwan as they are gazed upon, consumed, and mastered by their American ‘guests’. In works such as Nosaka Akiyuki’s “American Hijiki”, the age-old trope of the “harlotized metropolis”63 (city-as-whore, whore-as-city) is dusted off and given a new airing—one in which the connection is made so transparent as to become almost seamless. In other narratives, meanwhile,

presence) stirred up problems such as an intense culture clash between East and West, a decay of social ethics, and a loss of ethnic pride”. See Dong, “Meiguo Meiguo wo ai ni”, 26. 63 The phrase is William Sharpe’s. See Sharpe, Unreal Cities (Baltimore and London, 1990), 11.

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it is the base-town—rather than the city proper—that functions as the catalyst for disquieting shifts in the social order. Operating as a kind of crude urban surrogate, the base-town usually grows out of traditional rural settlements, and represents the shady lures of the metropolis divested of all the sophistication that we associate with urbs. Collectively, then, these texts are alike not just in their interlinking of the triangular paradigm with the trope of the city, but in the full freight of social critique that these twinned metaphors are made to carry.

Politics and sexuality: “Leap Before You Look” and the occupation narratives of Ôe Kenzaburô Many of these points come into sharp focus across a collection of interlinked works written by Ôe Kenzaburô during 1958 and early 1959, in which the writer takes as his subject the socio-psychological fallout on Japanese male youth of the American occupation of Japan and its long aftermath. In this self-contained series of narratives, which culminates in the notorious novella Warera no jidai (Our Era, 1959),64 Ôe devises an explicitly sexual metaphor for the power alignments of the postwar era. Specically, he uses the motif of an interracial ménage à trois—whose component parts are usually an intellectual youth, a middle-aged prostitute, and an American GI—to suggest elliptically the traumas of defeat, foreign occupation, and unequal military alliance with the US.65 Ôe’s aim at this time was to translate into his ction the atmosphere of subjugation that shrouded Japan throughout this period, but which remained—even given the events of the late fties66—a subject few

64 Kôno Kensuke sums up the general consensus on Our Era quite nicely when he describes the novella as a “cheap, comicbook creation, with provocative and tedious sex scenes, persistently repeated sexual metaphors, and a helping of terrorism and violence”. See Kono, “Warera no jidai. Kurîshe no mori” (“Our Era. A Forest of Clichés”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû 42/3 (Special edition on Ôe Kenzaburô) (1997), 38. 65 Yoshikuni Igarashi puts a slightly different interpretative emphasis on the tripartite relationships that dominate the work of writers such as Ôe and Kojima Nobuo during the late 1950s. Igarashi draws attention to the role played by so-called “in-between people” (chûkansha)—prostitutes, interpreters, and Japanese-Americans are key examples—in ction of this period, and reads these chûkansha as signs of Japan’s ambivalence about its politico-cultural hybridity in the new world order. See Igarashi, Bodies of Memory (Princeton, 2000), 73–103. 66 See p. 112 above.

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writers could bring themselves to explore.67 Ôe develops his triangular paradigm over ve separate works, four of them short stories: “Ningen no hitsuji” (“The Human Sheep”, February 1958), “Miru mae ni tobe” (“Leap Before You Look”, June 1958), “Kurai kawa, omoi kai” (“Dark River, Heavy Oars”, July 1958), “Kassai” (“Cheers”, September 1958), and the other, of course, the afore-mentioned Our Era (1959). The speed of Ôe’s composition during this period would alone attest to the grip this paradigm exercised over his imagination; but these stories are also marked by an overlap in theme, atmosphere and characterization that is insistent to the point of repetition. Moving through this series story by story, the reader can almost plot Ôe’s path as he considers the triangle from its differing vantage points only to reach the same conclusion about its nal dimensions.68 Since constraints of space make it impossible to examine all of these ve narratives, the analysis that follows singles out one text—“Leap Before You Look”—for close exploration.69 67 See Nagao Nishikawa, Le Roman Japonais depuis 1945 (Paris, 1988), 271. The late 1950s, however, seemed to mark the beginnings of postwar reassessment. Indeed, 1958 saw the publication of Endô Shûsaku’s Umi to dokuyaku (The Sea and Poison), arguably the rst ctional narrative which explored issues of the nation’s war guilt and responsibility in explicit fashion. 68 This urge towards repetition is a constant of Ôe’s work, as Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama have also observed. In reference to Dôjidai gêmu (Contemporary Games, 1979) and M/T to mori no fushigi na monogatari (M/T and the Marvels of the Forest, 1986), they write that Ôe tells “virtually the same story” in these two separate texts, thereby “. . . repeating a familiar pattern in his voluminous oeuvre whereby the possibilities of a single situation are fully exhausted through repetition and variation”. See the introduction by Paul St John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama to their translation of Ôe Kenzaburô, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (London, 1995), 14. 69 The decision to focus on this particular story is not so much an arbitrary choice, however, as an attempt to ll in some of the gaps that exist in Ôe scholarship as it currently stands. Although the series of texts examined here has garnered some scholarly interest, only the rst and last narratives of the set—namely “The Human Sheep” and Our Era—have received serious attention in the West to date. “The Human Sheep” is perhaps Ôe’s most graphic rendering of power relations in occupied Japan, and it has been made the subject of in-depth studies by Frederick Richter and Michael S. Molasky. It is also the only narrative of the series which has appeared in English translation. The unprecedentedly explicit sexual content of Our Era, meanwhile, made it an immediate cause célèbre in Japan and has given it a certain notoriety there ever since. The three short stories sandwiched between “The Human Sheep” and Our Era, however, have been comparatively neglected. Michiko Wilson provides a useful overview of all ve occupation narratives in her book-length study of Ôe’s entire oeuvre; but apart from this survey-style introduction to the series, references to the lesser-known texts have tended to be of a more glancing nature, both in Japan and the West. One exception is a recent study by Margaret Hillenbrand, which focuses on “Dark River, Heavy Oars”. See Frederick Richter, “Circles of Shame: ‘Sheep’ by Ôe Kenzaburô”, Studies in Short Fiction 11 (Fall 1974), 409–15; Molasky, op. cit., 159–67; Michiko Wilson, The Marginal World of Ôe Kenzaburô. A Study in Themes and Techniques (New York and London, 1986), 22–32; and Margaret Hillenbrand, “Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and the San Francisco

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This analysis is, however, prefaced by a brief introduction to the series as a whole. 1. Ôe’s use of the sexual metaphor Written before the Ampo movement, the ve texts nevertheless partake of its era and spirit; and a string of tension-ridden incidents relating to the US presence in Japan provides the immediate historical backdrop to the collection.70 Given the resistance that was fomenting as Ôe wrote, it comes, therefore, as something of a surprise to discover that his concern in this group of texts is less with political activism than with moral anesthetization of the most abject kind. Indeed, rather than strict verisimilitude (and the escalating opposition that was occurring in the world outside the text), Ôe’s series sites itself at the metaphorical—and highly alarmist—intersection of politics and sexuality. Ôe’s commitment to this mission is such that he himself admits elsewhere that he ends up overplaying the element of despair in his depictions of the interracial ménage à trois. As he puts it: I am prepared to accept the criticism that I have exaggerated the dark, woeful side of sexuality inherent in the tripartite relationship of the subjugator, the subjugated, and the intermediary.71

Ôe’s clear, stated intention in these works is to show by means of extended sexual metaphor how the nation’s failure to stand up to America was fatally compromising the masculinity of postwar youth. As a result, the narratives dating from 1958–9 are located squarely in the realm of masculine sexual paranoia and nightmare. Images of ritual shaming, emasculation, impotence, and even male rape haunt these stories, and they form an arresting counterpoint to the sense of empowerment that public protest was creating in the preamble to the head-on confrontations of Ampo. This theme of masculinity under sexual siege is—of course—not just literal in its connotations, but is also deployed guratively to suggest the threat posed to Japan’s very sovereignty by the US-Japan Security Treaty. Politics and sexuality recur in tandem across Ôe’s work during System: the Occupation Narratives of Ôe Kenzaburô”, Journal of Japanese Studies 33/2 (2007). 70 For a more detailed account of the historical background to these texts see Nakamura Yasuyuki, Ôe Kenzaburô. Bungaku no kiseki (Ôe Kenzaburô. The Locus of Literature) (Tokyo, 1995), 70; and Packard, op. cit., 35–41. 71 Ôe Kenzaburô, Ôe Kenzaburô zensakuhin, vol. 1, 380.

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the late fties and early sixties, and this fusion of themes was his considered literary response to the fraught dilemmas of the time.72 In an essay entitled “Warera no sei no sekai” (Our Sexual World, 1959), Ôe discusses the prevalence of sexual imagery in his ction of the time in candid terms. He writes: I believe that a nation in the Far East called modern Japan has, to put it simply, become a nation of sexual beings (seiteki ningen) under the USJapan Security Treaty system. In my view, such is the nationalization of this kind of sexual being that it is utterly meaningless for modern Japanese even to strive to become political beings (seijiteki ningen) . . . I believe that in this tendency towards indolence that hovers over modern Japan, the retrogressive satisfactions of the sexual being—as distinct from the spirit of struggle and restlessness that characterize the political being—are casting a heavy shadow . . . I wanted to describe the stagnation that aficts youths in modern Japan, and my intention has been to create a realistic picture of Japanese youth by clinging to sexual images. What I seek to describe is the misery of those who stagnate, and in particular the misery of stagnant youths. Needless to say, this is the misery of youths who are sexual beings in modern Japan.73

In this remarkable statement, Ôe reveals that, for him, the sexual image is a blanket signier for the submissiveness, stagnation and willful abnegation of political responsibility that characterized early to mid-postwar Japan. He identies the sexual realm as the last refuge of the disenfranchised, a lower order of existence to which the politically or militarily emasculated are consigned—and a fate from which contemporary male youth, in particular, seemed reluctant to escape. Certainly, Japan’s young men come under assault here. Yet at the same time, there is no mistaking the ultimate target of Ôe’s critique either here or throughout his ctionalized series on occupied Japan. Rather than the “nation of sexual beings” and the “misery of stagnant youths”, it is the agents of political emasculation—the San Francisco system and the conservative government which helps to uphold it—that inspire these works and take the full force of Ôe’s outrage. Ôe holds fast to the motif of the interracial ménage à trois in this set of narratives because it is an apposite framework within which to elaborate

72 Ôe also participated in the pre-Ampo conicts. For a discussion of his involvement in these demonstrations, and their possible inuence on the writing of “Leap Before You Look”, see Ichijô Takao, Ôe Kenzaburô. Sono bungaku sekai to haikei (Ôe Kenzaburô. His Literary World and Background) (Osaka, 1997), 22. 73 Ôe, “Warera no sei no sekai”, in Ôe, Genshuku na tsunawatari. Gendai Nihon no essei (Solemn Tightrope-walking. Essays on Modern Japan) (Tokyo, 1991), 317.

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further these linked themes of the outcast sexual realm, beleaguered masculinity and the imperiled nation-state. By implicating his young male protagonists in mésalliances with GIs and prostitutes, Ôe creates a literary metaphor which reveals not only that the Security Treaty has bred a generation of cowardly “sexual beings”, but also—and more tellingly—that the inner logic of dependency on the US creates contexts in which Japanese often have no choice but to behave as ‘pimps’. In some cases, this pimping is quite literal—such as the short story discussed below in which the anti-hero pockets the money his prostitute mistress receives from her GI customer. In many other cases, however, the pimping motif is used more allusively, and refers to the moral compromises that occur within an occupied zone, where active collaboration, quiet collusion and other kinds of greater or lesser betrayal are an inescapable part of the social landscape. In this sense, the series as a whole is a drawn-out meditation on the theme of baikoku (treason; literally, ‘selling the nation’); and Ôe structures it around the triangular paradigm because the merging of sex with politics showcases notions of treachery in highly provocative style. 2. The city in Ôe’s occupation narratives Perhaps the key point of departure in exploring the city in Ôe’s narratives on occupied Japan is to note that this series marks something of a caesura with Ôe’s preceding work, and with it he moves the arena of his ction from primitive rural Shikoku to the postwar metropolis. Ôe’s stated aim at the time was to transform himself into an “anti-pastoral, realistic writer”;74 and the gap in ambience between Ôe’s stories of occupied Japan and the pastoral Bildungsroman “Shiiku” (The Catch, 1958) which directly precedes them could scarcely be wider.75 “The Catch”, which was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in its year of publication, is often described as Ôe’s most beautiful work. Almost as if he were deliberately creating a prescient counterpoint to the later city narratives, Ôe spares no effort in his evocation of the rural landscape in this earlier novella. A graphic and intensely realized sense of place animates every page of the story, and Ôe revels in the visual complexity, vibrancy 74 Ôe, “Warera no jidai to boku jishin” (“Our Era and Myself ”), in Genshuku na tsunawatari, 334. 75 See Hisaaki Yamanouchi, The Search for Authenticity in Japanese Literature (Cambridge, 1978), 165.

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and thrill of the natural world. Yet beyond his surface celebration of nature red in tooth and claw, Ôe’s more profound message is that the natural world breeds an alertness and intuitive idealism in the youth who is raised at close quarters to it—qualities which quickly desert the male protagonist when he is relocated to the city. There is, of course, an inevitable logic to the urban backdrop against which Ôe’s tales of occupation are staged. The military personnel, sexual permissiveness, and demi-monde of bars and night-clubs that Ôe describes in these stories are phenomena of the city, and thus the city is the only arena in which Ôe’s paradigm can be meaningfully played out. Yet for Ôe, the city remains a non-place. Indeed, whilst nature in “The Catch” is noisy, vivid and bursting with startling details, Tokyo in Ôe’s narratives of the Pax Americana is an empty landscape, drained of color. And instead of the boy-narrator interacting passionately with nature whom Ôe describes in “The Catch”, the stories of occupied Japan present a protagonist in full retreat from the world around him, whose imagination turns in on itself and is consumed by a kind of paranoid indifference. Unlike many city writers (Murakami Ryû is a conspicuous local example) who dwell with Dickensian gusto on the details of urban blight, the familiar topography of neon, tarmac and swarms of moving people has scant place in Ôe’s metropolis. Yet ultimately it is the very drabness of this city space that—for Ôe at least—makes it the symbolic home of postwar Japan. Denuded of earthy rural vitality, the city becomes the obvious site for Ôe’s narratives of malaise, emotional absence, political apathy, failed relationships, and sexuality devoid of desire. A monochrome place barely worthy of description, the city in this vision is the prime emblem of a society that is no longer at one with itself, that has shifted from communality (kyôdôtai) to the social atomization which is the ineluctable result of baikoku. 3. “Leap Before You Look” Ôe’s short story “Leap Before You Look” presents an opportunity to explore these themes in greater textual depth. The I-narrator of this story is a Tokyo student, who by his own admission is a reclusive nihilist. He lives with his mistress, Yoshie, a middle-aged prostitute who caters exclusively to foreign clients, but must share her most nights with her current patron Gabriel, an American war correspondent and former GI. Gabriel, who has a seasoned contempt for Japanese youth, regularly baits the narrator about his cowardice, until one day the latter’s patience

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snaps and he knocks Gabriel unconscious while his back is turned. Soon afterwards, the narrator begins a secret affair with another woman, Tagawa Yûko, who quickly falls pregnant. Unexpectedly ecstatic at the news, the narrator resolves to abandon Yoshie and start life afresh with Yûko and their child. When Yûko contracts tuberculosis and is forced to abort the child, however, he soon nds himself drawn inexorably back to his former mistress. Yet shortly after his return, the narrator discovers that his experiences have left him impotent. That same night he dreams that he has been cornered by hostile foreign soldiers, with his only available escape route a stagnant pool in which he will surely drown. More perhaps than any other story in the occupied Japan series, “Leap Before You Look” affords privileged access into the consciousness of the young male who is such a constant presence in Ôe’s writing at this time. The I-narrator of this text exemplies the breed of aimless and craven youth on whom, in Ôe’s view, the psychological fall-out of defeat in war and American occupation had impacted most devastatingly. In an apparently inconsequential incident at the beginning of the story, we see the narrator deliberately drinking contaminated water at the courtyard fountain, despite the warnings of the university authorities. He remarks nonchalantly: I preferred to moisten my throat, even though I knew this would damage my health, than put up with a parched and burning thirst . . . This kind of behavior . . . was a way of exercising authority over the university, and there were a great many students around me who were hoarse-throated and sickly pale with diarrhea as a result of braving the risks and quenching their thirst. This was a pretty spiritless tendency, I reected, swilling the foul water round my mouth . . . Young people who are indifferent to politics, indifferent to the prospect of future illness, indifferent to the task of nding a lover, but who take their thirst very seriously . . .76

Here the narrator reveals himself as an archetypal seiteki ningen, fully aware that his gestures of rebellion are scarcely pinpricks of irritation on the tough exterior of the Establishment he despises, yet in the end deeply blasé about his own irrelevance. Unlike his elders of the Shôwa single-digit generation, whose memories of war are fresh enough for them to savor the comfort and stability of the late fties, the narrator is a true child of post-war Japan. Too young to remember anything before the occupation, he nevertheless nestles too cozily within Japan’s climate

76

Ôe, “Miru mae ni tobe”, in Miru mae ni tobe (Tokyo, 1974), 118–9.

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of dependency to take a stand on anything. Paralyzed by apathy, the narrator fastens—in full ironic consciousness—on trivia as a means of registering his disaffection. Yet whilst he may eschew the activism raging around him on campus, the narrator himself confesses that only two years earlier he was heavily involved in protests against the expansion of US military bases—doubtless the Sunagawa struggle in which Ôe himself took part. This topical reference hints at the quick and contagious nature of dependency, which—Ôe implies—can reduce even a former student radical with a history of committing “extreme acts” (kageki na kôdô) to a state of depressive inertia. Indeed, the narrator’s sole loyalty now is to utter political disengagement, as he proves only moments later, when he chooses to have his nose punched and bloodied by student militants rather than sign their petitions against French colonialism in Algeria. By way of an apology for his actions, the narrator remarks sardonically that the only reason for the modish status of “bravery” (isamashisa) on campus is the students’ absolute removal from it in reality. Beneath the narrator’s noncommittal posturing, however, lie fear and ennui, and he refers frequently to the ‘bitter stillness’ (nigai seijaku) that hangs over him like a constant shroud—an obvious symbol for the mood of dependency and apathy that, in Ôe’s view at least, was enveloping most of his generation. Nowhere are the effects of this ‘bitter stillness’ more apparent than in the narrator’s relationship with Gabriel. As in all the occupied Japan stories, the American is a physically overbearing type who takes pleasure in intimidating the more diminutive Japanese around him. Yet, in a move that initially seems paradoxical, Gabriel is also an articulate mouthpiece for Ôe’s disenchantment with postwar Japan. From his rst appearance in the story onwards—when he greets the narrator, still fresh from his run-in with the student militants, with the words Japanese youth, particularly those belonging to the intelligentsia, have a reputation for never getting into ghts77

—Gabriel tries repeatedly to sting or shame the narrator out of his inertia by pouring scorn on Japan and the Japanese national character. Just as America squeezes military concessions out of a Japan seemingly unable to say no, so the narrator allows Gabriel to cuckold him and humiliate Yoshie without demur; and Gabriel’s barbs are designed to alert the narrator to the parallels between their own ‘friendship’ and 77

Ibid., 125.

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the American-Japanese axis itself. Gabriel, a former GI turned war correspondent, has had his eyes opened to the consequences of Western imperialism and military adventurism, and in his own perverse way seeks to enlighten the narrator as to the dangers of compliance. This is the signicance of Gabriel’s offer to take the narrator on assignment with him to Vietnam, where the latter will have the opportunity to ght the French, witness resistance movements close-up, and cultivate real isamashisa—an offer that is ignominiously declined. Gabriel’s attempts to galvanize the narrator into action reach a climax one night when they visit a strip club with Yoshie, and Gabriel reminisces drunkenly about his experiences as a GI: “I was a soldier during the Korean War . . . A bunch of us threw this dirty little Japanese into a sewer in the red-light district and drowned him. There was a crowd of Japanese there at the time, but instead of lynching us, they just stood there quietly and watched”. Gabriel went on and on about how wretched and lthy the Japanese looked, lying there in the sewer just like a grub beetle. I began to get angry. “Yoshie’s the same, you know—submissive in the face of humiliation. Just like that crowd of Japanese. D’you want to hear about it?” “Tell me”, I said, in a voice hoarse with humiliation and anger. Gabriel’s eyes glittered and his body twitched with laughter as he told me that he had never once had normal sexual relations with Yoshie . . . “Anyway”, he said, “in my opinion, the Japanese have gone soft since the war. They never lose their tempers. Even when you drown one of their kind in a sewer, they just stand by and watch. They’ll assume whatever obscene position the customer requests . . . What a submissive race! Even you’re not capable of saying much. When I gave you the chance to go to Vietnam and kill some French, you couldn’t even give me a straight answer”.78

It is difcult to imagine a more damning allegory of Japan’s postwar relationship with the US than the one painted by Gabriel here. Using the twinned motifs of male cowardice and female degradation, Gabriel presents Japan’s international predicament in a politico-sexual idiom that plays to the reader as much as to the feckless anti-hero of the story. Yet even in the face of this extreme provocation, the narrator cannot make the shift from pimping (baikoku) to patriotism (aikoku), and retaliates instead by knocking the American out when the latter is urinating drunkenly by the roadside. In one sense, of course, Gabriel is simply a bully who relishes the petty dominion he exercises over the narrator and Yoshie: his thuggery 78

Ibid., 136.

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is that of the hegemon and the entire ménage-a-trois is nothing more than the sum of its anti-imperialist parts. Yet at the same time, Gabriel’s aggression and cruelty are also the hallmarks of the seijiteki ningen, whose “spirit of struggle” (tôsôshin) is precisely what enables him to achieve mastery in the international arena. As Ôe himself explains it in “Our Sexual World”, The political human being confronts and struggles against others in a tough and cold-blooded manner, either felling others or liquidating them into his own system . . .79

These combative qualities are clearly valorized over the pathologically disengaged stance of the narrator, whose existence is both dened and curtailed by an effete sexuality. Perhaps even more notable is the attitude of almost fatherly concern that Gabriel displays towards the narrator. In marked contrast to the aid packages, military protection, and lessons in democracy that ofcial US paternalism was handing out to Japan, Gabriel dispenses a kind of tough love which, rather than fostering dependency, implicitly exhorts the narrator to resist the Pax Americana. Indeed, far from being an enforcer of US power on the ground, Gabriel emerges as a committed proponent of the very left-wing liberation causes that were close to Ôe’s own heart. In some senses, this is doubtless testimony to an even-handed desire on Ôe’s part to distinguish the individual American citizen from the monolithic apparatus of US state power. Yet more pertinent, perhaps, is the painful satire of Japanese youth being coached in the rudiments of patriotism by the occupying forces. The narrator’s brief interlude with Tagawa Yûko constitutes his one chance of escape from entanglement with Yoshie into a life of autonomy beyond the shadow cast by the US. Although their affair begins inauspiciously, with the narrator as immune to Yûko as he is to everything else, the news of her pregnancy brings a sudden reawakening to life, hope, and the pleasures of responsibility. Whereas previously his shroud of “bitter stillness” sealed him off from others, he now nds himself cocooned in warm companionship with his fellow Japanese: I felt a strong solidarity with (my fellow passengers on the underground) . . . When night fell . . . they would probably engage in the act of love, and

79

Ôe, “Warera no sei no sekai”, 315.

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The powerful undertow of nationalism here, suggested by the image of legions of Japanese linking arms and breeding offspring as part of some mass procreation rite, is almost bathetic in its naked ideologizing. It contrasts all too starkly with the narrator’s instinctive reaction on hearing Yûko’s news, which is to scrub all traces of Yoshie’s smell from his body, and to dismiss their former life together as “excessively sterile” ( fumô sugiru). That Yûko and the unborn child offer escape from the impasse in which the narrator’s life is frozen becomes apparent when we crossreference this passage with an excerpt from an essay Ôe wrote very shortly afterwards, entitled “Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki” (“The Rehabilitation of Japan for Postwar Youth”). Here Ôe writes: Japanese youth despair of the Japanese race because they themselves have no solid sense that they are participating in national construction, and, furthermore, because they are resigned to the fact that the government of Japan is being conducted in a place that lies beyond their reach. These two fundamental feelings gripping Japanese youth are rooted in one single fact, namely that Japan is under American control, and that it is not the will of the Japanese people which drives the nation. Therefore, only after this shameful state of affairs has been knocked to pieces will Japanese youth be able to recover from their deep-rooted despair and political apathy and begin to gaze anew on Japanese reality. It is quite simple: in order for Japanese youth to recover their passion for the nation, foreign bases must be eradicated from Japan.81

This transition from “deep-rooted despair and political apathy” to a state of mind in which young citizens can “begin to gaze anew on Japanese reality” is precisely that which the narrator undergoes in this middle section of “Leap Before You Look”. The two passages even share the same slightly jingoistic, speechifying tone, amplied by the regular driving beat of references to ‘Japan’ and the ‘Japanese’, and by Ôe’s use of overlapping vocabulary to convey a sense of collective patriotic endeavor. Thus the feeling of solidarity (“rentai o kanjita”), the linked arms (“ude o kumiatte”) and the creation of children (“kodomo o tsukutteiru”) that are described in the passage from “Leap Before You Look” nd their reection in the participation (“sanka shiteiru”) and nation-building 80 81

Ôe, “Miru mae ni tobe”, 150. Ôe, “Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki”, in Genshuku na tsunawatari, 136–7.

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(“kunizukuri”) that Ôe analyses in the later essay. Both passages, moreover, are alike in their unembarrassed emotionality. Yet whilst in his later essay Ôe advocates the elimination of US bases from Japan as the remedy for the “deep-rooted despair and political apathy” of Japanese youth, in “Leap Before You Look” the narrator’s cure comes simply from his rejection of Yoshie. Indeed, it is precisely his abandonment of Yoshie in favor of Yûko that allows him—temporarily at least—to make the shift from seiteki ningen to seijiteki ningen, from baikoku to aikoku, and from pimp to patriot. In other words, these two passages, read in juxtaposition, make it quite transparent that, within Ôe’s politico-literary schema, the narrator’s relationship with a prostitute serving GIs is as much an instance of baikoku as the governmental decision to allow US bases to remain on Japanese soil. Still more to the point, insofar as the narrator’s microcosmic experience is a natural mirroring of events in the political macrocosm, the dilemmas of seiteki ningen and baikoku all carry a certain dreary inevitability about them. And if we pursue this analogy to its logical conclusion, it becomes equally axiomatic that any governmental system which sanctions the bases must bear the nal guilt for creating a nation of ‘pimps’. Thus although Ôe is passionate in his denunciation of youth and its apathy, Japan’s rot— for him—is ultimately systemic, and traces its origin back to the neoconservative forces for whom alliance was a powerfully vested interest. This notion of the inescapability of ‘pimping’ in US-dominated postwar Japan is driven home when, at the story’s end, the narrator nds himself drawn hopelessly back to Yoshie. Certainly, a sense of circuitry is implied here, as the narrator comes full circle in his battle between sex and political engagement. Yet Ôe’s circle exists less in stasis than in a state of vicious escalation; and when the narrator returns he discovers that, in his absence, Yoshie has stepped up her work as a prostitute servicing foreigners stationed in Japan. She even observes off-handedly that her occasional local clients are “useless little Japanese” (tsumannai chippoke na Nihonjin),82 borrowing almost to the letter the expression used by Gabriel earlier in the story to describe the Japanese who looked on in silence while their compatriot was drowned in a sewer. That same evening the narrator discovers that he has become impotent, and is visited by a nightmare in which he too is trapped by foreign soldiers near a stagnant pool. The dream is a clear echo of Gabriel’s savage

82

Ôe, “Miru mae ni tobe”, 177.

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reminiscences, and this continuity between past and present, memory and nightmare, works to develop the notion of circuitry into something closer to enclosure: waking or dreaming, in the public realm of politics or the intimate space of sexuality, there is no refuge from the logic of baikoku. Indeed, although Ôe’s tales of apathy conict with the charged atmosphere of the time, the series becomes strangely prophetic when it is assessed retrospectively. The I-narrator intellectual who abandons the forms and meaning of protest as futile, and eventually chooses to embrace the status quo American-style, becomes a prescient gure in the light of history as it was to unfold.

The past in the present: Nosaka Akiyuki’s “American Hijiki” Divergent as it is in tone and mood, Nosaka Akiyuki’s short story “American Hijiki”83 is an apt companion piece for Ôe’s tales of occupation. As mentioned earlier, it may at rst seem incongruous to include Nosaka within a group of writers whose chief commonality is a dedicated counter-hegemonic agenda. Whilst there is little doubting Nosaka’s maverick tendencies—during his checkered career he has worked as a singer, politician, TV writer, and proponent of liberal causes84—conventional literary wisdom has tended to slot him into the long tradition of offcolor comic writing inaugurated by Ihara Saikaku and continued in the later Edo period by writers such as Jippensha Ikku and Shikitei Samba.85 Serious, oppositionalist purpose sits rather uneasily within the gesaku (ribald prose) genre of which Nosaka is the designated heir apparent. Certainly, it is fair to say that Nosaka shares a genealogy with the dilettante men-of-letters who brought pace and irreverence to the 83

Hijiki is a species of edible brown algae. In Nosaka’s story, it refers to the black tea dispensed to the starving Japanese masses by their American occupiers after the war, a substance that the young Toshio mistakes for local seaweed and tries to consume as such. 84 Quoting the writer himself, Matsuda Osamu lists Nosaka’s varied occupations as “part-timer (dog-washer, wood-chopper, basecamp laborer, salesman of imitation DTT and second-hand American clothing, bellboy, agent arranging accommodation for examination students, and apple-picker), photographer, manager, short story writer, columnist, songwriter, comic dialogist, literary miscellanist, TV personality, novelist, Naoki prize winner . . . and on top of that, singer and politician”. See Matsuda, “Oitsumerareta sakkatachi” (“Hunted Writers”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû 19/15 (1974), 23. 85 Exemplary here is Nosaka’s salacious 1963 novel Erogotoshitachi (The Pornographers), which depicts the workings of the sex industry with naughty humor.

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Tokugawa literary scene—as the catholic scope of his interests proves. Nosaka’s style, too, with its frequent use of earthy Kansai dialect, is a world away from the more self-conscious literariness of writers such as Ôe or Mishima Yukio. Yet in the pair of autobiographical novellas “American Hijiki” and “Hotaru no haka” (“Grave of the Fireies”) which won Nosaka the Naoki Prize in 1967, seriousness of purpose is all too poignantly apparent.86 Already an orphan by the time war ended, Nosaka lost his younger sister to malnutrition in the immediate post-surrender cataclysm, and became a delinquent during the Allied occupation.87 Written within a few months of each other, these two stories are intimate, semi-autobiographical meditations on the war and its enduring legacy; and whilst comic elements often come to the fore, humor is ultimately used as a foil for themes of suffering, guilt, and trenchant social critique. At the center of “American Hijiki” is Toshio, a salaryman who, after a childhood of war-time deprivation, now lives a comfortable life in Tokyo with his wife Kyoko and their small son. Kyoko’s sudden announcement, however, that the family will soon be hosts to the Higginses, an American couple she befriended whilst on holiday in Hawaii, launches Toshio into a tailspin of anxiety and bitter-sweet reminiscences about his past. Composed in equal measure of ashback and real-time narration, this story uses the familiar triangular paradigm to explore the lingering legacy left on Toshio by the misery and debilitation of the war and the occupation that followed it. The ashback sections of text recount in disjointed, dream-like fashion Toshio’s memories of war, his rst unforgettable encounters with the occupying troops, and his work “supplying girls to soldiers” (heishi ni onnatorimochi) in the shelled ruins of Osaka. The real-time narration interwoven between the ashbacks, meanwhile, records with black humor the Higginses’ stay in Tokyo, and Toshio’s increasingly frantic efforts to impress Mr Higgins—whose imperturbably blasé manner, and past history as a GI in occupied Japan, only spur his host on to ever more desperate gestures. To Toshio’s own 86 Owing to the huge popularity of Takahata Isao’s eponymous anime of 1988, “Grave of the Fireies” has perhaps become better-known in recent years as a piece of cinema than as a literary text. For critical studies of the novella see Sukegawa Noriyoshi, “Hotaru no haka” (“Grave of the Fireies”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû, 19/15 (1974), 140–43; and Igarashi, op. cit., 176–81. 87 For an autobiographical account of this period in Nosaka’s life, see Nosaka Akiyuki, Adoribu jijoden (An Ad-lib Autobiography), in Tomaru Tatsu (ed.), Nosaka Akiyuki. Sakka no jiden (Autobiographies of Writers) vol. 19 (Tokyo, 1994). For Nosaka’s reminiscences of his sister’s death, see pages 186–206.

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dismay, he nds himself reverting uncontrollably to the pimp persona he cast off years before, escorting Higgins to hostess bars, arranging assignations with expensive call-girls, and nally treating Higgins to a live sex show, in which top billing goes to Yot-chan, reputedly the owner of Japan’s ‘number one’ penis. Unfortunately for Toshio, however, Yotchan shares his emasculating memories of reaching adulthood under the shadow of American occupation, and, on glimpsing Higgins in the audience, the show’s star attraction is struck down with stage fright and cannot perform his turn. Yot-chan’s impotence puts the nal seal on the failure of Toshio’s campaign to impress Higgins, and the story ends on a sour and disconsolate note. Here, once again, Japan within the US hegemonic system is congured as the body of a prostitute, procured for her American masters by ever-accommodating local pimps. Yet whilst the basic outline of the triangular paradigm remains unchanged, Nosaka lend its contours an extra edge by moving the time-frame forward two decades—thereby suggesting that the trauma inicted on the Japanese psyche by the immediate postwar years is far from healed. What is more, through his description of Toshio’s guided tours of seedy downtown Tokyo, Nosaka suggests a link between sexual labor, the reconstruction of the neon metropolis, and Japan’s very rise from the ashes during the twenty years that followed the war. In a further variation on Ôe’s theme, Nosaka blurs the gure of the prostitute—populating the story, in fact, with a succession of different women and men employed in the Tokyo sex industry—and brings the relationship between ‘patron’ and ‘pimp’ into far sharper focus. In particular, Nosaka probes Toshio’s response to Higgins, and presents the nely shaded ambiguity of the pimp’s feelings towards his patron as a running commentary on Japan’s relations with the US during the era which lasted from defeat in 1945 to economic blast-off in the sixties. Ôe’s anxiety over high-level state handling of bilateral relations is also leavened by a lighter cynicism here; but the text is still replete with subversive messages. For a start, Nosaka’s novella is tough and pragmatic on the US in East Asia. By depicting his American as an opportunistic sex tourist and part-time pornographer who has returned to Japan to relive the heady, hedonistic days of the occupation, he drives home the by now all too familiar connection between geopolitical hegemony and sexual exploitation in the ‘Orient’. Just as critically, his protagonist Toshio—standardbearer of the new Japan by day and GI pimp by night—is a brilliantly realized symbol of the moral equivocations that lie suppressed beneath

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the nation’s postwar miracle. Endlessly wavering between resentment and an almost puerile eagerness to please, Toshio’s schizophrenia is Japan’s postwar predicament—right-wing/left-wing, pacist/militarist, nationalist/internationalist—writ large. And whereas Ôe writes fervently against Japan’s continuing complicity in the hope of abrogating inequitable alliance, for Nosaka the nation’s passivity is simply the organic evolution of a process that began with the arrival of Allied troops in 1945. A pimp-like servility is Japan’s conditioned response towards the US, and railing against the architects of the San Francisco system—for Nosaka, at least—somehow misses the point. Japanese society in its entirety, as evinced by our everyman Toshio, is in thrall to the Pax Americana, and the net of blame must be cast far wider. Like Ôe, however, Nosaka’s concern is with personalizing the geopolitical, and in his text the postwar entente which gave Japan the role of ‘second string’ within an overall gameplan of American economic and military ascendancy is translated into a tale of unevenly matched rivalry between two red-blooded, hard-drinking heterosexual men. Toshio, selfcast as junior partner in the alliance, does his best to impress Higgins, who effortlessly asserts his superiority by remaining unmoved by the gauntlets thrown down by his Japanese host—at the same time as consistently out-drinking and out-whoring him. Still more gallingly, Higgins shows little sign of being impressed by Japan’s sophisticated sex industry, the medium through which Toshio has chosen to demonstrate the triumph of postwar national reconstruction. Throughout the text, in fact, Tokyo becomes the body of a prostitute whose best features Toshio must market and sell to Higgins as a means of proving to his ‘client’ the renaissance of the entire Japanese nation. This disturbing, darkly comic interlinkage becomes clear when we examine Nosaka’s use of the twin leitmotifs of the city and sexuality more closely. In Toshio’s fretful imagination, the roles of city tour-guide and prostitute-touting pimp are conated almost as a point of principle. Even before the Higginses arrive, in fact, the two identities have synthesized themselves axiomatically in his mind: . . . what makes me really mad is that when they turn up we’ll have to do the tour of Tokyo. The building that you see to your right is Japan’s tallest skyscraper. Rookku atto za raito birudingu, zatto izu za haiesuto . . . Why should I have to carry on like the Nakanoshima pimp (ponbiki) all over again . . .88 88 Nosaka, “Amerika hijiki”, in Amerika hijiki, Hotaru no haka (American Hijiki, Grave of the Fireies) (Tokyo, 1968), 51.

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Yet once he resigns himself to the role of pimp/guide, Toshio soon gets back into his stride. Briskly dispatching the two wives back home, he makes sure that his whistle-stop tour of the city’s sights is men-only, since, for him, the night-time metropolis of Tokyo is an erotic playground in which only pimps and their patrons belong. Thus while the ladies tour the Kabuki theatre and the Sengakuji temple, the Tokyo that their menfolk explore reads like an itinerary of the red-light district: hostess bars, love hotels, prostitutes, call-girl agencies and live sex shows. Indeed, Tokyo in this narrative is a night-bazaar stocked with erotic commodities that Toshio purchases for Higgins in ever more lavish quantities in order to convince the latter of Japan’s return from the brink. Further proof that the sex industry, Tokyo, and Japan’s postwar resurrection are glossed as one and the same in Toshio’s imagination is provided by his intimations that national progress is measured, rst and foremost, by the quality and range of prostitutes available on the market. Thus the most natural way of demonstrating to Higgins that Japan is no longer the destitute bomb-site it was in 1945 is to procure for him a “young beauty with a slim gure who might be taken for a fashion model”89—a far cry from the pale-skinned, skinny-shouldered “would-be whores” (pansuke shibô)90 whom he supplied to GIs in war-torn Osaka. This campaign to disabuse Higgins of his occupation-era views on Japan by escorting him around Tokyo’s night-spots is, of course, doomed from the outset. Toshio’s inability to see himself, Higgins and Tokyo as anything other than pimp, client and prostitute makes his plan to re-educate the American self-defeating, for the simple reason that his sexual reication of Japan’s capital city means the degradation of the very object that he is holding up for Higgins to admire. Thus instead of allowing Tokyo—birthplace of Japan’s extraordinary economic miracle and triumphant home of the 1964 Olympics—to speak for itself, Toshio insists on acting as its bungling interpreter; and his mediations lead to a depressing tale of miscommunication. Ultimately, it is Toshio himself, for whom Japan continues to exist as a commodity packaged up for consumption by the more powerful US, who is in critical need of re-education. Japan may be well launched on its way to economic preeminence, Nosaka seems to say, but for children of the occupation like

89 90

Ibid., 79–80. Ibid., 50.

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his protagonist Toshio, inferiority complex towards America is a mindset that resists all reprogramming. As Toshio puts it All my life, there will be an American parked permanently inside me like a dead weight, and from time to time my American, this American inside me, will lead me around by the nose . . . this is my incurable illness, my Yankee allergy ( fuchi no yamai no merikan arerugi).91

The enduring power of memory is, in fact, one of the seminal themes of “American Hijiki”, and it nds telling expression in the structure of the text. Throughout the novella, Nosaka creates an intricate narrative texture in which past and present, dream and waking-time are sutured together as a means of showing the nal irreversibility of Toshio’s wartime conditioning. As Yoshikuni Igarashi has recently argued, the task of forgetting that the Japanese government enjoined upon its subjects during the decades of reconstruction may have been largely successful in the public and political domains, but in the worlds of dream, fantasy, and popular reminiscence, memories of war and defeat were not so easily banished.92 Nosaka’s Toshio, as he its imperceptibly between his dreams of ‘Year Zero’ and the contemporary moment of Higgins and their pilgrimage round Tokyo’s esh-pots, presents a perfect case of the psychic ssures that occur when past trauma is improperly managed. Toshio’s Osaka past literally keeps intruding into his Tokyo present—a process captured by frequent linguistic shifts from Kansai dialect to standard Japanese and back again93—to the extent that he is unable to distinguish Higgins in his mind from the Americans he dealt with as an adolescent in the aftermath of war. Images of America-san superimpose themselves confusedly on his consciousness, and at the story’s end all that is clear and consistent is a debilitating sense of his own inferiority. This inferiority complex nds its roots not just in the familiar story of defeat, surrender, and Allied occupation, but in Toshio’s intensely 91

Ibid., 89. See Igarashi, op. cit., 11–13. 93 Dialectal medley and a mixing of registers are a long-standing feature of Nosaka’s style, and a key source of his originality. In reference to The Pornographers, for example, Hasabe Hideo writes that “The most fundamental point about the style that Nosaka adopts in The Pornographers is the fact it deploys the spoken language of Kansai—Kansai dialect, in other words—not just in dialogue sections, but sometimes even in the main body of the narrative ( ji no bun) . . . In this work, Nosaka has succeeded in producing a strikingly fresh and vivid reality not just by relying on the novelty value of his subject matter, but also through style”. See Hasabe, “Nosaka Akiyuki: buntai no mondai” (“Nosaka Akiyuki: Questions of Style”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû 19/15 (1974), 85. 92

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subjective memories of the mid-1940s. And, above all else, it is Toshio’s past as a pimp for GIs that haunts him. In the immediate aftermath of war, perhaps all Japan had to sell to its conquerors—who were meanwhile distributing largesse and hijiki among the starving populace—was its womenfolk, a trade through which the fatherless Toshio scraped a living for his invalid mother and small sister. And while Toshio may blame America for the disasters that have been visited on his family, and, by implication, on the Japanese nation itself— After all, it was the ravages of the war that did for my mum’s health and eventually killed her; and if you think about it, it was because of America that I ended up taking my little sister under my wing and that we both suffered so much . . .94

—he cannot escape the creeping self-disgust which reminds him that he fended for himself and his family by supplying this same America with the sexual services of equally destitute Japanese girls. Here too, just as in the earlier Ôe stories, the trauma of coping with national catastrophe is read guratively as the travails of a youth striving to achieve manhood in intrinsically dishonorable circumstances. Indeed, whichever way Toshio looks at it, the encounter with America has proved emasculating for him, either through defeat itself or through the shameful behavior which defeat forced upon him. As a result, his consciousness has been freeze-framed in the occupation era of his adolescence; and despite Japan’s miracle—and his place within it—in Toshio’s own mind he is still the scruffy, underfed pimp living off America-san. In these various ways, Nosaka’s story probes the tensions that play beneath the surface of Japan’s postwar identity and its ongoing relationship with the US. Although the narrative eschews direct references to Ampo, the US bases, and bilateral relations generally, these political lacunae are entirely disingenuous within a text so attuned to American power, past and present. Through his depictions of Toshio and Tokyo—salaryman and high-rise capital city by day, GI pimp and red light district by night—Nosaka implies that beneath the high gloss of Japan’s postwar miracle, the dynamics of its relationship with the US remain unchanged from the time of occupation. More radically, the equation between sexual labor and postwar reconstruction that is made throughout the text suggests obliquely that the nation’s success after the occupation is predicated upon a long-term quasi-institutionalized GI pimp mentality. 94

Nosaka, “Amerika hijiki”, 83.

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Continuities of this kind are, of course, unwelcome; and so the voices of the past are carefully silenced beneath concerted exhortations to forget. This tendency nds its reection in Toshio’s work colleagues, who turn a deaf ear whenever he tries to bring up the war, and throw themselves instead into a future of doubled incomes and double-digit growth. Yet truth will out, and Toshio nds his personality almost sundered by its desire for expression. Instructed to forget the past even whilst it was so obviously still alive in the present, Nosaka’s character is thus both perpetrator and victim of the ‘pimping’ culture. His crimes of baikoku are only made more ludicrously extreme by the pressure to pretend that the war and Occupation are just history, and that—contrary to what all his instincts scream at him—Japan and the US are now joined happily in alliance. Ultimately, Nosaka’s text suggests that it is only through a conscious excavation and examination of the past that the pimp persona can be cast aside, and a genuine recovery accomplished.

Huang Chunming’s Young Widows: Vietnam, R&R, and the entertainment boom Young Widows by Huang Chunming elaborates the triangular paradigm of treasonous sex and politics in ways that up the ante of subversion still further. Huang’s credentials as an oppositionalist writer require only the briefest of rehearsals here. Among the most talented of the xiangtu group,95 Huang in his early oeuvre captured the mood of life in Taiwan’s rural communities with an unsentimental empathy born of his youthful experiences growing up in the small town of Yilan. Exploring the agrarian mode at a time when it was being besieged by forces of change, Huang in these stories earned his reputation as a regionalist writer

95 As mentioned earlier, Huang is uncomfortable with this designation. For an analysis of why he came to reject the nativist label, see Qi Yishou, “Yi ba xinsuan lei. Shiping ‘Wo ai Mali’ ” (“A Bitter Tear. A Critique of ‘I Love Mary’ ”), in Shuping shumu (Book Review and Bibliography) 71 (March, 1979), 18. Qi conceptualizes the shift in terms of a move from literature of the ‘soil’ (tu) to literature about the ‘foreign’ ( yang), and argues that an increasing preoccupation with (neo-colonialist) social satire over nativist realism (xiangtu xieshi) was crucial to Huang’s evolution as a socially committed writer. Elsewhere, Huang has described himself as a “country bumpkin” (xiangxia tubaozi), who only realized that such a thing as a root-seeking movement existed among intellectuals after he had moved from the countryside to Taipei. His remarks are quoted in Lin Qingxuan, “Huang Chunming, xiaoshuo, Huang Chunming” (“Huang Chunming, Fiction, Huang Chunming”), Shuping shumu 14 ( June, 1974), 84.

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(bentu zuojia); and even at this early stage in his career he was manifesting what one critic has called a “preconceived disillusionment with modernity”.96 In the years that followed this early acclaim, Huang’s counter-cultural sensibilities led his writing along an increasingly linear trajectory, and his critique of Taiwan’s modernization sometimes teetered on the edge of polemic. In common with many other Nativist writers, this critique was consistently conceptualized along the urbs versus rus axis97—and as the city continued to encroach into Taiwan’s rural hinterland throughout the 1960s and 70s, so too did Huang’s literary vision become ever more xed on the notion of metropolis.98 The urban for Huang is a portmanteau metaphor for Taiwan’s ills: mainlander political hegemony, neo-imperialist threats to the island’s local identity, and cultural despoliation all coalesce in the metropolis-as-metaphor in his ction. Huang’s sense of panic appears most palpably in the works that belong to what Howard Goldblatt has designated the third phase of his output,99 such as “Pingguo de ziwei” (“A Taste of Apples”, 1972), “Wo ai Mali” (“I Love Mary”, 1979), “Shayaonala, zaijian” (“Sayonara, Zaijian”, 1974), and Young Widows. In these latter two texts, in particular, Huang develops a strident critique of imperialism—both American and

96

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 155. For a discussion of the various ideological reasons behind nativist hostility towards the city and idealization of the countryside, see Jing Wang, op. cit., 55. In particular, the nativists have glossed the village as a “reservoir providing inexhaustible resources of . . . nationalism and as the last stronghold of old culture and local customs” (p. 49). An intriguing parallel for this is found in recent Japanese discourses on the village, which also deploy romanticized images to ideological ends. As Stephen Vlastos puts it, “the idea that Japan’s farm villages function as a reservoir of national culture, reproducing the core values and habits that shape Japanese national character, is a relatively recent invention . . . (and) belongs to a modern discourse that developed in reaction to social cleavages and national anxieties attendant on modernization”. Vlastos, “Agrarianism Without Tradition. The Radical Critique of Prewar Japanese Modernity”, in Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), 79–80. 98 This shift has not been a popular one amongst critics, and Young Widows has attracted particular disapprobation. See, for example, Ai Zhishen, “Huainian na sheng ‘Luo’. Kan ‘Xiao guafu’ Huang Chunming zhu” (“Cherishing the Memory of that Sound of a ‘Gong’. A Reading of Young Widows by Huang Chunming”), Shuping shumu 75 (April, 1975), 111–12. Ai argues plaintively that the rot in Huang’s ction sets in with the publication of “Sayonara, Zaijian”. From this point onwards, his work becomes dominated by a sense of fakery ( jia) and superciality ( fu), and is as “shallow in content” as the wigs and costumes of the young widows themselves. 99 See Howard Goldblatt, “The Rural Stories of Hwang Chun-ming” in Faurot, op. cit., 111. In a similar vein, Gao Tiansheng claims that in Young Widows, one can observe Huang’s attempts to “cast off the set forms of nativism”. See Gao Tiansheng, Taiwan xiaoshuo yu xiaoshuojia (Taiwanese Fiction and Fiction Writers) (Taipei, 1994), 110. 97

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Japanese—and does so via a provocative fusion of the sexual and the political. Like the Japanese texts which predate it, Young Widows launches its critique at three distinct targets: the misuse of American military muscle in the region; the capitalistic opportunism displayed by those who, themselves safe within the US system of patronage, turn armed American intervention in Vietnam into a dollar-spinning enterprise; and the damage that this alliance between US military planning and local entrepreneurialism inicts on patterns of local culture. Indeed, insofar as national and international concerns are disposed along the lines of a ménage-à-trois (here, the habitués of “Young Widows”, the agship attraction of Taipei’s red-light district), both Huang’s text and Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose, I Love You continue the work of Ôe and Nosaka. Yet certain key emphases differ; and although the critique of faceless Pentagon power is clearly pursued in both texts from Taiwan, individual Americans occupy a smaller space—indeed, in Rose, Rose they do not appear at all. This shift in emphasis is probably a straight mirroring of the differences between Taiwanese and Japanese experiences of the Pax Americana. Whilst Japan felt the US as an insistent physical presence, for Taiwan, American power was both less immediate and more institutionalized. At any rate, this downsizing of the role of the GI opens up new scope for the attack on the domestic scene, and the bulk of both texts from Taiwan is given over to a full-blown satirical portrait of the ‘pimping’ society in thrall to US power. In Young Widows, this adjustment of emphasis is staged through a split-level narrative structure. The principal storyline relates the activities of a syndicate of brothel-operators, led by the American-educated Ma Shanxing, who are intent on squeezing every last cent out of GI Joe. Rejecting the Western-style format and décor of previous bars, Ma determines that the best way to lure customers is to market the inscrutable mystique of the Orient ( yiguo de qingdiao), and, in particular, the cult of female chastity. The slapstick comedy of Ma’s efforts to recreate an ambience of high Qing decorum in a downmarket Taipei brothel is offset, however, by a series of unhappy memoirs related by the prostitutes and their GI clients. Together these personal histories form a counter-narrative both to the war itself—waged, as it were, just off-stage—and the broad satire of the compradors and their merrily hard-headed pragmatism. These concurrent plotlines allow Huang to shift textually between the American top brass (the aggressive agents of history), the pimp syndicate (its opportunistic auxiliaries), and the

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traumatized GIs and their Madame Butteries—who, needless to say, are history’s victims. This layered framework creates, in its turn, a polyphony of narrative tones: quasi-factual critique, broad clowning, and poignant rst-person testimonials alternate successively with one another as Huang writes the war in its various arenas. The hegemonic position of the US within East Asia is established tersely right at the outset—in fact, the very rst lines of the story run as follows: In 1968, the American president Lyndon Johnson ordered a record number of American troops to be stationed in Vietnam. When the number had reached over ve hundred thousand, Taiwan was incorporated as another Far Eastern R&R center for the American troops stationed in Vietnam.100

This brief passage encapsulates the dynamics of the day: the suggestion of America as self-appointed global policeman; the bloody escalation of its military capacity in Indochina; its policy of turning neutral local allies into campaign auxiliaries; and the inability of these allies—economically and strategically mortgaged as they are to maintaining US goodwill—to say no. A similar passage occurs right at the end of the text, announcing in equally blunt terms Nixon’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam. The positioning of these two references to America’s ruling élite as book-ends that frame a comedy about prostitution in Taipei is an expression of the extent to which US policy is the author of recent histories, writ both large and small. Together, these markers of authorship work to place the entire narrative under the mantle of unaccountable American power; and although bald geopolitical fact does not intrude on the central segment of the text, its effects remain omnipresent. In particular, Huang continues his critique of the US through the memoirs of combat recounted by GI patrons of “Young Widows”. Perhaps the most polemical of these reminiscences is told by two seventeen-year old recruits, both conscientious objectors who marched against the war before being conscripted. The teenage soldiers, both high on hallucinatory drugs, reveal that the holiday they are enjoying in Taiwan is, in fact, a reward for having killed 32 Vietcong in the eld. Sub-narratives of this kind, whilst referencing the pain of the Vietnamese, spotlight America’s treatment of its own to suggest the broad constituencies of victimhood that are brought into being by the war. 100 Huang Chunming, “Xiao guafu”, in Huang Chunming, Shayaonala, Zaijian (Sayonara, Zaijian) (Taipei, 1978), 85.

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In the bulk of the text, meanwhile, Huang Chunming turns his satirical eye on Taiwan’s collaborating classes. Here, as in previous texts, collusion is made synonymous with pimping, both factually and in the more exible realm of metaphor. In the literal sense, collaboration is represented by the syndicate of brothel-operators headed by Ma Shanxing, who provide the capital and expertise necessary to launch the “Young Widows” bar. Interspersing their pursuit of prot with the hard-luck stories of abandonment, abuse, and unmarried motherhood told by the prostitutes who are indentured at the bar, Huang advances his critique of the sex industry at full throttle. Yet at the same time, his text intimates that the conglomerate of Taipei brothel-operators are, in the end, nothing more than shrewd entrepreneurs: their line of work may be dubious, but their business sense and work ethic are exemplary. Huang foregrounds this theme of inventive and industrious entrepreneurialism throughout the text, and in so doing, deliberately speaks the language of 1960s and 1970s Taiwan. By turning a prot from the US-Taiwan alliance, the pimp syndicate is simply following the hard economic logic of the time, and thus its members differ only nominally from a huge swathe of other business interests on the island. Ultimately, Huang implies, the syndicate is nothing other than a warped simulacrum of the American-backed multi-national corporations that began dominating the economic scene in Taiwan around this time, just as the pimps themselves are alter egos of the ‘compradors’ who staffed these more respectable enterprises.101 Huang builds on this sense of a pervasive ‘pimping’ mentality through his characterization of Ma Shanxing. Ma, whose given name puns on ‘skilled in business’, has studied market analysis and hotel management in the US.102 This experience is his chief calling-card, and it allows him to claim nominal membership of the highly élite group of Taiwanese who left the island to study abroad (usually in America) as part of the socalled brain drain (rencai wailiu) that began in the late sixties. Rather than assisting national construction in the conventional way on his return to Taiwan, however, Ma deploys his new skills in the GI sex industry—thus crassly subverting the traditional pattern according to which young men

101 To borrow Lü Zhenghui’s designatory scheme, Young Widows falls neatly into the second period of the xiangtu wenxue movement, which is dominated by ction centered on “colonialist economics and multinational corporations” (zhimin jingji ji kuaguo gongsi de xiaoshuo). See Lü, op. cit., 62. 102 Huang, “Xiao guafu”, 90.

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studied abroad in order to ‘save the nation’ (liuxue jiuguo) from imperialist ruin. Through this inversion of the proper norm, Huang implies that studying abroad—a career path which has commanded prestige in Taiwan throughout the postwar decades—is nothing more than a conveyor belt for the production of US lackeys. And given that from the 1970s onwards, approximately 70 percent of Taiwan’s Cabinet were educated abroad, Huang’s satirical portrait of Ma Shanxing has an unpleasant topical resonance.103 Worst of all, Huang intimates that the pimping chain begins, not among the poor and disadvantaged, but at the most inuential levels of Taiwanese society. Huang’s satire of Ma Shanxing, the pimp of learning, also extends to the latter’s abuses of the Chinese tradition, and the readiness with which he abets the processes of cultural inundation that go hand in hand with US hegemony. The fear that national culture is being imperiled by the forces of Americanization is a theme to which Huang Chunming has returned repeatedly, most controversially in the short story “I Love Mary”. This story pokes fun at the new breed of jia Meiguoren or ‘fake Americans’, and their bottomless and indiscriminate appetite for anything made in the US. Like the asinine anti-hero of “I Love Mary”, Ma Shanxing knows no anxiety over the fate of indigenous identity, and is depicted in Young Widows as a cultural criminal who, far from treasuring the past, seeks actively to prostitute it. In his efforts to attract GI custom, Ma kits his staff out in form-tting qipao, decorates the bar with folding screens and copies of Hong lou meng, and instructs the girls to simulate the prim expressions of traditional widows. In much the same way that the scalp-hunting Japanese sex tourists in “Sayonara, Zaijian” seek out aboriginal girls for a ‘different’ thrill, Ma reduces the oppression of women in traditional society to a kind of recherché aphrodisiac, marketed for its curio value: Ma planned to ensnare the enemy with the mysteries of the East . . . and sought to develop the young widows’ cultural understanding . . . Why had women had their feet bound in ancient China? He told them about the chastity arch and cracked jokes about widowhood. Why had virginity been prized from the Song dynasty onwards? How had it been checked? Ma discoursed on bedroom dramas from The Golden Lotus, and on moral instruction for women . . . He spoke a great deal about things relating to China—and, of course, they all concerned sex.104

103 104

See Copper, op. cit., 79. Huang, “Xiao guafu”, 142–3.

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Ma’s presentation of traditional China here deliberately taps into a vein of sensationalist thinking about the ‘Orient’ among Western observers that has a history as long as the East-West encounter itself. The critical difference, of course, is that instead of an Orient ‘othered’ by the Western gaze, Huang’s text gives us a Taiwanese protagonist who undertakes this process of erotic Orientalization himself. These notions of pimping as collaboration are given a nal seal by the wartime setting and martial language with which Huang Chunming equips his novella. More precisely, the conversion of Vietnamese suffering into Taiwanese prot that the text describes allows Huang to extrapolate the motif of pimping far beyond Taiwan, and transform it into an issue of Asian sovereignty and solidarity—or rather the lack thereof. Ma Shanxing’s enterprise seems to have imbibed the old dictum of divideand-rule rather more readily than any notion of regional camaraderie, and far from locating Taiwan within a discourse of pan-Asianism that abhors the bloodshed in Vietnam, his sole concern is with the lucrative race against other client states, each of which is seeking to provide the most stimulating R&R for the GIs. As he puts it in a speech to the staff of “Young Widows”: You have to make them give up any notions about going back and spending their money in other R&R centers, like the Ryukyus, Japan or Hong Kong.105

To underline the point linguistically, Ma Shanxing’s business plans read like a second-rate imitation of US policy, full of references to world domination, empire-building and military strategy. At one point, he even proclaims that he will treat the bar project as “another Vietnam War” (ling yizhong Yuezhan).106 In other words, alliance with the US as Huang Chunming describes it here means a domino effect of dishonorable transactions. Ma Shanxing ‘pimps’ himself, his fellow Taiwanese, the Chinese cultural heritage, and even his identity as a citizen of postcolonial Asia in his efforts to ride the war boom and turn geopolitics into prot. Finally, Huang targets the socio-cultural changes that military alliance with the US, and the concomitant exposure to American inuence, have brought to local life. Specically, Huang mobilizes the R&R

105 106

Ibid., 116. Ibid., 104.

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“bar industry” ( jiubaye) as a signier of high-speed urban growth and ever-proliferating urban cultures. Underlying this representional strategy is the notion of a natural dialectic between tradition and change that is thrown damagingly out of kilter by the knock-on effects of US militarism and the service economy that sustains it. This link between US militarism, R&R, and articially accelerated urbanization is made explicit at the beginning of Young Widows: In 1968 . . . Taiwan was incorporated as another Far Eastern R&R center for the American troops stationed in Vietnam. The bar trade, which had previously been listless and depressed, all at once began to boom as if it had suddenly glimpsed the sunlight. Bars in places like Taipei, Jilong, Taizhong and Gaoxiong began to ourish one after another, and even remote Hualian, which had never before had a bar, joined in the new industry.107

In the story, the inux of tens of thousands of American soldiers speeds the momentum of the city in diverse ways. In established metropolitan areas, the economy booms as it is ooded with hard currency, and changes its shape as it accommodates to the demands of new consumers, both American and Taiwanese. Huang’s narrative describes how the prostitutes acquire a taste for American canned goods, face cream, cigarettes and liquor, and become the conduit through which such articles gain currency and exposure in the wider local market. Although this process is admittedly on a smaller scale to that found in the exclusively R&R towns of South Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines, the text also describes how the prostitutes’ need to ‘dress up’ for work creates a new network of hairdressers, cosmetic retailers and clothes shops. In similar manner, the physical landscape of the city is transformed by the rapid creation of new bars, nightclubs and brothels. Tradition gives way to a tawdry glitz, and the city assumes a more recognizably ‘modern’ personality to match its new appearance: The shop fronts of public teahouses were given a make-over, and decorated with neon English shopsigns which winked like eyes. Teahouses were transformed into bars; and in keeping with this the tea attendants also changed their identities and became bar girls.108

More disturbingly, Young Widows shows how the success of the redlight entrepreneurs carries out an evangelizing function for the urban mode more generally. Indeed, not only do more far-ung places such as 107 108

Ibid., 85. Ibid., 85–6.

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Hualian nd themselves pulled into the swelling orbit of the metropolis, but the ‘city’ which they become is a ‘harlotized’ one—less a grand seat of politico-cultural power than an extended pleasure quarter which only comes alive at night. At the same time, moreover, the repeated use of the term ‘industry’ (hangye, jiubaye) to describe the nascent bar boom in Hualian indicates the sheer speed and scope of change, as well as implying a link between the esh trade and the various government-sponsored industries that were encroaching on the countryside. This notion of an ofcially sanctioned ‘harlotization’ of rural Taiwan is picked up with a vengeance in the nal text explored in this chapter, Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose, I Love You.

Pimping on the grand scale: Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose, I Love You Like Huang Chunming, Wang Zhenhe—who was brought up in ‘remote’ Hualian—is renowned as a chronicler of the so-called ‘little people’ (xiao renwu) trodden underfoot by Taiwan’s high-speed modernization. The sympathy he shows towards those left stranded by the pace of change, together with his use of local color (bense) and Taiwanese dialect, have led to his designation as a canonical xiangtu writer. Yet throughout his literary career, Wang’s sympathy for the browbeaten was always tempered by satire—so much so, in fact, that even in well-loved and much-anthologized ‘nativist’ works such as “Jiazhuang yi niuche” (“An Oxcart for a Dowry”, 1967), he does not balk at depicting the backwardness and casual brutality of Taiwan’s rural communities. Wang’s satirical bent hardened over time; and in a further similarity with Huang Chunming, he increasingly made the city the setting for his farcical portraits of contemporary society. Rose, Rose, I Love You, Wang’s last novel, resembles other works produced during the nal stage of his literary output—such as “Xiao Lin lai Taibei” (“Xiao Lin in Taipei”, 1973) and “Meiren tu” (“A Portrait of the Beautiful People”, 1981)—in its biting critique of the ills Wang witnessed around him. His targets include precipitous change, the dislocation of traditional values, jia yangguizi (imitation foreign devils),109 109 The term jia yangguizi appears as early as Lu Xun’s “Ah Q zhengzhuan” (“The True Story of Ah Q”, 1921). This designation, in its turn, is reminiscent of the derogatory tag ermaozi (secondary foreigner), which was used to describe Chinese Christian converts during the anti-Christian riots at the end of the 19th century. Anke Pieper notes the prevalence of this motif in the work of both Wang Zhenhe and Huang Chunming, and observes that their satire of the tendency “to worship and believe slavishly

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and the damage that this comprador culture was visiting on the island. In many ways Rose, Rose, with its Zola-esque cast of characters, can be seen as the apotheosis of this parodic movement. The inventive and openended nature of the text has attracted a great deal of critical attention, and approaches ranging from post-modernist to theatrical have been applied to it.110 The following reading, however, focuses more on Wang’s agenda of critique, and consequently spotlights certain features of the text at the same time as sidelining others.111 A novel of this depth and ambition can accommodate a variety of approaches—and these need not be mutually exclusive. Rose, Rose describes the farcical activity into which the provincial town of Hualian is thrown when the locals discover that they are to play host to three hundred GIs on leave from Vietnam for a weekend of R&R.112 In double-quick time, the various bigwigs of the town join forces with the local brothel-operators to construct Hualian’s rst real bar, and muster together all the available prostitutes into an ad hoc boot camp. Presiding over these activities is Dong Siwen: ostensibly the English teacher at the local high school, but in actual fact an iconoclast

in foreign things” (chongyang miwai) nds its origins in the covert anti-imperialism of the Taiwanese xiangtu writers of the 1920s and 30s. See Pieper, op. cit., 85. 110 See, respectively, Huang I-min, “A Postmodernist Reading of Rose, Rose, I Love You” in Tamkang Review 17.1 (Autumn, 1986), 27–45; and Yao Yiwei, “Wo du Meigui meigui wo ai ni. (Daixu)” (“A Reading of Rose, Rose, I Love You. [Introduction]”), in Wang Zhenhe, Meigui meigui wo ai ni (Rose, Rose, I Love You) (Taipei, 1984), 1–10. Yao Yiwei compares the novel to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Molière’s L’Ecole des Femmes as a means of drawing out its theatrically comic effects. 111 In particular, my analysis moves away from linguistically-oriented interpretations of the text. Almost a cause célèbre in itself, the language of Rose, Rose, I Love You is so dense and richly-textured that it has tended, with some justication, to gure largely in many critical studies of the novel. The fullest analysis thus far is that by Jeffrey Kinkley, who reads the novel as a feast of kitsch effects, and also provides some fascinating commentary on the linguistic features of the text. Studies by critics such as David D.W. Wang, Leo Ou-Fan Lee and Xiao Jinmian similarly devote attention to the topic. See Kinkley, “Mandarin Kitsch and Taiwanese Kitsch in the Fiction of Wang Chen-Ho, Modern Chinese Literature 6/1–2 (Spring/Fall, 1992) 85–109; Wang, “Radical Laughter in Lao She and his Taiwan Successors”, in Howard Goldblatt (ed.), Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences (Armonk and London, 1990), 44–63; Lee, “Beyond Realism: Thoughts on Modernist Experiments in Contemporary Chinese Writing”, in Goldblatt, Worlds Apart, 64–77; and Xiao, “Huaji duoci de meigui. Xidu Wang Zhenhe xinzuo Meigui meigui wo ai ni” (“A Comic and Thorny Rose. A Close Reading of Wang Zhenhe’s New Work Rose, Rose, I Love You”), in Wang Zhenhe, op. cit., 263–78. 112 For excerpts of an interview with Wang Zhenhe in which he describes the personal memories which inspired Rose, Rose, I Love You, see Qiu Yanming, “Ba huanxiao sanman renjian. Fang xiaoshuojia Wang Zhenhe” (“Spreading Hearty Laughter Through the World. An Interview with the Writer Wang Zhenhe”), in Wang Zhenhe, op. cit., 255.

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and knave whose chronic atulence becomes the outward symbol of far graver improprieties. Teacher Dong is backed up in his plans by a team of helpers, who count among their number not just the local pimps and procuresses, but also several notable pillars of the Hualian community. Structured around four key scenes of smutty and increasingly hysterical comedy, the novel spans the short time-frame between the arrival of the telegram from US military headquarters and the opening ceremony of Dong Siwen’s so-called “Crash Course for Bar Girls” (banü suchengban)—indeed, the powerful sense of forward momentum that the text generates is crucial to its message. By a stroke of quiet genius, the text stops just short of the warship’s arrival, and the GIs themselves do not appear in the narrative.113 In many ways, Rose, Rose is a clear literary successor to Huang Chunming’s earlier novella. The opening passage of Young Widows, already quoted above, paves the way for Wang’s novel, describing the unstoppable spread of the bar trade across Taiwan and even referring explicitly to the foothold it has gained in so remote a place as Hualian. The bulk of Huang’s text, however, deals exclusively with the booming bar trade in Taipei, and leaves the narrative thread of Hualian and its nascent bar culture dangling. It is this loose end that Wang picks up seamlessly in Rose, Rose, and weaves into a tale similar to its prototype. Like Young Widows, Rose, Rose uses the GI entertainment boom in Taiwan as the point of origin for a darkly humorous critique that employs a subversive clown-like gure as its master of ceremonies; and one could indeed argue that this neat dovetailing of place and theme marks a deliberate effort on Wang’s part to claim continuity with the earlier story. More generally, too, Wang’s use of the tripartite paradigm slots his novel neatly into a regional intertext of writings on the American epoch that use sexual metaphor to impugn politics. Wang’s innovation lies in the excising of esh-and-blood GIs; and by telescoping the entire narrative action into the brief period before the US warship docks, the emplotment of the novel allows it to zero in on the domestic Taiwanese response to American power. As a result, and despite its many concessions to comedy, Rose, Rose is more sweeping in its attack on local society than the other 113

Sheng-mei Ma observes astutely of this absence that “Cultural compradors . . . are most pronouncedly abominable in that their servitude to transnational capitalism is practiced as a way of life, practiced despite a total absence of representatives of American or foreign interests. Put another way, compradors serve intuitively at the pleasure of the West, even though no Westerner is there to be pleased”. See Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Albany, 1998), 139.

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three texts examined in this chapter. More specically, Wang arranges the theme of pimping on a grand scale around three inter-related sub-motifs, each of which leads on logically from the next. These are procurement and the pursuit of prot as a subversion of ‘proper’ Confucian reality; the high-speed Americanization of local society; and the transformation of sleepy Hualian into a quasi-basetown. Firstly, and most strikingly, the community that Wang Zhenhe describes in Rose, Rose I Love You is one that has been turned on its head by the lure of the dollar sign, and profane inversions of the proper Confucian order of things abound throughout the novel. Dong Siwen, the corrupt pedagogue, is the prime example of this. Neglecting his duties at the local school, Dong Siwen instead organizes a master-class whose pupils are all prostitutes drawn from the major brothels of the town— the so-called “big four” (sida gongsi)—whom he plans to coach in the arts of the skilful courtesan. The appearance of the bar in which these trainees will work is a further violation of the natural order, as suggested by the ironic gloss on it provided by the narrator: Ever since Pangu separated heaven and earth no-one had ever submitted an application to set up a bar in Hualian.114

Through this propagandist harking back to ancient Chinese mythology—indeed to the rst being in the Chinese creation myth—Wang alludes to the long continuum of traditional Chinese culture, at the same time as intimating that this heritage is now being rudely interrupted by the vulgar economics of the sex industry. The sanctity of Confucian family bonds is also derided, as one of the pimps offers the sexual services of his college-educated son to homosexual GIs with an eye for the main money-making chance that is calculated to offend. This sense of a world turned upside-down by the lure of foreign currency is conrmed by the comic readiness with which ofcialdom and the professional classes collude with Dong Siwen’s pimping schemes. The chief culprits here are Councilor Qian, Lawyer Zhang and Doctor Yun, stereotypical members of the middle-classes, each of whom carries out his own personal subversions of li (Confucian ritual) in the name of the bar project. The rest of the town’s bourgeoisie is also happy to turn propriety on its head; and when the American warship arrives, Teacher Dong announces that

114

Ibid., 55–6.

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Everyone, from the mayor to the county magistrate, from the citizens’ representatives to the county legislative members, together with a large group of students and another of local people, will be at the harbor to welcome them.115

This droll picture of local dignitaries lining up at the seafront to meet and greet the vacationing GIs as if they were a high-level diplomatic delegation shows the upending of decorum in clear, visual terms. Just as acerbic is the deliberate enumeration of the lesser folk—“citizens’ representatives”, “students”, “local people”—whose presence gives the welcoming party a more homely feel. Indeed, the passage as a whole has an indisputably staged, even hammy quality to it, with its neat cross-section of Hualian life assembled on the quayside for the reader’s inspection as much as for the GIs. Yet ultimately, and in common with the rest of the novel, the sheer staginess of the farce is Wang Zhenhe’s whole point: indeed, he himself has admitted that Rose, Rose was never intended as an accurate portrait of Hualian at the time of the Vietnam War.116 Instead, the text occurs in a projected realm of realized fears and nightmares, and its overblown comedy is the valve through which panic is released. This farcical process whereby Hualian’s respectable classes willingly debase themselves in the scramble for GI dollars is, moreover, mirrored by a converse elevation in status of the town’s crooks, pimps, and prostitutes. Thanks to the imminent GI visit, the owners of the so-called “big four” suddenly become valued citizens, wooed by their social betters on account of the expertise they have accumulated in the management of brothels. The glorication of the prostitutes and their ‘sentimental education’ is even more conspicuous. Raised almost to the status of a holy creed, the “Crash Course for Bar Girls” involves tuition in a promiscuous range of curricula, which together function as a kind of microcosm of the subaltern sexual economy—in which GI-pleasing is avored with a dash of local color: English, dance, singing, information on international etiquette, beauty and make-up, an introduction to American culture, an outline of Chinese civilization, plus physiological hygiene, legal matters, the art of mixing drinks, and Christian prayers . . .117 115

Ibid., 25. Wang describes his version of events as an “utter fabrication” (quan shi xugou), which stems from the fact that he did not have the “good fortune” to take part in the construction of the bar industry himself ! See Qiu, op. cit., 256. 117 Ibid., 168. 116

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Instantly striking here is the fearless iconoclasm of Dong Siwen’s ideas, which break all the rules of class and conscience in order to turn Hualian’s most downtrodden inhabitants into its star turn. Yet far more troubling, perhaps, is the way in which the utopian aims of his project jar unpleasantly with the crass realities of female sexual labor—indeed, the ‘rehabilitation’ of Hualian’s sex workers is an entirely cosmetic affair here, ruled by the spirit of capitalism and indifferent to the women as anything other than a lumpen economic asset. These subversions of the proper order are accompanied by the efforts which the novel’s characters make to wipe out any traces of indigenous identity that may linger about their persons or behavior. ‘Taiwaneseness’ and the markers of locality are deemed parochial by the collaborating masses in Wang’s text, who vie with one another in learning, and trading, the complex idioms of international consumerism. This sense of cultural ‘remaking’ is not just a natural consequence of the subversions of tradition referred to earlier, but functions more signicantly as a key prerequisite for Hualian’s transformation into an outpost of US power and inuence—if only in brothel mode. As a result, all the characters in the novel, regardless of their differing roles and social status, are compulsive and indiscriminate consumers of the brand. A consumer code made up of Brazilian coffee, Japanese toothbrushes, Napoleon brandy, Right Guard deodorants, Camels, Kents, American menthols, French cigarette lighters, the best sashimi, and Christian Dior silk ties constitutes one of the many languages that characters in the novel use to converse with one another—a code which sometimes spills over into verbal communication. The medley of linguistic voices which Wang assembles in Rose, Rose is, as noted earlier, a topic which has attracted much critical attention. The lingua franca of the novel is a cross-fertilized patois of Mandarin, English, Taiwanese, Japanese, and consumer gibberish, which characters use, or more likely misuse, to show off to one another or establish their place in the pecking order, with concern for mutual intelligibility a very low priority. And just like smoking a foreign cigarette or sporting a designer cravat, in the world of Rose, Rose larding one’s speech with soundbites borrowed from half-mastered foreign tongues is a means of proving one’s international credentials and shrugging off the markers of provinciality. The corresponding loss of national identity, meanwhile, causes not a whisper of regret. Most ironic of all, of course, is the fact that this trashing of local culture is largely self-inicted, occurring as it does before a single US warship has docked in Hualian harbor.

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When viewed together, these subversions cannot fail to imply the loss of Hualian’s former identity, and the beginnings of its degradation into a de facto basetown. Indeed, although the limited nature of Taiwan’s role as host nation for US military personnel ensured that many of the socio-economic changes linked to military prostitution remained at the edgling stage, there can be little doubt that Rose, Rose, I Love You seeks to pregure a Hualian in which the basetown has taken over. The primary catalyst for this projected metamorphosis is, of course, the bar. According to its publicists, this bar/brothel will shine as a beacon of Chinese culture: This beautiful bar, replete with the avor of Chinese tradition and culture, will be a trailblazer in our cultural history. No exaggeration, it will be an unprecedented masterpiece . . . You students are truly fortunate to be able to serve the American serviceman and earn foreign currency for our nation in a place of such unprecedented perfection!118

The irony here is heavy, particularly when one reects that real-life R&R resorts and base-towns elsewhere in Asia—in particular Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines—generally consist of a seedy main thoroughfare dotted with American fast-food outlets, souvenir stalls selling American branded goods, and subterranean bars blasting out American music. Wang Zhenhe drives home the connection between his textual Hualian and a bona de base-town via the unholy alliance struck between town’s professional classes and its pimps, procuresses and prostitutes. This move constitutes the rst step in the kind of socio-economic transformation already far advanced in the base-towns of America’s other client states. In these outposts, the greater part of economic activity has been subsumed into the entertainment business, with the result that many citizens are eventually reduced to the level of camp followers parasitically dependent on American military personnel for their survival. And if troops are repatriated or deployed elsewhere, the service economy that caters to them has no choice but to up sticks too, leaving behind ghost towns that blight the face of the countryside and offer no prospect of recovery. The rise to power and prominence of Hualian’s underclass that Wang Zhenhe depicts in Rose, Rose also mirrors other developments well documented elsewhere. As studies of prostitution

118

Ibid., 218–9.

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and the US military in Asia have demonstrated, the multi-million dollar entertainment industry spawns an economy based on sexual labor, drugs and racketeering, and supervised by criminals and gangsters— who over time transform quiet law-abiding settlements into increasingly lawless shanty towns. The mushrooming urbanization and rural pillage that often accompany military installations are also hinted at, as Wang makes an explicit connection between the development of a US-sponsored sex industry in Hualian, and the small seaside town’s quick acquisition of city landmarks and behaviors. The end-point of this process is presaged by the narrative voice, which observes in almost elegiac terms that . . . the rows of deep green eucalyptus trees on Huagang Mountain seemed to be standing right before one’s very eyes. But after only a few short years, buildings over four stories high had sprung up like a dense forest all over Hualian city . . . so that if you wanted to gaze out . . . at the sea beyond the breakwater, or at the eucalyptus trees on Huagang Mountain, it would no longer be possible.119

Wang’s narratorial device of setting the novel twenty years in the past when Hualian was poised at the cusp of change allows plenty of scope for retrospective nostalgia of this kind. And by implying that it is the economics of the esh trade that cause sections of the hinterland to ‘urbanize’, or at least to exhibit decidedly and destructively urban characteristics, Wang is once again echoing the experience of other US client states. In her study of U.S. military prostitution in Korea, Katherine Moon observes that, The majority of the strategic areas (close to the border with North Korea) developed into R&R boomtowns beginning in the mid-1950s. Most of these areas had been sparsely populated agricultural villages. For example, Tongdu’chon sprouted from agricultural elds into one of the most notorious camptowns, having housed four different U.S. infantry divisions since the end of the Korean War.120

Of course, any recent visitor to Hualian can testify that the town never became Taiwan’s Koza or Tongdu’chon, whilst the existence of the “big four” makes the reverse point that brothels were far from a novelty in 1970s Hualian. Yet for Wang Zhenhe, it is the appearance of a Westernstyle bar staffed by English-speaking bar girls and catering to American 119 120

Ibid., 67. Moon, op. cit., 28.

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customers that is the harbinger of urban dystopia for the town; and his novel, for all the studied, self-aware exaggeration of its comedy, uses the politico-sexual triangle to locate the Pax Americana at the heart of Taiwan’s ‘failed’ modernity.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated some of the textual strategies that Japanese and Taiwanese writers use to query the exercise of US military, economic, and cultural power in postwar East Asia. Their skepticism is unconcealed, and all of the texts explored here are charged with a keen critical energy. As an intertext of writings, their version of the relationship between US hegemony and unfolding local modernities jars with that promoted by the state and espoused by the moral majority, and these subversive re-writings articulate themselves through a ctional praxis that uses Verfremdungseffekt to chafe against a basic realist grain. All four narratives have their moorings in realism, yet venture forth into anti-realist modes both to mirror the distortions of the modernity they represent, and to push readers into a more quizzical cognitive relationship with notions of orthodoxy and the ‘normal’. It is no accident that both Ôe Kenzaburô and Wang Zhenhe have issued the specic disclaimers cited earlier about the ‘exaggerated’ truth claims of their versions of the Pax Americana. Most of the texts analyzed in this book take broad license with the truth, in fact, and the question of ‘accuracy’ constitutes something of a sub-topic in itself—particularly since documented historical events are referenced so liberally by writers in both literary cultures. Yet ultimately, it is the aesthetics of alterity that are paramount here, and which act as the medium through which moral messages are encoded. Extended sexual metaphor is, of course, the premier instrument for creating a sense of imaginative otherness in this particular corpus of texts. Throughout these writings, the politics of bilateral relations are made one with the sexual body, and images of impotence and delement abound as a subaltern reality is internalized in degraded corporeal form. Ôe’s tales of occupation present perhaps the high water mark of this metaphoric movement: through articially repeated plotlines, leitmotifs, and gurative language, the politico-sexual connection is deliberately labored in these otherwise realist narratives, and when they are read as a consecutive set, the sense of art not so much imitating

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life as aggressively reinterpreting it becomes unmissable. In “American Hijiki”, on the other hand, a sense of otherness is rendered not just via metaphor, but through Toshio’s split consciousness and simultaneous realities. Nosaka’s schizophrenic protagonist oscillates between past and present, and inhabits a city (Tokyo? Osaka?) which shifts its spatial and dialectal identity to match his mental state. It is this fusion of ashback and multilingualism—both common enough features of realist narrative—that transforms Nosaka’s text from a brisk but straightforward political satire into a more aesthetically complex text that accesses pathos to deepen its oppositional charge. In Huang Chunming’s Young Widows, the reality effect is both maintained and subverted rather differently. The onward march of linearity is kept up in this narrative, but Huang’s juxtaposition of multiple, segmented realities, all spliced neatly together in the manner of a splitscreen format, enables him nonetheless to write against the monologism of the ofcial story of Taiwan’s alliance with the US. The separate narrative ‘screens’ of Ma Shanxing, the GI recruits, the prostitutes at the bar, and the Vietnam war itself compete both for textual space and for the narrator’s attention. And although each discrete reality is recounted in properly mimetic style, the text creates a fundamentally anti-realist, Rashomon-style tension between these different ‘authenticities’ that forces the reader into engagement and adjudication. Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, Rose, Rose, I Love You exhibits a literary personality so split as almost to require a denition of its own. On the one hand, the narrative races forward, its directional momentum driven by the deadline of the GI arrival; yet again and again, time is suspended as self-standing set pieces of a highly theatrical kind are allowed to unfold in slow motion. In a different mode, the text blends the delivery of detail, the sociological insight, and the precision documenting of life that are the trademarks of realism with a delight in the carnivalesque that seems to mock this seriousness of purpose. And while the narrator is sometimes the omniscient moral gure familiar to us from realist narrative—who gently guides the reader towards the correct interpretation of his tale—Wang’s storyteller is also a jester-cum-Greek chorus-cumChinese vernacular raconteur who openly reveals his presence through asides, laments, and other self-reexive devices. Inevitably, emphases differ: from Japan to Taiwan, and from text to text, the representation of life within America’s East Asian protectorates undergoes subtle shifts and modulations. We can speculate, for example,

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that the brasher note of humor in the texts from Taiwan is permissible because the island was not dogged by the heavy legacy of defeat and US occupation that makes even a satire like “American Hijiki” more tragic than comic. Similarly, it is likely that the GIs have a more personal face in the Japanese narratives because American power had a far greater presence on the ground than in postwar Taiwan. Yet more signicant is the fact that these four otherwise divergent authors—along with the various others listed earlier in the chapter—all gravitate towards identical representational strategies when writing the Pax Americana. The parallels grow still more meaningful when we reect on the considerable body of Korean literature which visits the selfsame theme in analogous ways, from Nam Jeong-hyon’s short story “Bedpan” (“Bunji”, 1965), to Kim Myong-in’s poetry collection “Tongdu’chon” (“Tongdu’chon”, 1979), to Choe Ik-seok’s novel, The Spy From a Strange Country (Isang-han nara-eseo on suipai, 2003). Across all these texts, the sex industry operates as a metonym for unequal state-to-state relations, the dilemmas of complicity, and the cultural pain of Americanization. Up to a point, there is certain inevitability to the protean role played by sexual labor in representations of American Cold War hegemony: the realities of military prostitution combine with the irresistible symbolism of the motherland for sale to create a paradigm that is both true to life and suitably alarmist. Yet perhaps the ultimate signier is more condensed and specic still, and lies in the nightmare of the basetown. Places such as Tongdu’chon, Itaewon, Olangapo, Subic Bay, Sasebo, and Koza resonate in the East Asian cultural imaginary, and in many ways it is territorial outposts such as these which constitute the imagistic heartland of the textual productions explored here. Nodes of US power, both topographically and guratively, these sites both radiate their inuence outwards in a centrifugal movement, and act as the centripetal point for local fear and anxiety. The basetown with its often sordid economy (the harlotized metropolis, once more) is, in other words, both the endgame and the point of origin for all these texts—the source of their anxiety and the place to which they fear they are heading. Every bar or brothel opened is the building block for some new basetown, and every sexual transaction carried out within the three-way nexus represents the contagion of this basetown logic. Indeed, this gap between the basetown as present fact and future nightmare creates another space in which the tension between realism and anti-realism, social critique and dystopian fantasy can be played out. And although a number of

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nation-based studies have explored US hegemony, military prostitution, the basetown, and/or the literary paradigms such phenomena inspire (Moon, Molasky, Wilson, Igarashi et al.), it is only through a comparative approach that we can glimpse the sheer sweep and scale, not just of American power, but of the impassioned responses it has generated.

CHAPTER THREE

DISCORD AT HOME: THE RUPTURED FAMILY IN POSTWAR FICTION

Transformations in the family: basic themes This chapter explores ction on the family, and assesses the responses of writers to the dislocation of traditional kinship patterns in Japan and Taiwan that occurred during the miracle years of economic growth. This break with the past assumes numerous forms. The weakening of extended kin networks and the corresponding growth of nuclear families, a waning of family authority, increasing differentiation of social networks away from the core familial matrix, late marriage, a rising incidence of divorce, increased numbers of single-parent families, and a declining birth-rate are among the shifts that transformed notions of home and household in postwar Japan and Taiwan—as, of course, elsewhere. In both societies, moreover, these transformations took place to the accompaniment of ofcial and semi-ofcial diktats which claimed the family as the matrix of morality, and pronounced on the duty of citizens to behave in a commensurately ‘familial’ manner. In other words, economism (the primacy of the economic mode) and familialism (dened here as the investment in conservative notions of family) were advanced as simultaneous propositions for good governance, and this linkage provoked a sustained backlash. The texts analyzed here belong squarely within this backlash, and they write against these twinned propositions, both separately and in their mutual interaction. Once again, the resistance to local ideologies takes counter-cultural form; and two linked pivots dene the structure of literary protest across a range of narratives. Most conspicuous, of course, is the relationship between economism and the esh-and-blood family (as opposed to its ideological incarnation ‘familialism’), and the repeated message that the nation’s miracle has ravaged its families. In countless texts, the processes of modernization, industrialization, and above all urbanization that were stage-managed by the state and enacted at the micro-level by national subjects are shown as profoundly inimical to family life. The theme is, indeed, an almost perennial xture, replayed repetitively by

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writers and lmmakers throughout the period, and also referenced in less sustained fashion as a ready shorthand for social malaise. In fact, damaged and dysfunctional families take to the stage against such a variety of backdrops in postwar cultural production that it seems fair to suggest that the theme is a core topos for aesthetic disaffection in both societies. Either way, the texts explored here constitute only a small, if illuminating, cross-section of this wide literary intertext. The second thematic pivot is couched more subtly within this body of narratives and is implicated ironically with the rst. The dysfunctional family in these texts works as the inverse image of the domestic unit prescribed in ofcial and semi-ofcial discourses on marriage, parenthood, and inter-generational roles during the period in question. In both societies, the state promoted a familialism based on stability, good lial conduct, monogamy, procreation, self-sacrice and gendered behavior—ideologies which, in their turn, were consistently reinforced in locales as diverse as schools, the business world, and the mass media. Underlying the professed virtue and benevolence of this ‘ideologuing’, of course, was the notion of a national edice—a family state—built on solidly stacked domestic blocks which replicated the priorities of the establishment in innite microcosm. Tradition, if not entirely re-invented, was certainly deployed to expedient contemporary ends as elites worked to create a docile and effective workforce which would carry out the labor of modernization. And at the same time, this calculated recourse to ‘tradition’ and ‘ethics’ allowed the state to present itself as the defender of kith and kin and cling tight to its moral mandate—whilst passing responsibility for the failing family on to the nation’s subjects, whose lack of lial piety, marital forbearance and so on could be suggested as the reason why the unity of yore had gone. In other words, familialism and economism, tradition and modernity were made to intersect in carefully pragmatic ways within the dominant discourse on progress. The narratives examined here explore family life as it struggles for space within this tight nexus of economic and ideological pressures. Indeed, although their critique of the state and its agencies is sometimes subtly encrypted, these texts write against the intersection of economism and famialism in unmistakably subversive ways. Across these works, the family is less ourishing than dead or dying. Stock themes of divorce, inter-generational strife, and fragmented family networks maintain, unsurprisingly, a constant presence; but more symbolically signicant are the interlinked motifs of failed liality, banishment and disowning, extreme domestic violence, non-procreativity, orphanhood, abandon-

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ment, abortion, infanticide, incest, child abuse, transsexuality, and the strident disavowal of conventional gender roles that recur across these narratives. These themes cluster together to expose the hypocrisy of suturing progress in the public macrocosm together with neo-traditional values in the domestic microcosm. The result is a corpus of texts in which economism is equated with the destruction of home and hearth, and familialism is mocked by a range of ‘deviant’ behaviors. In this group of writings, once again, the disavowal of state-stewarded modernity is made textually implicit through the recurrent tropes of the city and sexuality, which structure these narratives in a cyclical pattern of cause and effect. The city plays its well-rehearsed role of portmanteau metaphor for modernization here, and its status as an index for industrialization, urbanization, rural exodus, and precipitous social change allows writers to identify it unambiguously as the destroyer of family. As part of the same process, the image of the metropolis becomes the natural ashpoint for literary antagonism towards the state apparatus, and lurid tableaux of urban blight recur across these writings. Sexuality, meanwhile, takes its place within this cyclical pattern as the medium through which emotionally disenfranchised urbanites seek to repair the bonds of family that the city has devastated. The search for surrogate fathers, mothers, siblings, or children is unrelenting across this body of texts, and whilst these quests are erotic in form, in substance they are usually tortured and devoid of desire. Just as pertinently, the unsettled urban world militates against lasting attachments, and these afliative bonds ultimately prove tenuous—leaving their actors still more bereft than before. In this way, the twin tropes work together to disclose the wasting away of intimacy that, in the view of many writers at least, is the hidden corollary of miracle growth. The analysis that follows explores these linked themes through reference to four key texts: Wang Wenxing’s “Muqin” (“Mother”, 1960), Bai Xianyong’s Niezi (Cursed Sons, 1983), Murakami Ryû’s Koinokka beibîzu (Coin Locker Babies, 1980), and Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchin (Kitchen, 1988).

Kinship change: the socio-cultural background to literary opposition A literary study such as this cannot, of course, offer much more than a cursory overview of the family and its transformations in Japan and Taiwan during the later postwar period. Consensus on the topic has proved predictably elusive among scholars of both societies, and the effort to adumbrate, let alone synthesize, these various positions is far

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beyond the remit of this chapter. Nor does the transforming family obey some transnational East Asian norm—even when we take into account the tendency of many commentators to read natural local variations as signs of inalienable cultural difference. Both the indigenous kinship patterns upon which modernization worked, and the articulations of this modernization itself, differ from society to society; and it is not the role of comparativism to elide these differences. Nevertheless, Japanese and Taiwanese ction on the family is rooted in the transformations of a postwar history that, in many ways, runs along parallel lines. As a result, some degree of cross-cultural contextualization is necessary here, not to hold the text up to the mirror of the real so much as to assess why changes to family life should have elicited so intense a response among writers from both literary cultures. 1. Taiwan The traditional family in Taiwan is, of course, the crucial context against which the transformations of the postwar era—and literary responses to them—should be assessed. The family system ( jia) that held sway in Taiwan until the advent of modernity was an offshoot of kinship structures on the Chinese mainland, although a number of signicant local variations existed.1 The jia, in common with its mainland counterpart, was patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchal, and generally consisted of a group of extended kin who shared rights in a common property. Ritual, economic and subsistence activities were typically conducted within the jia, which operated on a system of pooled labor. Its behavioral ethics were derived directly from Confucian doctrine, and centered on the virtues of lial piety (xiao), loyalty (zhong), and benevolence (ren). Although members owed their nal obedience to the family head ( jiazhang), the jia was organized according to strict generational, age and gender hierarchies; individual desires were typically subordinated to the common weal. Familial continuity was prized, and great care was taken 1 Many of these variations, which include differences in marriage practices and in the lineage composition of settlements, stem from Taiwan’s historical status as a settler society. Yet as Hill Gates and Emily Martin Ahern have noted, it is only in recent decades that this local particularity has become a focus for scholarly analysis in its own right. As they put it, “Anthropologists have . . . gone to Taiwan to study what they could no longer study in other provinces. It was Taiwan’s representativeness, not its special qualities, that rst attracted their interest”. See Gates and Ahern, “Introduction”, in Hill Gates and Emily Martin Ahern (eds.), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society (Stanford, 1981), 8.

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to maintain the ‘family rope’—a pattern that found religious expression in the cult of the ancestors. This socio-economic nexus formed the basic family system that prevailed on Taiwan at the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Japanese occupation. Perhaps surprisingly, given the broad sweep of changes that the colonialists brought to the island, fty years of external domination affected this system only cosmetically. As commentators have noted, this was because Taiwanese family organization presented no great challenge to the execution of Japanese goals, and in some respects actually assisted the colonial endeavor.2 More important than questions of exogenous inuence, however, was the fact that the Japanese occupation insulated Taiwan from many of the ideological currents that were circulating on the Chinese mainland during the early decades of the twentieth century. Cultural iconoclasm, which peaked during the May Fourth period, identied the family system as the root cause of China’s malady, and made it the object of unremitting attack. Kin practices from arranged marriage to the law of the father were interrogated, and young iconoclasts in China’s cities began to organize their personal relationships along self-consciously modern lines.3 Although some of these ideas traveled across the Straits, the cushioning effect of foreign occupation allowed traditional family ideology to preserve its basic sanctity. Indeed, as Arland Thornton and Hui-sheng Lin have observed, the experience of Japanese colonization meant that Taiwan entered the . . . postwar era with most of the older values of the Chinese family system unaltered. Its insulation from the mainland and the Japanese policy of noninterference in local organization and the KMT retention of earlier values make the changes since World War II a laboratory for the effects of economic change, industrialization, [and] urbanization.4

The onslaught of modernity in the postwar period was quick and dramatic, as industrialization, urbanization, migration to the cities, increased education, the amplied powers of the state, soaring personal incomes, 2 Dung Sheng-chen, however, makes the rather different point that family solidarity persisted during the colonial era because limited access to economic and civil power forced Taiwanese to fall back on local family networks as their principal resource. See Dung, “Taiwan’s Social Changes in the Patterns of Social Solidarity in the 20th Century”, in Edmonds and Goldstein, op. cit., 69–70. 3 See Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 257–9. 4 Arland Thornton and Hui-sheng Lin, Social Change and the Family in Taiwan (Chicago, 1994), 48.

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consumerism, the spread of mass media, and the forces of internationalization worked to dislodge the family from its place of absolute primacy in the Taiwanese ‘life-picture’. At the same time as the sanctity of family lost ground, the internal bonds that formerly gave the traditional jia system its tight cohesion also began to loosen. This shift along the sliding scale towards non-familial modes of life has taken various forms. To cite some key examples, the island has the highest divorce rate in East Asia; and even in cases where formal divorce is avoided, marital discord has become endemic, prompting terms such as ‘divorce within the household’ ( jiatingli de lihun) and ‘divorce Chinese-style’ (zhongguoshi lihun). Filial piety is also under threat, as the pressures of a graying population—increased life expectancy, growing numbers of senior citizens, and the care requirements of the old—have led to neglect of elders and intergenerational strife. These factors, in their turn, are a major cause of the abnormally high incidence of suicide that aficts senior citizens in Taiwan.5 Further down the generational spectrum are the intrafamilial tensions caused by Taiwan’s frantically competitive educational system. A public culture which bends the knee to educational qualications has led parents to enforce painfully strict regimes of study on their children; and just as cram schools (buxiban) have become ubiquitous, so has the pressure on families to ‘perform’ escalated. At the furthest extreme, cases of child abuse have shown a noticeable rise in recent years.6 These instances of malfunction in the family system are often more suggestive than conclusive, of course, and the bulk of sociological evidence indicates that the Taiwanese family is still a long way from crisis point.7 Indeed, many claim that keystone values have survived the transformations, whilst others go further and argue that greater malleability in the organization of kinship ties has allowed for positive ‘innovations’ within the family structure.8 Taiwanese ction tends, however, to be adamant in the cause-and-effect relation it posits between modernization 5 See Chang Chiang-fung, “A Silent Protest—Suicide in Taiwan”, Sinorama 22/3 (March, 1997), 112–21. 6 See Chang Chiang-fung, “Will It Ever End? Taiwan Moves to Curb Child Abuse”, Sinorama, 22/7 ( July, 1999), 118–24. 7 A propos the lial bond, for example, Robert M. Marsh notes that although ideal relations “are all signicantly less normative—less seen as binding obligations—in 1991 than in 1963”, actual behavior demonstrates a higher degree of continuity. As he puts it, “ if the amount and kind of relationship one has with parents in Taiwan has become somewhat more discretionary, this does not mean actual contact with parents and doing things for them necessarily decline”. See Marsh, The Great Transformation. Social Change in Taipei, Taiwan Since the 1960s (Armonk, 1996), 127–8. 8 See Thornton and Lin, op. cit., 409.

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and family dysfunction. Sacriced to Taiwan’s economic miracle, the domestic sphere is described in the vocabulary of decay, and forms a dissenting contrast to the buoyant growth of the public realm outside. As suggested earlier, these representations of the family in extremis constitute a disavowal of the dominant discourse on two distinct counts. In the rst place, the processes of modernization which they oppose are, to a degree unusual among developmental models, the fruits of state intervention. Taiwan’s shift to the progressive economic mode was orchestrated in brisk fashion by the KMT,9 from the early implementation of import-substitution strategies to the later development of a competitive export-oriented economy. And as a logical result, the dying family in Taiwanese ction becomes, if not an ad hominem critique, then certainly a highly targeted one. The party-state also showed its hand forcefully in the discourse of familialism in postwar Taiwan. This intervention assumed a number of forms, most of which fanned outwards from the state’s self-appointed role as custodian of traditional Chinese values, and its associated desire to impart a Confucian gloss to Taiwan’s modernization (in pointed contrast, of course, to the desecration of those same values that was being carried out on the Maoist mainland). Soon after evacuating China, the KMT began fostering the élite gentry culture that had prevailed during the pre-war period. Branding it Chinese national culture, the new party-state worked to ensure its dissemination across Taiwan.10 In practice, this meant that an orthodoxy of conservatism held sway in education and the socialization of children in schools, liality was inscribed as the dominant social code, and the stable family unit was recast as the primary building-block of prosperous modern society.11 This revamped 9 As Ambrose Y.C. King puts it, “in Taiwan’s miraculous development, the partystate has, from the very beginning, played the role of guidance and control. It has not only enjoyed a highly autonomous status but has also used its power to transform the society”. See King, “State Confucianism and its Transformation: the Restructuring of the State-Society Relation in Taiwan”, in Tu Wei-ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, 235. 10 As Stevan Harrell and Huang Chun-chieh put it, this kind of moral traditionalism is “a descendant of the Kuomintang’s New Life Movement of the 1930s . . . in which a Confucian tradition was invented—now that the living Confucian order of imperial times was safely in the past—as a moralistic defense against the undesirable cultural byproducts of material modernization”. See Harrell and Huang, “Introduction: Change and Contention in Taiwan’s Cultural Scene”, in Harrell and Huang, op. cit., 5. 11 For a discussion of liality within the Taiwanese social system, see David K. Jordan, “Filial Piety in Taiwanese Popular Thought”, in Walter H. Slote and George A. Devos (eds.), Confucianism and the Family (Albany, 1998), 267–83.

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traditionalism sat uneasily alongside the pressures of a rapidly modernizing polity, however, and the inherent contradictions of reviving tradition at a time of ux became apparent as Taiwan’s miracle took shape. This point is well illustrated by the changing gender ideologies propagated by the KMT during the martial law period. As Catherine S. Farris has observed, in the initial stages of its rule the KMT prescribed the old-style role of ‘good wife and virtuous mother’ (xian qi liang mu) for women in order to foster stability at a time of social upheaval.12 As economic growth pushed its way up the political agenda, however, young women were exhorted to enter the workforce and aid national construction through the provision of cheap manual labor. Yet as high-speed growth began to create dislocations of its own, housewifery was reinstated as woman’s raison d’être, and the earlier ideologies came tactically to the fore once again. This case study is perhaps unusually clear-cut; but there can be little doubt that paradoxes within state policy wrenched the Taiwanese family in conicting directions during the miracle years. Unsurprisingly, writers found themselves grappling with these tensions, and as Ai-Li S. Chin puts it, many expressed . . . the sentiments of a generation who in real life are faced with the task of reconciling the ofcially endorsed return to tradition in a modernizing society.13

Chin bases her observation here on a literary sample drawn from the early 1960s, when the strains between traditionalist ideology and modernizing praxis were only just beginning to intrude on literary consciousness. During the thirty-year period examined in this book, these strains intensied, and continued to make their way into a wide range of literary writings. 2. Japan Like the jia, the traditional Japanese kinship system (ie) was patriarchal and, in many cases, patrilocal. It provided living quarters for its members, but was also an economic entity: it owned goods and assets, and its communal subsistence activities centered on a means of production.

12 See Catherine S. Farris, “The Social Discourse on Women’s Roles in Taiwan: A Textual Analysis”, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), The Other Taiwan, 305–29. 13 Ai-Li S. Chin, “Family Relations in Modern Chinese Fiction”, in Maurice Freedman (ed.), Marriage and Kinship in Chinese Society, (Stanford, 1970), 101.

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Like the jia again, the ie was seen as the physical manifestation of a continuous bloodline that stretched backwards to the family forebears and forwards into the realm of the unborn—and considerable investment of psychological and economic resources was made to ensure its preservation. Unlike its Chinese counterpart, however, in which equal inheritance among sons was the favored practice, a system of unigeniture prevailed in Japan. Thus whereas joint families encompassing vertical, horizontal and collateral kin constituted the kinship ideal in China, the Japanese version was patterned on the stem family, a vertical structure composed of inheriting sons in successive generations together with their immediate procreative kin.14 Other sons would often be related to the main line (honke) in a branch or client relationship (bunke). Together, these lines formed the ‘lineage’ (dôzoku), a grouping which has often been compared, somewhat misleadingly, with the Chinese clan. Yet as anthropologists have noted, the Japanese dôzoku was predicated on power relations and material exigencies that went some way beyond those implied by the Chinese idea of clan;15 and it is perhaps this exible and pragmatic approach to notions of kinship—as opposed to the more literal, even quixotic attitudes adopted by the Chinese—that stands as the most striking difference between the two systems. Fundamentally, however, the traditional family in both societies was bound together by the same intangible code: Confucian doctrine on family mores, and, in particular, the cardinal ethic of lial piety.16 Indeed, although Confucian ideology on the family only began to be propounded with real energy during the Tokugawa period, before which time indigenous ‘habits of the heart’ predominated, the legacy of cultural proximity has endured. Key here is the fact that neither Japan nor Taiwan has witnessed a vigorous anti-Confucian, anti-lial piety movement—such 14 As John Pelzer has noted, however, the Chinese kinship ideal of the joint family was statistically rare, and stem families were in reality far more common; thus this difference was perhaps more theoretical than actual. See John Pelzer, “Japanese Kinship: A Comparison”, in Freedman, op. cit., 227–48. 15 See, for example, Pelzer, op. cit., 237. 16 Mizoguchi Yûzô, for one, stresses the particular relevance of this aspect of the Confucian legacy within the broader East Asian context. In his study of Confucianism in Asia, he identies the six main categories of Confucian thought as ritual, philosophy, political economy, the notion of responsibility felt by the ruling middle class, communal ethics, and individual ethics. While Mizoguchi readily concedes that great differences vis-à-vis these categories exist across the states that have absorbed Confucian doctrine, he notes that it is in the area of individual ethics (i.e. the Wulun wuchang) that this doctrine has proved most tenacious and inuential, particularly in Japan. See Mizoguchi Yûzô, Jukyô to Ajia shakai (Confucianism and Asian society) (Tokyo, 1988), 5.

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as that which led to the wholesale disavowal of the system in mainland China during the high Communist era. Instead, Confucianism has been allowed to retain its place within the pantheon of beliefs, even though the demands of modernity have caused its importance to suffer a natural diminishment. In this context, some commentators query the relevance of Confucianism to the family in later postwar Japan, claiming that revisions to the civil code after WWII, together with precipitous social change, have all but wiped out its residual inuence.17 Yet despite the fact that the Japanese family has long been shorn of the explicit label ‘Confucian’,18 distinct traces of the norms and forms of Confucian thought—and lial piety in particular—have lingered throughout the upheavals of the postwar period. Indeed, it seems reasonable to concur with Robert Smith’s assessment that it whilst it is “impossible to advance a plausible argument that the Japanese family today is Confucian in the strict sense”, it is equally impossible to argue that the Japanese family has been “completely purged of the effects of attempts by the authorities to structure it in terms of selected Confucian principles”.19 As with Taiwan, moreover, industrialization, urbanization, and continuing rural-to-urban migration have worked cumulatively to disrupt pre-modern kinship patterns during the time-frame 1960–90. Together with rising afuence, the emergence of the consumerist creed, mass communications, and Japan’s incorporation into the global realm of money and ideas, these changes have impacted in inevitable ways on family life. The shift towards nuclearization of households has continued, creating a preponderance of neolocal units based on the conjugal bond (often referred to as kazoku) over the multi-generational lineality formerly enshrined in the ie. Both marriage rates and fertility have declined—to the chagrin of the state—and the incidence of divorce has risen, particularly among couples with grown children.20 ‘Divorce within 17 Constitutional change after 1945 had a particular impact on the status of women, whose rights had been severely curtailed under the quasi-Confucian Meiji civil code. Equality under law has not, however, translated into equality of opportunity, and it is apparent that vestiges of the Confucian bias against women—and of ie-style patriarchy—have endured well into the postwar period. 18 Takie Sugiyama Lebra argues, for example, that the Confucian legacy underlies notions of the family life-course in contemporary Japan, and, moreover, that it continues to shape ideologies of maternal altruism and self-abnegation. See Lebra, “Confucian Gender Role and Personal Fulllment for Japanese Women”, in Slote and DeVos (eds.), Confucianism and the Family, 227. 19 Smith, op. cit., 157. 20 See Sumiko Iwao, The Japanese Woman. Traditional Image and Changing Reality (New York, 1993), 113–5. In many cases, such divorces are related to the so-called sôdai gomi

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the family’ (kateinai rikon)—similar to that prevalent in Taiwan—is also common.21 One possible cause of this is the postwar move away from formal arranged marriage to more relaxed forms of marriage brokering (miai) and unmediated love matches (ren’ai kekkon).22 The well-attested phenomenon of the absentee father and its role in the rise of Japan Inc. is a further factor, as overtime and mandatory ofce socializing (tsukiai) among Japan’s worker tribes have kept the sararîman away from home.23 His partner in stereotype is the ‘education mother’ (kyôiku mama), neglected by her spouse and denied a satisfying career, whose overweening desire to enjoy vicarious success through her offspring warps her proper ‘maternal qualities’ (bosei).24 Obsessional child-rearing is intensied by the pressures of a highly competitive examination system ( juken sensô), which compels parents (usually mothers) to arrange extra-mural scholastic regimes centered on the cram school ( juku and yobiko) that are often even more rigorous than their Taiwanese counterparts. This hothouse environment, in its turn, has been linked to the rise in violence perpetrated by children against their mothers. Yoshio Sugimoto, for one, traces this process back to its institutional source, arguing that “children’s domestic violence indirectly represents injuries that Japan’s (giant rubbish) phenomenon, in which older salarymen who have dedicated themselves to work at the expense of home and family are treated as unwanted domestic clutter by their wives after retirement. 21 As Kyoko Yoshizumi observes, social change has given rise to “several variant forms”, including “the ‘pseudo-single-mother family’, in which the father, though legally present, is in fact too busy to spend much time with his family, and the ‘latent-disorganization family’, or ‘domestic divorce’, in which a husband and wife continue to remain legally married in spite of the fact that a conjugal relationship no longer exists”. See Yoshizumi, “Marriage and Family: Past and Present”, in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda, Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (New York, 1995), 183. 22 For an analysis of the shifting balance between miai and ren’ai kekkon see Kamiko Takeji, “Reinterpreting Mate Selection in Contemporary Japan”, in Susan Orpett Long (ed.), Lives in Motion. Composing Circles of Self and Community in Japan (Ithaca, 1999), 27–40. Takeji acknowledges the shift to ren’ai kekkon, but argues for the continuing resilience of miai as a socio-cultural institution. 23 Muriel Jolivet provides a useful account of the problems of absentee fathers in Japan: The Childless Society (London and New York, 1997), 61–76. Jolivet cites idioms such as kazoku sâbisu (family service—a term used to describe the time fathers feel obliged to spend en famille) and pettoka (the child as a domestic pet) to suggest that paternal absenteeism is effectively institutionalized in contemporary Japan. 24 Discussions of bosei can be found in Margaret Lock, “Ideology, Female Midlife, and the Graying of Japan”, Journal of Japanese Studies 19/1 (1993), particularly pp. 69– 70; and Kano Kimiyo, “Bosei no tanjô to tennôsei” (“The Birth of Motherhood and the Emperor System”), in Inoue Teruko, Ueno Chizuko, and Ehara Yumiko (eds.), Bosei (Motherhood) (Tokyo, 1995), 56–85.

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corporate system has inicted on Japanese families”.25 Other endemic problems among Japanese youth, including school bullying (the notorious ijime mondai) and a disturbingly high suicide rate, can also be read as knock-on effects of this kind of pressure in the home.26 Predictably enough, scholars of Japanese society are divided over whether these signs of disorder in the family system constitute real and worrying dysfunction.27 Some argue for the resilience of the ie, and cite the enduring existence of three-generation stem families (sansedai kazoku)—particularly in the countryside—as proof of this thesis. Others concede the emergence of alternative patterns of domesticity, but construe these as signs of exibility within the system rather than as the portents of family breakdown.28 Writers of imaginative ction, however, are haunted by the conviction that family life is mired in crisis. Dislocated by the forceful pull of kôdo seichô, the family appears either as a barely functioning simulacrum of its pre-modern self, or it disappears altogether, its place taken by new-style groupings of the emotionally disenfranchised such as those found in the ction of Yoshimoto Banana. In a sense, these literary depictions of family breakdown are simply inverse formulations of the romanticized domesticity found in daytime soap operas and perennially popular cartoons such as Sazae-san, in which heart-warming scenes of family togetherness (ikka danran) appeal precisely because of their increasing elusiveness in real life. Either way, the counter-cultural character of much Japanese writing on the family is obvious. And like the Taiwanese ction discussed earlier, it takes socalled “friendly authoritarianism”29 as its implicit antagonist, critiquing the dominant discourse on two fronts. The guiding role played by the state in shepherding the economy towards miracle growth is, once again, the most conspicuous target. For the two decades that began in the mid-fties and saw prime ministers Kishi Nobusuke, Ikeda Hayato, and Satô Eisaku at the political helm, national policy-making demonstrated remarkable levels of coordination between key power blocs as it geared itself towards a strategy that has 25

Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society (Cambridge, 1997), 157. See Azuma Hiroshi, Nada Inada, Ogi Naoki, and Yazaki Ai, “Coming to Grips with Bullying”, Japan Echo 13/2 (1986), 56–62; and Ishikawa Yoshimi, “How We Failed Our Children”, Japan Echo 13/2 (1986), 63–66. 27 For a summary of the conicting viewpoints, see Sugimoto, op. cit., 160–1. 28 See, for example, Ochiai, The Japanese Family System in Transition (Tokyo, 1997), 58–63. 29 The expression is Yoshio Sugimoto’s. See Sugimoto, op. cit., 258. Similar notions of power are explored at length in Susan J. Pharr, Losing face: Status Politics in Japan (Berkeley, 1990). 26

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been aptly called “GNP-rst”.30 The famous ‘three pillars of Japanese capitalism’ were at their most tight-knit and effective during this period, and led to a sense that power lay well beyond the reach of most of the nation’s citizens.31 And even after competing groups had begun, if only in small ways, to impinge on the authority of the ruling triad, its leadership role in Japan’s continuing growth remained formidable. A sense of dismay, even outrage, at the social costs of economic growth began to appear from the late 1960s onwards, and a spate of civic protest movements (shimin undô) gave popular anger physical form.32 Fictional narratives which deplore the effects of modernization on the family belong, whether they intend it or not, within this wider oppositional discourse that pitted itself against the powers that be. Paradigmatic here is Murakami Ryû’s Coin Locker Babies, which references many of the other concerns mooted by the shimin undô alongside its dominant theme of the family in crisis. In Japanese ction too, moreover, we discover various kinds of ironic commentary on the ideological intrusions made by the establishment into private family space. Just as in Taiwan, Japanese elites have been quick to resuscitate Confucian, or quasi-Confucian, ideas as a symbolic resource in ofcial projects of modernization. Indeed, whilst one might question the view that Confucian tenets undergird Japan’s economic miracle, and quarrel outright with Francis Hsu’s claim that “the ethic of lial piety was and is at the core of the human foundation of Japanese industrialization and modernization”,33 there can be little doubt that postwar Japan has seen the kind of judicious (re)invention of tradition of which Eric Hobsbawm et al. have written.34 And although the terminologies used to dene domestic rectitude may vary, the same basic paradox between traditionalist rhetoric and the exigencies of rapid growth 30

Koji Taira, op. cit., 170. Caution is also appropriate here, since, as political scientists have begun to demonstrate in recent years, power-holding in postwar Japan is a complex affair that should not be viewed in bluntly monolithic terms. In particular, the enduring view that a conservative coalition of big business, the bureaucracy, and the LDP has held sway uninterruptedly and repelled all challengers throughout the ‘long postwar’ has been steadily replaced by an awareness that the era subdivides into distinct phases, each of which is marked by shifting distributions of power. 32 See Margaret A. McKean, Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan (Berkeley, 1981). 33 Francis L.K. Hsu, “Confucianism in Comparative Perspective”, in Slote and DeVos (eds.), Confucianism and the Family, 62. 34 See the essays collected in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992). 31

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remains. Most importantly, perhaps, the dominant discourse—in the form of state policy, business and employment practices, education in schools, the mass media, and the legal system—has sought a certain continuity with the Meiji-era ideal of the family state (kazoku kokka). This concept combines ofcial paternalism with an awareness of the role the family unit plays as a primary social context for modernizing policy, and it stresses the inter-dependence of state and subject.35 After 1960, as kôdo seichô began to create ruptures within this primary social context, conciliatory mechanisms of various kinds were required to offset the sense that growth was as destructive of family life as it was creative of wealth. As with Taiwan, the return to tradition presented itself as an obvious ideological antidote to the pressures of change. Trends ranging from the furusato bûmu (hometown boom) to the popularity of NHK’s Oshin family saga and even the use of history in samurai dramas ( jidaigeki) complemented government white papers on the importance of traditional family values, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s.36 Yet even while these messages were issuing forth, an inadequate welfare system, exploitative attitudes to female labor, and the demands of male white collar work indicated a strong pull in the opposite direction, towards an unsentimental technocratic society in which economic values were the real currency. This sense of anomaly nds its most extreme expression in the corporate world, where the discourse of ‘family values’ was deployed to strikingly counter-intuitive effect during the period examined here. As many scholars have noted, the overtime and tsukiai referred to earlier form part of a larger business culture in which employees were socialized to identify with their company as a quasi-familial entity. This company ‘family’—which is by no means extinct today—typically demanded levels of loyalty and commitment more commonly associated with ties of blood, and used the rhetoric of kin and belonging to keep salarymen in the ofce and away from home.37 Japanese writers 35 See Ueno Chizuko, “Modern Patriarchy and the Formation of the Japanese Nation State”, in Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa MorrisSuzuki (eds.), Multicultural Japan. Palaeothic to Postmodern (Cambridge, 1996), 213–223. 36 For a discussion of the way that female roles are encrypted in Oshin, see Paul A.S. Harvey, “Interpreting ‘Oshin’. War, History and Women in Modern Japan”, in Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (eds.), Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (Richmond, Surrey, 1995), 75–110. 37 As W. Mark Fruin puts it, “The pre-war analogy of genealogical and ideological equivalency of rm and family has been transformed into a postwar simile of cultural proclivity. That is to say, the rm has become like a family in an emotional sense because

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play on these kinds of paradox in their work, and create extreme family situations to point up the hypocrisies of the system.

The city and sexuality: the circuit of loss and substitution The city and sexuality recur as rhetorical gures across postwar ction about the family from Japan and Taiwan, and in a variety of guises. The work of Tomioka Taeko, for example, uses disturbing metaphors of sexuality to suggest the loveless core that hollows out the urban nuclear family in contemporary Japan.38 For the âneurs in the ction of Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, meanwhile, the city’s pleasure quarters exist as an alternative private mode to this kind of conventional domesticity, and displace the family unit altogether.39 Taiwanese writers as varied as Su Weizhen, Zhu Tianwen, Xiao Sa, and Zhang Dachun have also had repeated recourse to the city and sexuality when representing family dysfunction,40 and the two topoi appear in an inventive range company employees tend to identify themselves emotionally as well as intellectually with their rms.” Quoted in Robert J. Smith, “A Pattern of Japanese Society: Ie Society or Acknowledgement of Interdependence”, Journal of Japanese Studies 11/1 (1985), 31–2. 38 Paradigmatic examples of this in Tomioka’s work are “Hatsumukashi” (“Yesteryear”, 1976), “Dôbutsu no sôrei” (“An Animal’s Funeral”, 1976), and “Suku” (“Straw Dogs”, 1988). Perhaps most striking of all is Tomioka’s novel Sakagami (Sakagami, 1990), which describes a group of social and sexual mists who form an alternative domestic community known as the “house of mystery” ( fushigi no ie). 39 Examples include Genshoku no machi (The Street of Primary Colors, 1952), “Shûu” (“Sudden Shower”, 1956), “Shôfu no heya” (“The Prostitute’s Room”, 1958), and Anshitsu (The Dark Room, 1970). One commentator goes so far as to describe the antipathy felt by the protagonist of The Dark Room towards monogamy and procreation as a “phobia” (kyôfushô). See Tomaru Tatsu, “Anshitsu” (“The Dark Room”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaki to kanshô (National Literature. Interpretation and Appreciation), 50/6 (1985), 78. Kaga Otohiko elaborates on this point, and observes that “A scenario that appears frequently in Yoshiyuki’s works is that in which the man remains happy as long as he merely likes a woman, but becomes wretched as soon as he falls in love with her. It follows from this that marriage in the conventional sense is meaningless, and that the connection between a man and a prostitute, a relationship in which a man and a woman have merely physical dealings with one another, becomes the ideal. This idea is traced consistently through (Yoshiyuki’s) work, from Genshoku no machi (1952) up until the more recent Anshitsu (1970).” See Kaga Otohiko, “Yoshiyuki Junnosuke ni okeru sei” (“Sexuality in the work of Yoshiyuki Junnosuke”), in Yamamoto Yôrô (ed.), Yoshiyuki Junnosuke no kenkyû (Studies in the Fiction of Yoshiyuki Junnosuke) (Tokyo, 1978), 110. 40 Writers such as Su Weizhen and Xiao Sa return again and again to the theme of domestic meltdown in their ction. Relevant stories here are Xiao Sa’s “Wo er Hansheng” (“My Son, Hansheng”, 1981), and “Danshen guizu” (“Bachelor Aristocrats”, 1984); and Su Weizhen’s “Lijia chuzou” (“Leaving Home”, 1987), and “Yinying hou” (“Behind the Shadow”, 1987).

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of permutations across their work. Indeed, the presence of these two tropes in literary writing which explores the loss of home and hearth is so pervasive that the topic practically merits a full-length study to itself. The reading of the twin metaphors presented below is, therefore, neither prescriptive nor exhaustive, but is intended rather as a partial overview of this intertext of writings. In each of the narratives explored here, the city works as a blanket metaphor for the welter of modernizing changes that—in the view of many writers at least—have devastated family life during the time-frame in question. Kinship change in Japan and Taiwan is, of course, the result of a close constellation of factors; yet in ctional narrative, it is specically the urban condition in its various aspects that, time and again, becomes agent, site, and signier of the transformations that have worn down the fabric of family life. Writers in both literary cultures re-create, and reimagine, the real-city and its documented relationship with the unraveling of kinship ties, foregrounding the junctures where the metropolis and the family meet and interact. In particular, the word-city trails the real-city as it moves along two intersecting axes: urbanization, by which I mean the growth of cities, both externally and internally; and on the other, urbanism, loosely dened here as the city as a way of life. In the world outside the text, both axes have crisscrossed the space of the family—often disruptively—and writers make good use of this actual, and remembered, impact in narratives that reference the urban space of the real at the same time as departing imaginatively from it. Indeed, both urbanization and urbanism have given writers in Japan and Taiwan much material for counter-cultural critique. Immediately striking, perhaps, is the hard physicality of untrammeled urbanization in the miracle nations. Describing the industrialized ‘Pacic Belt’ which stretches from Tokyo to Kitakyushu, Koji Taira writes of “rabbit hutches” in faceless apartment blocks (danchi), and states that Japanese cities were “virtual war zones” during the period of rapid GNP growth.41 Thomas Gold paints an equally grim picture of urban Taiwan: the island’s western strip from Keelung to Kaohsiong has now become an endless sprawl of distressing, almost freakishly ugly high-rise apartment blocks and factories almost crammed on top of each other. There seems to have been little advance macro-level planning or co-ordination, posing tremendous problems of utilities . . . services and green spaces.42 41 42

Taira, op. cit., 171. Thomas Gold, “Taiwan Society at the Fin de Siècle”, in Shambaugh, op. cit., 50.

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Right across industrialized East Asia, mushrooming development, chaotic urban planning, demographic overcrowding, and heavy shrouds of pollution have spawned cities in which traditional family life seems unsustainable. Economically, too, urbanization—or the familiar process whereby city and country move inexorably towards one another—is an obvious culprit in the sundering of the extended family; and the nuclear units it creates in recompense have not always thrived in the inhospitable urban climate described above. It is this sense of a paradoxical progress that has provoked slogans such as ‘rich Japan, poor Japanese’ ( fukoku hinmin) to describe the fate of those who live out the economic miracle in the nation’s big cities.43 Similar resentment at the inequities of the miracle has occurred in urban Taiwan, where soaring property prices have made home-ownership impossible for many and spawned protests such as the ‘Snails without Shells’ (wu ke woniu) pressure group.44 Large-scale logistic and environmental problems of this kind inevitably spill over into psycho-social life, intensifying the anomie which Durkheim identied long ago as a side-effect of metropolitan life.45 And whilst the notion of the urban mise-en-scène as hostile to human interaction is a truism universally acknowledged,46 the fact that the Asia Pacic region has experienced the fastest urban growth in the world over the last three decades has given this maxim something of a new lease of life. At any rate, the powers ascribed to the city assume grand and varied proportions in postwar ction from Japan and Taiwan. In many texts, the metropolis functions synecdochally, as heavy industry, bureaucratization, the mechanization of daily life, the rise of technocracy, uncontrolled capitalism, and the atomization of human relations are all subtly elided with the more visible entity of the city. Another common pattern sees the physical reach of the city invading sequestered domestic space 43 For a discussion of fukoku hinmin, see Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Afuence (Armonk, 1996), 104–6. 44 Formed in 1989 by Lee Hsing-chang, the ‘Snails Without Shells’ group targeted the injustices of government housing policy, which seemed to be favoritizing the construction industry rather than helping lower-income groups realize their aspirations for a family home—a key goal in Taiwan where approximately 80% of families own their own property. See Taipei Times, August 26th, 2000. 45 Durkheim rst introduced the concept of anomie (lawlessness or structurelessness) in The Division of Labor in Society (1893), and elaborated its denition further in Suicide (1897). 46 Simmel argued as early as 1902 that the city as a way of life precludes deeply-felt ties of kinship, which require instead “the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habitations”. See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and tr. Kurt H. Wolff (New York, 1950), 410.

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in more literal ways, as old homes are torn down and families evicted or displaced. Elliptically, such texts impute the encroachment of the state into family life, and their counterpointing of the city and the home suggests the blurring of private/public boundaries that is a hallmark of modernity. Other narratives link the expanding city with the organs of modernizing and authoritarian state power even more directly. Clear instances of this conation can be found in the xiangtu literature produced in Taiwan from the 1970s onwards, in which urban technocrats despoil the countryside with ugly developmental projects.47 Still other texts describe the desperate inescapability of urban life, and create toxic cityscapes in which the family is suffocated out of existence. Common to all these narratives, meanwhile, is a sense of the city as a signier of loss and emotional attenuation: each recounts how familial relations are either destroyed by the physical incursions of the city, or prove unsustainable on its difcult terrain. The destruction of family life by the city, and the emotional attenuation it engenders, constitute the rst stage in the circular process of loss and surrogacy that structures each of the narratives discussed here. This original loss fuels desire, and the disintegration of family becomes the motive force which impels protagonists into new modes of affective behavior. These new modes involve the forging, either consciously or otherwise, of substitute kinship ties, a process of restitution and reinvestment which forms the second stage in the circular pattern. The tendency of emotionally dispossessed urbanites to seek out replacements for the lost family is, of course, a well-attested norm in the nonctional world. Urban sociologists have long noted that the city seems to encourage secondary social networks over primary ones, and Louis Wirth, leading light of the Chicago School, observed in 1938 that In view of the ineffectiveness of actual kinship ties, we create ctional kinship groups . . . and the city as a community resolves itself into a series of tenuous segmental relationships . . .48

47 Huang Chunming’s short story “Nisi yi zhi lao mao” (“The Story of a Drowned Cat”, 1974) offers a striking example of this kind of critique, and describes the construction of a swimming pool on sacred ground in rural Taiwan. In a similar vein, “Sunnong Lin Jinshu” (“Lin Jinshu, the Bamboo-shoot Grower”, 1982) by Lin Shuangbu ctionalizes the destructive impact of state bureaucracy on traditional farming communities. 48 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in Richard Sennett (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (New York, 1964), 163.

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Numerous later sociologists have put alternative, and less eschatological, constructions on the transfer of emotional investment away from the family.49 Yet many key works of ction from postwar Japan and Taiwan echo this Wirthian notion.50 Indeed, these texts can be read as gloomy local meditations on the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft—from a form of interaction based on personal ties and the community to one based increasingly on impersonal kinds of association—that has characterized post-traditional societies all over the world. Or, to recast the terminology slightly, such works describe a social world in which the family has begun to recede from view, and where a discernible movement is taking place from liative to afliative forms of attachment. Just as importantly, they share a conviction that such associations are ersatz shells of the authentic esh-and-blood bonds that are lost and unreconstructable under modernity. Afliation recurs as a thematic keynote across this body of texts because of the clear challenge it presents to the dominant discourse on the family in postwar Japan and Taiwan. Indeed, the theme has something of a history as a signier of literary opposition to authoritarian injunctions on the family and its rightful conduct. In his analyses of Natsume Sôseki and Tokuda Shûsei, for example, James Fujii notes the subversive avor of the motif, and shows how it is used to limn the psychological predicaments suffered by rural people who migrated to Tokyo ( jôkyô) in the early years of the twentieth century. In particular, Fujii cites the unorthodox domestic arrangements of Sasamura, the protagonist of Shûsei’s novel Kabi (Mould, 1911): A far cry from the family (ie) promoted by Meiji government edicts and didactic tracts, Sasamura’s family mirrors the constant mutability that marks city life: his personal associations are afliative, ever-changing, and replaceable . . . The Meiji authorities [meanwhile] sought to exploit a

49 Wirthian theory (also known as determinist theory or the theory of urban anomie) has been challenged by competing paradigms of city life, such as the subcultural thesis. The latter holds that, although the urban environment may debilitate kinship ties, it also brings forth vibrant micro-communities, often based on ethnicity, occupation or cultural background. For a discussion of these debates, see Claude S. Fischer, The Urban Experience (New York, 1976), 27–37. 50 Local social commentators, too, have been alert to this tendency. See, for example, Nakano Osamu, “The Surrogate Family”, Japan Echo 15 (1988), 48–52. Nakano claims that “such phenomena as surrogate parents, surrogate families, and surrogate schools are ubiquitous in our society . . . [and] for some of today’s children, real life at home or at school is so difcult to endure that imitation experiences are more satisfying” (p. 49).

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chapter three ‘procreative, generational urge authorizing liative relationships’ in creating the obedient imperial subject.51

Afliation here, and in Shûsei’s later novel Arakure (The Wild One, 1915), clearly stands as an expression of protest against the Confucian-inuenced ideologues of the day, whose homilies on the family were ill-suited to the disorientating pressures of the modern metropolis and merely sharpened the angst of dislocation. Fictional writing from postwar Japan and Taiwan takes notions of afliation still further;52 and it is through their explorations of this motif that writers foreground the sexual metaphor and thereby bring the pattern of loss and substitution full circle. All the writers considered here—as well as numerous others—explore afliation in terms of illicit, even extreme sexual relations. Indeed, whilst afliation in Shûsei’s prose tends to denote the general transition from Confucian-inected Gemeinschaft to the Gesellschaft of the modern nation-state, in these later narratives it represents the more specic replacement of kinship ties by taboo-shattering sexual ones in which ‘deviance’ is a point of principal. And as such, the motif takes on an uncomfortably dystopian cast. Each text under discussion here opens, identically, with the gure of a protagonist cut off from kin family and set adrift in the metropolis, and the subsequent narrative movement follows this protagonist’s quest for reengagement with the sexual others whom the city throws his or her way. As destroyer of family and liation, the metropolis is, of course, home to innite numbers of emotional vagrants, and thus the search is ostensibly straightforward. Yet at the same time—as Shûsei’s work predicts—the impermanence of the urban milieu gives these heuristic quests for surrogate mothers, fathers, or children a doomed quality. The word-city fosters only transient and eroticized encounters, and familial rootedness of the kind the protagonist seeks remains elusive. In other words, the trope of sexuality is the textual means through which writers express their anxiety at what Anthony Giddens has called 51

James Fujii, op. cit., 192. Dramatic examples from Japan can be found in Honma Yohei’s novel Kazoku gêmu (Family Game, 1984), which has also been made into a well-received lm directed by Yoshimitsu Morita; and Shimada Masahiko’s Yumetsukai (Dream Messenger, 1989). Reasons of space prevent an analysis of Shimada’s novel here; but its exploration of the urban family, sexuality, and afliation makes it one of the most striking exemplars of the themes considered in this chapter. Dream Messenger describes a world in which family as we know it has vanished, where orphans can be hired out—almost by the hour—as ‘rental children’ to satisfy the needs of childless couples, and where sexuality has broken virtually all the bounds of taboo. 52

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“the transformation of intimacy” under modernity.53 Authenticity gives way to simulacra, and the shift from liative to afliative modes brings a thinning of affect rather than freedom of emotional manoeuvre. As if to intensify this sense of a world out of kilter, in which even the family has lost its ontological bearings, the sexual encounters that replace kith and kin in these texts are rich in dystopian symbolism. ‘Deviance’, as suggested earlier, is an obvious and repeated theme, but equally relevant are the moods of shame, deadened desire, simulated pleasure, and real pain that color sexuality in these textual ctions. Indeed, with the exception of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen—an apparent anomaly of which more will be said later—death, murder, self-immolation, mental illness, and overpowering anomie result from the search for emotional recompense. The failure of these quests constitutes the nal turn in the vicious circle of loss and surrogacy that these narratives trace; and their abiding ‘message’ is of the family as a wraith-like presence that that neither ideology nor the searching subject can pin down.

Wang Wenxing’s “Mother”: modernity, neurosis, and the incest taboo Wang Wenxing’s short story “Mother”, rst published in the journal Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature) in 1960, captures this circular movement in concise form. A leading member of the modernist clique, Wang Wenxing established himself from the early 1960s onwards as an innovative and dissenting force in Taiwanese ction, producing narratives which both raid the techniques of Western modernism and experiment aggressively with the possibilities of the Chinese language. Throughout his literary career, moreover, Wang has cross-examined neo-traditionalist discourse in postwar Taiwan, and many of his works are pervaded by anti-establishment sentiment. This cultural critique reaches its apogee in two landmark novels: Jiabian (A Change in the Family, 1973), and its follow-up Beihai de ren (Backed Against the Sea, 1981). Yet even in his earliest short stories, Wang’s drive to unsettle the conservatism of contemporary Taiwanese society is clear; and “Mother” is typical of this countercultural approach. Consonant with its early date in Taiwan’s miracle history, it marks the rst stirring of new perceptual modes, exploring in nuce the notion of writing progress within the private sphere of domesticity, and laying out in experimental miniature the theme of subverted 53

See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990), 112–4.

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lial piety to which Wang would return with a vengeance in A Change in the Family.54 As such, it presents us with a tting point of departure. Here, as elsewhere, Wang Wenxing’s critique revolves around the twin metaphors of the city and sexuality. The text falls into three narrative segments, which together form a short sequence of family dysfunction and deploy the two tropes in alternating turn. Wang opens with the incursions of the city into the countryside, setting a solitary factory in an otherwise tranquil pastoral world as a stylized symbol of the budding miracle. In the next, and longest, narrative segment, the focus abruptly shifts, and pulls the reader with a jolt into the inner world of the eponymous mother, a nameless woman in the grip of near-hysterical neurosis. Here Wang Wenxing avails himself of the textbook modernist technique of stream-of-consciousness monologue to reveal that the mother is incestuously xated on her young son Mao’er. In the story’s nal segment, the boy’s consciousness becomes the object of Wang’s direct narration. Repulsed by his mother’s obsession, the boy’s love and lial piety turn to hatred, and he transfers his affections to a local divorcée in a conspicuous gesture of afliation. This surrogate relationship is explored euphemistically, yet is sexual nature is communicated through detail and symbol, and the story ends with these intimations of corrupted innocence. Mental illness, incest, and pre-pubescent sexuality form an interlinked chain of ‘deviance’ in the text, and its progressive movement—from city, to mother, to boy, to loss, to delement—rewrites the teleological journey of the miracle in opposite terms. Appropriately enough, Wang Wenxing begins with the city, and the opening moments of the text are redolent with the sense of imminent change. A charm-lled bucolic landscape is played off against the rst signs of encroaching industrialization to create a sense of liminality, a threshold to the urban in which one order of life is yielding to another: The August sun sang hummingly from early morning till dusk like soundless music. After midday in this part of the city suburbs, the paddy elds, the newly-built houses crowded tightly together, the trees and the sandy beach were all lying still and patient, enveloped in thin grey vapor, waiting 54 Given its early date, “Mother” does not rank among the most amboyant expositions of family breakdown in postwar Taiwanese ction. That particular accolade might well belong to Dong Nian’s short story “Dahuo” (Conagration, 1979). This later text marshals the themes of the city, sexuality, and the search for a surrogate family into a hard critique of Taiwan’s modernity, and culminates in a scene of self-immolation that parallels the climax of Murakami Ryû’s Coin Locker Babies. See Dong Nian, “Dahuo”, in Dong Nian ji (The Collected Works of Dong Nian) (Taipei, 1992), 151–165.

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for nightfall which still seemed a long way off . . . Naked children frolicked in a sandpit lled with shallow water, splashing and calling out to one another.55

The sense of nascent change implied by the “newly-built houses crowded tightly together” grows much stronger when the scene pans to the factory itself: On the other side of the river was a stone-milling factory. In the mornings the workers punted boats to the middle of the river and loaded them up half-full with stones. When the boats reached shore, the workers’ wives and small children gathered round and shoveled the stones onto carts. Pushing the carts along iron tracks, the women and small children would then make the climb towards the factory . . . The motors in the factory emitted a pounding noise, like the weak pulsating of a heart.56

The commercial activity described here is primitive—more cottage industry than the export-oriented, high-tech capitalism commonly associated with the Taiwan miracle—yet a retrospective view reveals it as the genesis of the sophisticated post-industrial urban society prospering on the island today. This sense of incipient growth is conrmed by the factory’s output: the milled stone that it produces is used for cement, or as gravel for roads—raw materials in the growth of industrialized cities and their tentacular expansion outwards. This point is corroborated a few pages later when the text makes self-conscious reference to the cement road (shuinilu) that runs past the row of houses.57 Just as importantly, Wang Wenxing uses this crucial passage to convey the power and presence of the factory, the urban satellite that dwarfs the lives of those who live in its shadow. The Sisyphean character of the human labor it exacts is unmistakable, as the workers cart the stones upwards at the behest of the crude industrial behemoth atop the hill. This impression of mindless, exploitative toil is intensied by the involvement of the workers’ wives and small children, whose labor reveals the factory’s success in subsuming the entire community into a single means of production. Finally, the mechanization of modern urban life is suggested, in reverse, by the anthropomorphic gloss Wang gives the factory, whose motors beat like an ailing human heart.

55 56 57

Wang Wenxing, “Muqin”, in Shiwu pian xiaoshuo (Fifteen Stories) (Taipei, 1979), 29. Ibid. Ibid., 32.

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This implied link between automatization and human pathology is developed more fully in the next section of the text, as Wang Wenxing leaves the exteriority of emerging modernity for its interior landscape within the mother’s mind. The cause-and-effect relation of these two states—modernization and mental disorder—is conveyed by the uninterrupted ow of the narrative as it moves without signposting from the realism of the rst section to the blatant artice of stream-of-consciousness. Only at the end of the mother’s monologue is the reader made aware that the exposition of her psychosis has been neatly framed on either side by the “weak pulsating” of the factory’s motors, and that this framing serves an exegetical, annotating function. Wang Wenxing derives full value from the stream-of-consciousness technique in this section. Frenzied repetition, syntactical distortions, slippage between personal pronouns, and shards of memory are used to convey the otherness of the bourgeois self—or as Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang has put it, the agony of “imaginary post-Freudian middle-class spiritual dilemmas”.58 In the most obvious sense, the mother’s psychic disturbance drums out a challenge to the smooth rhetoric which makes progress, afuence, and contentment interchangeable synonyms for one another. Yet beneath this surface message lies a further set of meanings, which emerge steadily as the mother’s ramblings visit and re-visit the same core themes. Collectively these themes cohere into a more involved critique of the changes undergone by the family in postwar Taiwan. This critique hinges, of course, on the mother’s tentative infringement of the incest taboo: When I’m all alone in the afternoon suddenly I start worrying about him. It’s as if I can see his classmates bullying him, hitting him. I dash to the school . . . Mao’er come to your mother, come. She hides behind a clump of bushes . . . He is wearing a new light blue uniform, clean and fresh . . . Two plump bare legs are visible below his shorts. He’s wearing a new pair of little white leather shoes. He is clean and fresh. Suddenly he starts crying. Her face turns pale and she rushes out from behind the bushes . . . she picks him up and presses her cheek to his. A sparkling teardrop rolls down his round cheek. He pouts and puckers his lips. He buries his face in his mother’s shoulder. She kisses his chest where his shirt gapes open. . . . Oh you are Mama’s little darling, the way you pout your little mouth is so adorable, it makes Mama want to kiss you again and again . . .59

58 59

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 41. Wang, “Muqin”, 30.

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Wang’s invocation of the incest taboo to comment on the emotional ravages of modernity is, of course, a considered affront to conservative propriety; and in this context, “Mother” can be seen as a precursor of the outrageous interrogations of Confucian morality that dominate his later oeuvre. In A Change in the Family, for example, the iconoclast Fan Ye exiles his senile father from the family home, whilst Backed Against the Sea features another deranged mother obsessed with turning her young son into sausage meat, and a father who turns the death and burial of his still-born infant into the material for crass comedy. The antiauthoritarian nature of all these characterizations is staged for maximum impact. Fan Ye trespasses against the ideal of the lial son (xiaozi) in thoroughgoing fashion, just as the disturbed mothers are an extreme violation of the model of feminine rectitude, the ‘good wife and wise mother’ of popular lore.60 In each case, impropriety works to impugn the moral ministrations of the ruling order, and reveals that modernity creates ontological states that the ethics of the past are hard put to mediate or control. Overshadowed by the incest motif, yet just as germane to Wang’s critique, are the less stylized indices of familial change that recur throughout the story. “Mother” makes coded reference to virtually all the transformations that the Taiwanese family has undergone during the postwar period; and at the risk of seeming to mine the text for positivist social data, these are perhaps worth dwelling on momentarily. First of all, the nuclearization of domestic units forms a key sub-text to the main thematic structure. Mao’er’s immediate family appears to be made up of his parents alone; no mention is made of any other relation, either paternal or maternal; and the mother’s solitude and inactivity appear to corroborate the absence of elder or extended kin. Taiwan’s declining birth-rate, too, is reected in the fact that Mao’er is an only child, a condition that the mother alludes to mournfully again and again in her soliloquy, almost as an apologia for her obsessive attachment to the boy. Marital disharmony, meanwhile, surfaces in the strained relationship between the mother and her husband, and still more tangibly in the shape of the neighborhood divorcée, a rogue presence whose sexuality unsettles the bourgeois complacency of the neighborhood. Yet most 60 Li-fen Chen notes the “blasphemy” of the anti-motherhood motif in Wang’s later novel Backed Against the Sea, and claims that “it expresses an anarchism going further than the challenge to patriarchal authority in the controversial Chia-pien”. See Chen, Fictionality and Reality in Narrative Discourse: A Reading of Four Contemporary Taiwanese Writers (n.p., 2000), 138.

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signicant of all, perhaps, is the story’s depiction of the disintegrating affective bonds within the family, a theme which Wang articulates through inverse parallelism. On the mother’s side, normal maternal feeling has been warped into semi-erotic xation; whereas for her son, the deformation of love assumes the opposite form as he rejects her eroticized affect for that of a subversive maternal surrogate. The import of this last point becomes clearer when the text segues into its third and nal section. Here, the mobile narrative voice relocates itself within Mao’er’s consciousness, and accesses his displaced love as a way of staging the nal act in the sequence of cause and effect that is set in motion by the advent of the city. Immediately striking here is the bald statement that the boy “loathed his mother”.61 The same passage reveals that he shuns his home, ignores her when she calls for him, and when her name is mentioned, his eyes are with the “rage of a small lion”.62 Indeed, just as the mother’s eroticized attachment to her son contravenes the orthodoxies of Chinese familial behavior, so does he, in his turn, throw down a gauntlet to the putative norm. After all, the dynamics of the mother-son relationship, traditionally grounded in the mother’s gentle compassion (ci) as opposed to the stern dignity ( yan) typied by the father, should arguably make the exercise of lial piety from son to mother both easier and more heartfelt. Instead, the mother’s psychosis effectively makes the boy an outcast from his home, a banishment that pushes him into the ‘city’ in the search for afliative restitution. In “Mother”, this quest for a substitute takes the form of the boy’s infatuation with the local divorcée, a femme fatale whom his mother despises; and physical similarities between the two women—both are described as pale-skinned beauties d’un certain âge—work to underline the theme of simulation. This sense of lack, of displaced desires continually surfacing at some remove from their origins, is reinforced by the repetition that gives cyclical structure to the narrative. The boy’s infatuation is an ironic replay of his mother’s earlier obsession, as he spies on his love from treetops, lingers xatedly on the details of her appearance, and catches voyeuristic glimpses of her as she undresses. The divorcée, for her part, has a studied erotic allure that turns her into the alter ego of the boy’s mother, whose unvoicable desires have produced sexual pathology. By contrast, the divorcée literally ‘speaks’

61 62

Ibid. Ibid., 33.

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her sexuality (even if her language is clichéd): she wears skin-tight black satin outts, her long tapering ngernails are painted red, and she languorously encourages the boy’s attention. In the nal lines of the story, her seduction becomes still more blatant, as she slips on a pair of slippers embroidered with golden phoenixes—a symbol of betrothal and sexual union—before nally enticing the boy with a box of chocolates.63 Yet the very ‘immorality’ of her seduction suggests the ultimate futility of the boy’s surrogate love: rather than restitution, the afliative tie can only intensify his originary loss.64 Mao’er, whose growth to adulthood will coincide almost exactly with Taiwan’s transition to capitalist maturity, becomes, therefore, a symbol of the ‘otherness’ of miracle growth—his story is that which runs parallel to the telos of progress in time, but directly counter to it in meaning.

Paternalism and patriarchy in Bai Xianyong’s Cursed Sons Bai Xianyong’s Nie Zi (Cursed Sons) picks up the leitmotifs of Wang’s earlier critique, and develops them in more sustained fashion. First published in 1983, the novel describes the turbulent lives of a community of adolescent male prostitutes and their clients, who congregate nightly in Taipei’s New Park. In particular, the story traces the adventures of its narrator, A-qing, and his companions as they attempt to nd love, security and a livelihood in the metropolis after being ejected from the family home because of their sexual orientation. Cursed Sons is a multi63 Up to a point, the story’s depiction of budding sexuality links it to a number of related works that Wang Wenxing published during the same time period. All these pieces are small-scale Bildungsromane, which deal with rites of passage such as the male adolescent’s apprehension of mortality (“Rili” [“Calendar”, 1960] and “Mingyun de jixian” [“Line of Fate”, 1963]), and his initiation into eroticism (“Hanliu” [“Cold Currents”, 1962]). Closer still are works such as “Heiyi” (“Black Gown”, 1964) and “Qianque” (“Flaw”, 1964), which explore adult-child relations of a vaguely improper kind, and have an illicit sexual undertow. Both stories feature sinister but outwardly respectable characters who bully or inveigle impressionable children, and act as their introit to a bewildering adult world. 64 This investing of hopeless aspiration in an idealized female gure is a familiar pattern in modern Taiwanese urban ction. As the writer and critic Ping Lu has pointed out, “recent ction from Taiwan reects the hope that, by availing themselves of idealized images of women, men can ease the real pressure they endure and the anxieties of their existence . . . (yet) the women encountered in real life certainly do not have the power to rescue the male protagonist and lead him out of the urban cage.” See Ping Lu, “Duhuizhong chenlun de nan” (“The Degraded Male in the Metropolis”), in Zheng Mingli (ed.), Dangdai Taiwan dushi wenxue lun, 213.

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layered narrative that lends itself to several interpretive approaches. Homosexual protest, social commentary, autobiography, and cultural critique all co-exist within Bai’s novel, and this signicatory potential is mirrored in the critical studies that the novel has inspired, both in Chinese-speaking societies and the West.65 In the following analysis, I focus on the issues of kinship that are raised within the text, and explore how Bai Xianyong uses the family in crisis as a synecdoche for the failures of Taiwan’s authoritarian postwar miracle. This reading is not, however, intended reductively, but rather as one interpretative strategy amongst many possible others.66 Like Wang Wenxing before him, Bai Xianyong uses the rhetorical gures of the city and sexuality to express his counter-cultural critique. Emotive images of Taipei’s urban sprawl recur as indices of the miracle’s dark side, and in several key passages the city is identied as the destroyer of family life. The novel’s protagonists all seek out restitution for this loss in the realm of sexuality, and pursue substitute gures and 65 Liu Chuncheng, for example, alludes to the autobiographical details implicit within the novel’s exposition of homosexuality. See Liu Chuncheng, Taiwan wenxue de liangge shijie (The Two Worlds of Taiwanese Literature) (Taipei, 1989), 342–3. In her recent analysis of Cursed Sons, on the other hand, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang cites “the relationship between the public and the private and . . . the way paternal authority dominates in the family and in (Chinese) society” as the key issues of the text. See Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 96. Huang Zhongtian, meanwhile, adopts a still more sociological approach to the novel, analyzing at length the insights it offers into Taiwanese youth culture. See Huang Zhongtian, Taiwan changpian xiaoshuolun (A Discussion of Long Fiction from Taiwan) (Taipei, 1989), 202–14. This view is upheld by Helmut Martin and Monika Ganssbauer, who claim that in Cursed Sons “The moral decline of modern Taiwanese society is symbolically implied”. See Helmut Martin and Monika Ganssbauer, “Kritische Bibliographie zur ‘Geschichte der taiwanesischen Literatur’ ”, in Sandschneider and Martin, op. cit., 184. Also common, particularly in Taiwan, are studies which use queer theory to interpret the novel. See, for example, Ye Dexuan, “Yinguibusan de jiatingzhuyi chimei. Dui quanshi Niezi zhuwen de lunshu fenxi” (“The Unexorcised Demon of Familialism. A Discursive Analysis of Some Interpretations of Cursed Sons”), Zhongwai wenxue (Chung-wai Literary Monthly) 24/7 (1995), 66–88. Ye’s article reviews various Chinese-language critiques of the novel and exposes their homophobic bias. 66 As Zhu Weicheng has noted, however, it is worth remembering that Bai Xianyong’s critical stock amongst the wentan has gone down in recent years, despite his status as the “spiritual leader of the modernist clique on Taiwan” (Taiwan xiandaipai de jingshen lingxiu). In particular, nativist-minded critics such as Peng Ruijin and Gao Tiansheng have looked askance at his departure for the US, calling it “self-imposed exile (ziwo fangzhu), vagrancy (liulang), and rootlessness (wugen).” Yet as Zhu notes, “What is intriguing here is that as an accompaniment to this tendency whereby Bai Xianyong has been gradually marginalized on Taiwan, we have clearly witnessed his speedy canonization on the mainland in recent years”. See Zhu, “(Bai Xianyong tongzhi de) nüren, guaitai, guozu: yige jiating luomanshi de lianjie” (“[Comrade Bai Xianyong’s] Women, Queers, and Nation: Continuity through Family Romance”) Zhongwai wenxue (Chung-wai Literary Monthly) 26/12 (May, 1998), 47.

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experiences in an effort to restore their lack.67 Yet without exception these simulacra prove false, leaving the boys still more emotionally dispossessed and tormented than before. Indeed, although the text directly implicates the city in the unraveling of the family matrix, the boys all see their backgrounds as a source of debilitating shame—and predictably enough, it is this sense of unworthiness which sabotages their attempts to nd recompense through sexual love. At the root of this complex, Bai Xianyong implies, lies the discourse of neo-traditionalism (and, in particular, lial piety and the law of the father) that was fostered in Taiwan throughout the period of martial law. Taught to internalize the code of familial sanctity as truth, the boys see their broken homes as a mark of disgrace and banishment. Through his exploration of these interlinked themes of shame and social exclusion, Bai Xianyong probes the disjunction between rigidly codied norms of kinship and the more uid reality of family life during Taiwan’s miracle years, and mounts a sustained critique of pious authoritarianism. This critique begins with the city, Bai’s favored signier of both modernity and its discontents. Throughout the text, intensely realized images of urban decay point up the physical and psycho-social fallout of the miracle, as Bai juxtaposes development and disintegration to suggest the linkage between Taiwan’s growth and the malfunction of its families. To press the point home, families of low socio-economic status predominate in Cursed Sons, and urban poverty is used as a roving spotlight for the ssures within the miracle. Hostile representations of Taipei abound in the novel, but a close reading of A-qing’s recollections of his family home at the beginning of Book 2 is enough to reveal Bai’s dystopic vision. Describing the lane on which his family lived, A-qing recalls the daily discord of life in the slums: Life was a struggle for pretty much everyone, and cries of discontent rang out from every home. I recall that during all those many years our lane never seemed to enjoy a sense of peace. As soon as the shrieking would

67 In an interview with his biographer Wang Jinmin, Bai Xianyong himself has conrmed the surrogate nature of many of the liaisons depicted in the novel, stating that, even more than homosexual desire, it is the yearning for a substitute home and father that explains these relationships. See Wang Jinmin, Bai Xianyong zhuan (A Biography of Bai Xianyong) (Hong Kong, 1992), 137. In fact, substitutive sexuality of this kind recurs throughout Bai’s work. In Tales of Taipei People, for example, Bai repeatedly explores the theme of sexuality as a substitute for the lost homeland. Examples include “Jin daban de zuihou yi ye” (“The Last Night of Taipan Jin”), “Yi ba qing” (“A Touch of Green”), “Huaqiao rong ji” (“Glory’s by the Flower Bridge”), and “Na pian xue yiban hong de dujuanhua” (“An Expanse of Blood-red Azaleas”).

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And as the remainder of the passage makes clear, urban blight—overcrowding, pollution and squalor—is to blame for these shattered domestic harmonies: . . . the doors, windows, and eaves were thoroughly decrepit, and resembled a crowded pack of shabby beggars, humping their shoulders and huddling their backs . . . The contents of the uncovered rubbish bin in the middle of the lane were a motley mix . . . sometimes a dead cat might be lying there, its belly swollen till it bloated, its eyes bulging and its white teeth bared. Who knows which household had poisoned it and tossed there to rot slowly. On its surface swarmed huge glossy green ies with red heads, who would y off with of a buzzing sound when people walked past, leaving a nest of squirming white maggots exposed on top of the dark grey cat corpse . . . the cement oors were so damp they seemed to be sweating. All year round the house rotted, still and silent. Blotches of furry mould, green, yellow, and black, climbed from the foot of the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Our clothes always bore a strong smell of mildew, and however much we washed them, they could never be washed clean.69

The opening lines of this passage anthropomorphize the family home as a way of linking its physical dilapidation to the parlous state of the relationships inside its walls, culminating in an image which reads deformity as the endpoint of urban decay. Later on, a cluster of degenerative, parasitic images (the monstrous ies and poisoned cats) turns the ghetto where A-qing grew up into a site set on its own destruction. The wasting character of the city is made still more explicit when the focus of the scene shifts to the interior of the house. Here, the starting-point of decomposition is the shabby cement oors—a signier of ill-judged urbanization—from which the damp seeps upwards to engulf the entire home. The effects of this putrid atmosphere on family life are suggested by the “still and silent” ambience which rules the house and by the stench of mildew that hovers permanently over its inhabitants. In other words, A-qing and his family inhabit the dumping ground of Taiwan’s miracle economy: what lters down to them from rising GNP and tireless industrial development is nothing but the debris of progress—quite literally—and the result is an almost tangible contamination that spreads into the realm of love and affect.

68 69

Bai, Nie zi (Taipei, 1980), 40. Ibid., 41.

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This sense of progress as an afiction emerges still more clearly when we consider the representation of sexuality and surrogacy in Cursed Sons. Most conspicuous here, of course, is the search for a paternal surrogate which drives nearly all of the novel’s characters. The relationships between Little Jade and Old Zhou, Little Jade and Lin Maoxiong, Wu Min and Mr. Zhang, and A-Qing and Yu Hao exemplify this pattern.70 Yet perhaps even more germane to the novel’s structure than this sugardaddy/hustler dynamic is the quest for an ersatz home, a rooted obsession that virtually every character in the novel shares. Throughout the text, the boys’ yearning for a replacement home is centered on Taipei’s New Park, a place which functions primarily as the casual cruising ground for the city’s homosexual community.71 The role of this highly sexualized space as a symbol of home in the collective imagination of the boys is two-sided: it is both a renegade kingdom which outs the neo-traditionalist state and its agencies, and a communal nest which gives the boys shelter as they drift homeless through the city. This duality is made apparent through language. Instantly striking here is the vocabulary of dominion and exclusion that accompanies any mention of the park, and the insistent use of terms such as “kingdom” (wangguo), “nation” (guodu), “territory” (guotu), “tightly woven fence” ( jinmi de weili), and “tiny state” (zuierxiaoguo). This physical annexing of the park is both a defense against, and a challenge to, the strictures of KMT rule, a point that A-qing makes explicitly in the rst few pages of the novel.72 Up to a point, this challenge to the state is couched in terms of gay protest, just as the entire novel reads uently as a plea for sexual tolerance in an ethically regimented society—and is often interpreted as such.

70 Other examples of foster father-son relationships include A-qing and Wang Kuilong, Yang Jinhai and A-xiong, Yang Feng and Hua Guobao, and Grandad Guo and Iron Ox. The sole exception to this pattern of sexual liaisons between sugar daddies and destitute adolescents is A-qing’s genuinely lial relationship with the philanthropist Fu Chongshan. Fu Chongshan, whose own son committed suicide after being disowned by his father for homosexual activity, seeks to redeem himself for his earlier intolerance by acting as benefactor and protector to the boys of New Park. 71 In the latter stages of the novel, the park is temporarily superseded as gathering point and refuge for the community by “Pleasantville” (Anlexiang), a gay bar managed by Yang Jinhai. Although “Pleasantville” initially appears a safer haven than the park, it is soon forced into closure by scurrilous newspaper reports about its existence. After this setback, the community retreats once again to the familiarity of the park. 72 He refers to the community of hustlers as “our anarchical kingdom” (women na ge wuzhengfu de wangguo) and describes it thus: “In our kingdom, there are no days, only dark nights . . . we have neither government nor constitution; we receive recognition and respect from no-one, and our populace is nothing but a mob”. Ibid., 3.

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Yet this territorialism is more than just a declaration of esprit de corps among Taipei’s boliquan.73 Ultimately, it relates back to the loss of family—every boy in the novel is the product of a broken home—and to the need the protagonists feel for a cloistered space which can stand in for this lack. This point becomes clearer when we turn to the other cluster of images that Bai uses to give textual presence to the park. These images, which focus on nests (wochao) and the edgling bird (qingchunniao), stand for safety and belonging in the schematic layout of the novel, and create the interior other to the terminologies of segregation described above. Indeed, the image of a sheltered nest hidden within the technologydriven metropolis provides a striking mode of representation for the yearning all the boys feel for the lost familial idyll, and it is often used to generate a sense of pathos. As Grandad Guo, a veteran of the park, describes it: Sooner or later each and every one of you comes ying to this old nest . . . You’re a ock of edglings who have lost your nest, like a band of sea swallows that cross the oceans and the seas, just trying desperately to keep ying ahead. You yourselves don’t even know where you’ll end up.74

A sense of history and lineage, commensurate with that of family, is also fostered among the community of the park. ‘Family’ lore and mythology is handed down from generation to generation, and A-qing and his companions know by heart the stories of their forebears. This notion of genealogy is reinforced by physical likenesses and the use of parallelism: Grandad Guo likens A-qing to a “little hawk” (xiao cangying), suggesting an ancestry with Phoenix (A-Feng), a long-dead member of the boliquan, and hints at similarities in their temperaments. This tenuous continuity is made more tangible through the studio portraits that Grandad Guo takes of all the young men. Compiled in a volume entitled “Birds of Youth”, this collection of portraits becomes an ersatz family album for those who seek haven in the park. Yet the park can only ever be a poor proxy for the family bonds that dissolve under modernity. Most obviously, the park’s role as a locus for transgressive sex makes it a target for the disciplining hand of the state,

73 Literally ‘the glass circle’, boliquan is a slang term for the gay community in Taiwan. 74 Ibid., 73–85.

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and thereby comprises its status as a shelter. Patriarchal law—symbolized by the police—keeps the lines of demarcation that the boys draw around their surrogate home elastic, and the community must continually realign or draw in its borders if it is to escape detection. Still more problematic is the destructive behavior of the protagonists themselves. Blighted by the losses of the past, the boys are unable to transcend their damaged states and form reciprocal attachments—as A-qing puts it: In this small world of ours, sealed off and crammed with people, we all stretched out starving, desperate claws, and violently scratched, clutched, tore, and pulled at one another, as if we were trying to tear back some kind of recompense from the esh of others.75

The search for restitution becomes a brutal pursuit, and as soon as night falls, the trope of the edgling bird gives way to images drawn from nature’s unheimlich side, which transform the park from a safe haven into the haunt of sexual predators. Instead of vulnerable edglings, the boys become “a urry of bats” ( yi qun bianfu)76 or a “swarm of wasps” ( yi wo feng),77 and both love and desire are displaced by more violent drives. This quick shift from imagery of the nest to imagery of the hunt illustrates the ‘curse’ of the lost family, which prevents the boys from entering into relationships which might sustain them. Instead, sexual relations in the novel are typically self-serving and violent; and although passion (qing) is an insistent force, it nds its expression in mental cruelty, sadism, and on occasion murder.78 At the root of this displacement of love by violence lies the sense of shame which plagues all the homeless boys in the novel. Shame recurs throughout Cursed Sons, and is all the more resonant a theme because it is linked in only the most peripheral manner to sexual orientation—contrary to the interpretive gloss that conservative ideologues might favor. Indeed, at no point in the narrative does a single protagonist profess the slightest sense of ‘shame’ at his sexual choices; and Bai Xianyong’s pegging of this theme to repressive neo-traditional ideology rather than to notions of erotic ‘impropriety’ works well within his discourse of liberalist protest. In Cursed Sons, shame is a family issue, a response to the basic paradoxes of Confucian-inected modernity. Put simply, the boys 75

Ibid., 111. Ibid., 33. 77 Ibid. 78 For a discussion of qing in Cursed Sons, see Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 101–111. 76

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of New Park suffer the stigma that attaches to broken families in a society which legislates for harmony and hierarchy in the home—at the same time as moving at full tilt towards a modernity that is consciously predicated on the ‘breaking’ of the old domestic nexus. Progress has made the boys anomalies within the social order even though, in their deracinated, mobile state, they are precisely its most natural offspring. And although almost every character in the text shares this same past, their loss retains the lineaments of a shame that must never be articulated. As A-qing puts it: Although we people of the park will talk about most things when we see each other, we never bring up our own family backgrounds. Even if we do mention them, we hold a great deal back, since every one of us has a secret anguish ( yintong) that can never be revealed.79

Even more destructive, however, is the shame that haunts the boys on account of their repeated transgressions against the cardinal code of lial piety. As is often noted, intense father-son conflict ( fuzi chongtu) reverberates through Cursed Sons.80 A-qing and his father, Papa Fu and his son, and Wang Kuilong and his father are all locked in struggle with one another; and in each case, the intransigence of the Confucian patriarch becomes the seed of estrangement and tragedy. Originally, of course, these clashes stem from issues of sexual orientation: unable to follow the conventional lifepath his father has laid down for him, the son has no choice but to violate the code of lial piety. Unable in his turn to tolerate this disobedience, the father disowns the son and banishes him from the family home. This banishment ( fangzhu) brings a lifetime of suffering for both father and son, and their pain—which is continually re-enacted within the “father-son” liaisons referred to earlier—is the principal means through Bai Xianyong registers his plea for tolerance. Yet important though this plea is, perhaps the chief strength of Cursed Sons is the way in which it extends the theme of persecuted homosexuality into a far more inclusive metaphor for the depredations of ‘soft totalitarianism’. This extension is achieved through the causal connection Bai sets up between the law of the father at home and KMT patriarchy at large—a 79

Bai, Nie zi, 89. Liu Jun, for example, highlights the motif of banishment to explore the ways in which the father-son bond in Cursed Sons diverges from the tianlun relation—in which natural attachment and ethical duty complement one another—that should ideally pertain between the two. See Liu, Bai Xianyong pingzhuan. Beimin qinghuai (Melancholy Sentiment. A Critical Biography of Bai Xianyong) (Guangzhou, 2000), 340–1. 80

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point that is made textually explicit by the fact that all these fathers are, within their differing social echelons, devoted servants of the Nationalist government. In Cursed Sons, lial piety, patriarchy and the autocratic state are all mutually implicated in a disturbing chain of command that consigns the individual and his liberties to the margins. In this context of repeated banishment, the son who trespasses the lial way takes a stand not just against his father, but against the coercions of autocratic political power more generally. And, as part of the same logic, the homosexual outcasts who populate Bai’s novel become, through their deance, a powerful symbol of oppressed constituencies across the socio-political spectrum. Ultimately, Bai’s novel deconstructs the KMT’s resuscitation of ‘tradition’ and ‘ethics’ for the purposes of social control by turning resistance into a new ideal of rectitude—indeed, it is the ‘unlial’ boys who demonstrate the greatest loyalty (zhong) and benevolence (ren), usually to one another. Yet this deance comes at a cost. In each boy’s case, the disavowal of a behavioral code instilled from childhood onwards engenders deep trauma which, in its turn, makes emotional restitution impossible. Indeed, whichever way one looks at it, the discourse of neo-traditionalism in postwar Taiwan emerges as a destructive force in Cursed Sons, and Bai identies it again and again as the genesis of profound psychological disorder. For the boys of New Park, the trauma of family breakdown, the transgression of lial piety, and the pain of abandonment have become proof, not of the fraught dialectic between tradition and modernity that obtains in the society around them, but of their own irredeemable unworthiness. And in a predictable vicious circle, it is this self-hatred that prompts A-qing and his companions to spurn genuine overtures of love in favor of the patent dangers of life as rent-boys in the park. Inevitably, the boys are left demeaned by their work as prostitutes, and the search for surrogate loves quickly becomes overlaid with the same feelings of unworthiness that were provoked by the original loss of home and family. This endless cycle explains A-qing’s confusion and ight when Yu Hao, a prospective lover, unexpectedly treats him with affection: Of all the people that I’d encountered, Yu Hao was the most decent, the most lovable, and the easiest to talk to. But when he’d put his arm around my shoulder a moment ago, I felt an inexplicable shame, as if my body were infested with scabies that I could bear no-one to touch. I couldn’t tell him about those dark, black nights in the garrets of low-class inns behind the train station, or about the stinking public toilets at the China Market

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chapter three in Westgate, or about those men with blurred faces who had left their lth on my body.81

Caught in this circular and self-defeating movement, the boys have scant chance of turning their ersatz loves into an authentic reality. In the end, it is only the Confucian fathers—and, by implication, the state itself—who can break the cycle and open a path to reconciliation. This truth is shown by Fu Chongshan and the father of Wang Kuilong, both intractable authority gures who eventually show remorse for the severity with which they treated their sons. It is their renunciation of patriarchy for paternalism that opens up the possibility of a family—and, by extension, a nation—which can exist harmoniously in modernity.

Tokyo in apocalypse: Murakami Ryû’s Coin Locker Babies Murakami Ryû’s Koinrokka beibîzu (Coin Locker Babies), rst published in 1980, offers few such redemptive possibilities. The novel traces the parallel histories of Hashi and Kiku, two latter-day foundlings who are abandoned as newborn babies, not on the proverbial orphanage steps, but in the shoebox-sized metal coin lockers located in every railway station across Japan.82 The storyline of Coin Locker Babies is elaborate, and features an almost Dickensian range of oddball, oddly-named allegorical characters, as well as Grand Guignol effects, potted histories that spin off the main narrative, and a subtext of pointed social commentary.83 The novel opens in arresting style, with the rejection of Kiku by his natural mother, his entombment in a coin locker, and his eventual rebirth as a true son of the city. The focus then shifts to the orphanage in which the boys spend their early motherless years. Here they undergo psychiatric treatment designed to ease the anxiety they feel over this loss: they are fed a sleep-inducing drug, and then rest unconscious in a padded 81

Ibid., 327. Stephen Snyder has noted that Coin Locker Babies “is based on a series of actual incidents in which newborns and aborted fetuses were left in train station lockers around the country—a practice that briey became a ‘fad’ in the early 1970’s”. See Stephen Snyder, “Two Murakamis and Marcel Proust. Memory as Form in Contemporary Japanese Fiction”, in Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder (eds.), In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture (Boulder, Col., 1996), 77. 83 This diversity in character and plot is part of Murakami’s strategy to ‘write’ contemporary Japan. Indeed, Giorgio Amitrano claims that Murakami’s work spearheads a new genre of literature which is “syntonizing itself with the present”. See Giorgio Amitrano, The New Japanese Novel (Kyoto, 1996), 12. 82

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chamber, while the soothing sound of a mother’s heartbeat as it is heard by her unborn fetus is transmitted through invisible speakers. Later, the ‘brothers’ are adopted by an elderly couple and raised on a small island off the west coast of Kyushu until late adolescence, when one after the other they head back to Tokyo to track down and punish the mothers who abandoned them. Once in Tokyo, the boys each develop strange and alienating obsessions. Hashi, a successful musician, seeks to pin down and isolate the elusive soothing sound he heard in the padded chamber, whilst Kiku, an athlete, attempts to procure a supply of a deadly nerve agent called Datura, so that he can wipe out the metropolis which he holds responsible for the catastrophe of his birth. Interweaving these two narrative threads in alternate chapters, the novel builds up to a doomsday climax, in which Kiku annihilates Tokyo by releasing canisters of Datura into the atmosphere, whilst Hashi descends into violent sociopathy. The counter-cultural elements in this novel—and in many other Murakami writings, for that matter—have not gone unremarked. Ever since his debut novella Kagirinaku tômei ni chikai burû (Almost Transparent Blue, 1972), a tawdry account of basetown culture, Murakami has enjoyed shaking up the intellectual establishment with his preference for subject matter that is risqué, tasteless, and taboo. Indeed, it is this predilection for extremity that has led Fuse Hideto to label him, somewhat disparagingly, as a “writer of ‘sex and violence’ ” (“sei to bôryoku” no sakka).84 Stephen Snyder is more specic on the subject, and writes that: Murakami’s is a ction of what Jean Baudrillard calls “extreme phenomena” . . . and as such is positioned in opposition to the totalizing, accelerating (and, for Murakami, deadening) ow of everyday life in late-century Japan . . . His mission (to use a term seemingly inappropriate to Murakami’s authorial persona) . . . has been to confront a complacent Japanese collectivity with unsettling images of itself or what it can become—images drawn from the realm of marginalized or dangerous sexuality or alternative fantasy universes.85

This view of Murakami as a Baudrillardian critic of the blandishments of the ‘new middle-mass society’ (shin chûkan taishû shakai) is both 84 Fuse Hideto, “Dennô jidai no bungaku: Murakami Ryû no shôsetsu o megutte” (“Literature in the Computer Age. Towards a Reading of Murakami Ryû’s Fiction”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû 38/3 (1995), 49. 85 See Stephen Snyder, “Extreme Imagination: The Fiction of Murakami Ryû”, in Snyder and Gabriel, op. cit., 201–3.

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tenable and illuminating, particularly in relation to Coin Locker Babies. Yet Murakami’s literary shock tactics should not blind us to the fact that his confrontational energy is usually channeled towards social concerns that are very far from anarchic or ‘extreme’. On the contrary, a good many of his writings reveal Murakami to be a secret moralist who, although he may employ radical and subversive strategies in his ction, is at heart motivated by values that are surprisingly old-school.86 Interpretations of Murakami that stress his desire to épater les bourgeoisie, although instructive up to a point, run the risk of occluding this more basic bent.87 Even more than radicalism, it is social outrage that gives inner shape to many of Murakami’s writings, and it is on this aspect of his work that I focus here. Coin Locker Babies gives us Murakami’s baseline ‘moral’ message in unequivocal terms, and even the most stubbornly postmodern of readers cannot duck the writer’s horror at the beleaguered state of the family in late twentieth-century urban Japan. More specically, Coin Locker Babies marshals the metaphors of the city and sexuality in graphic fashion as master-tropes for representing a social world which, in Murakami’s eyes at least, has become actively and violently opposed to family life. Murakami’s textual encounters with the city are consistently lurid. From the opening scene in which the infant Kiku is interred in an anonymous coin locker to the novel’s gory climax, urban Japan is demonized as the destroyer of home and family, and images of Tokyo in this novel have a visual immediacy to them which is unusual even for toshi bungaku (urban literature). Themes of sexuality in Coin Locker Babies work in tandem with the urban metaphor to heighten this atmosphere of dystopia. Once again, sexuality seems to offer some form of emotional restitution 86 The less edifying side to Murakami’s ‘conservatism’ can be seen in his arguably racist depictions of African-Americans in Almost Transparent Blue. For a more detailed discussion, see John G. Russell, “Race and Reexivity. The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture”, in John Whittier Treat (ed.), Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, 35. 87 Relatedly, there seems to be a sense among certain key gures in the bundan that Murakami Ryû is a more ‘serious’ proposition than others in his literary peer group— most notably the much-maligned Haruki. In a recent taidan (dialogue) between Karatani Kôjin and Murakami Ryû, the former suggests the latter as a successor to Nakagami Kenji—an established bundan favorite—and refers disparagingly to Murakami Haruki’s hypocritical dependence on literary magazines (bungei zasshi) at the same time as applauding Ryû for his dislike of the practice. See Karatani and Murakami, “Taidan: Karatani Kôjin, Murakami Ryû kara Kyûba, eizu, rokujû nendai, eiga, bungei zasshi” (“Dialogue: Karatani Kôjin and Murakami Ryû on Cuba, AIDS, the sixties, lm, and literary magazines”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû 38/3 (1995), 6–25.

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to the foundling boys—particularly Hashi, who seeks out matronly surrogates for his birth-mother and eventually marries a woman twice his age. Yet as the novel progresses, desire turns increasingly alienating, degraded, and above all dangerous: in Murakami’s Tokyo, sex has become so entangled with violence that the two are no longer dissociable from one another, and virtually every erotic episode in the text is framed in a context of sadism or brutality. In conguring the city in Coin Locker Babies, Murakami gives himself a wide and theatrical remit. The metropolis is writ large throughout the novel, to the extent that it impinges forcefully on characterization, mood, and emplotment, and exerts a narrative presence equal to that of the novel’s main protagonists. The personication of the city is, of course, an established conceit of urban writing. Yet in certain passages of Coin Locker Babies, Murakami seems to invest Tokyo with attributes that transcend straight anthropomorphism to border on the supernatural—and this point emerges with particular vividness in descriptions of the city’s impact on the family. Typical here is the passage that describes Kiku’s reaction to the death of his beloved foster-mother Kazuyo shortly after he and she arrive in Tokyo for the rst time. Foster-mother and son have come up to the metropolis from Kyushu to hunt down the runaway Hashi, but within hours Kazuyo is inexplicably dead of fever, leaving Kiku alone in a Tokyo that is frighteningly alive: Sunlight made its way in through the chinks in the curtains, and the temperature of the room rose steadily. Concrete and glass sealed the room tight and Kiku was completely drenched in sweat. Outside, the roar of the power generator at the demolition site started up, and made the windows shudder. The crane swung its iron wrecking ball, and when its rst blow lodged itself in the wall of the building Kiku woke from troubled sleep with a scream . . . Looking round the room, he saw the white object lying next to him . . . He could not bear this sickening heat, he thought, as all of a sudden he became aware that he was boxed in and conned . . . He could hear the sound of concrete being smashed to pieces, whilst the street outside was warped by the sweltering summer heat, and the buildings gasped for air. Suddenly he felt that the muddy, melting streets were calling him, as a desolate city came oating up inside his head, one that stretched as far as the island with the abandoned mine [near the boys’ home]. But now it overlapped with the Tokyo outside his window which was panting in the morning heat, and this Tokyo was calling him, Kiku could hear its voice, crying “Destroy me, lay everything to waste”.88

88

Murakami Ryû, Koinrokka beibîzu, vol. 1 (Tokyo, 1984), 105–6.

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Juxtaposing the thuds of the wrecking ball with snapshots of Kazuyo’s corpse, this passage re-enacts the city’s ‘murder’ of family life, as Kazuyo, the only authentic maternal surrogate in the novel, is wiped out by the sweat and clamor of the metropolis.89 Suppressed memories of Kiku’s mid-summer ordeal in the coin locker re-surface, unbidden, at several points to underscore the message. The city itself occupies the subject position in this passage, acting as the active and animate agent of destruction, and transforming its citizens into actionless objects. More monumental than just Tokyo per se, it stretches “as far as the island”—a reference to the undifferentiated urban sprawl that surrounds the Shinkansen tracks from the capital to Kyushu—at the same time as forcibly implanting itself within Kiku’s imagination (“a desolate city oating up inside his head”). Murakami’s vision of the city as the destroyer of home and family finds its fullest and most spirited expression in “Chemical Island” ( yakujima), a sealed ghetto contaminated by poisonous waste and patrolled by armed sentries in protective suits. Here, the city’s marginalized congregate and make mayhem: First of all, convicts took advantage of the fact that the arm of the law did not stretch as far as Chemical Island. Then drifters from all over began to gather. Before long, the mentally ill were abandoned there; and as lowclass prostitutes, rent boys, criminals on the run, perverts, cripples and runaways turned up in droves, a strange society began to form.90

In some ways, a literary construct as self-consciously stylized as Chemical Island might seem more at home in sci- fantasy than regular ction; certainly, the random violence, toxic waste, criminal underbelly, commodied sex, and sinister mass media that already beset the real-life city are given a futuristic spin within this imaginary space. Yet Chemical Island is ultimately rooted in the here-and-now, and Murakami uses this image of the city in crisis to make some stark points about the consequences of Japan’s state-stewarded modernity. Indeed, when we consider that Coin Locker Babies was written in 1980, at the end of a decade marked by vocal citizens’ movements against pollution and other social ills, the textual role of Chemical Island as a barely camouaged critique 89 This suggestion of annihilation is mooted a few pages earlier when a hustler schools Kiku on life in the city: “Incredible, isn’t it, the energy of a big city—day after day you can feel it wearing down your mind and your body. It’s amazing; you get wiped out by the energy—yes, that’s the word, wiped out.” See ibid., 100. 90 Ibid., 68–9.

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of the state and its destructive infringements into the lives of the nation’s subjects becomes quite transparent. Most obviously, Chemical Island evokes by association the notorious Minamata pollution case, in which poor shing families from southern Kyushu were forced to seek redress from an unscrupulous state after suffering exposure to deadly industrial toxins.91 The physical and mental handicaps caused by the pollution made the plaintiffs untouchables in a society traditionally intolerant of such defects; and in many ways, Minamata came to symbolize the traumatic collision between modernity and the xed ways of the past. Murakami’s poisoned ghetto recreates a world in which Japan’s marginalized continue to suffer the toxic fall-out of aggressive modernization: poverty, pollution, social exclusion, and disease combine in his text to echo a case that questioned the very foundations of Japan’s postwar success. Perhaps the most poignant of all the images associated with the Minamata scandal were those of the children in whom chemical poisoning had produced incurable congenital deformities. And in just the same way, Murakami’s depictions of the disadvantaged children of Chemical Island carry deep resonance in his critique of Japan’s modernity and its impact on the family. Indeed, the symbol of the abused or abandoned child maintains a constant presence in this novel, both inside Chemical Island and beyond its walls. The novel’s very title brings the theme into play, and the opening scene, in which the maternal womb is replaced by a coin locker—perhaps the most mundane and bathetic symbol of Japan’s mechanized age—provides the seminal image of the text.92 Quite apart from the coin locker babies themselves, vignettes featuring maltreated children occur at frequent intervals in the text. In each of these small episodes—which, since they seldom advance the plot, are perhaps best glossed for their symbolic value—Murakami sets up a chain of culpability for the abuse of children. That sequence, although it might begin with parental neglect, points the nal nger of blame

91

For a discussion of Minamata, see Hidaka Rokuro, The Price of Afuence (Tokyo, 1984), 136–161. 92 Takeda Nobuaki presents a different view of imagery in the novel. Although he concedes that the motif of the coin locker—which evokes images of “conned space, birth or rebirth, nature and artice, and maternity”—is the key generative metaphor of the text, he argues that the “superior quality” (takuetsusei) of Coin Locker Babies lies in the range of subsidiary images that it deploys. See “Koinrokka beibîzu. Yawarakana hako no mure” (“Coin Locker Babies. A Pack of Soft Boxes”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû 38/3 (1995), 90–3.

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at the city, progress, and breakneck modernity. Not surprisingly, this theme of parental helplessness and the suffering child reaches its nadir in the passages which describe life on Chemical Island. In this ctional palimpsest of urban Japan, children are abused, murdered, or poisoned by industrial waste, and their victimhood occurs casually, as if it were fully naturalized within the urban landscape. In a typical scene, Hashi nds the stiff corpse of a new-born baby lying in the road, and is forced to bury it in a shoebox; whilst Kiku sees what is perhaps the same baby only minutes before its death: On the roof of the upper storey was a baby, crying its eyes out and poised to topple from the eaves . . . It was stark naked and could not walk or talk yet . . . A fat woman wearing only black underwear stuck her head out of a window, screeching “It’s my baby!” at the top of her voice. She tried to scoop the baby up with a buttery net . . . but eventually just slammed the window shut again.93

The unappeased ghosts of discarded children haunt the text, from the baby on the eaves (whose mother slams the window in a deliberate ashback to the slamming of the coin locker door) to Hashi and Kiku themselves. Both of them fantasize about murdering their mothers—and Kiku eventually succeeds in doing so. These allegorical tableaux of abandoned or abused children assume specic resonances in the context of Japanese culture, and the special sanctity that it accords to childhood and the mother-child bond. Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists from Ruth Benedict to Doi Takeo have spilt much ink on this subject; and Doi, in his famous study Amae no kôzô (The Anatomy of Dependence, 1971), goes so far as to posit infantilism and maternal dependence as the psychological underpinnings of Japanese society.94 Within this general framework, infants and toddlers have predictable pride of place—hence the absolute pampering of preschoolers, and the popularity of proverbs such as ‘the soul of a threeyear old endures till a hundred’ (mitsugo no tamashii hyaku made). Whilst one might take exception to at least some of Doi’s ndings, the cult of the child in Japan can scarcely be gainsaid, and it assumes a prominent position in a wide variety of public and private discourses. Most obviously, the sacralized space occupied by children in the Japanese cultural 93

Murakami, Koinrokka beibîzu, vol. 1, 132–3. See Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture (London and Henley, 1967), 177–208; and Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo, 1971). 94

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imaginary has been decisive in the formation of both gender and family ideologies—and as such, it has proved patently useful to the state in its drive to create domestic units grounded in notions of procreativity, mai hômu (my home-ism), and social conformism. Murakami Ryû’s depiction of forsaken children—and, still more pertinently, forsaken babies—jibes plangently at these socio-cultural norms. Paternal gures are, of course, unnamed and missing throughout, in an amplied echo of the absentee father syndrome referred to earlier. Mothers fare still worse. Provocative images of maternal cruelty and dereliction are repeated almost to the point of excess in Coin Locker Babies, and they allow Murakami to express dissent at state ideologuing in an idiom that strikes at the heart of longcherished Japanese perceptions about the family.95 Murakami extends this critique through his exploration of sexual themes in Coin Locker Babies, and in particular through the character of Hashi. Initially, at least, sexuality seems to promise Hashi recompense for loss and an escape from the city. Yet as the narrative unfolds, his quest for a surrogate, far from leading him out of dystopia, simply draws him deeper into it. Hashi begins his search for a substitute mother and home early on in life. While still at the orphanage, he invents a game called “house” (mamagoto): He would arrange a toy plastic dinner set, toy pots and frying pans, a toy washing machine and a toy refrigerator on the oor in an orderly fashion. This method of arrangement . . . created the very model of an efcient kitchen . . . but when the positioning of the miniature pieces of furniture and the miniature tableware was complete, Hashi would on no

95 Anne Allison examines the prevalence of subverted motherhood as a cultural theme in contemporary Japan in “Transgressions of the Everyday: Stories of MotherSon Incest in Japanese Popular Culture”, positions 2/3 (1994), 467–99. Citing Murakami’s novel and the real history behind it as key case studies, she argues that these ‘media myths’ display anxiety over the almost exclusive control over child-rearing that is assigned to mothers in Japanese society. Another remarkable example of this theme in Japanese ction is Yoshiyuki Junnosuke’s The Dark Room. Orphanhood, abortion, techniques of infanticide (including the brutal tsubushi), and cruelty to children form the subtext of this novel; and one of the protagonists actually professes to enjoying abortion as a means of birth control. As she puts it, “I really like conceiving a child and then getting the doctor to drag it out of me”. See Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, Anshitsu (The Dark Room) (Tokyo, 1994), 103. In many ways, the novel recalls the work of the female writer Kôno Taeko, for whom the rejection of motherhood is a well-nigh obsessive theme. Texts such as “Yôji-gari” (“Toddler-hunting”, 1961) and “Ari takaru” (“Ants Swarm”, 1964) describe female protagonists with unconventional domestic arrangements, a taste for violent sex, and a pathological aversion to bosei. Needless to say, Kôno’s work has a powerful feminist thrust, and there is self-evidently a case for viewing her work as a subversive protest against the strict social codes which still govern Japanese women’s lives.

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chapter three account tolerate any alteration to it. If anybody changed the arrangement or knocked it over by mistake, Hashi would y into a violent rage . . . At night he slept next to the model kitchen, and in the morning as soon as he woke up he would check to see that everything was in order. For a while he would gaze at the model happily, but before long his expression would change to one of uncontrollable displeasure. Then, all of a sudden . . . he would smash the kitchen to pieces.96

The game of “house” consumes Hashi’s energy and imagination, but the scars left by the coin locker run too deep for him to be able to turn this plastic simulation into a reality that lasts longer than a few hours. An identical pattern of create-and-destroy characterizes the young Hashi’s indiscriminate searches for a replacement mother; as he tells Kiku, . . . when I see some poor old lady, I want to throw my arms around her and call her Mummy. But if it really was my mother, I’d probably kill her instead.97

These early compulsions form the template for Hashi’s marriage to Neva, a blatant maternal substitute who is at least twenty years his senior. The two meet when Neva, a fashion stylist, is assigned by Hashi’s manager to supervise the outward details of his transformation from orphan to popstar. Rather than physical attraction—his previous sexual experiences have been exclusively homoerotic—it is Neva’s skills as an attentive nursemaid, efcient manager, and maternal placebo that draw Hashi to her. The directness with which Murakami describes this interplay of sexuality, motherly solicitation, and Hashi’s desire for amae (to borrow Doi’s terminology) adds a subtext of incest to the marriage, thereby allowing Murakami to deconstruct the mother-child relation from another outlawed perspective. This subtext moves to the surface when Hashi’s attention begins to shift from his wife to the hordes of middle-aged women who ock to hear his music: Hashi was sitting on a sofa, surrounded by three middle-aged women. The wrinkled grooves of their faces were clogged with white powder . . . Hashi wondered why it didn’t bother him to be surrounded by these women, all well into middle age, who were pawing at his body to their heart’s content . . . He had already slept with three different women behind Neva’s back. All three had been the same age as his wife . . .98

96 97 98

Murakami, Koinrokka beibîzu, vol. 1, 11. Ibid., 35. Murakami, Koinrokka beibîzu, vol. 2, 85–9.

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Desire is irrelevant here, and all these older women are merely approximate simulacra for the real object of Hashi’s search—the sound of the in utero heartbeat which constitutes his only tie to the lost mother. Until the novel’s last scene, when Hashi is nally able to pin down the fugitive sound, his quasi-incestuous encounters with older women provide the physical sensation most akin to the enclosing security of the padded chamber and its soothing maternal heartbeat: What he liked about the quivering soft skin of older women was its reassuring quality. He didn’t quite know why, but it was calming, and reminded him of that soft room . . . and it always had to be in a soft room that he could hear that sound, a soft room made from the ample esh of a naked woman’s inner thighs. . . .99

When Neva tells Hashi that she is pregnant, his obsession with tracking down the elusive sound begins to turn to madness. Obscurely aware of the connection between pregnancy and the soothing beat, Hashi conceives the idea that only by killing Neva and her unborn child will he be able to recapture the sound and the sense of wellbeing that it imparts. In this way, the pattern of destruction traced in the text comes full circle, as Hashi nds himself drawn ineluctably back to the violence that surrounded his own birth. As the novel nears its conclusion, the search for a surrogate loses all conciliatory meaning, and culminates in a scene in which Hashi stabs Neva, slashes his wrists and is nally committed to an asylum. Almost simultaneously, Kiku releases the canisters of Datura into the atmosphere above Tokyo, and in the holocaust that follows, Hashi makes his escape from the institution. Wandering through the ruins of the city, he encounters a heavily pregnant woman, and just as he is poised to kill her—the nerve gas induces a murderous rage before the onset of death—he hears the sound of the elusive heartbeat. Hallucinating, he travels into the esh and blood of the woman’s body to confront the sound—and, by implication, his mother—before nally releasing her and disappearing into the wasteland of Tokyo. As should be clear from the above, the novel’s nale is so bloody and eschatological as to be almost tongue-in-cheek—although the sarin gas attacks of March, 1995 showed Murakami to have been stunningly prescient. Yet despite their stylized excess, the last few pages of Coin Locker Babies provide a proper climax to the critique of modernity and the family that Murakami has developed throughout the text. The metaphors 99

Ibid., 91–2.

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of the city (now in ruins), sexual surrogacy (now turned sociopathic), and the beleaguered child (now once again in utero and in mortal danger) combine with timely symmetry to create an apocalypse that loses none of its impact from being kitsch and overblown. Throughout the novel, Murakami has stretched metaphor to the limit of its capacities, and the concluding pages provide both an apotheosis and a resolution of the tensions that this narrative design has created. Of course, Hashi’s decision to release the pregnant woman suggests a point of exit from the vicious circle of death and simulation, but as Snyder, for one, has noted, this escape route is “predicated on DATURA, on the destruction of Japanese society itself ”.100 In the end, the success of the novel’s conclusion lies in the reader’s sense that Murakami uses his extreme metaphors to intimate that Tokyo’s day of reckoning has, in fact, already arrived, and that the real apocalypse—in his mind at least—is the urban world as it is now.

A fake fairytale of the consumer family: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto The nal text examined here is Banana Yoshimoto’s novella Kitchen. As beloved by millions of readers as it is reviled by many in the bundan, Kitchen’s combination of contemporaneity, nostalgia, and unabashed schmaltz clearly captured something in the ambient mood of late eighties Japan, where huge sales and media hype turned its author into an overnight publishing sensation. Critical hostility has been almost as intense,101 and at rst glance it is easy to see why. Kitchen is imsily plotted, its female I-narrator chats to her audience in the unmodied tones of a co-ed,102 and there is a mawkish feel to the whole that is almost entirely

100

Stephen Snyder, “Two Murakamis and Marcel Proust”, 79. The sense of gall that many establishment writers feel at Yoshimoto’s success is doubtless intensied by the fact that she is the daughter of the prominent leftist intellectual Yoshimoto Takaaki. Some see Yoshimoto junior’s unabashedly popular oeuvre as a betrayal of her ‘serious’ birthright, whilst the condemnation of others seems to be colored by their dislike of the extreme stances periodically adopted by Yoshimoto senior. See Ann Sherif, “Japanese Without Apology: Yoshimoto Banana and Healing”, in Snyder and Gabriel, op. cit., 284–5. 102 As with Murakami Haruki (see p. 265 below), there appears to be a need amongst the critical community to explain—if not justify—the simple readability which is such a feature of Yoshimoto’s work. Hirata Toshiko, for example, praises the fact that Yoshimoto’s stories eschew “pointless detours” and can be read in one sitting, thus allowing the reader an easy “sense of achievement”. There is something rather arch about 101

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unleavened by irony or self-awareness. There are, however, other ways of reading this text. Indeed, its remarkable impact, both in Japan and abroad, remains quite mystifying so long as we persist in locating Kitchen solely in the matrix of the popular and the tame. Kitchen professes to be about overcoming family loss and dysfunction, and it explores its oldschool theme of optimism in despair through daring motifs of gendercrossing, alternative lifestyles, and the post-nuclear family. In the most obvious sense, readers across the globe have responded to this clever blend of old and new, and to the way in which the heroine seems to prevail over a plastic postmodern world in which all sureties have disappeared from view. Yet, as I shall argue here, one can also read Kitchen as something of a parody—though possibly an inadvertent one—of the triumph of romantic love over family breakdown. And even if the parody is unintended, which on balance seems unlikely, it remains true that Kitchen’s success as a piece of ction stems from the duality of estranging otherness and sugary optimism that Yoshimoto’s fable manages to generate. The heroine of the novella is Mikage, an orphan whose family members have vanished one by one, leaving her adrift in a Tokyo that Yoshimoto describes as vast, atomizing, and impersonal. As Mikage herself puts it (in what may or may not be a deliberately surrealist echo of the rst line of L’Etranger): My grandmother died the other day. It came as quite a shock. My family, once so real, had decreased one by one with the passage of time, and when it suddenly struck me that I was here alone, everything before my eyes began to look like falsehood . . . It was just like science ction. The darkness of the cosmos.103

Soon afterwards, a college student and vague acquaintance of Mikage’s grandmother named Tanabe Yûichi takes pity on the heroine and invites her to live with him and his mother Eriko, a transsexual nightclub hostess. In Eriko and Yûichi, Mikage acquires a surrogate mother/ father and brother, and for the next few months the three live together as an idyllic post-nuclear family. In Book Two, however, Eriko is murdered by a crazed stalker, and Yûichi, too, is left orphaned in the city. Hirata’s rejection of “difculty” as a hallmark of literary worth; yet her assertion is no more tendentious than the opposite view, which would reject Yoshimoto out of hand because her ction is too “easy”. See Hirata, “Ôzappa ni mita Yoshimoto Banana” (“An Overview of Yoshimoto Banana”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû, 39/3 (Special issue devoted to Yoshimoto Banana) (1994), 114. 103 Yoshimoto Banana, Kitchin (Tokyo, 1991), 7.

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The remainder of the novel traces the faltering process whereby Mikage and Yûichi transform their surrogate sibling bond into a relationship of sexual love; and the novella ends with Mikage rescuing Yûichi from grief and alienation in much the same way as he saved her from this fate at the beginning of the story. At rst sight, then, Kitchen appears to buck the dominant trend of the other writings discussed in this chapter, in which the twin tropes of the city and sexuality are used to communicate the destructive impact of modernity on the family in a cyclical pattern of loss and surrogacy.104 The familiar metaphors are, of course, more than evident in Yoshimoto’s text—the novel’s very premise is the role played by emotional simulacra in post-familial urban society; and if anything, Kitchen explores its theme of surrogacy with an unprecedented intensity of focus. The critical difference between Kitchen and its East Asian predecessors lies in the way that Yoshimoto’s novella appears to resolve the vicious circles of loss found in these other texts into a pattern of healing and regeneration.105 In her debut piece, Yoshimoto seems to present sexual love as an antidote to the ravages of modernity, and in so doing gives us a happy ending that would be highly malapropos in any ‘serious’ literary text about the postwar epoch. Overall, a sense of grievance is missing here; and as a result, the counter-cultural protest that keeps the work of Wang Wenxing, Bai Xianyong, and Murakami Ryû darkly meaningful—in the eyes of critics at least—is dissolved into sentimentality in Yoshimoto’s world. This, without doubt, is the most obviously exasperating aspect of the text. Kitchen dabbles in classic modernist traumas such as urban alienation and the loss of affect only to double-cross the reader with solutions that are at best arch, and at worst embarrassingly trite. In 104 Yoshimoto herself seems to corroborate this point when she writes elsewhere— with surely disingenuous naïveté—that years of peace have lessened human suffering and made the sustenance offered by family increasingly unnecessary. See Yoshimoto, Painappurin (Pineapple Pudding) (Tokyo, 1992), 38. 105 This, at least, is the view espoused by several commentators. Yonaha Keiko, for example, writes that the prevailing pattern in Yoshimoto’s work explores a “narrator or protagonist who encounters the misfortune of the death of a blood relative or the divorce of (her) parents, and becomes the victim of bodily abnormalities such as anorexia, sleeping sickness, aphasia, sleepwalking, or cognitive disorder”. This abnormality threatens to engulf the protagonist, until she is brought back to the world of the living by another character who has either undergone a similar experience, or shares a similar kind of sensibility (kansei). See Yonaha, “Shintaisei to gensô. Amurita o chûshin ni” (“Physicality and Illusion. An Analysis Centered on Amrita”), Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû, 39/3 (1994), 123. Ann Sherif adopts a similarly optimistic stance, and argues that Yoshimoto offers a welcome palliative to the “dystopic visions” that preoccupy many others in the bundan. See Sherif, op. cit., 299.

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other words, to suggest that this novella has any kind of oppositionalist import is to court the ire of heavyweight critics such as Masao Miyoshi, who dismisses Yoshimoto’s ction as little more than “baby-talk”.106 Yet as I have already suggested, the key to Kitchen and how it might perhaps be ‘read’, both as a text and as an international bestseller, lies in how seriously we choose to take its saccharine solutions to the problems of the (post)modern. Indeed, a closer reading of the text reveals discordance within the romantic theme, and the dénouement, when it nally arrives, creates at least as many tensions as it resolves. Overall, these counter-indicators suggest that it might be more instructive to read the novella’s amor vincit omnia conclusion not as the schmaltzy feel-good ending that it rst appears, but as a subtle gesture of critique. Put simply, it is not love and companionship that Mikage and the other dramatis personae posit as the panacea for family breakdown so much as commodity culture—and, in particular, the paraphernalia we associate with kitchens. Commodities rule in Kitchen, from the opening scene in which Mikage describes her passion for well-appointed kitchens to the conclusion, where she woos Yûichi with a dish of takeaway (and emphatically not home-made) katsudon. A shared passion for image, surface, and materiality is what brings the couple together, and their ‘romance’ is less a salvational sexual bond between two bereft orphans than a meeting of sophisticated consumer minds. Their relationship with each other, and with Eriko for that matter, is mediated not through the traditional channels of love and desire, but via the more dubious consolations of material objects. Sofas, potato peelers, juicers, and fountain pens form their language of choice; and whether Yoshimoto intends it or not, the dominance enjoyed by commodities in her text transforms this seemingly innocuous tale of teen romance and emotional rehabilitation into quite a mordant satire of contemporary Japanese life. At the same time, of course, there can be little question that this critique looks bland when set against the committed anti-authoritarianism of writers such as Wang, Bai, and Murakami. Kitchen is devoid of overt political consciousness, let alone the radical animus that res these other writers. In fact, it would be impossible even to x the story in either social place or political time were it not for Yoshimoto’s plentiful references to Japanese food and up-to-the-minute consumer durables. And it is equally true that the reader of Kitchen will look in vain for Murakami-

106

Miyoshi, op. cit., 236.

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style denunciations of the role played by the Japanese establishment in dismantling old kinship structures and in making the city a grim and inescapable reality for most of its citizens. Yet in many ways, Yoshimoto’s post-familial, commodity-driven world speaks for itself. Mikage and Yûichi, with their passion for objects rather than each other, stand as eloquent symbols of the defective nature of growth and progress in the years since 1960. The pair live in a society in which market forces have been pushed to their logical conclusion, and for Mikage and Yûichi, life, death, and love can only be experienced in their consumer manifestations. In this sense, Yoshimoto’s novella becomes a critique of the Frankenstein commodied world spawned by years of aggressive state-sponsored economism, and this subtext is all the more effective for being packaged in so disingenuously sentimental an exterior. Stripped of its comforting commodities, the ‘real world’ of Kitchen is bleak and lonely. Not surprisingly, this real world denotes contemporary Tokyo, which is described in understated but resonant terms. Urban images in Kitchen mirror those of the other narratives explored in this chapter: once again, the city is opposed to intimacy, communality, and the health of family, and it operates as a subtle metonym for human suffering throughout the text. In Yoshimoto’s Tokyo, kith and kin die pointlessly, inexplicably, and in large numbers. The deaths of no less than six close relatives are recounted in the text, and these family ghosts outnumber the living by a ratio of more than two to one. Siblings are non-existent, as is the notion of extended kin. In the case of Eriko’s murder, the city plays a clear role in this gradual decimating process: transsexual nightclubs, stalking, and random killing are all, in their very different ways, aspects of contemporary urban life, where freedom and anomie can collide with violent results, and where those who engage in what Mikage delicately refers to as “night-time work” (otsutome ga yoru no mono)107 are particularly vulnerable. More signicant, however, are the many other bereavements that are utterly central to the story, but are discussed in a manner so matter-of-fact that this in itself becomes a point of curiosity. Most of these deaths are given no explanation whatsoever, despite their impact, and Mikage and Yûichi accept them with a quiet passivity which implies that, in the end, no explanation is necessary. The Tokyo of the text is a black hole for family life, into which mothers and fathers disappear quite routinely, and where those

107

Yoshimoto, Kitchin, 17.

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left behind can merely gaze into what Mikage herself calls “the darkness of the cosmos”. Indeed, the theme of bereavement occurs so insistently, and at the same time so mysteriously, within this text that it begins to assume the lineaments of a symbol. The import of the symbol is fairly unambiguous, and it seems clear that the disappearance of parents, grandparents, siblings, and wider kin that takes place in Kitchen is a metaphoric representation of what some have called the death of the family in urban Japan post-1960. This sense of the modern city as terminal to family life becomes more distinct when we examine the textual twinning of urban images with experiences of bereavement, loss, and isolation in the novella. Yoshimoto’s vision of Tokyo is, of course, a far cry from that of Murakami Ryû. The city as a descriptive metaphor in Kitchen plays a relatively subdued role: rather than a living, breathing presence which intrudes violently on the narrative action, Tokyo in this later text is a backdrop, providing local color of a more specically psychological kind. The city in Kitchen is usually imagined in panorama, watched by Mikage from her elevated vantage point in the Tanabe apartment, but seldom explored close-up. As Deborah Epstein Nord has noted, panoramic views of the city in pre-modern ction often suggest the protagonist’s mastery over the streets beneath, just as the labyrinthine eye-level representations of twentieth-century prose mirror the many disorientations of modernity.108 In Kitchen, urban vistas re-emerge, not as a sign of control this time, but as a representation of the chill and distant character of the city, and its implication in the loss of warmth and traditional domesticity. In Kitchen, these panoramas accompany the experience of family loss in a recurrent pattern. As Mikage says to Yûichi: “Somehow, there’s always death everywhere around us. My parents, my grandfather, my grandmother . . . your birth mother, and now Eriko . . .” . . . I turned and gazed out of the window at the beauty of the glimmering night scene. Looking down from high above, the city was fringed with specks of light, and the lines of cars were a shining river that owed through the night. “Well, I’ve become an orphan”, said Yûichi.109

A similar passage occurs earlier in the novella, when Mikage reects on the death of her grandmother: 108 See Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets. Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca and London, 1995), 25. 109 Yoshimoto, Kitchin, 79.

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chapter three I caught sight of myself reected in the large window through which the rain-veiled night-scene blurred into blackness. There was no-one in this world to whom I was tied by blood, and I could go anywhere, do anything.110

In both these passages, the experience of bereavement is linked metaphysically to the surrounding metropolis at night, and Mikage looks to the city for an explanation of her family tragedy as if she holds it responsible. Yet Mikage’s gaze merely reveals the city to be remote and unconcerned: Tokyo ows on regardless whilst she and Yûichi alone are stranded in time. The city, the concentrated mass of humanity below them, is all the while carefully depersonalized (“points of light” [hikari no tsubu], “lines of cars” [kuruma no retsu], “gleaming river” [hikari no kawa]), with the result that their sense of isolation is redoubled by the familiar paradox of the atomizing crowd. This notion that Mikage, Yûichi, and their high-rise apartment are marooned in the city combines with images of exclusion and emotional segregation: throughout the text, Tokyo is an entity that Mikage observes from the outside in, and Yoshimoto often depicts her watching the apparent normality of other peoples’ lives. It is within this context of urban estrangement that Mikage and Yûichi form their surrogate bond. Almost in the manner of a secret society, the pair ‘recognize’ each other as fellow-victims of loss, and in a gesture more suited to the romanticized furusato of tourism campaigns than contemporary Tokyo, Yûichi invites Mikage—who is virtually a stranger—to move in with him and his mother. The three form a confederacy of the walking wounded, and their kitchen becomes both an oasis of comfort and a signier of their disconnection from more mainstream modes of familialism and sociality. At rst sight, the mock-up version of family life that they and Eriko create in the Tanabe kitchen looks to be a blissful exemplar of the post-nuclear family: everything from gender to the division of labor is uid and exible, patriarchal authority has vanished, and family life proceeds in an atmosphere of mutually respectful laissez-faire. When contrasted with the stereotypical Japanese family as described earlier in this chapter, their household emerges as an idyll of new-age peaceability. Absentee fathers, obsessive maternalism, teenagers locked in exam hell, and the many thorny issues that plague Japan’s rapidly ageing society have, of course, no place here, but neither do timeless problems such as generational strife, sibling

110

Ibid., 15–16.

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rivalry, and all forms of domestic cruelty. Indeed, despite the nostalgic refrain that repeats itself continuously throughout the story, Mikage’s acquired family is more utopian than it is reminiscent of any known past. The death of the nuclear family, Kitchen seems to suggest, is a terrible but liberating sorrow. Through it, the subject can transcend conformity, attain personal enlightenment, and—most important of all—form allegiances based on taste and compatibility rather than the pot-luck of biological birthright. Neither a sense of loss, nor the city with which it is intertwined, can trouble Mikage and Yûichi once they are ensconced as siblings/lovers in their beloved kitchen—as the conclusion promises us they will be. In this same vein, John Whittier Treat has noted that “The ideal family in Banana’s stories . . . is never a genetic given but instead a willed construct”; it is “contingent, provisional, and temporary”, and thereby “suggests a nascent critique of how processes of identication and differentiation may operate throughout a range of contemporary human communities”.111 This point captures what is subversive, possibly even oppositional, about Yoshimoto’s much-maligned novella. That there should be life and love after the nuclear family is a clear affront to modernist sensibilities. After all, any such assumption lets the capitalist machine off the hook for all the damage that the telos of progress has wrought, at the same time as implying—just as vexingly—that the pursuit of modernity has, on the contrary, created familial formations far more pleasurable and communal in their essence than anything that came before. Yet even whilst it purports to rejoice in them, the point of Kitchen is the way in which it simultaneously problematizes these newstyle philosophies of family. A “willed construct”, “contingent, provisional, and temporary”—this description of the Banana family reminds us of nothing more than the very ethos of consumption, which legitimizes limitless desire, operates on a system of fashion and disposability, and has no moral grounding. The only real end-point for this avenue of logic is the notion of family as commodity, a kind of pick-and-mix affair that has a shelf-life like any other consumer item on the market. This, indeed, is Yoshimoto’s alternative modernity, a social world in which the time-honored concept of kin—the home of lineage, permanence, rootedness, belonging, and emotional continuity—has died and been reborn as an innitely interchangeable simulation of its former self. 111 John Whittier Treat, “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shôjo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject”, Journal of Japanese Studies 19/2 (1993), 373–4.

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The consumer character of this ersatz family reveals itself the moment the reader steps inside the Tanabe kitchen, which, as should be clear by now, is the pre-eminent signier of home in the text. When Mikage rst arrives, she is still undecided as to Yûichi’s offer of shelter; and intuiting her uncertainty, the latter shrewdly invites her to tour the kitchen: The mat laid over the wooden oorboards felt pleasant to the touch, and the slippers Yûichi wore were good quality; a necessary minimum of wellused kitchen implements were arranged just so. There was also a Silverstone frying pan and a German-made potato peeler . . . Lit up by a small uorescent light, tableware and sparkling glass reverently waited their turn. At rst glance the kitchen looked in utter disarray, but everything was of singularly good quality. There were special things, too, like porcelain bowls, gratin dishes, huge salvers, and a pair of beer jugs . . . I looked around, nodding my assent. It was a good kitchen. I fell in love with it at rst sight.112

This passage requires little glossing, since it tells its own story eloquently enough. What is going on here, in blunt terms, is a compatibility test between two potential ‘family’ members/lovers, in which afnity is assessed not through the medium of interpersonal exchange, but via the impersonal language of consumer choice. Yet this is by no means a mere evaluation of wealth and spending power. On the contrary, what Mikage is searching for—and what she duly nds—are the material signiers of lifestyle, cosmopolitanism, and savoir faire: the Tanabe kitchen is a judicious blend of taste and earthiness, and it is precisely this admixture that entrances her.113 After all, it is an elusive ideal. If the exquisite utensils sat unused and immaculate, or if the plates were not expectantly “awaiting their turn” (shinto deban o matsu) because of regular use, then the illusion of authentic homeliness that is striven for here would ultimately fail. The process of reication detailed here extends beyond family to encompass human relations more generally within the simulational world of Kitchen. Yûichi’s former girlfriend, in despair at his remoteness, claims that “he can only like a girl as much as he likes a fountain pen”.114 Mikage sees no point in refuting this, and

112

Yoshimoto, Kitchin, 14–15. As Treat puts it in another article on Yoshimoto, “the dense tableau of colors and shapes (in the kitchen Mikage loves) is the late twentieth-century update of the classic Dutch still-life . . . a luxurious ‘home’ that reeks with nostalgia for the family and its oldfashioned comforts”. See Treat, “Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen, or the Cultural Logic of Japanese Consumerism”, in Skov and Moeran, op. cit., 280. 114 Yoshimoto, Kitchen, 45–6. 113

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remarks simply that, “The quality and importance of a fountain pen were completely different to him than what they were to her”.115 There are no ironical undertones here, let alone concern over Yûichi’s utter emotional absence—just a sincere understanding of the solemnity with which material objects can be invested. In fact, neither ‘brother’ nor ‘sister’ seem capable of relating to those outside their home, and are often described by their peers as “weird” (kawatteru), “coolly indifferent” (suzushii), or “cold” (tsumetai). This leads us to perhaps the most revealing aspect of the critique hidden within Kitchen. Marketed worldwide as a contemporary love story, the novella describes two beautiful long-limbed (nagai teashi o motta) adolescent orphans who co-habit in a household where, sexually speaking, anything goes. Yet Kitchen is remarkable for its rejection of eroticism as a theme. In one sense, this narrative choice allows the novella to maintain its all-important air of cuteness, which emerges all the more effectively for Yoshimoto’s artfully blasé treatment of transsexuality. Yet in another sense, the erotic world is just as degraded here as it is in the work of Murakami Ryû, Nakagami Kenji, and Ôe Kenzaburô, where cold or brutal sex scenes are the norm.116 It is hardly counts as a shattering insight to observe that libidinous energy has been diverted into the pursuit of commodities in this text. Yet given that Kitchen presents itself as an account of the restitutive powers of heterosexual love, it is an ironic step to portray Mikage and Yûichi as so in thrall to consumerism that they become not just androgynously the same, but more or less asexual too. This, perhaps, is the key to Kitchen’s success as a piece of ction. What strikes the reader at rst glance as a syrupy romance is on closer inspection revealed to be a rather soulless account of ‘family’, ‘love’, and ‘sex’ as experienced by emotional automata. Indeed, it is precisely this jarring of effects that lifts Kitchen some way above the category of the blandly popular to which Miyoshi et al. would like to consign it.

115

Ibid., 46. For an analysis of the interplay of violence and sexuality in Nakagami’s work, see Livia Monnet, “Ghostly Women, Displaced Femininities and Male Family Romances: Violence, Gender and Sexuality in Two Texts by Nakagami Kenji”, Japan Forum 8/1 (1996), 13–34. 116

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This chapter has explored the textual strategies that some key Japanese and Taiwanese writers deploy to register their protest at the changes that state-stewarded modernity has wrought on the family nexus. Each of the texts analyzed here is heavily freighted with counter-cultural critique, and the ideologies of harmony, cohesion, and cooperation that shape the dominant discourse are upended in these narratives of unhomeliness. Indeed, writers from both societies seem so intent on limning a social world emptied of meaningful emotional content that they depict family change in terms of irreparable breakdown, and take little heed of counter-intuitive ndings in the process. To some extent, of course, this jaundiced view extends beyond the literary realm, and belongs to a more generalized postwar Weltschmerz. As the sociologist Ochiai Emiko has noted of Japanese society, “a vague sense that the family is in crisis has . . . existed throughout the postwar period, more as a kind of unconscious mood than as a conclusion based on solid data.117 The texts examined here do more than simply purvey the Zeitgeist, however. Their dystopian imaginings of the family have an almost doomsday quality to them; and in a heightened reworking of reality, they conceptualize kinship change in terms of severe social pathology, re-writing the socio-demographic transformations cited at the beginning of this chapter in the language of trauma and dysfunction. Thus the weakening of extended kin networks and the growth of nuclear families becomes the wholesale atomization of family units; the waning of family authority is translated into an aggressive renunciation of lial piety; the ‘thinning’ of familial intimacy as individuals expand their social repertoire transmutes itself into alienation; late marriage is replaced by lifelong singleness; divorce and the rise of single-parenthood become an epidemic of fractured families; and declining fertility is transformed into the abandonment and abuse of children. Once again, in other words, ‘reality’ exists at a high pitch in these texts; and, moreover, it nds its expression in writings that strain persistently at the connes of the realist form. In Wang Wenxing’s “Mother”, the

117 Ochiai Emiko, op. cit., 4. John F. Copper makes a related point about Taiwan when he observes that “although Taiwan’s social problems are less serious than those in the modern Western democracies, they seem to be worse because they have appeared so suddenly”. See Copper, Taiwan. Nation State or Province? (Boulder, Col., 1999), 86.

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sudden slide into embattled stream-of-consciousness re-creates the fragile nature of modernity, and suggests the process whereby the machines of progress (the factory) build themselves on the fractured ruins of self and family. Shifting narrative perspectives, each at dramatic odds with one another—the impersonal omniscience of the opening segment, the rst-person hysteria of the middle section, and the narrated thirdperson Bildungsroman of the nale—reinforce this sense of rupture and distance. Cursed Sons, by contrast, is perhaps the most ostensibly realist of the narratives explored here; yet even this relative realism does little to mitigate the radical status of the text. Taiwan’s rst gay novel, it ‘outs’ a hidden world, impeaching what Robert P. Weller has termed the “paternal moralism” of Taiwanese society, and compelling that society to confront its own alterity. Moreover, the text’s apparent ‘realism’ oats deceptively on the surface of deep symbolic structures, which endow Bai Xianyong’s core themes of passion, rebellion, and banishment with signicatory potential beyond that vouchsafed by the conventional realist mode. Coin Locker Babies, meanwhile, is at once kitsch satire, futuristic sci- adventure, and Zola-esque social history—all to the accompaniment of crisp urban dialogue and a pacy narrative momentum. Throughout, Murakami uses this genre-crossing style to suggest that anarchy and danger lie beneath the surface of the nation’s success, whilst the nale stages an almost cinematic Armageddon to state more baldly that the bland quotidian world of 1980’s urban Japan contains the seeds of disaster. Finally, in Kitchen, Yoshimoto Banana promises hope, healing, and fairytale romance in a format we might dub the ctionalized selfhelp book—only to produce a surprisingly hard-edged text that ends up mocking its own sentimentality in unexpected ways. Indeed, rather than revealing her protagonists as three-dimensional, angst-ridden personalities—as diehards such as Masao Miyoshi would doubtless prefer—Yoshimoto takes the joke still further by presenting them as expert consumers who negotiate their way around Japan’s postmodernity with cold panache. Realist elements are present in abundance throughout the text: indeed, John Whittier Treat has likened Yoshimoto’s domestic tableaux to the masterworks of Dutch realism. Yet rather than reassuring audiences that all is for the best in the best possible of worlds as Vermeer, Hals, and Steen do with their jugs of milk, loaves of bread, and hearthside dogs, Kitchen uses mimesis to record a world in which the paraphernalia of daily life has become an index of immorality, a visual and tangible sign of the reication of contemporary Japanese life.

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Naturally, these disparate texts are more modulated in character than they are monolithic, and each bears distinctive cultural imprints. Thus liality, or the transgression thereof, is a particular preoccupation for Bai Xianyong in neo-Confucianist Taiwan, just as Murakami Ryû anchors his novel in the Japan around him, from its premise (the real-life ‘fad’ for leaving newborns in coin lockers) to the still searing memories of Minamata. Yet these markers of difference take their place within an overall representational schema that remains remarkably constant across the cultural divide. The death of the family and its half-hearted rebirth through forms of afliation is a fear shared by all these writers, and each turns to the tropes of the city and sexuality to give this fear artistic form. Still more pertinently, every narrative considered here builds its schema around a singular shared motif that encapsulates the overriding message of family life in extremis: the victim child. Orphanhood, infanticide, child abuse, incest, banishment, and desertion form the core subject matter of these texts, and the juxtaposition of helpless innocence with the “harlotized metropolis” throws the theme into even sharper relief. More ‘conventional’ forms of family strife—divorce, inlaws, and the aged—are rejected as tame and meaningless in this ctional discourse, and scarcely register. These latter are, after all, socially legitimate forms of domestic conict, the province of day-time TV and women’s magazines. In the image of the damaged infant/child/adolescent, however, the writers analyzed here nd an icon whose shock value is as yet unmitigated by popularization, overuse, and the co-option of the mass media. Clearly, what the reader witnesses across these texts is literary defamiliarization of a particularly heart-tugging and effective kind—not least since even the casual visitor to Japan or Taiwan can scarcely fail to notice that these societies dote on children. The other requisite component in this schema of the suffering child is, of course, the sinning parent, and parental wrongdoing typically assumes one of two forms in this body of literature. Most conspicuous are the cruel parents, whose hysteria (Wang Wenxing’s “Mother”) or tyranny (Bai Xianyong’s Cursed Sons) works to ‘banish’ the child from the safety of the familial nexus. Their more insidious co-conspirators, meanwhile, are the absent parents, whose criminal neglect (Murakami Ryû’s Coin Locker Babies) or careless mortality (Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen) leaves the child destitute in a rapacious urban world. Yet in the context of the socio-political critique that is pursued across these texts, the two categories of maltreatment belong emphatically within the same symbolic system. Each alludes to different aspects of bad gover-

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nance: the latter to the hard-edged, emotionally indifferent economism that both Japan and Taiwan practiced as state policy throughout the period 1960–1990; and the former to the authoritarian code of familialism that was used to stitch together some of the domestic ssures that the ‘miracles’ left in their wake. And through the double meaning contained within the gure of the victim child—at once an immediate icon of pathos, and a broader symbol of the nation’s failings—writers can register their dismay at family life in ways that resonate in both the private and the public spheres.

CHAPTER FOUR

SEX AND THE CITY: COMMODITIES OF CHOICE

Consumption in East Asia: general remarks The nal chapter of this book explores the representation in Japanese and Taiwanese ction of escalating consumerism in the miracle societies. The rise of a moneyed lifestyle in both countries is typically understood as the quid pro quo for hard economic work and relative political passivity: shopping, leisure, travel, and entertainment are the just deserts of the good citizen in a pact that purports to benet state and society alike. More than simply a reward, however, energetic consumption has also become a social rule and duty in industrialized East Asia, and the probity of the consumer way has been driven home by the forces of the establishment in both direct and subtle ways. Most signicant here, perhaps, is the careful twinning of commodity ownership to social belonging—an ideological match that has proved highly potent in the later postwar period. The result is that habits of consumption in Japan and Taiwan rank amongst the most conspicuous not just in East Asia, but throughout the afuent world. Japan’s various consumer tribes, with their cult-like pursuit of the brand, honed tastes, and sophisticated patterns of self-differentiation, have an international prole that has tended to eclipse that of their Taiwanese counterparts. Yet in Taiwan, too, consumption has become a way of life, inaugurating an era of choice, easy disposability, and quotidian aesthetic awareness. The writings explored in this chapter articulate a direct challenge to the seemingly transparent pleasures of acquisition, and the role these pleasures play in sustaining the region’s miracle economies. These texts are conspicuously wary of the coalition between the state, business interests, and the consuming public that has led to the ascendancy of the consumerist ethic in contemporary East Asia, and some writers even have recourse to the language of conspiracy theory when describing the blandishments of ownership. Their critique becomes more stringent still, however, when it moves from public spaces to the realm of the psyche. All the writers considered here—and many more besides—suggest that the material plenty of contemporary life in Japan and Taiwan

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is inversely mirrored by different kinds of spiritual and affective poverty, which work to tarnish the rhetoric of afuence. As a set of cognate writings, these texts plot the trajectory of consumerism in Japan and Taiwan, revealing how, over time, it transcends its purely commercial character, moves steadily to saturate the social and cultural elds, and eventually succeeds in colonizing realms and practices hitherto untouched by its logic. These writers share an intuitive sense that consumerism leads to reication right across the social realm, a process which, in its turn, brings various kinds of psychological mortication. Resistance to the consumer ethic in ction from Japan and Taiwan frequently xes upon the metaphors of the city and sexuality as devices for representing the hidden penury of East Asia’s newly afuent societies. In numerous texts, the city is the place where, and sexuality is frequently the means through which, consumption of an excessive kind is enacted. In many senses, this schematic choice of metaphors is inevitable. The city’s role as the locus classicus of consumerism is well attested by theorists of consumption, who describe how multinational corporations, shopping malls, ambient advertising, and mass-media formations combine within the contemporary urban space to create a vast emporium within which the city-dweller is continually besieged by inducements to consume. And as rural areas are scissored down to green belts, which duly disappear as separate conurbations merge into the megalopolis, it is becoming increasingly difcult to imagine a locality which can exist outside this all-consuming city. The narratives discussed here all turn on this notion of the city as ubiquitous market-place, and use metaphors of trade, barter, and claustrophobia to suggest both the rampant character of consumerism and its inescapable physical presence. If the city emerges as a marketplace in this group of texts—a place of arcades, malls, and densely-packed entertainment districts—then sexuality is the principal commodity which is traded in this consumer mecca. Commercialized eroticism—by which I mean both the process whereby sex is used to sell merchandise, and also the sense in which sexuality is itself fully commodied—is the subject of all the texts examined here, and it functions as the prime metaphor for the reication of human relations in advanced capitalist society. Sexuality belongs squarely within the province of economics throughout these narratives, and is so far estranged from notions of love and desire that it becomes little more than another empty signier in the affectless code which constitutes the consumer language. Narratives from both societies are remarkably consistent in the way they use the debasement of intimacy

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by capital to critique the absolute privileging of the economic mode within recent and contemporary East Asian society. Sexuality is made a metonym for the transformation of subjectivity that occurs when the material impinges upon the affectual; and despite the great sexual freedom their protagonists enjoy, eroticism in these texts is curiously tense and constrained. The pages that follow reference a range of texts from both literary cultures, but will focus in detail on four core narratives: Mishima Yukio’s “Hyakuman’en senbei” (“The Million Yen Rice Crackers”, 1960), Murakami Haruki’s Dansu, dansu, dansu (Dance, Dance, Dance, 1988), Li Ang’s Anye (Dark Nights, 1985), and Zhu Tianwen’s Hong meigui hujiao ni (“Red Rose is Paging You”, 1990). A brief proviso is, however, necessary here before embarking on the chapter proper. As with many of the texts discussed elsewhere in this book, the license granted ction to run with intuitions without ever having to furnish empirical proofs for them makes for a bleak and disturbing set of literary representations. Consumption reies, according to these writers; and the fact that their literary instinct may well contradict the lived experience of consuming individuals in Tokyo and Taipei is beside the point. Their ctional worlds also jar with much intellectual debate on consumption, which has proved consistently diverse and lively in the last few decades. From the daring polemics of Jean Baudrillard to the more measured and conciliatory tone of thinkers such as Michel de Certeau, philosophers and sociologists have built an industry around theories of consumption which, in its size and variety, bets the role played by materialism within late capitalist society. Of particular relevance here is the fact that the tide has turned against the polemicists in recent years, and the more modulated positions elaborated by theorists such as de Certeau now enjoy critical favor.1 Fiction from postwar Japan and Taiwan prefers to paint socio-cultural change exclusively in its dysfunction, however; and whatever thinkers such as de Certeau might have to say about strategies of resistance at the microlevel, and the ability of users

1

One aspect of de Certeau’s work is concerned with possibilities of resistance, and makes the consumer, rather than the system, the focus of analysis. As he puts it, “If it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures . . . manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only to evade them, and nally, what ‘ways of operating’ form the counterpart, on the consumer’s . . . side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of the socioeconomic order”. See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), xiv.

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to harness commodities in liberating or subversive ways, the consumer society emerges as a place of oppression in the texts analyzed below.

The cult of consumerism: the socio-economic background to literary opposition 1. Japan The attack on consumerism that is mounted in the Japanese texts I discuss here is rooted in the nation’s postwar history, and nds a number of linked targets. Not surprisingly, a recurrent focus for critique is the role played by the government, big business, and the mass media in steering Japan’s consumer revolution. To begin with, the role played by the Japanese state in the creation of a society in thrall to conspicuous consumption is well known, and, in many ways, subscribes to a pattern found throughout the nations of newly industrialized East Asia. As Richard Robison and David S.G. Goodman have noted: In Asia . . . it has tended to be the state that has acted as the midwife of capitalism. It has not been in the freedom of laissez-faire but in the incubator of dirigiste regimes that the chaebols and zaibatsu and their equivalents have ourished. Where laissez-faire capitalism is now emerging after a period of dirigisme, it is the state that has provided the political conditions for this to take place.2

Moreover, although the entrepreneurial mechanisms which would eventually generate consumerism on a grand scale were set in place by the state during the early decades of the twentieth-century, it was the years after 1960 that saw these earlier policies really bear fruit. Successive postwar cabinets recognized that consumerism was the key to continued economic growth, and mass consumption took hold quickly. The blueprint for this strategy was provided by prime minister Ikeda Hayato’s famous Income-Doubling policy (shotoku baizô keikaku) of 1960.3 Following closely in the wake of Ampo, income-doubling transformed major sectors of the economy and sought, in effect, to recast the national 2 Richard Robison and David S.G. Goodman, “The New Rich in Asia. Economic Development, Social Status and Political Consciousness”, in Richard Robison and David S.G. Goodman, The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle Class Revolution (London, 1999), 1–16. 3 For a breakdown of the Income-Doubling policy, see Takafusa Nakamura, The Postwar Japanese Economy. Its Development and Structure, tr. Jacqueline Kaminski (Tokyo, 1981), 84–5.

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mindset along economic lines. The interventionist character of the policy is of particular note here, as is the tight linkage it posited—and subsequently pursued—between statist direction, big business, and individual consumption.4 Symbiotic links were set up between the state and its various mandarinates on the one hand and key players in the business community on the other, in the natural expectation that reciprocity would yield a faster rate of growth. Just as importantly, incomedoubling under Ikeda and his bureaucratic aides-de-camp stretched right across the production chain—targeting consumers as determinedly as it did producers—and the policy moved in close tandem with exhortations to spend. Inspired by tantalizing media glimpses of the middleclass American dream, Japanese society began to orient itself decisively towards consumerism. The policies of the 1960s reaped an extraordinary harvest. Incomes and GNP did indeed double—with interest—whilst exports and output increased, consumer goods inundated the market, and the overall economy expanded at dizzying annual rates. What is more, growth proved self-generative; and as kôdo seichô moved into top gear, diversifying the economy and creating more jobs than could be lled, mass migration from the countryside began to inate the population of Japan’s cities. The result was that, during the course of the 1960s, both the capital and the actors necessary for a sustained boom in consumption became available on the urban scene. The role played by the state and big business in priming this consumer explosion is clear. Yet at the same time, it is an equally accepted fact that Japan’s spending boom post-1960 could not have been maintained without the fuel provided by the nation’s giant media industry—and the advertising campaigns which, in part at least, have kept this vast machine in business.5 Commodity culture has been the stock-in-trade of the industry at least since 1960, and the media has worked alongside the so-called three pillars of Japanese capitalism in marketing consumerism to the masses.6 A quick survey of mass media 4 See Gary D. Allinson, “The Structure and Transformation of Conservative Rule”, in Gordon, op. cit., 134–6. 5 As Maggie Farley observes, this hand-in-glove relationship has disturbing implications, since “Reporters understand that they are to go soft on big advertisers (such as Dentsu, the world’s largest agency), and when they forget, pressure from advertising agencies on behalf of their clients will quickly remind them”. See Farley, “Japan’s Press and the Politics of Scandal”, in Susan J. Pharr and Ellis S. Krause, Media and Politics in Japan (Honolulu, 1996), 139. 6 Karel van Wolferen describes Japan’s media workers—particularly the “house-broken press” who staff the so-called kisha clubs—as lackeys of the “System” who practice

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formations over the last few decades, whether these be newspapers, magazines, television, radio, or the ubiquitous products of the advertising industry, reveals an astonishing glut of targeted consumer information. Powerful organs of the media have orchestrated themselves for the promotion of the consumer lifestyle throughout the later postwar era, instructing their audiences in “what they should be, what they should aspire to, what they should consume in order to conrm their middleclass status”.7 All this is not to say, however, that the state-led path to consumer plenty always ran smooth from 1960 onwards. The 1970s brought economic slowdown and a succession of ‘shocks’, as Japan’s rapid incorporation into the world system made it vulnerable to the same kinds of turbulence that buffeted other major economic players.8 Natural brakes were applied to consumption growth during this period, as all sections of society were beset by a sense of jitteriness about the nation’s economic future. Yet at the same time, other, related changes were occurring within the economic realm which would eventually lead to the expansion—and entrenchment—of the consumer ethic. To be more precise, the same globalizing momentum that unsettled Japan’s economic condence also lessened the degree of direction which the state could exercise over large corporations. This process, in its turn, forced these corporations to become more adventurous and free-wheeling. As the nation’s giant rms turned more international in their outlook and operation, they began to elude strategies of governmental control, expand into freer offshore terrain, and pursue prots outside the traditional regulatory a policy of expedient “self-censorship”, and enjoy “cozy relations” with “the people whose activities and aims they are expected to scrutinize”. Recent years, however, have seen a re-evaluation of the inuence exerted by the mass media, with scholars such as Kabashima Ikuo and Jeffrey Broadbent arguing that these formations are as pivotal to the exercise of power in contemporary Japan as the so-called Ruling Triumvirate. The gist of their argument, moreover, is that the eforescence of oppositional movements in the 1970s owes a great deal to the good ofces of the mass media, which championed these causes and carved out a place for them in the public mind. Fictional representations of the media both echo and contradict this claim. Murakami Haruki, in particular, steals a march on the scholarly community in his recognition of the huge power wielded by the media, but his works focus more on the media’s role in pushing the dominant consumerist agenda than on the succor these organizations can bring to lost causes. See Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power (London, 1989), 124–5; and Kabashima and Broadbent, “Referent Pluralism: Mass Media and Politics in Japan”, Journal of Japanese Studies 12/2 (1986), 329–61. 7 Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture”, in Gordon, op. cit., 247. 8 See Yutaka Kosai, The Era of High-Speed Growth. Notes on the Postwar Japanese Economy, tr. Jacqueline Kaminski (Tokyo, 1986), 173–187.

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frameworks.9 The result was continued growth, though at a less precipitous rate than that of the 1960s. And this trend—whereby cores of economic power linked to the state but semi-independent of its jurisdiction began to inuence the shape of growth—had inevitable implications for domestic consumption. Although the high era of dirigisme may have passed, the economy continued to ourish—if under less unied tutelage. Corporate power blocs equally committed to sustaining high levels of consumption were taking their place alongside centralized state planning, and despite the global downturn, Japan’s consumer boom was not allowed seriously to slacken its pace. As this brief sketch should make clear, the hyperconsumption that had begun to dene metropolitan Japan by the 1980s was the offspring of political direction, inuential mass media, and expanding corporate power. Dominant macrocosmic energies were channeled towards economic growth over several decades, and created a public culture in which afuence and its material signs took on the appearance of a moral order, replete with what Hidaka Rokuro has called a set of “standardized values”.10 Unsurprisingly, several important postwar writers try to draw these éminences grises of the managed society into open scrutiny in their work. To cite just a couple of examples, Abe Kôbô and Murakami Haruki—two writers not often yoked together—both make clever use of conspiracy theory in their ction, and create Orwellian worlds in which sinister bureaucrats, businessmen, and media executives conspire to replace, steal, and erase individual identities.11 Yet in the nal analysis, the creation of a ‘public culture’ dedicated to consumption requires a social inclusiveness that extends beyond the ambit of the state, the media, and big business. To be more precise, postwar Japan’s powerful consumer ethic owes as much to the aspirations of the Japanese people as it does to the tactics of economic and moral suasion employed by the architects of kanri shakai. The desires of the middle mass have given both momentum and staying power to Japan’s consumer revolution, and as 9 See Laura E. Hein, “Growth Versus Success. Japan’s Economic Policy in Historical Perspective”, in Gordon, op. cit., 118–9. 10 Hidaka, op. cit., 70. 11 Abe’s prolic oeuvre is preoccupied with ideas of disempowerment and deleted identity, and most of his seminal works are paranoid exposés of the cloak-and-dagger agencies that run Japan. As Susan Napier describes it, his writings “increasingly show the individual acquiescent, beaten down by a variety of factors, usually including a vast, faceless, and ultimately insane conspiracy which is often abetted by an increasingly incomprehensible and sophisticated technological base”. See Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, 204.

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such, they are targeted by the critical animus of many ctional representations of the commodied society. Notions of the ‘new middle mass’ (shin chûkan taishû) in postwar Japan—its denition, constituency, and ideological meaning—have long provoked sociological debate,12 with some scholars stressing the increasingly attened shape of Japan’s once uneven class prole,13 and others arguing that discrepancies from this demographic norm are so routine as to make the term ‘middle mass’ a risky means of classication. Predictably enough, writers across the spectrum robustly debunk the myth of a cohesive bourgeois monolith. Extreme social aberration is the keynote struck by literally dozens of the most important postwar narratives, and their ostensibly middle-class protagonists often exist in states of absurd non-conformity. Yet the norm from which they diverge is always unchangingly homogeneous; and a key dening feature of this ‘new middle mass’ as it is construed in the work of numerous writers is a determined zeal for consumption. Writers have good historical reason for linking consumerism to social uniformity. In the early days of kôdo seichô, wealth and the manner in which it should be handled were unfamiliar dilemmas for the nation’s newly moneyed classes—dilemmas to which media images and, to a lesser extent, government propaganda offered ready solutions.14 Long habituated to privation, thrift and nancial modesty, the general populace lacked a developed consumer consciousness; and this naïveté meant that popular tastes and aspirations could be molded in highly specic ways, and towards highly reied ends. Consumption was made synonymous with membership of the middle-class in an endlessly reciprocal—and prot-generating—piece of logic, where entry into the club could be furnished only through the ownership of key consumer items. The inuence of US wealth and power put the nal seal on this new ethos. Both during the occupation period and after it, Japanese families were exposed to snapshots of suburban life in the world’s new superpower, and the American consumer 12 For a summary of some of the opposing stances among Japanese scholars, see Hiroshi Ishida, Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan (Basingstoke and London, 1993), 18–20. 13 A seminal study in this regard is Ezra F. Vogel’s Japan’s New Middle Class. The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). 14 It is worth remembering here that the stigma attached to ostentation nds its roots not only in the hardships of war, but in the sumptuary edicts of the Tokugawa period, and the disdain that socially elevated orders felt towards the merchant caste (chônin) and their arriviste fripperies. For a uent account of chônin culture, see H. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture (Honolulu, 1984), 146–80.

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lifestyle soon became co-terminous with success on both the individual and collective planes. At the heart of bourgeois aspiration lay domestic utopia in the form of mai hômu. Stocked with the standardized icons of consumer desire, mai hômu was the ultimate emblem of middle-class belonging—and as such assumed a quasi-sacred air. As if to prove the point, the rst major electrical appliances to be showcased inside mai hômu—refrigerators, washing machines, and black-and-white TVs—were nicknamed the ‘three imperial regalia’ (sanshu no jingi) in recognition of the august status they occupied in public consciousness. As Yoshikuni Igarashi observes: It is ironic that the cultural legitimacy that the imperial family used to represent in pre-1945 Japan diffused into postwar middle-class households in the form of such consumer goods.15

Ironic indeed, but there was a certain irresistible logic to this diffusion. Ideologies of communality and social cohesion in the prewar period had been rooted in tennôsei and a shared worship of the emperor, and the transfer of imperial idiom to the chief tokens of consumerism was a clear portent of how Japanese society would be ‘managed’ in the postwar era. That the public should have embraced this reworked terminology so wholeheartedly only added to the irony. The coercive power of material desire became clearer in the years that followed. The ‘three imperial regalia’ were succeeded by new sets of consumer cravings, all couched in ad copy-friendly groups of three, which ranged from electric fans at one end of the scale to holiday villas at the other.16 Although the ante was upped each time, the basic technology of articially induced desire remained the same, as ever more sophisticated techniques of marketing, advertising, and distribution ensured that the consumption ethos achieved broad penetration across Japanese society. As growth continued, it was only natural that consumer desires should both proliferate and diversify. By the 1980s, if not earlier, consumption in Japan had evolved into a sophisticated organism, omnipresent and polymorphous, and capable of satisfying a wide range of tastes. Japan’s consumers themselves now sought differentiation, rather than the ready15

Igarashi, op. cit., 79. As William W. Kelly explains it, “The 3 S ’s were senpûki, sentaku, and suihanki (electric fan, washing machine, and electric rice cooker); the 3 C ’s were kâ, kûra, and kara terebi (car, air conditioner, and color television); and the 3 J’s were jueru, jetto, and jûtaku ( jewels, overseas vacation, and a house). See Kelly, “Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan. Ideologies, Institutions, and Everyday Life”, in Gordon, op. cit., 195. 16

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made, mass-produced identity of earlier years.17 Products began to offer the possibility of an individuated consuming self—even if this self was simply a bespoke collage of items drawn from the vast mass of goods currently on the market. As a result, the standardized wish-list of earlier years was replaced by innite niche markets, a movement that was mirrored spatially by the emergence of so-called ‘epitome districts’—small business sectors given over to specialized consumption—in many of Japan’s larger cities.18 In some senses, of course, differentiation of this kind speaks of choice, freedom, and the re-emergence of identity. The work of many Japanese writers, however, recalls Baudrillard’s dictum that “to differentiate oneself is precisely to afliate to a model . . . to a combinatorial pattern of fashion, and therefore to relinquish any real difference”.19 Consumerism, whether mindless or artful, is associated with social control, political anesthesia, individual disempowerment, and lost selfhood in many ctional narratives, and this suspicion of wealth links writers to other rebellious voices in Japanese society. In particular, their distrust of consumption as a coercive social order links many in the bundan to Japan’s progressive intellectuals, and the latter’s oft-voiced fear that consumption has beguiled the nation’s middle classes into surrendering their political drive.20 Consumerism, according to this rationale, is both cause and effect of the notorious depoliticization that Japan’s middle-masses have undergone during the later postwar period, a renunciation of responsibility which, in its turn, has

17 A vocal proponent of this view is Fujioka Wakao, who argues in his book Sayônara taishû (Farewell to the Masses, 1984) that the consolidated middle mass of yore has broken down into discrete “micromasses” (shôshû), who pursue products that appeal to their subjective “intuition” (kansei). Generational differences are critical to Fujioka’s thesis, and he claims that contemporary Japanese society subdivides into older “ants” and the more youthful “grasshoppers” whose desires have pushed this shift in the consumer economy. A useful précis of his views can be found in Fujioka, “The Rise of the Micromasses”, Japan Echo 13/1 (1986), 31–8. 18 John Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan. A Sociology of Consumption (Oxford, 1997), 33–4. 19 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (London, 1998), 88. Nishibe Susumu makes much the same point about the beguiling character of differentiation as both a social fact and a critical construct in “A Denunciation of Mass Society and Its Apologists”, Japan Echo 13/1 (1986), 39–43. 20 Hidaka Rokuro, for one, links this tendency explicitly to “my-homeism” (maihômushugi). As he puts it, “The children of ‘my-homeism’ developed what we can call ‘me-ism’, i.e. complete egocentrism, which did not result in political activism, but in political indifference”. See Hidaka, “Personal Retrospective. The Crisis of Postwar Democracy”, in Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.), Democracy in Contemporary Japan (Sydney, 1986), 234.

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allowed the reication of the social world in the interests of capital to proceed largely unchallenged. Ultimately, of course, what is at stake here for both writers and intellectuals is social control and the integrity of the subject in the ‘managed society’—and, more pertinently, the role that consumption plays in this management of persons. As John Clammer has noted: . . . both the way in which certain socio-cultural changes take place in Japan, and the way in which others are prevented from occurring, derives not primarily from political control, but from ‘cultural’ control. This notion of ‘culture’, once deconstructed, turns out very frequently to mean consumption behavior.21

Needless to say, resistance becomes highly problematic in this context of veiled and diffused authority. Indeed, such is the penetration of the consumer creed within contemporary Japanese society that, as Marilyn Ivy nicely observes, “the critical discourse on mass culture, in the form of mass-marketed books, has become a protable part of the culture industry itself ”.22 The writers considered here take this situation as the primary context for their critique. In their work, consumption is a way of life, an ethical code, and a sophisticated apparatus of social control that is effective because it is impersonal, ubiquitous, and—most important of all—counter-intuitive. And despite their eventual apprehension of this fact, the protagonists in both Mishima’s short story and Murakami’s novel are lost for a means of protest or escape. 2. Taiwan If we follow the standard indices of assessment—GNP, the distribution of income between needs and wants, and the dissemination of key consumer icons, to cite a few—then Taiwan clearly belongs amongst the advanced consumer nations.23 Vibrant media and culture industries, a irtation with the postmodern, and a dedicated attitude to leisure complete this picture of East Asian-style consumption at the n-de-siècle. As with all the comparative histories sketched in this book, consumer

21

Clammer, op. cit., 19. Ivy, op. cit., 242. 23 For a useful data breakdown on consumption in Taiwan during the late 1980s and early 1990s, ranging from total consumer expenditure to per capita consumption of beef, see J.J. Chu, “Taiwan: A Fragmented ‘Middle’ Class in the Making”, in Robison and Goodman, op. cit., 205–6. 22

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Taiwan both converges with and differs from the Japanese experience, and thus provides a revealing foil. At rst sight, however, it is the parallels which seem to predominate. Brands, consumption activities, and mass cultural formations have shown considerable overlap—at least in recent years—and Japan has played the role of local consumer mentor with great success in post-martial law Taiwan. As with Japan, the bedrock of GNP and stockpiled wealth which made Taiwan’s consumer revolution possible was built up during a state-led program of economic development that began during the 1950s and was undergoing radical shifts by the late 1980s.24 What is more, both societies launched their growth from ‘ground zero’ economic predicaments, which although they differed in their root causes, were alike in the privation that they caused the populace at large.25 In the decades of development that followed, both societies witnessed a tight interplay between state and capital which allowed growth to proceed at rates that the older Western economies, with their less interventionist market ethos, found extraordinary. Mass consumption in Taiwan, just as in Japan, is the sometimes wayward offspring of this statist model of development. In both cases, moreover, a bulging middle-class has ensured that the market for consumer goods remains eager and unsaturated, just as mass media and a spate of new popular cultural forms have expanded the possibilities of consumption beyond the material. At the same time, however, signicant differences remain. Most obviously, Taiwan’s consumer revolution came comparatively later, just as its miracle did not achieve lift-off until Japan’s was already well launched; and evidence of a consumption lag is still discernible today. Equally important distinctions lie in the dynamics of the state-business relationship, the co-existence of transnational corporatism with family-based entrepreneurial units, and, most of all, the role that afuent middleclass consciousness has played in Taiwan’s political liberalization. As Kuan-Hsing Chen puts it: 24 By “radical shifts” I am referring, of course, to the bursting of the economic bubble in Japan, and the rescinding of martial law that took place in Taiwan approximately two years earlier. In their very different ways, these monumental changes marked the end of an era dened by dirigiste economic growth. 25 The devastation that war and nuclear assault had visited on Japan was extreme; but the combined effects of Japan’s local war effort, US bombing, KMT mismanagement, and hyperination had sunk Taiwan in a plight that was almost as desperate by the end of the 1940s. As Alice H. Amsden puts it, Taiwan “is one of the few nonsocialist economies since Japan to rise from the grossest poverty and to enter the world of the ‘developed’ ”. See Amsden, op. cit., 78.

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chapter four Taiwan’s local history seems to challenge the argument that (the) political legitimacy of the governments of some nations in Asia lies in the state’s ability to improve the material life of the governed . . . and that, because of that, the new middle class may be inclined to be supportive of (the) existing regime rather than of change.26

In other words, precisely the same material comforts that have induced long-term political lethargy in Japan have acted as an enabling agent for activism in neighboring Taiwan, with clear implications for the ways in which consumption is understood within the Taiwanese cultural imaginary. Whilst the dirigiste nature of Taiwan’s postwar development is by now a familiar topic, the trajectory of growth that underpins consumer plenty today is a topic that merits some brief contextualization here. Taiwan occupies the status of ‘model’ among competing developmental paradigms, and commentators have noted not just the state’s leadership but also its skill and know-how in steering the nation towards economic maturity. When viewed as a comprehensive long-term strategy, it becomes clear that KMT economic policy ‘prepped’ Taiwan’s consumer revolution. The curbing of ination after retrocession, egalitarian land reform after 1949, protectionist import substitution in the 1950’s, aggressive export-oriented economic growth from the 1960’s onwards, Taiwan’s incorporation into the global economy, and massive infrastructural investment in the 1970s forged solid bases in production and distribution, and generated the conditions under which mass consumption would inevitably have its day. In this teleological sense alone, the critique of consumerism in Taiwanese ction engages au fond with KMT-driven developmentalism—even if political grandstanding is rare in these texts. That said, straightforward critiques of money culture, materialism, and the effects of the KMT’s economy-rst policies nevertheless remain a literary constant, from the nihilistic lures of the stock market in Li Ang’s Dark Nights, to the satire of entrepreneurialism that we nd in Huang Fan’s “Renren xuyao Qin Defu” (“Everyone Needs Qin Defu”, 1980). Yet at the same time, it is equally tempting to see the hedonism of consumer Taiwan as a rebellious other to the monochrome of the ‘prelapsarian’ state-controlled world that was fading fast throughout the 1980s. Certainly, it is true that the state itself was ambivalent about 26 Kuan-Hsing Chen, “The Formation and Consumption of KTV in Taiwan”, in Chua Beng-Huat (ed.), Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities (New York, 2000), 163.

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consumerism and its social implications. It sat on the fence on the capital formation versus consumer spending debate—indeed, Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves and high personal savings rate would suggest a privileging of the former27—and martial law with its curfews and moral austerity presents a contrast with the tactical appeals to luxury and selfgratication that underpinned the Income-Doubling years in Japan. Yet at the same time, ever-increasing afuence was both the most transparent—and the most tangible—means through which to prove the legitimacy of autocratic rule. Material gains were an essential compensation for missing liberties, and were fed as a sop to the populace in much the same way as kôdo seichô worked to absorb unruly energies in postAmpo Japan.28 In this sense, therefore, the emergence of a freewheeling consumer society in Taiwan was the only logical outcome of KMT economism—even if those selfsame policies would ultimately lead to the unseating of authoritarianism. Either way, the shadow of the state hangs over many of the writings referenced here, and Taiwanese writers share space with their Japanese counterparts in the linkage they suggest between state power, the triumph of materialism, and the attempt to dull political aspirations through consumer glut. The literary critique of consumption also turns, naturally enough, on themes of semi-institutionalized business power. The prime exemplar of this sub-genre is to be found in Chen Yingzhen’s Huashengdun dalou (Washington Building), a set of four loosely linked narratives written in the late 1970s and early 1980s which depict working life inside the Taipei ofces of a US multinational corporation. The Taiwanese protagonists of this series are locked in postures of servility towards their US business masters, and a smart consumer lifestyle with all the trimmings is presented as the trade-off for neo-colonialist co-option. The Washington Building series is ideologically loaded, but its polemical take on comprador culture and the multinationals is quasi-autobiographical and claims a rm basis in reality.29 Such corporations were key nodes in the 27 Li-min Hsueh, Chen-kuo Hsu, and Dwight H. Perkins note that many studies chronicle the Taiwanese experience as if it were “mostly a story about rapid capital accumulation”. See Hsueh, Hsu, and Perkins (eds.), Industrialization and the State. The Changing Role of the Taiwan Government in the Economy 1945–1998 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 10. 28 As Thomas Gold observes, however, “The KMT party-state fell victim to its own success”, and its skill in creating wealth across the spectrum engendered the very socioeconomic constituencies which eventually challenged its mandate. See Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk, 1986), 128. 29 Chen Yingzhen himself worked for a US multinational after his release from prison. See Kinkley, “From Oppression to Dependency”, 245.

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dissemination of consumer values, whilst at the same time functioning as the dominant economic meta-reality, and locking Taiwan into what Chen’s ction suggests is a classic “dependency complex”.30 Yet what Murakami Haruki likes to call the ‘system’ or ‘net’ of contemporary consumer Japan—the coalescence of different sites of political, nancial, and bureaucratic power into an omnipresent establishment—nds few parallels in Taiwanese representations of the afuent society. The KMT may have been in league with US conglomerates, who, in their turn, marketed goods, lifestyles, and aspirations to the Taiwanese themselves, but these texts do not grapple with the notion of a faceless ‘system’ that orchestrates the consumer world and steals private identities. This absence of ‘conspiracy theory’ arguably has its roots in what we might term comparative miracle history. As economists have noted, the KMT tended to remain ‘aloof ’ in its dealings with the local business community, and preferred directing policy from above to getting directly involved with industry and commerce.31 Still more importantly, the Taiwan miracle was crafted in the main by small and medium-sized companies, many of which were either family concerns or operated on the Chinese familial system. Thus, although sararîman-style professionals recur across Taiwanese representations of the afuent society, many texts favor themes of rags-to-riches, parvenuism, and good oldfashioned greed over the notion of the cog in an anonymous corporate wheel. Texts such as Zheng Qingwen’s “Zuihou de shenshi” (“The Last Gentleman”, 1975) and Liao Huiying’s “Youma caizi” (“The Mustard Seed”, 1983) demonstrate this quite clearly.32 Consumption is linked to individual agency in these texts, and consumers are go-getting, selfmade, and socially mobile. In this sense, the critique of materialism in Taiwanese ction proceeds, predictably, from local history, and its focus on ruthless acquisition arguably stems from what Thomas Gold

30 For a discussion of the appropriateness of this term for Chen Yingzhen’s later ction, see ibid., 254–8. 31 See Gold, State and Society, 126. 32 Chu Yen analyses the prevalence of parvenuism as a theme in recent Taiwanese ction in “Sociocultural Change in Taiwan as Reected in Short Fiction: 1979–1989”, in Stevan Harrell and Huang Chun-chieh, op. cit., especially 208–12. Anke BreymannMbitse, meanwhile, has observed that “the nancial cares of small businessmen vulnerable to unpredictable swings in the economy” are the themes of several works by Liao Huiying, including “The Mustard Seed”. Ironically, Breymann-Mbitse also notes that Liao herself saw ctional writing as an entrepreneurial exercise, and set out to solve family nancial difculties by winning lucrative literary prizes. See Breymann-Mbitse, “Liao Huiying—eine taiwanesische Frauenschriftstellerin der achtziger Jahre”, 125.

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has called the comparatively “anarchic and self-directed” character of the nation’s private sector.33 During the 1980s, these powerful social forces pushed increasingly for greater freedoms in the public realm, and a nascent civil society began to take shape on Taiwan. Integral to this process was the expansion of print and electronic media, and by the middle of the decade, these burgeoning culture industries had begun to impinge powerfully on the ways in which writers imagine the consumer society in their work.34 Whereas Li Ang and Chen Yingzhen describe Taiwan’s new plutocrats and their obsessional relationship with what capital can buy, the narratives that start to appear towards the end of the thirty-year span explored in this book—and, of course, thereafter—acknowledge the many ways in which the conduits of consumption have expanded beyond the purely material. Clearly, these newer critiques operate within a transformed social eld. The mania for leisure, information overload, global ow, the wide diffusion of advertising, the media revolution brought about by press freedoms post-1987, and the advent of the so-called ‘Fourth TV Station’ (di si tai)—a cable network that broadcasts everything from CNN to dubbed Korean soap operas—are both the context and the subject of this recent ction, and lend it a noticeably ‘glocal’ avor.35 Throughout the 1990s and beyond, the work of writers such as Zhang Dachun, Lin Yaode, Yang Zhao, and Zhu Tianxin has grappled with this new reality at the same time as being itself perceptibly recongured by it. In the process, Taiwanese ction has become textually porous, permeated by consumer culture even whilst it tries to maintain ironic distance. Finally, and perhaps most critically, Taiwanese representations of the consumer society are all about the middle classes—their growth, their aspirations, and the ‘myth’ of their political ambitions. In the early postwar years, middle-class belonging on Taiwan was an ethnopolitical issue rather than a strictly economic or professional one. The 33

Gold, State and Society, 126. Hung-mao Tien provides a concise description of the Taiwanese mass media in The Great Transition (Taipei, 1989), 195–215. Written shortly after the lifting of martial law, Tien’s account sees “political sanitization”, “increasing commercialism”, and “decreasing ideological control” as the three driving forces behind contemporary media formations. 35 For analyses of these phenomena—particularly leisure—see Thomas A. Shaw, “‘We Like to Have Fun’. Leisure and the Discovery of the Self in Taiwan’s ‘New’ Middle Class”, Modern China 20/4 (1994), 416–45; and Jim Hwang, “Desperately Seeking Fun”, Free China Review 43/7 (1993), 4–21. 34

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bourgeoisie—if such a term is not ahistorical here—consisted of émigré mainlanders of the Jun-Gong-Jiao group (the military, ofcialdom, and the educational establishment) who had crossed the Straits with the KMT. Although bensheng Taiwanese sometimes inltrated the lower levels of this power bastion, most of the local population was barred a priori from ‘middle-class’ afliation as it was then construed.36 What is more, the holocaust of February 28th, 1947 had left the native intellectual community almost literally decimated, and Taiwanese challengers to the waisheng (mainlander) élite were too few and scattered to re-group themselves into a plausible contesting force. Cowed by 1947 and its aftermath, the local population diverted its energies to the economy, and this division of the public realm into discrete spheres of inuence obtained throughout the 1950s and 1960s—all to the accompaniment of state rhetoric about ‘prosperity’ ( fanrong) and ‘stability’ (anding). By the early 1970s, however, the success and sophistication of the Taiwan miracle had begun to unsettle this stasis. Wealth, the great leveler, combined with the particularity of the Taiwanese developmental model—in which the rewards of growth were distributed with remarkable evenness across the social spectrum—to create large new castes of the economically empowered.37 Their emergence coincided with the diplomatic crises that chipped steadily away at the KMT’s mandate throughout the 1970s; and the result, as numerous historians have documented, was a surge of oppositional energy which the ossifying state apparatus was increasingly unable to contain. As already mentioned, analyses of this period typically trace the corelation between growing middle-class economic clout and the articulation of a determined political opposition.38 It is a short step from this to argue that consumption power has acted as an enabling force in Taiwan, ring up political aspirations and thereby ying in the face of theories from both East and West that claim the immanently stupefying effects of afuence, leisure, and the creature comforts. Clearly, Taiwan presents an intriguing case-study in the possibilities of democratic awakening. Yet when we consider ctional representations of the consuming classes, it 36 See J.J. Chu, Taiwan at the End of the 20th Century: the Gains and the Losses (Taipei, 2001), 111–3. 37 For the relatively egalitarian nature of income distribution in Taiwan’s economic miracle, see Shirley W.Y. Kuo, The Taiwan Economy in Transition (Boulder, 1983), 93–4. 38 See Alexander Ya-li Lu, “Political Opposition in Taiwan: the Development of the Democratic Progressive Party”, in Tun-jen Cheng and Stephan Haggard (eds.), Political Change in Taiwan (Boulder, 1992), 122–3.

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becomes apparent that writers often give the relationship between afuence and Taiwan’s political awakening a rather different gloss. Li Ang’s Dark Nights, published a mere two years before the lifting of martial law, illustrates this point in textbook fashion. The novel describes the lives of an élite group of upwardly mobile ‘players’—the protagonists include a bensheng blue-chip industrialist, a journalist/stock-market speculator, a returnee computer scientist, and a well-connected academic—the very social actors whom historians have identied as the movers and shakers of Taiwan’s great liberalization. Yet politics is a gaping lacuna in the text, and Li Ang’s characters care only for money and sex—in that order. Zhu Tianxin’s short story “Xindang shijiuri” (“Nineteen Days in the New Party”, 1989) goes further in its debunking of the received wisdom about consumer power, the middle-classes, and how to foment opposition politics. Her protagonist, a bored mainlander housewife, uses her surplus cash to dabble in the stock market, and gets so swept away by the thrill of speculation that she becomes involved in street demonstrations against KMT nancial policy. As Zhu Tianxin’s text makes explicit, it is not democratic idealism that leads the protagonist to defy the state, but rather a growing consciousness of her rights as a consumer. “Red Rose is Paging You” by Zhu’s elder sister continues this theme of money politics. The story hints repeatedly at the seamy side of Taiwanese politics (from gangsterism to the late-eighties fad for bootleg videotapes of brawling in the Legislative Yuan to suggestions of vote-rigging), and sites this critique within a urban consumer narrative replete with KTV parlors, label mania, and Hong Kong soap operas. The implications of all this seem self-evident. Rather than a process of empowerment—in which full citizenship eventually issues forth from economic labor— ‘democracy’ is consumed like any other brand name in these narratives, and just as with the Japanese texts under analysis here, commodity culture is seen as anathema to genuine political engagement. Of course, this is neither to deny the middle-class roots of Taiwan’s democratic achievement, nor to dismiss the crucial role that literary writing has played in the evolution of political rights. Yet literature remains perverse, some might say instinctively so, in its insistence that materialism reies and afuence breeds depoliticization. The fact that Taiwanese ction so often construes political commitment and consumer performance as opposite poles within a behavioral economy—despite the lived and remembered reality of middle-class activism on the island—drives this point home unmistakably. Consumerism is, appropriately enough,

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all-consuming in these texts: politics is either written out altogether, or simply works as a means to a material end. Indeed, while it may be a commonplace in Taiwan studies to link the rise of afuence with the fall of autocracy, ctional writing depicts consumption practice as simply another form of constraint. Just as in the narratives from postwar Japan, an ambience of entrapment denes these texts, and despite their hard-won wealth and liberties, consumers in Taiwanese ction are often disenchanted and disempowered.

The urban marketplace: the city and sexuality The trope of the city is utterly germane to dystopian representations of consumerism from Japan and Taiwan. The imagined metropolis can function as setting, character, metaphor or plot in narratives of the consumer society; and this sense of interaction, even mutuality, between consumption and its urban backdrop is central to the critique of materialism that many Japanese and Taiwanese writers stage in their work. In many ways, this mutuality is simply a dramatic heightening of the situation that pertains throughout late capitalist society, where mass consumption and the megalopolis have emerged in tandem and inect one another in numerous ways. Theorists of consumption repeatedly stress the inevitability of this relationship.39 Simple demography is the core factor here: after all, consumption on a grand scale is impossible without both the multitude and the density of persons to which the urban milieu is home. Just as relevantly, a closely-packed population yields a higher rate of interaction within the group, with the result that information is circulated, networks are created, and goods change hands at a far quicker pace than that found in demographically dispersed environments. Crowding also has key psychological effects. Unlimited opportunities for comparison, together with the intensied desire for self-differentiation that accompanies a life lived en masse, create rivalries over status that tend to express themselves in material ways. Under these conditions, consumer aspirations multiply exponentially. The social histories of postwar Japan and Taiwan provide fascinating case studies of this interplay between urban life and escalating consumption. Both countries have experienced huge waves of rural-tourban migration during the later postwar period, and this exodus has 39

See, for example, Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 64–65.

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caused previously discrete cities to swell into blurred conurbations. The Kanto and Kansai plains of Japan, home to tens of millions of citydwellers, offer striking examples of the rise of megalopolis. In Taiwan, meanwhile, a population whose overall density ranks amongst the highest on earth is crammed for the most part into the eastern coastal cities of Taipei, Gaoxiong, Taizhong, and Tainan. This concentration, in its turn, creates levels of urban crowding that nd still fewer equals on the late capitalist scene. What is more, urbanization in Japan and Taiwan has been as rapid as it has been totalizing, with the result that continuity with older communal forms has often proved precarious, and new vacuums have opened up in psycho-social life—empty spaces that consumption has been quick to colonize. Speed of growth has also shaped the physical infrastructure of cities. The major metropolises of both countries are haphazardly zoned, and a single district can be polymorphous, with commercial, residential, industrial, and entertainment sites lumped together in an unsegregated mêlée.40 This constellation of factors has transformed the cities of postwar Japan and Taiwan into sociological spaces almost predestined to play host to aggressive consumer capitalism, even without the interventions of the state, big business, and the mass media discussed earlier. In their conjunction, these forces and factors have ensured that Japanese and Taiwanese cities are not just places where consumption happens, but interactive consumer meccas whose very design, decoration, and topography is geared towards the practice of materialism. Banner, billboard and ambient advertising, epitome districts, product placement, and corporate sponsorship of everything from sport to cultural events combine to create an urban world in which hyperconsumption is entirely naturalized. If close reciprocity between consumption and the urban space is obvious enough in the world outside the text, then in ctional landscapes these two entities become more or less synonymous. The city is consumption and consumption is the city in a closed circuit of meaning. This ontological parity becomes clearer when we review the descriptive means that writers employ to render the city in narratives of consumerism. Again and again, the signs of the city are glossed within these texts 40 Although Japan’s lack of zoning is better documented, urban Taiwan is perhaps the more chaotic of the two. In the words of Jim Hwang: “As a walk through any neighborhood in Taiwan will show, the zoning laws separating residential, commercial, and industrial areas are not enforced. Thus no matter where a person lives or works, there are restaurants, video game parlors, discos, KTVs, and clothing boutiques down the street, next door, or even downstairs”. See Hwang, op. cit., 11–12.

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as sites of consumption: department stores, karaoke and KTV bars, luxury hotels, exotic eateries, shopping malls and arcades, sports stadia, stock exchanges, or the bodies of those who work in the sex industry. Indeed, in conspicuous contrast to the smokestack cities of Fordist capitalism, the metropolis in these texts supports, and is supported by, an elegant service economy with white-collar and hi-tech overtones. This point is perhaps self-evident; yet it is worth noting the symbolic use to which writers put postwar changes in the means of production. City people in these texts are not just consumers, but professional functionaries within the service or information industries: hoteliers, stockmarket speculators, copywriters, actors, journalists, models, TV executives, and corporate technocrats predominate, and the presence of these tribes reiterates the point that the city and consumption are one and the same. This equation works in reverse, too. Consumerism in Japanese and Taiwanese ction is an urban activity, and one, moreover, that helps to push the boundaries of the city outwards. The main ostensible exceptions to this rule—sun worship, holidaying at hot spring resorts, and other leisure forms that involve the consumption of the natural world—serve merely to show that the countryside, too, is fast becoming subsumed within the consumer domain. In other words, the city is limned in the language of consumerism throughout these texts: urban space is simply a mass of consumption sites and urbanites are those who manage and consume these sites. And in an inevitable process, this equivalence between consumption and the city means that the latter begins to lose the other signicatory foci which have traditionally worked to dene it. Politics, religion, high culture, historical consciousness, and a sense of time are deliberately missing from these ctional cities, as shopping districts such as the Ginza or Ximending have replaced state edices, temples, and seats of learning as the true heart of the metropolitan world.41 The city as it emerges within textual space is shorn of any kind of personality beyond the commercial; and, as a result, a mood of ephemerality shapes the landscape of many novels and short stories. The laws of fashion prevail, giving the city an anonymous, makeshift look. New shops, restaurants, hotels, and themed skyscrapers spring up continually, and construction work of various kinds is a constant backdrop of these writings. This is 41 Mike Featherstone conceptualizes this shift along a temporal continuum that begins with the pre-modern, evolves into the modern, and ends with postmodernity. See Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London, 1991), 99.

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not just economic growth, but a measure of the restless quest for novelty that moves consumerism forwards until sites of consumption themselves become as transient and disposable as the objects they house. Ultimately, of course, the city itself is nothing other than a commodity within this imaginative schema: its sights and sounds are consumed and discarded like any other mass-produced object, and its personality is thoroughly standardized as a result. In these various different ways, the writers analyzed here interweave images of the city and consumerism so closely in their work that the former begins to yield up its identity to the latter. A clear slippage in signication is the result, and this conation serves set purposes within the ctional agenda of critique. More specically, this merging of signs offers an effective textual means through which to express the imprisoning character of consumer capitalism. Observers of the postmodern often comment on the ‘weightlessness’ of the late twentieth century consumer city, where signs oat free of their referents, and the solidity (and concomitant burden) of meaning is lost. In supercial ways, the texts explored in this chapter either pregure this shift or are fully integrated within the logic of the postmodern. Yet what strikes us more deeply on reading these representations of the consumer society is not weightlessness so much as its direct opposite: claustrophobia and the heavy mass of a reied world. Objects crowd both protagonist and reader in these writings, dominating living space as they dominate the text, and material ownership is an exhausting tyranny. The shops, restaurants, hotels, and bars of the cityscape project this sense of material encroachment onto the grander external scale, creating a sense of inescapability from the ceaseless demands of consumption. Finally, the sheer reach of the urban denies the protagonists of these texts any respite from their civic duty as consumers. Holidays are possible—and taken frequently—but destinations, leisure activities, and fellow travelers are governed by the rules of the metropolis, and the countryside is vanishing fast. The metaphor of sexuality works in close tandem with that of the city, and is used to extend these notions of objectication and entrapment into the non-spatial world of psyche and affect. Commodied sexual images both complement and complete the urban as a narrative category: through them writers elaborate the paradoxes of pleasure/ duty, plenty/penury, and innite choice/limited freedom to which I have alluded already, and thereby deconstruct the myth of afuence in moral terms. This pairing of literary tropes is in some senses predictable, since the role played by sexuality in the dispensations of consumerism is

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as fundamental as that of the city. Indeed, both commercialized sexuality and the cult of the body more generally are the natural offspring of commodity culture, which sets the visible and the tangible above more abstract modes of apprehending the external world. And just as consumption and the city become virtually synonymous in late capitalist society, so does a similar transposability of terms occur between consumption and sexuality. Eroticism is both a marketable product and a marketing technique in the consumer society, and as such provides a neat exemplar of the exibility of market forces. As with the consumer city, both Japan and Taiwan offer notable instances of the interplay between sexuality and consumption during the later postwar era. Their integration is perhaps most seamless in Japan, where the fusion of the erotic, the commercial, and the quotidian which has taken place during the postwar decades is much debated. Western reports of this phenomenon typically draw attention to the violent pornographic content of manga, the dubious products dispensed by Japan’s vending machines, the fairytale love hotels that dot the horizon as conspicuously as pachinko parlors, or the kawaii (cute) high-school girls who moonlight as prostitutes to fund their label habits.42 These almost clichéd instances of the intersection between sex and the prot motive in postwar Japan grab attention of an overt and sensationalized kind. Yet perhaps just as pertinent are the more banal and institutionalized ways in which this oldest of relationships is mediated. After all, massproduced cartoon porn and the de-ghettoization of sexual labor cannot occur without baseline establishment approval—or at least the willingness to turn a blind eye. Indeed, what intrigues the observer here is precisely the fact that close links between the erotic and the commercial in postwar Japan seem to proceed without the stigma that can still attach itself to this nexus in other late capitalist societies. Interaction between consumption and sexuality is expected; and this applies not just to the sex industry but to the manifold other business interests which deploy eroticism as a marketing tool. All in all, the two are so closely interlinked that even mundane acts of consumption can often assume an erotic aura. As John Clammer puts it, consumerism in Japan often involves

42 A useful, though sometimes slightly dated, account of sexual mores in Japan can be found in Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: The Pursuit and Politics of Sex in Japan (London, 1991).

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the pursuit of jouissance—physical sensation, quasi-erotic interaction with the thing, intensity of experience.43

This sense of consumption as sensual pleasure—as an erotic end in itself—is perhaps the endpoint of the interrelationship between consumerism and sexuality, and such moments of seduction recur across the texts that are analyzed in the following pages. Various commentators have stressed the pre-modern origins of Japanese consumption behavior, and there is certainly a case for arguing that an age-old Japanese heritage of uninhibited sensuality, aesthetic cultivation, and even physical narcissism underpins the intertwining of the erotic and the economic just described. This argument does not, however, extend to Taiwan, where Chinese traditions of prudery pre-date the fusion between sex and capital that we witness ever more noticeably in the later postwar period. Moreover, the brand of neo-traditionalism promoted by the KMT throughout the martial law era sought to maintain continuity with the starchy attitudes towards sexuality that had prevailed in upper-class circles on the pre-war mainland, even in the face of rapid social change. The years since 1960, however, have seen a rather different ethical momentum, as miracle growth has led to a series of attitudinal shifts that Jeffrey Kinkley has collectively termed the “forced internationalization of the Chinese cultural realm”.44 Most obviously, this description refers to the process whereby economic success has propelled Taiwan into the global ow of goods, information, and marketing technologies. As they travel, these commodities transform; and just like big brand names or notions of democracy, the interface between sex and commerce is a worldwide reality that has been exported to Taiwan and taken root there.45 Of particular relevance here is Japan, and the inuence that it has exercised on ethico-economic mores in recent and contemporary Taiwan. From the sex tourism described in Huang Chunming’s celebrated short story “Sayonara, Zaijian” to the erotic

43

Clammer, op. cit., 106. See Jeffrey Kinkley, “Mandarin Kitsch, and Taiwanese Kitsch, 90. 45 Tu Wei-ming, for one, writes that “Prostitution is legal, red-light districts are ubiquitous and many respectable hotels operate as part-time brothels. The sex industry is so lucrative that it has penetrated coffee houses, video stores and barber shops”. See Tu, “Cultural Identity and the Politics of Recognition in Contemporary Taiwan”, in Shambaugh, op. cit., 91. More recently, the furor over so-called ‘betel nut babes’—scantily-clad young women who peddle betel nut by the roadside all over Taiwan—has pitted the government against the entrepreneurs on the issue of commercialized eroticism. 44

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meanings embedded within KTV culture, Japan’s synthesis of the commercial and the sexual informs much of the trafc that continues to ow between the two countries. The sexual metaphor in narratives of consumerism from Japan and Taiwan is an extended meditation on the blurring of categories described above. Unsurprisingly, prostitution emerges as the dominant leitmotif for this mésalliance between sex and money; but arguably more signicant are the ways in which Japanese and Taiwanese authors seek to expand, elaborate, and defamiliarize denitions of sexual labor in their writing. In Dance, Dance, Dance, for example, Murakami Haruki describes a international escort agency for the super-rich, which dispatches highclass call-girls to its jet-setting clients with all the anonymous efciency of a courier service. Li Ang’s novel Dark Nights, meanwhile, fuses plotlines of partner-swapping and stock market speculation to suggest the vacuity of both business and the erotic within an endlessly repetitive system of exchange. In these texts, and many others, we see a conscious effort to expose the sexual economy which is all around us, but is increasingly invisible to the jaded eye. This exposure is managed through the creation of ctional worlds in which this habituation to commodied sexuality is taken to another level, where eroticism is the only commodity on the market, and where protagonists with whom the reader is expected to identify buy and sell sexual labor without a surreptitious backwards glance. In other words, over-familiarity becomes—paradoxically—a technique for defamiliarization, an alarum to the reader about the world beyond the text. Ultimately, every erotic exchange becomes a form of labor in these writings, a behavioral mode in which characters engage in order to accumulate capital of various kinds—economic, social, cultural. And the natural corollary to this process is the departure of desire. This lack of libidinous energy is a constant presence-in-absence across narratives of the consumer society, and a sense of sexuality as pleasurable, intimate, and unifying seems to recede from these texts in inverse proportion to the number of explicit images or references they contain. The protagonists of these writings lead lives free of moral constraint, and yet their sexual liberation only seems to bring on the paralysis of excessive choice. Indeed, the catchwords of the consumer society—plenty, pleasure, and freedom—have vanished from the relational sphere in these narratives, and now apply only to the world of objects. Yet even objects fail to satisfy their owners in these stories, as do shopping, leisure activities, restaurant-going, and all the other signiers of the consumer

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code. And whilst John Clammer has argued that certain kinds of consumption offer Japanese “a way out: a zone of liberation, play and the imagination . . . a device for the re-enchantment of the world”,46 ctional narrative from both Japan and Taiwan seems to suggest precisely the opposite. Characters try hard to enjoy intimate encounters with their possessions (the household goods in Mishima’s “The Million Yen Rice Crackers” and the pipes doted on by Xiang Ge in Zhu Tianwen’s “Red Rose is Paging You” are obvious examples), and what little desire exists in these texts has clearly migrated from the animate to the inanimate. Ultimately, however, objects disenchant these protagonists in much the same way as sexual relations do. This is largely because the two are so numbingly undifferentiated from one another—and at the same time so inescapable and banal in ctional worlds where sexuality, consumption, and the city intersect as the main vectors of experience. Just as the city acts as a spatial metaphor for the encroachments of the reied world, so do sexual images provide the psycho-social dimension to this same dystopian picture, and the twin tropes combine into a cohesive representational strategy for the colonizing powers of consumption.

Mishima Yukio’s “The Million Yen Rice Crackers”: income-doubling, ‘the three imperial regalia’, and consumption as sexual labor Mishima Yukio’s contempt for the material society runs through his oeuvre, dominating such key texts as Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956) and the nal tetralogy Hôjô no umi (The Sea of Fertility, 1969–70). For him, mass consumption is grubby, synonymous with the bathos and tedium of postwar life. The standardization of experience it has brought is deadening in Mishima’s view, and he sees it as responsible for the corrosion of bushidô (the martial spirit) and authentic Japaneseness that has occurred since the pre-war glory days he immortalizes in works such as “Aikoku” (“Patriotism”, 1960), and Homba (Runaway Horses, 1969). Mishima’s disaffection with the new cultural turn intensied throughout the sixties—as kôdo seichô killed off what remained of the martial spirit after defeat, surrender and Allied occupation—and it culminated in the extreme gesture of his ritual suicide in 1970. The subject of Mishima’s relationship with contemporary Japanese society

46

Clammer, op. cit., 94.

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is a fraught one, but in “The Million Yen Rice Crackers”, at least, we nd a short and highly effective exposition of his views on the degradation of the postwar world. Written just at the onset of the high-growth period, the story describes the uses of material desire as a strategy for social management, and cross-cuts metaphors of the city and sexuality to show the spread of market logic into all areas of life. The story begins—symbolically enough—in Tokyo’s New World Building (shin sekai no biru), a state-of-the-art consumption venue that houses coffee shops, department stores, and an indoor amusement park. The storyline is simple, and follows a young married couple, Kenzô and Kiyoko, as they tour the sights before meeting an older woman, referred to only as obasan, for an appointment whose purpose is kept equally vague. The couple’s model consumer lifestyle, revealed in stages as they perambulate the New World, is the central theme of the story, and Mishima takes care to emphasize their decency, virtue, and inherent ‘Japaneseness’. The sense of hope and auspiciousness that dominates most of the narrative nds its crystallizing image in the million-yen rice crackers of the story’s title, a packet of biscuits baked in the shape of banknotes which Kenzô buys to cement the couple’s good fortune. It is not until the last few paragraphs that the truth about their afuence is disclosed—and only then through tersely elliptical means. The mysterious obasan is, in fact, a procuress who arranges erotic oor shows for upper-class ladies, and Kenzô and Kiyoko are her employees. She ‘chaperones’ them round the smarter parts of town, where they perform behind closed doors for audiences of voyeures. Through this almost stagy twist, Mishima’s message about the nature of consumption is allowed to emerge with its full shock value; and it is fair to say that the story’s handling of genre and trick denouement owe something of a debt to Maupassant. Ultimately, however, “The Million Yen Rice Crackers” is rooted in a powerful sense of historical time and place: codewords, clues, and cultural references are planted across the text, and context is everything here. The date of the story provides an early marker in this regard. “The Million Yen Rice Crackers” was rst published in Shinchô (New Tide) in September 1960, right in the middle of the most signicant watershed in postwar history. The furor over Ampo was beginning to subside, former war criminal Kishi Nobusuke had recently been replaced as prime minister by the new-style technocrat Ikeda Hayato, and the latter’s income-doubling plan had just been unveiled in preparation for its formal launch in December of the same year. In other words, Japanese

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society was poised on the cusp of its postwar economic miracle at the very moment that the dream of a truly participatory political culture seemed to be fading from view. Mishima’s story is pervaded by this sense of imminent change. The mood of the narrative is expectant, identities are blurred, and the physical scenery of the story conrms this presentiment of a new order. Yet, in many ways, what makes the story so striking is the highly selective way in which the landmark year of 1960 is rendered. Time and place are meticulously realized as far as the chronology of postwar consumption is concerned, but the Ampo backdrop, with all its attendant passion and fury, has been expunged from the story entirely. Indeed, despite the obvious political messages of the text—state-sponsored consumerism corrupts, economic miracle spells human degradation, and so on—politics per se has no place in Mishima’s representation of the new Japan. A naïve explanation of this absence might refer back to Mishima’s ultra-fascist views, and his contempt for the left-wing activism that fomented the Ampo protests.47 Far more likely, however, is the view that politics disappears from Mishima’s text just as it was disappearing from Japanese society—at least as far as meaningful opposition, mass engagement, and a broad pluralism of opinion were concerned. Kenzô and Kiyoko are wholly depoliticized in this story, their energies diverted to the pursuit of materialism as a way of life, and Mishima uses the blank screen of their political consciousness to demonstrate that consumption has emerged as the pre-eminent means of control in the contemporary social world. Like Ôe’s “Leap Before You Look”, this is a prescient text. As the narrative trails them round the New World Building, Kenzô and Kiyoko quickly reveal themselves to be model citizens of post-Ampo Japan. For a start, their wholesome connubial bond ( fufu no mutsumiai) is foregrounded throughout, and maintains a perfect balance between mutual respect, sexual desire, and gendered role-play. In many ways, the pair are eerie forerunners for the Takeyama couple in “Patriotism”, 47 Mishima’s ideological antipathy towards left-wing activism, and student radicals in particular, reached its peak during the Zengakuren movement of the late sixties. In May 1969, he was challenged by Zenkyôtô—the radical hard core—to take part in a now famous debate at the University of Tokyo, and Mishima readily picked up the gauntlet. For a full account of the debate, see Kosaka Shûhei, Hizai no umi: Mishima Yukio to sengo shakai no nihirizumu (The Sea of Nothingness: Mishima Yukio and Nihilism in Postwar Society) (Tokyo, 1988), 19–34. Despite their mutual hostility, however, both Mishima and the students were alike in their violent rejection of the postwar order—indeed, Kosaka cites Mishima’s revealing observation that the “direct democracy” of the students was very close in its fundamental character to the “revolution under the imperial banner” that Mishima himself preached.

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later paragons of wedded bliss and devotion in Mishima’s ction who captured the writer’s imagination in an equally intense way. The two stories were published within two or three months of each other, and the sense of intertextuality is unmissable. “Patriotism” is set during the aftermath of the failed restorationist coup of 1936, and describes the ritual suicides of Lieutenant Takeyama and his wife Reiko, imperial loyalists who decide to take their own lives as a gesture of allegiance to the emperor and to Takeyama’s comrades-in-arms who have been executed for their part in the insurrection. The love and communion between the Takeyamas is the focus of the text, and becomes the perfect private complement to their public loyalty to the emperor. In lingering scenes that only Mishima could have written, the pair consummate their union one last time before the act of seppuku, and the process of agony and violent death is powerfully—some might say luridly—transgured by the afterglow of this eroticism. Kenzô and Kiyoko are obvious Doppelgängers for the lieutenant and Reiko. Their physical beauty, attachment to one another, and old-style loyalty to a higher power all mirror “Patriotism” precisely, and the only warping of the reection occurs when the object of their loyalty is revealed. Tennôsei has been replaced by the creed of consumption as the ideology that commands unquestioning obedience in postwar Japan, and the sense of parallelism is reinforced by the way in which Mishima interweaves themes of sexuality and self-sacrice at the nale of both texts. One cannot help but be reminded of Yoshikuni Igarashi’s observations about the ‘sanshu no jingi’ and the gradual transfer of cultural legitimacy from the imperial house to mai hômu.48 In fact, Mishima makes this point himself right at the beginning of the text. The ‘sanshu no jingi’ make an immediate appearance when Mishima describes Kenzô and Kiyoko’s aspirations—the rst of many indicators of their exemplary consumer conduct: Well aware of the various disadvantages of hire purchase, the couple made a point of waiting until Financial Plan A, B or C had come to fruition, and then paid in cash for an electric washing machine, television or refrigerator.49 48 As Sasaki Takatsugu has noted, it was precisely the reversal of this tendency—i.e. the reinstatement of the idea of the emperor as the “ultimate basis” (kyûkyoku no konkyo) of culture—that Mishima sought to achieve through his suicide. See Sasaki, Mikumano gensô. Tennô to Mishima Yukio (The Mikumano Illusion. The Emperor and Mishima Yukio) (Tokyo, 1989), 72. 49 Mishima Yukio, “Hyakuman’en senbei”, in Mishima Yukio tanpen zenshû (The Complete Shorter Works of Mishima Yukio) (Tokyo, 1964), 964.

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This sense of discipline is underlined by the couple’s saving habits: after all, consuming went hand in hand with saving, and putting money away was just as key to the nation’s economic well-being as acquiring the latest trio of household or lifestyle desiderata. At the same time, the cumulative nature of the couple’s purchase plan pregures the steady escalation of consumer desire during the miracle years, when ‘needs’ succeeded one another in a pattern whose very orderliness cast a normalizing air over material greed. Yet Kenzô and Kiyoko also know their place, and their desire for washing machines, TV sets and refrigerators is entirely appropriate to the historical moment in which the story is set. 1960 marked the infancy of the mass consumer epoch, and the pair seem to understand intuitively that successful consumption means knowing the rules, and aspiring to the right things at the right time:50 A construction fund had not yet made an appearance in the couple’s plans, but sooner or later it surely would. One day, all the things they could only dream of now would come to pass in the most natural of ways.51

In other words, a clear sense of consumption as good behavior and—by logical extension—social control emerges in the text, as does an awareness of the ways in which material desire can be mobilized for the purposes of social engineering. Mishima was a notorious snob, whose patrician background and elegant connections were doubtless instrumental in shaping his antipathy towards the postwar money ethos. Yet his portrayal of the edgling middle class is no less insightful as a result. Kenzô and Kiyoko are neatly-drawn crossbreeds of the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern, and—ultimately—the bourgeois and the not. Kenzô, for example, is pale-skinned but robustly built, wears geta with a Western-style shirt (written in katakana to underline the contrast orthographically), and despises the upper-class women for whom he performs at the same time as coveting their lifestyle. Rather than being a marker of class tension, however, the very hybridity which is so apparent here is simply a way-stage on the road towards the homogeneous mass culture that Mishima so despised. It signies the couple’s

50 In a larger sense, Mishima’s story is imbued, somewhat prophetically, with the notion of the ‘life course’ (raifu kôsu) that came to prominence during the 1970s. Best understood as an ideology of appropriateness, the ‘life course’ was promoted by a range of vested interests, and laid down rules about lifestyle timing—when to marry, reproduce, retire, save, spend, and so on. For analyses, see the essays collected in David W. Plath (ed.), Work and the Lifecourse in Japan (Albany, 1983). 51 Mishima Yukio, “Hyakuman’en senbei”, 970.

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liminal status—the sense in which they embody some nascent social formation—at the same time as showing that material desire and acquisition are the means through which this new class will be consolidated. Mishima’s portrayal of Kenzô and Kiyoko as exemplars of the new consumer society continues with his critique of the arts of consumption. Throughout the text, consumption is glossed as an acquired skill that requires inputs of time, effort and stress; and time and again Mishima shows the couple anxiously hard at work as they realize their dreams: They were extremely prudent when making a big purchase. First, they ordered catalogues, and compared the products of each company. Then they consulted the opinions of people all around who had already bought one; and when it nally came to the moment of purchase, they went to a wholesale dealers in Okachimachi.52

This suggestion of consumption as labor—which anticipates, of course, the role of sexuality in the story—sits uneasily alongside the received wisdom that consumerism spells leisure, ease, and freedom from the toils of production. An even stronger sense of disjuncture is created when Mishima describes the aestheticization of consumer work, the process by which consumption is elevated to the status of an art form for the everyday: When Kiyoko took a comb in her hand, or leafed through the pages of a calendar, or folded a yukata, there was not the slightest sense of the mere routine of daily life about her actions; instead, her body and soul were always quick with vitality, and it seemed as if she were keeping close company with the objects called ‘comb’ and ‘calendar’ and ‘yukata’. She soaked in this world of things as utterly as if she were soaking in a bath.53

Up to a point, there may be something of an attempt to evoke the heyday of Heian material culture in this sly passage: the references to “comb and calendar and yukata” recall court ladies at their toilette, and Kiyoko’s ability to commune with the objects of quotidian life brings to mind the elegance and mono no aware (sensitivity to the transience of things) that transgured the mundane in the world of Sei Shônagon. If so, then the attempt is almost certainly ironic. Mishima’s Kiyoko lives in an era in which “comb and calendar and yukata” are mass-produced and therefore unalterably prosaic, a point the author reinforces by using a foreign neologism to describe the calendar (karenda), and by downgrad52 53

Ibid., 965. Ibid., 967.

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ing the kimono of yesteryear to a humble yukata. Rather than being a sign of rareed good taste, Kiyoko’s empathy with the objects around her is precisely the opposite—a sign of gross reication and of the intrusions of base materiality into the realm of mind and spirit. This sense of encroaching materiality is corroborated by Mishima’s use of urban images in “The Million Yen Rice Crackers”. Tokyo in the text takes metonymical form in the shape of the New World Building, a centre for shopping, leisure and entertainment that is soon abbreviated to “New World” in recognition of the social revolution that consumption has heralded. Soon, however, the utopian overtones of this nomenclature become a focus for parody, as Mishima’s text begins to reveal that the New World’s consumption sites—far from inaugurating a grand new epoch—are simply a series of simulacra for the world of nature and tradition that the city has replaced. This point is made in the rst few paragraphs of the story, when we discover that the Gourd Pond at Asakusa has been blocked up and replaced by the “neon pagoda” (gojûtô no neon) atop the “New World” as the chief night-time attraction of the district. To Kenzô and Kiyoko, its soft colors represent “an untouchable dream of life” (dare no te mo todokanai . . . seikatsu no yume), and they gaze upon it as if it were a site of great scenic beauty. This sense of nature and culture impersonated by the lures of the consumer city—and thus effectively elbowed out—continues inside the New World: On the vast salesoor splendid, glittering cheap merchandise was piled high on all sides in multi-colored mountains, and the faces of shopgirls peeped out narrowly from the gaps in between the mountains. The interior of the hall was ooded in cool uorescent light. Behind a forest of antimony models of the Tokyo Tower was a row of wall mirrors painted with Tokyo scenes, and as they walked past, the distorted images of a mountain of neckties and summer shirts on the opposite side undulated in each separate glass.54

Piles of merchandise are heaped high like mountains, shopgirls cavort like nymphs, strip lighting masquerades as sunshine, and—as if the motif of fakery needed any further signposting—“mirrors”, “antimony models”, and “distorted images” reiterate the point that the consumer city is a giant hyperreality which mocks the truths it mimics. The indoor amusement park brings this sense of a bogus world to its climax. “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” offers virtual encounters

54

Ibid., 964.

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with sharks, coral, and octopuses, whilst “Magic Land”—an enchanted cottage complete with articial butteries and wooden tulips—allows the couple a brief and tantalizing foretaste of mai hômu. For most of the story, Kenzô and Kiyoko are beguiled by the city, and consume its sights with the naïveté that is expected of them. It is only on their return from Nakano—the scene of the sex show—that disenchantment sets in, and they begin to understand its counterfeit and imprisoning character. When the couple pass by the “New World” again on their way through Asakusa, the billboards are “submerged in a poisonous black” (dokudokushii iro o kuroku shizumeteita) under a heavy sky, the pagoda is shrouded in darkness, and the city seems as bleak as their mood. The source of this disillusion, which Kenzô feels with a particular intensity, is the realization that a hoax has been perpetrated on them—much like the trick that Mishima plays on his reader through the twist in the story’s tale. Throughout the narrative, consumption has been portrayed in terms of hard work, good behavior, and the lures of the visual, with Kenzô and Kiyoko the photogenic medium through which these points are made. The couple spend their daylight hours engaged in the labor of judicious spending (no mention is made of any other regular employment); their consumer choices, habits, and dedication show them to be model citizens of the new Japan; and continuous references to the visuality of consumer culture make it clear that the pleasure of the gaze is the blandishment that keeps them motivated. In many ways, the striptease and live sex show represent the natural apotheosis of this fusion of the economic, the moral, and the voyeuristic; the only difference, of course, is the construction one puts on the moral component of the equation. In this sense, Kenzô and Kiyoko’s night-time activities are supremely logical, and their sexual labor represents nothing other than the consumer system functioning successfully and at full tilt. The problems arise, according to Mishima’s text at least, from the inherent depravity of the system itself, which disguises itself in pseudo-moral garb at the same time as energetically abetting the debasement of human relations. In their desire to succeed, Kenzô and Kiyoko have learned the lessons of consumption not wisely but too well, and it is the sudden apprehension of this which explains Kenzô’s disillusion. At the same time, his self-disgust is complicated by feelings of bafement and outrage: the couple have simply followed the rules, so the degradation that overwhelms them seems an unjust return. The fact of this degradation remains, however, and is in no way alleviated by issues of logic—nor, for that matter, by the large sum of money that

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the married ladies of Nakano pay the pair for their show. The couple’s sexuality, their intimate life together, is a spectacle just like those of the New World that Kenzô and Kiyoko consumed earlier in the story; and the irony of this, together with the realization that the sexual display pays for everything else, makes for an unpleasant epiphany. Indeed, Kenzô wants to tear the notes up, so deep is his humiliation, and Kiyoko quickly hands him the million-yen rice cracker to destroy instead so that the hard-earned cash can be saved. But the once crisp cracker is now as soggy as the couple’s dreams, and Kenzô cannot break it. The million-yen cracker, which earlier denoted endless possibilities and seemed a talisman for their success, is revealed as yet another bogus sign, just as its unbreakability suggests the power exercised by the simulacrum in the postwar consumer world.

Journeys through the consumer maze: Murakami Haruki’s Dance, Dance, Dance In the view of his detractors, at least, Murakami Haruki is ill-qualied to critique the consumer society. His books are simply too ‘easy’ to have critical edge,55 whilst he himself has been made far too wealthy and successful through the practice of taishû bungaku (popular literature) for his protestations about the system to exert much subversive power.56 His spectacular sales are the result of an unholy pact between this critically compromised author and his intellectually lethargic audience, who have together conspired to squeeze ‘real’ literature out of the publishing

55 Kawamoto Saburô identifies this “ease of reading” ( yomiyasusa) as one of the dening features of Murakami’s oeuvre, and cites it, along with the author’s use of aphorism and metaphor, as aspects of his style that have remained constant throughout his long and prolic career. See Kawamoto Saburô and Kawasaki Kenko, “Haruki no futari” (“The Two Harukis”), Eureka 32/4 (Special issue devoted to Murakami Haruki), (2000), 30. 56 Murakami’s marketability is clearly a vexing problem to his peers in the literary world, bothering both critics and fellow writers alike. In the Afterword to Tengoku ga futte kuru (Heaven is Falling Down, 1985), Shimada Masahiko ponders the issue thus: “I wonder why my works are not as popular as those of Mr. Murakami. To give an example, he is very particular about the way to make a sandwich, whereas I search for the points of similarity between sandwiches and the protagonist”. Tongue-in-cheek it may be, but there is a certain edge to Shimada’s distinction between his own quasi-existential concerns, and Murakami’s oft-remarked penchant for detailing the minutiae of food preparation. See Kawata Uichiro, “Manuke na keijô no mono” (“Something with a Stupid Shape”), Eureka 32/4 (2000), 146–7.

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mainstream. This, at any rate, is the opinion of bundan heavyweights such as Masao Miyoshi, cited earlier as the scourge of Yoshimoto Banana. Such assessments are depressing, not least because they are so patronizing of Murakami’s substantial reading public—who, according to this rationale, read to be momentarily diverted rather than because of any desire for ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’.57 Yet just as worrying, perhaps, is the facile equation which these commentators set up between literariness and literary merit, and their stubborn insistence on an elite/popular divide which nowadays looks ever more outmoded. Murakami’s ction ‘works’, in the sense that it resonates with a huge mass of readers, precisely because it implicitly acknowledges that the invasions of capital into literature are an immutable fact, and has learned to operate adroitly within this new aesthetic reality. Thus rather than view literature as a citadel which perches loftily above the commodication of late capitalist society, Murakami deconstructs this society from the inside, using the selfsame terminology and techniques of the consumer world. Chief among these techniques is what Miyoshi calls the “pick-uppable” character of Murakami’s prose. His works follow largely linear plots, employ a conversational narrative tone, and, rather than requiring long stretches of concentration, are well-suited to the stop-and-start of commuter journeys. A world away from the hard-won pleasures of jun bungaku, perhaps; but at the very least Murakami’s “pick-uppability” rescues his writing from the fate of ghettoization or obscurity that awaits many more difcult works from the literary citadel. More importantly, Murakami’s acknowledgement that reading is a leisure pursuit like many others, and must therefore compete for enthusiasts within the entertainment marketplace, gives his critiques of consumer Japan a savviness that can be more telling than the outrage of those who lament the “empire of signs” from the outside.58 57 This public has ensured that Murakami’s books are more or less instant bestsellers. His most important ctional works include: Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979); 1973 nen no pinbôru (Pinball, 1973, 1980); Hitsuji o meguru bôken (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982); Sekai no owari to hâdoboirudo wandârando (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1985); Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood, 1987); Dansu, dansu, dansu (Dance, Dance, Dance, 1988); Kokkyo no minami, taiyô no nishi (South of the Border, West of the Sun, 1992); Zô no shômetsu (The Elephant Vanishes, 1993); Nejimakidori kuronikuru (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994–5); Suputoniku no koibito (Sputnik Sweetheart, 1999); and Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore, 2002). 58 Jay Rubin refers to an interview with Murakami in which the latter explained “the situation faced by the writer in the late 20th century who hopes to reach a large audience. The reading of novels, he said, must compete with sports and the stereo and TV and videos and cooking . . . (and) the writer has to work harder to draw the reader

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Dance, Dance, Dance exemplies this sense of an insider’s take on the consumer society. Its oddball anti-hero, another reincarnation of Murakami’s favorite I-narrator (boku),59 is highly conversant with the ways and means of consumption. He is employed, in a rather desultory manner, as a freelance journalist, and spends his days churning out meaningless copy for PR newsletters and company brochures. “Shoveling cultural snow” (bunkateki yukikaki )60 is the term he uses to describe his work—a metaphor for life inside Japan’s giant service industries that suggests a kind of knowing resignation. Indeed, boku marvels continuously at the ingenuity of the “system” (shisutemu), extemporizing astutely about the “net of capitalism” (shihon no ami),61 the virtues of waste, and the fruitlessness of resistance. Yet his consciousness still seems hardwired to seek ways out: a leftover from the Zenkyôtô protests of the late sixties, boku has a history of activism, and he remains unreconciled to the blandness of contemporary life.62 As a result, he is obsessively nonconformist in dress, culinary tastes, and psyche.63 And in many ways, his immediate reality ripples with the effects of this quirkiness: parallel universes, ghosts and spirits, dream-worlds, clairvoyants, escape routes, and promises of salvation haunt both him and those who are drawn into his orbit.64 into the cognitive system unique to the novel form”. See Rubin, “The Other World of Murakami Haruki”, Japan Quarterly 39/4 (1992), 494. 59 The I-narrator in Dance, Dance, Dance is, in fact, the selfsame boku whose earlier history is told in A Wild Sheep Chase; but permutations of this same narrator occur right across Murakami’s ction. 60 Murakami Haruki, Dansu, dansu, dansu, vol. 1 (Tokyo, 1991), 30. 61 Ibid., 113. 62 Ellis S. Krauss explores the fate of student activists, particularly those involved in campus struggles during the Ampo protests of the late fties and late sixties in Japanese Radicals Revisited. Student Protest in Postwar Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974). He expands on the idea that “political protest is an age-related phenomenon”, and shows the ways in which radicals were reabsorbed into conventional society after their trial by re (p. 172). For Murakami’s narrator, however, protest is less a rite of passage than a dening moment from which he has never recovered. 63 Yoshimoto Takaaki argues quite the opposite, however, and writes that “A key part of the appeal of this work lies in the characterization of the boku protagonist, who . . . has neither an exaggerated sense of bankruptcy and nality about the state of the world, nor any overblown logic about world salvation. He is exceedingly ordinary, and since he is not a man to shoulder the burden of great ideas, he is not the possessor of an unusual personality either”. See Yoshimoto, “Dansu, dansu, dansu no miryoku” (The Appeal of Dance, Dance, Dance), in Kuritsubo Yoshiki and Tsuge Teruhiko (eds.), Murakami Haruki sutadîzu, vol. 2 (Tokyo, 1999), 209. 64 Jay Rubin analyses Murakami’s techniques of alterity in Rubin, op. cit. He argues that Murakami’s work is marked by “a tendency to contrast ‘existence’ and ‘non-existence’ or ‘being’ and ‘non-being, which often results in the positing of two parallel

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In its most basic outlines, the novel is structured as a quest, whose supercial purpose is to track down a vanished girlfriend of the narrator’s named Kiki, but whose real aim is a heuristic search for identity of a far more metaphysical kind. One is instantly reminded here of Abe Kôbô’s faux-mystery novel Moetsukita chizu (The Burnt-out Map, 1967), in which the detective-narrator embarks upon a search for a missing man who turns out, of course, to be none other than himself. As Matthew Strecher has noted, the recuperation of lost identity is Murakami’s major theme, and most of his narrators try to wrestle their sense of selfhood back from a system in which—to quote the familiar proverb—‘the stake which sticks out is hammered down’ (deru kui wa utareru).65 Dance, Dance, Dance is another of these textual journeys, and its forays into mysticism, together with the various symbolic personages whom the narrator encounters on his way, seem at rst to t this pattern of enlightenment through struggle. Yet by the end of the novel, boku’s epiphanies have lead him only into psychological cul-de-sac, and Murakami uses the metaphors of the city and sexuality to show that both enlightenment and identity are misnomers inside Japan’s consumer web. The plot of Dance, Dance, Dance is complicated, and space constraints prevent an extended summary here. In simple terms, the narrator’s search for Kiki propels him into a series of experiences and encounters which Murakami uses to paint the landscape of 1980s urban Japan. It is these symbolic meetings, rather than the mechanics of emplotment, which push the narrative movement forward; and their physical backdrop is as integral to the writer’s allegorical canvas as the encounters themselves. This backdrop is, of course, the city—not Tokyo exactly, although much of the novel is set there, but the uniform urban sprawl which, in Murakami’s view, is the site of identity erasure in contemporary Japan. The narrator makes this point explicit at the beginning of the novel. It so happens that he is in Sapporo at the time, at the very beginning of his quest for Kiki, but as he puts it himself: It was a scene that was being played out daily in cities all across Japan. You could shift the interior of the coffee shop, entirely as it was, to Yokohama or Fukuoka, and there would be no sense of dislocation whatsoever. But in

worlds, one obviously fantastic and the other closer to recognizable reality”. This results in a ction “full of wells, deep pools, silent dark corridors, and underground labyrinths”. 65 See Matthew Strecher, “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki”, Journal of Japanese Studies 25/2 (1999).

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spite of that—no, because of the fact that it all seemed exactly the same—I sat there in that coffee shop, drinking my coffee, and feeling an intense, searing loneliness. I sensed that I alone was the outsider. I was totally disconnected from this city, these daily lives.66

This short extract is far more than simply a repetition of the familiar urban paradox of the loner and the crowd. In fact, a clear continuity exists here between the loneliness and sense of loss (sôshitsukan) that overwhelm boku and the specic consumer experience of the kissaten. The latter’s raison d’être is to create ambience of some kind—typically a feeling of ‘at home-ness’, but with more stylish overtones. Yet the narrator’s sudden realization of the multiple simultaneity of the moment in which he is suspended, the fact that it is being mirrored in franchises of the same kissaten chain right across urban Japan, generates precisely the opposite effect. Instead of a esh-and-blood experience, the coffee shop offers him a mass-produced simulation of one—rather like the logic of pop art and limited editions—and he is left with an almost modernist sense of alienation. At the same time, however, it is not the fact of his solitude that oppresses the narrator—who is a natural loner anyway—so much as the sensation that his reality, far from being his own, belongs to the particular consumption venue in which he presently nds himself. He is essentially extraneous to it, and any identity he calls his own is inauthentic. A conviction that the consumer city detaches people from reality runs right through Dance, Dance, Dance, and the sense of loss that critics often allude to in discussions of Murakami’s ction is in many ways a lament for this lost authenticity. Dance, Dance, Dance makes this three-way connection between loss, consumption, and the metropolis explicit in the text through the repeated motif of urban wandering. The narrator drifts through the city streets at all times of the day and night, with no itinerary and no destination in mind, and at one stage in the novel he does little else for several pages at a stretch. These wanderings typically occur at times of stress and confusion; and unlike the âneur who strolls for pleasure and sexual opportunity, boku’s search is solipsistic, a quest for street-level introits into his ‘real’ self. But these perambulations only worsen boku’s predicament. His sôshitsukan is mapped directly onto the blurred and anonymous cityscape, and the two merely reinforce one another: he wanders because he is lost, and he is lost because he wanders. The topography of urban Japan serves Murakami well in this 66

Murakami, Dansu, dansu, dansu, vol. 1, 54.

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metaphorical project. Japanese cities are famous for their lack of zoning and ease of disorientation: straight boulevards are few and far between, residential districts are often almost labyrinthine, and instead of a xed metropolitan heart, there are numerous ‘sub-centers’ with railway stations as their nuclei.67 Dance, Dance, Dance turns all this into a philosophical point, a spatial commentary on the nation’s loss of spiritual core. As the narrator wanders the city in search of meaning, all he actually encounters is an endless sequence of consumption sites—McDonalds, Dunkin’ Donuts, Café Figaro, Kinokuniya, and the Tokyo Tower follow one another in predictable succession, and constitute his only means of (mis)navigation. Traveling further aeld—to Sapporo, for example— only intensies this sense of a geography of consumption, since everything there is just a downsized copy of the Tokyo blueprint. Murakami’s vision of the consumer city nds its fullest realization in Sapporo’s Dolphin Hotel, the scene of the narrator’s affair with Kiki, and the starting point of his search for her four years later. The Dolphin Hotel of boku’s memory is steeped in the mood and feel of lm noir, and seems better suited to Raymond Chandler than the high gloss of bubble-era Japan: All the furniture was faded, all the tables creaked, and none of the keys locked properly. The corridors were down at heel, and the lightbulbs dim. The plugs in the washbasins were a poor t, and so water just drained away . . . The manager . . . was a middle-aged man with mournful eyes who had a couple of ngers missing.68

Replete with atmosphere and secrets, the Dolphin is a rare site of meaning in 1980s urban Japan. Its shabbiness and air of disrepute give it presence in the material blandness that surrounds it, and it pulls like a lodestar on the narrator’s imagination. When he returns there years later in search of Kiki, however, all that remains of the hotel is its name: It had metamorphosized into a twenty-six oor giant edice. There were Bauhaus-style modern curves, gleaming with glass and stainless steel, and poles uttering with national ags lined the driveway. Sprucely uniformed porters hailed taxis, and a glass lift sped up to the top-oor restaurant.69 67 Such is the amorphous quality of this urban landscape that Ashihara Yoshinobu uses the term “amoeba city” to describe sprawling postwar Tokyo. See Ashihara, The Hidden Order. Tokyo through the Twentieth Century, tr. Lynne E. Riggs (Tokyo, 1989), 55–63. Ashihara’s main thesis, however, is that Tokyo’s apparent disorder belies an efcient internal dynamic. 68 Murakami, Dansu, dansu, dansu, vol. 1, 12. 69 Ibid., 56.

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The transformation of the Dolphin into a consumer sign, luxuriously appointed but emptied of meaning, becomes Murakami’s narrative pretext for a long excursus into the “system” and the role it plays in turning the Chandler-esque city into a place of consumption fatigue and sôshitsukan. The chapters in which Murakami elaborates this theme build up to something of a crescendo, as the new-look, ve-star Dolphin becomes an all-purpose signier for the conspiracies of late consumer capitalism. This critique has the boku narrator as its mouthpiece, and begins with descriptions of the meticulous market research that precedes the hotel’s capital outlay, right down to computer simulation studies which secondguess the “cost price of toilet paper and the quantities of it that might be consumed”. Next, the narrator moves on to the “smile tuition” (waraikata no kyôiku) undergone by hotel receptionists. A budgeted component of the “warm at-home feeling” (atatakami no aru kyojûsei) which the hotel is trying to patent, these “toothpaste-advert smiles” (hamigaki no senden mitai ni nikkori to waratte)—like the Sapporo café before them—are obvious mock-ups, and only intensify the narrator’s nostalgia for the mournful-eyed proprietor of the old Dolphin and his missing ngers. Then we tour the hotel’s facilities, which make a fetish of comprehensiveness and even include a heliport on the roof. In the subsequent chapter, the scene shifts beyond the hotel walls to observe the “spreading inuence of the new Dolphin Hotel”. Here, cheap restaurants with noren curtains and sweet shops “where a cat was always dozing by the stove” are making way for showrooms and cafés with a shinier nish, whilst the Dolphin Hotel dominates the skyline like the “star that led the three magi to . . . Bethlehem”.70 To save all this from the cliché it is fast becoming, Murakami changes tack in the pages that follow and turns to the quasi-supernatural as a means of accessing the darker side of the new Dolphin and what it represents. The narrator befriends one of the toothsome receptionists, who tells him that the sixteenth oor is haunted by the presence of the former Dolphin. This sixteenth oor and the mysterious “Sheepman” who inhabits it form a deep-reaching kink in the real, an oracle on the straight-seeming world in which most of the narrative is set; and this departure into magical realism allows Murakami to suggest the suppression of fantasy upon which consumer way depends. Indeed, this nod to

70

Ibid., 58–70.

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the ghost-world, deliberately incongruous in the polished hyperreality that is the new Dolphin, is a pointed hint at the spectral state to which individuality of all kinds has been reduced in contemporary Japan. That the “system” has usurped its place is made very clear soon afterwards, as the sinister side of urban redevelopment is revealed. Corporate link-ups, paper companies, murky property deals, turf wars, yakuza intimidation, right-wing thugs, and political corruption at the municipal, prefectural, and national levels are the vested concerns behind the Dolphin Hotel, and they are meshed in such a way as to imply a full-blown conspiracy. But that conspiracy is faceless, as if it involved interests, not people—indeed, not a single specic name or individual is mentioned—whilst ‘real’ identity hides out on the sixteenth oor, only intermittently accessible. In other words, the Dolphin Hotel is a compressed micro-image of the consumer city proper. It stimulates useless desires, colonizes physical and mental space, uses fake civility to cover its traces, and is presided over by an invisible cabal of businessmen, politicians, and crooks who force selfhood into spectral hiding. When we turn to the representation of sexuality in Dance, Dance, Dance, it becomes clear that Murakami uses motifs of eroticism to play out many of these same themes in complementary style. Unsurprisingly, prostitution is a key leitmotif here—and nowhere more strikingly than in what is perhaps the novel’s most arresting representation of the consumer world: the international call-girl ring referenced earlier in this chapter. The narrator’s rst encounter with this organization comes in the form of his relationship with Kiki, who moonlights for the agency in her spare time before vanishing under mysterious circumstances. Indeed, as early as page 13, we nd the prostitution ring associated with missing persons and, by implication, the evaporation of identity: In actual fact, she had several names. But at the same time, she had none at all. Her personal belongings—which amounted to practically nothing—never bore a name. She had no commuter pass, driving license or credit cards . . . There was no way of getting any kind of grip on her existence. Prostitutes have names, perhaps, but they inhabit an anonymous world.71

This point becomes explicit later in the novel, when the narrator nds himself implicated once again with the organization, this time through 71

Ibid., 13.

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a former junior high-school classmate of his called Gotanda. Gotanda, who is named—tellingly enough—after an upmarket district on Tokyo’s Yamanote line, is now a successful actor, and his wealth and fame have bought him membership of this exclusive sex club. One evening, Gotanda invites the narrator to join him in “calling in some women” (onna o yobu), and in the pages that follow the special character of this most obliging of service industries is disclosed.72 It is apparent from the outset that the agency exists as a kind of erotic foil for the lifestyle showcased so exhaustively in the Dolphin Hotel: the prostitutes are, of course, natural beauties, but they are also educated, charming, and immaculately presented. And, like the Dolphin with its roof-top heliport and conference rooms kitted out for simultaneous translation, they satisfy needs and desires that their clients scarcely knew they had. Most important of all, the poise, grace, and professional skill of the women are such that the act of procurement is almost denied its monetary character, and becomes, instead, a twelve-hour long simulated amour. In an extension of the “toothpaste” civility of the Dolphin receptionists, Gotanda, the narrator, and their ‘dates’ listen to Bob Dylan, sit cozily on the oor sipping brandy-and-sodas, luxuriate in bathtubs à deux, and eat toast and marmalade together in the morning. The absolute inevitability of all this is, of course, the nal point. As boku puts it, An international delivery service, I thought to myself. You place your order in Tokyo, and sleep with a girl in Honolulu. Systematic, expert, sophisticated. Not grubby . . . just businesslike . . . That’s because there was an independent illusion at work here, and one with its own distinctive characteristics. And once there’s an illusion at work, it begins to function like a genuine commodity—and advanced capitalism will dig out commodities from each and every crevice . . . Before you know it, there’ll be a call-girl catalogue order service at the Seibu department store.73

Yet just like the kissaten experience before it, the narrator’s liaisons with women from the sex club—he sleeps with another whilst on holiday in Hawaii—do nothing to attenuate his sôshitsukan. Indeed, the very awlessness of the placebo he is offered in place of genuine human connection merely deepens his apprehensions about the “system” and its tentacular reach. Rightly so, in fact, since the “system” runs the prostitution ring just as it runs the Dolphin.

72 73

Ibid., 275. Murakami, Dansu, dansu, dansu, vol. 2, 159.

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The rst clues to this come during the scene just described, when Gotanda tells the narrator that the entire evening can be written off as expenses. As he puts it: The system goes like this. The company has this cover as a party service, and so they can make out squeaky clean receipts . . . So you sleep with a girl and, hey presto, it’s entertainment expenses.74

The narrator discovers the more disquieting side to this secret economy shortly afterwards, when he is questioned by the police in connection with the murder of one of the prostitutes with whom he and Gotanda spent the night. Like Kiki, the dead woman is known only by a pseudonym, and carries no credentials. The intrigue thickens when Gotanda informs the narrator that the club is made up of “big names” across the spectrum of power, and that it simply closes ranks or wields its political clout when anonymity is threatened. As it turns out, Gotanda is the probable villain, a fact conrmed by his confession and suicide near the end of the novel; yet his guilt is simply the system’s most visible face. In the end, these missing or murdered women, and their place within a prostitution ring which serves the “system”, are transparent tropes for the process whereby identity is forcibly deleted in contemporary Japan. In this sense, they, and their disappearance, are metaphorically at one with Murakami’s vision of the city. Just as the city is the site of identity erasure (a process epitomized by the commandeering of the old Dolphin Hotel), so are the prostitutes (whose sexual labor is the ultimate commodity) the most conspicuous objects of this vanishing. Both are controlled by the system, and the novel ends with boku’s wary apprehension of the completeness of its sway. Yet in a sense—and as Murakami well knows—the seasoned late twentieth-century reader’s reaction to all this is ‘so what?’. The system is corrupt, commodities rule, and prostitutes are disappearing victims: there is little new here for Murakami readers either Japanese or Western. This very jadedness is, however, critical to Dance, Dance, Dance. Less forward-moving than back-sliding, the purpose of boku’s quest has been to demonstrate to him the almost tediously axiomatic nature of the consumer world around him. Enlightenment is pointless, just as selfhood is impossible, in the commodied world of late-twentieth century Japan, and all the narrator’s revelations about the system seem dated

74

Murakami, Dansu, dansu, dansu, vol. 1, 275–6.

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and banal. Rather than his lost self, in fact, all that his quest brings is an uneasy sense of truce or accommodation with the system, a rapprochement that seems complete when he falls in love with the feistiest of the Dolphin receptionists at the end of the story. For the former Zenkyôtô radical, this journey through urban consumer Japan has acquiescence as its endpoint, and the novel’s conclusion simply conrms what one of the policemen investigating the prostitute’s murder told him early on in his search: It’s not 1970 anymore. We haven’t got the time to do the old anti-authoritarian thing with you now . . . Those days are nished, you know. Me, you, we’re all buried up to our eyeballs in society. There’s no authority anymore, and no anti-authority either. No-one thinks like that anymore . . . The system’s got it all nicely worked out.75

Closed circuits of consumption: Dark Nights by Li Ang The rst Taiwanese text to be explored here is Li Ang’s Dark Nights, an account of sexual mores in parvenu Taipei which, to quote Michelle Yeh, is an abrasive analysis of “the impact of commercialization and materialism on human nature in contemporary Taiwan”.76 Li Ang is perhaps the most internationally acclaimed of Taiwan’s postwar female writers. Her ction consistently bends or breaks taboos, and her desire to stretch the boundaries of representation has made her a strong counter-cultural presence within the Taiwanese literary community.77 Li made her name through proto-feminist short ction, texts such as “Huaji” (“Flower Season”, 1968) “You quxian de wawa” (“The Curvaceous Dolls”, 1970), and “Renjian shi” (“The World of Men”, 1974), which explore budding

75

Ibid., 308. Michelle Yeh, “Shapes of Darkness: Symbols in Li Ang’s Dark Night”, in Michael S. Duke (ed.), Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals (Armonk, 1989), 78. 77 Most of this taboo-breaking is, of course, related to the frank representation of sexuality in Li Ang’s work; indeed, according to Li herself, sex is “the most incisive force breaking through a conventional society”. See Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, “Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang’s The Butcher’s Wife”, Modern Chinese Literature 4/1–2 (1988), 178. Zhang Songsheng (Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang) corroborates this view of Li Ang as a counter-cultural force, and claims that Li is “a writer extremely attuned to ‘alternative visions’”. See Zhang, “Dangdai Taiwan wenxue yu wenhua changyu de bianqian” (“Contemporary Taiwanese Literature and the Changing Cultural Field”), Zhongwai wenxue 24/5 (1995), 128. 76

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sexualities in mildly risqué style. Li Ang’s major breakthrough, however, came with her novella Shafu (The Butcher’s Wife, 1983), a graphic and visceral account of the battle of the sexes which won her plaudits both locally and abroad.78 Since The Butcher’s Wife, Li Ang has sought to broaden her ctional purview, and subsequent writings—most notably Miyuan (Labyrinthine Garden, 1991), and Beigang xianglu renren cha (Everyone Puts Incense in the Northern Port Incense Burner, 1997)—have explored historical memory, national identity, and local political culture whilst remaining anchored in female consciousness. In some ways, Dark Nights is a transitional piece. It ventures more boldly into the social world than Li’s earlier works, most of which take womanhood as their sole sphere of operation, yet it lacks the heavy political inputs that have made her more recent publications so contentious.79 The political lacunae in Dark Nights speak loudly in their apparent absence, however. Indeed, the text as a whole is a sustained exposition of sexual/money politics, and the lack of other kinds of commitments amongst its cast of characters functions as an index of their dedication to afuence as an article of faith. As a text, Dark Nights moves along overlapping circuits of nancial exchange and sexual barter to spell out its message about the commodication of Taiwanese society. The narrative movement itself is structured along self-consciously cyclical lines. A series of terse interviews between Huang Chengde, a wealthy industrialist, and Chen Tianrui, an acquaintance of Huang’s who has salacious secrets to reveal to the latter, form the principal architecture of the text. The intervening narrative segments are much longer, and use ashback to ll in the details of the scandalous dossiers that Chen has compiled on Huang’s wife, friends,

78 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng examines issues of gender in this novella in the above-cited article. Li Ang herself, meanwhile, notes the international prole of the novel—which has been translated into English, German, Japanese and French—in her original preface to Miyuan (Labyrinthine Garden). See Li Ang, Miyuan (Taipei, 2001), 5. 79 Both these texts have caused a considerable stir in Taiwanese politico-intellectual circles. The interface between gender and national history that Li Ang attempts in Labyrinthine Garden has fascinated critics, and brought forth a slew of studies, including a sizeable web project that found publication in Zhongwai wenxue in July, 1999. The four stories collected in Everyone Puts Incense in the Northern Port Incense Burner, meanwhile, deal frankly with sex and politics, and suggestions that at least one of the texts may be a roman-à-clef has fuelled scabrous interest. For an analysis that reads these two texts together, see Liao Chaoyang, “Lishi, jiaohuan, duixiangsheng. Yuedu Li Ang de Miyuan yu Beigang xianglu renren cha” (“History, Exchange, and the Object Voice: Reading Li Ang’s Labyrinthine Garden and Everyone Puts Incense in the Northern Port Incense Burner”), in Zhou Yingxiong and Liu Jihui (eds.), Shuxie Taiwan. Wenxueshi, houzhimin yu houxiandai (Writing Taiwan. Literary History, Postcolonial and Postmodern) (Taipei, 2000), 287–315.

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and business associates. In essence, these exposés reveal that Huang’s intimate circle is criss-crossed by a series of illicit liaisons which leave virtually everyone within that circle compromised. Huang’s wife, Li Lin, is having an affair with his close friend and business partner, Ye Yuan. Ye, a married journalist, divides his time between stockmarket speculation, Li Lin, and another business associate of Huang’s named Ding Xinxin. Ding, in her turn, conducts concurrent affairs with Ye Yuan and Sun Xinya, a PhD in computer science who has recently returned from the US. Chen Tianrui, for his part, lusts hopelessly after Ding Xinxin. Both this incestuous web and the symbolic standing of each of its players in the socio-economic geography of 1980s Taiwan are considered narrative moves. In tandem with the leitmotif of stockmarket speculation, this closed circuit of sexual exchange among the island’s new elite generates the foundational metaphors of the text—deceit, claustrophobia, barter, and social reication.80 From its formal design to its characterization, Dark Nights elaborates this cluster of images in order to give textual expression to what Li Ang sees as the melancholy by-products of the Taiwan miracle; and once again, the rhetorical gures of sexuality and the city provide the broad canvas upon which these images are delineated. Just as integral to this general project of critique, however, are the imprints of commodity culture that lie heavily upon the text. Brand names from Mercedes Benz to Estée Lauder, Cartier, and Armani give Dark Nights its labels gravitas, and a lifestyle of seaside villas, steak tartare, and expense accounts is aunted by the novel’s protagonists. Yet the ippant fetishization of the brand that is so common a conceit among narratives of the consumer society is largely absent here. In texts such as Tanaka Yasuo’s Somehow, Crystal and Zhu Tianwen’s short story “Shijimo de huali” (“Fin-de-siècle Splendor”, 1990)—local apogees of this trend—international brand names abound with an almost comical frequency, and these signs without referents are given free rein to usurp narrative space. Texts such as these imply a contemporary East Asian world awash with foreign commodities, in which the local voice is all but drowned out, and where the best possibilities for critique lie in the satire of this cultural inundation. Li Ang’s approach is rather different, however. In part, perhaps, because of the earlier date of the text, 80 In her analysis of the novella, Michelle Yeh argues that the dark night of its title, the sea, and the classical theory of wuxing are the pre-eminent symbols in the text. See Yeh, op. cit.

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Dark Nights is more concerned with the unfolding relationship between local life and tradition and the ingressions of global commodity culture. Indeed, the theme of hybridity and imminent change is germane throughout, and Li Ang sets the scene—quite literally—for this leitmotif right at the beginning of the novel. Here, Chen Tianrui arrives at Huang Chengde’s condominium to launch his exposé, and casts an eye around the artfully styled interior: At the entrance (to the apartment) was a large Chinese-style screen, riotously carved with miniature gures, owers, and birds . . . Beyond the screen, there was a spacious sitting-cum-dining room. On the dark grey carpet sat a set of claret-red leather sofas; the long Western-style dining table was made of redwood, and was matched by several dining chairs with the characters for ‘good fortune’ emblazoned on their backs.81

Opulence is the keynote here, but the real luxury comes not from blanket Westernization but from a careful fusion of decorative styles. The baseline tone is Occidental (dark grey carpet, sofas, dining table), just as the materials (claret-red leather, redwood) are both exotic and conspicuously exclusive. Huang’s nancial credentials thus established, it is left to the ornamental Chinese touches to lend a sense of grace, and give the room an additional local ambience. Yet as the characters for ‘good fortune’ indicate unmistakably, the real message of this room is not taste and sensibility but wealth and greed; and, as such, the Huang home is a paradigm for the novel to come. Replayed again and again in more gurative style throughout the remainder of the text, this opening scene delineates in precise visual terms the impact on traditional culture of Taiwan’s incorporation into the global consumer economy. It is, however, in Li Ang’s representation of eroticism in Dark Nights that cheapened, commodied Taiwan comes under harshest scrutiny, and each sexual liaison in the novel expounds this theme in subtly variegated fashion. Moreover, when the novella is viewed as a piece, it becomes evident that the nexus of liaisons that holds the text together operates on the same guiding principles: capital accumulation—either nancial, social, or cultural—is the objective of the sexual actors; desire is often coincidental to sex; and libidinous energy is focused not on the body, but on various material ambitions that use intimacy as their cipher. In other words, women and men use one another in this novel for money, goods, and status, and eroticism becomes so entirely disconnected from 81

Li Ang, Anye (Yonghe, 1994), 2.

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pleasure that liaisons become an exercise in low-level warfare.82 Perhaps the most straightforward instance of this is Ding Xinxin’s affair with Ye Yuan. Sharp-witted and seductive, Ding Xinxin uses these natural assets to force her way into social circles that would otherwise be closed to her—a fact her lovers, particularly Ye, intuit and exploit. After musing to himself about her well-sprung gure and ability to play the charming faux-naive in front of powerful men, Ye reects on the precise nature of Ding Xinxin’s allure: Relying on his instinctive sense about women, Ye Yuan could tell that . . . Ding Xinxin most denitely did not come from a well-heeled family . . . It was early summer, and she was wearing a plain pair of jeans, a synthetic fabric shirt, and her sandals and handbag were cheap goods, something Ye Yuan knew from his considerable experience in giving presents to women. In spite of this—indeed, because of it—he found Ding Xinxin intriguing.83

Ding Xinxin, with her breasts as “springy as jelly”, is an obvious sexual trophy. As such, she becomes another appurtenance—just like his car, or the pied-à-terre in which their affair is conducted—within Ye Yuan’s rich material life. Yet what really appeals to Ye here is Ding Xinxin’s obvious hunger for things that he has within his gift: soirées at Western restaurants, designer dresses, and introductions to elite social cliques (all of which he soon duly supplies). This hunger allows him to ‘play’ Ding Xinxin: her material desires give Ye Yuan a socio-economic ascendancy that he can convert into the symbolic capital of sexual conquest, and as they jockey for position the pair engage in the game of barter which, for Ye, has become the relished essence of human interaction. Ye Yuan is older, richer, and better-connected than Ding Xinxin; but the key point in the above-quoted passage—and throughout the novel—is their essential ontological equivalence within the larger consumer system. Ye Yuan may be higher up the food chain, but both prey on each other in a distasteful symbiosis. The sexual act is simply the medium through which this ruthless trade is negotiated: it is the currency of their transaction.84 82

Sexuality in Dark Nights recalls Howard Goldblatt’s description of Li Ang’s work: “The physical coupling of the protagonists, which solves none of the problems in their lives, is representative of the joyless, desperate, guilt-laden, and ultimately empty sexual activity that appears in so much of Li Ang’s ction”. See Goldblatt, “Sex and Society: The Fiction of Li Ang”, in Goldblatt (ed.), Worlds Apart, 156. 83 Li, Anye, 83. 84 Li herself makes a similar point about the novel. When questioned about Dark Nights in an interview with Jian Yingying, she states that “Unlike the West, the development of capitalism in Taiwan has not undergone several hundred years of cumulative

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Li Ang returns to this notion of trade repeatedly in Dark Nights, working sullied eroticism into a metonym for the degradation of sociality right across the landscape of contemporary Taiwan. No passage in the novel illustrates this theme of degradation more powerfully than the one quoted at length below, in which sex, money culture, and the ruin of Chinese tradition combine to create a bitterly satirical narrative moment. Ding Xinxin and Ye Yuan are in bed together, but the latter is moodily preoccupied, fretting over the risks and disappointments of stockmarket speculation: These last few days Ye Yuan had not managed to track down any insider information about the price of “Eastern Light” stock . . . Frustration and a sense of futility that he had been running around after stock market news for the last ten years without making the slightest headway began to lend Ye Yuan’s tone of voice a genuine mournfulness, and no matter what questions Ding Xinxin asked him he made no response . . . an idea came to Ding Xinxin. In a deliberately skittish manner, she dangled her breasts . . . heavily in front of Ye Yuan’s face, and said coquettishly, “I once had a Chinese classics teacher who used to make us memorize the Analects of Confucius. Fortunately, he didn’t teach us for long, so I only learned a few lines. Let’s have a competition, whoever gets stuck rst is the loser”. Ye Yuan still did not reply, but seemed to cheer up, and turned to suck Ding Xinxin’s bright nipples, which quickly grew erect. “The gentleman strives for virtue, not food, and when tilling. . . .” Bitten hard, Ding Xinxin stopped her recitation and gave a yelp; with his lips still grazing her nipples and softly rubbing them, Ye Yuan continued to murmur the lines indistinctly . . .85

The treacheries of the stockmarket are key to Li Ang’s critical design throughout Dark Nights: wheeling-and-dealing represents illusion, entrapment, and the chase, and captures the consumer city in miniature. Here, however, the crux is more specic, and hinges on the metaphoric synthesis between speculation, the couple’s loveless and illicit affair, and the improper uses to which they put the sacralized canonical text. Each of these points segues naturally into the next to imply not just loose linkage, but a close sequence of cause-and-effect. process. Taiwan has accepted wholesale both the advantages and the disadvantages of capitalism, and nowadays male-female relations in Taiwanese society are part and parcel of commerce. Of course, genuine feeling is not entirely non-existent, but sex and love in society are principally an aspect of ‘trading’” (Li uses the English term here). See Jian Yingying, “Nüxing, zhuyi, chuangzuo: Li Ang fangwenlu” (“Woman, Doctrine, and Creativity: A Transcript of an Interview with Li Ang”), Zhongwai wenxue 17/10 (1989), 192–3. 85 Ibid., 100–1.

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The passage begins with Ye Yuan’s excursus on the perils of the market, where information, slippery and elusive, is the commodity that rules. Repeated four times in three lines, “information” (xiaoxi ) is twinned with terms of “manipulation” (caozuo), “ensnaring” (taoqu), “acquisition” (huode), and “being at the mercy of other people’s whims” ( yangren bixi). Information is Ye’s only route to capital, and the pursuit of it constitutes his ‘labor’. Yet the essential unreality of the market means that information cannot be trusted, and the sweat of his brow translates into “frustration and a sense of futility”, rather than any concrete gain. Thus although he may make a killing from time to time, this prot is quickly absorbed back into the system again, and brings no real security. A microcosm of consumption logic itself, Ye’s career as a speculator is driven by illusory desires and an ever-present sense of lack which can never nd satisfaction. This pattern nds its natural mirror in his erotic life with Ding Xinxin. She is part of the precise same market logic, and ( just like insider information) is there to be manipulated, ensnared, acquired, and placed at the mercy of Ye’s whims. The moment of clarity that is visited upon Ye Yuan—that the market is a futile trap—extends to his feelings about Ding, too, and she no longer seems worth the effort. The situation is saved, for the time being, by an entirely subversive recourse to the moral authority of the distant past; and it is Ding Xinxin’s game—her use of the Chinese tradition in all its augustness to tease and titillate her lover—that temporarily improves Ye’s humor. Just as in Huang Chengde’s apartment, where nods to traditional decor are a kind of ostentatious afterthought in the overall scheme, the Analects in this passage are entertaining precisely because of their utter redundancy to the way in which Ye Yuan and Ding Xinxin live their lives now. Throughout Dark Nights, commodity culture, sexuality, and the decay of tradition are linked in a repetitive critical pattern. Ding Xinxin’s affair with Sun Xinya, a returnee computer scientist who can differentiate expertly between varieties of Western cheese, provides another notable example. Tubby, bald, and unprepossessing, Sun Xinya is hardly an erotic match for an alpha female such as Ding. She knows, moreover, that Sun is set on using her: he “parades her beauty” (xuanyao ta de meili) in front of his friends, but whisks her away from any elite gathering before she can use her sexual networking skills on other men. But as Ding Xinxin watches Sun drinking in the applause after delivering a speech entitled “In Search of China’s New Management Science”, she feels “inexplicably proud”, and nds herself obliging him sexually soon

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afterwards. Evidently, Sun’s speech is critical to his wooing of Ding; and here, once again, the degradation of tradition plays its part in their erotic orchestrations. Sun’s lecture begins by parroting the familiar precepts of Japanese-style management—“lifetime employment” (zhongshen pinyong), “job rotation” (gongzuo lunhui ), and so on. Next he proposes— and here the level of satire is notched up a peg or two—that “China’s modern management philosophy” (Zhongguo xiandai guanli zhexue) should blend contemporary theories with the accumulated wisdom of The Book of Changes, Laozi, and Sunzi’s Art of War. Sun’s glory on the stage, the triumph that electries the audience and wins him Ding Xinxin’s favors, is precisely this glib, unabashed deployment of ‘tradition’ in the service of advanced consumer capitalism.86 In a deliberate re-staging of Ding’s earlier encounter with Ye Yuan and the Analects, sexuality and the Chinese ethico-philosophical tradition become the medium through which social reication is exposed. Li Ang’s representation of the city in Dark Nights provides the nal foil for these interlinked themes. At rst sight, the novella is striking for its almost claustrophobically inward focus: landscapes tend to be psychological, dialogue is often pared down, and Li is at her best when slowly mapping the terrain of the mind. When exteriority intrudes, it does so for an explicit purpose, such as the extended boudoir scene in chapter two, which describes Li Lin at her toilette—her bedroom, her clothes, her make-up—with a deliberation which is almost excessive. Awaiting the arrival of her lover Ye Yuan, Li Lin is tense and febrile, and the physicality of the scene is as painstaking as the protagonist’s illicit ‘body project’. Not surprisingly, therefore, the city does not exert the kind of noisy narrative presence found in many of the other narratives examined here. Yet Taipei is the indissociable context for Li Ang’s critique in this text—so much so, in fact, that it provides the novella with its title. The eponymous “dark night” appears only intermittently in the narrative, and when it does, it is associated with Huang Chengde, the character who, more than any other, is forced into a realization about the corruption of the world around him. As Chen Tianrui tells his story of adultery and betrayal, Huang nds his gaze drawn again and again to the Taipei skyline outside his twelfth-storey apartment window: Outside the window, the sky was already pitch-black, and tiny dots of light, faint and indistinct, gradually appeared in the small square of night-

86

Ibid., 137–8.

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sky that could still be seen from the high building; but he could not tell yet whether they were stars, distant neon, or the occasional airplane ashing past.87

Earlier in the narrative, too, Huang stares out of his French windows at “the dark Taipei night in which scattered lights were ickering”.88 In fact, the motif recurs in every meeting between the two men,89 and their last climactic showdown—which is also the nal scene of the novella— ends with a vista of the city drenched in driving rain. This juxtaposition of miserable epiphanies and Taipei at night is pursued insistently, and Li Ang intensies its allegorical meaning by making the city darker and more forbidding as the scenes succeed one another, and Chen Tianrui’s revelations multiply in number and shock value. Huang Chengde’s humiliation at being betrayed by his wife and close friend nds its poetic ally in the blackness of the metropolis by night, where solitude and estrangement are symbolically implied, and he nds his gaze riveted to the cityscape outside his window. Just as signicantly, Taipei is implicated in an intimate manner with Chen’s sordid account: its whirl of bars and restaurants provides endless opportunity for sexual adventure, just as its anonymity makes it the perfect mise-enscène for betrayal. Indeed, the city becomes a ready accomplice in the degradation that is handed round from one person to the next within Li Ang’s circle of characters. The night-time metropolis, in which the lights are “faint”, the stars fade into neon, and nature yields to artice is the shroud that conceals their moral decay, and its hard modernity provides the physical setting for the eclipse of tradition by materialism that is enacted by each of the protagonists in the text. This point is reinforced by the fact that most of the novella’s key scenes—the seductions, indelities, and double-deals—take place at night. Indeed, Taipei has scant presence in this novel apart from in its night-time guise, and this dark metropolis—so close in mood to the nocturnal cityscapes rendered in lms such as Edward Yang’s Kongbufenzi (The Terrorizers, 1986) and Tsai Ming-liang’s Heliu (The River, 1996)—becomes, once again, almost a protagonist in Li Ang’s tale of the commodied world.

87 88 89

Ibid., 119. Ibid., 71. Another example occurs on page 29.

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chapter four KTV city: Zhu Tianwen’s “Red Rose is Paging You”

The nal text to be explored here is Zhu Tianwen’s “Red Rose”, one of a collection of loosely-linked narratives about contemporary Taipei that the writer completed in 1990.90 Both this story and its companion pieces in Fin-de-siècle Splendor (Shijimo de huali) have attracted keen critical notice, with several commentators hailing the set as Zhu’s literary “breakthrough”.91 Not surprisingly, given the story’s montage-style structure, studied lack of emplotment, and consumerist savoir-faire, it is the postmodern sensibilities of “Red Rose” that demand attention rst. In fact, Zhu’s entire volume seems to offer a treasure-trove of evidence that Taiwan is now in thrall to the “cultural logic of late capitalism”; and the liminal globalization of Li Ang’s earlier novella seems to have become a fully-edged reality here. ‘Postmodern’ is, however, a tricky label to afx to Zhu Tianwen’s recent ction. There can be little question that the caliber of Zhu’s writing has been raised by its exposure to Taipei’s ambient consumer culture, ironic though this may seem given the author’s earlier reputation as a purist and devotee of Zhang Ailing. Nowadays, her ction nds its niche in the fuzzy space between high and low in the contemporary cultural scene, and is quintessentially ‘post’ in the way that it bastardizes different genres to create a signature style. Yet at the same time, a marked hostility towards the new age hides itself, without much success, beneath Zhu’s modish prose. Many of the characters in Fin-de-siècle Splendor (Tong in “Roushen pusa” [“Cardinal Bodhisattva”], Jiawei in “Dai wo qu ba, yueguang” [“Take Me with You, Moonlight], the eponymous masseur in “Chai Shifu” [“Master Chai”], and, of course, Xiang Ge, the protagonist of “Red Rose”) nd their realities in some way unheimlich, and it between the present and more congenial imagined worlds. Indeed, much of the momentum generated by “Red Rose” and its fellow stories comes from their counterbalancing of surface postmodernist effects with a subtext of melancholy and nostalgia.92 As a collection, these stories are distrustful of both afu-

90 The stories were published separately in national newspapers before being collected in the volume Shijimo de huali. 91 See Shu-chen Chiang, “Rejection of Postmodern Abandon: Zhu Tianwen’s Finde-siècle Splendor”, Tamkang Review 29/1 (1999), 41–2. 92 A similar point is made in a recent article by Liu Liangya, who writes: “Writers such as Zhu Tianwen seem au fait with new trends in Western theory, yet . . . in her recent works Fin-de-siècle Splendor and Notes of a Desolate Man she almost adopts the stance of defending modernism and modern ideology in order to chastise the grotesque and

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ence and political freedom, and their protagonists’ lives are an exercise in counterfeit pleasures. Throughout Fin-de-siècle Splendor, Zhu creates this mood of dislocation through her evocation of the consumer city and the sexual economy that obtains within it. “Red Rose” is arguably Zhu’s most uent and nuanced representation of post-martial law consumer culture on Taiwan, and it is for this reason that it forms the focus of analysis here. Surprisingly enough, the text has received scant critical attention. A denite buzz has surrounded Fin-de-siècle Splendor right from its earliest publication in 1990, but critics from both Taiwan and the West have latched on to “Master Chai” and the title story “Fin-de-siècle Splendor”—along with the later novel Notes of a Desolate Man—as the chief bearers of Zhu’s new style. The subject of numerous scholarly articles, these latter texts are also frequently anthologized, and all three have been translated into English.93 Yet despite its lower literary prole, “Red Rose” offers perhaps a sharper set of aperçus into Taiwan’s cultural condition at the end of the thirty-year period examined in this book. Its middle-aged anti-hero, Xiang Ge, is a producer of TV soap operas. He spends his days either working at a furious pace in the TV studio, or frequenting KTV lounges,94 polishing his collection of marijuana pipes, and hunting listlessly for casual sex. In many ways, Xiang Ge is Taipei Man at the cusp of the new era. He is dressed head-to-toe in “fashionable gear” (saobao huo), he mixes with Hong Kong actors and directors (Gangxing Gangdao), his wife and sons watch NHK broadcasts and converse fashionably in Japanese, and he has useful “political”—for which read underworld—connections.

gaudy spectacle of postmodern Taiwan society . . . (postmodern here principally indicates the post-martial law era of capitalist consumer culture). This complex contradiction reveals Taiwan’s special political, economic, and social environment, and causes modern (or even pre-modern) and postmodern ideologies to mingle and conict with one another . . .” See Liu Liangya, “Baidang zai xiandai yu houxiandai zhi jian. Zhu Tianwen jinqi zuopinzhong de guozu, shidai, xingbie, qingyu wenti” (“Wavering between Modernism and Post-modernism. Issues of Nationality, Generation, Gender and Sexual Passion in Zhu Tianwen’s Recent Works”), in Zhongwai wenxue 24/1 (1995), 8. 93 “Master Chai”, for example, appears in two important recent anthologies—one published in Taiwan, and the other in the US. See Mei Jialing and Hao Yuxiang (eds.), Taiwan xiandai wenxue jiaocheng. Xiaoshuo duben (A Course in Modern Taiwanese Literature. Fiction) (Taipei, 2002); and David Der-wei Wang and Jeanne Tai (eds.), Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (New York, 1994). 94 KTV is an offshoot of karaoke, but differs from the latter in that singing typically takes place in individual rooms—equipped with a TV, microphones, and a stereo system—which customers hire out on an hourly or nightly basis. Food and drink are usually served.

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At rst sight, in other words, the story looks like a celebration of heterodox new ways of living, and what critique there is appears to be of a retrospective kind, directed implicitly at the authoritarianism that tamped down Taiwanese ebullience in the past. Pleasure seems to be pursued for its own sake in the world of “Red Rose”. The characters bristle with energy, and Zhu Tianwen’s style, written in a vivid continuous present, is a good match for their non-stop movement. Zhu, now a so-called ‘new breed writer’ (xinrenlei zuojia), has clearly shaken off her juancun roots—indeed, the story’s mix of playfulness and plasticity in moral values looks a good deal like a rejection of the old order.95 Yet at the same time, the permissiveness of the post-martial law world has a certain eschatological quality in Zhu’s text: meaningless sex, hard drugs, gangland violence, and political corruption are the stuff of routine, and a sense of imminent anarchy hovers over the story. The authoritarian state may be gone, but the real question Zhu Tianwen seems to be asking here is: what has come in its place? The answer supplied in “Red Rose” is explicit enough, and makes itself manifest in the very rst lines of the story. This opening scene is set in a KTV lounge, and describes Xiang Ge, drunk and high on marijuana, performing his “newly mastered signature song” (xinlianjiu de zhaopaige), the karaoke favorite “Little Clown” (“Xiao chou”). Zhu’s prose here is noticeably, and deliberately, eroticized. It interweaves images of physical transportation and spiritual release, and makes effective use of the double entendre contained in the term gaochao (high tide/climax) to suggest the power that karaoke exerts over Xiang Ge: 95 As mentioned earlier, Zhu Tianwen is the daughter of Zhu Xining, a well-known mainlander émigré writer, and she and her sister Zhu Tianxin were brought up in the juancun, or military dependents’ villages, that sprang up across Taiwan after the exodus of the KMT to the island in 1949. Seen as mainlander bastions, the juancun developed their own distinctive culture, which was often characterized by a nostalgic longing for China and a certain disdain for Taiwan. In her early career, Zhu Tianwen championed these attitudes; and it was not until the mid-1980s that her writing became imbued with real local avor. See Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, “Chu T’ien-wen and Taiwan’s Recent Cultural and Literary Trends”, Modern Chinese Literature 6/1/2 (1992), 62–70. Huang Jinshu has noted, however, that each of the characters in Fin-de-siècle Splendor still appears to have a juancun background—despite Zhu’s move away from juancun ideology. The only exception is Xiang Ge, the protagonist of Red Rose, who is an overseas Chinese from Korea. Yet the salient point—as Huang rightly observes—is that the scene of Zhu’s ction has shifted to the city, with all the cultural mix that this entails. See Huang Jinshu, “Shenji zhi wu: hou sishi hui? (Hou)xiandai qishilu? Lun Zhu Tianwen” “A Dance of the Nymphs: the last forty chapters? A (Post)modern Revelation? A Discussion of Zhu Tianwen”, Zhongwai wenxue 24/10 (1996), 109. Huang’s article also details the considerable shifts that Zhu Tianwen’s writing has undergone in recent years.

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His style of singing speeded up some parts and drew others out more lingeringly, so it was as if one wave was holding him back only for another to push him onwards to the climax, towards those two words “Little Clown”, “Little Clown”. His soul stirred, and in an instant his qi was clear; his body surrendered up his spirit, and he rode on the wings of the song straight to the top of the clouds. It was great, today he really was on great form.96

Indeed, it soon becomes evident that KTV is the prime signier of consumer culture right across Zhu’s text: “Red Rose” begins and ends in a KTV lounge, and it is the KTV experience which provides its most telling moments. Kuan-hsing Chen’s observations on the phenomenon are extremely pertinent in this regard: By the end of 1988, KTV neon bill-boards dominated the evening cityscape . . . with the emergence of KTV, singing culture became almost a popular social movement, cutting across racial, ethnic, gender and class boundaries . . . KTV was everywhere: private companies, schools and public institutions, including military camps. By early 1990, other forms of what can be called (the) X-TV phenomenon also appeared: HTV referred to KTV merging with hotel business; R(estaurant)TV; D(iscodancing)TV; CTV, with CD Laser equipment; guei TV, cargo containers (guei) transformed into entertainment sites; T(ea house)KTV; B(eer house)D(isco)KTV; BTV for love hotels; and nally, cable TV offered services for home viewers to order particular songs to sing to. Taipei, at that time, could be said to be a KTV city.97

It goes without saying here that the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the explosion of KTV in 1988 followed one another in a close sequence of cause and effect. KTV, with its emphasis on pleasure, self-expression, and emotionality, is a reex reaction against the controls of the past, and is often cited as a paradigm of the liberal energies unleashed by Taiwan’s ‘great transition’. Yet at the same time, there is a clear sense of over-saturation in Chen’s account. In fact, although “popular social movement” is his preferred term, the level of KTV penetration described above—schools, homes, barracks, businesses, and above all the leisure industry—suggests a cultural craze which has gone beyond simple popularity to become virtually hegemonic. This, at any rate, is the construction of KTV that we nd in Zhu Tianwen’s text. In “Red Rose”, the world of KTV is Xiang Ge’s most meaningful reality, and the story seems to suggest that if the passing of the autocratic state has left a power vacuum, then it is ‘singing culture’ 96 97

Zhu Tianwen, “Hong meigui hujiao ni”, in Shijimo de huali (Taipei, 1990), 155. Chen, op. cit., 168.

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which has lled it. This is not to say, of course, that the latter is the sole medium through which Zhu makes her points about consumption in contemporary Taiwan. As I shall discuss later, KTV works alongside other carefully realized motifs of the consumer society to create a metaphor in the round; and Zhu Tianwen often describes Xiang Ge striking up a surreally intimate rapport with the objects (designer desklamps, exotic pipes, Action Men dolls et al.) which surround him. Yet the extraordinary proliferation of KTV as a cultural form—a proliferation that was taking place as Zhu Tianwen wrote—makes it an unusually apposite locus for critique. Omnipresent and seductive, KTV and the consumer world it epitomizes are an ironic successor to the state in this text, and the power monopoly that pertained before 1987 seems to have diffused into new varieties of socio-cultural control. And ‘control’ is the key term here. Zhu’s text implies that this swamping consumer culture is the legacy that the KMT and its economy-rst policies have bequeathed Taiwan; and, in “Red Rose” at least, resistance is just as problematic in 1990 as it was during the era of the Chiangs. This point becomes clear when we examine Zhu’s representation of what Kuan-hsing Chen terms “KTV city” more closely. The city is the ultimate other for every character in Fin-de-siècle Splendor, the existential bottom line with which they must negotiate at all times.98 “Taipei is very curious. It is utterly chaotic, but it has a tremendous energy, with every kind of potential”99—so says Zhu Tianwen of the metropolis that she describes elsewhere as full of “steaming smoke and rising dust”.100 This sense of Taipei as a force to contend with—even a personality in its own right—emerges palpably in “Red Rose”, and the reader can almost see the city molding Xiang Ge in its own image.101 The jolting, almost 98 Relatedly, a kind of love-hate attitude towards the city in Zhu Tianwen’s writing has been identied by the Taiwanese critic Ma Sen in a recent article on urban literature, in which he draws particular attention to her earlier short story “Yanxia zhi du” (“City of Hot Summer”). See Ma, op. cit., 196. 99 Quoted in Chiang, op. cit., 51. 100 Zhu Tianwen, “Chai Shifu”, in Shijimo de huali (Taipei, 1990), 15. Wang Ban makes a similar point about the physicality of Zhu’s Taipei: “In Zhu Tianwen’s ction, Taipei always seems like a suffocating furnace. Blindingly bright shop fronts crammed with high-fashion commodities from all over the world line the boulevards, and media information is the daily air that people breathe”. See Wang, “Huhuan lingyun de meixue. Zhu Tianwen xiaoshuozhong de shangpin yu huaijiu” (“Calling for a Graceful Aesthetics. Commodities and Nostalgia in the Fiction of Zhu Tianwen”), in Zhou and Liu, op. cit., 346. 101 Taipei throughout Fin-de-siècle Splendor recalls Jane Augustine’s observations on the metropolis as a literary protagonist: “the city as character is present when the human

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jump-cut texture of Zhu’s writing plays a key role here. The ow of the narrative in “Red Rose” is close to stream-of-consciousness, and alternates between Xiang Ge’s secret nostalgia and his encounters with the consumer city. These vignettes of urban life come thick and fast, interrupting Xiang Ge’s reminiscences and creating a sensation of unruly perceptual overload throughout the text. Zhu’s attention to mood and detail comes into its own here, and whether she is describing the staff at a KTV box who “chirrup like magpies into their walkie-talkies”,102 or the cold light of a toy-shop window after closing-time in which “bright yellow Big Birds from Sesame Street goose-step efciently in mid-air”,103 Zhu imagines the barrage of consumer images that the city throws at its inhabitants in terms of sensory assault and invasion.104 As “Red Rose” nears its conclusion, this medley of sights and sounds becomes increasingly frenetic. Indeed, by the last few pages of the text, there are few boundaries left between Xiang Ge’s interior world and the consumer city: images, memories and consumer objects are elided into one another without any disciplining hand, and the narrative is a blurred mirror of its protagonist’s ethico-spatial disorientation. The setting for this nale is, predictably enough, a KTV lounge. This, however, is no ordinary karaoke box: christened “I AM I”—a decidedly ironic touch given the ontological uncertainty that hangs over the story—this venue is a so-called PDK, a state-of-the-art night-spot that combines a piano bar, disco, and KTV (gangqinba disike KTV )105 with food, shows, bingo, and fruit machines (chican kanxiu binguo laba).106 Zhu lingers on the glittering articiality of “I AM I”:

characters are . . . out of touch with their prescribed set of values, thus shaky and uncertain in personal identity and consciousness . . . (or) when the particular features of a particular city are perceived by a human character as a will or force or pressure bearing upon him or her, producing a reaction which would not have occurred otherwise. Human characters then even develop into manifestations of the stronger force, the city, instead of developing into selves divergent from it or opposed to it”. See Jane Augustine, “From Topos to Anthropoid: the City as Character in Twentieth-Century Texts”, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), City Images (Amsterdam, 1991), 74. 102 Zhu, “Hong meigui hujiao ni”, 156. 103 Ibid., 166. 104 Chen Huiying makes a similar point by referring to the way in which Zhu Tianwen “uses the perception of the sensory organs to break down the incidents of life and turn them into (ctional) fragments brimming with vitality”. See Chen, Ganxing, ziwo, xinxiang. Zhongguo xiandai shuqing xiaoshuo yanjiu (The Perceptual, the Self, and the Mental Image. A Study of Modern Chinese Lyrical Fiction) (Hong Kong, 1996), 92. 105 Zhu, “Hong meigui hujiao ni”, 167. 106 Ibid.

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chapter four The glass-fronted KTV rooms were sprinkled like stars on all four sides of the piano bar, and two palm trees, varnished gold and covered in tin foil, towered over the proceedings.107

—and on the hybridity to which it is home. Songs in Mandarin and Taiyu (Taiwanese) overlap seamlessly with one another, and allude, perhaps, to the possibilities of integration in a society still riven along ethno-political lines. Yet ultimately, it is not conciliation but a sense of otherness which strikes the dominant tone here: rap-style numbers confuse Xiang Ge, and trigger poignant memories of the early days when he and his wife were courting. Before long, the marijuana pipe starts to circulate, intensifying the haziness of the scene, whilst Xiao Wan, an associate of Xiang Ge, produces a dual-band walkie-talkie, and the narrative focus shifts to the craze for citizens’ band radio that was sweeping Taiwan at the time. An obvious precursor of the internet, the vogue for walkie-talkies takes the consumer revolution into the ether, and works as a vivid signier of the ubiquity of consumption. For Xiang Ge, this talk of walkie-talkie culture shifts imperceptibly into melancholic predictions about his life at home, where Japanese and “American” (Meiguohua) are the languages of choice and the so-called patriarch is rapidly becoming an outsider. In the last lines of the story, these separate signs—KTV, citizens’ radio, and Taiwan’s increasing internationalization—are fused into the narrative’s abiding image of Taipei. A scene of son et lumière, the city is as vibrant and unstoppable in this passage as Xiang Ge himself is a spent force: Whilst his wife and sons used languages that he did not remotely understand to talk to one another, he would just have to keep on guessing about what they said, suspicious, jealous, and humiliated; little by little he would wither away and die. This was how Xiang Ge imagined his future, as he faced the glass KTV rooms with their countless screens that ashed like stars and the walls of MTV that surged on all sides of the dance oor. The colorful city lights were just appearing, and the night-time world seemed to spread like wildre. Another city, a city in the sky that could be heard but not seen, was beginning to form under the canopy of darkness. It was a city of walkie-talkies, and as the night deepened, the trafc in the air grew more frantic, right until the morning sun began to rise and the sounds slowly disappeared.108

Sexuality is, of course, the other rhetorical medium through which Zhu Tianwen explores consumer Taiwan in “Red Rose”. As mentioned 107 108

Ibid., 167. Ibid., 169–170.

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earlier, Xiang Ge is a habitual opportunist, whose night-time excursions into the city typically involve the “search for girls” (zhao meimei ).109 At rst sight, moreover, Taipei seems sexually adventurous and free-wheeling in Zhu Tianwen’s text: young women are liberated, and a casual erotic encounter is as much a part of the evening’s entertainment for Xiang Ge as the mandatory visit to a KTV lounge. In simple terms, sex is a commodity like any other in “Red Rose”. Yet precisely because of this equivalence of values, illicit liaisons quickly lose their thrill, and the subsuming of desire into the greater logic of consumption leaves Xiang Ge pining, quite ironically, for his wife. In fact, all Xiang Ge’s fantasies are centered on her and the more old-fashioned pleasures of conjugal life. His wife’s alluring unreadability—“her expression was ambiguous, and seemed to hover between amusement and anger”110—still has the power to “tug at his heart”, and Xiang Ge’s recollections of their past together summon the only real erotic charge in the text. His more physical encounters with women in the city, meanwhile, are devoid of any such frisson. Indeed, many of them border on the ridiculous. At the beginning of the story, Xiang Ge feigns a drunken stupor to escape the attentions of a lively twenty-year-old named Chrysanthemum whose energies have proved too much for him the previous night; and recalling another ing, he remarks dispassionately that “the girl’s plump buttocks were criss-crossed by the shadows of the sunlight streaming in through the Venetian blinds, so that he suddenly felt as if he were grappling with a seedless watermelon”.111 These encounters are deliberately de-eroticized, and the humorous note they strike serves to underline the frivolous role sex plays in an economy of entertainment and diversion, where little is allowed to carry serious weight any more. To reinforce the point, Xiang Ge’s paramours are usually described as lishi or mazi, generic terms for young females that carry a slangy, disrespectful nuance, and the interchangeability of these women in the consumer chain is suggested by the fact that Xiang Ge and his friends like to swap their sexual partners. In other words, “Red Rose”—like so many other narratives of the consumer society before it—describes the debasement of sexual intimacy through capital, a theme that emerges in stark relief when we consider the quasi-erotic air that material objects acquire throughout the story. It almost goes 109 110 111

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 157.

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without saying that Xiang Ge is a sandwich-board advertisement for the urban consumer lifestyle, from his “open-necked Yves Saint Laurent shirt, with a silvery white pure silk scarf tied at the collar” to his “chamois leather Bally shoes”.112 More signicant, perhaps, are the intensely empathetic relationships he builds with the consumer objects that adorn his life. Xiang Ge’s marijuana pipes provide the most striking instance of this anthropomorphic drive—his preferred pipe is “about the half the size of his palm, at and pear-shaped, made of black wood and ornately carved”,113 but he has others made of brass and sandalwood, and together they amount to a minor xation: One of his favorite pastimes was to clean his pipes under the cool white light of the TIZIO lamp using white spirit and cotton-wool. He would clean each pipe until all the blockages were removed, and then line them up to receive his inspection. He would often spend many an hour like this with his pipes, a mutual appraisal in which neither tired of the other.114

The contrast between the doting attentions that Xiang Ge gives his pipes and the clinical depersonalization of his sex life is so obvious here as to scarcely require comment; and the point is driven home by the bonding moments that Xiang Ge shares with other consumer objects. Finally, given the story’s immediate background, it is worth considering the role that politics plays in Zhu Tianwen’s text. Completed in March 1990, the story was written at a time of feverish political activity in Taiwan: restrictions on opposition parties and the press ( jindang jinbao) had been lifted, and a sense of possibility and empowerment was beginning to infuse the political scene. As stated earlier, the standard account of this process links anti-authoritarian activism to the rise of an afuent middle class, and argues that economic growth was the sine qua non of political liberalization. “Red Rose” offers some intriguingly oblique insights into this truth. Direct references to politics occur just twice in the text, and then only very briey; yet both these allusions bear tellingly on Zhu Tianwen’s critique of contemporary consumer Taiwan. The rst is a blatant nudge at the so-called ‘black gold’ (hei jin) and local vote-buying machines that propped up the KMT’s power base during the turbulent post-martial law years.115 Here, Xiang Ge refers to 112

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 156. 114 Ibid. 115 See Linda Gail Arrigo, “From Democratic Movement to Bourgeois Democracy: The Internal Politics of the Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party in 1991”, in Rubinstein, The Other Taiwan, particularly 149–52. 113

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the attempts of his friend, Xiao Wan, to prevent the former’s wife from voting for the Minjindang (DPP) candidate in an upcoming election by encouraging Xiang Ge to feed her sleeping pills. Xiao Wan is a member of the Zhulianbang (United Bamboo Gang), Taiwan’s most powerful underworld force, and Zhu Tianwen’s suggestive linking of the local KMT candidate with maa vote-rigging lambastes the conduct of the ruling party post-1987. At the same time, it implies more generally that money politics are the natural corollary of an aggressively consumer world. Zhu Tianwen’s reiterates this point in her second dig at Taiwan’s political culture. Reecting on the popularity of videos in the night markets of Taipei, Xiang Ge notes that it is “sex and politics” (seqing gen zhengzhi ) that really sell.116 Special favorites include “massage skills for loving couples” and live footage of scufes between politicians in the Legislative Yuan, juxtaposed with one another with obvious ironic intent. Just like sexuality, politics has been co-opted into entertainment consumer culture, and Taiwan’s much-lauded democratic transition ends up looking tawdry and sensationalist in Zhu Tianwen’s text.117

Conclusion This chapter has sought to demonstrate the powerfully oppositional thrust of ctional narratives from Japan and Taiwan that take the consumer society as their subject. The four paradigmatic narratives explored in the preceding pages re-write afuence, representing it in the language of poverty, emptiness, and constraint. As an intertext, they deliberately position themselves against the dominant ow of ideologies about the virtue of consumption, and use alienation effects to draw out the unnaturalness of a reied world. As with all the texts examined in this study, rhetoric rather than any even-handed mimesis is the concern of writers, and these texts have minimal regard for the documented empirics of consumption. Indeed, the notion that consumerism might liberate or even enchant is barely entertained here, whilst the idea that purchasing power might express itself deviantly—in ways that subvert 116

Ibid., 165. In this sense, Zhu’s text can perhaps be interpreted as an example of what Thomas Gold has called “post-democratization triste”. Liu Liangya makes a similar point: “On the one hand, (Zhu) has retained the values of modern thought as well as a complicated nostalgia towards martial law culture and the old order; and on the other, she is also sensitive to some of the liberations brought by capitalist consumer society”. See Liu, op. cit. 117

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the dominant discourse—is as alien as the suggestion that non-biological families might be more sustaining than those bequeathed by birth would seem to the writers examined in chapter three. All of the authors analyzed here appear convinced of the surety of their moral terrain, and the inherent ‘immorality’ of the consumer society becomes a given that is left undisturbed by counter-intuitive ndings of any kind. Instead, the focus of all these writings lies rmly in the creation of a kind of heightened, highly colored ‘reality’, in which moral concerns predominate and the ctional form conspires fully in this reconguring of the observed world. In common with the other texts examined in this book, these narratives of consumerism both avail themselves of the mimetic properties of the realist mode, and at the same time are inventive in the tactical departures they make from it. Thus Mishima’s use of an ‘O. Henry’ or ‘whipcrack’ ending at the conclusion of “The Million Yen Rice Crackers” administers a disturbing jolt, and forces the reader to reconsider the narrative just read in precisely the same way that Kenzô and Kiyoko are compelled to rethink the reality they inhabit. Just as the gemütlich existence of the couple is a sham, so has a fraud been perpetrated on the reader by the fake realism of Mishima’s prose, and the casting of both reader and narrative subject in the identical role of the duped allows the text to reveal the ruses of consumption through a smooth fusion of form and content. Murakami Haruki subverts realism in rather different style. In Dance, Dance, Dance, the intense materiality of daily life—evoked through Murakami’s hallmark descriptions of the minutiae of food preparation, dress, music, and shopping—jars with impromptu slidings into magical realities where these routines suddenly become little more than the white noise of consumption. The world of the Sheepman, the old Dolphin Hotel, and the retreat from realism that they represent serve what is both an unsettling and a compensatory function, allowing the reader momentary access to a lost nostalgic past which seems full of the kind of plenitude that boku’s daily life so lacks. Either way, like all good magical realism, the tension between truth-telling and the fabular remains unresolved throughout the text, as each asserts its claims on the reader’s attention, and each derives its meaning from juxtaposition with the other. Indeed, as Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris have put it, “the supernatural (in magical realist narratives) . . . is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence—admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism”.118 118 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham N.C., 1995), 3.

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Li Ang’s Dark Nights, by contrast, seems at rst sight to make scant deviation from the conventional realist mode. The text is an unembellished, pragmatic account of contemporary Taipei society, which relies on close detailing of everyday practices to imbue its ction with the lifelike air that is so germane to realist narrative. What is more, characters interact with their social context in true dialectical fashion, and the narrative voice is objective and omniscient, hunting down falsehoods and bashing accepted truths. Yet on closer inspection, the novel reveals itself to be darker and denser than the kind of kitchen-sink psycho-sexual realist piece that it rst appears. For a start, the dystopian tenor that hovers over the text is so heavy as to be overbearing: this is a novel studied and stylized in its bleakness, which mobilizes symbolism—a device often disparaged by realism, with its naturalistic aspirations and refusal of romanticism—as a means of deepening the gloom. The shadiness of the city, set off against the clinical clarity of the sexual encounters that take place within it, creates peculiar chiaroscuro effects; and the themes of barter, speculation, and decaying tradition that the text pursues are so sharply and repetitively delineated as to become de facto symbols themselves. Finally, and relatedly, the incestuous circularity of the relationships that shape the text is a deliberate anti-realist conceit, as Li Ang boils the teeming metropolis of Taipei down to six dysfunctional character types—‘everymen/women’ for the consumer age, whose allegorical function ultimately outstrips their ‘realist’ humanity. Zhu Tianwen’s “Red Rose” presents a nal case study of morally charged Verfremdungseffekt. As suggested earlier, Zhu offsets contrasting moods in this text, shifting uneasily between plasticity and nostalgia, hedonism and ennui. This changeability of temper extends, moreover, to the literary identity of the text, which is a hybrid—if not outright pastiche—of several different modes. A lavish attention to the details of middle-class life signals realism, whilst a drive to represent experience as discontinuous, non-sequential, and fragmented suggests modernism, and—nally—a mood of knowing excess points clearly to the postmodern. One cannot help but be reminded of Fredric Jameson’s dictum that “realism, modernism, and postmodernism are the cultural levels of market capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and multinational capitalism”119—with the obvious conclusion being that Zhu’s disconcerting fusion of all three in “Red Rose” works as a commentary of sorts on the complexity of Taiwan’s cultural condition. Rather than rubbing one another out in 119 See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York, 1991), 185.

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neat palimpestual fashion, these different developmental stages seem instead to co-exist with one another in tense, even traumatic ways on the island; and Zhu’s text plays on this dialectic as a means of stirring her readers, once again, into a more engaged response to the processes of modernity. As with all the texts explored in this book, differences in chronological and cultural milieux inect the representation of consumerism in inevitable ways. Just as the ‘three imperial regalia’ of Mishima’s 1960 short story give way to the jet-set internationalism of the call-girl agency in Murakami’s later text, so do the two narratives from Taiwan reect the moving trajectory of consumption practices across time. Local markers also have a prominent presence, from the excision of politics in Mishima’s text and its sardonic inclusion in Zhu Tianwen’s story, to the subtle differences in brand allegiance displayed by Murakami’s Japanese protagonists and their Taiwan counterparts in the work of Li Ang. Equally relevant is the way in which the transregional journeys made by consumer praxis imprint themselves on these texts. Japanesestyle management becomes a buzzword in Li Ang’s Taipei, whilst ve years later KTV—a lively offspring of karaoke—and the fad for learning Nihongo colonize the city even more comprehensively in “Red Rose”. These paths of divergence and crossover notwithstanding, perhaps the most signicant relationship between this group of texts is their shared deployment of more or less identical strategies for representing the consumer epoch. More specically, the tight mix between realist and anti-realist modes that is pursued across these texts serves as the broad narrative form for a schema of metaphor that is shaped, once again, around the recurrent tropes of the city and sexuality. Indeed, if the fusion between realism and its others constitutes the basic syntax of Verfremdungseffekt in this group of narratives, then the two tropes work as the signiers of this defamiliarization process. Intimately linked to the success of the consumption ethos, the city and sexuality have their semantic values turned upside down in these texts, and the tropes are invested with a complex double valency which alternates between familiarity and the unexpected. Thus the city is both the consumer cornucopia we recognize from life, and a site rendered almost prison-like by its sheer surfeit of objects and attendant atmosphere of claustrophobia. Instead of a place of possibility, the metropolis is congured as a dead-end for aspiration in these narratives, and its apparent variety becomes nothing more than an identikit persona in which the same brands and outlets create a barely shifting morphology. Sexuality,

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meanwhile, is both the casual leisure activity promoted by the popular media and, more sinisterly, a graphic measure of the move towards grosser forms of reication. Subsumed within the consumption order, eroticism becomes a kind of lifestyle ‘duty’ in these writings, an activity engaged in for reasons of money, goods, and status that ultimately connotes work far more than any kind of pleasure. In other words, the twin tropes overturn the roles conventionally assigned to them within the logic of consumption (where they typically work to propagate its agenda), and thereby radicalize any lingering readerly misconception that consumerism means pleasure, choice, or freedom.

CONCLUSION

This book began as an assessment of the links between Japanese and Taiwanese ction during the period 1960–1990, and, as such, constitutes the rst extended attempt to apply notions of an intraregional episteme to the discipline of contemporary East Asian comparative literature. The study has sought to explore both the common ground which these two literatures share, and the potential that such commonality holds for constructing more self-referential modes of interpreting non-Western experiences of modernity. These interpretive modes aim to move beyond the long shadow cast by Western epistemological dominance, at the same time as resisting the lures of ethnic particularism and national ‘uniqueness’. The three chapters that form the backbone of the book—each of which analyses literary responses to a core formation of East Asian modernity—stand as interlinked case studies of this project. Together, their analysis of the ways in which writers have represented the modern in their work speaks suggestively of what one might term the form and function of ctional practice inside two of the key nations of industrialized East Asia. At the heart of this practice lies a profound sense of ambivalence, if not explicit hostility, towards the mission of modernity as it is conceived within the dominant discourse. Presided over by the authoritarian state, this discourse consists of the ideologies—at once economically progressive and culturally conservative—that have shaped the course of societal change in Japan and Taiwan during the later postwar era. In one sense, of course, the oppositional thrust that informs so much ctional writing from postwar Japan and Taiwan is scarcely novel. An antagonistic relationship between literature and authority is one of the hallmarks of modernity everywhere, and of all the parallels that could be cited, the literatures of disenchantment explored here share perhaps their closest fellowship with the rebellions of Euroamerican modernism. Yet at the same time as recognizing this afnity, the core chapters of this book have attempted to show that the quasi-modernist impulse that animates ctional practice from Japan and Taiwan is neither a deliberate infringement of Western literary ‘copyright’, nor a hapless capitulation

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to the dominance of Western cultural forms across the globe. Indeed, whilst it would be rash to deny the role played by inuence (particularly when a good many writers make no secret of their borrowings), the close readings presented in this book have sought to show that the adversarial aesthetic of Japanese and Taiwanese postwar ction has germinated in contexts that are resolutely local. In both nations, ‘friendly authoritarianism’ and ‘soft totalitarianism’—its partner in oxymoron—have pushed hardline modernizing programs at the same time as muzzling political opposition in direct or circuitous ways. The result has been that many literary intellectuals have found themselves stepping into the political breach and invoking a spirit of remonstrance that has ancient antecedents in the East Asian region. The ctional critiques which issue forth from this encounter between the interventionist state, a ‘lost’ or at any rate muted political opposition, and the East Asian tradition of the ethically-committed literatus express themselves in general and specic terms alike. Both broad-brush policies and more targeted state actions are impugned in overt or indirect ways across this corpus of texts—from the Rest and Recreation Association, Ampo and the San Francisco system, Minamata, and the IncomeDoubling policy, to war booms, Neo-Confucian familialism, madcap urban planning, ‘black gold’, and the decision to allow Taiwan to serve as America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier”. And whilst polemic is rare— indeed, some writers would balk at being called anti-authoritarian—the counter-hegemonic cast of literary production in both Japan and Taiwan suggests a denite, if variable, degree of ideological investment. Mishima Yukio’s spectacular suicide and Chen Yingzhen’s long incarceration provide extreme examples of the steps that writers have been prepared to take in order to express and uphold their beliefs; but even a cursory reading of ction from Japan and Taiwan reveals a surprisingly solid commitment to moral codes across the board. Indeed, ction with such a pronounced political stamp can sometimes seem alienating to a reader weaned on Western literature, where even the moral indignation of modernism tended to approach its targets via symbolic proxies. To argue in these terms is of course, a contentious business, since such intimations of an East/West reading divide cannot but summon up the controversial specter of Fredric Jameson’s “national allegory”, and his oft-cited and oft-lampooned claim that all third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specic way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories . . . the story of the

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individual is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture or society (italics in the original).1

As a result, or so Jameson argues, the radical divide between public and private that marks the literary imagination of Euroamerica is breached in the non-West; so-called “third-world” texts are irrevocably politicized in nature; and although such works deserve canonization for what they can teach us jaded postmoderns about the virtues of political engagement, we would look to them in vain for the subtle textual pleasures on offer in our own canon. Leaving aside the dubious conation between the non-West and the so-called “third-world” that is pursued throughout Jameson’s essay, perhaps a graver aw in his argument concerns postcoloniality, and the assumption that it is the travails of the imperialist experience which explain the ‘clunky’ obsession with politics that drives non-Western texts. Indeed, a reading of ction from postwar Japan and Taiwan presents a rather different prototype for the politically engagé text. Instead of a globally-inected paradigm in which the non-Western, “thirdworld” writer allegorizes the impoverished, oppressed nation and his place within it, the texts analyzed in this book operate largely within the domestic sphere. They take as antagonists their counterparts in the local establishment, and explore not the cannibalistic backwardness of their native land as a totality (as did Jameson’s prime case study Lu Xun) but rather the battles to dene ‘progress’ within an economically successful but highly ssured body politic. In both countries, and for most of the thirty-year period examined here, the hand of the state in everyday life has been so palpable, and the mechanisms for effective political opposition so weak, that the ethico-political burden borne by literature has had as much to do with the expression of dissident, or at least dissonant, opinion in the local arena as with global struggles over power, identity, and life after colonialism. Even those texts which do engage explicitly with issues of neo-imperialism and the vassal state—such as those considered in chapter two, for example—reserve their spikiest critique for those compatriots who collaborate with the would-be colonizers. In other words, the adversarial aesthetic of Japanese and Taiwanese postwar ction differs from earlier Western revolts against modernity chiey because of the relatively politicized literary culture from which they 1 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, Social Text 15 (1986), 69.

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spring. Yet at the same time they also unsettle cultural paradigms which read the politicization of non-Western texts in terms of postcoloniality, the battle for nationhood, and the search for global justice. These narratives are both rebellious and political—but in ways that require their own interpretive framework. This point becomes still clearer when we examine this adversarial aesthetic more closely. The notion that a fusion of realist and anti-realist modes is the formalistic driver of these literatures of disenchantment has been explored at length in the preceding pages. My analyses of specic narratives have sought to show that magical realism, fantasy, science ction, farce, pastiche, allegory, deep symbolism, whiplash endings, stream of consciousness, montage, and even kitsch stitch themselves into the basic realist weft to create a textual fabric which crisscrosses the familiar with the unfamiliar in ways tailored to demand a more engaged response from readers. Verfremdungseffekt or defamiliarization, the practice whereby reality is made deliberately unrecognizable within the text, co-exists at close quarters with an equally strong desire to represent reality with mimetic persuasiveness; and the result is a ctional mode nely tuned to the project of moral dissent. These narratives use more or less experimental modes to release readers from orthodox encodings of the real and empower them to view modernity from the ‘outside’—but at the same time their realist persona holds onto the observable world with the tightness required to keep that modernity in sharp documentary focus. Realism and its anti-realist others do not so much clash in this intertext of writings as partake in a productive dialectic, in which the tension between the two becomes the genesis of narrative meaning. Integral to the inner microcosmic workings of this dialectic are the city and sexuality, the two centripetal topoi around which more specic kinds of critique converge in a broad range of writings. Floating signiers of dysfunction within countless ctional works since 1960, these twin tropes work in conjunction with the realist/anti-realist dialectic to ensure that the new vision of reality that readers attain once their eyes have been forced open is an overwhelmingly negative one. The liberal use of experimental modes, risqué motifs, and taboo topics across these narratives can, however, be deceptive. Concealed beneath a surface play of magical realism, farce, or kitsch, in which eroticism takes center stage against a cosmopolitan urban backdrop, there can lie a sometimes retrograde set of ideologies; and it is in this paradox that the specically local character of these rebellious, politicized texts begins to announce itself more discernibly. Indeed, rather than glossing these

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texts as oppositional in a strictly avant-garde sense, it might, in fact, be more apposite to view them as gestures of protest that are less vanguard than nostalgically inclined—if not even downright reactionary on occasion. For a start, the realism which is so integral a component of these narratives is, in many ways, a moral-didactic genre, or at the very least a literary mode that seeks to impart solid, veriable information about society to the reader. From the great Victorian tomes of Eliot and Dickens to the cinematic neo-realism of Ozu Yasujirô and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the realist endeavor is marked by a desire to document that makes no secret of its commitment to the ethical dimensions of truth-telling. In these texts from Japan and Taiwan, the information imparted is that modernity as it is pursued by the establishment is a tale of impoverishment and loss; and the deployment of realist techniques aims to lend this account the unimpeachable gravitas of objectivity. Just as relevant, furthermore, is the almost inevitable subtext or counter-narrative to this tale of atrophy: the notion of a world of plenitude that state-sponsored modernity has displaced or driven underground. Virtually all of the authors considered in this book write allusively of this world in their work. Tennôsei in Mishima’s work, the Dolphin Hotel in Murakami Haruki’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Ôe’s Shikoku valley, Yoshimoto Banana’s fortress family, the Agape-style communitas to which Bai Xianyong’s rentboys aspire in the midst of Eros, the Hualian of eucalyptus trees remembered from Wang Zhenhe’s childhood, Huang Chunming’s saltily humorous rural idylls, and the peculiar wistfulness for a past epoch that permeates many of Zhu Tianwen’s Taipei characters are all notable examples. This world of plenitude is a place where culture is indigenous, the city is far distant, the countryside is home, the family is intact, work is never automated, and society is harmonious. More often than not, moreover, it is in the delineation of this nostalgic plenitude that the anti-realist modes within the dialectic come into play. Allegory, deep symbolism, and the fantastic become the other to the hard modern world that is represented by realism; and in this way, these anti-realist modes become structurally complicit with the quest for ethical authority in which realism, through its professed truth-telling, is engaged. Certainly, it is plain enough that modernity has failed in these narratives from Japan and Taiwan. The societies they describe are riven and inhumane, and there is a palpable sense of lag or ssure between the rude vitality of capitalist development and the parlous state of humanism, which has retreated into neo-traditional cultural conservatism—if

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it exists at all. The modernity they describe is what Habermas would call “an incomplete project”, a cluster of ideologies in which the Enlightenment values of humanist reason and universal morality have been derailed by the juggernaut of capitalist efciency. Yet at the same time, it would be misleading to suggest that the past of plenitude for which these Japanese and Taiwanese writers yearn is by default a habitat hospitable to so-called ‘Enlightenment values’. On the contrary, each of the markers of this plenitude listed above also has its more reactionary alter ego. Indigenous culture lacks the invigorating stimuli of foreign inuence; poverty, superstition and the feudal mentality blight rural life; the traditional family unit is typically home to patriarchal oppression; work that is not automated is often back-breaking manual labor; and a society with little conict can all too easily be an oppressively hierarchical one, in which the social mobility and economic freedoms that can jeopardize the smooth running of the ancien régime are tamped down. In a peculiar irony, these narratives—which so often show disdain for the sanctimonious ends to which ‘tradition’ has been mobilized within the dominant discourse—are just as prone to romanticizing the past in more or less ideological ways. What is more, this kind of romanticization occurs alongside more outright expressions of reactionary sentiment. Ôe’s series on Occupied Japan, for example, although designed as a ctionalized critique of Japan’s relationship with hegemonic American power, ends up reading just as uently as an extended denunciation of the free-wheeling sexuality embodied in the gure of the GI prostitute.2 The texts by both Wang Zhenhe and Mishima Yukio explore questions of social mobility in ways that are often explicitly derisive of the ‘lower orders’ and their aspirations. The nostalgic longing of Zhu Tianwen’s Taipei characters can be read as deeply undemocratic insofar as it harks back to the guarded but orderly days of the martial law era. And even a text such as Bai Xianyong’s Cursed Sons, which owes a debt to the author’s impressions of ‘ower power’ counter-culture in 1960s America, keeps a very safe distance from anarchy. Indeed, father-son conict in the text is less a tale of mutiny against the ruling system than a plea for a more enlight-

2 For an analysis that interprets the series through the prism of gender politics, see Margaret Hillenbrand, “Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and the San Francisco System”.

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ened kind of patriarchal familialism, and the yearning for Enlightenment rationality that runs through the novel is rmly tempered by its quasi-Confucian context. Murakami Ryû’s sadistically negligent mothers in Coin Locker Babies, meanwhile, carry the can for an entire society’s betrayal of childhood, and critics have long been wary of the racist and sexist undertones which color the apparently outré radicalism of his earlier writings such as Almost Transparent Blue. In certain ways, women’s liberation, the possibility for social betterment, political pluralism, the easing up of Confucian-inected hierarchies (‘authentic’ as opposed to state-decreed), and the slow death of the myth of racial ‘purity’ become almost as problematic in these texts as the litany of modern ills identied by Aihwa Ong and quoted in chapter one of this book. This reactionary bent becomes clearer still when we cross-examine the function of the twin tropes of the city and sexuality in these narratives. Whilst the ancient lineage of these master-tropes as symbols of malaise can scarcely be denied, perhaps the more pertinent point about both metaphors is their capacity to represent not just dysfunction, but states of ambivalence—and, in particular, the Janus-faced nature of the modern condition. This point emerges clearly in the Western canon, where, either singly or together, the two tropes have been deployed as signiers of the disembedding of tradition and the ever-multiplying freedoms of modernity. Thus in English and then American literature, and from Blake to D.H. Lawrence to Jack Kerouac, writers have used the two metaphors to describe this process of unshackling in both its excitement and its anxiety. Indeed, the counter-cultural, revolutionary status of authors such as these depends very much on this stormy dialectic. The intertext of writings explored in this book, however, gravitates consistently towards the negative pole of the ambiguities inherent to the two tropes. The core chapters of this book have demonstrated how, in text after text, writers from postwar Japan and Taiwan use the city and sexuality to create narrative canvasses in which dark tones predominate, and the liberatory potential of both is painted out. Metonyms of modernity’s somber side, the tropes serve the quasi-moral mission of these texts; and the fact that both metaphors can also denote freedom and pleasure—but are so seldom allowed to do so—underscores the point in effective fashion. How can we account for the quasi-conservative tone created by this interplay of formalistic and rhetorical strategies, this adversarial aesthetic in which rebellious and politicized drives assume so anti-modern

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a stance that they begin to veer towards the reactionary? After all, this undertow of illiberalism lies uneasily below both the formal experimentalism of these texts and their indignation at the inhumane conduct of the establishment. Perhaps the beginnings of an answer can be found in the reactive interface referred to above, in which friendly authoritarianism, a lost or muted opposition, and a venerable tradition of intellectual remonstrance have combined to create cohorts of writers who have an unabashed determination to confront socio-political questions in their work. This tendency towards an engagé pose is well-attested at the national level by critics both local and global. Academics have long found it a useful feature when drawing up the literature courses, so common on campuses across the world, in which Nosaka’s “American Hijiki ” ‘explains’ Japan’s lingering war trauma, and Bai Xianyong’s Cursed Sons ‘describes’ what it is like to grow up queer in Taiwan. This is not to deny, of course, that some scholars have tackled in compelling ways such questions as the ethical burden borne by East Asian literatures, the role of literature as a space of otherness, and the relationship between a powerful state and a disaffected literary community. Yet the fact that they tend to make these interventions in their capacity as critics of national literatures means, almost inevitably, that they focus on the particularistic, the indigenous, the local. And to be fair, this local eld is thick with the kind of difference and debate that fuels academic inquiry. Thus the distinctions between the ‘rst generation’ of postwar authors (Noma Hiroshi, Ôka Shôhei), the ‘second’ (Abe Kôbô, Mishima Yukio), and the ‘third’ (Kojima Nobuo, Yasuoka Shôtarô, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke and Shimao Toshio); between the ‘two Murakamis’ (Haruki and Ryû); or between the purism of Ôe Kenzaburô and the populism of Yoshimoto Banana continue to engross many critics of modern and contemporary Japanese literature. In similar fashion, the differences between the modernists and the nativists; between waisheng and bensheng literary sensibilities; or between nationalist and postmodernist ctions intrigue commentators on the literature of postwar Taiwan. Some observers, it is true, have sought to speculate in more macrocosmic terms about the motive forces at work in these literary cultures. Susan Napier’s study on the uncanny overlap between Ôe and Mishima, writers more commonly viewed as implacable ideological adversaries, is one notable example; another is Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang’s probing of the shared thematic and formalistic space occupied by Taiwan’s modernists and nativist writers, despite their frequent and

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well-publicized contretemps.3 Yet even these more overarching interventions are dened, and thus up to a point constrained, by the paradigm of national literature and—more to the point—by the myths about the genesis of literary impulses to which it can give rise. Comparativism, by contrast, reveals the degree to which both engagé narrative, and the mild illiberalism to which it can be prone, are at the same time regional phenomena; and in this way it can open up a different order of interpretive approach. Indeed, the question of why so many literary producers across industrialized East Asia oppose modernity in the old-fashioned way that they do resonates at a deep structural level which the comparative approach can go some way towards illuminating. Most obviously, of course, comparativism modulates the particularizing tenor which can be heard, either faintly or at a louder pitch, in many analyses of East Asian literature. Indeed, whilst it is far from my intention here to argue against ‘national literature’ in any absolute sense, surely Ahearn and Weinstein are right to argue that “literature itself is irrepressibly mixed, stereophonic, porous, marked by exchanges and inuences, international”.4 Rey Chow makes the point still more forcefully when she claims that comparativism must question the very assumption that nation-states with national languages are the only possible cultural formations that produce ‘literature’ that is worth examining . . . comparative literature should remain the place where theory is used to put the very concept of the nation in crisis, and with that, the concept of the nation as the origin of a particular literature.5

Ultimately, Chow even suggests that comparative literature should increasingly turn its attention away from “the materiality of verbal language” and towards a new discipline in which “the study of literature is relativized not along lines of nations and national languages but, more rigorously, along lines of aesthetic media, sign systems, and discourse networks”.6 Viewed from this kind of perspective, the intertext of writings

3 See Susan Napier, Escape from the Wasteland; and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance. 4 Ed Ahearn and Arnold Weinstein, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: The Promise of Comparative Literature”, in Charles Bernheimer (ed.), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore and London, 1995), 79. 5 Rey Chow, “In the Name of Comparative Literature”, in Bernheimer, op. cit., 109– 12. 6 Ibid., 116.

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under analysis in this book functions as a powerful refutation of the idea that a specic nation-state and its consecrated national language is the fons et origo of any given ctional practice. Again and again, authors from Japan and Taiwan have recourse to the same themes, plot-lines, topoi, characterization, organizational structures, and milieux as they write the modern; and in the process they create a mode of narrative that is both of the nation and intrinsically beyond it. Indeed, the ethical investment made by these narratives, and their gentle nods to old-school ways, only signify in the fullest sense when we acknowledge the extent to which they are simultaneously local and regional phenomena. More specically, a ‘national literature’ approach alerts us to the ways in which local socio-political forces dene the parameters and preoccupations of literary production. Obvious examples include the role of surrogate opposition played by Japan’s progressive intellectuals during the heyday of LDP dominance, or the extent to which Taiwan’s nativists were politicians manqués at a time when opposition parties were still outlawed. Yet at the same time, the panoptic potential of comparativism permits such observations to be relocated transnationally, and thus glossed for their structural rather than contingent meaning. In other words, the interventionist character of so much narrative from Japan and Taiwan—its desire to speak unswervingly of US hegemony, familial breakdown, and consumer bloating—becomes what Chow might call a “sign system” or “discourse network”: it is an aesthetic response to soft totalitarianism that traverses national languages and is no respecter of territorial boundaries. The force eld in which the committed literatus confronts friendly authoritarianism on its program for modernity produces an international intertext of writings, whose engagé pose can be read in meta-theoretical ways that both complement the local story and unsettle its parochial tendencies. In particular, the comparative approach suggests some explanations for the reactionary leanings that sway this intertext—rationales that can be missed when we view such narratives solely in their guise as exemplars of national literatures. According to the Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi, societies end up with the governments that suit them best. To be more precise, he suggests that China remains a totalitarian state because there is insufcient “concern” (guanxin) on the part of ordinary people for speeding the advent of democracy.7 It is tempting to extrapolate Fang’s argument to the govern7

158.

Fang Lizhi, Zhongguo de shiwang he xiwang (China’s Despair and Hope) (Singapore, 1989),

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mental context of industrialized East Asia, and to argue that ‘friendly authoritarianism’ has ourished in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan until recently because these ‘post-Confucian’ states are settled in a deep groove of conservatism, monoculturalism (to use Allen Chun’s term), and passivity. So deep is this groove, in fact, that one might claim that even elite cultural producers—supposedly at the heart of the vanguard—are so entrenched within it that their critiques of modernity, although sometimes vehement, are more concerned with attacking the establishment on account of its unethical path to progress than with promoting more liberal routes of their own. The battle becomes a contest between different kinds of conservatism: the ‘sham’ brand propounded by the establishment, and the more genuine values espoused by literature. The result is a ctional practice which, in its antipathy both to the ruthless nature of economism and the specious side of neo-traditionalism, nds itself yearning for a space and time that, although they may be illusory and unpindownable, are nevertheless a province of the past rather than the future. And this nostalgic mood cannot but be reactionary because of its implicit backward glance, its apparent wariness of change, and its hidden belief that utopia has been banished rather than awaiting discovery. This ‘natural conservatism’ has doubtless been further entrenched by the tempo of modernization across the region, as vertiginous change has impacted on conformist mindsets. Psychic and physical landscapes that re-make themselves at top speed are disorientating not least because their originary state can be held intact within memory. The result is that the ‘before and after’ of modernity exists in a sharper state of disjuncture than that found, for example, in nationstates that modernize at a more measured pace. Thus Wang Zhenhe can lament the loss of Hualian’s eucalyptus trees in Rose, Rose so plaintively because he remembers them so well. The problem with this discursive line is, of course, its reliance on culturalism as a strategy for theorizing difference. Indeed, whilst it may be reasonable enough to speak in loosely approximate terms of the ‘conservatism’ of societies in industrialized East Asia—perhaps basing this assessment on a seemingly neutral index of factors such as ethnic homogeneity, the salience of family ties, and a high savings rate—a more engaged attempt to interpret cultural practice in the region must balk at trading in culturalist generalities of this kind. For a start, the presence of the West as socially ‘progressive’ comparator is all too easy to detect in evaluations of East Asian ‘conservatism’; and it is a short and disheartening step from this to the old binary logic that equates

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the West with modernity and the East with tradition in a crude division of space and time. Just as signicantly, the conservative thesis on literary production takes too many totalizing risks, and fails to account for various ‘anomalies’ within the basic conformist schema. How, for example, can we account for those writers who are genuinely anarchic, or at the very least schizophrenic in their approach to socio-political questions? Authors such as Kôno Taeko and Tomioka Taeko are true subversives, whilst more than one critic has noted Ôe Kenzaburô’s “split personality”—the appreciable degree to which his writings, whilst “predominantly left wing”, are nevertheless shadowed by “a right-wing doppelgänger from which he cannot escape”.8 What, moreover, of Taiwan, where forty years of KMT-led conservatism have given way to a frenetic political free-for-all in which the public sphere is, to quote Tu Wei-ming, “saturated with partisan messages”?9 Conservatism as a unifying ideology in postwar Taiwan might be better understood not as a ‘deep groove’ but as a thin plaster coating which ultimately failed to seal in powerful ethno-political tensions. If we accept that the culturalist thesis has only limited validity here, perhaps we can call on another of Fang Lizhi’s observations to provide greater insight. In an earlier article, Fang speaks more optimistically of late 1980s China, applauding the edging sprouts of democracy— in the form of “groups which have the power to exercise checks and balances”, and “non-governmental activities such as friendship associations, discussion fora, and clubs”10—that were beginning to change the face of the Chinese public sphere during this momentous period. Ultimately, as Fang was doubtless aware, the role of such afliations in a totalitarian state is principally a structural one, since they work more to institutionalize the possibility of civil society than to designate in hard concrete terms what the alternatives to autocracy should be. Fang’s gamut of pro-democracy stirrings is undeniably rough and ready in theoretical terms, yet it may well have something indirect to say about the reactionary undertow that belies the surface current of radicalism in so much ction from industrialized East Asia. Long years of one-party rule, whether democratic or otherwise, will almost inevitably set a social 8 James Ryan, “The Split Personality of Ôe Kenzaburô”, Japan Quarterly 50/4 (1993), 445. 9 Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural Identity and the Politics of Recognition in Contemporary Taiwan”, in David Shambaugh (ed.), Contemporary Taiwan (Oxford and New York, 1998), 72. 10 Fang Lizhi, op. cit., 5–6.

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tone in which the mere presence of alternative voices can begin to count for more than what those voices actually have to say. Contention operates counter-culturally rather than as an established socio-political habitus or behavior, and dissonance per se turns, in effect, into a mild form of dissidence. Even when political pluralism is a constitutional right both formally enshrined and regularly exercised, if this pluralism is in truth more nominal than electorally potent, then opposition can become more a question of structural role than of intellectual content. It is in this context that the sometimes reactionary character of these narratives from Japan and Taiwan—and, more particularly, their seeming hesitation to articulate alternative possibilities for the modern— begins to make more sense. Although mechanisms of resistance were reasonably plentiful in both societies during the period 1960–1990, the transformative power they exercised on the dominant discourse, on the ideologies that shaped the practice of everyday life, remained relatively limited and sporadic for many of those years. Fictional practice, like Fang Lizhi’s non-governmental groupings, was precisely one of these mechanisms: a space other to the state, the establishment, and their various agencies, and one through which, on occasion, real change could be effected. And it is perhaps ‘culturalist’ in a more acceptable sense to suggest that the tradition of ethically-intentioned interventionism that has so long distinguished the East Asian literatus served to underline this function all the more forcefully. Yet in so far as the transformative effects of ction were indeed limited and sporadic—as opposed to consistently potent and pressurizing—its identity as a site of protest arguably ended up meaning more than the exact nature, or indeed the sum total, of that protest: ctional practice was counter-cultural simply because it was contentious, and semi-dissident for the principal reason that it expressed dissonant views. More to the point, when protest is in itself something of a counter-cultural act, and when the establishment to which it objects is so behemothic a force, it is perhaps unavoidable that this protest should nd itself thrown back into reactive rather than creative behavior. After all, the very maintenance of a rebellious posture under such circumstances consumes considerable authorial and textual energies—energies that might well ow in more free-oating ways if ctional practice did not feel so intense a need to act as a ‘mechanism of resistance’. What is more, whilst the three decades under analysis here were by no means a period of stasis, one-party rule remained a constant in both nations throughout; and just as the agencies of the establishment surely settled

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into their role as power-holders, so too, in all likelihood, did writers of ction grow habituated to the xed ontology of opposition. It is easy to imagine how the dialectic between action and reaction, between state policy and literary critique might fall into a rhythm of sorts—not a hard and fast pattern, perhaps, but certainly a well-rehearsed two-step in which writers began to cleave to their self-appointed role. And insofar as literary disenchantment was shaped by reaction, by reex responses to a far more dominant set of discourses, there may perhaps be an inevitability to the absence of truly liberatory energies across these texts. Indeed, under circumstances such as these, it is a short and easy step from the reactive to the reactionary, from aspiration to nostalgia, and from critiques of the unethical nature of progress to veiled yearning for the rose-tinted values of the past.

GLOSSARY

Note This glossary does not include the names of writers working in English, or of Chinese or Japanese terms occurring in the titles of such works; nor of names familiar in standard English usage, for example towns; dynasties, geographical features; politicians and the like.

Japanese Section 1973 nen no pinbôru Abe Kôbô Adoribu jijoden aidoru “Aikoku” aikoku Ajia no koji amae Amae no kôzô Amerika hijiki. Hotaru no haka “Amerikan Sukûru” Ampo anime Anshitsu Arakure “Ari takaru” atatakami no aru kyojûsei baikoku baishun baishun Beddotaimu aizu. Yubi no tawamure. Jeshi no sebone Beheiren Beigun kichi boku bosei “Bosei no tanjô to tennôsei” bundan Bungakkai bungei zasshi bunkateki yukikaki

1973年のピンポール 安部公房 アドリブ自叙伝 アイドル 愛国 愛国 アジアの孤児 甘え 甘えの構造 アメリカひじき．蛍の墓 アメリカンスクール 安保 アニメ 暗室 荒くれ 蟻たかる 温かみのある居住性 売国 売春 買春 ベッドタイムアイズ．指の 戯れ． ジェシの背骨 ベ平連 米軍基地 僕 母性 母性の誕生と天皇制 文壇 文学界 文芸雑誌 文学的雪かき

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glossary

bunke burakumin bushidô butsudan Chikamatsu chônin chûkansha chûkun aikoku Daitôa kyôeiken Daiyon kanpyôki danchi Dansu, dansu, dansu “Dansu, dansu, dansu no miryoku” dare no te mo todokanai . . . seikatsu no yume Den’en no utsu “Dennô jidai no bungaku: Murakami Ryû no shôsetsu o megutte” deru kui wa utareru “Dôbutsu no sôrei” Doi Takeo Dôjidai gêmu dôka dôzoku dokidokushii iro to kuroku shizumeteita Ehara Yumiko Endô Shûsaku Eriko Erogotoshitachi Eureka fuchi no yamai no merikan arerugi fûfu no mutsumiai fukoku hinmin fumô sugiru Fujii Shôzô Fujiwara Hamanari furusato furusato bûmu Fuse Hideto fushigi no ie Futabatei Shimei futsû no shimin genbun-itchi “Genshoku no machi” Genshuku na tsunawatari. Gendai Nihon no essei gesaku

分家 部落民 武士道 仏壇 近松 町人 中間者 忠君愛国 大東亜共栄圏 第四間氷期 団地 ダンスダンスダンス ダンスダンスダンスの魅力 だれの手も届かない 生活の夢 田園の憂鬱 電脳時代の文学： 村上龍の小説をめぐって 出る杭は打たれる 動物の葬礼 土居健郎 同時代ゲーム 同化 同族 毒々しい色と黒く沈めいた 江原由美子 遠藤周作 えりこ エロ事師たち ユリイカ 不治の病の メリカンアレルギ 夫婦の睦みあい 富国貧民 不毛すぎる 藤井省三 藤原浜成 故里 故里ブーム 布施英利 不思議の家 二葉亭四迷 普通の市民 言文一致 原色の街 厳粛な綱渡り． 現代日本のエッセイ 戯作

glossary geta gojûtô no neon Gotanda Hamase Hiroshi hamigaki no senden mitai ni nikkori to waratte “Haruki no futari” Hasabe Hideo Hashi “Hatsumukashi” hausu heishi ni onnatorimochi Higashi Mineo hijiki hikari no kawa hikari no tsubu Hirata Toshiko Hiroike Akiko Hitsuji o meguru bôken Hizai no umi: Mishima Yukio to sengo shakai no nihirizumu Hôjô no umi Homba honke Honma Yôhei hontôjin “Hyakuman’en senbei” ianfu mondai Ichijô Takao ie Ihara Saikaku ijime mondai ikka danran Inoue Teruko isamashisa jetto ji no bun jidaigeki Jippensha Ikku jôkyô jûeru juken sensô juku “Jukyô to Ajia shakai” jun bungaku jûtaku kâ

315

下駄 五重塔のネオン 五反田 濱政博司 歯磨きの宣伝みたいに にっこりと笑って 春樹のふたり 長部日出雄 ハシ 初昔 ハウス 兵士に女取りもち 東峰夫 ひじき 光の川 光の粒 平田俊子 広池秋子 羊をめぐる冒険 非在の海：三島 由紀夫と戦後社会 のニヒリズム 豊饒の海 奔馬 本家 本間洋平 本島人 百萬圓煎餅 慰安婦問題 一條孝夫 家 井原西鶴 いじめ問題 一家団欒 井上輝子 勇ましさ ジェット 地の文 時代劇 十返舎一九 上京 ジューエル 受験戦争 塾 儒教とアジア社会 純文学 住宅 カー

316 Kabi Kagayakeru yami kageki na kôdô Kagirinaku tômei ni chikai burû Kaga Otohiko Kaikô Takeshi kaiseimei “Kakuteru pâtî” Kakyô hyôshiki kanri shakai kansei karâ terebi karaoke Karatani Kôjin karendâ “Kassai” katakana kateinai rikon katsudon kawaii Kawabata Yasunari Kawamoto Saburô Kawasaki Kenko Kawata Uichiro kawatteru Kaze no uta o kike kazoku Kazoku gêmu kazoku kokka kazoku sâbisu Kazuyo Kenzô kichi no onna kichi shôsetsu “Kichi no onnatachi” “Kichi, sensô, yokubô no vijon” kigyônai kumiai Kitchin Kiki Kiku Kikuchi Masanori Kindai bungaku no kizuato. Kyû shokuminchi no bungakuron Kinkakuji kisha kissaten Kiyoko

glossary 黴 輝ける闇 過激な行動 限りなく透明に近いブルー 加賀乙彦 開高健 改正名 カクテルパーティー 歌経標式 管理社会 感性 カラーテレビ 空オケ 柄谷行人 カレンダー 喝采 カタカナ 家庭内離婚 カツ丼 可愛い 川端康成 川本三郎 川崎賢子 川田宇一郎 変わってる 風の歌を聞け 家族 家族ゲーム 家族国家 家族サービス 和代 健造 基地の女 基地小説 基地の女たち 基地、戦争、欲望 のヴィジョン 企業内組合 キッチン キキ キク 菊池昌典 近代文学の傷痕． 旧植民の文学論 金閣寺 記者 喫茶店 清子

glossary Kobayashi Yoshinori kôdo seichô kodomo o tsukutteiru Koinrokka beibîzu “Koinrokka beibîzu. Yawaraka na hako no mure” Kojima Nobuo Kojima Nobuo shû Kokoro Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kanshô Kokubungaku. Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû kokugo kokutai Kokkyo no minami, taiyô no nishi kômin kôminka Komori Yôichi kônichi undô kônichigun konketsuji Kôno Kensuke Kôno Taeko Kosaka Shûhei kunizukuri kûra “Kurai kawa, omoi kai” kurai tani Kuritsubo Yoshiki kuruma no retsu Kyo Sekai (Xu Shikai) kyôdôtai kyôfushô kyôiku mama kyôka kyûkyoku no konkyo M/T to mori no fushigi na monogatari mai hômu maihômushugi mamagoto manga “Manuke na keijô no mono” Marina no tabibukure – tawawa Taiwan Matsuda Osamu Memushiri kouchi miai Mikage

317 小林よしのり 高度成長 子供を作っている コインロッカーベイビーズ コインロッカーベイビーズ 柔らかな箱の群れ 小島信夫 小島信夫集 心 国文学．解釈と鑑賞 国文学．解釈と教材の研究 国語 国体 国境の南、太陽の西 公民 公民化 小森陽一 抗日運動 抗日軍 混血児 紅野謙介 河野多恵子 小阪修平 国造り クーラ 暗い川、重い櫂 暗い谷 栗坪良樹 車の列 許世階 共同体 恐怖症 教育ママ 教化 究極の根拠 M/T と森の不思議な物語 マイホーム マイホーム主義 飯事 漫画 間抜けな形状の物 満裡奈の旅ぶくれーたたわ台湾 松田修 芽むしり仔撃ち 見合い みかげ

318 Mikkai Mikumano gensô. Tennô to Mishima Yukio Minamata “Miru mae ni tobe” Mishima Yukio Mishima Yukio tanpen zenshû mitsugo no tamashii hyaku made Mizoguchi Yûzô mizu shôbai Mizukara waga namida o nuguitamau hi Moetsukita chizu mohaya sengo dewa nai mono no aware Mori Ôgai Morita Yoshimitsu Murakami Haruki Murakami Haruki to Amerika. Bôryokusei no yûrai Murakami Haruki sutadîzu Murakami Ryû Nagai Kafû nagai teashi o motta naichijin Nakagami Kenji Nakamoto Takako Nakamura Yasuyuki naniwa-bushi Nantonaku kurisutaru Natsu no yami Natsume Sôseki Nejimakidori kuronikuru nenkô joretsu seido Neva Nichi, Chû, Chô no hikaku bungaku kenkyû Nichi-bei anzen hoshô jôyaku nigai seijaku Nihon josei aishi: yûjo, jorô karayuki, ianfu no keifu Nihon kindai bungaku no hikaku bungakuteki kenkyû Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen Nihon no yoru to kiri Nihon tôchika no Taiwan. Teikô to dan’atsu Nihonjinron Nikutai no mon “Ningen no hitsuji” noren

glossary 密会 三熊野幻想．天皇と三島由紀夫 水俣 見る前に飛べ 三島由紀夫 三島由紀夫短編全集 三つ子の魂百まで 溝口雄三 水商売 みずから我が涙を ぬぐいたまう日 燃えつきた地図 最早戦後ではない 物のあわれ 森鴎外 森田芳光 村上春樹 村上春樹とアメリカ． 暴力性の由来 村上春樹スタディーズ 村上龍 永井荷風 長い手足をもった 内地人 中上健次 中本たか子 中村泰行 浪花節 何となくクリスタル 夏の闇 夏目漱石 ねじまき鳥クロニクル 年功序列制度 ニヴァ 日、中、朝の比較文学研究 日米安全保障条約 苦い静寂 日本女性哀史：遊女、女郎 からゆき、慰安婦の系譜 日本近代文学の 比較文学的研究 日本近代文学の起源 日本の夜と霧 日本統治下の台湾．抵抗と弾圧 日本人論 肉体の門 人間の羊 暖簾

glossary Noruwei no mori Nosaka Akiyuki Nosaka Akiyuki. Sakka no jiden “Nosaka Akiyuki: buntai no mondai” “Nosaka Akiyuki: Shôwa hitoketa sedai no han-kokka genkei” nuberu bâgu Ôba Minako obasan Oda Makoto Ôe Kenzaburô Ôe Kenzaburô dôjidaironshû Ôe Kenzaburô zensakuhin Ôe Kenzaburô. Bungaku no kiseki Ôe Kenzaburô. Sono bungaku sekai to haikei “Oitsumerareta sakkatachi” Ôka Shôhei Okinawa no onnatachi: josei no jinken to kichi, guntai Okinawa no shônen onna no bôhatei onna o yobu onrî “Onrîtachi” Ôshima Nagisa Oshin Ôshiro Tatsuhiro otsutome ga yoru no mono Ozaki Hotsuki “Ôzappa ni mita Yoshimoto Banana” pachinko Painappurin panpan pansuke shibô pettoka ponbiki raifu kôsu Reiko ren’ai kekkon rentai o kanjita Sakagami sanka shiteiru sansedai kazoku sanshu no jingi sararîman Sasaki Takatsugu Satô Haruo

319

ノルウェイの森 野坂昭如 野坂昭如．作家の自伝 野坂昭如：文体の問題 野坂昭如：昭和一桁 世代の反国家原型 ヌベルバーグ 大庭みなこ おばさん 小田実 大江健三郎 大江健三郎同時代論集 大江健三郎全作品 大江健三郎．文学の軌跡 大江健三郎．その文学世界と背景 追いつめられた作家たち 大岡昇平 沖縄の女たち： 女性の人権と基地、軍隊 沖縄の少年 女の防波堤 女を呼ぶ オンリー オンリー達 大島渚 おしん 大城立裕 お勤めが夜のもの 尾崎秀樹 大ざっぱにみた吉本ばなな パチンコ パイナップリン パンパン パンすけ志望 ペットカ ぽん引き ライフコース 礼子 恋愛結婚 連帯を感じた 逆髪 参加している 三世代家族 三種の神器 サラリーマン 佐々木孝次 佐藤春夫

320

glossary

Sayônara taishû Sazae-san “Sebuntin” Sei Shônagon sei to bôryoku no sakka “Seiji shônen shisu” seijiteki ningen Seishun zankoku monogatari seiteki ningen Sekai no owari to hâdoboirudo wandârando sengo Sengo Nihon no taishû bunka shi “Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki” senpûki sentakuki seppuku shihon no ami “Shiiku” Shikitei Samba Shimada Masahiko Shimao Toshio shimin undô shin chûkan taishû shakai Shin gômanizumu sengen. Taiwan ron shin sekai no biru Shinchô shinpoteki “Shintaisei to gensô. Amurita o chûshin ni” shinto deban o matsu “Shisha no ogori” “Shishatachi no saishû no vijon to warera ikinobitsuzukeru mono shi-shôsetsu shisutemu “Shôfu no heya” shôjo shôshû shotoku baizô keikaku Shôwa hitoketa Shunpuden “Shûu” shûshin koyô sôdai gomi Sonezaki shinjû sôshitsukan

さようなら大衆 サザエさん セブンティン 清少納言 性と暴力の作家 政治少年死す 政治的人間 青春残酷物語 性的人間 世界の終わりとハードボイルドワンダーンド 戦後 戦後日本の大衆文化史 戦後青年の日本復帰 扇風機 洗濯機 切腹 資本の網 飼育 式亭三馬 島田雅彦 島尾敏雄 市民運動 新中間大衆社会 新ゴーマニズム宣言．台湾論 新世界のビル 新潮 進歩的 身体性と幻想． アムリタを中心に しんと出番を待つ 死者の奢り 死者たちの最終の ヴィジョンと我ら 生き延びつずける者 私小説 システム 娼婦の部屋 少女 小衆 所得倍増計画 昭和一桁 春婦伝 驟雨 終身雇用 粗大ゴミ 曾根崎心中 喪失感

glossary suihanki Sukegawa Noriyoshi Supotoniku no koibito Suzuki Seijun suzushii taidan “Taidan: Karatani Kôjin, Murakami Ryû kara Kyûba, eizu, rokujû nendai, eiga, bungei zasshi” Tagawa Yûko taishû bungaku Taiyô no hakaba Takahashi Gen’ichirô Takahashi Takako Takahata Isao Takazato Suzuyo Takeda Nobuaki Takeyama takuetsusei Tamura Taijirô Tanabe Yûichi Tanaka Yasuo Tanin no kao Tanizaki Junichirô tatami Tengoku ga futteiru tennôsei Tôkai Sanshi Tokuda Shûsei tokuju Tomaru Tatsu Tomioka Taeko Tomioka Taeko shû toshi bungaku tôsôshin tsubushi Tsuge Teruhiko tsukiai tsumetai tsummanai chippoke na Nihonjin Tsurumi Shunsuke Tsushima Yûko ude o kumiatte Ueno Chizuko Ukigumo Umi to dokuyaku Umibe no Kafuka

321

炊飯器 助川徳是 スポトニクの恋人 鈴木清順 涼しい 対談 対談：柄谷行人、村上龍 からキューバ、エイズ、六０年代、 映画、文芸雑誌 田川佑子 大衆文学 太陽の墓場 高橋玄一郎 高橋多佳子 高畑勳 高里鈴代 武田信昭 竹山 卓越性 田村泰次郎 田辺雄一 田中康夫 他人の顔 谷崎潤一郎 畳 天国が降っている 天皇制 東海散士 徳田秋声 特需 遠丸立 富岡多恵子 富岡多恵子集 都市文学 闘争心 ツブシ 柘植光彦 付き合い 冷たい つっまないちっぽけ な日本人 鶴見俊輔 津島佑子 腕を組み合って 上野千鶴子 浮雲 海と毒薬 海辺のカフカ

322

glossary 和魂洋才 笑い方の教育 われらの時代 われらの時代と僕自身 われらの時代．クリーシぇの森 われらの性の世界 薬島 やくざ 山田詠美 山本容郎 大和魂 安岡章太郎 予備校 幼児狩り 読みやすさ 与那覇恵子 吉田春夫 吉田精一 良重 吉本ばなな 吉本隆明 吉行淳之介 吉行淳之介における性 吉行淳之介の研究 吉行淳之介全集 よっちゃん 浴衣 夢使い 財閥 贅沢 全学連 全共闘 象の消滅

wakon yôsai waraikata no kyôiku Warera no jidai “Warera no jidai to boku jishin” “Warera no jidai. Kurîshe no mori” “Warera no sei no sekai” yakujima yakuza Yamada Eimi Yamamoto Yôrô Yamato-damashii Yasuoka Shôtarô yobikô “Yôji-gari” yomiyasusa Yonaha Keiko Yoshida Haruo Yoshida Seiichi Yoshie Yoshimoto Banana Yoshimoto Takaaki Yoshiyuki Junnosuke “Yoshiyuki Junnosuke ni okeru sei” Yoshiyuki Junnosuke no kenkyû Yoshiyuki Junnosuke zenshû Yot-chan yukata Yumetsukai zaibatsu zeitaku Zengakuren Zenkyôtô Zô no shômetsu

Chinese Section A-Feng “Ah Q zhengzhuan” Ai Zhishen aihao Taiwanzhe Ang Lee (Li An) Anlexiang Anye A-qing A-xiong

阿鳳 阿Q正傳 艾知申 愛好台灣者 李安 安樂鄉 暗夜 阿青 阿雄

323

glossary “Ba huanxiao saman renjian. Fang xiaoshuojia Wang Zhenhe” Bai Xianyong “(Bai Xianyong tongzhi de) nüren, guaitai, guozu: yige jiating luomanshi de lianjie” Bai Xianyong pingzhuan. Beimin qinghuai Bai Xianyong zhuan “Baidang zai xiandai yu houxiandai zhi jian. Zhu Tianwen jinqi zuopinzhong de guozu, shidai, xingbie, qingyu wenti” baihua banü suchengban Beigang xianglu renren cha Beihai de ren bense bensheng bentu bentu zuojia bentuhua Bijiao wenxue Zhongguo xuepai boliquan buxiban Cai Kangyong caozuo “Chai Shifu” Chen Haoyang Chen Huilong Chen Pengxiang Chen Ruoxi Chen Tianrui Chen Yingzhen Chen Yingzhen zuopinji Cheng Ma “Chengshi zhi zui. Lun xiandangdai xiaoshuo de shuxie xintai” Chenlun chican kanxiu binguo laba chong-Han chong-Ri chongyang chongyang miwai choudoufu chuangkou wenhua ci Cunshangliu zuojia

把歡笑撒滿人間。 訪小説家王禎和 白先勇 (白先勇同志的)女人， 怪胎，國族：一個家庭 羅曼史的連接 白先勇評傳。悲憫情懷 白先勇傳 擺盪在現代與後現代之間。 朱天文近期作品的國族， 時代，性別，情慾問題 白話 吧女速成班 北港香爐人人插 背海的人 本色 本省 本土 本土作家 本土化 比較文學中國學派 玻璃圈 補習班 蔡康永 操作 柴師父 陳浩洋 陳輝龍 陳鵬翔 陳若曦 陳天瑞 陳映真 陳映真作品集 程麻 城市之罪。論現當代 小説的書寫心態 沉淪 吃餐看秀賓果拉把 崇韓 崇日 崇洋 崇洋迷外 臭豆腐 窗口文化 慈 村上流作家

324

glossary

Da shuohuangjia “Dahuo” Dai Jinhua “Dai wo qu ba, yueguang” dalu re Dangdai Taiwan dushi wenxue lun “Dangdai Taiwan wenxue yu wenhua changyu de bianqian” Dangdai Taiwan zhengzhi wenxue lun dangwai danshen guizu danzi mian dazhonghua di si tai dixia wenxue Ding Xinxin Dong Nian Dong Nian ji Dong Siwen “Duhuizhong chenlun de nan” Dushi manyouzhe. Wenhua guancha Dushu Ererba shijian Ererba xiaoshuo ermaozi Fan Ye fangong dalu fan-gong wenxue fangzhu fu Fu Chongshan fuzi chongtu gangqinba disike Gangtai Gangxing Gangdao Ganxing, ziwo, xinxiang. Zhongguo xiandai shuqing xiaoshuo yanjiu Gao Tiansheng gaochao gongzuo lunhui guanxi Gudu Guo Moruo guodu guoji daduhui Guomindanghua

大説謊家 大火 戴錦華 帶我去吧月光 大陸熱 當代台灣都市文學論 當代台灣文學與 文化場域的變遷 當代台灣政治文學論 黨外 單身貴族 擔仔麵 大眾化 第四台 地下文學 丁欣欣 東年 東年集 董斯文 都會中沈淪的男 都市漫遊者。文化觀察 讀書 二二八事件 二二八小説 二毛子 范曄 反攻大陸 反共文學 放逐 浮 傅崇山 父子衝突 鋼琴吧迪斯可 港台 港星港導 感性， 自我，心象。 中國現代抒情小説研究 高天生 高潮 工作輪迴 關係 古都 郭沫若 國度 國際大都會 國民黨化

glossary Goutong yu gengxin: Lu Xun yu Riben wenxue guanxi fawei guotu guoyu hangye “Hanliu” Hanye sanbuqu Hao Yuxiang harizu hataizu hei jin “Heiyi” hejin wenhua Heliu Hong lou meng “Hong meigui hujiao ni” Hou Hsiao-hsien Hua Guobao “Huainian na sheng ‘Luo’. Kan ‘Xiao guafu’ Huang Chunming zhu” “Huaji” “Huaji duoci de meigui. Xidu Wang Zhenhe xinzuo Meigui meigui wo ai ni” huanbao wenxue Huang Chengde Huang Chunming “Huang Chunming, xiaoshuo, Huang Chunming” Huang Fan Huang Jinshu Huang Yingzhe Huang Zhongtian huangdi zisun huangmin yishi Huangren shouji “Huaqiao rong ji” Huashengdun dalou “Huhuan lingyun de meixue. Zhu Tianwen xiaoshuozhong de shangpin yu huaijiu” huode jia jia jia Meiguoren jia yangguizi Jiabian Jian Yingying

325 溝通與更新： 魯迅與日本文學關係發微 國土 國語 行業 寒流 寒夜三部曲 郝譽翔 哈日族 哈台族 黑金 黑衣 合金文化 河流 紅樓夢 紅玫瑰呼叫你 侯孝賢 華國寶 懷念那聲鑼。 看小寡婦黃春明著 花季 滑稽多刺的玫瑰 細讀王禎和 新作玫瑰我愛你 環保文學 黃承德 黃春明 黃春明 小說黃春明 黃凡 黃金樹 黃英哲 黃重添 皇帝子孫 皇民意識 荒人手記 花橋榮記 華盛頓大樓 呼喚靈韻的美學。朱天文 小説中的商品與懷舊 獲得 家 假 假美國人 假洋鬼子 家變 簡瑛瑛

326

glossary

“Jianli bijiao wenxue Zhongguo xuepai de lilun he buzhou” jiatingli de lihun Jiawei jiazhang “Jiazhuang yi niuche” “Jin daban de zuihou yi ye” jindang jinbao jinmi de weili jiubaye juancun Jun-Gong-Jiao junren zuojia kaidi mao Kongbufenzi “Kuaguo wenhua shangpin xianxing ji: cong Cunshang Chunshu yu harizu tan shangpin lianwu yu zhuti jiushu” “Kuangren riji” Lao She Laozi li Li Ang Li Lin Li Qiao Li Qiao ji Liang Shuming Lianhe wenxue Liao Chaoyang Liao Huiying “Lijia chuzou” Lin Maoxiong Lin Qingxuan Lin Ruiming Lin Shuangbu Lin Yaode Lin Zhengsheng ling yizhong Yuezhan lishi “Lishi, jiaohuan, duixiangsheng. Yuedu Li Ang de Miyuan yu Beigang xianglu renren cha” Liu Chuncheng Liu Jihui Liu Jun Liu Liangya liulang

建立比較文學中國 學派的理論和歩驟 家庭裡的離婚 佳瑋 家長 嫁妝一牛車 金大班的最後一夜 禁黨禁報 緊密的圍籬 酒吧業 眷村 軍公教 軍人作家 凱蒂貓 恐怖分子 跨國文化商品現形記： 從村上春樹與哈日族談 商品戀物與主體救贖 狂人日記 老舍 老子 禮 李昂 李琳 李喬 李喬集 梁漱溟 聯合文學 廖朝陽 廖輝英 離家出走 林茂雄 林清玄 林瑞明 林雙不 林耀徳 林正盛 另一種越南 儷史 歴史，交換，對向聲。 閲讀李昂的迷園與 北港香爐人人插 劉春成 劉紀蕙 劉俊 劉亮雅 流浪

glossary Liuxing huayuan liuxue liuxue jiuguo “Liuyueli de meiguihua” Lü Heruo Lu Xun “Lu Xun sixiang zai Taiwan de chuanbo, 1945–9. Shilun zhanhou chuqi Taiwan de wenhua chongjian yu guojia rentong” Lü Zhenghui luroufan Ma Sen Ma Shanxing Mao’er mazi Meigui meigui wo ai ni “Meiguo Meiguo wo ai ni. Naoju Meigui meigui wo ai ni de huangmiu yuyi” Meiguohua Mei Jialing “Meiren tu” “Mingyun de jixian” Minjindang Minnanyu Miyuan “Muqin” “Na pian xue yiban hong de dujuanhua” Nie zi “Nisi yi zhi lao mao” nuhua Nuowei de senlin “Nüxing, zhuyi, chuangzuo: Li Ang fangwenlu” ouxiang Ouyang Zi Peng Ruijin pi-Kong Ping Lu “Pingguo de ziwei” qi Qi Dengsheng Qi Yishou “Qianque” qin-Mei fan-gong qin qi shu hua qing qingchunniao qipao

327 流星花園 留學 留學救國 六月裡的玫瑰花 呂赫若 魯迅 魯迅思想在台灣的傳播， 1945–9. 試論戰後初期台灣 的文化重建與國家認同 呂政惠 鹵肉飯 馬森 馬善行 貓耳 馬子 玫瑰玫瑰我愛你 美國美國我愛你。鬧劇玫瑰玫瑰 我愛你的荒謬寓意 美國化 梅家玲 美人圖 命運的跡線 民進黨 閩南語 迷園 母親 那片血一般紅的杜鵑花 孽子 溺死一隻老貓 奴化 挪威的森林 女性，主義，創造：李昂訪問錄 偶像 歐陽子 彭瑞金 批孔 平路 蘋果的茲味 氣 七等生 齊益壽 欠缺 親美反共 琴棋書畫 情 青春鳥 旗袍

328

glossary

Qiu Yanming Qu Yuan quan shi xugou ren rencai wailiu “Renjian shi” Rentong yu guojia: jindai Zhong-xi lishi de bijiao Ribenhua “Rili” saobao huo “Shayaonala, Zaijian” seqing gen zhengzhi Shafu Shahe beige “Shangbanzu de yiri” Shao Yujuan “Shenji zhi wu: hou sishi hui? (Hou)xiandai qishilu? Lun Zhu Tianwen” Shengsi chang shengtai zuojia Shi yu Zhongguo wenhua Shijimo de huali Shiwu pian xiaoshuo shuangpin shoubaji shuinilu Shuping shumu Shuxie Taiwan. Wenxueshi, houzhimin yu houxiandai sida gongsi sijiu “Si le yige guozhong nüsheng zhi hou” Song Zelai Si yu yan Su Weizhen Sun Xinya “Sunnong Lin Jinshu” Sunzi taoqu Taibeiren “Taimushan ji” Taiping tianguo taishang de guangcai Taiwan changpian xiaoshuolun “Taiwan guangfu chuqi de yuwen wenti” Taiwan qingjie Taiwan sibai nian shumin shi Taiwan wenxue bentulun de xingqi yu fazhan

丘彥明 屈原 全是虛構 仁 人才外流 人間世 認同與國家：近代中西歴史的比較 日本化 日曆 騷包貨 莎喲娜啦再見 色情跟政治 殺夫 沙河悲歌 上班族的一日 邵毓娟 神姬之舞：後四十回？(後)現代啟示 錄？論朱天文 生死場 生態作家 士與中國文化 世紀末的華麗 十五篇小説 雙頻手扒雞 水泥路 書評書目 書寫台灣。文學史， 後植民與後現代 四大公司 四舊 死了一個國中女生之後 宋澤萊 思與言 蘇偉貞 孫新亞 筍農林金樹 孫子 套取 台北人 泰姆山記 太平天國 台上的光彩 台灣長篇小説論 台灣光復初期的語文問題 台灣情節 台灣四百年庶民史 台灣文學本土論的興起與發展

glossary Taiwan wenxue de bentu guancha Taiwan wenxue de liangge shijie Taiwan xiandaipai de jingshen lingxiu Taiwan xiandai wenxue jiaocheng. Xiaoshuo duben Taiwan xiaoshuo yu xiaoshuojia Taiwan xinwenxue yundong Taiwan xinwenxue yundong 40 nian Taiwan yishi Taiwanren sanbuqu Taiyu Tiananmen tianlun Tianma chafang tianxia Tong Tsai Ming-liang tu waisheng Wang Ban Wang Changxiong Wang Dewei Wang Jinmin Wang Kuilong Wang Tuo Wang Wenxing Wang Zhenhe wangguo “Wanshang dijun” wenhua chongjian wentan “Wo ai Mali” “Wo du Meigui meigui wo ai ni. (Daixu)” “Wo er Hansheng” Wo meimei wochao women na ge wuzhengfu de wangguo Wu He wu ke woniu wu-xing wugen Wu Min Wu Nianzhen Wu Zhuoliu wulun wuchang xian qi liang mu Xiandai wenxue xiandaipai

329 台灣文學的本土觀察 台灣文學的兩個世界 台灣現代派的精神領袖 台灣現代文學教程。小説讀本 台灣小説與小説家 台灣新文學運動 台灣新文學運動40年 台灣意識 台灣人三部曲 台語 天安門 天倫 天馬茶房 天下 佟 蔡明亮 土 外省 王斑 王昶雄 王徳威 王晉民 王夔龍 王拓 王文興 王禎和 王国 萬商帝君 文化重建 文壇 我愛瑪莉 我讀玫瑰玫瑰我愛你（代序） 我兒漢生 我妹妹 窩巢 我們那個無政府的王國 舞鶴 無殼蝸牛 五行 無根 吳敏 吳念真 吳濁流 五倫五常 賢妻良母 現代文學 現代派

330 Xiang Ge xiangtu xiangtu wenxue yundong xiangtu xieshi xiangxia tubaozi xiao xiao cangying “Xiao chou” Xiao guafu Xiao Hong Xiao Jinmian “Xiao Lin lai Taibei” xiao renwu Xiao Sa Xiao Wan xiaojuchang yundong xiaolongbao Xiaoshuo Zhongguo. Wan Qing dao dangdai de Zhongwen xiaoshuo xiaoxi xiaozi “Xindang shijiuri” xinlianjiu de zhaopaige xinrenlei zuojia xinruxuejia Xiong Shili Xu Xueji xuanyao ta de meili “Xunguiji” yan yang Yang Dechang Yang Feng Yang Guifei Yang Kui Yang Zhao yangren bixi “Yanxia zhi du” Yao Yiwei yashuazhuyi Yaxiya de gu’er Ye Dexuan ye shenghuo Ye Shitao Ye Yuan “Yexing huoche” “Yi ba qing”

glossary 翔哥 鄉土 鄉土文學運動 鄉土寫實 鄉下土包子 孝 小蒼鷹 小丑 小寡婦 蕭紅 蕭錦綿 小林來台北 小人物 蕭颯 小萬 小據場運動 小籠包 小説中国。 青 到當代的中文小説 消息 孝子 新黨十九日 新練就的招牌歌 新人類作家 新儒學家 熊十力 許雷姬 炫耀她的美麗 尋鬼記 嚴 洋 楊徳昌 楊峰 楊貴妃 楊逵 楊照 仰人鼻息 炎夏之都 姚一葦 牙刷主義 亞細亞的孤兒 葉徳宣 夜生活 葉石濤 葉原 夜行火車 一把青

glossary “Yi ba xinsuan lei. Shiping ‘Wo ai Mali’ ” yi qun bianfu yi wo feng yiguo de qingdiao “Yinhunbusan de jiatingzhuyi chimei. Dui quanshi Niezi zhuwen de lunshu fenxi” yintong “Yinying hou” yinxing de ciwenhua “You quxian de wawa” You Shengguan “Youma caizi” Yu Dafu Yu Hao Yu Yingshi Yuan Qiongqiong Yuedu dangdai xiaoshuo. Taiwan, Dalu, Xianggang, haiwai Yujian 100% Murakami “Yun” Yusheng Zhan Hongzhi Zhang Ailing Zhang Dachun Zhang Songsheng Zhang Yiping Zhang Zhiyong Zhanhou Taiwan wenxue jingyan Zhanlüe yu guanli zhao meimei Zheng Li’er Zheng Mingli Zheng Qingwen zhengzhihua zhimin jingji ji kuaguo gongsi de xiaoshuo zhong Zhong Zhaozheng Zhongguo qingjie Zhongguo xiandai guanli zhexue Zhongguohua zhongguoshi lihun zhongshen pinyong zhongti xiyong Zhongwai wenxue zhongyuan zhongxin zhuyi Zhou Yingxiong

331 一把辛酸涙。試評我愛瑪莉 一群蝙蝠 一窩蜂 異國的情調 陰魂不散的家庭主義魑魅。 對詮釋孽子諸文的論述分析 隱痛 陰影後 隱性的次文化 有曲線的娃娃 游勝冠 油麻菜籽 鬱達夫 俞浩 余英時 袁瓊瓊 閲讀當代小説。 台灣，大陸，香港，海外 遇見100%村上 雲 餘生 詹宏志 張愛玲 張大春 張誦聖 障衣萍 張志勇 戰後台灣文學經驗 戰略與管理 找妹妹 鄭栗兒 鄭明琍 鄭清文 政治化 植民經濟跨國公司的小説 忠 鍾肇政 中國情節 中國現代管理哲學 中國化 中國式離婚 終身聘用 中體西用 中外文學 中原中心主義 周英雄

332 Zhu Weicheng Zhu Tianwen Zhu Tianxin Zhu Xining Zhulianbang ziran xiezuo ziwo fangzhu zuierxiaoguo “Zuihou de shenshi”

glossary 朱偉誠 朱天文 朱天心 朱西甯 竹聯幫 自然寫作 自我放逐 蕞爾小國 最後的神士

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INDEX

Abe Kôbô 63, 85n, 89n, 96, 238, 268, 306 Ahearn, Ed 307 Ang Lee 17 Appadurai, Arjun 23, 70 Bae Yong-joon 18 Bai Chongxi 103 Bai Xianyong 5, 9, 61, 84, 93, 98–9, 103, 175, 199–208, 220–1, 229–30, 303–4, 306 Barthes, Roland 47 Baudelaire, Charles 62, 87 Baudrillard, Jean 10, 209, 234, 241, 250n Bei Dao 32 Benedict, Ruth 214 Benjamin, Walter 87 Cai Kangyong 21n Certeau, Michel de 234 Chandler, Raymond 270–1 Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne 31n, 80n, 84, 101–2, 122n, 154n, 196, 200n, 205n, 275n, 286n, 306–7 Chen Huilong 21n Chen Kuan-hsing 27n, 243–4, 287–8 Chen Ruoxi 99 Chen Shuibian 18n, 54 Chen Yingzhen 31n, 57n, 59, 74n, 100, 108, 122n, 124n, 125, 245–7, 300 Chiang Kai-shek 56, 119 Chikamatsu Monzaemon 91 Chin, Ai-Li S. 180 Ching, Leo 16n, 18, 22n, 76n Choe Ik-seok 171 Chow, Rey 34n, 65, 80n, 307–8 Chun, Allen 309 Clammer, John 241n, 242, 254–5, 257 Cocteau, Jean 61 Copper, John F. 119, 120n, 158n, 228n Craig, Albert B. 75 Dai Jinhua 48 Davies, Gloria 45–6, 49

Deeney, John 31, 39n, 41n Derrida, Jacques 2, 47–8 Disraeli, Benjamin 60 Doi Takeo 214, 216 Dower, John 112 Dylan, Bob 273 Eisenstadt, S.N. 23, 24n Endô Shûsaku 3, 31n, 35n, 96, 135n, Enloe, Cynthia 128n, 129 Fairbank, John K. 75 Fang Lizhi 308, 310–11 Fanon, Frantz 127, 128–9 Faris, Wendy B. 294 Farris, Catherine S. 180 Foucault, Michel 39, 47 Fujii, James 191–2 Fuse Hideto 209 Futabatei Shimei 32 Gabriel, Philip 94, 209n, 218n, Giddens, Anthony 192–3 Gluck, Carol 55–7, 59n Gold, Thomas 19, 81, 188, 245n, 246–7, 293n Goldblatt, Howard 154, 162n, 279n Goodman, David S.G. 235, 242n Greene, Graham 3 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 26, 304 Hals, Frans 229 Haraszti, Miklos 101–2 Harootunian, Harry 25n, 41n, 65 Hidaka Rokuro 213n, 238, 241n Higashi Mineo 108, 118, 125 Hobsbawm, Eric 185 Hou Hsiao-hsien 17–8, 303 Hsia, C.T. 32 Hsu, Francis 185, Huang Chunming 5, 7, 80, 93, 98, 100, 107, 122, 125, 131, 153–61, 163, 170, 190n, 255, 303 Huang Fan 89n, 103, 244 Huang, Philip 81–2 Hyam, Ronald 126, 130

356

index

Igarashi, Yoshikuni 134n, 147n, 151, 172, 240, 260 Ihara Saikaku 146 Ikeda Hayato 83, 184, 235–6, 258 Irigaray, Luce 47, 109n Ivy, Marilyn 237n, 242 James, Henry 34 Jameson, Fredric 33n, 34n, 48, 63–5, 295, 300–1 Jippensha Ikku 146 Kaikô Takeshi 115 Karatani Kôjin 48, 67, 210n Kawabata Yasunari 21, 32 Kim Myong-in 171 Kinkley, Jeffrey 57n, 162n, 245n, 255 Kipling, Rudyard 130 Kishi Nobusuke 82, 112, 184, 258 Kissinger, Henry 120 Kobayashi Yoshinori 18 Kojima Nobuo 96, 108, 134n, 306 Kôno Taeko 85n, 89n, 97, 215n, 310 Kristeva, Julia 47 Lacan, Jacques 39, 47, 92 Lamley, Harry J. 76–7 Laozi 282 Li Ang 5, 10, 85, 98, 234, 244, 247, 249, 256, 275–84, 295–6 Li Qiao 79, 104n Li Yongping 103 Liang Qichao 32, 60 Liao Huiying 246 Lin Shuangbu 100, 190n Lin Yaode 247 Lin, Hui-sheng 177 Lu Xun 31n, 32, 33n, 34n, 40, 78n, 161n, 301 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 39 MacArthur, Douglas 105, 110–1, 122, 131 Mao Zedong 120 Marx, Karl 2, 62 Maupassant, Guy de 258 McClintock, Anne 126 Mishima Yukio 5, 10, 21, 35n, 60, 90n, 94, 96, 98, 108, 147, 234, 242, 257–65, 294, 296, 300, 303–4, 306–7 Miyoshi, Masao 25n, 41n, 65, 97, 221, 227, 229, 266 Mo Yan 3

Moon, Katherine 128n, 131, 168, 172 Mumford, Lewis 86 Murakami Haruki 5, 10, 20–1, 49, 59, 61, 84, 93–4, 96–7, 208n, 210n, 218n, 234, 237n, 238, 246, 256, 265–75, 294, 296, 303, 306 Murakami Ryû 5, 9, 68, 94, 96, 103, 108, 115–7, 125, 139, 175, 185, 194n, 208–18, 220–1, 223, 227, 229–30, 305–6 Myers, Ramon H. 75n, 76n, 77n, 81n, 99n, 119–20 Nakagami Kenji 89n, 97, 210n, 227 Nam Jeong-hyon 171 Nandy, Ashis 27, 48n Natsume Sôseki 37n, 191 Nixon, Richard 120, 156 Noma Hiroshi 306 Nord, Deborah Epstein 223 Nosaka Akiyuki 5, 7, 59, 94–5, 107, 111, 125, 133, 146–53, 155, 170, 306 Ôba Minako 96 Ochiai Emiko 184n, 228 Oda Makoto 115, 117 Ôe Kenzaburô 5, 7, 59–61, 68, 84–6, 90n, 93–6, 107, 113, 115, 125, 127n, 134–49, 152, 155, 169, 227, 304n, 306–7, 310 Ôka Shôhei 306 Ong, Aihwa 19n, 22, 57, 305 Ôshima Nagisa 108, 113n Ôshiro Tatsuhiro 108 Ouyang Zi 89n, 99 Owen, Stephen 32 Palumbo-Liu, David 43 Peattie, Mark R. 75n, 76n, 77, 81n Pike, Burton 88 Presley, Elvis 116 Qi Dengsheng Qu Yuan 58

99

Reischauer, Edwin O. 75 Robison, Richard 235, 242n Roseneld, John M. 44–5 Rougemont, Denis de 91 Sakai, Naoki 25n, 50, 67–8 Satô Eisaku 184 Sei Shônagon 262 Shih, Shu-mei 66, 86n

357

index Shikitei Samba 146 Shimada Masahiko 97, 192n, 265n, Shimao Toshio 306 Simmel, Georg 87, 189n Smith, Robert J. 72, 182, 187n Snyder, Stephen 94, 208n, 209, 218 Song Zelai 58n, 100 Spivak, Gayatri 51–2 Steen, Jan 229 Strecher, Matthew 97, 268 Su Weizhen 103, 104n Sugimoto, Yoshio 183–4, 241n Sunzi 282 Taira, Koji 83, 185n, 188, Takahashi Gen’ichirô 63 Takeuchi Yoshimi 114 Tamura Taijirô 115n, 116n, 125 Tanaka Yasuo 86, 277 Tanner, Tony 91–2 Thornton, Arland 177 Tôkai Sanshi 32 Tokuda Shûsei 191–2 Tomioka Taeko 85n, 96, 187, 310 Treat, John Whittier 16n, 97, 98n Trilling, Lionel 65 Truman, Harry 119 Tsai Ming-liang 283 Tsushima Yûko 97 Tu, Wei-ming 19n, 26, 54, 71–2, 179n, 255n, 310 Tung, Chung-hsuan 42–3 Vermeer, Jan 229 Vogel, Ezra 25, 239n Wang Tuo 58n, 100 Wang Wenxing 5, 63, 68, 86, 98–9, 175, 193–200, 220–1, 228, 230 Wang Zhenhe 5, 7, 59, 61, 63, 84, 98, 100, 107, 122, 125, 131–2, 155, 161–70, 303–4, 309

Weinstein, Arnold 307 Wellek, René 34 Weller, Robert P. 229 Williams, Raymond 86, 101 Wirth, Louis 190–1 Wong, Shelley 93 Wu He 80 Wu Nianzhen 108 Wu Zhuoliu 79 Xiao Sa

89n, 103, 187,

Yamada Eimi 20, 96, 109n Yang Guifei 91 Yang Zhao 247 Yang, Edward 17, 63, 283 Yasuoka Shôtarô 306 Yeh, Michelle 275, 277n Yi Kwangsu 32 Yoshida Haruo 97 Yoshimoto Banana 5, 9, 20, 49, 61, 85, 94, 96–8, 175, 184, 193, 218–27, 229–30, 266, 303, 306 Yoshiyuki Junnosuke 187, 215n, 306 Yu, Pauline 30, 36 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 294 Zhang Ailing (Eileen Zhang) 102n, 284 Zhang Dachun 103, 104, 187, 247 Zhang Longxi 40, 43, 45 Zhang Xiguo 108 Zhang, Yingjin 33, 40–1, 43, 86n Zhao, Henry Y.H. (Zhao Yiheng) 66–7 Zheng Qingwen 246 Zhong Zhaozheng 79 Zhou Enlai 120 Zhu Tianwen 5, 10, 20n, 61, 63, 68, 84, 98, 103–4, 187, 234, 249, 257, 277, 284–93, 295–6, 303–4 Zhu Tianxin 20n, 103–4, 247, 249, 286n Zhu Xining 102n, 103, 286n

CHINA STUDIES ISSN 1570–1344 1. Berg, D. Carnival in China. A Reading of the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12426 8 2. Hockx, M. Questions of Style. Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12915 4 3. Seiwert, H. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13146 9 4. Heberer, T. Private Entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam. Social and Political Functioning of Strategic Groups. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12857 3 5. Xiang, B. Transcending Boundaries. Zhejiangcun: the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14201 0 6. Huang, N. Women, War, Domesticity. Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14242 8 7. Dudbridge, G. Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture. Selected Papers on China. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14770 5 8. Cook, C.A. Death in Ancient China. The Tale of One Man’s Journey. 2006. ISBN-10: 90 04 15312 8, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15312 7 9. Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Shaping the Reforms, Academia and China (1977-2003). 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15323 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15323 3 10. Berg, D. (ed.) Reading China. Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse. Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15483 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15483 4 11. Hillenbrand, M. Literature and the Practice of Resistance. Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15478 7, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15478 0 12. Hsiao, L. The Eternal Present of the Past. Illustration, Theatre, and Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573-1619. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15643 2 13. Gerritsen, A. Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15603 6 14. Starr, C.F. Red-light Novels of the late Qing. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15629 6