Hutchinson, R. & Williams, M. - Representing The Other in Modern Japanese Literature

Representing the Other in Modern
Japanese Literature
Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors
writing in Japanese in the twentieth century have constructed a division between
the ‘Self ’ and the ‘Other’ in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault
and Lacan, the chapters seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to
the central question of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and of how best to define
their identity.
A study of how these writers each arrived at their understanding of the
Japanese ‘Self ’ through the construction of some contrasting ‘Other’ is under-
taken through a categorisation of the ‘Others’ in question into three broad
categories. Part I examines a series of ‘external Others’, established by authors
such as Nagai Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Yokomitsu Riichi, whose own journeys
abroad enabled them to consider the question of national identity from a new
vantage point. Part II considers a series of ‘internal Others’, minority writers
including burakumin authors and those who, for whatever reason, have perceived
themselves as on the periphery of society looking in at the ‘Japan’ that has
marginalised them. Finally, Part III addresses those writers who can be charac-
terised as occupying some middle ground and whose writings deal with the
question of whether the ‘Other’ can ever become the ‘Self ’.
Using a diverse cross-section of writers and texts as case studies, Representing
the Other in Modern Japanese Literature brings together contributions from a number
of leading international experts in the field and will be essential reading for those
working in Japanese studies, colonialism, identity studies and nationalism.
Rachael Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Colgate

University, New York. Her current research interests focus on the dynamics of
representation in a range of textual and new media, including the literature of
Nagai Kaf ū, the films of Kurosawa Akira and the manga of Tezuka Osamu.
Mark Williams is Professor of Japanese Studies and Head of the Department

of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. His previous publications
include Endō Shusaku:
¯ a Literature of Reconciliation (Routledge, 1999), and with John
Breen (as editors) Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses (Macmillan, 1996).
Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series
Series Editor: Glenn D. Hook
Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield
This series, published by Routledge in association with the Centre for Japanese
Studies at the University of Sheffield, both makes available original research on a
wide range of subjects dealing with Japan and provides introductory overviews of
key topics in Japanese Studies.
The Internationalization of Japan Japanese Business Management
Edited by Glenn D. Hook and Michael Restructuring for low growth and glob-
Weiner alization
Edited by Hasegawa Harukiyo and Glenn D.
Race and Migration in Imperial Hook
Japan
Michael Weiner Japan and Asia Pacific
Integration
Japan and the Pacific Free Trade Pacific romances 1968–1996
Area Pekka Korhonen
Pekka Korhonen
Japan’s Economic Power and
Greater China and Japan Security
Prospects for an economic partner- Japan and North Korea
ship? Christopher W. Hughes
Robert Taylor
Japan’s Contested Constitution
The Steel Industry in Japan Documents and analysis
A comparison with the UK Glenn D. Hook and Gavan McCormack
Hasegawa Harukiyo
Japan’s International Relations
Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Politics, economics and security
Japan Glenn D. Hook, Julie Gilson, Christopher
Richard Siddle Hughes and Hugo Dobson
Japan’s Minorities Japanese Education Reform

The illusion of homogeneity Nakasone’s legacy
Edited by Michael Weiner Christopher P. Hood
The Political Economy of Grassroots Pacifism in Post-War
Japanese Globalisation Japan
Glenn D. Hook and Hasegawa Harukiyo The rebirth of a nation
Mari Yamamoto
Japan and Okinawa
Structure and subjectivity Interfirm Networks in the
Edited by Glenn D. Hook and Richard Japanese Electronics Industry
Siddle Ralph Paprzycki
Japan and Britain in the Globalisation and Women in the

Contemporary World Japanese Workforce
Responses to common issues Beverley Bishop
Edited by Hugo Dobson and Glenn D.
Hook Contested Governance in Japan
Sites and issues
Japan and United Nations Edited by Glenn D. Hook
Peacekeeping
New pressures, new responses Japan's International Relations
Hugo Dobson Politics, economics and security
Second edition
Japanese Capitalism and Glenn D. Hook, Julie Gilson, Christopher
Modernity in a Global Era Hughes and Hugo Dobson
Re-fabricating lifetime employment
relations Japan's Changing Role in
Peter C. D. Matanle Humanitarian Crises
Yukiko Nishikawa
Nikkeiren and Japanese
Capitalism Japan's Subnational
John Crump Governments in International
Affairs
Production Networks in Asia and Purnendra Jain
Europe
Skill formation and technology Japan and East Asian Monetary
transfer in the automobile industry Regionalism
Edited by Rogier Busser and Yuri Sadoi Towards a proactive leadership role?
Shigeko Hayashi
Japan and the G7/8
1975–2002 Japan's Relations with China
Hugo Dobson Facing a rising power
Lam Peng-Er
The Political Economy of
Reproduction in Japan South Korean Engagement
Between nation-state and everyday Policies and North Korea
life Identities, Norms and the Sunshine Policy
Takeda Hiroko Son Key-young
Representing the Other in Myth, Protest and Struggle in
Modern Japanese Literature Okinawa
A critical approach Miyume Tanji
Edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Mark
Williams Nationalisms in Japan
Edited by Naoko Shimazu
Representing the Other in Modern
Japanese Literature
A critical approach
Edited by Rachael Hutchinson and

Mark Williams
First published 2007
by Routledge
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© Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams, editorial matter and selection;
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Representing the other in modern Japanese literature : a critical approach
/ edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams.
p. cm. -- (Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Japanese literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Other
(Philosophy) 3. Self-perception in literature. I. Hutchinson, Rachael. II.
Williams, Mark,-d1957- III. Series.
PL726.65.R47 2006
895.6'09384--dc22
2005031246
ISBN10: 0-415-36186-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36186-6

ISBN10: 0-415-36185-0 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36185-9
ISBN13: 978-0-203-01234-5 (ebk)
Contents
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction: Self and Other in modern Japanese literature 1

R AC H A E L H U TC H I N S O N A N D M A R K W I L L I A M S
1 Hermes and Hermès: Othernesses in modern Japanese literature 19

I R M E L A H I J I YA - K I R S C H N E R E I T
2 Meet me on the other side: Strategies of Otherness in modern

Japanese literature 38
SUSAN NAPIER
PART I
External others 55
3 Who holds the whip? Power and critique in Nagai Kafū’s

Tale s of A m e ric a 57
R AC H A E L H U TC H I N S O N
4 ‘Foreign bodies’: ‘Race’, gender and orientalism in Tanizaki

Jun’ichirō’s ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’ 75
A D R I A N P I N N I N G TO N
5 Self and Other in the writings of Kajii Motojirō 96

STEPHEN DODD
6 Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others: Paris and Shanghai 109

D O U G L A S S L AY M A K E R
viii Contents
PART II
Internal others 125
7 Passing: Paradoxes of alterity in The Broken Commandment 127

MARK MORRIS
8 The Burakumin as ‘Other’ in Noma Hiroshi’s Circle of Youth 145

JA M E S R A E S I D E
9 Sincerely yours: Uno Chiyo’s A Wife’s Letters as wartime subversion 165

REBECCA L. COPELAND
10 Foreign Sex, native politics: Lady Chatterley’s Lover in post-

occupation Japan 183
ANN SHERIF
11 The way of the survivor: Conversion and inversion in Ōe

Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes 211
DAV I D C . S TA H L
12 Free to write: Confronting the present, and the past, in Shiina

Rinzō’s The Beautiful Woman 230
MARK WILLIAMS
PART III
Liminal sites 253
13 Yuta as the postcolonial Other in Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction 255

L E I T H M O RT O N
14 Modernity, history, and the uncanny: Colonial encounter and

the epistemological gap 271
FAY E Y UA N K L E E M A N
15 ‘There’s no such place as home’: Gotō Meisei, or identity

as alterity 292
AT S U KO S A K A K I
16 Beyond language: Embracing the figure of ‘the Other’

in Yi Yang-Ji’s Yuhi 312
C AT H E R I N E RY U
Index 332
Notes on contributors
Rebecca L. Copeland is Professor of Japanese Literature at Washington

University in St Louis, Missouri. Her major publications include: Woman Critiqued:
Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (2006); Modern Murasaki: Writing by
Women of Meiji Japan (2006) co-edited with Dr Melek Ortabasi; The Father–
Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001) which she co-
edited with Dr Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen; Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji
Japan (2000); and The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo (1992).
Stephen Dodd gained BA degrees in Chinese (1977) and Japanese (1980) from
Keble College, Oxford. He obtained a PhD in Japanese Literature from
Columbia University (1993). After teaching briefly at UC Santa Barbara
(1993), he became Assistant Professor in Japanese Literature at Duke
University (1993–94). Since 1994, he has been teaching at SOAS, University
of London, where he is Senior Lecturer in Japanese. He has written a wide
range of articles on modern Japanese literature, including ‘Fantasies, Fairies, and
Electric Dreams: Satō Haruo’s Critique of Taishō ’, Monumenta Nipponica 49
(1994); and ‘The Significance of Bodies in Sōseki’s Kokoro’, Monumenta Nipponica
53 (1998). He is the author of Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in
Modern Japanese Literature (Harvard East Asian monographs, distributed by
Harvard University Press, 2004). He is presently researching the writer Kajii
Motojirō, with the aim of producing a series of articles and a book.
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is Professor of Japanology (Literature and

Cultural Studies) at Berlin Free University. Her research interests are: transcul-
tural studies in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, translation
studies, semiotics of culture. Her major publications include: Das Ende der Exotik
(Frankfurt, 1988); Was heisst: Japanische Literatur verstehen? (Frankfurt, 1990); Rituals
of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon
(Cambridge, MA, 1996); Japanische Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein Handbuch (2000);
Kulturbeziehungen zwischen Japan und dem Westen seit 1853 (ed., Munich, 1999); Canon
and Identity: Japanese Modernization Reconsidered (ed., Munich, 2000). She is also the
editor of Japanische Bibliothek (Insel Publ., 34 vols, 1990–2000), and of Iaponia Insula
(Wiesbaden, Munich, 15 vols).
x Notes on Contributors
Rachael Hutchinson earned her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2000,
and is currently Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Colgate University,
New York. Her publications include: ‘Occidentalism and Critique of Meiji: The
West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kafū’, Japan Forum 13(2) (2001): 195–213;
and ‘Orientalism or Occidentalism? Dynamics of Appropriation in Akira
Kurosawa’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song-Hwee Lim (eds) Remapping World
Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006). Her latest work,
‘A Fistful of Yojimbo: Appropriation and Dialogue in Japanese Cinema’ is forth-
coming in Paul Cooke (ed.) Dialogues with Hollywood (Palgrave). She is currently
working on a book-length manuscript exploring the Occidentalist critique of
Nagai Kaf ū . Her wider research interests focus on representation and identity in
a range of narrative media.
Faye Yuan Kleeman is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the

University of Colorado. Her main research interests are: colonial literature,
women writers, comparative culture. Her major publications include: Under an
Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (University of
Hawai’i Press, 2003); ‘A House of Their Own: Constructing the Gynocentric
Family in Modern Japan’, Japan Studies Review 1(2) (Summer, 1998); ‘A Defiant
Muse: Reading and Situating Kurahashi Yumiko’s Narrative Subjectivity’, in
Tomoko Kuribayashi (ed.) The Outsider Within: Ten Essays on Modern Japanese Women
Writers (University Press of America, 2001); ‘Minzuxue yu zhiminzhuyi: Xichuang
Man zai Taiwan’ (Ethnography and colonialism: Nishikawa Mitsuru in Taiwan),
Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu tongxun, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy,
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, 11(1) (2001); ‘Gender, Ethnography and
Colonial Cultural Production: Nishikawa Mitsuru’s Discourse on Taiwan’, in
Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory (Columbia
University Press, 2005); and ‘The Gendering of Modernity: The Colonial Body
in Japanese and Taiwanese Literature’, Journal of Modern Chinese Language and
Literature 7(2) (2005).
Mark Morris received his BA from Columbia University, and his PhD from
Harvard University. He has taught Japanese literature and film at the University
of Adelaide and, since 1989, the University of Cambridge, where he is a
Lecturer in Japanese Cultural History. He is a Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge. He is the author of several major articles on classical literature
and literary criticism in The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies: ‘Sei Shonagon’s
Poetic Catalogues’ (June 1980); ‘Buson and Shiki: Part One’ (Dec. 1984), ‘Part
Two’ (June 1985); ‘Waka and Form, Waka and History’ (1986). His work on
modern fiction includes: ‘Japan’, in The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing
(1996); ‘Magic Realism as Ideology: Narrative Evasions in the Work of
Nakagami Kenji’, in A Companion to Magical Realism (2005); and, as editor, a
special issue of Japan Forum (1996), entitled ‘Towards Nakagami’. His work in
progress includes ‘Postcolonial Visions: Japan in Recent Korean Films’ and ‘Ozu’s
War’.
Notes on Contributors xi
Leith Morton teaches English at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan,
where he is a Professor in the Foreign Language Research and Teaching Center.
His main research interests are: modern Japanese literature, culture and
aesthetics. His major publications include: Tales from East of the River (Melbourne:
Rigmarole Press, 1982); Divided Self: A Biography of Arishima Takeo (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 1988); The Fox (Tokyo: Kumon Publishing Co., Ltd, 1989) (illustrated by
Murakami Yukuo); as co-editor and translator, Seven Stories of Modern Japan
(Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1991); as editor and translator, Mt Fuji: Selected Poems
1943–1986 by Kusano Shinpei (Michigan: Katydid Press, 1991); An Anthology of
Contemporary Japanese Poetry (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993);
The Flower Garland (Sydney: Island Press, 1993); A Day at the Races (Macao: English
Dept., University of Macao, 2003); Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2003); At the Hotel Zudabollo (Sydney: Island
Press, 2004); Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); as poetry co-editor and co-trans-
lator, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature vol. 1: From Restoration to
Occupation, 1868–1945 (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005).
Susan Napier is Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of

Texas at Austin. She is the author of three books: Escape from the Wasteland:
Romanticism and Realism in the Works of Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō; The Fantastic
in Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity; and Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving
Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation. She is currently working on a book concerning
the construction of ‘Japan’ in the Western imagination.
Adrian Pinnington is Professor of Comparative Literature, The School of

International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo. His main research
interests are: the reception of classical Japanese literature in modern Japan and
the West; Japanese cultural identity; waka and haiku. His publications include:
‘R.H. Blyth, 1886–1964’, in Ian Nish (ed.) Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits
(Folkestone: Japan Library, 1994); ‘Arthur Waley and Japanese Literature’, in The
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. 12 (Tokyo: The Asiatic Society of
Japan, 1997); ‘Yoshimitsu, Benedict, Endō: Guilt, Shame and the Post-war Idea
of Japan’, Japan Forum 13(1) (Winner of the Toshiba International Prize for best
paper in Japan Forum, 2002); and as editor with Hoshino Tsunehiko, Takaha Shugyō,
Selected Haiku (Tokyo: Furansudō, 2003).
James Raeside is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Keio

Gijuku University, Tokyo. His main research interests are: comparative literature,
in particular, European and Japanese novelists of the twentieth century; Noma
Hiroshi; Mishima Yukio; postwar Japanese fiction. His major publications
include: ‘This is not Hell nor am I out of It: Noma Hiroshi’s Waga tō wa soko ni
tatsu’, Japan Forum 9(2) (1997): 195–215; ‘The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is
Strong: Mishima Yukio’s Kinjiki and Oscar Wilde’, Comparative Literature Studies
36(1) (1999): 1–23. ‘Quelques liens entre l’érotisme de Georges Bataille et Gogo no
xii Notes on Contributors
Eikōde Mishima Yukio’, Japon Pluriel 3 (1999): 377–94; ‘Kurai e kara Dark Pictures
e’, Noma H’iroshi-kai no Kaihō 7 (2000): 29–34; as translator, Dark Pictures and other
Stories (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000); ‘The Money-Go-Round: Twentieth-Century
Picaresque in Priestley’s The Good Companions and Ibuse’s The Bill-Collecting Trip’,
New Comparison 35/36 (2003): 266–80; and ‘This Death in Life: Leprosy in
Mishima Yukio’s Raiō no terasu and Beyond’, Japan Forum 15(1) (2003): 99–123.
Catherine Ryu is Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at

Michigan State University in East Lansing. Her main research interests are:
Heian narratives, gender studies, Nō drama, zainichi literature, and Korean liter-
ature. Her major publications include: ‘A Golden Needle, a Rabbit’s Tail, and the
Density of Female Body Fat: An Analysis of Murō Saisei’s Metaphors for Enchi
Fumiko’s Writing Libido’, in Eiji Sekine (ed.) Love and Sexuality: Proceedings of the
Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies (Purdue University, 1999); ‘Kaigai ni
okeru Genji kenky ū: Raiza Darubii cho Murasaki Shikibu monogatari:
Nantonaku Heian kagirinaku murasaki’, Genji Kenkyū 7 (April 2002); ‘“Reading”
the Female Reader in Liza Dalby and Her Tale of Murasaki’, in Eiji Sekine (ed.)
Japan from Somewhere Else: Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies
(Purdue University, 2002); ‘Peter H. Lee: Envisioning the Future of Korean
Literature in the Global Context’, in Pioneers of Korean Studies. Seoul, Korea (The
Academy of Korean Studies, 2004); ‘Affirming the Feminine: Grandma the
Maitreya in Kim Chong-han’s Surado (1969)’, in Hanmaum Seoun (ed.) The
Proceedings of 2004 International Conference on Korean Nuns within the Context of East
Asian Buddhist Traditions, vol. 1 (2004): 327–40 (in Korean) and vol. 2 (2004): 385–
402 (in English).
Atsuko Sakaki is Professor in East Asian Studies and Associate Member of the
Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her main
research interests are: corporeality and spatiality; cross-cultural analysis; narra-
tive studies; and gender studies. Her major publications include: Obsessions with the
Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006);
Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard
University Press, 1999); The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi
Yumiko (M.E. Sharpe, 1998); and ‘Scratch the Surface, Film the Face: Obsession
with the Depth and Seduction of the Surface in Abe Kōbō ’s Face of Another’,
Japan Forum 17(3) (October, 2005).
Ann Sherif is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Language at

Oberlin College, Ohio, USA. She is the author of Mirror: The Essays and Fiction of
Kōda Aya (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999); ‘The Aesthetics of Speed and the
Illogicality of Politics: Ishihara Shintarō’s Literary Debut’, Japan Forum (2005);
and ‘The Politics of Loss: On Etō Jun’, positions (2002). Her translations include
fiction by Yoshimoto Banana, Kōda Aya, and Hasumi Shigehiko. Her current
research focuses on Cold War culture in Japan and the politics of Japanese
publishing.
Notes on Contributors xiii
Douglas Slaymaker is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of
Kentucky, Lexington, KY. He currently serves as Director of the Japan Studies
Program and as a Co-director of the Asia Center at the University of Kentucky.
He is the author of The Body in Postwar Fiction: Japanese Fiction after the War
(Routledge, 2004), and the editor of Confluences: Postwar Japan and France
(University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2002) and One Hundred
Years of Popular Culture in Japan (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). His current
research projects focus on the work of Tawada Yoko, and also on the interac-
tions of Japanese intellectuals with China and France in the early twentieth
century.
David C. Stahl is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film and

Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (State University of
New York). His major research interests are: the memory and representation of
the Asia Pacific War experience in Japanese literature and film; psychoanalytic
examination of Japanese survivor narratives; and issues concerning traumatic
loss, mourning and recovery. His major publications include: The Burdens of
Survival: Ōo ka Shōhe i’s Writings on the Pacific War (University of Hawaii Press,
2003). He is currently writing a book on trauma, repetition and recovery in
modern Japanese literature and film. He is also working on a psychoanalytical
examination of Nosaka Akiyuki’s firebombing memoirs, focusing on his fictional
treatment of his traumatic home front experience in ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ and
Takahata Isao’s anime version of the same.
Mark Williams is Professor of Japanese Studies and Head of the Department

of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. His current research interests
are: the memory and representation of the Asia Pacific War and the Occupation
period in Japanese literature; tenkō literature. His major publications include:
Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses (edited with John Breen, Macmillan Press,
1996); Endō Sh ūsaku: A Literature of Reconciliation (Routledge, 1999); Foreign Studies
and The Girl I Left Behind (translations of two novels by Endō Shūsaku); ‘Life after
Death? The Literature of an Undeployed Kamikaze Squadron Leader’, Japan
Forum 4(1) (1992); ‘Double Vision: Divided Narrative Focus in Takahashi
Takako’s Yosōi seyo , waga tamashii yo !’, in S. Snyder and P. Gabriel (eds) Ōe and
Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999); ‘Bridging
the Divide: Writing Christian Faith (and Doubt) in Modern Japan’, in M. Mullins
(ed.) Japan Christian Yearbook (Brill, 2003); ‘Endō S hūsaku: Death and Rebirth in
Deep Rive r’, Christianity and Literature 51(2) (2002); and ‘Shiina Rinzō: Imaging
Hope and Despair in Occupation Japan’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 66(3) (2003).
Acknowledgements
This book is the fruit of a research project that grew out of a meeting held on
30 May 2001 between British and Japanese research funding bodies, other
interested parties, and the British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS). In
the wake of the meeting, three research projects were identified as filling
important gaps in the literature: the ‘Other’ in Japanese literature; governance
in Japan; and modern and contemporary Japanese nationalism. It was agreed
at a meeting of the BAJS Council shortly thereafter that three members of
Council would act as project leaders, drawing on both members of the associa-
tion and others in the field in order to find the best possible contributors to
produce three edited books. This is the second of those three volumes to
appear in print, the others being Contested Governance in Japan, edited by Glenn
Hook, and Nationalisms in Japan, edited by Naoko Shimazu.
The members of these projects, and especially the project leaders and
editors, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Great Britain–Sasakawa
Foundation, and especially to Mike Barrett, its Chief Executive. If it had not
been for the Foundation’s generous support, and Mike’s belief in us, these
projects would not have been realized. We are also grateful to the Toshiba
International Foundation and to BAJS for generous additional financial
support.
Craig Fowlie at Routledge agreed to take on the three volumes as part of
the Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series, subject to the
standard international peer review. We are grateful for his enthusiastic support
of these projects and for the assistance we have received from Stephanie Rogers,
Helen Baker and the rest of the editorial team at Taylor & Francis.
Finally, as far as this project is concerned, in addition to the above-
mentioned sponsors, we would like to thank the Japan Foundation Endowment
Committee, the British Academy and the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures at the University of Leeds for further financial assistance that
enabled us to invite our various contributors to an initial workshop in Leeds in
June 2003 and to a follow-up workshop at the Association for Asian Studies
annual convention in San Diego in March 2004. We would also like to express
our gratitude to all of the contributors for their cooperation and willingness to
meet our various requests and deadlines. Thanks are also due to our anonymous
Acknowledgements xv
referees, to our respective colleagues at Colgate and Leeds, and, last but by no
means least, to our families, who have enabled us to retain sight of the bigger
picture as we completed this project.
Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
Introduction
Self and Other in modern Japanese
literature
Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
The history of Japan in the twentieth century reads like a rollercoaster of human
experience: the rise and fall of empire; the tumult of the fifteen-year war waged
across China, the Pacific and South-East Asia; the atomic bomb and its after-
math; rebuilding and repatriation; economic boom and collapse. From the
closing years of the Meiji period right through to the present day, the nature of
modern Japan, built as it was on empire and immigration, has made the question
of what makes a person ‘Japanese’ an important site of intellectual endeavour.
Whether pointing to one’s individual identity or to that of the nation, the task of
defining the ‘Self ’ took on great significance in the twentieth century as change
occurred more quickly than ever before. The question of how Japan should
modernise yet still preserve its own heritage plagued intellectuals of the Meiji
period, while others were more concerned with pinning down Japan’s position
vis-à-vis other nations in the shifting power dynamics of Western colonialism.
The concern with preserving the Japanese heritage came to the fore in the
Nihon e no kaiki movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a ‘Return to Japan’ after years
of Westernisation, while the often obsessive patriotism of the war years elevated
‘Japaneseness’ to an almost consecrated state of being. The devastation of war
engendered a search for a new national model with which to rebuild Japan, while
at the personal level individuals began the difficult task of reconciling their war
personas with their postwar selves. As families separated in the war were reunited
and repatriated, a new sense of alienation emerged in the culture shock of
arriving back in Japan. Add to this the dizzying speed of economic recovery
through the 1960s and 1970s, the height of the ‘bubble economy’ in the 1980s,
and the shock of collapse and recession in the 1990s, and the postwar trend
towards defining oneself by one’s economic status was suddenly revealed not only
as problematic, but also as meaningless. It is not surprising that the literature of
modern Japan, written by individuals living in often turbulent times, has revolved
around the central questions of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and how best to
define one’s identity.
The focus on identity or the ‘Self ’ in Japanese literature is clearly seen in the
fact that one of the most enduring and popular literary forms in Japan has been
termed the shishōsetsu, usually translated as ‘I-novel’.1 Kobayashi Hideo wrote in
1935 that, of all the writing in the world that centred on the individual ‘I’, only
2 Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams
Japan’s literature focused on that ‘I’ without placing it in conflict with others in
society.2 In Kobayashi’s critical reading, the Japanese concentration on the ‘puri-
fied I’ was seen as insular and problematic. Much has since been written on the
Japanese search for self and subjectivity in terms of the ‘I-novel’ (Fowler 1988;
Fujii 1993; Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1996; Suzuki 1996), and this art form cannot be
overlooked in considering Japanese formulations of identity. But there were other
ways in which Japanese writers problematised their identity which did not
depend on the confessional form or inward-looking explorations of the indi-
vidual psyche. This volume looks at the process of self-identification, not in a
vacuum, but in relation to others. In other words, how did Japanese writers see
themselves in relation to society and the wider world? Looking at the twentieth
century as a whole, we see that Japanese literature has sought many avenues of
understanding through contrasting the Japanese ‘Self ’ against a wide variety
of ‘Others’, both inside and outside Japan. One reason for directing this search
for meaning away from the ‘purified I’ comes from historical circumstances,
particularly the colonial relationships that dominated Japanese experience
throughout the twentieth century.
As John Lie and others have shown, the geographical definition of Japan
changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing
boundaries had far-reaching effects on the identity of people living within them
(Lie 2001). The expanding borders of empire brought about an increase in phys-
ical mobility through immigration or wartime deployment. The further from
Tokyo the colonising Japanese travelled, the more people they encountered who
were different from themselves, while the wars that followed in East and South-
East Asia and the Pacific brought direct contact with the foreigner as enemy. On
the other hand, the further the empire stretched and grew, the more varied
were the people who made up the new citizenry of that empire: by 1914,
‘Japanese’ subjects included former nationals of Taiwan and Korea, as well as
the inhabitants of the Micronesian islands, the southern half of Sakhalin
(Karafuto) and parts of southern Manchuria.3 Later, many of these same subjects
would travel to the Japanese islands to take advantage of labour shortages during
the war, so that the ethnic make-up of ‘Japan’ changed dramatically. Changing
borders thus created a tension between the subject of empire and the individual
experience of national origin. This tension between different versions of the Self
can be seen clearly in the literature written by people subsumed into the empire
as it grew, as well as that written by various members of the multi-ethnic society
contained within the new borders of Japan. Similarly, the colonial experience of
Japan during the Allied Occupation of 1945–52 created an identity crisis as the
conquering empire was turned into newly colonised space. The painful
outpouring of tenkō or ‘political conversion’ literature showed writers renouncing
their former beliefs in Communism, in the divinity of the Emperor, in the very
definition of imperial Japan. Responsibility, complicity and the search for a new
Self form some of the most interesting questions of identity in postwar Japanese
literature. It is clear that the historical context has been significant in the intellec-
tual endeavour to define ‘Japan’. Although the particularities of the twentieth
Introduction 3
century underlie many issues explored in this study, however, our work is based
on literary rather than historical discussion. This book examines the ways in
which the idea of the Japanese Self has been problematised in literature, as
writers through the twentieth century sought to define their identity in relation to
a rapidly changing world. The way in which identity is problematised, defined,
and explored in these works hangs on ideas of the ‘Self ’ as opposed to some kind
of ‘Other’, and it is the ways in which these authors chose to represent this
‘Other’ that this book takes as its central focus.
The ‘Other’ of our title thus indicates the imagined entities which literary
authors have constructed as the defining Other for the Japanese Self. This kind of
binary opposition is a fundamental structure of phenomenology, which places
things in opposition to each other in order to arrive at definitions of those things.
We define one thing in terms of another thing, or indeed in terms of a ‘not-
thing’, in order to seek some kind of truth as to the essence of the thing defined.
One dialogic opposition frequently discussed in this regard is that between East
and West, or Orient and Occident, and a major component of both Orientalism
and Occidentalism involves what James Carrier has called ‘essentialist, dialectical
definition’ of Self and Other, where ‘essentialisation’ is defined as the process of
‘reduc[ing] the complex entities that are being compared to a set of core features
that express the essence of each entity, but only as it stands in contrast to the
other’ (Carrier 1995: 3). These core features form a ‘timeless essence that
pervades, shapes, and defines the significance of people and events that consti-
tute it’ (ibid.: 2). These ideas of Self and Other, and of essentialisation, are
especially applicable in an analysis of modern Japanese literature, because so
much writing from Meiji through to the present period consists of essentialised
representations of other nations and places, as well as different sections of society
within Japan and the empire, in order to come to some overall definition of what
it means to be Japanese.4 Before we begin our study of these essentialised repre-
sentations, however, it is necessary to note that there are a number of problems
involved with binary structures, both for the writers using binary structures as
models with which to comprehend and represent their world, and for academics
who wish to talk about those binary structures in describing the writers’ work.
The main problems with using the binary structure are basic problems of
phenomenology. First, any binary structure is arbitrary in its nature, as people
must choose the objects to be contrasted against the thing they wish to define.
This choice is subjective and arbitrary at best, but could be deliberately skewed,
as choosing one oppositional object over another would produce a different, and
perhaps more favourable, result. This problem helps us realise that the ‘Other’
that appears in many of the works we study may have been chosen in order to
make a particular point about the Self which could not be made by contrasting
that Self against some different Other. Second, binary systems nearly always
construct hierarchies, placing the thing to be defined over and above the
contrastive Other. The superiority of the Self against the chosen Other is, over
time, taken as natural. Third, the act of comparison and contrast emphasises
certain elements of the Self or Other to make the contrast more effective,
focusing more on difference or more on similarity to make a point. These partic-
ular elements come to stand for the whole Self and the whole Other, in the
process of essentialisation. The representations of the Other in the works studied
in this volume do fall prey to these problems, demonstrating the bias, the natu-
ralised hierarchy, and the essentialisation of the binary structure. However, the
authors using these structures may also be doing so for effect. The very act of
choosing the binary structure – who will be Self and who or what will stand in
for the Other – is what is interesting about their work.
Turning to the problems generated by the binary structure for academics who
wish to talk about representations of Self and Other, we find that the main
problem with writing about ideas of nationhood in terms of Self and Other or in
terms of the nation itself (‘Japaneseness’) is that this can, all too often, end up
reifying the very construct that the investigation seeks to expose as constructed.
For example, a focus on the Meiji construction of ‘Japan’ can become mired in
identifying essential characteristics which were perceived by contemporary
people to comprise ‘Japaneseness’, thereby minimising the intended focus on the
perception itself. Our genealogy of imagery depicting Japan in relation to
various Others in the twentieth century must therefore look to the process rather
than the end product of construction. The vocabulary can also become tortuous,
as we seek to investigate how writers depicted relationships between the
perceived ‘Japan’ and other entities both within and outside its perceived
borders. It is, therefore, necessary to write in a clear way, but also necessary
for the reader to bear in mind that ‘Japan’ is a perceived construct made by
people for a reason, not an eternal, naturally occurring unit. Our answer to these
problems of description and vocabulary is to always be as specific as possible. All
the contributors to this volume have chosen specific case studies of instances
where authors have represented the ‘Other’ in writing, engaging with these
Others in the attempt to make sense of their own position and identity. The
contributors have also been specific about what conclusions we can draw from
these case studies. The more case studies we look at, it seems, the more inter-
esting and complex this construct called ‘Japan’ becomes, as it shifts in relation to
its chosen Others.
In emphasising the constructed nature of Self and Other in the works studied
here, our approach is very different from that of the vast body of work known as
Nihonjinron, usually translated as ‘theories of Japaneseness’. Nihonjinron theorists of
the twentieth century sought to define and pin down a particular ‘Japan’ opposed
to various imagined ‘Others’. As Michael Weiner (1997) has pointed out, the
primary focus of Nihonjinron is, as its name implies, the Nihonjin or Japanese
people themselves, meaning that discussion of Japan inevitably boils down to an
emphasis on racial division and difference. To be sure, issues of the Japanese
‘Self ’, definitions of identity, and so on are indeed connected to the movements
of Nihon e no kaiki and Nihonjinron in the sense that they are all attempting to come
to some definition of what it means to be Japanese. However, whereas a
Nihonjinron approach to literature would attempt to identify ‘unique’ characteris-
tics of Japaneseness, reifying the Japanese ‘Self ’ in contrast to ‘Others’, we aim
Introduction 5
to focus on the process of construction, to see how and why writers chose to
construct particular images of Self and Other and for what purposes. By high-
lighting the fluidity of such concepts as Japan and Other, we aim to perform an
archaeology of representation, one which illuminates the processes at work
behind such representation and thus destroys the possibility of these concepts
becoming fixed. Through the various works examined in this volume, ‘Japan’
emerges as an evolving, constantly changing, historical construct, malleable and
open to reconstruction. In stressing that neither ‘the West’ nor ‘Asia’ nor ‘Japan’
can be treated as whole, everlasting, essentialised entities, but rather as so many
overlapping systems, our work will point to the myth of Nihonjinron. At the same
time, we aim to better equip ourselves to confront the tenuous and artificial
nature of the divisions postulated by Nihonjinron, providing a frame of reference
in which we can see that Nihonjinron is by no means the only way that Japanese
have defined the ‘Japanese Self ’.
The main problems involved with using and talking about binary opposition
are thus arbitrariness, the naturalisation of hierarchy, essentialisation and a
misleading focus on difference and division. But perhaps the most intractable
problem with the binary structure is, as Derrida maintains, the fact that two
totalistic entities cannot actually exist. Always in dialogue and always influenced
by the Other, each has a trace of the other in it. As Atsuko Sakaki points out in
her contribution to this volume, Derrida’s insistence that there is no ‘Self ’
autonomous of the ‘Other’ leads to the conclusion that the process of identifica-
tion is always more important than the idea of identity in itself. In other words,
the strong relationship between any two entities constructed in opposition to each
other is far more significant than the construction of either entity in itself.
Keeping Derrida’s sense of connection in mind, the volume opens with two
chapters which take different approaches to this central question of the relation-
ship between Self and Other in Japanese literature. In Chapter 1, Irmela
Hijiya-Kirschnereit takes an historical approach to the meaning of ‘Otherness’
and ‘foreignness’ in Japanese culture, situating her case study of Mishima Yukio’s
construction of the West in a set of concentric circles of historical engagement
with the Other. In the process, she highlights the constructed nature of our own
theoretical and academic engagement with ‘Otherness’, examining the many
different terms used for the Other in European languages as well as the Japanese.
Susan Napier’s Chapter 2 focuses more closely on the nature of the Self–Other
relationship in modern Japanese literature, examining the tenuous membrane
between ‘this side’ and ‘the other side’ of existence in the work of two authors at
either end of the twentieth century: Natsume Sōseki and Murakami Haruki.
What emerges most strongly in this chapter is a sense of permeability, a blurring
and stretching of boundaries, as the Japanese Self, engaging with the Western or
Asian Other, finds the trace of the Other constantly impinging on its own
consciousness. The dialogic relationship is demonstrated through metaphors of
visibility, of penetration and permeation, so that it is not the difference between
‘our side’ and ‘the other side’ that is important but the process of moving
towards and engaging with that other side. It is in the space between Self and
Other that the relationship emerges, and it is this relationship that serves as the
wider focus of this volume.
To analyse this relationship and the dynamics of representation, we base our
approach on the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, who both used
formulations of Self and Other to explain various phenomena in human experi-
ence. Theoretical discourse on the idea of the Other was largely shaped by
Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, based on the acknowledgement of
strangeness in the Other and an emphasis on distance and difference rather than
shared characteristics or solidarity. ‘Other’, as used in capitalisation throughout
this volume, is a term derived from Lacan’s metaphor of the ‘mirror stage’ of the
developing infant. Lacan held that the child, looking in the mirror, would at once
recognise itself as a whole independent being, and at the same time, would
realise that this mirror image was completely unconnected to itself – unattainable,
distant, alien and ‘Other’. Thus, the child’s self-image stems from a fundamental
mis-identification, resulting in a fragmentation of the psyche. This fragmentation
of the subject is compounded as the child passes through Oedipal stages, culmi-
nating in being denied access to the mother. Desire for the mother is forced to
shift to desire for an ‘Other’, signifying an unattainable locus of desire in the
subject’s subconscious. In Lacan, therefore, desire for the Other serves as a moti-
vating force but also as a source of frustration, unfulfilment and fragmentation.
As Kleeman points out in Chapter 14 in this volume, Lacan’s vision of the Other
encompasses everything that the Self is not. But there is always a relationship
between the two. While Lacan bases his theory on difference between Self and
Other, it is desire for the Other that brings the ego into being – the desire for
the Other thus shapes the Self.
In Foucault’s work, on the other hand, the relationship between Self and
Other is expressed in terms of power. Investigating social structures such as
clinics and prisons, it was clear to Foucault that knowledge was equivalent to
power: the act of knowing enables one to name, define, categorise and order
objects (whether they be patients, prisoners, children or citizens of the state),
thereby gaining power over them. The representation of the Other in words thus
becomes an act of power. This relationship between language, knowledge and
power is very strong in Foucault’s thinking, and is often referred to in terms of
‘discourse’, where a ‘discursive act’ refers to the use of words – whether speech,
literature, recorded observations or any other media – whereby the speaking
subject wields power over the recorded or represented object. The Self thus
constructs the Other by way of a particular image of that Other, in the act of
representation. But Foucault asks the crucial questions: who decides who is
Other? Who writes and represents that Other, in what ways? What is the effect of
such representational discourse? These fundamental questions on discursive
practice – the actions of power inherent in the act of writing – necessarily
underlie our project. Foucault’s concentration on power in society is structured in
terms of centre and margins – not in a monolithic static system, but in a
constantly challenged and reconfigured one, contested by individuals trying
either to hang on to power or to wrest it away from the centre. The possibilities
Introduction 7
of counter-discourse from Foucault’s margins have inspired the best of postcolo-
nial thought: Spivak (1987), Said (1978) and Bhabha (1994) have taken Foucault’s
work to its limits in applications to the dynamics of power in literary representation.
Lacan and Foucault thus have two very different approaches, but in both, it is
the relationship between the Self and the Other that is ultimately more impor-
tant than the constructs themselves. In Lacan, it is desire and yearning that fills
the space between. In Foucault, the exercise of discursive power fills the space.
These two very different thinkers are also complementary, and will help us talk
about the constructs in the Japanese writers’ work without succumbing to binary
essentialisation ourselves. Throughout this volume, the contributors constantly
return to this relationship that fills the gap between Self and Other. The Self
engages with the Other through feeling – whether desire, fear, yearning or preju-
dice – and also through the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the speaking voice or
other bodily contact. These feelings, bodily contacts and modes of representation
fill the perceived gap between Self and Other, connecting them in a relationship
that cannot be severed. Rather than speaking in terms of a binary system of two
opposed singular entities, therefore, we must speak in terms of negotiation,
blurred and shifting boundaries, and conclude that it is in the process of contact,
observation and representation that identity is defined. It is for this reason that
we have entitled this book Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature, rather
than Others in Modern Japanese Literature, because it is in the process of representa-
tion that the relationship between Self and Other is most visible.
The question to be asked, then, is how did representing the Other lead
Japanese authors to new definitions of what it meant for them to be ‘Japanese’?
What problems, questions, crises of identity did these authors experience in
recognising their own relationship with the Other? This book tries to apprehend
the critical moment where Self engages with Other and expresses the effects of
that engagement in writing. The moment of recognition that occurs in the space
of the representational process is often uncomfortable, but always crucial. In the
recent trend towards analysing memory and the signification of plural narrative
histories, the same moment of recognition is central. To redress the elision of
history – whether in the colonial encounter or closer to home – it is necessary to
recognise one’s own role in contributing to that history. To catch the Japanese
writers in their moments of recognition is to be privy to a private negotiation of
identity as well as the responsibility that a chosen identity entails.
This ‘critical moment’ points us towards our subtitle, ‘a critical approach’ to
modern Japanese literature. All the contributors have focused closely on the crit-
ical thinking of the authors they study, exploring the conceptual orders that each
author built to comprehend the world in terms of Self and Other. The acts of
construction, interrogation, subversion and inversion uncovered in their works
show the highly developed critical sense these authors trained on the modern
world. Moreover, the ‘critical approach’ indicates our desire to turn the critical
eye on ourselves as scholars, acknowledging the choices we have made in the uses
of Western and Japanese theory as well as in the works we study and the transla-
tions we use as evidence. By taking Foucault and Lacan as the underpinning
theorists for this book, we acknowledge that the structures of power and repre-
sentation found in these thinkers profoundly influenced the ‘trinity’ of
postcolonial studies – Said, Spivak and Bhabha – who in turn have influenced
different branches of cultural theory as the field continues to specialise. Western
theory is clearly not homogeneous, and our aim is not to simplify or make mono-
lithic a ‘set’ of cultural theory. Individual chapters incorporate a variety of
different approaches to research and inquiry into issues of identity and represen-
tation in the text, including postcolonial studies, gender studies and
psychoanalytic theory. While some chapters here are more profoundly influenced
by Lacanian psychology, or Foucauldian structures of power, or Said’s vision of
Orientalism, the basic concept underlying the book is a willingness to explore the
constructions of Self and Other visible in modern Japanese literature. It is our
hope that this common ground between contributors, as well as the commitment
to specific case studies and contextualisation, will make the book more readable
and useful for readers daunted by the vast array of theorists in cultural studies.
Similarly, the use of Japanese theorists is by no means homogeneous. While
there are few contributors here who have not been influenced by Karatani Kōjin’s
thinking on the ‘origins’ of Japanese literature, Kleeman directly addresses the
ideas of Komori Yōichi on colonialism and introduces us to the important
concepts of what Komori calls ‘colonial regard’ and ‘colonial disregard’.
Pinnington deconstructs the Japanese academic reception of Edward Said’s
Orientalism, indicative of the strong trend in Japan, as elsewhere, to take a cue
from France in discussing the colonial relationship. It is true that the reference to
Western theory far outweighs the reference to Japanese theory in this book. One
reason is that Japanese theorists have often followed Lacan and Foucault in
discussing ideas of Self and Other. It seems reasonable therefore to go to the
source in formulating our own models of interpretation. A future research
project may do well to investigate how Lacan and Foucault have been interpreted
and applied by Japanese thinkers, and to build on the essays here in showing how
Self and Other have been analysed in Japanese literary theory. Another reason
for the theory imbalance is that many Japanese thinkers who have written copi-
ously on the ideas of Self and Other have done so in essentialist terms,
contributing to Nihonjinron theory. A more systematic engagement with Nihonjinron
is indeed necessary, in order to deconstruct its unbalanced view of the world and
explore how it arose and its influence on academia. We hope that the present
volume will provide an opening for this kind of engagement in the future.
Overview of the book

The book is divided into three parts indicating what kind of ‘Other’ the writer is
engaging with: Others outside Japan; Others inside Japan; and the complicated
Other of the liminal colonial and postcolonial world. These divisions are some-
what arbitrary, but they also point to the way our perspective on the Other is
formed: is the Other close to me, far away from me, or part of me? While we
have chosen to include particular works depending on the type of Other that is
Introduction 9
represented, the works themselves are not ‘representative’: not everyone who
wrote on America wrote like Nagai Kafū¯ , not every woman who wrote on the
war wrote like Uno Chiyo, and not every visitor to the Asian colonies wrote in
the same way as Satō Haruo. All works analysed constitute specific instances of
an encounter with the imagined Other and the construction of that Other in
literature. While the politics of knowledge and representation are inescapable in
the research process, we have included a mixture of those authors famous in the
West (Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Ōe Kenzaburō) with authors whose
names are not so well known (Kajii Motojirō, Yi Yang-Ji, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro) in
order to show the wide spectrum of writers engaged in the critical apprehension
of the Other. Where contributors have felt it necessary, works have been
re-translated from the original Japanese language, in attempt to show the orig-
inal from another perspective than that provided in translations already
available.5 Elsewhere, works have been chosen that have not yet been translated
into English, to redress the balance of the translated canon.6 In terms of the
language of the original texts, while the liminal sites of Japan’s colonies would
undoubtedly provide many examples of representing the Other from both the
colonising and colonised points of view, we have had to limit the current enquiry
to those works written in the Japanese language.7 However, the works examined
were written in the Japanese language by a variety of people who would define
themselves variously as ‘mainstream Japanese’, Okinawan, Korean-Japanese,
repatriated Japanese, or some other perceived minority identity. What these
authors have in common, whether ‘mainstream’ or ‘minority’ Japanese, is that
they have all problematised the idea of what it is that makes someone ‘Japanese’.8
Taken together, we have a collection of moments of engagement that show the
crucial questions of identity asked by Japanese writers through the twentieth
century.
Part I External Others

Part I focuses on Japan’s perspective looking at ‘Others’ outside Japan, exploring
visions of what constitutes ‘non-Japan’ or the non-‘Nihonjin’. While Japan’s
perspective on the external Other could also include such issues as the function
of the ‘West’ in Meiji literature through the medium of translation, or the repre-
sentation of European foreigners in Tokyo, the chapters here focus on the
Japanese writer abroad, experiencing the Other through physical relocation and
the shock of cultural difference. Although all the writers discussed in this section
are coincidentally male, not all writers who travelled abroad were male. The
point is significant, because the male discourse on the feminised ‘Other’ has been
seen as the norm. The idea of a gendered Orientalism has so infused studies on
representation of the Other that it is difficult to present work on a political or
racialised Other without being asked to place the discussion in gendered terms.
Although the dichotomy of the male subject Self writing the powerless (subal-
tern) and therefore feminised Other is a discourse with considerable weight, we
reject this approach on the grounds that it replicates gender imbalances that
should be uncovered through genealogy, not perpetuated through generalisa-
tions. In this book we have a number of authors, most of whom happen to be
male, some female, but all of whom take on the subject stance when representing
their chosen Other.9 The normalisation of the feminised Other may come, not
only from the fact that most writers who travelled were men, but also from the
definition of the Lacanian Other, which, as we have seen, implies desire. Many
critics writing about the Other in cultural terms also speak in terms of desire.10
While desire is one factor in the relationship between Self and Other, however, it
is not the whole story. As Rachael Hutchinson argues in Chapter 3, Meiji litera-
ture often deals with the Other in mediated, analytical constructions, often highly
critical of the relationship between Japan and the Other in question. Not all
Meiji literature can be categorised in terms of yearning for the Other, dominated
by the desire and triangular mediation of ‘gap theory’. In Hutchinson’s reading
of Nagai Kaf ū ’s Amerika monogatari (Tales of America, 1908 [2000]) we see a
writer wrestling with the concept of Other, pondering the dichotomies of Europe
and America, white and black, female and male, as well as East and West. In Kafū¯ ’s
work there appears not one homogeneous ‘West’, nor one simple binary
construction of ‘Japan and the West’, but a multiform, many-layered constella-
tion of dichotomies which raise many questions for the critical observer.
One of the most interesting and problematic questions to come out of post-
colonial theorising on Japan is that of where Japan fits with regard to
Orientalism. Writers such as Nagai Kaf ū and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō were certainly
influenced by their reading of Pierre Loti, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and
other French and British writers whom Said would doubtless define as Orientalists.11
In Chapter 4, Adrian Pinnington addresses this discourse on Japan’s relationship
with Orientalism through Tanizaki’s portrayal of China, emphasising the
complicated nature of the relationship between Japan and its perceived ‘Orient’.
Pinnington clearly deconstructs the academic debate on Tanizaki’s Orientalism,
and in so doing, achieves a new reading of Tanizaki’s construction of race,
gender and the nation. Stephen Dodd’s Chapter 5 on Kajii Motojirō similarly
extends the recent discourse on modernity and the subject in twentieth-century
Japanese literature by focusing on Kajii’s negotiation of selfhood in the rapidly
changing world of Tokyo in the 1920s.12 A foregrounded cityscape and a vast
array of material goods point to Kajii’s physical engagement with consumerist
Tokyo, assailed by bright lights and harsh sounds as he seeks relief from mental
anguish. As in many other Modernist works, mental anguish is related to physical
illness, and in examining Kajii’s tuberculosis in relation to his literature, Dodd
hits upon the importance of the bodily, physical subject in the Self of modern
Japanese literature. A similar barrage of light and sound attacks Yokomitsu
Riichi’s hero in Shanghai, a city which revolves on the axes of trade and posses-
sion: of land, bodies, and money. In Chapter 6, Douglas Slaymaker analyses
Yokomitsu’s construction of the Other in Shanghai and Paris by way of his
equally representational Othering of woman, arguing against the simple
gendered binary in a complex layering of Otherness with the question of
national identity at its root.
Introduction 11
Reading these four essays together, one is struck by the impact of movement
on the writer’s body, as the fluidity of travel produces the encounter with the
Other, accompanied by a fluidity of consciousness. As the writer’s consciousness
expands to include a feeling of possession over the represented object, the
emphasis is on the writer’s subjectivity and how the boundary delineating the Self
may be expanded or contracted for different purposes. The writers here transcend
the boundaries of ‘Japan’ to question the meaning of national identity. Such a
shifting of boundaries may be seen as a defining characteristic of the modern.
We see in the works analysed here a fin de siècle search for meaning, a dissolving
world, as well as a fear of, or uncertainty towards, change. There is also an
increasing focus on the writing process, as the narrative and writerly process takes
centre stage. In this reflexivity, noted particularly in the writing of Nagai Kafū¯
and Kajii Motojirō, we have a doubling of the critical sense, so it is not just what
one writes, but how one writes the Other, that becomes important.
Part II Internal Others

As seen above, the history of modern Japan, involving empire, colonialism,
immigration, war and repatriation at once creates an idea of ‘Japan’ as one
homogeneous national unit subject to periodic expansion and contraction, and
also as a multi-ethnic community of people contained within the constantly
changing national borders (Lie 2001). This section deals with the issue of centre
and peripheries within Japan itself, exploring such questions as how the centre
looks out at the peripheries and margins of its own society, as well as how the so-
called peripheries look ‘in’ towards the centre. The very idea of a ‘central’
Japanese state, or the construction of ‘typical’ Japanese society, provides the
fundamental question – who is it that defines the position of centre and
periphery? Who decides which people belong in which category, and is this cate-
gorisation open to change? Part I of this volume does not include the perspective
of how Western and Asian Others look at Japan, but Part II does address the
question of how those constructed as Others inside Japan look at the ‘Japan’ that
marginalises them.13 The crucial difference is that the ‘Others’ appearing in this
section are also nominally ‘Japanese’, which raises many interesting questions
about the definition of both ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’. People whose identities are often
constructed in terms of being Other to some Japanese ‘norm’ are the burakumin,
those of ambivalent sexualities, those left behind by the ‘economic miracle’, the
deracinated postwar population, Korean-Japanese (or zainichi-Kankokujin) writers,
and women writers. The lines of difference thus arrange themselves along the
axes of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. Some of the questions raised
in this section lead to yet more questions about liminality and the paradoxes
involved in defining a ‘Self ’ against an ‘Other’. In exploring issues of being
‘Japanese’ in a liminal ground, we not only seek to explore the concrete experi-
ence of Japanese writers who occupy this liminal space, but also to challenge and
investigate issues of closure inherent in any division constructed in discourses
(and discursive acts) of binary opposition.
The first two chapters here explore the representation of the burakumin, or
former ‘outcasts’ of the Tokugawa social system, in terms of their Otherness to
modern Japanese society. In Chapter 7, Mark Morris addresses the issue of
‘passing’ in Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1906 [1974])
in terms of identity politics. Passing – assuming an altered identity of ‘other’ to a
self which is dominated and othered by the dominant mainstream – is examined
not only in terms of ethnicity, but also of gender. The politics surrounding the
publication, republication, consecration and rewriting of the work are also shown
to reflect contemporary social issues concerning the treatment and representa-
tion of burakumin alterity. In Chapter 8, James Raeside explores the burakumin
identity from another angle, in Noma Hiroshi’s massive work Seinen no wa (Circle
of Youth, 1946–70). Raeside examines the interpersonal relationships in Noma’s
fiction in terms of Hegelian dualistic structures. Individual identity is seen to be
stronger than assigned labels, as the characters, burakumin or otherwise, are
revealed to have many varied motives – often more concerned with family
vendettas than wider social issues, although the force of political protest is far
stronger in Circle of Youth than in The Broken Commandment.
Moving away from ethnicity to gender alterity, Rebecca Copeland’s Chapter 9
examines Uno Chiyo in the context of issues which faced women writing on the
war, whether travelling to the front in Asia or remaining at home. How did the
woman writer develop strategies that allowed her to exercise creative power at a
time when masculine strength was valorised and the paternal power of the
nation foregrounded? Uno Chiyo’s independence and creativity shine through
once again in this study, which highlights Chiyo’s critique and her subversion of
what constitutes a woman’s ‘acceptable’ behaviour. In Chapter 10, Ann Sherif
looks at gender politics in a different light, examining the reaction of Japanese
intellectuals to the trials surrounding the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady
Chatterley’s Lover in Japan. Arguing that much of the objection to Lawrence’s novel
was based on a differentiation between ‘native sex’ and ‘foreign sex’, Sherif at
once recognises the inherent allure of the Other in the medium of translated
literature, and highlights the complexity of translation in how it challenges our
understanding of what constitutes ‘native literature’ or ‘foreign literature’ at any
particular moment.
David Stahl and Mark Williams show two sides of the aftermath of war in
their respective chapters (Chapters 11 and 12), dealing with the hibakusha (atomic
bomb survivors), and the writers who suffered for ideology in the tenkō (conver-
sion) literature of postwar Japan. Stahl analyses Ōe Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima nōto
(Hiroshima Notes, 1965 [1995]) to show the ‘othering’ processes that operate on
the disfigured, as well as the subjectivity available for the ‘othered’ through the
inversion of the status quo. The emphasis on the word ‘survivor’ as opposed to
‘victim’ reminds us of the power and agency inherent in our choice of words,
whether in Ōe’s representation or in our English translation of hibakusha. Stahl
takes the act of hearing a narrative as a bodily experience, suggesting that the
boundary between Self and Other is not only blurred but permeable. In the
context of the rebuilding nation, Williams reads Japan as a colonised space
Introduction 13
during the Occupation years, using Said’s model of colonialism to reconfigure
tenkō literature as a site of counter-discourse. Shiina Rinzō’s Utsukushii onna
(The Beautiful Woman, 1955) is analysed in terms of the freedom of human
beings to write their own past, foregrounding agency as the foundation for
writing the Self.
One central concept that emerges from these essays is the importance of the
body in wartime and postwar literature. We have the absent body of the soldier-
husband at the Front, the focus on body and sex in the 1950s trials and nikutai
bungaku (carnal literature), and in the case of the burakumin, the question of the
invisible trace of the Other within – ‘identity’ carried in the blood. As in Part I,
the act of seeing in this section is significant. Not only is there an unwillingness
on the part of society to see the hibakusha, but also the unwillingness of the
hibakusha to have other people see their bodies. Nobody can see the soldier who is
absent even though his absence engenders a great desire to see. When we are
talking in terms of the centre and periphery, and the people who live on the
margins of the main society, the issue of seeing and non-seeing becomes very
important. But, just as the expansion of the Self overcomes the seemingly solid
boundaries of the physical world in Part I, the same volition resurfaces in the act
of showing oneself to others (and one can show oneself through the writing act).
By choosing when to show, and to whom, the marginal can become subject, not
just object to the Other’s gaze. The act of showing, as well as the act of seeing,
constitutes a moment when the boundary between Self and Other is blurred.
The effect that a visual image has on us is very strong precisely because it consti-
tutes such a close and visceral engagement with the Other, coming into us
through our eyes. Similarly, the hearing of another’s tale, especially if we don’t
want to hear it, is a very direct engagement as the sounds come into us through
our ears. This seeing and showing of the body within Japan seem to be another
site of engagement like the permeable, flexible boundaries we saw in Part I.
However, the most obvious site of engagement between Self and Other is the
boundary itself. A boundary naturally implies duality, a place dividing one thing
from another. At the workshop on Self and Other that formed the basis of this
volume, James Raeside and Faye Kleeman pointed out that human beings dislike
duality and the identity crisis it engenders, leading us to search for a point of
resolution by facing our identity in a critical way. The most obvious place where
boundaries become an issue for human identity is the colonial liminal site,
bringing us to the final part of the volume.
Part III Liminal Sites

The two main questions that form the basis of our inquiry in Part III are: ‘What
is it that brings the centre and peripheries together?’ and ‘Is there a middle or
liminal ground?’ What becomes clear in this section is that the three parts of Self,
Other, and any liminal ground are not fixed: ‘Japan’ is not a closed structure (as
Nihonjinron theorists would have us believe) but malleable and open to reconstruc-
tion. This section explores what it means to define ‘Japan’ through an examination
of those peoples who are not ethnically Japanese but who have at some time
assumed or been forced to assume a Japanese identity due to historical circum-
stance. The most obvious example is that of coloniality through the Japanese
occupation of Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, Manchukuo, and the Micronesian
islands. The colonial Other represents the locus of the interface between Japan
and the Other, as the site where the Other is forced into becoming the ‘Self ’.
The question is, can the Other ever become the Self ? The chapters in this part
examine the theoretical question of empire and the loss of empire, bound up in
identity formation: what was the ‘Japaneseness’ that these people were forced to
assume? Examining the process of Japanising the Asian Other will tell us much
about the definition of Japanese identity. The Japanised Other will be analysed
through writings of people who have undergone this process themselves and
whose literature can be read as both construction and reflection of the ‘semi-
colonised self ’. Perhaps the most interesting case of the ‘semi-colonised’ writer
comes in the case of Okinawan literature, which has experienced the double
coloniality of both Japan and the United States. Invaded by the Satsuma domain
in 1609, the kingdom of the Ryukyu Islands was annexed by the Meiji govern-
ment and made a prefecture of Japan in 1879. Established as one of the main
centres of the US Occupation after 1945, Okinawa remained under occupation
until 1972, when it was supposedly handed back to the mainland. The fact
that much of Okinawan territory remains under American occupation today
forms the context of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, which
explores the modern sense of identity through the figure of the female shaman,
or yuta. In Chapter 13, Leith Morton’s analysis of Ōshiro’s texts challenges the
classification of Okinawan literature as ‘peripheral’, and warns against
reading the yuta as a ‘gendered Other’. The agency of the yuta in the face of
bureaucratic and military obstacles is analysed with a reminder that the beauty
and humour of Ōshiro’s fiction are as much a part of the literature as any
dynamics of power.
Faye Kleeman’s Chapter 14 situates the colonial context of Taiwan within a
broader enquiry about the Othering process: is an Other that arose through the
mediation of geopolitics, especially colonialism, different from an internal Other like
Japan’s zainichi - Kankokujin (Korean–Japanese), burakumin, hibakusha, or Ainu? One
distinguishing feature of the external Other as colonial or imperial subject is the
necessity of incorporating him/her into the empire. Kleeman challenges Komori
Yōichi’s argument on colonial liminality in terms of agency, and uses the writing of
Satō Haruo to examine the epistemological gap inherent in colonial encounters
within the specific context of the emergence of the modern subject. As a manifes-
tation of the boundary or contact zone, the colonial Other could be the very site
which best allows us to overcome the binary construct. In Chapter 15, Atsuko
Sakaki examines the thoretical model, put forward by the writer Gotō Meisei, that
urges us to revise the way we understand the cultural identity of Japan. Gotō was a
returnee from the former colony of Japan, present-day North Korea. Being
forced to ‘return’ to Kyushu, which didn’t feel like ‘home’, Gotō recognised that
there is indeed no centre in Japanese culture or in the mind of the Japanese, as
Introduction 15
Japan is hybrid and torn from within. He proposed the model of an oval (as
opposed to a circle) which has two centres (as opposed to one) as a metaphor for
Japan. Overall, his case constitutes a valid antithesis to the theory of Nihon e no kaiki.
As noted above, because the colonial moment is so important in this study, it is
tempting to examine it ‘from the other side’, including writings from the
colonised spaces written in languages other than Japanese. However, such a project
is far beyond the scope of this study, so we must hope that others will continue to
explore the question of how Self and Other have been represented in the former
colonies of Japan, whether in Taiwan, Korea, Okinawa or elsewhere, and in the
various languages of those countries. What is possible, and critically illuminating,
is to examine ‘semi-colonised’ literature written in Japanese by a so-called ‘non-
native speaker’. Catherine Ryu’s Chapter 16 on Yi Yang-ji takes a novel by a
Korean-Japanese writer as a case study to examine the possibilities and significa-
tions of language – issues which also form the basis of the novel under
examination. Yuhi (Yuhi, 1988) is a novel about writing and signification, where
both the novel itself, as well as the writing examined within it, are penned in
Japanese by ‘non-native’ speakers. The counterpoint between the identities of
author and narrator is analysed in terms of Lacanian language and symbol,
reaching through the text to find that, in the space beyond language, the distance
between Self and Other collapses completely. Ryu’s essay may be read as a
pointer towards a loophole in Lacan’s work on the Self which heralds the possi-
bilities of relation rather than distinction. Like the possibilities found on
Foucault’s margins, the ‘Lacanian twist’ highlights the idea that the relationship
between Self and Other, most clear in this section analysing liminal colonial sites,
really is more important than the Self or Other in isolation. Ryu’s essay serves as
a fitting conclusion to the volume, positing a theoretical model which emphasises
the relationship inherent in the process of representing the Other, rather than the
image that results from that representation.
Note on the text

The system of referencing we have used shows the original date of publication
first and then the date of the English edition is given in square brackets after-
wards.
Notes
1 The inadequacy of this translation, stemming from the fundamental inequivalence of
the words ‘shōsetsu’ and ‘novel’, is widely recognised. For an interesting discussion of
the problem see Miyoshi (1991: 9–36). While ‘I-novel’ is undoubtedly an unsatisfac-
tory translation, we use it here to point to the indigenous Japanese art form that
centres on the inner workings of the individual’s mind.
2 See ‘Discourse on Fiction of the Self ’, in Kobayashi (1995), especially pp. 69–70.
3 Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War yielded Taiwan as a colony from 1895, while
victory over Russia added southern Sakhalin and the southern Manchurian territory
in 1905. Korea was made a protectorate in 1905 and was formally colonised in 1910.
Islands in Micronesia (called Nan’yō in Japanese) were occupied from 1914–44.
While Myers and Peattie (1984) define the Japanese empire in such terms as to cate-
gorise the territory gained in China, South-East Asia and the South Pacific from
1931–45 as an ‘informal’ empire, Beasley argues that we should widen the definition
of Japanese imperialism to take these territories into account (1987).
4 On binary opposition, and its particular applicability to analysing literature of the
Meiji period, see Hutchinson (2000: 1–2).
5 It may be interesting for readers to compare Stahl’s translation with that of Swain
and Yonezawa, Hutchinson’s with Iriye’s, and Morris’ with Strong’s, for example.
6 On the politics of translation, see Fowler (1992).
7 This criterion is not as simple as it sounds: as Maher points out, what we call ‘the
Japanese language’ is in fact a pluralistic mixture of dialects and modes of expression
(1995). On writing from Taiwan and the colonial south by Japanese, expatriate and
Taiwanese writers, see Kleeman (2003). An interesting case study may also be found
in Ching (2001), Chapter 5. On Korean-language writing on the colonial experience,
see Kyeong-Hee Choi and Michael Shin, both in Shin and Robinson (1999). Choi
(2001) and Swaner (1997) also provide excellent readings of colonial Korean literature
in terms of writing and the body.
8 John Lie suggests the terms ‘Japanese Japanese’ and ‘Yamato people’ as alternatives to
‘mainstream Japanese’ (2001: 3).
9 It is interesting to note here that Meiji and Taishō period female authors writing on
the Western Other mostly used it as a contrast by which to criticise Japanese gender
dynamics. Most of these works were written by women who had travelled abroad (just
as the male writers on the Western Other tend to be those who had travelled to
Europe and America). Karen Kelsky argues that women’s writing on the Other came
to a head in the Occupation when the racial Other was suddenly present and visible
in Japan, resulting in a portrayal of the Western Other in a sexualised and fetishistic
representation of the white male soldier (Kelsky 2001: 120–1).
10 The most famous example being René Girard’s model of triangular desire, employed
by Ken Ito (1991). See also Stephen Snyder (2000).
11 Certainly, the question plaguing Nagai Kafū in the closing years of Meiji was exactly
how to position Japan vis-à-vis the ‘Orient’ of mainland Asia, and whether Japan was
part of, or separate from it (Hutchinson 2001).
12 An excellent example of this discourse is Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese
Modernism (2002).
13 The question of how Japan has been represented by others has been examined at
length – some interesting examples for further reading are Miyoshi (1979, 1991),
Clammer (2001), Wilkinson (1991) and Iriye (1975).
References
Beasley, W.G. (1987) Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Burke, Kenneth (1969) A Grammar of Motives, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Carrier, James G. (ed.) (1995) Occidentalism: Images of the West, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ching, Leo T.S. (2001) Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Choi, Kyeong-Hee (2001) ‘Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyong’ae’s “Under-
gound Village”’, Public Culture 13(3): 431–58.
Fowler, Edward (1988) The Rhetoric of Con fessi on : Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century
Japanese Fiction, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Introduction 17
——(1992) ‘Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Trans-
lating Modern Japanese Fiction’, Journal of Japanese Studies 18(1): 1–44.
Fujii, James (1993) Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative,
Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela (1996) Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and
Socio-Cultural Phenomenon, Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.
Hutchinson, Rachael (2000) ‘Occidentalism in Nagai Kaf ū: Constructing a Critique of Meiji,
1903–1912’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Oxford University.
——(2001) ‘Occidentalism and Critique of Meiji: The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai
Kafū ’, Japan Forum 13(2): 195–213.
Ito, Ken (1991) Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Kelsky, Karen (2001) Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Kleeman, Faye Yuan (2003) Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and
the South, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Kobayashi Hideo (1995) Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo – Literary Criticism 1924–
1939, trans. Paul Anderer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lie, John (2001) Multiethnic Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lippit, Seiji (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Maher, John C. (1995) ‘The Right Stuff: Towards an Environmental Linguistics’, in John
C. Maher and Gaynor Macdonald (eds) Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language,
London: Kegan Paul International.
Miyoshi, Masao (1991) Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United
States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Myers, Ramon H. and Peattie, Mark R. (eds) (1984) The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–
1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, New York: Pantheon.
Shin, Gi-wook and Robinson, Michael (eds) (1999) Colonial Modernity in Korea, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Snyder, Stephen (2000) Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kaf ū, Honolulu,
HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York:
Methuen.
Suzuki, Tomi (1996) Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Swaner, Scott (1997) ‘Frustrating Colonial Narratives: Writing and the Body in Dictée’,
Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 3(2): 130–52.
Weiner, Michael (1997) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, New York: Routledge.
Further reading
Clammer, John (2001) Japan and its Others, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1996) The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans.
Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, New
York: Pantheon.
Iriye, Akira (ed.) (1975) Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Lacan, Jacques (2004) Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton.
Miyoshi, Masao (1979) As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States,
Wilkinson, Endymion (1991) Japan Versus the West: Image and Reality, London: Penguin.
1 Hermes and Hermès
Othernesses in modern Japanese
literature
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit
The promise of our topic is this: that in discussing the manifold dimensions of
the Other as it is represented in modern Japanese literature we will gain an
insight into the ways the ‘world’ of ‘Japanese’ literature is categorized and
structured. I prefer to approach it in the form of four concentric circles. As an
introduction, let me first of all give a rough historical sketch of ‘Japan and its
(exterior) Others’, or at least of some remarkable aspects which may be of
relevance for us here. Next, I will briefly discuss the notion of the Other.
Then, I intend to take a somewhat closer look at our intellectual agenda, and,
finally, I want to present the case of Mishima Yukio and his references to the
West and to European literature as an example of a re-invention of ‘modern’
Japanese literature. But let us proceed by highlighting some historical aspects
first.
Circle 1: Othernesses formed and formulated

In our quest for ‘Japan and its Others’, it seems appropriate first of all to scruti-
nize, albeit in a necessarily superficial manner, Japan’s relationship to the world.
Let us take a look at that topos which has determined Japan’s image through the
centuries more than anything else. At the same time, we also witness Japan’s early
encounter with a foreign culture, which had a fundamental influence on her self-
image. We are talking here of the influence of continental culture, above all of
China, which served as a point of comparison for the earliest European travelers
to the East, who used to describe Japan as being the cultural junior, the younger
brother, the emulator and imitator.
From a Japanese perspective, her geographical distance from the continent, on
the fringe of the Chinese cultural community, was ideal and resulted in what can
be called, after David Pollack (1986), a dialectical relationship in contrast to
subjugation or subordination. Japan profited from the achievements of the domi-
nant culture, but her distance made possible ample control over what to accept at
what time and to what extent. In this process, China always functioned as a
parameter of otherness. By taking in foreign elements, the Other was selectively
internalized, so to speak, but at the same time, the very essence of the Self was
articulated (Jackson 1990: 256).
20 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit
For many centuries, down to the so-called ‘opening of the country’ and its
orientation towards the West in the nineteenth century, what was Japanese could
only be perceived in relation to what was Chinese as the example of otherness. It
goes without saying that we are not dealing here with a geographical entity or
‘objective’ cultural facts. ‘Japan’ in this sense is a construct, just as ‘China’ is, and
of course, this applies as well to the other entities which come into play, be they
called ‘Asia’, ‘Europe’, the ‘Occident’ or the ‘West’. Donald Keene (1973) even
goes so far as to see in the relationship of attraction and rejection, in the ‘love–
hate’ attitude towards China, a central aspect, not only of literature, but of the
whole traditional culture of Japan. As a matter of fact, we could study in litera-
ture this process of national, cultural, and aesthetic self-definition vis-à-vis China,
a process to which the question of so-called ‘influence’ is less appropriate but
which could more adequately be studied as a ‘constructive dialectic’ in the form
of a Japanese monologue with herself about China.
Before 1868, Chinese was, with but a few exceptions, the only foreign
language read in Japan. On the other hand, written Chinese had a very hybrid
status because of the Japanese ‘invention’ of kanbun, which permitted a Japanese
author to write a text in Chinese without being able to speak a word of the
language. By this procedure of reading or articulating the written text as
Japanese, not only was the otherness of the Chinese text suspended, but also the
polarity of symbol and meaning was neutralized. It was only the encounter with
the West which forced upon the Japanese a new understanding of ‘translation’, for
they were now for the first time confronted with the fact that symbol and meaning
do not coincide, that the connection between the written characters and what
they denote is arbitrary and that therefore the meaning of a text in a foreign
language can only be disclosed by a ‘real’ translation (Jackson 1990: 259).
On the other hand, however, for the first time in several centuries there was a
chance to meet foreigners in Japan,1 or, as a member of a delegation, abroad.
How these Japanese travelers to the West on an official mission, beginning with
the January 1862 mission, explored foreignness in very concrete terms is as fasci-
nating a chapter in history as is the experience of Western diplomats and of the
Western consultants called into the country by the government in Tokyo.
Fortunately, both these explorations are well documented in Japanese as well as
in Western languages.2
No less engrossing are the experiences of Japanese writers since the late nine-
teenth century in America and Europe which, in literary form, highlight the
cultural shock and the different phases of self-exploration abroad and after
returning home. But for the great majority of Japanese writers and intellectuals,
their encounter with the West took place in their own country, although their
spiritual and mental commitment was no less intense, with Christianity and
Marxism being two focal points of their involvement.
For the young elite of early modern Japan, Christianity as a ‘window to the
West’ held a great attraction, embodying in their eyes a value system which
seemed suited to help shatter traditional feudalism. Christianity undoubtedly
served as a spiritual catalyst for the Japanese search for identity, which frequently
Hermes and Hermès 21
followed the characteristic pattern of a ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki): this
pattern consists of a phase of enthusiastic adoption of Western culture and civi-
lization and of Christianity, followed by rejection and a turning to whatever was
considered to be traditional Japanese spirit and values. Nevertheless, the whole
body of modern literature is interspersed to an astonishing extent with Christian
motifs and biblical references, and these aspects exist independently of how
intensively and how long the author was personally involved with Christianity
(see Williams 1996: 156–74).
The encounter with Marxism is of no less importance to Japanese intellec-
tuals, although, like Protestantism in the late nineteenth century, it hardly
affected the bulk of the population. Its influence on the country’s elite, however,
was all the more intense. During the Taishō period (1912–26), Marxism widely
dominated intellectual life, as it offered a comprehensive model for interpreting
history as well as the present age. Marxism therefore held great fascination both
as a ‘science’ and as a revolutionary idea leading to concrete action, and continued
to exert its influence even in cases where scholars and writers had to recant
under political pressure (tenkō).
Japan’s colonial experience in the first half of the twentieth century, which
Komori Yōichi and others interpret as a form of compensation to divert herself
from external colonial pressures,3 represents another set of encounters with the
Other both within and beyond the boundaries of the Japanese islands. Here, the
experience becomes even more complex, as the colonial Other is superseded by a
second plane resulting from that conscious or unconscious act of self-assertion in
the face of internal colonization. Thus, Japan has been conducting a dialogue
with the Occident for more than a century, one that has, however, been largely
ignored by the West.
Circle 2: Dialectics of difference: methodological considerations on the

notion of the Other
A culture that discovers what is alien to itself simultaneously manifests what
is in itself.
(McGrane 1989: 1)
This statement by Bernard McGrane aptly summarizes our expectations for the
topic at hand. The alien, or the Other, as we here term it, is a relational notion.
It assumes a dialectical relationship between the Self and the Other. The Self
becomes aware of itself only through perceiving the Other, and cognizance of
the Other is possible only to the extent that the Self consciously objectivizes and
relativizes its own system of codes. As for possible definitions of the Other, we are
faced with a wide spectrum of differing notions: there is the normative versus the
cognitive Other, the intra- and the intercultural Other, ethnic Otherness, outsiders
and outcastes, the unknown as a source of fear and fascination, the exotic and
the intellectually attractive, the foreign and the non-member (non-belonging), the
temporally or spatially distant, the repressed, the enigmatic and the uncanny
or numinous (Wierlacher 1993: 39). All these concepts have been productive
in literature in Japan and other regions of the world for centuries, although
they have only rarely been studied in a systematic way. Modern disciplines
such as law, sociology, cultural anthropology, theology, philosophy, and mathe-
matical logic all define their own specific notions of Otherness depending on
their research objectives. But even disciplines such as ethnology have so far
refrained from attempting a precise definition of the notion. Xenology, or the
study of the Other, as an interdisciplinary and interculturally oriented field of
Cultural Studies, has, however, received a boost since the later 1980s due, inter
alia, to the political situation after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, an
accelerated globalization, the North–South conflict, and migration problems in
the wake of such events. What has been a constant concern in this context is the
question of how to thematize different cultures as systems of rules and
hypotheses without subjugating them or alienating them from themselves. The
question culminates in the observation that we will have to accept an
incommensurable rest of cultural Otherness, which should be not suppressed
but accepted within the framework of a critically informed hermeneutics (ibid.:
48–9).
The notion of Otherness, however, prefigures a certain understanding rooted
in the semantics of English. Research on the phenomenon in other languages
may produce other distinctions and problematics, depending on different
semantic fields in their respective notions. In English, foreigner and stranger desig-
nate non-membership of an ethno-political unit, or of one of its segments such
as local communities, social class etc. respectively, while alien refers to a natural
given otherness. The same tripartite structure holds for Italian with forestiero,
straniero, and alieno, while French covers the first two categories by étranger, whereas
the third category is represented by autre or d’autrui. Of particular relevance to
our topic are, of course, the respective Japanese terms, from the binary notions
of uchi versus soto (the ‘inner’ or ‘own’ versus ‘the outer’) or the distinction of ji
(self) versus ta (the other) to terms designating a person’s spatial, social, ethnic, or
cultural otherness such as yosomono, bugaisha, gaijin, gaikokujin, ijin, ketō, nanban, etc.
The rigidity or fluidity of these distinctions is also an aspect to be considered. In
England, in early modern aristocratic households we find lists of visitors, which
contain only two categories: ‘domestics’, i.e. those attached to the house by rela-
tionship or service, versus ‘others’. Or take the basic distinction of friend and foe
with the implication that in tribal societies there was no third status in between
tribal brother and enemy. The eminent importance of the status of guest in older
societies can be explained by the fact that it provided the only chance of a
temporary change from one to the other side of the binary distinction (Stagl
1997: 88). It goes without saying that all these distinctions on the level of
everyday speech are reflected in the respective scholarly discussions. Research in
German, for example, differentiates between the Strange (das Fremde) and the
Other (das Andere), the Strange being Otherness interpreted (as ‘Interpretament’)
(Wierlacher 1993: 62).4
Not just in modern writing but within the history of what has traditionally
been understood as Japanese literature in a wide sense, including genres such as
travelogues (kikōbun), literary diaries (nikki) as well as topographies such as the
Fudoki, essays (zuihitsu), anecdotal literature such as setsuwa and other forms, we
can study the whole cultural spectrum of possible Othernesses, from ethnic and
sociological to anthropological and existential, or from epistemological to polit-
ical aspects.
Let these very rough and cursory remarks suffice to demonstrate that our
concern lies right in the center of an increasingly dense network of studies dedi-
cated to aspects of the Other and fed by a wide range of disciplinary approaches
and methodological premises.
Circle 3: Japaneseness and liminalities: practical considerations

It may make sense to ponder a while about the implications and ramifications
of ‘Japan and its Others’, before we plunge into an ocean of case studies. Put
briefly, the focus of this volume is an examination of the ways in which
authors writing in Japanese have constructed divisions between center and
periphery/Self and Other in literary texts. This starting point – or should I
better say purpose – of our investigations is naturally based on a number of
premises, and it is these premises which deserve our attention, as they will
inevitably shape the results of our work. What is it, then, that we are looking for
as we investigate the Japanese Self as manifested in literary texts? Or, to put it more
radically: What do we talk about when we talk about Japan? And does it make
sense at all to look for a Japanese Self ? Do we want to learn something about
Japan or about literature? Let me first present a few general thoughts, using no
more than a general (scholarly) common sense, without any resort to ‘theory’,
although, as we all know, we can never really tell where our comprehension of
things is tinted by what the seventeenth-century German physicist–philosopher
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg described as processes of our intellectual diges-
tion.
As Hutchinson and Williams have reminded us in their Introduction to this
volume, Japan’s ‘Self ’ and ‘Others’ do not make up a fixed, polarized, binary
opposition, but are to be discussed as representations with a strong tendency to
turn into essentialized entities. So far, so good. It seems wise, therefore, to ques-
tion all those notions that we are dealing with, beginning with geographical,
racial or ethnic identity, as well as any other issue of closure constructed in
discourses. In our research design, we tacitly acknowledge the importance of
‘nation’ or ‘nationality’ as an essential unit of inquiry. This is perhaps one of the
core problems of our agenda, and it would be wise not to lose sight of it as we
plunge into concrete case studies. But where do we look for the Japanese Self
and its Others in written literary texts? On the level of content or narration, we
may first distinguish two broad categories of settings, namely, works set in Japan
and works set abroad, so-called kaigai shōsetsu, which, apart from Japan’s colonial
adventure and literature instrumental in this context, have been relatively rare
until fairly recently, probably reflecting the fact that most Japanese writers live in
Japan and that, except for a large Korean-Japanese community, there are very
few members of other ethnic groups writing in Japanese. These facts contrast
strongly with many other literatures, where a conspicuous number of works
regarded as representative texts are either written in diaspora by emigrant writers
or inside the country by immigrants expressing themselves in what is their second
or third language. Literary Japan has so far and in this respect been neither on
the ‘dispatching’ nor on the ‘receiving’ side. Japan’s writers have usually
preferred to find ways to adapt to the circumstances instead of leaving the
country.
On the level of content, we may next distinguish between different phenomena
of Otherness in a Japanese literary text. The Other may make its appearance in
the form of characters such as the Stolz family in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novel
Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters, 1943–48 [1956]), the American GI in Mishima
Yukio’s Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956 [1959]) or the black
deserter called ‘Spoon’ in Yamada Eimi’s Beddotaimu aizu (Bedtime Eyes, 1985
[1991]). We could further compartmentalize this category by determining the
degree of focus or centrality of the respective character, from marginal such as
the Westerners observed by the protagonist of Natsume Sōseki’s novel titled
Sanshirō (Sanshirō, 1908 [1977]) on his first trip from Kumamoto to Tokyo,
through those, important but not central to the plot such as the American mili-
tary personnel in a Hakone hotel where Namiko, the protagonist in Sono Ayako’s
story Enrai no kyakutachi (Guests from Afar, 1954), works as a temporary staff
member, to those examples where a foreigner is the protagonist of a whole work,
such as in Tanizaki’s Dokutan (The German Spy, 1915) or Endō Shūsaku’s
Obakasan (Wonderful Fool, 1959 [1974]).
It is not only characters, though, but also objects, concrete as well as abstract,
which may represent the Other in a literary text. Any object of material culture
imported from the ‘West’ can function as a condensed representation of the
Other, be it neon lights and a flush toilet in Tanizaki’s essay ‘In’ei raisan’ (In
Praise of Shadows, 1933–34 [1977]) or an imported gramophone in Ōba Minako’s
novel Mae mae katatsumuri (Dance, Snail, Dance, 1984). In Nosaka Akiyuki’s
novella Amerika hijiki (American hijiki, 1968 [1977]), the packages of chewing gum
dropped by American planes as basic food supply for the hungry population are
grotesque symbols of miscommunication. While those who dropped them regard
them as indispensable items for daily consumption and thus as blessings bestowed
upon a needy people, the starving recipients who are desperately chewing those
strange tasting sticks feel oddly betrayed, while the reader of this biting satire
registers the cultural incongruity as well as the symbolic potential of this essen-
tially American item.
Objects of otherness in a Japanese text may be cultural artifacts on a referen-
tial as well as on an interliterary level, pertaining to contacts between different
‘literatures’ or literary systems. Since early Meiji, these references to ‘things
Western’ are so abundant in so many works that their sheer frequency results in
assimilating and ‘naturalizing’ the foreign. We can, however, discern a number of
different functions these references may cover, from authorization, such as when
shizenshugi (naturalist) writers quote Zola or Rousseau to make their case, to
distancing, as when Akutagawa Ryūnosuke sketches a Japanese way of realistic
writing embodied by Shiga Naoya surpassing even masters such as Tolstoi.
Interliterary references may be explicit, or implicit as in the case of Ogawa Yōko’s
novel Kusuriyubi no hyōhon (Specimen of a Ring-finger, 1994), with its subtle
borrowings from Richard Harris’ Silence of the Lambs.
Foreign objects could also take the form of institutions. Think of such
quotidian assets as the café in Taishō days, regarded as a paradigmatic site of
the performance of so-called modern life. To what extent is this institution,
adapted as it is to local needs while still maintaining the exotic flavor of the
foreign to Japanese customers in the 1920s, a Japanese one? Obviously, this is a
territory of shifting boundaries, and the question of where to draw the line
clearly depends on the eye of the beholder and her purposes. In most cases, it
will be difficult if not impossible to make clear distinctions. In other words, we
are in constant danger of positing antagonisms and constructing othernesses for our own
analytical purposes. When, for example, Hayashi Fumiko in her Hōrōki (Diary of
a Vagabond, 1930 [1951]) incorporates a cultural artifact such as ‘Katyusha’s
Song’, ‘we can identify no purely Japanese or Western culture, nor is there a
clear distinction between traditional and modern’, as William Gardner (2003: 98)
aptly observes.
The volatility of boundaries between Self and Other in modern Japan is
perhaps most dramatically demonstrated in a case like the following, when, in a
1952 poem entitled ‘Cool’, Tanikawa Shuntarō portrays jazz trumpeter Miles
Davis in the following way:
You are a cool Negro, Miles.

You disgrace us with your pink blood.
You pat us softly with the fair inside of your hand.
I have Bach and Rembrandt, but
You were born out of Bongo’s womb,
Brought up at the blue creek’s bottom . . .
(Rabson 1989: 86)
It is not the strong racist undertones and the insulting nature of this negative
stereotyping that I intend to point out here – Steve Rabson, to whom I owe this
reference, has aptly done so already – but the fact that, in the confrontation with
the black American, the borders of the Japanese Self are boldly stretched to
include ‘Bach and Rembrandt’. It is amazing how these epitomes of European
high culture, which, in another context, may figure as ultimate examples of
Otherness, are claimed here to seal the cultural superiority of the Self. In passing,
we may note how bitter an irony lies in the fact that Japanese cultural superiority
is not secured by referring to indigenous artists.
This observation has perhaps sensitized us to the importance of considering
the historical moment in which a text was written and first read. Earlier studies
of the image of foreigners in modern Japanese literature were in broad agree-
ment that stereotyping in two extremes – ‘as objects either of unqualified
abhorrence or unequivocal admiration’ (Tsuruta 1989: 1) – had prevailed.
Historical developments are, however, undeniable, and some of the most outra-
geous racist myths and offensive stereotypings of foreigners may not work any
more today.5 Ted Goossen suspects that we also have to take into account the
‘distance’ of the foreign object.6 Were the black man – in this case the black
soldier in Ōe Kenzaburō’s story ‘Shiiku’ (Prize Stock, 1958 [1981]) – to be recast,
for example, as a member of a more ‘familiar’ minority – ‘a Korean, let’s say, or
a Chinese, or a member of the outcast buraku community, or even as a white –
the impression left would surely be far more distasteful’ (Goossen 1989: 144).
Whether and how this ‘distance’ in the case of African Americans might have
shrunk during the past few decades can be studied, to cite but one example, in
the works of Yamada Eimi which, I would maintain, still carry a subtext of racial
prejudice running counter to her more differentiated and distinctly positive
surface descriptions.
What should have become clear by now is the fact that we are less concerned
with a straightforward description of the image of foreigners or of foreign objects
in these Japanese texts than with the textual strategies that incorporate these in
the context of constantly shifting boundaries. Modern Japanese texts reflect a
process of cultural appropriation characterized by the assimilation of previously
non-belonging (foreign) elements, a process during which the standpoint of the
Self is in continuous flux. Consequently, the perception of ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ is
changing as well. Within this complex play, to resort to such questionable bound-
aries as ‘Western influence’ versus ‘Japanese tradition’ would be highly
counterproductive. Such a conceptualization would not only imply the existence
of a superior and supra-temporal stance determining the nature of certain
elements – whether they are to be regarded as foreign or native; it would also
claim something of a cultural copyright, the statement of which would, however,
lie exclusively at the discretion of the beholder (Hijiya-Kirschnereit and Bollinger
1998: 658).
Circle 4: Mishima Yukio’s Kyo-ko no ie as a case study

It is about time now for a closer look at one example in order to test the produc-
tivity of our set of questions. I have chosen Mishima Yukio’s novel Kyōko no ie
(Kyōko’s House) as the second most voluminous text,7 a work of ambition,
published in 1958–59, of this representative postwar author. Mishima’s seri-
ousness is emphasized by the fact that the work was published as one of his
very few kakioroshi shōsetsu (a narrative written in one casting) as opposed to the
standard Japanese procedure of publishing the work in magazine or newspaper
installments prior to the book form.8 Even though critics widely agree that the
work was a failure, it is a paradigmatic text in many respects, called by the author
his ‘study in nihilism’ (Mishima 1966: 625) and his farewell to the postwar
period. Mishima intended, after The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, his 1956 story of
one individual’s reaction to the change of atmosphere after Japan’s defeat in
the war, to develop his interpretation of the postwar period as a whole in the vein
of a European writer. His ambitions are further underscored by the fact that in
this one case he did keep a literary diary, published shortly after the novel, with
the title Ratai to ishō (Bareness and Clothing, 1959), documenting and commenting
on the gestation of his work in a manner reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s
Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (The Emergence of ‘Doctor Faustus’). Hashikawa
Bunzō was among those who read Kyōko’s House as a ‘document of wartime and
postwar intellectual history’ and thus called it ‘a very handy and indexed
library’.9
Mishima no doubt intended to join the ranks of what was perceived as world
literature by these very attitudes and modes of publication, but even more so by
his literary style and themes. Throughout his career, Mishima had made it very
clear that even though he productively referred to classical Japanese literature
such as Nō and appreciated the ‘modern classics’ of the Meiji and Taishō periods,
his frame of reference comprised Baudelaire and Balzac, Racine and Ibsen,
Nietzsche and d’Annunzio, Pater and Rilke, not to mention Classical Greek
authors such as Socrates, Plato and Euripides, whom he seems to have encoun-
tered mainly in the course of his intensive consideration of European symbolist
and fin de siècle literature. It is not that Mishima was intent on distancing himself
from the Japanese canon; his project obviously was an amalgamation of native
and occidental, as well as of ‘traditional’ and modern elements. Hence his depic-
tion of his own works as ‘Mori Ōgai plus Thomas Mann’.10 Moreover, the
practical dimensions of this concept can be studied in the impressively complex
and balanced architecture of a novel like Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors, 1951–53
[1968]), where Mishima unfolds a veritable maelstrom of allusions, knotting
together motifs from symbolist and classical Greek works with Japanese litera-
ture. Several finely elaborated networks of mythical and interliterary
references are thrown into the narration to form cascades of symbols and
interconnected motifs. Most conspicuous are the numerous allusions to Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Walter Pater’s
Marius the Epicurean, together with reminiscences of the Platonic Dialogues and a
sophisticated chain of scenes modeled according to the classical repertory of locus
amoenus.11 That neither his contemporaries nor later professional readers seem to
have realized these complex encodings12 is a problem worth discussing in
another context. Suffice it to say that the work’s reception was obviously over-
shadowed by its provocative aspects, the sensationalism of the hero as
homosexual and the sarcastic portraits of foreigners. In other words, the work
was deprived, in this most common reading, of all its dimensions until what was
left was a barely realistic story of a young homosexual and his patrons, dismissed
by Masao Miyoshi as ‘one of the gaudiest and emptiest [works] Mishima ever
wrote’ (1974: 158).
The fact that Mishima readers did not live up to what Wolfgang Iser has termed
the work’s ‘implicit reader’ poses interesting questions concerning, inter alia, the
validity of our research set-up. We may note first of all that Mishima’s intention
of inscribing his work as world literature, which in the 1950s was identified, both
in Japan and in the West, with canonized texts in European languages, was
thus ignored. The same thing happened with Kyōko’s House. Here, too, the
author’s aforementioned attitude concerning aspects of production, reception,
and distribution points to a conscious appropriation of European modes, which
was, however, not registered by his readership. And, furthermore, his references
to the European literary subsystem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were left largely undiscovered, although we have to admit that they are
much less in number and complexity as compared to Forbidden Colors and some
other works. This incongruity between the production and reception obviously
matters, but before elaborating on this aspect of Otherness assimilated or ignored,
let us take a brief look at other phenomena of Otherness manifested in Kyōko’s
House.
The novel, covering a narrative time span of two years from April 1954
through April 1956, tells the story of four young men in their twenties – the boxer
Shunkichi, Natsuo, a painter, Osamu, an actor, and Seiichirō, a company
employee – four individuals whose paths cross at the house of their extravagant
female friend Kyōko in Tokyo’s Shinanomachi quarters. Theirs is a world of pros-
perity, if not subdued lavishness, symbolized by such assets as open fireplaces,
chandeliers and a well-functioning heating system – this at a time when few
households in Japan boasted such items. Kyōko and her female friends wear mink
coats, the protagonists prefer Western food and Western outfits and live in
Western-style houses.13 That they shake hands instead of greeting each other in a
more conventional Japanese manner is a conspicuous sign of the extent to which
they distance themselves from the ordinary postwar middle class in their attempt
to adopt a Western lifestyle.14 Foreigners and products of foreign origin abound
in most of Mishima’s works, and their function is to breathe an air of luxury and
of cosmopolitan flair into the novel’s world. Kyōko’s parties are garnished by the
presence of foreigners. Comments such as ‘There were even four or five
foreigners’ (gaijin sae shi, gonin ita), however, suggest a pride in this rare achieve-
ment, although a certain dose of inferiority complex in the face of ‘the West’
shines through as well (Mishima 1964: 355). This also applies to Osamu who is
proud of the fact that his buttocks look attractive to women because they remind
them of foreign sailors. He is equally proud that his mother has the air of a
French brothel owner, and he dreams of sleeping with a foreign actress.15 When
reading this postwar novel, we should bear in mind the still enormous prosperity
differential between the West and Japan in the 1950s as well as the prestige and
dreamland quality embodied by the former.
On the linguistic/stylistic level, we find a characteristic blend of tradition-
alism and cosmopolitanism, to be read in the author’s stubborn adherence to
historical forms of writing. Thus, in his ‘serious’ works, works which fall into the
category of ‘pure literature’ (junbungaku) as opposed to works of a more popular
kind,16 he refused to make use of the reformed type of jōyō kanji (Sino-Japanese
characters in common use). On the other hand, this conservative style, which
can also be interpreted as an expression of his retrograde utopianism, is combined
with an obvious delight in katakana words17 and quotations from European
languages, a combination that attests to a strong elitist attitude, given the above-
mentioned prestige value of ‘things Western’. We can thus reveal attitudinal
concurrences between the stylistic/expressive and the narrational level of the
work.
In his novel, the author also attempts an incorporation of the Other in the
form of extending the geographical boundaries of the plot. In the later part of
Kyōko’s House, we witness Seiichirō’s move to New York and, by the end, Natsuo
is making plans to leave for Mexico. What happens in New York is mainly
‘brought home’ – in the most literal sense – to the other characters as well as to
the readers through letters, in which Seiichirō depicts his life abroad. Only in the
ninth of the ten chapters is the narratorial stance moved to New York. A conspic-
uous narratorial device is the increased frequency of ‘realistic’ details in this part
of the book. Here, we are even informed about the Brooklyn accent of the
garage attendant with whom Seiichirō parks his black-and-white Packard, a 1951
model, for a monthly fee of 25 dollars. We also learn about the height of the
white fir on Rockefeller Plaza, or about the number of bedrooms in a Japanese
company representative’s home (see pp. 466–7, 493, 471).
Particular care is given to the description of phenomena that appear to have
been widely unknown to Japanese readers at the time of the book’s publication
such as automatic door openers. Certainly, sections like the one in which their
functioning is meticulously explained provide educational material for the
Japanese reading public. The author, appropriating his average reader’s level of
knowledge, adopts the role of cultural mediator and lards his text with common-
sense information such as the remark that 1 a.m. is not late for a party by New
York standards, or that some inhabitants of this city prefer to sleep with a
window open even on the coldest of nights (pp. 494, 496). So much for educa-
tional effects in this novel on the most mundane and everyday plane. On the
other hand, a certain degree of exoticizing these American habits on the part of
the author cannot be denied.
That Kyōko’s House is, however, by no means a simple realistic novel becomes
clear when we take into consideration the strategies of stereotyping and
symbolism, which figure prominently in this work. Both of these strategies, with
stereotyping frequently merging with symbolism, are to be observed in the
configuration of the characters and in the acting spaces, beginning with the two
megacities. Tokyo and New York are set in a relationship of gradation, with the
American city functioning as an expanded space of action. Characters are like-
wise designed as magnifications or as diminutions of each other – for example,
Ms. Yamakawa in New York who is introduced as ‘a Kyōko of a global map stan-
dard’ (p. 473), while Fujiko, as Kyōko’s ‘scion’ (p. 159), stands for the reverse
relationship. For Seiichirō, his move to New York is a visible sign of his success
as a professional, and for the whole novel, this widened geographical and
cultural space implies a further generalization of the novel’s world, where both
cities and their inhabitants are to be regarded as parts of the same paradigm.
Thus, the upper middle-class atmosphere of Kyōko’s house and her friends with
their moderately exotic attitudes and lifestyle assets modeled on European and
North American images (which, in their very clichéd patterns, remind us of
Hollywood motion pictures) is extended to the American continent. And, in a
reverse movement, the foreign is thus familiarized.
While this reading of the novel may well reproduce, in its socio-cultural
subtext, the aspirations of Mishima’s Japanese readership at that time, the
assimilation of an idealized ‘American way of life’, we should not overlook
other dimensions of this complex work. As mentioned before, interliterary
aspects figure prominently in this author’s texts, and it is the allusions to the fin de
siècle European literary subsystem that give this work its special flavor and in
turn provide links with other Mishima texts. It would exceed the given frame
of this chapter to delineate the narratorial procedures and the multitude of levels
on which these encodings are to be found. Suffice it to say that they are to be
detected in all possible units of this work, from the lexical through the ‘philo-
sophical’ level. The protagonists’ basic feelings are marked by leading notions,
placed in the manner of leitmotifs, such as muchitsujo (disorder), sekai hōkai (end
of the world), sutoishizumu (stoicism), waisetsu (obscenity), fuan (uncertainty),
taikutsu (boredom), kodoku (loneliness), and muimi (meaninglessness). From the
very first sentence this mood is alluded to: ‘Everybody was yawning’ (minna
akubi o shite ita) (p. 5). This elitist mood of ennui and nihilism forms a curious
contrast to the mundane bourgeois aspirations mentioned before, and it sets
the protagonists off from the average individual in a manner reminiscent of
Nietzsche’s superman. Splinters of these ideas are reflected in Seiichirō’s musings
as well as in Shunkichi’s activism and anti-intellectualism. The division between
consciousness (ishiki) and action (kōdō), an elaborate aestheticism, the preponder-
ance of aesthetic categories, which replace moral ones, and the glorification of
the immoral (haitoku) are further hints in this direction. What is more, the work
contains passages in which these references to the European fin de siècle are
encoded in a more sophisticated way. As a matter of fact, those readers who do
not recognize the strong mythological allusions in the following scene will
realize only a superficial understanding of what is going on:
On a cold January day, Osamu and Kyōko met in town and go for a walk.
The signal of a train passing served as a prelude to Osamu’s musing: ‘In
the end, old age will also befall me. I will turn into an old man bothering
others with his boasting talk of when he was young and strong’. A little
girl in the street offered them a flower bouquet wrapped in cellophane
paper in such an obtrusive way that Osamu stopped and bought it. From
the woolen glove full of holes the girl’s thumb protruded like a pink ginger
stem.
‘This is for me?’ asked Kyōko.
‘No’, answered Osamu cruelly. And then, with his fingertips on which
he wore the Hermès gloves that he had received from Mariko, he devot-
edly plucked one petal after the other from the tastelessly combined
bouquet of withered chrysanthemum, narcissus, and winter rose and
scattered them on the street as they walked on. Kyōko eventually joined
in.
‘We act as if we were drunk, don’t we?’ she said. Both of them had a
premonition of being beside themselves with hilarity, but before this
happened, the bouquet was used up.
(p. 206)
Osamu, we have to add here, has already been linked with the Narcissus of
mythology by his frequent consultation of mirrors. In this scene, the Narcissus is
tied up with the Hermes of mythology. Hermes, herald of the Olympian gods
and the guardian god of youth, bears an essential likeness to Eros and Aphrodite.
Hermes’ love is the love of the favorable moment, of the lucky love adventure,
but at the same time, he also escorts the souls of the deceased to the underworld.
It is these traits of the Hermes of mythology that are alluded to here, for shortly
before this scene, Kyōko and Osamu euphorically decide to marry when they are
80. With that age, which Osamu will not reach, death is thematized as well.
A conspicuous multitude of syntagmatic links is to be found in this scene: the
girl’s gloves are antithetical to Osamu’s, and her protruding thumb is
contrasted with his fingertips in the exclusive garment. The simile of ‘pink ginger
stem’ associates her with the flowers. The bouquet’s composition with three
sorts of flowers refers to four seasons – spring with narcissus, autumn with
chrysanthemum, summer and winter with (winter) roses. By the Hermès gloves
the Narcissus mythological leitmotif is also addressed directly. In a similar way,
we can observe in fin de siècle literature a predilection for this mythological
feature, which is often thematized by way of hands to suggest the reflexiveness of
art.18
The narcissus, the flower of the underworld and of the graves which, as
legend has it, grew out of the blood of Narcissus, also refers to death. The
gesture of plucking the petals alludes to those ecstatic experiences later in the
work at the end of which Osamu will die. Thus, this scene is a multifaceted fore-
shadowing of coming events and of Osamu’s death. Mishima, in contriving an
elaborate architecture of leitmotifs and mythical allusions, places himself in the
tradition of European symbolism, or, to be more precise, he extends his frame of
reference to include himself and his readership in the context of canonized liter-
ature of Western making.
Let us finally turn to one more aspect which helps to specify further Mishima’s
intentions. His ambition is to write ‘like a Western author’, as he confesses in his
Ratai to ishō (Mishima 1966: 626). Although we have already presented numerous
clues from the work that define which tradition he identifies with, it is enlight-
ening in this context to consider a discussion with the famous critic Nakamura
Mitsuo, published in 1968, where Mishima, under the rubric of ‘Nothingness
and Substance’, discusses what he sees as the elemental experience of modernity
in literature. He speaks of fundamental doubts concerning visible reality, and he
refers to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous text ‘Ein Brief ’ (A Letter), first
published in a Berlin newspaper on 18 October 1902, where this experience
found artistic expression for the first time. The work consists of the letter of a
fictive young English lord, Philip Chandos, dated 22 August 1603, addressed to
his friend and mentor, Francis Bacon. In it, the writer requests the addressee’s
understanding of the fact that he has been unable to realize any of his literary
plans and then explains the reasons for his two years’ silence. The ‘Chandos
letter’, as it is often called, is thought to be the most important text written by
Hofmannsthal, and a key document of literary modernity. It is a brilliant play of
hide-and-seek in which the young fin de siècle author who had already won consid-
erable fame speaks, in rich prose, of turning silent in the face of everyday reality.
The fear of the emptiness behind the words, the expulsion from the paradise of
trust in language, the loss of all certainties lead to an existential crisis, which is
more than just an individual’s plea. Hofmannsthal’s contemporaries already
sensed the meaning of this ‘Letter’ as a document to an epochal feeling, which
persists to the present. The empty talk of a backstage-like public, the scatter-
brained and unconcentrated state of mind which we regard as a sign of our
times, the discomforting feeling that the world dissolves in front of our gaze and
leaves us with words devoid of meaning – these experiences were anticipated by
Hofmannsthal a century ago.
Mishima explains:
Towards the end of the 19th century, there was an epochal current in which
the belief in the phenomena of reality was suspended. This current eventu-
ally developed into existentialism. Even the activism resulting from
existentialism can probably be traced back to this.
(Nakamura and Mishima 1968: 41)
Mishima then explains the key episode in Hofmannsthal’s work, a scene in

which Lord Chandos walks in his garden and, upon seeing a watering can, is
struck by a deep fear as suddenly words and objects fall apart in his mind. ‘This
is the first voice’, says Mishima, ‘to describe this experience, which then extends
to Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea).’ Interestingly, Mishima then distances himself
from a Japanese tradition in his comparison with shishōse tsu (I-novel) writings:
This kind of experience is never expressed in this way with shishōsetsu charac-
ters. Here, everything has a meaning, and in the world of meaning all kinds
of things happen . . . These experiences of the Self are expressed in the
characters of the work as substantial entities. And as this is undoubtedly a
creation, it is undoubtedly supposed to be art. However, didn’t we start out
from a point where ‘things with a substance’ no longer exist? The word
‘nothingness’ to describe this may sound a bit too banal.
(ibid.: 41–2)
What Mishima makes very clear in his statement is the fact that he wants to be
understood as a modern artist who gives expression to this key experience voiced
in Hofmannsthal’s work. The native tradition of shishōsetsu writing – and of Shiga
Naoya in particular, whom he refers to in this context – is denied modernity and
even artistic value. It is this doubt concerning the ‘substance’ of the real world,
which Mishima tried to express in Kyōko’s House, in a scene that remains cryptic to
readers who do not realize this referential plane. In an episode in New York,
when Seiichirō and Fujiko are heading home from the theatre, a horse-drawn
carriage passes by:
‘Strange things coming along at this time of the day’, remarked Seiichirō.
‘It’s a carriage,’ replied Fujiko, but her answer was, strictly speaking, not
an exact response to Seiichirō’s comment. It revealed the typically female,
strong yardstick which seeks to make sense of reality in the simplest possible
way. Seiichirō sensed a strong aversion. What he himself had seen was, yes, a
carriage pulled by grey horses, but he just briefly said, ‘That is your halluci-
nation.’
(Mishima 1964: 489)
This episode may seem strange or even bizarre. But instead of simply registering
its misogynist flavor, we dig deeper in realizing that this and other eccentric views
and experiences of the protagonists are devised by the author to express key
experiences of modernity. This is not to say that Mishima is artistically convincing
in each of these instances. Yet his intentions are clear, and they amount to
opening up what he sees as a modern frame of reference.
But what about his readership? While the average postwar Japanese reader may
have had more educational knowledge than contemporary readers concerning
literature in Japanese and in Western languages, not many of them will have had
the capacity to sound the mythical allusions and the references to fin de siècle
works. Most of them would have been happy to identify Hermès as a famous
French house of leather and fashion as would contemporary readers whose world
is even more commercialized than the postwar decade. Mishima, on the other
hand, was not only keen on making his readership familiar with the mundane
aspects of Western civilization in its ethnic, social, and cultural Otherness; he
also claimed membership of a transnational literary canon, which establishes
itself by way of explicit and implicit interliterarity. He was, of course, well aware
of the elitist character of his ambitions and did not expect all of his readers to
follow him. The same, by the way, applies to his romantic and utopian conserva-
tivism, expressed, inter alia, in his partly archaic use of language and of the
pre-reform writing system. In his essay, ‘Shō setsu to wa nani ka’ (What is the
novel?), he calls it his cultural mission to restore to life forgotten Japanese.
‘Strictly speaking’, he writes, ‘it is impossible to use Japanese without believing in
Japanese history.’ Whoever knows this antique vocabulary is his reader, the others
are expected to use dictionaries (Mishima 1971: 105).
What a cultural mission! Here is Mishima, the standard-bearer of postwar
literature in Japan, aspiring to merge conservativism – a largely re-invented form
of traditionalism – and what he understands as the most artistic and valid strand of
literary modernity reaching from fin de siècle symbolism to existentialism in a
highly eclectic synthesis. A synthesis is also attained in his ‘staging’ of moments
of enlightenment and epiphanies repeatedly occurring in the text which indirectly
refer to the ‘Chandos letter’ while, at the same time, this pattern is also structured
according to the mystical satori (enlightenment) experience, which relates to a
traditional esthetics.19 As a result, the borders between the posited cultural Self
and the cultural Other are constantly blurred, just as readers of his works are
made to shift back and forth with their attention between a seemingly realistic
and a mythological, symbolistic and interliterary level. In other words, Mishima’s
work occupies a liminal space, an in-between area that aspires to transcend the
boundaries of ‘Japanese literature’.
Had Mishima lived on, he might have been asked by the German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to respond to Hofmannsthal’s ‘Chandos Letter’ like so
many other authors whose essays on the one-hundredth anniversary of its publi-
cation were later collected in book form. Taken together, these thirty-five essays
inspire questions as to whether Hofmannsthal’s concerns are still of relevance to
writers and readers today. Naturally, the answers differ from emphatic agreement
to bitter criticism of the author’s purported affirmative imperialism. But why not
pose the same question regarding Mishima himself ? Instead of an answer, let me
close by quoting from a poem by Lavinia Greenlaw, a young British writer, enti-
tled ‘Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos, 1603’:
Steady, Chandos. We are out of rhyme.

Note the flaw in the empty eye.
When things lift away from themselves,
we can do no more in words than meet them
in like vein. Why not remain speechless?
Theaetetus complained to Socrates
of dizziness when asked to see beyond what is
as it is named. His sickness was wonder.
(Spahr et al. 2002: 142)
Notes
1 This is, admittedly, a generalization. In connection with the sankin kōtai rules, those
Japanese living alongside the routes of foreign delegations on their way to the Shōgun’s
court in Edo were occasionally able to catch glimpses of Europeans and Koreans.
Ronald Toby (1986) has given a fascinating account of these encounters.
2 For an overview of research on these cultural contacts between Japan and the West in
the form of an annotated bibliography covering the years from 1853 through 1996,
see Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1999).
3 See Komori (2001) and Faye Kleeman, Chapter 14 in this volume.
4 Another important distinction in a German research context concerns a cognitive-
cultural versus a social dimension of otherness or, in other words, non-familiarity
versus non-membership or non-belonging. In English, one might speak, after Chantal
Zabus (1990), of ‘foreignness’ versus ‘otherness’. While the ‘foreignness’ of European
languages, for example, can be dissolved to the extent that they are acquired, their
non-belonging to the African societies remains intact. To distinguish these two dimen-
sions of otherness seems important in the light of the fact that it is a functional
requirement in modern societies to disconnect ‘belonging’ and ‘familiarity’ (Münkler
1998: 22).
5 Tsuruta Kinya compares the development of writers such as Tanizaki or Sōseki, whose
images of the Other differentiate and ripen over the years with an analogous develop-
ment on the level of the nation as a whole, from Edo through Shōwa (Tsuruta 1994:
501).
6 Justin Stagl (1997) deals with ‘grades of otherness’, which would be another way of
categorizing ‘distances’.
7 It is only a few pages shorter than his novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors, 1951–53
[1968]). The individual volumes of his later tetralogy Hōjō no umi (The Sea of Fertility,
1965–70) are shorter than this work.
8 Interestingly, this mode was seen as the author’s ‘resistance to mass media’, and, in an
interview on the occasion of the novel’s publication, Mishima admitted to a feeling of
pride as well as one of ‘being left out’ on seeing his colleagues publish their works
continuously in magazines while he preferred to confine his work to his study until its
very completion (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1976: 32). Later, Mishima proudly compared his
novel’s mode of publication – two chapters were pre-published in a magazine – with
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (ibid.: 190).
9 Quoted in ibid.: 227.
10 With this comment, he refers to his novel Kinkakuji; see his essay ‘Jiko kaizō no koko-
romi’ (An Attempt at Self-improvement, 1956).
11 A detailed delineation of the parallels to Mann’s Death in Venice, which form the portal
to other symbolist as well as Classical Greek works; can be found in Hijiya-
Kirschnereit (1990).
12 This is not to say that the work is without serious weaknesses. But most of them lie on
a plane which those readers critical of the novel did not even realize. Thus, it is not
superficiality or a defective construction but the overabundance of symbolism and
allusions, the excessive baggage of meaning and its all too perfect architecture that
could be criticized (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 1990: 68).
13 See Mishima (1964: 355, 311, 191). All subsequent references to this novel are cited,
as page number only, in the main text.
14 The handshakes are mentioned in ibid.: 37, 261, 343.
15 See ibid.: 355, 311, 191.
16 On the problematic of the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘popular’ works, see Hijiya-
Kirschnereit (1976: 205, 216).
17 On katakana words in Kyōko’s House, see ibid.: 230.
18 The Narcissus motif figures prominently with writers such as Rilke, George, and
Valéry, with whose works Mishima was familiar. In Thomas Mann’s Schiller novelette
‘Schwere Stunde’, this motif is thematized through the protagonist’s looking at his
hands.
19 A detailed delineation of satori experiences in Kyōko no ie and a comparison with
conventional representations of this pattern in Kurosawa Akira’s motion picture
‘Sugata Sanshirō’ and in the painter Hayashi Takeshi’s autobiography can be found in
Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1976: 151, 194–7, 203, 265, 267).
References
Main text
Mishima Yukio (1964) Kyōko no ie (Kyōko’s House), Tokyo: Shinchōsha (Shinchō bunko
1961).
Other references
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Culture’, Journal of Japanese Studies 29(1): 69–101.
Goossen, Ted (1989) ‘Caged Beasts: Black Men in Modern Japanese Literature’, in Kinya
Tsuruta (ed.) The Walls Within: Images of Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese
Abroad, Vancouver: Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, pp.
137–61.
Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela (1976) Mishima Yukios Roman, Kyōko-no ie: Versuch einer intra-
textuellen Analyse, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
——(1979) ‘Thomas Mann’s Short Novel Der Tod in Venedig and Mishima Yukio’s Novel
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Tenterden: Paul Norbury, pp. 312–17.
——(1990) ‘Thomas Manns Novelle Der Tod in Venedig und Mishima Yukios Roman Kinjiki:
Ein Vergleich’, in Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.) Was heißt: Japanische Literatur verstehen? Zur
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——(ed.) (1999) Kulturbeziehungen zwischen Japan und dem Westen seit 1853: Eine annotierte Bibliogra-
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Jackson, Earl (1990) ‘The Metaphysics of Translation and the Origins of Symbolist Poetics
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University Press.
Mishima Yukio ([1959] 1966) Ratai to ishō (Bareness and Clothing), in Mishima Yukio hyōron
zenshu, Tokyo: Shinchōsha, pp. 523–626.
——(1971) ‘Shōsetsu to wa nani ka’ (What is the Novel?), Shinchō (January): 90–137.
Miyoshi, Masao (1974) Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
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Verlag.
——(ed.) (1998) Die Herausforderung durch das Fremde: Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe, Berlin:
Akademie Verlag.
Nakamura Mitsuo and Mishima Yukio (1968) Taidan – ningen to bungaku (Humans and
Literature: A Discussion), Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Pollack, David (1986) The Fracture of Meaning: Japan’s Synthesis of China from the Eighth through
the Eighteenth Centuries, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese Abroad, Vancouver: Institute of Asian
Research, University of British Columbia, pp. 82–118.
Spahr, Roland, Spiegel, Hubert and Vogel, Oliver (eds) (2002) ‘Lieber Lord Chandos’:
Antworten auf einen Brief, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
Stagl, Justin (1997) ‘Grade der Fremdheit’, in Herfried Münkler (ed.) Furcht und Faszination:
Facetten der Fremdheit, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 85–114.
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——(ed.) (1994) Nihon bungaku ni okeru ‘tasha’ (The ‘Other’ in Japanese literature), Tokyo:
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2 Meet me on the other side
Strategies of Otherness in modern
Japanese literature
Susan Napier
I looked on her as she looked at me

We looked and stood a moment
Between Life and Dream
We never met since:
Yet oft I stand
In the primrose path
Where life meets Dream
Oh that Life could
Melt into Dream
Instead of Dream
Is constantly
Chased away by Life.
Natsume Sōseki (written in English, quoted in Etō Jun, Natsume Sōseki)
The choice of title for my chapter is inspired by Leeds’ connection to popular

music (specifically one of the all-time great rock albums, The Who’s Live at
Leeds), but the title itself is from a more recent album, A New Day at Midnight by
David Gray. The album is dedicated to Gray’s father who had died the year
before and the song ‘The Other Side’ which inspires my title concerns the
singer’s hope to meet someone (presumably his father or perhaps a lover, in
any case a person lost to him) on the ‘other side’. Gray’s song never holds out
the definite possibility of a meeting but is rather imbricated with yearning,
suffused with a desire for two different entities to come together, if only transi-
torily.
The other side, or mukōgawa in Japanese, is a concept that crosses cultures,
touching on the spiritual, the supernatural, and the mythic. In fact, in 1985,
Kinya Tsuruta along with a number of other Japanese critics published a book
called Bungaku ni okeru ‘mukōgawa’ (The ‘Other Side’ in Literature), in which he
defined the mukōgawa as ‘something that exists in contradistinction to “this side”,
something that is conceived as an artistic space and does not exist in reality . . . a
place of compensation for “this side”, a space of illusion’. On the ‘other side’,
according to Tsuruta:
Strategies of Otherness 39
the hands of the clock don’t necessarily keep the correct time, time hastens
or slows and sometimes stops or, frequently, the hands even reverse them-
selves and go backwards. Spatially it is a place where the lines on the map
may not be of any use. But most importantly it is a place . . . where what you
expect to happen – the laws of nature – do not necessarily fulfill them-
selves.
(Tsuruta 1985: 6)
Much of what Tsuruta describes seems very applicable to the fantastic and uncanny
texts of Japanese literature or even to more realistic ones where otherness
impinges more subtly. We might remember the opening scene in Izumi Kyōka’s
Koya hijiri (Saint of Mount Koya, 1908 [1995]) in which the monk stands help-
less in the mountains of Hida gazing at a useless map just before he ventures into
a lost world of supernatural creatures and subversive memories. On a less clearly
fantastic level, we might think of the hidden garden of Tanizaki’s Yume no ukihashi
(Bridge of Dreams, 1959 [1977]) where two women transcend the inexorability of
time and death to become an uncanny model of motherhood.
But Tsuruta’s description needs to be amended in one area, I believe, and that
is what seems to be his notion of a hard and fast dialectic between this side and
the other. As the yearning first line in Gray’s song hints, we now live in an era
where it does indeed seem possible to imagine ‘meet[ing] on the other side’, and
the boundaries between this side and the other side, between Self and Other, or
between the virtual and the real are not nearly as firm as Tsuruta seems to be
suggesting. In recent years the old divisions and certainties that formed the back-
bone of Western philosophy have increasingly begun to be called into question.
As Gilbert Rose points out in The Power of Form , ‘The boundaries of our sepa-
rateness dissolve and reconstitute, dip back into and reemerge from looser, earlier
arrangements of reality’ (1986: 91).
In Japanese literature, ‘reality’, if such a thing exists, seems to be comprised of
many forms of ‘arrangements’. From my own research on Japanese fiction, espe-
cially the realm of fantastic literature – a major part of Japanese literary output –
it seems arguable that, if anything, Japanese literature and other arts have tended
to be particularly comfortable with interrogating the notion of separateness and
highlighting the fluidity of boundaries. Tropes of androgyny, including the
specific incorporation of one gender into the other, metamorphosis, and phan-
tasmagoria of all kinds, characterize many modern literary texts as well as
theater and art in Japan.
Even before the modern period, Japanese literature and art have highlighted
the notion that the membrane between Self and Other is a highly permeable
one. We need only think of the crucial spirit possession episodes in The Tale of
Genji, not to mention the many depictions of transformation in ukiyo-e (woodblock
prints) or kabuki theater. Even traditional poetry in which the poet’s persona
dreams of becoming a ‘thing of spring’ suggests a willingness to flow between
subjectivities while the persistent classical love poetry question of ‘Was it a dream
or was it reality?’ (yume ka utsutsu ka) underlines the ambiguity of the cosmos.
40 Susan Napier
With the twentieth century, the vision of the other side often becomes more
politicized, existing as a counterpoint to modernity or evoking a crisis between
the genders. Thus, Kyōka’s monk stands poised at the entrance to an ‘old road’
down into the womblike valley of the Japanese past dominated by a motherly
enchantress who turns the vulgar new men of Meiji into beasts. Although the
monk escapes physically unscathed, the memory of the other side haunts him for
the rest of his life. More recently, Kurahashi Yumiko’s 1987 science fiction
fantasy Amanonkoku ōkanki (Record of a Voyage to the Country of Amanon)
describes a voyage in which the masculine principle known as ‘P’ (standing for
penis) attempts to conquer the feminine realm of the country of Amanon, only
to find itself/himself reinscribed within the maternal body and producing a
child. While Kyōka’s monk is painfully separated from the otherness of a past
characterized by a fearsome but still maternal feminine, ‘P’ is forced to incorpo-
rate into the feminine principle of a provocative new world that hints at new
directions for contemporary Japan.
Even when a narrative appears to be working to expel the other, there are still
moments of inclusion, even in relation to the thorny question of Japanese subjec-
tivity vis-à-vis the Western Other. Thus, Ōe Kenzaburō’s mimetic ‘Shiiku’ (Prize
Stock, 1959 [1981]), one of the great narratives of wartime exclusion, initially
positions the Japanese and Western subjectivities as totally alien, emblemized by
the captured black American soldier and the Japanese children’s fascinated
incomprehension of him. But ‘Prize Stock’s’ tragic denouement also highlights
the moment when the soldier places the young boy’s hand upon his own head in
order to ward off the axe belonging to the boy’s father and, for a moment, the
two form a solid pattern of resistance before the axe crashes down and sunders
them forever.
Of course, nationalist versions of Self and Other in Japanese literature are
not restricted to Japan and the West. Seiji M. Lippit describes how Yokomitsu
Riichi’s Shanghai enacts a process of disintegration as its Chinese and Japanese
characters travel through a city of ‘false fronts’ but ends with a ‘glimpse of a
release from the conflicts of subjectivity’ (Lippit 2002: 114) as a prostitute in
China envisions the face of the Japanese protagonist. This ‘release’ is only
temporary, however, for soon the Japanese face becomes increasingly immersed
in ‘the waves of the long tongues, the hair slicked back with oil . . . the breath
reeking of opium’ (ibid.: 114–15), images that belong to her presumably Chinese
customers.
Lippit’s book also brings up another aspect of impinging Otherness: the
phantasmagoria that he sees inhabiting and delineating Japanese modernism. To
Lippit, these phantasms evoke the ambiguity of Japan’s position in the 1920s and
1930s, caught in a transition in which the old is both longed for but alien and the
new is both threatening and enticing. I would take this theme even further,
however, and suggest that the phantasmic Other and what Lippit terms ‘the
instability of place and borderlines’ (ibid.: 5) exist at least as far back as Natsume
Sōseki if not well before the modern period, and also extend to recent works by
such contemporary writers as Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki. If
anything, twentieth-century Japanese literature has as its hallmark this sense of
‘instability’, although in each period this sense takes on its own distinctive
form.
Before turning to a more detailed look at twentieth-century Japanese fiction,
however, it is worth pondering for a moment what we mean by the Other and
Otherness, both in general and in relation to Japan. Simply put, the Other is
what we are not. If we are masculine, the Other is feminine. If we are young, the
Other is old. If we are talking of Japan, then the Other is the West, or perhaps it
is China or Korea. If we are the here and now, then the Other is the past –
history, memory – what David Gray in his song alludes to as ‘the ghosts that
crawl upon my skin’. These can be personal ghosts or cultural ones. As Lois
Parkinson Zamora says of Latin American magic realism,
because ghosts make absence present, they foreground magical realism’s

most basic concern – the nature and limits of the knowable – and they facili-
tate magical realism’s critique of modernity . . . they represent an assault on
the scientific and materialist assumptions of Western modernity: that reality
is knowable, predictable, controllable.
(Zamora and Faris 1995: 498)
The oppositional quality of the Other is very notable in modern Japan as well,
where we cannot help but be struck by how important and how protean the
notion of Otherness has been throughout its modern history and culture. A sense
of an iconic ‘Japan’ vis-à-vis the rest of the world seems to have been an essential
part of national identity since at least the Meiji Restoration. Of course, this situ-
ation is not unique to Japan. The magical realist literature of Latin America,
especially that of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, grapples with its own
Western shadows and its own ghosts from a severely problematic colonial past.
Postcolonial English literature raises the ante by placing the Western and non-
Western Other side by side in London, the seat of the old British Empire, as
exemplified in works such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or some of Salman
Rushdie’s writings.
But Japan occupies perhaps an even more uneasy position, situated as it is at
the nexus between West and non-West, and modernity (or even postmodernity)
and the discourses of a still smoldering local tradition. Not only does Japan need
to contend with its own vision of the West, it also has in recent years finally
begun to take into account its knotty relations with East Asian neighbors. These
relations bring up further issues of Otherness, in particular ones related to the
past and memory (or frequently the lack of memory concerning Japan’s colonial
past). Moreover, I would suggest that modern Japanese culture is also still dealing
with an increasingly complex dynamic between male and female, a dynamic that
began at the turn of the twentieth century with a vision of the female as an uncanny
repository of the past and has become by the end of the century a trope of the
female as mediator to an Other world that the contemporary male can no longer
penetrate.
42 Susan Napier
In Discourses of the Vanishing, Marilyn Ivy speaks of the ‘fatefully dense articula-
tions of the Japanese imaginary with the fantasies of the West’ (1995: 6) and also
mentions that ‘Japan seems to reinscribe the distinction ever more sharply
between the “West” and Itself ’ (ibid.: 2). While not disagreeing with the impor-
tance of the Western Other, I would also, as with Tsuruta’s statement, want to
suggest that this is not always a rigidly delineated relationship. Thus, while Ivy
speaks of the Japanese anxiety to ‘keep the culture intact’ (ibid.), I would argue
that, at least in literature, such an endeavor has met with only fitful success and
has not necessarily even been the aim of many novelists. It is true that we have
on the one hand Mori Ōgai’s ‘Maihime’ (Dancing Girl, 1890 [1975]) or
‘Fushinchū’ (Under Reconstruction, 1910 [1961]) in which the feminized West in
an interesting role reversal is expelled or repudiated by the masculine Japanese
or, from the same period, Akutagawa’s ‘Kamigami no bishō’ (The Faint Smiles of
the Gods, 1921) in which the Japanese gods explicitly tell the intimidated
Portuguese priest that
The West too must change. We exist in the trees, in the currents of shallow
water, in the wind that blows through the roses, in the evening light that
lingers on the temple walls . . . Anywhere and anytime we are here. Please
be careful . . . please be careful.
(Akutagawa 1971: 10)
But Akutagawa’s writing contains many examples of the overlay of the Western
Other on the Japanese psyche (most notably in the famous line from ‘Aru Aho no
isshō’ (A Fool’s Life, 1927), ‘The sum of human life adds to less than a line of
Baudelaire’ (Akutagawa 1970: 8)). Even ‘The Faint Smiles of the Gods’ has a
prescient aspect to it, suggesting that the dynamic between the West and Japan
can never be so cut and dried. This can be seen in the passage where the
Japanese gods tell the priest that ‘it may even be that Deus himself will change
into a dweller of this land’. While this at first suggests that Japanese culture will
dominate, on closer inspection the statement hints at a more inclusive vision of
the other. As Stephen Frosh says, ‘this “other” lies as much within as without’,
and ‘put in literary terms, this recognition of the other within ourselves becomes an
instance of intertexuality – reading the other we reconstruct ourselves’ (1995: 289).
I would like now to turn to two writers whose recognition of the Other has
led, if not to reconstruction, then at least to the construction of a more complex
form of subjectivity vis-à-vis the Other. The writers I would like to discuss are
Natsume Sōseki and Murakami Haruki, who, to my mind, bracket with great effec-
tiveness the last century of Japanese literature. At first glance, they may seem
very dissimilar. Sōseki, born the year of the Meiji Restoration, is touted as
embodying the tensions and tragedies of Meiji masculinity. Steeped in traditional
culture (in fact he had first wanted to be a China scholar and wrote Chinese
poetry on his deathbed), Sōseki’s direct encounter with the West was in many
ways a tormented one. Although a brilliant student of English literature, capable
of writing both poetry and prose in English (see the quotation at the beginning of
this chapter), Sōseki almost immediately felt alienated from contemporary English
culture and English citizens. Most students of his life are familiar with his
description of his time in London where he ‘lived as a stray dog among wolves’,
clearly seeing himself as the abject Other from the wolf pack of Western
civilization. Even more intriguing is Sōseki’s disturbing anecdote of walking down
a busy London street and seeing a yellow wizened man approaching him, only to
realize as he grew closer that the man was himself – or rather, his reflection in a
shop window (Miyoshi 1974: 56–7). This anecdote suggests that Sōseki himself
became the phantasmic Other while in London, a creature who, in defiance of
the Lacanian mirror stage where the infant learns to distinguish between itself
and its mother through its delighted recognition of its own unique form, can
only see itself as a distorted outsider.
In contrast, the postwar Murakami appears initially to be the very model of a
postmodern international writer. Murakami’s writings give the impression of the
author as flitting seamlessly from Japan to Europe to the United States and,
within the States, to be happy making his home there (as long as it is in a univer-
sity town such as Princeton or Cambridge). Rather than being nostalgic for East
Asian tradition, Murakami apparently went out of his way to avoid reading
Japanese literature although, significantly, his father was a teacher of Japanese
literature in high school. And while Sōseki struggled mightily, although often bril-
liantly, to create a theory of literature that would transcend that of any English
critic, Murakami seems to toss off translations of American literature with
almost contemptuous ease. Furthermore, when Murakami does tell anecdotes or
write stories based on his direct experience of Western sojourns, they are usually
funny, or at most slightly rueful, indicative of a vision in which it is the
Westerners who come across as odder or more picturesque than their Japanese
observer.
Yet, Sōseki and Murakami share some major and fascinating similarities. As
should be clear from the above descriptions, they are both deeply drawn to the
Western Other and both of them may legitimately be seen as constructing an
important part of their literary identity through interaction with the West. In
Sōseki’s case, his ‘struggle in the abyss of the self ’ as Senuma Shigeki calls it, bore
fruit not only in his extraordinary treatises on literature, but in some of his more
creative and imaginative efforts, most notably the Yōkyosh ū (Drifting in Space), a
collection of tales that he wrote in 1906 soon after returning from London, and
his Yume j ūya (Ten Nights of Dream) which appeared in serialized issues of the
Asahi shinbun in 1908. While critics correctly identify these works as romantic or
even slight compared to his later powerful novels such as Sorekara (And Then,
1909 [1978]) or Kokoro (1914 [1957]), and there is no question that the English
Romantic and pre-Raphaelite threads clearly on display in these early works are
rewoven with more subtlety and complexity in his later novels, the best of these
works contain an ethereal energy that allows them to stand alone.
Murakami’s incorporation of Western literature is even more obvious than
that of Sōseki. As many critics have pointed out, he mixes hard-boiled detective
fiction, cyberpunk science fiction, Greek tragedy and Raymond Carver-style
44 Susan Napier
realism to produce works that not only resonate profoundly with young Japanese
but are also extremely accessible to Westerners. As Jay Rubin, one of
Murakami’s most prominent translators, says of Murakami’s prose style, ‘its
American flavor is subtle and feels both foreign and natural at the same time’
(2002: 288).
But this chapter is not simply about Western influences, nor even is it about
the Western Other. Sōseki and Murakami are worth exploring not only for
their significant incorporation of the Western Other in their work but also for their
exploration of other ‘Others’, most notably the problematic role of the historical
Other and the gendered Other. Furthermore, Sōseki and Murakami’s works both
contain an openness to the ‘other side’ through the use of uncanny or phantas-
magorical tropes that highlight the permeability of boundaries. These
boundaries include those not only between Self and Other but between past and
present and dream and reality. Both also highlight outsiderhood in terms of the
self vis-à-vis, not simply the West, but also mainstream Japan, and themes of
abjection and repudiation appear frequently in each authors’ writings.
Turning to analyses of specific texts, I will begin with a brief work from Sōseki’s
Yōkyosh ū entitled ‘Rondontō ’ (The Tower of London). Written in essay style,
‘Tower’ purports to be a factual account of Sōseki’s one and only trip to the
Tower. Yet, from the beginning, an air of unreality pervades the account. Sōseki
describes himself as being like a ‘hare from the country let loose in Nihonbashi
[the Japanese equivalent of London Bridge]’ (Natsume 1992: 23) and speaks of
the ‘kumodeji’(cobweb system) (ibid.: 24) of London transport, implicitly
suggesting that he is an insect, trapped in the web of the West. The Tower itself,
however, signifies something very different. While it itself has ‘trapped’ many
prisoners through the years (Sōseki renders an affecting, and seemingly eye
witness account of the murder of the little princes and the execution of Lady
Jane Grey, for example), for Sōseki himself, the Tower clearly becomes an image
of enlightenment. As he says, ‘[b]etween those dark spaces [of arriving and
leaving the tower] everything is bright. It is as if the darkness surrounding me
was split with lightning . . . then the darkness returned. So the tower becomes for
me the focus of my worldly dream’ (ibid.: 25).
The use of the Buddhist term shukusei, rendered in translation as ‘the focus of
my worldly dream’ but perhaps more accurately as a ‘dream of before one is
born’ is intriguing, given that Sōseki is describing a place that he himself refers to
as ‘the epitome of English history’. It is as if Sōseki, despite his overt objections
to England and his sense of Otherness within it, still finds himself drawn to
aspects of English culture. Indeed, it is possible to speculate that it was not
England so much as modernity in general which alienated Sōseki. This hypoth-
esis is reinforced by Sōseki’s comments when he actually reaches the Tower. He
says:
I found twentieth century London gradually disappearing from my mind and

giving place to a fantastic picture of the past . . . After a while I felt as if
someone on the ‘opposite side’ (mukō gishi, literally ‘bank on the other side’) was
reaching an arm across to seize me . . . the extended arm drew me ever so
strongly and I found myself walking. The arm was so irresistible.
(ibid.: 27)1
What is it about the Tower that draws Sōseki’s persona so ‘irresistibly’ to the
‘opposite side’ of the moat, a ‘side’ which is clearly England, imbued with English
history, and also, as we subsequently discover, the female Other? Furthermore,
why does he sense a ‘brightness’ that empowers him to create fantastic pictures
of a past that is not his? What is it about the space (both fantastical and concrete) of
the Tower that allows him to commune equally with the Other?
On the one hand, Sōseki at the Tower is in control, which he was not on the
cobweb streets of London. Steeped in English history, more versed in English
literature than many of his host countrymen, Sōseki projects upon the physical
walls of the Tower a variety of ghosts from the English past: the little princes
reading aloud to each other before their death, their mother desperately bribing
the gatekeeper for one last chance to see them, Lady Jane Grey going to her
execution while wearing snow white clothes (although her blood spatters at the
Sōseki persona’s feet). Sōseki conjures up these images from his reading and his
immersion in the art of pre-Raphaelite poets and painters, enabling his projected
self to act as a confident tour guide to the other side.
Furthermore, as suggested by the list above, the images that Sōseki sees are
not ones of a civilization of modernity and enlightenment. They are blood
soaked (sometimes literally, in the case of Jane Grey) memories of a problematic
past. It is perhaps significant that Sōseki particularly expounds on the victims in
the Tower. Not only does the (presumably Japanese) reader see English justice at
its most barbaric but it may also be a means for Sōseki to be able to identify with
Western Other, since this is an Other that is vulnerable and powerless, adjectives
all too appropriate for Sōseki’s own condition in London.
On the other hand, Sōseki’s sense of control can only last for so long and can
be problematic in its intensity, tempting him to project his fantasies on to present-
day England as well. An example of this occurs towards the end of his stay at the
Tower as he incorporates the contemporary English feminine Other into his
fantasies by projecting them onto a mysterious and beautiful woman who seems
to have an uncanny knowledge of the Tower. Sōseki fantasizes that she is in fact
the incarnation of Jane Grey in an attempt to incorporate the historical and the
feminine Other into the reality of modern London.
But the narrator is not allowed to remain immersed in his fantasies for long.
Returning to his lodgings in a self-described ‘trance’, the Japanese visitor’s fancies
are rudely rejected by his landlord who offers prosaic explanations for every
seemingly uncanny event. The landlord is especially disillusioning on the subject
of the mysterious woman, saying ‘scornfully’ that ‘London is full of such beautiful
women. If you don’t look out, you may run into danger’ (Natsume 1992: 55).
Given this ironic and disillusioning ending, we may well ask again, how could
the Tower be so empowering as to seem comparable to a Buddhist flash of
enlightenment? It seems as if contact with the Other can be empowering only
46 Susan Napier
when the subject’s imagination is in charge and no longer abject because of the
realities of race and nationality. Similar to the ancient castle or house of a
Gothic fantasy, the Tower becomes a site of Otherness where conventional rules
are lifted or reversed and, in the free floating space of the uncanny, characters
can take on, if only temporarily, new powers.
Fujita Eichi asserts that Sōseki initially looked on his time in London as a
chance to fulfill his pent-up ambition not only to master the English language but
also to offer up the global achievements of English literature (Fujita 1999: 31).
Thwarted in this ambition and thoroughly alienated from English life, it is not
surprising that it was during this period that Sōseki constructed his doctrine of
jikohon’i or ‘on my own terms’, which can be seen as an intellectual gauntlet
thrown down in the face of Western society. And yet Sōseki’s terms are not
merely a knee jerk resistance to the West. Rather, as James Fujii, in suggesting
that we ‘abandon static models of binary influence’, says, ‘[Sōseki]’s literary view
is much more a dynamic process of self-reflexive engagement with otherness’
(Fujii 1993: 11). Indeed, Hazama in his analysis of the ‘dense’ quality of the
prose of ‘Tower’ suggests that Sōseki essentially explores a complex continuum
involving real world history, drama (specifically works by Shakespeare and by the
contemporary playwright Ainsworth) and infused with ‘illusion’ (gensō), ‘imagina-
tion’ (sōzō) and ‘fancy’ (k ūsō ) in order to touch what he (quoting Sōseki) describes
as ‘that mysterious thing called the past’ (Hazama 1999: 10–21 passim). He also
points to Sōseki’s frequent use of the word mieru (‘seems’, ‘looks like’) rather than
the more straightforward miru (‘I see’) as implicating the narrator within his own
fictional world (ibid.: 20). In his vision of the Tower, therefore, Sōseki creates and
manipulates his own version of Otherness in which he is, if only transiently, a full
participant.
Perhaps Sōseki’s most sustained engagement with otherness is his brief work
Ten Nights of Dream, written, like ‘Tower’, a few years after he returned from London.
As with ‘Tower’, here again, Sōseki takes on the persona of the outsider but in
this case the dreaming ‘I’ is never in control. Each dream is essentially an
engagement with the Other, be it the past (both personal and national), the femi-
nine, or the West. But in each dream the engagement is deeply problematic.
This is not the place for a detailed examination of the dreams, but certain
thematic clusters are obvious. A sense of entrapment pervades almost all the
dreams, often combined with a sense that the dreaming subject has been repudi-
ated from the dream world. In the Dream of the Seventh Night, this repudiation
is from a dream of Western modernity emblemized by a ship sailing westward in
which the dreamer seems utterly out of place – to the point where he jumps
overboard only to realize that he also does not belong in the black waters (of the
past, of Japan, of his own consciousness?) below.
In the Dream of the Sixth Night, the dreaming ‘I’ desperately tries to incor-
porate the Japanese past into the problematic Meiji present, by sculpting ancient
‘guardian gods’ out of wood, only to be once again repudiated: he finds that
there are no ‘guardian gods’ in the woods of the present day. While the Sixth
Night Dream evokes the national past, the Dream of the Third Night evokes
both a personal and a national past. The dreamer is weighed down by the
personal past in the form of a blind child upon his shoulders. The child
announces that he is actually a blind man whom the ‘I’ murdered a hundred
years before, suggesting that the child actually stands for a Doppelgänger of the
dreamer who would normally repress his rage and guilt. But the ‘hundred years
ago’ reference also hints at the nation’s own violent past and the historical
burden that contemporary Japanese must bear. Otherness then, can be some-
thing imbricated within both the culture and the Self.
The other side of entrapment is the desire to escape from it but, here again,
the dreaming ‘I’ is stymied. As his samurai persona despairingly states in the
Dream of the Second Night, ‘my internal self was sealed, all exits blocked’
(Natsume 1974: 34). In this case the dreamer is unable to escape into Otherness
(in this case a longed-for Buddhist enlightenment) and is left with his lonely
subjectivity. Although the dreamer is a samurai, and therefore again evocative of
the past, his inability to escape his inner self suggests one of Sōseki’s later key
themes, the inevitable loneliness of the individual in the modern world, no
longer able to draw upon past tradition for empowerment. In the Dream of the
Fifth Night, the ‘I’ is a condemned prisoner who has lost hope of escape. The
only thing he waits for is to see his beloved once again but is betrayed by the
machinations of an evil witch-woman.
Issues of masculinity and femininity are also major elements in the dreams.
The previously mentioned dream of the samurai can be read as referring to both
spiritual and physical impotence as the dreamer watches his ‘9½ inch dagger
blade’ dwindle down to a needle point as he desperately strives for enlighten-
ment. The passive male ‘I’ on the ship in the Dream of the Seventh Night is
approached by women asking incomprehensible questions, another reason,
perhaps, for his decision to jump off the ship. In fact, it is often the enigmatic
female Other who places the masculine ‘I’ in a passive or even humiliating posi-
tion (with the single exception of a nurturing maternal presence in the Dream of
the Ninth night). In general, as in the Fifth Night Dream, women are traducers:
they appear in mirrors and disappear in reality. Ultimately, they are elusive. They
die and transform into flowers (Dream of the First Night), suggesting a purified
but unattainable form of female sexuality.
In the memorable vision of the Dream of the Tenth Night, women threaten
the male with a vision of despoliation. In this dream a mysterious and beautiful
woman threatens the narrator’s friend, Shōtarō, with the hideous fate of being
licked by an endless series of pigs. The pigs with their ‘filthy snouts’ suggest an
image of grotesque female sexuality – Shōtarō has to beat them off with his
‘stick’ – and this is supported by another of Shōtarō’s friends who remarks (in an
intriguing echo of the landlord in ‘Tower’) that ‘too much looking at women was
never a good thing’ (Natsume 1974: 63). But the conveyor belt image of the
endless numbers of pigs may also hint at the scene as a metaphor for industrial
life or even, perhaps, the never-ending impurities inside one’s own soul. In this
regard it is also interesting to note that Shōtarō’s friend would like to receive his
panama hat if, as seems likely, Shōtarō dies. If we see the hat as a signifier of the
48 Susan Napier
self, and the male self in particular, then not only Shōtarō’s death but the loss of
his hat suggests another image of ineffectual masculine identity, not only in relation
to women but also, perhaps, to the West, since the soon-to-be lost panama hat
would have been a relatively recent import.
In this final dream, Sōseki brings together a number of visions of Otherness:
the alienated self, the unattainable and threatening female, and the unmaintainable
Western Other. If, as psychoanalysis suggests, dream characters are frequently
projections of ourselves, an attempt to connect with a variety of ‘other sides’
within our own nature, then Sōseki’s dreams at heart hint at what might be
described as a continually frustrated attempt to deal with Otherness. The dreaming
‘I’ is aware of his isolation and alienation and yearns for the Other but is ulti-
mately incapable of crossing the boundaries.
There are other moments in Sōseki’s literature, however, where Self and Other
do seem to meet, at least transitorily. Perhaps one of the most memorable
moments is in his mimetic later novel, And Then, when Daisuke, his intensely
alienated protagonist, abandons himself briefly in an ecstatic union with the
Absolute, symbolized by the white flowers that Michiyo, the woman he longs for
but cannot possess, brings to him. For a brief moment, Daisuke actually does
seem to penetrate to the ‘Other side’ as he finds ‘amid the rain, amid the lilies,
amid the infinite past . . . a life that was pure and unsoiled’ (Nihon bungaku 1965:
321). But the novel’s ambiguous denouement hints that this is a condition that
cannot last or is only attainable through death or madness.
I would like to turn now to Murakami Haruki, another writer whose work has
shown a sustained engagement with Otherness. Space does not permit me to
deal with anywhere near the entirety of his lengthy œuvre so I would like to
concentrate on the novel that many consider his masterpiece, Nejimakidori
kuronikaru (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle). Written in 1996 (trans. 1998), almost
one hundred years after Sōseki’s Dreams, and containing in its Japanese edition over
nine hundred pages, Chronicle seems initially an unlikely comparison with Sōseki’s
far shorter pieces. And yet, the work deals with a notably similar range of issues,
including the burden of the past, both personal and national, the desire for salva-
tion and enlightenment – often combined with a sense of entrapment – and a
fascination with the mysteries of female Otherness on the part of a largely
passive male subject. Furthermore, all these themes are encased in a mysterious
atmosphere redolent of potential other worlds and permeated with dreams,
psychic visions, and other conduits to Otherness such as a computer program
that links to memories of the dead, and a well whose walls must be passed
through in order for the protagonist to finally connect with the other side. It is
perhaps not coincidental that Chronicle was one of Murakami’s first works after
his return to Japan from a prolonged sojourn in the West. Although, by all
accounts, Murakami’s time abroad was a largely pleasant one, it seems that the
dynamic of an exile (even if, in Murakami’s case, a voluntary one) looking criti-
cally at Japanese culture is one that is shared by both writers’ works.
Chronicle, as the ‘chrono’ in the title hints, ranges across time as well as space to
present a memorable but disturbing vision of a Japan in which both masculine
and feminine subjectivities exist in uneasy relation to a problematic social fabric, and
frequently in an estranged relationship to themselves as well – as the novel’s use
of pairings and Doppelgänger underlines. Chronicle also deals in a brilliant and orig-
inal manner with Japan’s experience in Manchuria. In the novel Manchuria
becomes not only a non-Japanese Other but a genuine example of the ‘other
side’ where maps are useless and where the laws of nature and humanity do not
apply. Examples of the latter include the psychic powers of Lieutenant Honda
and the quasi-occult experience of Lieutenant Mamiya when he is bathed in a
‘flood of light’ (p. 165) at the bottom of the well into which he has been thrown
by Russian and Mongolian soldiers. Examples of the former are equally memo-
rable, ranging from the skinning of Yamamoto by Mongolian soldiers to the
killing of the zoo animals and the massacre of the escaped Chinese prisoners of
war by the Japanese army.
Murakami’s choice of Manchuria as not only national Other but uncanny
Other might potentially be seen as a reluctance to engage with the reality of
Japan’s incursion into Manchuria, a reality that has been erased in many postwar
Japanese textbooks. Within the context of the novel, however, the ‘othering’ of
Manchuria actually underlines both the protagonist’s and the nation’s problem-
atic relationship with the reality of their past history. If the only way to deal with
Manchuria is to make it an occult Other, this suggests the deep ambivalence that
the Japanese feel toward confronting a past that at this point in time may appear
surreal. By ‘othering’ Manchuria, Murakami paradoxically points to its stubborn
reality. By defamiliarizing the war in Manchuria, Murakami forces the reader
(especially the Japanese reader) to revisit the war in a new light.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing instances of this use of defamiliarization is
Chapter 9 which Murakami entitles ‘The Zoo Attack, or, a Clumsy Massacre’.
The chapter records the ‘emergency liquidation’ of the animals in Hsinching zoo
by a force of Japanese soldiers led by a reluctant lieutenant, in the last days of
the war. The rationale for the killing seems somewhat dubious (as one character
says, ‘the whole country is going down the drain and you’re asking me about a
goddamn fucking zoo? Who gives a shit?’ (p. 401)), but this only heightens the
surreal horror of the episode. The killings are seen from the lieutenant’s point of
view and described in a flat, virtually affectless style which also adds to the
horrific intensity as the animals writhe in agony, and the soldiers are almost suffo-
cated by the smell of warm blood. The episode begs the question of why
Murakami did not choose to describe the slaughter of human beings by the
Japanese rather than animals. But, to my mind, Murakami’s decision to highlight
the animals’ death brings home the ghastliness of war with a freshness that
shocks all the more. Although the animals are clearly ‘Other’ in comparison to
human beings, this Otherness paradoxically emphasizes the corrupting effect war
has on the individual. The animals’ total innocence and total lack of connection
to the insane world that war has wrought make their unnecessary deaths all the
more disturbing.
Intriguingly, Sōseki also deals with Manchuria in a work published at the same
time as ‘Tower’, the short story ‘Shumi no iden’ (The Heredity of Taste, 1906).
50 Susan Napier
The story begins with a vision of war itself as an ‘other’ world in which the narra-
tive imagines the gods of war encouraging the Russians and Japanese to create a
‘massive slaughterhouse’ in which ‘ferocious hounds’ (Natsume 1974: 117) lap
blood and devour mangled human flesh. War story competes with romance as
the narrative progresses for, ultimately, ‘The Heredity of Taste’ is an occult love
story in which the narrator/protagonist finds that his friend Kō-san, who had been
killed in Manchuria, has left behind a psychic connection with a beautiful young
woman who, although she never actually spoke to Kō-san, visits his grave and
eventually becomes a nurturing friend to the dead soldier’s mother. While the
narrator attempts to modernize the relationship by ascribing it to ‘heredity’
(owing to the fact that Kō-san’s father and the young woman’s mother had had
an unfulfilled love affair), the reader is more likely to remember the scene when
the narrator first sees the young woman at the graveyard in the Jakko-in Temple.
As the narrator describes it: ‘There’s nothing in the world more deeply calm than
a tomb: yet as she stood before it, this woman was more calm. The ginkgo’s
yellow leaves are lonely and the tree, since it is haunted, lonelier still: but, seen in
profile under its emptying branches, she looked so yet more utterly lonely as to
seem the manifested essence of that sad-ghosted trunk’ (p. 167).
In the narrator’s vision the woman is Other, not simply in her beauty and
femininity but in her connection to the world of ghosts and death, in particular
Kō-san’s death which, Sōseki hints, is an unnecessary sacrifice to the dogs of war.
Although the story’s ending is technically an upbeat one, the images of death
and the shadows of the past that surround the woman are hard to dismiss. She is,
therefore, a potentially subversive conduit to other worlds, one who calls into
question the values of society.
In this regard, the woman shares much in common with the female characters
in Murakami’s Chronicle. Essentially a quest narrative, the novel follows its
narrator Tōru Okada’s search, first for a disappearing cat, then for a disap-
pearing wife, and finally for a self that may have disappeared long ago or
perhaps never even existed. Tōru is passive – for much of the novel he is more of
a link to other characters’ stories than an independent protagonist. Initially these
other characters include males, such as Lieutenant Mamiya whose account of his
entrapment in a well brings Tōru into contact with Japan’s recent history in
Manchuria. But as the novel continues, it is the many enigmatic female charac-
ters who dominate, both galvanizing and tantalizing Tōru as he attempts to break
out of his passivity.
As with Sōseki’s female characters, they vary considerably, but they are all far
from ‘normal’ women. They range from a ‘prostitute of the mind’ to a virginal
young girl who conducts surveys of balding men (another hint of male inca-
pacity, perhaps), to a sophisticated middle-aged women who sells psychic services
and has her own personal connection with Manchuria. Although Tōru’s
vanishing wife Kumiko dominates the book through her mysterious absence and
ambiguous, disembodied voice, all the female characters seem to stand on the
threshold between dream and reality. Again, like Sōseki’s female characters, they
are associated with both purity and corruption, offering flashing glimpses of
otherworldly knowledge, healing, and enlightenment but also degradation and
horror. Tōru is initially unwilling to open up to the reality of his own past and to
his own problematic identity, most notably the lies on which his marriage is based
and the suppressed violence in his own nature. Through the prodding of the
female characters, however, he begins to connect with the other side of his own
nature and also, ultimately, that of his country’s recent past, as he and the reader
learn of the violence of the Japanese incursion on the Asian continent and the
pervasive corruption of Japanese society today, embodied in the person of his
wife’s brother who may well be a dark Other of Tōru himself. Or, as Rubin puts
it, ‘Murakami has always written about half-remembered things that lurk in the
mind until they unexpectedly jump out and grab us. In the Wind Up Bird
Chronicle . . . what leaps out at his narrator from the depths of his individual
memory is Japan’s dark and violent recent past’ (2002: 213).
David Gray’s ‘ghosts that crawl upon the skin’ are made actual in Murakami’s
work not only through his female characters but through his use of myth and
legend. As with Sōseki’s work which clearly uses imagery derived from the English
pre-Raphaelite tradition along with a Zen-inspired search for absolute transcen-
dence, Murakami’s novel incorporates both Western and Japanese religious and
mythic references. The most obvious of these are the Greek myths, including
references to Theseus and the minotaur (symbolized by the unclean Ushiwaka,
the warder of Kumiko), and the Orpheus myth in which Orpheus goes down
into Hades to rescue Eurydice (Tōru and Kumiko). But Murakami also acknowl-
edges the similar Japanese myth of the god Izanagi’s search for his sister/lover in
Yomi, the land of the dead.
Incorporating the Other, however, does not necessarily guarantee a transcen-
dence from the loneliness of subjectivity. Tōru’s ultimate discovery of his wife
does not lead to their reunion. As with many of his novels, the male protagonist
is left wiser, more experienced, but ultimately alone with himself. In Sōseki’s
works, both mimetic and fantastic, the male is usually either psychologically
trapped (Kokoro, And Then, The Wayfarer) or else actually dead, most poignantly in
Kokoro. As the narrator says despairingly of his dead soldier friend in ‘The
Heredity of Taste’, ‘Kō-san since he jumped down into that damned ditch last
November has not climbed back out. Though I rap my stick on the wall of the
family tomb, though I shake it with my naked hands, Kō-san will sleep on in that
ditch. He will sleep on not knowing that such a beautiful girl is coming to visit his
grave carrying such beautiful flowers’ (p. 169).
Both Sōseki and Murakami do, however, offer brief glimpses in which the
Other is finally met in a moment of sacred union. In Sōseki’s case we must
return to the Tower of London and his description of it as a flash of light
bringing back images of a former life. The flash of light, however, is bounded
by darkness, the reality of Sōseki’s existence in London, which is re-emphasized by
the landlord’s cynical deconstruction of his Tower fantasies on his return from the
visit.
Chronicle also offers a literal flash of light, the scene of Lieutenant Mamiya in
the well when a ray of light briefly illuminates his prison. But, as Mamiya goes
52 Susan Napier
on to relate, the moment of radiance is evanescent. It does not save Mamiya or
lead him to another, better world. Tōru, looking for his own enlightenment, ulti-
mately finds himself at the bottom of a well visited, not by light, but by rising
water. Although we can interpret the water as purifying, washing away the illu-
sions and corruption that Tōru incorporates in himself and through his Doppelgänger
figures, the image also has nihilistic implications as the water seems to wash away
hope since, even after he is rescued from the well, he still cannot save Kumiko.
Unlike Kō-san, Tōru can ‘climb back out’ but the mysterious female Other is still
largely unattainable.
Even more than Sōseki’s works, Chronicle shows many attempts to ‘meet on the
other side’, especially in the attempted connections between male and female. In
certain ways, Tōru and his female interlocutors do help each other but ultimately
remain sundered. For example, Tōru’s birthmark helps the women who touch
and kiss it but he himself never speaks or touches them. Tōru makes love to the
‘prostitute of the mind’, Creta Kano, but never actually accompanies her to
Crete and she ultimately disappears. In the novel’s most disturbing vision,
Noboru Wataya has a sexual encounter with Creta Kano but this leads to her
defilement, to the production of something grotesque within her. This is a
meeting where Self and Other produce only abjection.
Like Sōseki’s dreamers, Murakami’s male protagonists’ search for union and
transcendence is ultimately stymied, a metaphor perhaps for the ultimate impos-
sibility of connection between human beings. I began this chapter by
emphasizing the permeability of the boundaries between Other and Self, or
other side and reality, and hope that I have to some extent demonstrated this.
Certainly ‘reality’ in both Sōseki’s and Murakami’s works is deeply overlaid with
otherness. But, as should also be clear by now, the Other can only penetrate so
far. Even after a century, the boundaries of Otherness still exist and the final
transcendent meeting on the other side is inexorably postponed.
Note
1 Sōseki’s fundamental attraction to the more romantic elements of English culture is
supported by the fact that two other stories in Yōkyoshū, ‘Maboroshi no tate’ (The
Shield of Illusion) and ‘Kairokō’ (The Dew on the Shallots) are clearly inspired by
English Romantic and pre-Raphaelite literature. Intriguingly, ‘The Shield of Illusion’
also highlights a mirror-like entity, in this case the shield belonging to William, the
young protagonist. Unlike the repudiating ‘mirror’ of Sōseki’s London shop window,
the shield, although decorated with a fearsome Medusa head, ultimately becomes a
magical conduit through which William and his lover enter a ‘world beyond the
shield’ containing a ‘southern land whereof the troubadours sing’. While Sōseki’s
Japanese personae seem never able to finally break through to the other side, it is
interesting that he sees his Western protagonists as having that capability.
References
Akutagawa Ry ūnosuke (1921 [1971]) ‘Kamigami no bishō’ (The Faint Smiles of the Gods),
in Akutagawa zenshū vol. 3, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
——(1970) A Fool’s Life, New York: Grossman Publishers.
Etō Jun (1974) Natsume Sōseki, Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Frosh, Stephen (1995) ‘Time, Space and Otherness’, in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds)
Mapping the Subject, London: Routledge.
Fujii, James (1993) Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Fujita Eiichi (1999) Sōseki to ibunka taiken (Sōseki and Cross-Cultural Experience), Tokyo:
Waizumi shoin.
Hazama Kafumi (1999) Natsume Sōseki shoki sakuhin (Natsume Sōseki: The Early Works),
Tokyo: Waizumi shoin.
Ivy, Marilyn (1995) Discourses of the Vanishing, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lippit, Seiji (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press.
Miyoshi, Masao (1974) Accomplices of Silence, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Murakami Haruki (1996 [1998]) The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, New York: Alfred Knopf.
Nakamura Miharu (1998) ‘Yukuefumei no jinbutsu’ (Lost People), Kokubungaku 43(3): 104–
10.
Natsume, Sōseki (1974 [1907]) Ten Nights of Dream, Hearing Things, The Heredity of Taste, trans.
Aiko Itō & Graeme Wilson, Rutland, VT: Charles Tuttle.
——(1978) ‘Rondontō’ (The Tower of London), in Natsume Sōseki zenshū , vol. 1, Tokyo:
Chikuma shobō.
——(1992) The Tower of London, trans. Peter Milward and Kii Nakano, Brighton: In Print.
Nihon bungaku (Anthology of Japanese Literature) (1965), vol. 13, Tokyo: Chūō kōron.
Rose, Gilbert (1986) The Power of Form, Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Rubin, Jay (2002) Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, London: Harvill Press.
Tsuruta Kinya (1985) ‘Mukōgawa no bungaku’ (Literature of the Other Side), in
Kokubungaku kenkyū shiryōkan (ed.) Bungaku ni okeru ‘mukōgawa’ (The ‘Other Side’ in
Literature), Tokyo: Meiji shoin.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Faris, Wendy (eds) (1995) Magic Realism: Theory, History, Commu-
nity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Part I
External others
3 Who holds the whip?
Power and critique in Nagai Kafū’s
Tales of America
Rachael Hutchinson
Introduction
The representation of Self and Other in modern Japanese literature is arguably
at its most evident in discourse of the Meiji period, at a time when Japan was
seeking to define her place in a rapidly changing world. In a discursive context of
European racial hierarchies and Social Darwinism, the Other that seems to
dominate Meiji writing is the West, constructed as seiyō (Occident) in binary
opposition to Japan’s tōyō (Orient). This West assumed huge proportions in both
political and literary discourse in the context of a modernising Japan. Fukuzawa
Yukichi (1835–1901) and the Meirokusha investigated Western models in their
written search for a method for modernisation, while travel writing and fiction set in
the West became increasingly popular.1 By the early twentieth century, authors such
as Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), Shimazaki Tōson (1872–
1943) and Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) had travelled in Europe and published short
stories based on their experiences. But what was ‘the West’ in Meiji writing, and
how did it function in literature of the period? When one encounters the miser-
able figure of Sōseki in London, weighed down by depression and an inferiority
complex, and when one reads Meirokusha discourse, based on the principle of
bunmei-kaika where Japan was to open up and achieve illumination and enlighten-
ment by following in the footsteps of Europe, one might think that the West in
Meiji writing functioned only as a model to emulate, an advanced entity able to
exert imperialistic power through unequal treaties and cultural trends. Even
though, after the Russo-Japanese War in particular, Japanese writers felt an
increasing sense of unease with this model and took a more questioning and
exploratory approach to issues of modernisation and defining the national iden-
tity, many critics have read literature and fiction of the period as subscribing to
the ideals of bunmei-kaika discourse. This kind of theorising on Meiji literature I
call ‘gap theory’, because it presupposes that any and every Japanese writer on
the West or on the future of Japan felt in their hearts that Japan was inferior to the
West and needed to catch up or close the gap.
Such ‘gap’ theorising may be seen in readings of Nagai Kaf ū’s Amerika mono-
gatari (Tales of America, 1908 [2000]).2 Written in 1903–7, it spans a time when
the popular image of America as the ‘sacred land of liberty’ was disintegrating
58 Rachael Hutchinson
and Meiji writers were taking a more critical approach to modernisation and
Japanese identity (Kamei 1975). However, Kaf ū¯ has not often been seen as a
critical writer, instead associated mainly with his love of the demi-monde and
its prostitutes. Tales of America itself reads on the surface like travel writing,
recounting the adventures of a young Japanese intellectual abroad, and when
it was published Waseda bungaku reviewed it as ‘postcard-like’, with no coherence
or deeper connecting ideology, a set of images of America appearing before
the reader for the purpose of entertainment and delight. Edward Seidensticker
(1965) reads the collection as mainly an egotistical pose to arouse envy from
young Japanese males left at home, while Ken Ito (1991) reads it in terms of
yearning for the Other after an Orientalist model. Ito’s argument is compli-
cated by the application of René Girard’s triangular desire, but he states that
the authorial persona of Tales of America ‘is a creature whose every perception
is coloured by his yearning to become an artist of another race’.3 Ito argues
that this yearning, coupled with a ‘sense of deprivation’ at being born in Japan
and not in the West, formed Kaf ū’s desire for the ‘given object’, or all things
Western:
A writer from a developing nation, he had learned to base his definition of

what it meant to be cultured and civilized upon his understanding of the West.
He viewed his own country’s distance from Western modernity as the essential
feature of its identity.
(ibid.: 42)
Ito here assumes that Kaf ū subscribed to the view held by not a few intellectuals
in the Meiji period, that Japan’s distance from Western modernity, culture and
civilisation was the essential feature of its identity – thus defining Japan by its
distance from the Western goal.4 This model portrays Kaf ū and other Meiji intel-
lectuals as passively coming into contact with the superior West and reacting to
it, perpetuating the ‘Western action, Eastern response’ stereotype of Japanese
history. It has been argued that many intellectuals, including the Meirokusha
ideologues, took the basic premise in their writing that Japan’s distance from ‘the
West’ was what defined Japan as ‘Japan’, and that the Japanese Self existed only
in contrast to its Western (superior) Other.5 But Ito’s use of this model in relation
to literature overlooks the number of intellectuals and writers such as Futabatei
Shimei, Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ōgai, Nagai Kaf ū and others, who questioned
this definition of Japanese identity and asked whether Japan needed to Westernise
at all in the pursuit of modernisation.6 Meiji literature is full of representations of
the Western Other, and not always the white European male who came to visit
Japan – the Other from far away impinging on the Japanese consciousness through
physical presence.7 Japanese writers also travelled overseas, and reported back
what they saw – not in the direct description of the Iwakura mission but in medi-
ated, critical constructions, often analytical of the relationship between Japan
and the Other in question. Far from being a discourse dominated by triangular
mediation and exoticist yearning for the Other in terms of ‘gap theory’, Meiji
Power and critique: Nagai Kaf ū 59
literature is often very critically aware and distanced from the supposed ‘object of
desire’.
Nagai Kaf ū’s Tales of America is an interesting case in point. On a closer exam-
ination of the ‘America’ represented in the collection, and of how this
representation is used, we see that Kaf ū uses the Western Other in these stories
in a consistently critical way. The dynamic between binarism and complexity in
Kaf¯ū’s works demonstrates the active role of the writer in choosing how to repre-
sent the Western Other. At times Kaf ū employs a simple binary construct of
Japan/America to make his point, while at other times he complicates the
contrasts through inversion or by the introduction of an external observer. In this
chapter I will examine three stories, each of which exemplifies one of these treat-
ments of the American Other. ‘Ichigatsu Ichijitsu’ (‘January First’, 1907)
demonstrates a simple binary construct, where ‘America’ is used for contrast
against Japan and ultimately as the foil for cultural Self-definition. ‘Chōhatsu’
(‘Long Hair’, 1906) shows an exploration of sexual and gender roles through
inversion; and ‘Rinkan’ (‘In the Forest’, 1906) employs an external observer.8 The
American Other acts as a trope through which Kafū investigates ideas of power,
freedom, sexual pleasure, gender roles, colonial legacy, nation-building, and the
exile abroad. This Other is used for critique and definition of the Japanese Self, and
for a deeper interrogation and problematisation of the very idea of Otherness.
The representations, critiques and interrogations of the Other in these three
stories are played out through narratives of sexual power. It is interesting that
feminist readings of Kaf ū are almost nonexistent, because ‘January First’ seems
like the perfect example to use as evidence for his critical awareness of the
gender inequalities inherent in Meiji society. All three of the stories I have chosen
for the purposes of this essay centre on the operation of power in relationships
between men and women.9 ‘January First’ shows men’s domination of women in
Japan and the comparative freedom of women in America, even though such
‘equality’ is acknowledged as superficial. In ‘Long Hair’ and ‘In the Forest’, Kaf ū
goes much further into the implications of power relations between men and
women, using the central relationship as the starting point for critical enquiry
into the nature of power itself. The domination and submission in such relation-
ships read as metaphors for racial domination, colonialism and slavery, while
inversions of expected roles interrogate the expectations of Kaf ū’s readers, both
in the Meiji period and in the present. The question of who holds the whip in
each relationship, and who is bound by cords, is the common question of all
three stories which opens a window on Kaf ū’s critical assessment of gender roles
and national history.
Direct contrast: ‘January First’

When considering Kaf ū’s three main treatments of the American Other in this
collection, the treatment which seems the most simple and straightforward is that
of direct contrast, drawn between Japan as a restrictive Confucian society and
America as a land of individual freedom and democracy. ‘January First’, published
in Taiseiyō on 20 August 1907, provides a clear example of this technique.
Masayuki Akiyama objects that Kaf ū’s aestheticism is at odds with American
Puritanism, so that his ‘understanding of American democracy may be said to be
external, sensuous, subjective and self-centred’ (1981: 97). However, a lack of
deep understanding or an aesthetic literary approach did not stop Kafū from
using the image of America as a land of freedom to great effect, portraying a
value system far removed from Japanese Confucianism. Kafū by no means
accepted America uncritically as a true country of freedom, as evidenced by the
shock expressed in his diary and his indignation in a later essay at the banning of
Strauss’ Salome and the treatment of Gorky in New York.10 But freedom and inde-
pendence, which Kafū calls jiyū, are still an extremely important concept in Tales
of America, used to introduce a severe criticism of a Japan which cannot experience
such freedom itself.11 Kafū’s imagined ‘country of freedom’ is used as a spring-
board from which he begins to criticise Japanese ‘feudal’ attitudes.
As the title suggests, ‘January First’ opens at the New Year’s Day celebrations
for expatriate Japanese employees of the US branch of Tōyō Bank, complete with
traditional food and drink such as zōni and sake. The party resounds with the
slurping, chewing and crunching sounds of appreciation as the male guests seize
the opportunity to escape the strains of fitting into Western society (KZ 3.168–9).
The only person missing is Kaneda. He is described as being too ‘haikara’ for such
gatherings, a word meaning ‘too Westernised’ in the Rokumeikan sense. Indeed,
his ‘Japaneseness’ is questioned when it is revealed that he never appears at
Japanese-style banquets and loathes the sight of sake and rice. Having lived in
America for six or seven years, Kaneda apparently has no intention of ever
returning to Japan. Kaneda’s anti-Japaneseness and refusal to be companionable
with his fellow expatriates are given greater significance through Kaf ū’s repeti-
tion of the words ‘sake’ and ‘rice’, three and four times respectively. The emphasis
on the national aspect of these symbols through use of the particular words
Nihonshu (Japanese sake) and Nihonmeshi (Japanese rice) increases Kaneda’s
perceived distance from the Japanese community. One man finally speaks in
Kaneda’s defence, asserting that he has good reasons for his avoidance of
Japanese banquets. This new voice now takes over the narration, describing how
he heard Kaneda’s story one night at a French restaurant. Once the scene is set,
Kaneda himself takes over the story and we hear his words directly. This kind of
embedded narration – from third person, to involved narrator, to central char-
acter and back again – features often in Tales of America, and has been criticised
as cumbersome and distracting.12 But the embedded narration here serves a crit-
ical purpose, which becomes clear at the end of the story.
Kaneda reveals that Japanese cuisine reminds him of his dead mother, who
was subjected to constant criticism from her husband on everything from the
quality of her cooking to her choice of tableware. The description of this father
figure is telling:
My father is probably well known to some people; now he has retired, but he
was originally a Justice of the Supreme Court. He is a master of the Chinese
classics and poetry, with a pre-Restoration education, and on top of that,
he’s an adept at tea ceremony, having studied the style of the Kyoto School.
He is a connoisseur of everything from calligraphy, paintings and curios to
swords, bonsai and bonseki, so the house always looked like a combination of a
garden nursery and an antique shop.
(pp. 171–2)
This passage constructs the father as part of the Meiji establishment, well versed
in every aspect of traditional Japanese arts and crafts except music and drama
(but he even achieves this association when Kaneda likens his constant grumbling
to a rakugo performance). Kaneda next outlines the roles played by his father and
mother in the house:
the first thing I heard when I was born was the hoarse complaints of my
father, the first thing I saw was the figure of my mother who never untied
the cords which bound back her sleeves; and the idea that fathers were
frightening and mothers were pitiful was the first to take hold in my innocent
child’s mind.
(pp. 172–3)
The tasuki – cords which hold back kimono sleeves – act as the visible symbols of
power, not only in this household but also in the patriarchal values of Meiji
society. Kaneda’s mother cannot untie these cords, bound as she is to a lifetime of
servitude. The Kaneda household is thus constructed as the repository of all
traditional Japanese culture and social values; but it is the ‘innocent child’s mind’
exposed to these values which undergoes a violent transformation in adolescence:
Acquiring such preconceived ideas from such an environment, I finally

progressed to middle school, and when I began to read the English language
textbooks, contemporary magazines and so on which portrayed a perfect
home life and innocent children, the Western ideas that were so full of words
like ‘love’ and ‘home’ truly made a violent impact on my heart. Moreover, I
felt that at some indefinable point in time, an extreme spirit of rebellion had
built a firm foundation in my breast – telling me that words like ‘the teach-
ings of Confucius’ and ‘bushidō’ that came from my father’s lips were the
enemies of human happiness.
(p. 173)
Here the ideas of the West (se iyō no shisō ) are set up in direct contrast against
those of Confucianism and bushidō. Kaneda can no longer communicate with his
father and leaves to attend school, but his mother dies from pneumonia in the
winter before his graduation, struggling to bring in one of her husband’s
precious bonsai from the snowy garden. It is thus a combination of servitude and
Japanese traditional culture which kills her. From that point on, the sight of Japanese
cuisine reminds Kaneda of his mother’s lifelong bondage and death. Since coming
to America, Kaneda has found he can avoid the sight of Japanese cooking. But it
is not just the physical absence of Japanese food that frees him from grief: the
Western philosophy of ‘love’ and ‘home’ is seen all around him in the treatment
of women.
Kaneda observes that in America, the roles of men and women seem at least
on the surface to be much more equal. Within the home, relations are governed
by respect and consideration, while outside the home women can still behave in a
free manner and enjoy life. While other Japanese find fault with the indepen-
dence of American wives, Kaneda thinks it is marvellous:
I don’t care if it is just a superficial hypocrisy, a formality – if the husband

carves the meat at table and places it on dishes for the wife, she in return will
make the tea and cut the cake for him. Just seeing this gives me great plea-
sure, and if you pressed me to question that surface appearance I could not
bear the destruction of such a precious, beautiful image.
(p. 175)
When Kaneda sees a girl freely enjoying a picnic of sandwiches or an apple, or

married women in a restaurant sharing champagne and conversation late at night,
hardly looking at their husbands, he is even happier: ‘Is this not a great consolation
to my eyes, which have never before seen the happiness of a wife or a mother?’
(p. 175). ‘January First’ presents a harsh critique against Confucian morals and
traditional samurai values, through contrast with a freer ‘America’. Kaf ū’s critique
of Meiji values is made possible through the construction of an opposing system of
values in the West. The seemingly simple binary structure is used to great critical
effect, as Kaf ū delves into the fundamental difference between Japanese and
American shisō through an exploration of gender roles within the home and in
wider society.13 At the same time, Kaf ū’s critical awareness is clear in his recogni-
tion of the ‘superficial hypocrisy’ of American gender dynamics.
At the end of the story, the critical effect of Kaneda’s tale is borne out in the
narrative present as the brackets of the embedded narration are closed one by
one. Kaneda thanks the gentleman for accompanying him to the French restaurant
and listening to his tale. After a break in the text, the gentleman addressing the
assembled company at the New Year’s banquet closes his story, while the last
paragraph is written from the original third-person perspective:
The speaker finished his tale and once again picked up his chopsticks to
finish his zōni. The only sound to break the silence that fell upon the
company for some time was the conspicuous sighing of the manager’s wife.
The hearts of women are more sensitive towards everything, it seemed.
(p. 176)
The invisible third-person narration is tinged by a subjective observation,

suggesting that the supposedly omniscient narration is actually only the personal
viewpoint of one of the many assembled guests. The narrator says that only the
woman is affected by the tale, but it is evident that the entire company has been
affected, because all have fallen silent. The narrator’s naïve insensitivity is made
more evident when we realise the significance of the ‘conspicuous sighing’. The
manager’s wife is sighing not in sympathy for poor Kaneda, but for his poor
mother. She is sighing because she is Japanese, has come all the way to America,
the so-called ‘country of freedom’, but is still serving her husband’s guests. She is
the only woman here among her husband and the assembled men and bachelors,
and there are no wives at the party. Kaf ū has recreated Meiji society in the
microcosm of the expatriate banking community. These Japanese may be in
America, but they have not undergone Kaneda’s violent epiphany nor experi-
enced his spirit of rebellion against Meiji society. This is why Kaneda is not at the
gathering – not just because he loathes Nihonshu and Nihonmeshi but also Nihonshakai
(Japanese society) as well, governed as it is by a philosophy that denigrates women.
Inversion: ‘Long Hair’

First published in Bungei kurabu (1 October 1906), ‘Long Hair’ was written in May
1906. At first glance this story also seems to use a simple binary structure of a ‘free’
America versus a more restrictive Japanese society that prizes honour and family
status above all things. But Kaf ū here uses not one binary structure but many,
forming an interconnected system of binary sets: man/woman, Japan/America,
submissive/dominant, deviant/normal. Kaf ū’s use of the ‘Other’ in these binary
structures becomes complicated as the expected behaviour of each side is
inverted. Through such inversion and complication, Kaf ū examines the dynamics
of power and interrogates the authority of so-called ‘normative’ structures in
society and literature.
‘Long Hair’ reads on the surface as a tale of sexual liberation in New York.
The opening scene centres on questions of gender roles and national identity, as
the first narrator (jibun) spies an exceptional carriage out in Central Park one
spring, carrying an exceptional couple. The carriage obviously belongs to the
woman, with the man ‘riding next to her’. The narrator seeks clues to the couple’s
identity in the appearance of their hair. The man’s long, black hair curled to his
shoulders arouses speculation among onlookers about his nationality: Mexican or
South American is suggested, but the narrator knows ‘in the very instant I first
caught a glimpse of him’ that the man is Japanese like himself (p. 69). The
narrator next wonders ‘what kind of Japanese’ the man is, and whether the
woman next to him in the carriage is his wife. Here the woman is identified
primarily by her blonde hair: ‘kinpatsu’ is written in kanji with ‘burondo’ appearing
in the text as katakana rubi or supertext (p. 70). She is established as a white
Western woman with foreign, exotic colouring. The association of the couple’s
national identities with hair type reminds us of the title of the story, which as the
narrative unfolds comes to represent deeper issues of national identity, gender
stereotypes and sexuality.
After this sight of the couple by the first narrator, the story is told by watashi, a
fellow expatriate Japanese in New York.14 Having attended classes at Columbia
University with the man in the carriage, watashi can reveal that the man is
Fujigasaki Kunio, the eldest son of an aristocratic family. Kunio has left
Columbia in order to pursue travel and leisure, and now lives in an apartment on
Central Park with the blonde woman. When watashi tracks Kunio down, we have
our second description of the woman as she opens the door. Kaf ū builds on the
first exotic impression and creates an image of the ‘loose American woman’
based on the narrator’s reading of her sexuality. She is about 28, possessing
green eyes with long lashes and ‘the usual indescribable expression of a Western
woman’. Describing her hair, this time the word ‘blonde’ appears as a singular
word in the text in katakana, unmediated by rubi. Watashi describes her as ‘vulgar
yet fascinating’, partly because her hair is loosely tied and appears on the point of
falling down to tumble about her shoulders, and partly because she wears a loose
afternoon gown which shows off her rounded shoulders and arms (p. 72). This
narrator’s first sight of the woman clearly represents her as a sexual being, on
the point of becoming entirely dishevelled. This stereotypical image plays into the
reader’s expectations of the female as ready to be possessed by the male, ready
for the inversion of the female as possessor as the story unfolds.
Elsewhere in Tales of America Kafū makes use of the ideal of America as a
country of romantic love and sexual freedom in order to criticise Japan.15 Here,
Kafū highlights the ideal of America’s libertarian attitude by saying that ‘in this
country there was nothing at all unusual in a man and a woman going riding
together and so on’ (p. 74). However, this apparent freedom is undermined by
watashi’s reaction when he discovers that the two are having an affair. When
Kunio finally admits to watashi that the woman is divorced and outcast from
polite society, taking a succession of lovers to divert herself, watashi labels her a
‘fallen woman’, calling her immoral and ruthless. Her beauty and sexuality are
now seen as snares to entrap men. The relationship between this divorced, sexu-
ally active woman and the young aristocrat breaks all social conventions, and
watashi is shocked. While watashi censures their love for breaking social norms
and expectations, we soon find out that he has even more reason to be shocked,
in the nature of the relationship itself.
Kunio admits that this relationship will only last until the woman finds
someone else, but says that ‘I don’t mind if it lasts only a moment. Even if that
moment is painful, I don’t mind as long as I have five minutes, even one minute,
of sweetness’ (p. 76). Watashi first makes scholarly efforts to understand the situa-
tion, reading Daudet’s Sappho where the hero feels love and abhorrence for a
woman simultaneously, but he feels that Kunio’s love is ‘completely different, of
another kind altogether’. He observes that Kunio has not an ounce of ‘strong,
manly love’ about him. ‘It was just as if man and woman had swapped their
social positions (chi’i ) and he, despite being the man, was embraced in her arms,
wishing to spend his days under the woman’s protection as if in a dream, like a
male concubine’ (p. 77). In fact, the two have not only swapped social and finan-
cial positions, but their sexual roles as well. In Japan Kunio had spent his days
seeking older geisha to protect and nurture him, pursuing his ‘strange variety of
desire’ (sono ki-i na isshu no nozomi ). Kunio’s family had sent him to Columbia
University to curb him of his tendencies, but the image of America as a ‘sacred
land of liberty’ gives way to a darker kind of liberation, where Kunio can seek
out masochistic pleasures, ‘forgetting even his family, even his country’ under
the spell of this beautiful sorceress. At this point in time Kunio has been kept by the
woman for two years. Kunio is in agonies, going to great lengths to keep the
woman’s favour, but ‘women are creatures such that the more a man humbles
himself before a woman, the easier it is to fall victim to her tyranny’ (p. 78). This
tyranny extends to physical torment. Her nerves frayed from so many years
ostracised by society, the woman is prone to fits of rage in which she destroys her
belongings and beats Kunio. One day she experiences some kind of epiphany
while tearing out her hair and asks him to grow his hair long like Henry IV. He
takes pleasure in carrying out her wishes: ‘Kunio immediately grew his lustrous
black hair until it reached his shoulders, curling the ends out beautifully’. In the
final sentence we find out that the woman has ordered him to grow his hair to
satisfy her own sexual fetish, as the first narrator is told:
When you saw him in the carriage, you probably thought that his long hair
was done to be fashionable. But actually when she loses her temper, he lets her
tear out his long hair, and grants a kind of painful pleasure to the frenzied
woman.
(p. 79)
Kafū uses the central relationship of ‘Long Hair’ to interrogate and problematise
the nature of power. Kunio forsakes the most binding of all Japanese traditional
ties, with family and country, in order to satisfy the woman and his own
masochistic tendencies. In the revelation that the central relationship is based on
sadomasochism, we understand why Kunio will not leave the woman: he has
sacrificed everything for the opportunity to live out his submissive role. He is
emasculated, but it is evident that he enjoys his subjugated position. Kunio is what
we may call a ‘semi-colonised self ’. By choosing to live in this role, Kunio takes
some of the responsibility for his situation and becomes complicit in his own
‘colonisation’. Kunio’s complicity is seen in Kafū’s emphasis on the word ‘deci-
sion’ (kesshin) at the critical point in the story when Kunio leaves university for
good. As watashi admonishes Kunio for dropping out of university halfway
through his degree, Kunio is silent, eyes downcast, while we hear the woman
playing the piano in the background. When the music stops, Kunio says ‘as if
reaching a decision’, that he is taking leave from university for the moment. Kaf ū
places great emphasis on this word ‘decision’, which is repeated four times, once
in quotation marks: ‘the word that I used, “decision”, seemed to hold a deep
significance for him’ (p. 74). Kaf ū makes a further statement in this story by
naming the hero ‘Kunio’, with ‘Kuni’ represented by the character for ‘nation’. Is
the Japanese nation to be colonised by white American power? Is Japan complicit
in its own powerlessness in enduring unequal treaties with the West for so long?
By placing the ‘nation’ in the centre of a text about sexual power, Kafū gives a
subtle hint at contemporary political dynamics.
On the surface, ‘Long Hair’ represents ‘America’ as a liberated society, an
Other which inverts Japan’s gender roles and family expectations. This seems to
reinforce the image of America as everything Japan is not, where anything is
possible. But looking a little closer, the simple surface contrast of liberated
Other/repressed Japan does not hold true. The central relationship is only
possible because the normative societies of both America and Japan have
rejected these people as misfits – her because of her divorce and him because of
his particular dissipation. Their outcast status allows them to find pleasure
outside the norms of society as they live on its margins. Rather than liberated
America/repressed Japan, we see a construct of normative behaviour opposed to
sexual deviancy, a construct which transcends national boundaries. The story
ends with the man’s complete submission to the powerful, yet dangerously unbal-
anced, ‘Western woman’. Her sexuality is such a threat that the second narrator
ascribes it to derangement. Through the inversion of expected roles and the
presentation of the deviant as something which can rather provide sweetness and
pleasure, Kaf ū interrogates the authority of such ‘normative’ expectations.
Yet another level of inversion is found in the narrative medium. Kafū’s audi-
ence of Japanese male readers would have expected the kind of demi-monde
fiction of a young man abroad popularised by Tōkai Sanshi and to some extent
by Kafū himself in the early stories of Tales of America.16 As Stephen Snyder
argues, ‘Long Hair’ would have been greatly disturbing to this audience,
‘resisting as it does patriarchal demands for male dominance, as well as reversing
the financial order that is generally inscribed in demi-monde fictions, where male
customers, writers and readers habitually purchase, textualise, and consume the
female body’ (2000: 47). The emphasis on complexity and the questioning tone
of this story show a more subtle criticism than that at work in ‘January First’, as
Kafū’s critical inversions not only refer to the entities within the text ( Japan/
America, female/male) but also to the outside world of the reader. By making
readers face their own assumptions about gender roles and sexual power, Kaf ū’s
critique extends to contemporary Meiji society in the act of reading, thus tran-
scending the boundaries of the text.
External observation: ‘In the Forest’

Rinkan (In the Forest), written in November 1906, deals with the problem of race in
America, specifically the black/white issue in Washington, DC. and how the
history of slavery is still alive in the modern consciousness, here manifest in a white
soldier’s treatment of a young black maid. Where ‘January First’ relied on a simple
binary construct and ‘Long Hair’ used inversion of such binary constructs, ‘In the
Forest’ introduces an outside observer to question the legitimacy of binary relation-
ships which unavoidably involve power and marginalisation. ‘In the Forest’ is
interesting because Kafū makes it clear that the West, while serving as ‘Other’ to
Japan, has its own definitions of ‘Other’ within itself. The ‘new continent’ of
America is not a homogeneous whole, but is rift with the issue of racial discrimi-
nation. The opening of ‘In the Forest’ has the narrator commenting on the two
things which travellers most notice about Washington – first, that the capital city is
open and park-like in design, and second, the surprisingly ‘large numbers of
black people wherever you go’ (p. 108). The narrator is visiting Washington in
the autumn, and for two weeks he has been sightseeing – first, the White House,
‘official residence of the President’, then the Capitol and various government
offices, then Washington’s grave on the banks of the Potomac and finally the
leafy suburbs. The narrator proceeds through the sights in descending order of
political importance, the urban trappings of state set in contrast to the beautiful
natural scenery of Maryland. We expect that as the narrator travels out to the
forest the visible exercise of power will decrease, but in fact the central event of
the story shows that, even in the middle of a forest, power is everywhere. In the
opening lines we are thus alerted to the two main concerns of this story – race
and the power of the state.
Crossing the bridge across the Potomac into Virginia, the narrator (jibun) finds
a small train station servicing Arlington, identified as a place with a large public
cemetery, military training grounds, barracks and officers’ residences. Waiting at
the station are a number of soldiers, some young black maids ‘who probably
work in the officers’ houses’, and some ‘white middle-aged women apparently
back from shopping’ (p. 109). The men form a homogeneous whole, repre-
senting the military state, while the women are classified by their race and by
their social status as subservient maids or consumers (presumably also as officers’
wives). However, it soon appears that while the soldiers may represent state
power in their uniforms, their bodies are anguished and oppressed by that
power:
as all the varied passions of their youth and fine physiques are oppressed
by military rules and regulations, the anguish of their flesh is somehow
expressed in their faces tanned by the sun and in the colour of their
bloodshot eyes, making their appearance fearsome, but at the same time
pitiful.
(p. 109)
The narrator stands on the platform with the men and looks back at Washington
for the view of Capitol Hill. First he sees all the monuments and buildings
gleaming white in the sun, then turning red and assuming an exotic, almost alien
Otherness to his eyes.17 The city becomes state power incarnate as he muses on
the significance of the scene:
It was a clear, wide panorama. I was suddenly aware that this was the capital
city which presided over this great continent of the Western hemisphere,
and gazing at the setting sun reflected in the water, my abstract impressions
of race, humanity, nation, political power, ambition, reputation, history – all
these things began to pile on top of each other in my breast, coming and
going, like the clouds on a summer’s day.
(p. 110)
The narrator feels that his thoughts are incoherent and he would not be able
to put them into words: ‘Only, it was like I was vaguely pursuing the shadow
of something large, while at the same time I had the sensation of a kind of
strong respect (sonkei) pressing down upon the base of my neck’ (pp. 110–11). We
can surmise the nature of the ‘large something’ casting a shadow over his
thoughts, as well as the source of the pressure on the back of his neck, from the
order and significance of his ‘abstract impressions’ as he gazes at the capital. His
first impression concerns race (jinrui), only then followed by humanity (jindō ). If
race is utmost in his mind when looking at the capital, we are reminded of the
opening sentence that contrasted a park-like Washington with a large black
population. In this capital city ‘race’ comes before ‘humanity’, as people are
defined primarily by the colour of their skin and not by their shared status as
human beings. Next he mentions ‘nation’ or ‘state’ (kokka), reminding us of the
state power which represses the soldiers who serve it, and the ‘political power’
(seiken) which resides in the city. Government and the exercise of power is
primarily the domain of white male adults,18 and the following focus on ambi-
tion (yashin) and reputation (meibō ) in the city reinforces the powerful status of
politicians and the President of the United States. Finally he thinks of history
(re kishi ). The history of the American nation – one of immigration, pioneers,
displacement of the native population, slavery, the Civil War and the establish-
ment of the Union – is rife with the racial question which sparked his original
train of thought. The narrator may not see the thread linking his thoughts
and feel ‘incoherent’, but the pressure at the base of his neck is caused by
‘respect’ – a pressure to bow his head at the power of the American state,
perhaps, or perhaps a feeling of sympathy with the subjugated races in his own
position as a Japanese. This is interesting because it is the one place in the story
when the narrator hints at his own position in relation to the black/white matrix.
The pressure of the racial question intrudes upon his own body, because ulti-
mately he must face his own position in an America rift with racial tension. In
this passage, Kafū has focused our attention on the narrator’s position vis-à-vis
what he is seeing, and on Washington as the centre of American democracy and the
culmination of colonial history. Both constructions intensify the following
scene.
The narrator walks into the forest and hides as he comes across a white
soldier with a young black girl kneeling at his feet, crying and clasping her hands
to her breast in an attitude of prayer. She is pleading, clutching his hand – ‘So,
you are asking me to break up with you?’ The soldier is infuriated by her
presumption, ‘spitefully and arrogantly’ asserting that it is he who will break off
the relationship, not she, denying her the right to ask for anything or exercise
choice in the matter. The girl is of mixed blood, ‘as much as half white’ but Kaf ū
refers to her from the American soldier’s viewpoint: ‘He was a fine American,
and she was a daughter of the black race, who were previously slaves’ (p. 112).
The soldier is identified here as ‘American’, not ‘white’. No matter how
‘repressed’ his body may be by military regulations, he will always have the
distinction of ‘Americanness’ in the colour of his skin. The girl is also American,
but is identified only by her slave ancestry, as she has no access to power. While it
is not directly stated in the text, the white race may be read in terms of their rela-
tionship to the slaves – they were historically the slave owners. It is no coincidence
that the story is set in Virginia, a Southern state. The whole history of the slave
trade, which led to the economic might of the American South, informs the scene.
The girl’s powerless position is emphasised by her inability to speak after this
point. The narrator finds the ‘cruel and brutal live scene’ unbearable, but he only
leaves when he fears discovery as his invisibility is compromised by a ray of
sunlight.
As the narrator walks back through the forest, it is not the couple or their rela-
tionship which arouse his interest, but rather ‘the long-standing problem of the
black and white races in this country’:
Why on earth, I wondered, was the black race so despised and looked down
upon by the white race? Could it be because their appearance is ugly,
perhaps, or because it is black? Or perhaps it is simply because fifty years
earlier they were slaves. Perhaps human races will never be able to escape
oppression unless they form a unified political group. Will the state and the
army be necessary forever?
(p. 113)
Here the narrator directly connects state power to the racial question, and char-
acterises that connection in terms of oppression and slavery. The capital city
‘others’ its black population; whites look down on blacks; blacks have no access to
political organisation and so will be oppressed by the state forever. The relations
between black and white are thrown into further relief by the scene in the forest,
as sexual power complicates the colonial legacy. In some versions of the story, the
narrator ends by saying ‘it seemed that I was still thinking about the various
inconclusive aspects of this extremely large problem, so difficult to put into
words’.19 Sakagami Hiroichi argues that Kafū is not interested in the deeper racial
problem and has no conclusions about it himself because it is so far outside his
own experience (1997: 96). But if we read this story as a meditation on power, we
see that Kafū clearly questions the legitimacy of a political system founded along
racial lines, and the scene in the forest demonstrates how cruel the exercise of
such power can be.
Other versions of the text omit this questioning train of thought, ending
simply ‘I never saw that black girl again while I was living in Washington’.20 But
this deceptively simple sentence reinforces the centrality of the act of seeing in
this story. The central event in ‘In the Forest’ is ‘what the narrator saw in the forest’.
Through the narrator, Kaf ū shows an incisive critical awareness of the powers of
observation and the visibility or invisibility this bestows on the object observed.
On one hand, the reality of the black/white relationship in America is visible
only in the forest, in the margins, away from the city. Back in Washington, this
kind of ‘cruel and brutal’ scene becomes invisible, naturalised as part of the
fabric of society where black people only appear as maids and porters. The
invisibility of the colonial legacy in contemporary society is highlighted by the
fact that the narrator never sees the girl again. On the other hand, Kaf ū ques-
tions the relationship between visibility and power. The story opened with the
large numbers of black people the narrator sees wherever he goes, but these people
have no power in the city. Mere visibility does not confer power, and the girl’s
invisibility does not change anything. Both versions of ‘In the Forest’ question
the nature of state power in relation to race, and the Othering of one race by
another.
The agency inherent in the narrator’s act of observation raises further ques-
tions about the positioning of races and nations relative to each other. While the
narrator feels a pressure on his neck, like a yoke or the compulsion to bow, Kafū
shows no such subservience in his incisive use of the observer position. Kafū, as
representative of the ‘Oriental Other’ to the West, is here de-constructing
American society in observing how it views the Others within itself. The intro-
duction of the external observer is a method Kaf ū would use to great effect in
Furansu monogatari (Tales of France, 1909) in observing Europe and its relationship
to the so-called Orient of Egypt, Persia and India. The flexible positioning of the
observer external to the dynamic of power relationships allows Kafū to examine
the workings of power between nations, often in a colonial context. ‘In the
Forest’ shows the beginnings of Kaf ū’s examination of colonial power, and the
colonial legacy of a nation still dealing with its past. This attention to colonial
power is seen again in ‘Shingapōru no sūjikan’ (‘A Few Hours in Singapore’,
written in 1908), as Western overseers are shown using Malay and Chinese coolie
labour to build up the economic might of the British Straits colonies. In both ‘In
the Forest’ and ‘A Few Hours in Singapore’, Kafū as an outside observer has a
position of agency unavailable to the black girl or the Malay coolies. By writing a
critique of America’s political and social systems, and by asserting his own posi-
tion as observer of this powerful nation, Kaf ū interrogates the hierarchy of nations
so prevalent in Meiji discourse.
Conclusion
In the three stories examined above we see that Kaf ū used a number of
different methods to examine power relations at work in America, Japan and
the colonial world. Kaf ū’s use of the ‘Other’ is both complex and critical, extending
far beyond a simple ‘Japan versus America’ framework. It is not a homogeneous
‘America’ that appears in Tales of America, the totalised entity often portrayed
by gap-theorists of Meiji discourse, but a complex constellation of dichotomies
open to questions and critique, as Kafū attempts to comprehend what such
dichotomies mean for his own identity and for Japan’s place in the world. When
America is contrasted directly with Japan, Japan and the values of the Meiji
period come under scathing attack. When America is displayed as a place
where anything might happen, the ‘anything’ often turns out to be much more
complex than readers might have expected, as social and gender roles are
reversed and the exercise of power comes to the fore. As he examines the power
structures operating between sets of social systems – gender, race, and nation –
he makes it clear that these systems are fluid, changeable (open to inversion),
observable (and therefore not closed systems in themselves) and open to
critique. In examining the power dynamics at work in and between different
sets of alterities, Kafū interrogates the notion of ‘difference’ and ‘alterity’ in
itself. Who is it that makes and defines roles in gender structures, in racial
constructs? Who is it that has the power to decide which is Self/coloniser and
which is Other/colonised? In constructing a shifting set of binary constructs on
the basis of power relations, Kafū is able to interrogate not only common images
of ‘Japan’ and ‘America’, but also the dynamics of power operating between the
two nations.
This play between binary structures and flexible, shifting complex systems gives
Kafū’s work a great capacity for the critical. The ‘America’ of Tales of America is
not the clear and simple ‘land of liberty’ or ‘civilised nation’ of Meiji discourse.
American freedoms – social, sexual and political – are all held to account in the
stories above. Social freedom and equality for women is visible in ‘January First’,
but is acknowledged to be superficial and not up to close scrutiny. Sexual
freedom is possible in ‘Long Hair’, but comes with the price of socially outcast
status. Political freedom is possible for white males in ‘In the Forest’, but not for
anyone in thrall to the power of the state or to preconceived racial constructs. By
dismantling these popular images of American freedom Kafū enacts a critique
not only on ‘America’ but also on Meiji stereotypes and expectations. Elsewhere in
Tales of America, the ‘civilised nation’ of America comes under equally harsh
scrutiny: the cities may be modern, but the electric lights serve to make it easier for
prostitutes to ply their trade at night, while many of these prostitutes were once
wholesome farm girls, tricked into their profession by unscrupulous pimps. By
casting doubt on the Othering of America as merely clean, modern and techno-
logically advanced, by critiquing the ‘democracy’ where plays are banned and
racism underpins the capital city, and by raising the spectre of colonial power,
Kafū casts doubt on the ideals of bunmei-kaika and the role of the West in the
modernisation of Japan.
By dismantling the image of America as the ‘sacred land of liberty’, Kafū
thus deconstructed and criticised a popular Meiji construct. In 1908, this
process had been going on for some time, and we may see Kafū’s work as part of
a wider discourse of dissent and doubt circulating among intellectuals after
the Russo-Japanese war. It is evident that political and literary writings on the
West were not always served by the same ideals, but could instead be opposed
in their representations and uses of the Western Other. Not all literature
accepted earlier Meirokusha binarisms, and even travelogue or demi-monde
literatures, long enjoyed for their exotic constructions of the Other, could
surprise audiences with their critical insight and inversions. One of the outcomes
of Kafū’s critique is to provide us with a new way of looking at the various Meiji
constructs of the Western Other, while the critical effect of Tales of America today
makes us question contemporary ‘gap theory’ underlying academic criticism on
Meiji period literature.
Notes
1 The Meirokusha, or ‘Meiji Six Society’, comprised Fukuzawa Yukichi, Mori Arinori
(1847–89), Nakamura Masanao (1832–91), Tsuda Mamichi (1829–1903), Katō Hiroyuki
(1836–1916) and Nishi Amane (1829–97). In their journal Meiroku zasshi these intellec-
tuals discussed various issues relating to modernisation, including methods to achieve
bunmei-kaika (civilisation and enlightenment) based on current trends in Western
thought. See Matsuzawa (1984).
2 Amerika monogatari is found in vol. 3 of Nagai Kafū, Kaf ū zenshū, 28 vols, Iwanami
Shoten, 1962–74, hereafter abbreviated as KZ. Bracketed page references in the text,
unless otherwise noted, refer to this volume and edition. All translations are my own,
although interested readers may find Mitsuko Iriye’s English translation of Amerika
monogatari useful (American Stories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
3 Ito (1991: 41). Ito’s structural application of Girard’s triangular desire is both useful
and sustainable when considering Kafū’s imitation of Western artists in ‘Ochiba’
(Falling Leaves, KZ 3.238–44) and ‘Pari no wakare’ (Farewell to Paris, KZ 3.541–57).
It is his subscription to the inferior/superior systems of gap theory which I am
addressing in this instance.
4 See Matsuzawa (1984: 210–11).
5 Ibid.
6 Yamanouchi (1978) examines the contradictions felt by Meiji writers between
imported Western culture and Japanese tradition, and their search for cultural and
individual authenticity.
7 Perhaps the best-known example of the physical Other appearing in Meiji Japan is the
foreigner on the beach with Sensei in the first few pages of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro.
8 These stories may be found in KZ 3.168–76, KZ 3.68–79, and KZ 3.108–16 respec-
tively.
9 The narrative frames of these stories often involve relationships between the male
narrators, often used for critical effect. While this chapter focuses on the central
stories of man-woman relationships, a good discussion of the framing narrative rela-
tionships may be found in Snyder (2000: 34–53).
10 See diary entries for 12 and 16 April 1906 (Saiyūnisshishō, or Leaves from a Journal of a
Western Voyage, is found in KZ 19.5–54); ‘Amerika no omoide’ (‘Memories of America’,
1945), KZ 17.205; Sakagami (1997: 98).
11 This idea of freedom (jiyū) is most evident in the celebrated James and Stella scene in
‘Shikago no futsuka’ (‘Two Days in Chicago’, KZ 3.200–14), as well as in the
narrator’s reaction to the Statue of Liberty in ‘Natsu no umi’ (‘The Sea in Summer’,
KZ 3.216–26). Both stories contrast the free ‘American spirit’ with a restrictive
Japanese society bound by Confucianism and sexual repression. Akiyama argues that
the ideals of American democracy inspired Kafū to rebel against ‘the semi-feudal and
patriarchal system in Japan’ (1981: 96).
12 See, for example, Seidensticker (1965: 23–4); Ito (1991: 36).
13 This use of the West as a defining contrast and a tool for critique of the status quo at
home may be read as what Xiaomei Chen calls ‘anti-official Occidentalism’. Kafū
was to make great use of this technique in his later works. See Hutchinson (2001);
Chen (1995).
14 Jibun and watashi can both be translated as ‘I’; Kafū uses the two different pronouns to
distinguish between the two first-person narrators.
15 In Natsu no umi (The Sea in Summer, July 1905) the narrator admires the physical
beauty of Western women (seiyō fujin), especially their choice of clothes to suit their
hair, face and figure. In comparison, ‘do not Japanese women seem to lack absolutely
all of these arts?’ American freedom of sexual expression through appearance is
contrasted sharply with Meiji society, where education is so full of ‘reproach and
intervention’ that Japanese girls shrink in fear rather than maximise their natural
endowments (KZ 3.220–1).
16 Tōkai Sanshi, real name Shiba Shirō (1852–1922). His serialised novel Kajin no kigū
(Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women, 1885–97) was a best-seller, based on his
travels in America in 1879.
17 Ken Ito equates this identification with Kafū’s ‘Orientalisation’ of America as an
exotic, mysterious Other (1991: 41–3).
18 Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment notwithstanding, government in 1906 was
dominated by white males. Women did not achieve the vote in America until 1920,
while the struggle for black voting rights continued through the 1960s.
19 This sentence appears in the 1972 Iwanami Shoten edition of Kafū zenshū (KZ 3.116)
but not in the original publication, nor in the 1992 Iwanami Shoten edition.
20 This is the last sentence in the first edition of the story from 1908, reproduced in the
1992 Iwanami Shoten edition. It is this version which appears in Iriye’s translation
(2000: 80).
References
Main texts
Nagai Kaf ū (1962–74) Kaf ū zensh ū (KZ) (Kaf ū’s Complete Works), 28 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten.
——(1992) Kafū zenshū (Kafū’s Complete Works), 30 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Other references
Akiyama, Masayuki (1981) ‘The American Image in Kafū Nagai and Henry James’,
Comparative Literature Studies 18: 95–103.
Chen, Xiaomei (1995) Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Girard, René (1965) Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans.
Yvonne Freccero, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hutchinson, Rachael (2001) ‘Occidentalism and Critique of Meiji: The West in the Returnee
Stories of Nagai Kaf ū’, Japan Forum 13(2): 195–213.
Iriye Mitsuko (2000) American Stories, New York: Columbia University Press.
Ito, Ken (1991) Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Kamei, Shunsuke (1975) ‘The Sacred Land of Liberty: Images of America in Nineteenth-
Century Japan’, in Akira Iriye (ed.) Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 55–72.
Kanno Akimasa (1996) Nagai Kafū junreki (Nagai Kaf ū’s Meanderings), Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten.
Komori, Yōichi (1997) ‘Rekishi-chiseiteki sakka Nagai Kafū: Furansu monogatari kara Bokutō
kidan e’ (Nagai Kafū as Historical and Geographical Author: From Tales of France to A
Strange Tale from East of the River ), Eureka 29(3): 124–35.
Kōno, Kensuke (1997) ‘Sei, tairiku, koroniarizumu: Amerika monogatari, Furansu monogatari ni
okeru “intercourse”’ (Gender, Continent, Colonialism: ‘Intercourse’ in Tales of America
and Tales of France ), Eureka 29(3): 170–5.
Matsuzawa, Hiroaki (1984) ‘Varieties of Bunmei Ron (Theories of Civilization)’, in Hilary
Conroy, Sandra T.W. Davis and Wayne Patterson (eds) Japan in Transition: Thought and
Action in the Meiji Era, 1868–1912, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses,
pp. 209–23.
Nagai Kafū ([1908] 2000) American Stories, trans. Mitsuko Iriye, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Natsume Sōseki ([1914] 1957) Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan, Chicago, IL: Regnery.
Sakagami, Hiroichi (1997) ‘Nagai Kafū Amerika monogatari: ikoku fūdo no hakken’ (Nagai
Kafū’s Tales of America: The Discovery of a Foreign Climate), Kokubungaku Kaishaku to
Kanshō 62(12): 93–8.
Seidensticker, Edward (1965) Kaf ū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kaf ū, 1879–
1959, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Snyder, Stephen (2000) Fictions of Desire: Narrative For m in the Novels of Nagai Kaf ū,
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Suenobu, Yoshiharu (1997) Nagai Kaf ū no mita Amerika (America as Seen by Nagai Kafū),
Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha.
Suzuki, Fumitaka (1995) Wakaki Kaf ū no bungaku to shisō (Literature and Thought of the
Young Kafū), Tokyo: Ibunsha.
Tsuruta, Kinya (1998) ‘Japanese Perceptions of Westerners in Modern Fiction’, in Keizo
Nagatani and David W. Edgington (eds) Japan and the West: The Perception Gap, Aldershot:
Ashgate, pp. 49–79.
Yamanouchi, Hisaaki (1978) The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further reading
Iriye, Akira (ed.) (1975) Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Jansen, Marius B. (1965) Changing Japanese Attitudes towards Modernization, Tokyo: Tuttle.
Miyoshi, Masao (1991) Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nagatani, Keizo and Edgington, David (eds) (1998) Japan and the West: The Perception Gap,
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Rimer, J. Thomas (1988) Pilgrimages: Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture, Honolulu, HI:
University of Hawai’i Press.
Seidensticker, Edward (1983) Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, London:
Allen Lane.
4 ‘Foreign bodies’
‘Race’, gender and orientalism in
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s ‘The Mermaid’s
Lament’
Adrian Pinnington
Reflecting the current strong interest in constructions of ‘otherness’ in modern

Japanese culture, there has been much discussion recently among Tanizaki
critics, both inside and outside Japan, of the presence of orientalist themes and
attitudes in his works. One can think of a number of reasons for this interest, but
one of these has undoubtedly been the strong impact of Edward Said’s
Orientalism on Japanese intellectuals. As a number of different writers, however,
have commented, there has been a certain oddity in much of the reception of
Said’s work within Japanese scholarship.1 This has perhaps been most clearly
expressed by Eiji Oguma:
In the modern era, it was frequently the case that when Western ideas were
imported into Japan, an attempt was made to ‘invent’ a corresponding idea
in Japanese history . . . When Edward Said’s Orientalism . . . was translated
and published in Japanese in 1986, a similar phenomenon was seen.
‘Orientalism’ was accepted as an authoritative academic paradigm of the
West, and as a new, universal discourse. A number of scholars in Japan
started to search for and identify Japanese versions of Orientalism in the
words used by modern Japanese intellectuals when referring to Chinese and
Koreans. On the other hand, however, there was very little research on how
Japan was portrayed by the West as part of the Orient . . . Ironically,
however, the more researchers emphasise the fact that an Orientalism existed
in modern Japan just as it did in the West, the more they ‘prove’ that Japan
had accomplished a modernisation that could be compared to that experienced
by Western nations.
(2002: 352–3)
Oguma argues persuasively that there have been two main reasons for this
tendency to emphasise Japan, as it were, as the subject rather than the object of
orientalism: a sense of guilt about past Japanese treatment of Taiwan, China and
Korea, and an unwillingness to echo the charges of Western discrimination
against their country frequently voiced by right-wing thinkers in Japan. Indeed,
these are perilous issues, and Oguma’s work itself perhaps does not entirely
escape the danger of seeming to offer excuses for Japanese nationalism.2
76 Adrian Pinnington
Nevertheless, it is striking just how precisely his remarks fit certain of the
recent discussions of orientalist themes in the work of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. These
have depicted the author as creating in his writings of the Taishō period an
orientalist view of both India and China that was immediately influenced by, and
reflected the same prejudices as, the orientalism of the West described by Said.3
Such an interpretation of Tanizaki’s work during this period is in many ways illu-
minating, but, it seems to me, for reasons that I will explain, hardly adequate to
the complexity of his attitudes. In this chapter I want to stress, by contrast, the
complication introduced into Tanizaki’s reception of such European orientalism
precisely by his consciousness of Japanese racial difference from the West, and to
suggest that this consciousness led him to relativise orientalist paradigms in inter-
esting ways. As my title suggests, I am particularly interested here in the way in
which issues of ‘race’, gender and orientalism converged in Tanizaki’s obsession
with the body, particularly the female body, and also the way in which his fore-
grounding of the element of sexual desire in orientalism allowed him to develop
an ironic distance from the very tropes that he was deploying. To illustrate this
process, I would like to discuss his ‘Ningyo no nageki’ (The Mermaid’s Lament,
1917), a fantasy set in China in which, I shall argue, he takes up, reflects on and
subverts themes derived from European orientalism.
Before doing so, however, I would like to discuss briefly and more generally
the issues of sexuality and gender in Tanizaki’s work and the ways in which these
are complicated by ‘race’. Since the study of sexuality gained academic
respectability in Japan in the 1990s, there has been an explosion of work on the
historical construction of modern Japanese sexual attitudes (for an interesting
discussion of this phenomenon itself, see Akagawa (1996: 193–204)). I think it
can safely be said, however, that until this outpouring of research, a typically
liberal narrative concerning the development of modern sexual attitudes in
Japan held sway. According to this, a traditional and puritanical Confucian
heritage was inherited and perpetuated in the Meiji period by a repressive state,
but, largely under the influence of the West, Japanese attitudes were gradually
liberalised, allowing the development up until the present of increasingly permis-
sive and positive attitudes to nudity and sexuality.4 While such a view probably
remains the common sense of many Japanese people, in the academic study of
the past ten years or so, however, under the influence of both feminist and
Foucauldian approaches, it seems to have been largely displaced by a very
different account. In this new narrative, the Meiji period is seen as marking the
development of a new essentialist view of gender, one which identified biological
sex and social gender, stigmatised homosexuality and other unorthodox forms of
sexuality as pathologies, fit only for medical or legal treatment, valorised virginity
(which had hitherto hardly even been recognised as a physical condition), and
created a ‘double standard’ which confined wives to the domestic sphere and
other women to the outcast state of prostitute. In all of this, Western or
European ideas, in the form both of the new science of sexology, and more
generally of Christianity and Victorian moralism, are held to have played a large
part. Thus it was in order to appear civilised in Western eyes that mixed bathing,
Foreign bodies 77
shunga, appearing naked in public, or cross-dressing, were all at one time or
another banned by central or local governments in early Meiji.5 This view of the
Meiji ‘modernisation’ of sexuality as an essentially repressive process, initiated
largely under the influence of the West, has, of course, often been accompanied
by the idea that the Edo period was the ‘other’ to this repressiveness. Thus Edo
culture has been seen as understanding gender in a social or performative rather
than essentialist manner – as symbolised by the figure of the onnagata – and also
as producing in shunga a distinctively non-pornographic erotic art. Indeed, this
idealisation of the Edo period has at points gone so far as to give rise to the
surprising phenomenon of what Koyano Atsushi has called ‘han-kindai feminizumu’
(anti-modern feminism) (Koyano 1999), in which the Edo period is seen as actually
less oppressive of women than the modern patriarchal order instituted in Meiji.
Again, there is clearly a lot to be said for such a view of modern Japan; a work
such as Mori Ōgai’s Wita sekusuarisu (Vita Sexualis, 1909 [1972]), for example,
despite the fact that its sexual explicitness led to it being banned, has convinc-
ingly been argued to have been not only repressive in its attitude towards
sexuality, but also deeply complicit with the discriminatory structures developing
within Meiji society (see Mori 1972; see also Mihashi (1999: 8–42)). Indeed,
probably the greatest mistake would be to opt simply for either the older or the
newer narrative; we need to recognise that there were (and are) many different
and competing sexualities present within Japanese society. The point I wish to
make here, however, is that it seems to me that there is a danger that this new
orthodoxy will cause us to lose sight of the important fact that, for many Meiji
intellectuals, far from European culture being seen as a source of puritanical or
repressive attitudes towards either sexuality or women, it was actually seen as at
once deeply erotic and giving women a uniquely privileged status.
An interesting instance of such an attitude can be found in the writings of
Okakura Tenshin, normally no friend to Western culture. In his The Awakening of
Japan, written in 1904 to defend Japan’s actions in the Russo-Japanese War, he
writes of the goals of the Meiji Restoration:
Another important feature of the reformation lay in the exaltation of

womanhood. The Western attitude of profound respect toward the gentler
sex exhibits a beautiful phase of refinement we are anxious to emulate. It is
one of the noblest messages that Christianity has given us. Christianity origi-
nated in the East, and, except as regards womanhood, its modes of thought
are not new to Eastern minds. As the new religion spread westward through
Europe, it naturally became influenced by the various idiosyncrasies of the
various converted nations, so that the poetry of the German forest, the adora-
tion of the Virgin in the middle centuries, the age of chivalry, the songs of the
troubadours, the delicacy of the Latin nature, and, above all, the clean
manhood of the Anglo-Saxon race, probably all contributed their share toward
the idealisation of woman.
In Japan, woman has always commanded a respect and freedom not to
be found elsewhere in the East . . . We have never hitherto, however, learned
to offer any special privileges to woman. Love has never occupied an important
place in Chinese literature; and in the tales of Japanese chivalry, the
samurai, although ever at the service of the weak and oppressed, gave his
help quite irrespective of sex. Today we are convinced that the elevation of
woman is the elevation of the race.
(Okakura 1905: 174–5)
What is interesting here, I think, is that Okakura does not see respect for women
as a universal or inevitable part of modernity, so much as a uniquely Western
cultural trait, with deep roots in Europe’s particular history and racial character.
For Okakura, who is intent on arguing that the Restoration and the new Meiji
settlement owed almost nothing to the West, the admission that Japan should
learn from this European cultural trait is a striking concession. Even more
striking, however, is the very different way in which he handles the same contrast
in his The Awakening of the East, the fiery anti-Western and anti-imperialist tract
which he wrote in 1902 during his visit to India, but which was never published
in his lifetime.6 Contrasting Eastern emphasis upon the family with Western indi-
vidualism, he remarks:
The protests of selfish rights and the demarcation of personal property blur
connubial felicity, and form the source of those incessant discords, and
unfortunate failings, so distressing to our eyes . . . Womanhood is worshipped
as the Mistress, not the Mother. The flights of their poetry, the daring of
their chivalry, all the tenderest emotions of their nature converge on the
Lady-love, not the sweet Maternal. Sex-adoration holds an undue impor-
tance in their life. It is almost the whole of their emotions – with us, it is a
part. These conditions suggest reminiscences of the predatory savage, who
mated like the wild game that contested their existence.
(Okakura 1984: vol. 1, 149; cf. 155)
Okakura was not himself noted for his marital fidelity, and the vehemence of his
expression here perhaps hints at some private emotional conflict; nevertheless,
this way of understanding the European stress on women’s status and rights as
both a unique cultural trait and the reflection of a disturbing eroticism, was
certainly not confined to him. His exact contemporary, Nitobe Inazō, for example,
an enthusiastic Westerniser, a Quaker, and himself married to an American
woman, expressed an even stronger distrust of Western attitudes in his famous
Bushidō (1905):
The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushidō was so thor-
oughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that it was required not only
of woman but of man. Hence, until the influence of its precepts is entirely
done away with, our society will not realise the view rashly expressed by an
exponent of woman’s rights, who exclaimed, ‘May all the daughters of
Japan rise in revolt against ancient customs!’ Can such a revolt succeed? Will
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it improve the female status? Will the rights they gain by such a summary
process repay the loss of that sweetness of disposition, that gentleness of
manner, which are their present heritage? Was not the loss of domesticity on
the part of Roman matrons followed by moral corruption too gross to
mention?
(Nitobe 1905: 148)
For Nitobe, who is concerned to depict bushidō as the Japanese equivalent of the
European chivalric code, to insist nevertheless on the superiority of traditional
samurai and Confucian notions of appropriate female behaviour, seems an odd
paradox. The fear of ‘moral corruption’, however, is only too characteristic of
his thought.
Interestingly, though, we can find exactly the same disturbing blend of eleva-
tion and sensuality that Western women were imagined to exhibit in fictional
treatments of the newly-educated young Japanese women of this period, the so-
called atarashii onna (new women). In Tayama Katai’s famous Futon (1907 [1981]),
for example, which is usually seen as the prototype for the kind of sexually
explicit confessional novel that Mori Ōgai was implicitly criticising in his Vita
Sexualis, the middle-aged hero finds himself sexually drawn to the young and
educated Yoshiko, a well-educated young woman with literary ambitions. In a
typical passage, he reflects on the contrast between his own wife and the young
girl students of his own time:
With the sudden rise of women’s education over the past four or five years,
the establishing of women’s universities, and the fashion for low pompadour
hairstyles and maroon pleated skirts, women no longer felt self-conscious
about walking with a man. To Tokio nothing was more regrettable than his
having contented himself with his wife, who had nothing more to offer than
her old-fashioned round-chignon hairstyle, waddling walk, chastity and
submissiveness. When he compared the young, modern wife – beautiful
and radiant as she strolled the streets with her husband, talking readily and
eloquently at his side when they visited his friends – with his own wife – who
not only didn’t read the novels he took such pains to write but was completely
pig-ignorant about her husband’s torment and anguish, and was happy as
long as she could raise the children satisfactorily – then he felt like screaming
his loneliness out loud.
(Tayama 1981: 42)
For an interesting discussion of this theme in modern Japanese literature, see

Mizuta (1996: 25–60).
Here, as with Western women, the atarashii onna are seen as not only more
confident and self-assertive than traditional Japanese women, but also as more sexu-
ally alluring. Another example of this combination of independence, intellectual
sophistication and erotic charm can be found in the character of Mineko, in
Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō (1908 [1977]), a work that is deeply concerned with the
differences between European and traditional Japanese notions of beauty and
the challenge of Western culture to Japanese sensibilities.7
Tanizaki’s relationship to this set of attitudes is complex. On the one hand,
hostile to the prosaic gloom of much naturalist writing, from the beginning he
incorporated and foregrounded elements of erotic fantasy in his writing. Yet, like
many of his elders – only much more so – he also from the beginning found
European culture, and European women, sexually alluring and liberating (on
this, see, for example, McCarthy 1998). In a long and rambling essay written in
1931, ‘Ren’ai oyobi shikijō’ (Romantic Love and Sexual Desire, TJZ 20: 239–78),
Tanizaki himself expressed his mature thoughts on this very issue of the influ-
ence of the West on Japanese sexual attitudes. Beginning with the question of the
very low status accorded to works dealing with romantic love in the Japanese and
Chinese tradition, he argues that it was only with the introduction of ‘a Western
way of looking at things’ that such fictions began to be valued in Japan. Just as it
had been Westerners who had taught the Japanese to appreciate ukiyo-e, so too –
and for very much the same reasons – it had been Westerners who had taught
the Japanese to appreciate the value of their own romantic fiction: the idea that
‘love, too, can be first-class literature, is something that we have been taught by
Westerners’ (TJZ 20: 245). Tanizaki has no hesitation in attributing this tradi-
tional Japanese contempt for romantic fiction, and indeed for women themselves,
to the dominance after the Heian period of the excessively masculine values of
the bushi. In illustration of this, he cites episodes from late Heian literature that
demonstrate a worship of women comparable to that found in Western litera-
ture. (Characteristically, one of these concerns a beautiful woman married to an
ugly man, and the other a sadistic woman who whips her lover, this being,
according to Tanizaki, perhaps the oldest oriental text in existence referring to
‘flagellation’ (in English in the original) for sexual pleasure (TJZ 20: 246–9)).
It is when Tanizaki turns to the changes introduced in Japanese attitudes in
the Meiji period, however, that he reflects on precisely the points that I have been
making:
Western literature has no doubt influenced us in many ways, but I believe

that the biggest influence has in fact been ‘the liberation of love’ – or, to put
it more bluntly, ‘the liberation of sexual desire’. The literature of the
Ken’yūsha group in the middle of the Meiji period still displays to some
degree the attitudes of the authors of popular fiction in the Tokugawa
period, but after that the literary movements connected with the Bungakkai
and Myōjō journals arose. By the time shizenshugi (naturalism) had become
popular, we Japanese had entirely forgotten the modesty of our ancestors,
who had regarded romantic love and erotic desire as something base, and
had abandoned the manners of Japan in the old days. If we actually
compare the novels of Ozaki Kōyō with those of the next great writer after
him, Natsume Sōseki, we can immediately see a clear difference in the way
women are viewed. Although Sōseki was a distinguished scholar of English
literature, he was in no way a Westernised writer, but rather a writer of the
Foreign bodies 81
traditional Eastern bunjin type, yet even so the women characters that appear
in such novels as Sanshiro¯ and Gubijinso¯, and the way the author treats them, are
of a kind that it is very difficult to find in Kōyō’s works. The difference between
the two writers is not so much a personal difference as a difference in the
currents of the times that they are writing in.
Literature is both a reflection of its age and, at times, one step ahead of
it, reflecting as it were the age’s future intention. The heroines of Sanshirō and
Gubijinsō are not the grandchildren of the gentle and refined women who
constituted the ideal of old Japan, but rather are somehow reminiscent of
characters in Western novels. But it was not the case that, at the time when
these novels were written, there were in fact many such women in Japan, but
rather that society was waiting for, and dreaming of, the appearance of such
‘self-aware women’. Probably almost all of the young men who were born
into that period, as I was, and who, like me, had literary ambitions, carried
in their hearts the same dream.
However, dream and reality rarely coincide. In order to lift the women of
Japan, who were weighed down by a long and old tradition, to the same
status as the women of the West, the work of several generations, both spiri-
tual and physical, would be required; there was no chance of achieving it
within the short space of our one generation. In brief, it would require
developing the Western beauty of pose, beauty of expression, beauty of gait.
In order to give women spiritual superiority, it was of course necessary first
to give them the appropriate physique. But when one comes to think of it, in
the West they have the distant civilization of ancient Greece, with its female
nudes, and still today everywhere in European and American cities we find the
streets decorated with statues of goddesses from ancient myth. Naturally, the
women brought up in such countries and such towns come to have well-
balanced and healthy physiques. For our women to develop the same level of
beauty, we would need to live among the same myths, to worship their
goddesses as our goddesses, and to transplant to our country their tradition
of arts stretching back some thousands of years. Now I can confess this, but
when I was a young man, I did indeed have such an impossible dream as
this, and when I realised that such a dream could not easily be achieved, I
felt an unutterable loneliness.
(TJZ 20: 254–5)
Tanizaki is here, of course, writing at a stage in his life when he has abandoned
his infatuation with the West and is intent on creating an alternative fantasy, that
of a ‘traditional’ Japanese sexuality, and indeed this very essay ends with an affir-
mation of a traditional and subtle Japanese iroke (sexual charm) over a crude,
Western ‘it’, as exemplified by the Hollywood actresses popular at the time. What
seems so characteristic of Tanizaki in the passage quoted here, however, is not
merely the sleight of hand whereby romantic love is reduced to sexual desire, and
respect for women to adoration of their bodies, but also the way in which he is
able to blend what is merely a personal fantasy – the desire to worship powerful
women – with a more widespread concern, the desire to modernise the relation-
ship between the sexes on what was taken to be the model of the West.
It seems to me that it is precisely this ability to find vehicles for a distinctively
unorthodox sexuality – Tanizaki’s own self-avowed masochism – in much more
widely shared fantasies, whether they be dreams of Western ‘modernity’ or visions
of a unique, traditional Japanese ‘sensibility’, which gives his fiction both its reso-
nance and its peculiarly subversive character. A novel such as Chijin no ai (Naomi,
1924 [1985]), for example, can be seen as, on one level, parodying such confes-
sional novels as Katai’s Futon (The Quilt, 1907 [1981]), replacing the ‘new woman’
of the former fiction with the vulgar and consumerist ‘modern girl’ of the
Taishō period.8 The narrator’s infatuation with, and attempt to set up, an ideal
modern home with the Western-looking Naomi naturally lead him into one
humiliation after another, as if the author is poking fun at the contemporary
drives to ‘rationalise’ Japanese houses and lifestyles on the basis of Western
models (on these movements, see, for example, Kashiwagi 2000). At the same
time, however, we gradually become aware that it is indeed these very humilia-
tions that the narrator is seeking to experience through the relationship, whether
he himself realises this or not. Tanizaki’s ability in this way to create narrators who
seem not to understand fully the significance of their own narratives, a feature of
many of his later fictions, was surely the most effective way of all to subvert the
conventions of the ‘I’-novel (see T. Suzuki 1996: 160–74, for a similar reading).
Here I would like to argue that there is often a similarly subversive quality to
Tanizaki’s handling of orientalist themes. Perhaps the best example of this is his
fantasy, ‘The Mermaid’s Lament’ (TJZ 4: 185–212). Writing in 1928, Tanizaki
himself said of the story that he had
taken the greatest pains over its composition, and, at the time it was
published, it gained a very high reputation in literary circles. Reading it now,
however, I realise that the works over which one takes the greatest pains are
not necessarily those that last the best.
(Tanizaki 1928: 3)
Tanizaki’s later disenchantment is, in fact, easy to understand, for in the story he
concentrates all his literary powers to produce an equivalent in Japanese literature
of those jewelled Decadent fantasies, such as Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and
Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890), which he himself admired so much, but
which also have not necessarily lasted well as literature. Despite Tanizaki’s own
sense in 1928 that his fantasy had already grown dated, the story itself has
recently attracted much attention, paradoxically being seen both as the starting
point for the author’s Shina shumi (taste for China), exhibited in many different
works between 1917 and 1926 (Nishihara 2003: 17), and also as the beginning of
his infatuation with the West (S. Suzuki 1998: 46; see also Liu 2002: 55).
Beginning in the time-honoured fashion of Japanese fairy tales with the
phrase ‘Mukashi mukashi . . . ’ (‘Once upon a time . . . ’), Tanizaki signals clearly to
his readers that this is to be a fantasy for adults, set in the Nanjing of Qing
Foreign bodies 83
China. The hero of the story, a young Chinese aristocrat, Mō Seichū (Meng
9
Shidao), whose father had made a fortune in the service of the Emperor but
whose parents are now both dead, is in fact a typical Decadent hero:
He was young, he had money, and he had inherited the glorious name of an
old family. These alone would have been enough to make him a truly fortu-
nate person. In fact, however, his good fortune was not confined to these
things, for in addition, he was also blessed in both face and mind, being at
once unusually good-looking and unusually intelligent.
(TJZ 4: 187)
At once wealthy and free of parental control, from an early age the young prince
sets about enjoying all the dissipations, including the sexual, offered by the flour-
ishing metropolis, until, when he is still only 23, he finds himself assailed by a
typically fin-de-siè cle ennui:
Perhaps it was for this reason that recently his brain seemed to have become
somehow dulled. Because he felt bored wherever he went, he ended up
staying inside his mansion all day, passing the time dully, half-asleep and
half-awake.
(TJZ 4: 188)
Moreover, behind this ennui, there lies a sense of desperation engendered by the
hero’s consciousness of the passing of time:
However, although Seichū’s wealth was inexhaustible, his life of course was
not, and he knew that he would not be able to preserve the beauty of his
youth forever. When, from time to time, he thought of this fact, then he
would suddenly become desirous of some pleasure and he would be assailed
by a sense that he could not fritter away his days in this fashion. Somehow or
other, before the youth that he now possessed had vanished utterly, he must
restore some tension to his slack existence, and boil up within his frigid
breast some scalding passion.
(TJZ 4: 189)
Driven by this hedonistic dilemma, he begs the merchants who throng his
mansion to find some new and exotic delight to titillate his senses; and the
merchants, conscious of his inexhaustible wealth, vie with one another to
supply him with unusual women and wines. At this point in the story, Tanizaki
is able to exploit to the full for some pages his own wide knowledge of tradi-
tional Chinese literature and culture, producing more and more obscure and
exotic lore (and ideograms with which to express this lore). None of the
women and delicacies brought by the merchants, however, can tempt the
young prince, and he finally takes to smoking opium to escape his boredom and
disillusion.
Up until this point, it is tempting to read this orientalist fantasy as nothing
more than Tanizaki following his own advice, expressed in Dokutan (1915), that, if
Japanese artists want to create an exoticism equivalent to that so popular in
Europe, then they should take their material from China or India (TJZ 3: 233).
Then, however, his fiction takes a surprising turn. One day, as the prince is
smoking opium and leaning out over his balcony, he spies in the distance a
shabby European merchant whom he takes for a Dutchman. The merchant
comes to where the prince is, looks up and informs him, in broken and strangely
accented Chinese, that he has brought a mermaid from the South Seas to sell to
him. The prince immediately feels as though he cannot refuse this strange offer:
Indeed, even before the prince had been shown the mermaid, he seemed to
become entranced by the looks of the foreigner. Until now, he had always
believed Westerners to be an uncivilized race, but the more he looked at the
face of this beggar-like barbarian, the more he felt some refined power
latent within it, a power that seemed to overwhelm and dominate him. The
blue eyes of the foreigner, like the deep blue of tropical seas, seemed to
summon his soul into their unfathomable depths. Again, although the prince
had always prided himself on his own good looks, somehow this foreigner’s
prominent brow, broad forehead and pure white skin seemed both far more
graceful and clear-cut than his own features, and at the same time far more
expressive, with their complicated mixture of melancholy and cheerful feelings.
(TJZ 4: 197–8)
The way in which the placid complacency of the prince’s world, as well as its
stifling limitation, are suddenly broken open by the intrusion of this ‘foreign
body’ is brilliantly suggested. This sudden introduction into an orientalist fantasy
of a European can indeed be seen, as critics have argued, as an expression of
Tanizaki’s sense of the superiority of European beauty to Chinese, or as an alle-
gory of the displacement of a China-centred world-view by a Europe-centred
one (Nishihara 2003: 76; Sakaki 1999: 198–9).
To leave the matter there, however, seems to me to miss the deeply disruptive
effect on the narrative. For Tanizaki’s very stress on the racial otherness of the
merchant’s European body – his blue eyes and white skin – inevitably puts the
Japanese reader into a radically different relationship with the prince. Far from
being the exotic object of the reader’s curiosity, the prince now becomes the
representative of the Japanese reader, as both are brought face to face with the
even more exotic beauty of the stranger. In a complex movement, utterly typical
of Tanizaki’s fiction, the prince at once feels his own beauty to be devalued by
the exotic charm of the European’s body, and experiences the very awakening of
desire for which he has been longing. It has been remarked that, in Tanizaki’s
famous In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows, 1933–34 [1977]) the differences
between ‘Japanese’ and ‘Chinese’ paper are effaced by the contrast between both
and the brilliant ‘whiteness’ of European paper, and that this is precisely because
the paper really stands for ‘skin’ (Tanikawa 2000: 112–13). In a very similar way,
Foreign bodies 85
the introduction of ‘race’ into the story fundamentally alters the relationship
between the Japanese reader and the Chinese hero, as the latter shifts from being
the object of a borrowed European orientalist gaze to being the subject of an
exotic longing for Europe.
Yet the subtlety of Tanizaki’s treatment of orientalism in the story goes
beyond this reversal of the reader’s relationship to the tale. For when the prince
sees the mermaid herself, he discovers her to be not only more beautiful than the
merchant, but even ‘whiter’:
Above all, what most startled the eyes and melted the heart of the prince
was the pure white of the woman’s skin, which contained not a speck of
impurity and was absolutely clean and spotless. The lustre of her skin was of
a white so utter that it was impossible to express with the ordinary adjective
‘white’. Because it was so completely white, it felt as though it would be
more appropriate to describe it as ‘shining’. Indeed, the skin all over her
body shone just like the pupils of her eyes. It was such a deep and myste-
rious whiteness that it seemed as if some radiant substance was secreted
within her bones and was giving off through her flesh a light akin to the bril-
liant rays of the moon.
(TJZ 4: 203)
As Tanizaki himself sometimes stressed, the admiration and yearning that he felt
for the ‘whiteness’ of Europeans itself had deep roots within traditional Japanese
attitudes to beauty, and indeed Japanese are recorded as having felt admiration
for the skin of Europeans from relatively early on in their experience of the West
(see Tsuruta 1998: 60). Yet here the ‘whiteness’ seems close to leaving behind
colour and ‘race’, coming to symbolise rather the ‘desirable’ as such – and there-
fore desire itself (compare Lamarre 1999: 34–5).
This is made clear when the prince asks the merchant, with a measure of
contempt, why he is willing to exchange the mermaid for mere treasure. The
merchant replies:
To some extent, what you say is quite appropriate. However, in the countries
of the West, mermaids are not such unusual creatures. My country lies in
the north of Europe and is known as Holland. Ever since I was a child, I
have heard that mermaids have lived since olden times in the river that runs
past the town where I was born, the Rhine. The lower halves of these
women’s bodies are sometimes the same as those of human beings, and
sometimes they have the legs of birds. From time to time they reveal them-
selves from beneath the waves of the Mediterranean sea or in the waters of
the mountains, forests and marches of the continent, and tempt human
beings. The poets and artists of my land have unceasingly sung of the
secrets of these women, and depicted their forms, teaching us just how
fascinating their mysterious smiles and just how terrible their charms in
fact are. For this reason, in Europe, even people who are not mermaids
have learnt from their bewitching beauty, and many women have developed
to some degree white skin, blue eyes and well-balanced physiques like those
of the mermaids. If you doubt this, just look at my face and the colour of
my skin. Even an ordinary person like me who is born in the West has some-
where about him a grace and dignity which he shares with this mermaid.
(TJZ 4: 204)
We immediately notice how close this theory is to the youthful dream described
in the passage from ‘Ren’ai oyobi shikijō’ quoted above. In other words, it is not
so much European beauty that Tanizaki desires, as the erotic desire that Europeans
have felt for their own beauty.
In the same way, I think that Tanizaki’s point is not that the clichés of orien-
talism are true, but rather that the desire expressed in orientalist fantasies, the
European desire, is deeply attractive to him. If there is any value-judgement
involved, it is that this European desire is more powerful and more intoxicating
than any imagined by traditional Chinese culture. This is underlined in the climax
of the story. Left alone with the mermaid, the prince passes his days in an unre-
quited longing for some response from her. Then, one evening,
the prince, overcome with despair and misery, filled a jade cup with
mature shao-hsing wine, and was enjoying the way in which this liquid, strong
enough it seemed to burn the entrails, was spreading through his whole
body. The mermaid, who had been curled up in the water like a sea-slug,
suddenly rose up to the surface of the water, as if yearning for the warmth of
the wine, and stretched both of her arms out of the jar. Before the prince
could decide whether or not to put the wine that he held to her mouth, the
woman forgot herself completely and, sticking out her brilliant red tongue,
put her lips like sea sponges to the edge of the cup and emptied it in one
gulp. Then, just like Salome in the picture on the theme of ‘The Dancer’s
Reward’ by Beardsley, she assumed a wicked grin and growled again and
again for another cupful.
(TJZ 4: 208)
This awakening of female desire and strength is, of course, a perennial motif in
Tanizaki’s fiction, but the illustration by Beardsley used to describe it here, one of
those created for Wilde’s Salome, seems to have had an especially deep impact on
the young writer (see Iwasa 1990: 72–89). Here, however, its appearance also
serves to underline the source of the fiction itself in Decadent fantasy, as if
Tanizaki is returning the fantasy to its source.10
Once she drinks the wine, the mermaid recovers her power to use human
speech, and she begs the prince to take her back to Europe and release her,
telling him:
As the Dutchman told you, my home is in the Mediterranean. If you ever

have an occasion to visit the West, be sure to visit Italy in the south of
Foreign bodies 87
Europe. Among the many beautiful countries of Europe, this is especially
beautiful with scenery as lovely as a picture. If at that time you happen to
take a boat through the Messina Straits, and find yourself passing off the
shore of Naples, then it is just there that my family has lived since ancient
times. In the old days, when sailors passed through those seas, they would
hear from somewhere the strange songs of the mermaids that would lure
them into the fathomless depths of the sea.
(TJZ 4: 208)
Finally, the prince accedes to her wishes, and takes her by steamboat to Europe
and releases her.
Why, then, does Tanizaki choose the image of the mermaid to symbolise the
object of his desire here? On the one hand, it is evident that the combination of
a white-skinned woman, her oriental lover, a foreign man, water and alcohol had
some special attraction for the author, perhaps one that was obscure even to
Tanizaki himself.11 But why choose a mermaid?
Recently, the noted Tanizaki scholar, Chiba Shunji, has argued that the mermaid
figure, which recurs repeatedly in works of this period, is actually based on Seiko,
the younger sister of Tanizaki’s first wife and usually considered the original for
Naomi, the heroine of Naomi. The reason he offers is that, just as a mermaid is
beautiful and yet impossible to engage sexually, so Seiko was deeply attractive to
Tanizaki and yet, because of her extreme youth, he was unable to have sexual
intercourse with her (Chiba 2003: 149–50). It seems to me, however, that although
the mermaid figure may have come to take on such an association, the mermaid
we find in this story is very different from such ‘hybrid’ figures as Naomi, or the
‘Eurasian’ prostitute Louise in Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1929 [1955]).
Rather, Tanizaki goes out of his way to stress that it is a specifically European
mermaid, although similar mermaids had in fact existed in Chinese and Japanese
traditions from much earlier times (see Sasama 1999). This undoubtedly partly
reflects the widespread popularity of the mermaid figure in late nineteenth-
century European literature and art, where, contrary to their present rather
innocent and cheerful image, both mermaids and sirens were seen as types of the
sexually predatory femme fatale (see the detailed discussion in Dijkstra 1989: 258–71).
But there also had been at least one occasion where one of these decadent
mermaids had appeared in a work much closer to home: Natsume Sōseki’s
Sanshirō, one of the very novels singled out by Tanizaki for the Western flavour of
its female characters. This occasion takes place relatively early in the novel, when
the hero Sanshirō goes to the mysterious Professor Hirota’s new house to help
him sort out and put away his things. There he meets his friend Yojirō and the
alluring heroine of the novel, Mineko. The three of them begin to put away
the professor’s books:
The three of them put in half an hour of concentrated effort, by which time
Yojirō had stopped his grumbling. One minute he was hard at work, and the
next he was seated cross-legged on the floor, facing the bookcases. Mineko
nudged Sanshirō, who smiled and called out to him, ‘Hey, Yojirō, what’s
going on?’
‘Oh, nothing. What a shame. What does the Professor think he’s going to
do with all these books he doesn’t need? He could sell them and buy stocks
or something and really make some money. Ah, what’s the use?’ he sighed,
without budging from his cross-legged position.
Sanshirō and Mineko looked at each other and smiled. As long as the
brains of the operation was not functioning, they could relax a bit, too.
Sanshirō began to flip through a book of poems. Mineko opened a large
picture book on her lap. The maid and the porter had a noisy argument
going on in the kitchen.
‘Look at this,’ Mineko said softly. Sanshirō leaned over her to look down
at the album. He caught the scent of cologne in her hair.
It was a picture of a mermaid, naked and in a sitting position with her
fishtail curled around behind her. She faced forward combing her hair,
holding the overflowing tresses in one hand. The sea stretched away in the
background.
Sanshirō’s and Mineko’s heads touched, and together they whispered, ‘A
mermaid.’
(Natsume 1977: 72–3)
In itself, this is an intensely erotic moment in the novel, and from this point on
Sanshirō begins to succumb to Mineko’s provocative charm. At the same time,
however, the European origin of the image is emphasised in the original by the
fact that the two characters both simultaneously use the English word ‘mermaid’
(given in katakana). Thus the incident also takes its place within a pattern of refer-
ences in the book to the beauty of European women. There has in fact been
much discussion as to what particular painting is being referred to here, the
details fitting no known painting exactly.12 What is more important, however, is
the way in which the image connects to the beauty of the Westerners seen by
Sanshirō at the beginning of the novel and the professor’s remarks about the ugli-
ness of the Japanese compared to them (ibid.: 14–15), and to the ‘voluptuous’
(again the English word is used) paintings by Greuze that Sanshirō is reminded of
when he first meets Mineko at the professor’s house (ibid.: 66–7), as well as the
later remarks by the painter Haraguchi concerning the differences between
European and Japanese notions of beauty and the reasons why Mineko looks
more Western than other models (ibid.: 176). Indeed, we are even told by some
students, who are discussing whether the bachelor Professor Hirota hates women
or not, that he has a Western nude hanging on his wall (ibid.: 129).
It seems unlikely that Tanizaki, with his fondness for Sōseki, was unconscious
of this earlier use of the mermaid image to represent Western beauty and sexu-
ality. Whether this is so or not, however, it is clear that the fantasy had a wider
resonance than the author’s personal fantasies. Moreover, ‘The Mermaid’s
Lament’ is by no means the only one of Tanizaki’s works where orientalist
themes are complicated and subverted by issues of race, and I hope on another
Foreign bodies 89
occasion to discuss some other examples, most notably the extremely interesting
use of the Arabian Nights in Some Prefer Nettles. John Clark has suggested, with regard
to the history of modern Japanese art, that it was precisely Japan’s position on the
periphery of ‘Euramerican’ discourses that led to a relativised and reflexive
understanding of modernity, and perhaps very much the same could be said of
the Japanese reception of orientalism (Clark 2000: 25–7). Here, however, I would
like to conclude by reflecting on a paradox that has also been pointed out by
Kinya Tsuruta (1998: 76–7; 2001: 147–9). This is the fact that, despite his
profoundly racialised imagination, in his later work, Tanizaki actually produces
some of the most realistic and sympathetic portraits of Westerners to be found in
modern Japanese fiction. Tsuruta instances, quite correctly, the extremely posi-
tive and humane depiction of the Stoltz family in Sasameyuki (The Makioka
Sisters, 1943–8 [1957]); but I would argue that we first find this characteristic much
earlier in his fiction, in Some Prefer Nettles itself, with its gentle and under-
standing portrait of the decaying Mrs Brent, the English Madame who runs the
brothel that Kaname visits in Kobe, as well as of the half-Russian, half-Korean
prostitute Louise. I think this is partly connected to the general shift in Tanizaki’s
writing from the pure fantasy of much of his earlier work, to the profounder
exploration of the role that fantasy plays in ordinary life, and especially in
personal relationships, in his later work, a shift that integrates, as it were, the
Decadent and the naturalist facets of his early fiction. But I would also argue that
it is related to the fact that, for Tanizaki, from the beginning, fantasies, including
the fantasies of ‘race’, Westernisation and orientalism, were clearly fantasies and
as such were neither to be suppressed by the state nor confused with reality. Indeed,
it is perhaps precisely this aspect of his thinking which allowed Tanizaki, unlike
so many other Japanese intellectuals of his generation, to remain unmoved by
the increasingly racialist fantasies developed and propagated by Japanese mili-
tarists in the 1930s.
Notes
1 In addition to the passage from Oguma (2002) discussed in the text, see Tsutsui (1999:
esp. pp. 2–8) and Hasumi and Yamauchi (1999: 43).
2 This is not necessarily to argue that Said’s orientalist paradigm can be applied
straightforwardly to Western perceptions of Japan. Indeed, it could be argued that,
precisely because Japan escaped colonisation, Western attitudes towards the Japanese
were never entirely the same as those towards the other colonised peoples of the
Orient (see Koshiro 1999: esp. pp. 9 ff.). See also Elson (1964: 161–6) for an inter-
esting discussion of the differences between how the Japanese and the Chinese were
presented in US school textbooks in the nineteenth century. Cohen also argues that
the image of Japan in the nineteenth century in the United States was very much
more favourable than that of China because Japan was so much more successful in its
cultural diplomacy (Cohen 1992: pp. 16 ff.).
3 Ironically it is the latest and by far the most detailed discussion of Tanizaki’s attitudes
towards India and China that most fits Oguma’s account (Nishihara 2003). While
Nishihara’s book is thoroughly researched and full of interesting information, he does
indeed treat Said’s work as ‘an authoritative academic paradigm’, not even hinting at
the criticisms that it has received, and declaring that it is his aim to apply Said’s work
to Japan’s Shina shumi (taste for China) (ibid.: 13–20). Although he is anxious to
demonstrate a clear connection between exotic treatments of China by Japanese
writers of the Taisho- period and Japan’s imperialism, he does in fact concede that
Japanese propaganda tended rather to stress Japan’s own racial and cultural identity
with the peoples it colonised than their ‘otherness’. He does not seem to realise,
however, what difficulties this creates for any attempt to understand Taisho- exoticism
on the model of Said’s work, which anyway is itself perhaps not as clear on the
connection between orientalism and colonialism as he takes it to be (ibid.: 19).
Moreover, there is definitely something rather procrustean about Nishihara’s application
of orientalism to Tanizaki’s work. For example, he quotes Tanizaki as observing
that:
All ethnic groups (minzoku) have their strengths and weaknesses. Although we
Japanese have many good elements, it is with regard to the power to create
fantasies that we are most lacking. In this respect the Germanic, Arab, Chinese,
Indian and other peoples have gone far beyond us.
Nishihara then remarks, ‘on the other hand, with regard to the West, Tanizaki consis-
tently represents it as rational, scientific and modern’ (ibid.: 117). Not only does it
seem odd to collapse a contrast between Japan and many other groups, including ‘the
Germanic race’, into one between the West and the Orient, it also seems very
misleading to suggest that, for Tanizaki, the main charm of the West lay in its enlight-
enment values. Liu Jianhui’s slightly earlier study (2002) makes rather more briefly
many similar points to Nishihara, also stressing the role that the expansion of
Japanese tourism played in the development of new exoticising attitudes to China.
However, for Jia, Tanizaki’s work represents a reversal, under the influence of
Decadence, of the low evaluation of China, as a backward nation, that had become
widespread in Japan after the country’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War. It thus
represents a new and uniquely Japanese form of orientalism (ibid.: 52–3). Chiba’s
even briefer discussion (Chiba 1998) also compares Tanizaki’s treatment of China to
the orientalism described by Said, but then goes on to make the important point that
for Tanizaki orientalism itself was exotic, and that, moreover, Said’s criticisms of
orientalism could as easily be applied to Tanizaki’s exoticising view of Europe (ibid.:
309–14). Interestingly, it is a mark of the ‘internationalisation’ of research into
Japanese literature that all of these discussions in Japanese are themselves heavily
indebted to the English-language scholarship on Tanizaki which pioneered discussion
of this issue: Ito (1991: 30–63, esp. pp. 53–4), Fogel (1996) and Sakaki (1999).
Lamarre’s (1999) remarks on Tanizaki’s orient and ‘the spectre of race’ are very inter-
esting, and to some extent overlap with my own view, although his overall theme of a
new ‘modern visuality’, exemplified by Tanizaki’s fiction, remained to me (perhaps
appropriately) somewhat opaque.
4 Most of the writers in Inoue et al. (1996) seem to assume such an attitude on the part
of their readers (e.g. Muta 1996: 79). Inoue interestingly compares and attempts to
reconcile the two narratives in a consideration of changing attitudes to female expo-
sure of their own bodies to public gaze, although he consciously, if somewhat
implausibly, omits the question of Western influence from his discussion. Tanikawa
(2000) is a useful reminder that many questions concerning Meiji – period sexual atti-
tudes actually remain to be determined.
5 This is obviously a somewhat crude and reductive summary of a great deal of often
fascinating work, but in its main outlines it seems to me fair. For representative exam-
ples see Muta (1996) or Kano (2001: esp. pp. 3–35).
6 See Okakura (1984 (I): 133–68). The manuscript was discovered by Okakura’s
grandson in 1938 when he was going through his papers and first published in
English in 1940 (ibid.: 436). In this connection, Hay, in his undeservedly forgotten
work, is interesting both on the way in which Okakura absorbed European orientalist
Foreign bodies 91
ideas in his vision of Asian culture, and on the general lack of response to his ideas
from Japanese intellectuals (Hay 1970).
7 I discuss the novel further below. In the novel itself, Mineko is repeatedly compared to
the women in Ibsen’s plays (Natsume 1977: 102, 141). Takamiya also points out the
superimposition of the figure of the Decadent femme fatale and the ‘new woman’ in the
figure of Mineko (Takamiya 1997: 38).
8 The ‘new woman’ and the ‘modern girl’, insofar as the latter existed at all, were very
different phenomena, but, as Barbara Sato’s interesting recent discussion indicates,
not only was the phrase originally coined to describe independent young British
women, but also many commentators on the ‘modern girl’ were concerned to distin-
guish her from the ‘new woman’ exactly because there was considerable fear that they
would be seen as the same (Sato 2003: 55 ff.).
9 The manuscript of Tanizaki’s first draft of the story has recently been published,
showing that he had intended at first to write the story as an ordinary realistic fiction,
but that at a later date he made a conscious decision to change the style (Tanizaki
2003). Nishihara has an interesting discussion of the anachronism in the story,
whereby the eighteenth-century prince travels by steamship via Hong Kong and
Singapore to Europe (Nishihara 2003: 75).
10 This paradoxical sense that the story is at once an imitation, a parody and a commen-
tary on Decadent fiction is made even clearer in the illustrated edition of this and
‘Majutsushi’ (The Magician, 1917) which Tanizaki published in 1919 (see Tanizaki
1978). The black-and-white illustrations, by the Japanese-style artist Mizushima Niou,
are a clear imitation of the prettier aspects of Beardsley and have themselves by now
achieved considerable fame in Japan. According to an interview with Mizushima’s
son, Kyōhaku Aran, himself a well-known fantasy writer, his father had no special
knowledge of Beardsley or Western art, a fact which suggests that Tanizaki himself
must have specifically requested the illustrations be made in Beardsley’s style (Kyōhaku
Aran 1988: 14–15).
11 It is fascinating to observe how, in a late and very different work, Kagi (The Key, 1956
[1960]), precisely the same combination recurs when the hero’s wife, Toshiko, the
whiteness of whose skin is stressed again and again, repeatedly gets drunk, falls
unconscious in the bath, and whispers to her husband the name of their young friend
Kimura, a man who just happens to look very like a famous American film star (see
Tanizaki 1960).
12 Haga (1988: 381–98) first suggested the most likely model, John William Waterhouse’s
Mermaid of 1900, which Sōseki may have seen in London. He was unable, however, to
find any book containing a reproduction of the painting that Sōseki was likely to have
seen. The painting itself, however, differs in various significant ways from the descrip-
tion given in the novel. Takamiya Toshiyuki has more recently thoroughly reviewed
the question and suggested that Sōseki most likely saw a black and white reproduction
published in 1901, and that this explains the lack of reference to the colours of the
original in the novel (Takamiya 1997: 34–40). Takamiya himself has continued the grand
tradition of Japanese interest in Decadent mermaids by publishing an essay and a
collection of reproductions of Victorian paintings of mermaids and other women
connected with water (Takamiya 1996).
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Main text
Unless otherwise specified, all works by Tanizaki are quoted from: Tanizaki
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(References in the text are given as TJZ followed by volume number and page.)
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——(2003) ‘“Ningyo no nageki” shokō varianto’ (‘The Mermaid’s Lament’: A Variant
First Version), Eureka (May): 135–43.
Tayama Katai (1981) ‘The Quilt’, in Tayama Katai, The Quilt and Other Stories, trans. E.G.
Henshall, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, pp. 35–96.
Tipton, Elise K. and Clark, John (eds) (2000) Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from
the 1910s to the 1930s, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Tsuruta, Kinya (1998) ‘Japanese Perceptions of Westerners in Modern Fiction’, in Keizo
Nagatani and David Edgington (eds) Japan and the West: The Perception Gap, Aldershot:
Ashgate, pp. 49–79.
——(2001) ‘A Pilgrimage to the West and Return: the Case of Tanizaki Junichirō’, in
Yoichi Nagashima (ed.) Return to Japan from ‘Pilgrimage’ to the West, Aarhus: Aarhus
University Press.
Tsutsui Kiyotada (1999) ‘Nashionarizumu to Ajiashugi ni okeru nijūsei’ (The Ambiva-
lence of Nationalism and Pan-Asianism), in Aoki Tamotsu, Kawamoto Saburō, Tsutsui
Kiyotada, Mikuriya Takashi and Yamaori Tetsuo (eds) Nihonjin no jiko ninshiki (Japanese
Self-Identity), Kindai Nihon bunkaron, vol. 2, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 1–20.
Further reading
Apart from the books and articles given in the bibliography, the following will be
useful for anyone interested in the development of Japanese racial attitudes:
Dikötter, Frank (ed.) (1997) The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, London:
Hurst & Co.
Dower, John W. (1986) War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York:
Pantheon Books.
Leupp, Gary P. (2003) Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–
1900, New York: Continuum.
Weiner, Michael (1994) Race and Migration in Imperial Japan, London: Routledge.
Foreign bodies 95
With regard to the questions of gender and sexuality in modern Japan, in addition
to the books and articles cited in the bibliography, the following are important:
Fruhstuck, Sabine (2003) Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, Berkeley,
Johnston, William (2005) Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern
Japan, New York: Columbia University Press.
Pflugfelder, Gregory M. (1999) Cartographies of Desire: Male –Male Sexuality in Japanese
Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ueno Chizuko (1990) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Ogi Shinzō, Kumakura Isao and Ueno
Chizuko (eds) Fuzoku Sei (Sexual Mores, Sex), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
5 Self and Other in the writings of
Kajii Motojirō
Stephen Dodd
Some writers, like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō , led such eventful, varied and – perhaps
most importantly – long lives, that simply to investigate the petty dramas of their
literary careers can prove to be a source of fascination. This cannot be said of
Kajii Motojirō. Born in 1901, he wrote only about 20 short stories before dying
of tuberculosis in 1932, and is best known today in Japan and (if at all) in the
West for his short story, ‘Remon’ (Lemon, 1925). Kajii’s personal history can
briefly be stated. Growing up in Osaka, his first ambition was to become an engi-
neer. It was only after he entered Kyoto’s Third Higher School (Sankō) that fellow
students encouraged him to develop a shared interest in music and the arts, and
he eventually turned to the writing of literature. In 1924, he went to study at
Tokyo University, and ‘Lemon’ appeared the following year in Aozora, a coterie
magazine (dōjin zasshi ) edited by Kajii and his fellow students. However, just as
he was beginning to flex his literary muscles, his TB took a turn for the worse. He
was forced to leave Tokyo late in 1926 and convalesced for sixteen months in the
hot spring resort of Yūgashima on the Izu Peninsula. After a brief return to
Tokyo, deteriorating health forced him to return home to Osaka in 1928, where
his family nursed him until his death.
While the brevity of Kajii’s period of literary activity is undeniable, his short
stories stand out in terms of both their fascinating narrative twists, and their use
of an undeniably beautiful poetic prose style. In this chapter, I will concentrate
mainly on ‘Lemon’, but also touch on one more of his best-known stories, ‘Aru
kokoro no fūkei’ (Landscapes of the Heart, 1926), in order to discuss one of the
major concerns of writers and intellectuals during the late Taishō/early Shōwa
period, namely, the slippery problem of how to define the shifting boundaries
between Self and Other. In this case, ‘Other’ refers to the world at large, exterior
to the confines of the physical self. In conclusion, I will also suggest some ways in
which this personal engagement with the world beyond the self might be related
to the wider social context of the writer’s times.
In the broad sweep of literary history, Kajii’s writing career began around the
time of the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 and finished just as the government
was cracking down on political dissent in the early 1930s. This was a brief but
very significant moment for modern Japanese fiction when two literary forces in
particular – the Neo-Sensationalists (Shinkankaku-ha) and writers of Proletarian
Self and Other: Kajii Motojirō 97
Literature (Puroretaria bungaku) – emerged to argue over definitions of Self and
Other, how best to articulate links between the individual and wider society and,
just as importantly, the literary medium most suited to express such relationships.
Though not strictly a member of either camp, Kajii was influenced by both. He
admired the stories of Kawabata Yasunari, one of the founders of the
Shinkankaku-ha, who was just then attracting attention as an up-and-coming writer
with his Modernist-inspired experimental stories; in fact, the two men actually
met and became friends while both were staying at Yūgashima. On the other
hand, during the last couple of years of his life in Osaka, Kajii became increasingly
attracted to the possibilities of left-wing literature as a means of attracting and
addressing the interests of a wider readership. The other major source of interest
for writers and critics of the time was the shishōsetsu (‘I-novel’) a genre equally
focused on defining and differentiating the concepts of Self and Other. It is not
surprising that Kajii’s own work should have drawn on all these influences when
he came to articulate his own highly fluid and intriguing definition of the terms.
Since I will be referring extensively to ‘Lemon’, it might be useful to provide a
very brief synopsis. The narrator is a young student living in Kyoto who finds it
impossible to find peace of mind. His feelings of unease are described in terms of
an ‘indefinable lump’ which ‘was constantly pressing onto my heart’ (KMZ 1999:
7). Though there was a time when he was far happier with life, he now wanders
the streets in a continuous state of dissatisfaction, while the fact that he suffers from
tuberculosis only exacerbates his condition. One day, he happens to pass a green-
grocer’s where he purchases a lemon, and its fresh appearance somehow revives
his spirits, albeit temporarily. The reader has already been informed that the
narrator once loved walking around Maruzen bookstore – a major centre for
imported Western literature and goods – but has recently found even that place
difficult to endure. However, the lemon endows him with renewed confidence to
revisit the place, and he ends up building a fantastic castle from some large
colourful books in the Art History Department. Suddenly depressed again, he
takes the lemon out from his pocket and places it next to his ‘castle’. The story
ends at the point where he has left the lemon in the shop and, walking down
the brightly lit district of Kyōgoku, he imagines the fruit as a bomb that will blow
the shop to pieces.
The fantastic element of this short story presents any reader with a challenge
to make sense of it, but various possibilities offer themselves. For instance, given
the writer’s use of a poetic prose style to express a destructive impulse, it would
be interesting to explore a possible link with anarchist poetry emerging just then
under the influence of Dadaism. In this connection, the poet Tsuboi Shigeji
(himself evoking the tenor of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909) wrote an
introduction for the first edition of the journal Aka to kuro in 1923, where he
likens poetry to a bomb (Lippit 1997: 11). For the purposes of this chapter,
however, the story may also be read as offering some useful insights into the
author’s articulation of Self and Other.
One way of exploring this concern is by examining how the narrator reveals
himself to the reader through a variety of disparate memories. For instance, as
98 Stephen Dodd
the story begins, it becomes clear that the young man’s earlier pleasure in visiting
friends’ homes in order to listen to music and poetry is no longer an attractive
proposition; the sound of even a few bars of music makes him ‘suddenly want to
get up and take my leave’ (KMZ 1999: 7). In other words, the unstable nature of
the narrator’s identity is highlighted through a self that, telling the story from the
narrative present, reflects on an earlier self no longer in existence. More gener-
ally, it is true that such memories sometimes appear to help confirm a fixed sense
of self, but at other times they create the impression that, on the contrary, a
settled sense of personal identity has been rendered unattainable.
In order to clarify my point, let me refer to Kobayashi Hideo’s seminal essay,
‘Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku’ (Literature of the Lost Home, 1933 [1967–69]),
where he argues that people from the provinces who have grown up with a
clearly defined understanding of native place (furusato ) are more fortunate than
people from Tokyo. According to Kobayashi, people from the capital like himself
lacked a sense of belonging to a particular home, even though they were born
and grew up in the specific area of Tokyo. This is because the city’s landscape
had undergone such constant physical change that inhabitants of Tokyo had no
access to what he calls ‘hard and fast’ (kakko taru) memories attached to place.
Without such memories, he laments, it was not possible to possess a clear and
consistent self-consciousness (ji-ishiki ) (Kobayashi 1967–69: 31–2).
It is unclear in ‘Lemon’ whether the student is a native of Kyoto; indeed, if
we follow the I-novel conceit that assumes the protagonist to reflect the real
circumstances of the author’s life, this is not the case. Moreover, Kajii describes
the experience of living in a much smaller urban than to Tokyo. Nevertheless,
there are interesting parallels in terms of the general relationship between
narrator and urban space. The young man certainly has access to a wide range
of memories, but they tell a double-edged story about how he perceives himself.
On the one hand, he describes his love of embossed glass marbles, and particu-
larly the pleasure he obtained from sucking on them; such recollections – what he
calls the ‘sweet memories of childhood’ (KMZ 1999: 8) – evoke links between
youthful experiences and oral satisfaction, and the accompanying sense of secu-
rity and belonging. In a similar fashion, his recollection of how he used to enjoy
listening to music and poetry implies that he was once a typical student who was
in the process of moving away from childish interests, and constructing a more
grown-up, sophisticated sense of himself through participation in cultural activi-
ties; in addition, he was confirming his identity as part of a group of like-minded
fellow students based in Kyoto. These memories might be understood as a posi-
tive means of consolidating an integrated, continually developing consciousness
of self-identity related to a specific place.
On the other hand, memories also reveal an alternative, less palatable under-
standing of self. The problem for the narrator in his present unhappy state of
mind is that such recollections painfully emphasize that the earlier, relatively
contented person no longer exists. Now, his memories are experienced against
the background of the constant ache of the unfortunate lump deep within his
body. What Kobayashi described as a ‘hard and fast’ memory has been trans-
formed, one might say, into a hard and fast lump. It could be argued that the
story’s narrative traces a positive development: the transfer of a repressed, inter-
nalized discomfort into an observable, externalized object which is resolved by
story’s end through the fantasy of its destruction. But during the course of the
narrative, the main focus concerns the very instability of self-identity. In partic-
ular, the malign growth generates such a source of alienation that the young man
feels impelled to wander the city streets alone in search of some potential power
of re-integration. Consequently, the city landscape comes to represent a sense,
not of belonging, but of lost identity. In this way, Kajii confirms similar concerns
expressed by Kobayashi only a few years later. As a writer inclined to poetic
expression, the only way Kajii can reinvigorate a fractured and run-down sense
of self is by transforming the oppressive lump through the aesthetic image of a
beautiful lemon.
In fact, the kind of introverted narrator portrayed in this story is a familiar
character in the literature of the late 1920s: a young person, restless, rootless and
afflicted by mental debilitation (shinkei suijaku) and, in this case, tuberculosis as
well. His engagement with the external environment is shaped at least as much
by fantasy and imagination as by mundane reality. And this leads to my second
point connected to Kajii’s understanding of Self and Other, namely, that this
very element of mobility/fluidity (both physical and figurative) is a fundamental
aspect of modern self-identity in Japanese literature.
On the practical side, such mobility is partly due to technological change; for
the first time in history, electrical lighting in urban centres meant that disaffected
youths had somewhere to wander during their angst-filled nights. But some
comments by Franco Moretti on the history of the Bildungsroman – a novel
dealing with one person’s early life and development – in Western literature
might help to clarify this phenomenon as part of a more general cultural devel-
opment in any modern society. Moretti (2002) notes that during the nineteenth
century in Europe, the traditional concept of youth as merely a chronologically
defined period in the biological life of a human being underwent a change. As
traditional society collapsed, so did the predictability of youth’s future, and youth
became more associated with the impulse towards anxiety and movement,
expressed especially through an interest in travel and adventure. The author
suggests that concerns with interiority and mobility emerged to epitomize youth,
not because youth itself needed to be defined, but because at the end of the eigh-
teenth century when Europe first encountered modernity, there existed no culture
of modernity. If modernity was a kind of ‘permanent revolution’, then neither
maturity nor old age could represent it any longer. Instead, youth was taken up
by writers in Europe as a theme in order to attach meaning to the culture of
modernity itself, and the youth-centred Bildungsroman emerged as an ideal literary
form to meet this need (Moretti 2002: 555).
In Japanese literature, if youth as a central theme is a mark of modernity,
then Kajii’s work is certainly modern. At the very least, the author’s early demise
ensured that the restless mobility of the youthful narrators and their strong
concern with interiorized anxieties are never fully worked out. His narrators
100 Stephen Dodd
never come to resemble, for instance, the far more self-reflective watakushi of Sōseki’s
Kokoro (1914 [1957]), whose earlier student experiences are reinterpreted in the
course of the telling through the mind of a more experienced man. And, related to
literature more closely based on the Bildungsroman pattern, Kajii’s characters are not
like Kanai in Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis (1909 [1974]), where the overarching chronological
narrative is powerful enough to reconfigure uncontrollable sexual urges into a more
rational discourse. In ‘Lemon’, the narrator is still a student only at the beginning
of a process of addressing his shift into full adulthood, still in the midst of what
Moretti called the ‘permanent revolution’ of unresolved experience.
An additional factor that emphasizes the aspect of modernity in Kajii’s
writing is the very ordinariness of his personality. He comes from no great
literary family, and is one of an increasing number of young people who have
benefited from universal education and emerged with the innate potential to
become established as a writer in late Taishō society gearing up to address the
increasing demands of a mass culture. Many of Kajii’s readers would have been
able to identify themselves with his transformative experience of growing up, and
to sympathize with the fundamental question, ‘who am I?’, that underpins the
narrative of his stories. In any case, Kajii’s restless characters arise from a line of
self-obsessed modern literary youths stretching from the indecisive Bunzō in
Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1886–89 [1967]) to the pathetically frantic
figure depicted by Akutagawa in his posthumous Haguruma (Cogwheels, 1927).
Another observation concerning Kajii’s articulation of self-identity connects
with my earlier point that his literature is modern because it expresses an overall
mood of mobility and fluidity. This mood also has relevance in the sense that the
writer sometimes presents a multiplicity of selves that exist simultaneously or
even overlap with each other within a single text. As a general concept, various
critics have noted that a concern with multiple realities relates to an increase in
forms of cultural production at the time. In particular, the cinema created new
means of cultural expression that began to overlap with literary techniques; for
instance, the opening scene of Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel, Shanghai (1928–31
[2001]), has frequently been linked to the cinematic gaze. Other writers such as
Tanizaki and Kawabata expressed their interest in the medium by writing
scenarios for the cinema. And certainly, quite a few of Kajii’s stories depict aspects
of lighting and visuality that might have been influenced by cinematic techniques.
However, a concern with simultaneous layers of reality can be related more
specifically to literary texts. Seiji Lippit has suggested that literature of the 1920s
is characterized by a deep crisis of identity. Precisely at this time when what had
begun during Meiji as the startlingly new genbun itchi (correspondence between
spoken and written languages) style of writing had come to be accepted by many
as a commonsensical and transparent form, and when many writers saw the I-
novel as the most appropriate genre to express the discrete consciousness of
subject identity, other writers began to question the very possibility of repre-
senting reality just ‘as it is’ (aru ga mama), and endeavoured to cast doubt on the
very idea of a fixed, bourgeois sense of self. Yokomitsu and other Shinkankaku-ha
writers were at the forefront of this challenge to the orthodoxy of the I-novel
(Lippit 2002: 29–30). One of the most extreme examples of this crisis of repre-
sentation is to be found in Akutagawa’s story, ‘Aru aho no isshō’ (A Fool’s Life, 1927),
where a wide variety of literary forms is employed within the text because no
single genre seemed capable of describing the full reality. Lippit notes that this
work is best characterized by montage, a technique he describes as
a series of rapid shifts between seemingly random events, without reference

to any sense of logical or linear development. The material body of the
text – the graphic laceration of the work and the prominent blank spaces
between the scenes – represents the complete breakdown of Akutagawa’s
faith in the capacity of fiction, and narrative in general, as a vehicle of self-
expression.
(Lippit 2002: 51)
In view of these comments, the final destructive fantasy in ‘Lemon’ may repre-
sent a similar ‘random event’, hinting at the writer’s exasperated effort to break
through the tangle of language itself, to reconstitute a semblance of unified
meaning through an anarchic impulse to engage head-on with the fractured
reality of everyday life. It must be said, though, that the story in general conveys
nothing like the degree of anxiety and total breakdown found in Akutagawa’s
work; indeed, Kajii’s overriding attraction to aesthetic imagery reconfigures
even the ‘bomb’ into a pleasurable image. Such an approach reflects a trend
among many writers – especially following the forced closure of the Proletarian
Literature movement – to smooth away, or even ignore, the socially divisive
environment which had actually contributed to the shape of their literary
impulse. Yet the very mixture of prose and poetry characterizing his writing
suggests that, even for Kajii, any clear separation of literary genres has become
problematic.
Beyond this blending of genres, Kajii’s work also addresses the concept of
multiple realities, and particularly multiple selves, in a more literal way. In
‘Landscapes of the Heart’, details of the main character Takashi are related in
the third person, but his general circumstances – a young man, restless and
uneasy, living in Kyoto – echo those of the first-person narrator of ‘Lemon’. At
several points, Takashi pauses to observe street life from the window of a room,
and closer examination of these particular scenes suggests that the protagonist
constitutes less a fully integrated identity than an amalgam of diverse elements.
The story is formally divided into parts. Part 1 begins with Takashi ‘gazing at the
slumbering street from the window of his room’ (KMZ 1999: 93) deep at night as
he contemplates the sorry state of his own life. Part 2 also opens with reference to
Takashi sitting at the same window; the reason he sits here so late is ‘because
sleep afflicted him with too many dark thoughts’ (ibid.: 95), thoughts which, it
turns out, are connected to his fear of having contracted a disease from a prosti-
tute. Part 3 appears to begin from the same vantage point, as Takashi sits in a
room where ‘he could hear the sounds of drunken punters and the women
enticing them to stop’ (ibid.: 97) in the street outside. However, further reading
102 Stephen Dodd
reveals that this room is different; this time he is in a brothel awaiting the arrival
of a prostitute. The fact that the same activity – the observation of outside activities
from the confines of a room – is quite unexpectedly shifted to another locality
highlights the still unresolved nature of Takashi’s personality: a sensitive,
thoughtful poet is suddenly re-presented to the reader as a young man struggling
with overwhelming sexual urges. Indeed, the very overlapping of experiences
whereby an apparently single room turns out to be another space – creating, as it
were, another viewpoint for Takashi to contemplate the world outside himself, as
well as another angle by which the reader comprehends Takashi – highlights the
complex play of similarity and difference in this supposedly unified character’s
struggle to make sense of himself.
Later on in the same story, another view from a window incorporating a
sudden narrative shift goes further to challenge the concept of self-consciousness
as a single identity. After Takashi and the prostitute have concluded their busi-
ness, the woman prompts him to leave with her, but he is loath to return home
since it is late at night, even though he suspects the brothel owner will not be
happy to let him linger if he does not ask for another woman. The indecisive
young man orders a beer from the maid but then, in the very next paragraph, it
is already dawn and Takashi is contemplating the view outside:
Sparrows chirruped in the guttering of the eaves. The view outside, fresh to
the eye and brightening in the morning haze, came together like a picture in
Takashi’s half-awake mind. Raising his head, he saw light from the electric
lamp, now thin in the morning air, illuminate the face of a sleeping woman.
(ibid.: 101)
Unlike Akutagawa’s late writings, there is a narrative logic to follow here, albeit
one requiring the reader’s full concentration; since the first woman had already
left, this sleeping woman must be another prostitute. However, just as the writer
unexpectedly shifted Takashi’s point of observation to a different room in the
earlier passage, this literary use of surprise emphasizes Takashi’s experience of
lived reality as fragments that do not easily fit together.
In ‘Lemon’, the representation of an unstable self can allow for an almost
playful escapism as the narrator articulates the possibility of slipping away from
the reality of Kyoto. Walking the streets, he imagines himself in a city many
miles away – he randomly suggests Sendai or Nagasaki – that offers greater
potential for peace of mind. The narrator compares the street he is walking
along to these cities:
If only this place could instantly transform itself into that city! When my illu-
sion finally began to take shape, I went on to apply pigments of my
imagination. My illusion and the run-down street were completely fused
together into one image, into which I happily watched myself as I really was
disappear.
(ibid.: 8)
This constitutes a vision of co-existing selves that brings to mind the Doppelgänger,
a concept taken up by Sigmund Freud in his highly influential essay, ‘The
Uncanny’ (das Unheimliche, 1919 [1956]). Freud suggests a positive aspect to this
phenomenon in the way it offers the prospect of ‘an insurance against the
destruction of the ego’, the possibility that the self may continue to exist beyond
the confines of the original self in another equally valid form. Read this way, the
scene from ‘Lemon’ may be simply reflecting the narrator’s wishful longing to
overcome and improve upon his present circumstances. Though he is far from
happy with his life in Kyoto, his very unhappiness drives him to construct
another more fortunate version of himself, albeit in the half-real streets of a
fantasy city.
On the other hand, Freud goes on to identify a negative aspect to the same
phenomenon that provides further insight into the Japanese story. He suggests
that the existence of a series of potential selves may also constitute ‘the uncanny
harbinger of death’ (Freud 1956: 235). The implication is that the concept of an
absolutely fixed and central self is ultimately diminished and devalued; the
danger inherent in multiple selves is that each separate self becomes dispensable.
In Japanese literature, there are certainly versions of such disturbing encounters
with a double. For instance, in Satō Haruo’s story, ‘Den’en no y ūutsu’ (Rural
Melancholy), published in 1919 – the very year that Freud wrote his essay – the
mentally unstable protagonist walks his beloved dog one night and becomes
aware of an apparently identical man calling from the distance. The uncanny
element arises from the uncertainty about whether this is really happening or
merely a delusion in the narrator’s mind, since the dog itself seems confused
about which direction it should run. In ‘Lemon’, the main function of the double
self is to provide an almost whimsical escape from mundane reality, but this
darker aspect of the Doppelgänger cannot be discounted since the whole story
speaks to the narrator’s deep anxiety about personal identity.
Freud’s writings have had a huge impact in raising the question of how
human consciousness engages with external phenomena, and this same theme
has been the subject of much Modernist literature and critical discourse, particu-
larly in relation to the urban environment. Kajii, too, reflects such ideas to the
extent that his writing challenges the very notion of the stable self by casting a
critical eye on apparently clear-cut boundaries between an internally contained
self and the external world. Once again, ‘Landscapes of the Heart’ provides some
pertinent examples. In the opening scene, where Takashi sits at his window lost
in contemplation, he witnesses the sight of ‘houses rising faintly in the dark [that]
emerged and dissolved before his very eyes’. Such impressions lead him to feel that
[he] could not tell where his own thoughts ended and the town in deep
night began. The oleander in the dark was in essence his very gloom. The shape
of walls revealed in the electric light merged completely with the darkness to form
a single shadow. At that point his ideas took on even more a solid (rittai-teki )
shape.
(KMZ 1999: 94)
104 Stephen Dodd
Such scenes where an anxious centre of consciousness tentatively examines itself
in the context of surrounding dark are not entirely new in modern Japanese litera-
ture; Shiga Naoya’s An’ya ko¯rō (A Dark Night’s Passing, 1921–37 [1976]) described
Kensaku’s encounter with a far more raw and frightening universal darkness
when he stood at midnight on the deck of his boat as he journeyed from Tokyo
to Osaka. Kajii, who is keener to investigate the actual process by which external
stimuli and conscious intervention seem to spill into each other, goes further to
provide a key to the ‘solid shape’ of the relationship between thoughts and the
phenomenal world.
This process is articulated most clearly later in the story when Takashi takes a
desultory walk along the Kamo River, its bank littered with the detritus of
modern life like piles of gravel and an abandoned surveyor’s measuring tape glit-
tering in the afternoon sunshine. After watching a scrap of newspaper rustle by
on the sharp wind, Takashi’s attention shifts again:
A tall zelkova tree thick with leaves stood on this side of the riverbank.
Takashi’s attention was drawn to the lofty treetop’s battle with the wind. As
he gazed intently for some time, something within his own heart lodged in
the treetop, and he felt himself sway with tiny leaves and bend with green
branches in the high currents.
‘That’s what the feeling is’, Takashi thought. ‘Vision itself has become a
thing of substance (miru koto , sore wa m ō nanika na no da). Part of my soul,
maybe all of it, has possessed that tree.’
(KMZ 1999: 102)
Reference to possession (noriutsuru), with its associations of religiosity, is not inci-

dental since the author aims to depict a form of communion between Self and
Other beyond rational explanation. In Takashi’s imagination at least, the tree’s
bending and swaying are experienced as phenomena integral to his own conscious-
ness. However, the very materiality of vision – or to directly translate Takashi’s
words, the fact that it is something – hints that the act of looking constitutes, not
so much a discrete activity as a concrete link between interior and external worlds;
less a barrier than a point of connection. Seen this way, vision itself provides the
tantalizing possibility of a more thorough interpenetration of Self and Other.
The potential for vision as a porous boundary between consciousness and
physical reality, specifically in terms of a two-way material link, is beautifully
explored in ‘Lemon’ in the scene where the narrator encounters the green-
grocer’s at night. The colourful fruit, set out on a black-varnished board, has a
powerful effect on the narrator, and it is described through a musical analogy:
The fruit on display seemed to have been coagulated into its present colour
and volume by something like a Gorgon mask (with the power to turn those
who looked on into stone) that had been thrust before the allegro flow of
some gorgeously beautiful piece of music.
(KMZ 1999: 9)
It may be that the disaffected youth can no longer bear to sit in a friend’s house
and listen to real music, but this does not stop him using it as an aesthetic
metaphor (further enhanced with mythical significance drawn from the Greek
tradition) in order to transform his experience of everyday reality. Put another
way, vision may be understood as a kind of funnel for the narrator’s powerful
imaginative forces, allowing him to reach out and reshape elements of the
external world.
On the other hand, vision also functions as a channel in the opposite direc-
tion, whereby elements of the external world have a transformative effect on the
narrator’s internal consciousness, as shown when the narrator describes the over-
whelming power of the brightly lit greengrocer’s surrounded by darkness:
In this surround of total darkness, several electric lamps set up at the storefront
lit the almost indulgently beautiful scene with a dazzling brilliance, unrivalled
by anything around, and seemed to drench it like a shower. Standing on the
road where the naked lamps cut their slender screws (rasenbo¯) of light deep into
my eyes . . . even in Teramachi it was rare for anything to delight me as
much as the sight of this greengrocer’s.
(KMZ 1999: 10)
Unlike the earlier passage, here it is the brightly lit scene itself that becomes an
active, even eroticizing force, as it physically enters the observing self in the form
of sharp light. Obviously, the freezing of colour by beautiful music and the pene-
tration of the self by external stimuli are events that follow a poetic logic beyond
common sense, but my point is that vision acts as a potent means to rupture clear
boundaries between Self and Other.
So far, I have examined Kajii’s articulation of the relationship between Self
and Other in terms of the personal experience of a particular narrator/protago-
nist, but I would like to expand my discussion here to investigate how this
relationship may be understood as part of the wider social environment in which
individual characters played out their roles. In this connection, some recent
comments by Harry Harootunian are useful in indicating that Kajii’s characters
were certainly not alone in the manner of their engagement with the external
world. For instance, he notes that post-World War I Japan witnessed a rapid
increase in the availability of Western consumer commodities:
The site of this explosion of modern life was the metropolitan centre, and its
primary constituencies, especially after the earthquake of 1923, were the
masses who worked in the urban industries, consumed its products, and
played on its streets. In fact, the discourse on everyday modern life was really
about life on the streets.
(Harootunian 2000: 18)
Kajii’s Kyoto-based stories may reflect urban life on a diminished scale, but even
the streets of this city usually associated with ‘traditional’ Japanese culture were
106 Stephen Dodd
not immune to signs of modern consumer life: the lemon encountered during a
stroll was an import from California.
But Harootunian goes further to show how Kajii’s writing reflects a more
general conflict between the undeniable attraction of consumer goods and a
perception that what he calls the ‘spiritual values’ of everyday Japanese life were
being lost. Particularly after the earthquake, a national mood of self-reflection
emerged in which ‘there was no lack of thoughtful and anxious concern for
the growing importance of desire (materiality) and the eclipsing of spirituality’
(ibid.: 20). Of course, such unease was not entirely new; an anxiety that modern,
largely imported values and goods threatened the ‘native spirit’ was a dominant
theme at least from the beginning of Meiji, and early Taishō literature was char-
acterized by a great deal of soul-searching about an ‘authentic’ Japanese self, as
exemplified in the philosophical musings of Abe Jirō’s best-selling Santarō no nikki
(Santarō’s Diary) published from 1914. However, what makes Kajii’s writing
stand out is not so much his preoccupation with introverted speculation – in this
he was simply reflecting the concerns of his own generation – but his literary
attempt to break down these apparently clear-cut dichotomies.
In order to examine how these categories were effectively blurred, it might be
useful to stay for a moment with Harootunian’s concepts of materiality and spiri-
tuality in order to identify correspondences in Kajii’s writing. The critic sets the
broader context by describing Japanese salary men of the 1920s as finding them-
selves in the awkward position of being ‘both intellectual producers whose skills
and value were undermined by the market and custodians of culture who were
losing their grip on cherished values’. Their response was to embrace a concept
of culture associated with seishin (spirit) and ‘the world of nonmaterial values’
(Harootunian 2000: 208). A parallel process appears to be at work in ‘Lemon’
where the narrator recalls the pleasure that he once found in his visits to
Maruzen. He describes the various goods he would see on display:
Red and yellow eau de cologne and eau de quinine. Amber and jade green
perfume bottles of tasteful cut-glass workmanship with elegant raised designs
in rococo style. Pipes, daggers, soap, tobacco. At times, I would spend a good
hour looking at such things. And, finally, my extravagance would run to the
purchase of one first-class pencil.
(KMZ 1999: 8–9)
It is characteristic of Kajii’s writing that this list of desirable objects produces a

predominantly visual impact, although additional olfactory impressions (of
cologne, soap and tobacco) plus the rich green colours create an overwhelming
feeling of the exotic and foreign. The inaccessibility of these commodities to
everyday life is compounded by the fact that the narrator can merely afford a
single pencil, so that they largely remain available only as a series of transitory
sensory impressions. Moreover, still a student, the young man is even less likely
than the typical salary man of the time to actually possess them. On the other
hand, while the salary man’s perceived disengagement from his world led him to
take refuge in ‘nonmaterial values’, in ‘Lemon’ the narrator’s equally powerful
sense of loss finds comparable compensation by imaginatively translating
consumer goods into aesthetic properties in order to reclaim them as his own. In
this sense, Kajii re-engages with his surrounding environment by reformulating
material goods into a distinctively literary version of the ‘spiritual life’.
While the above observations relate to the content of the passage from
‘Lemon’, a consideration of the text’s formal properties may offer further insight
into the relationship between Self and Other in terms of a broader social reality
that incorporates, but also goes beyond, individual experience. Here is part of
the passage in its original Japanese:
Aka ya ki no ōdokoron ya ōdokinin. Shareta kiriko-zaiku ya tenga na rokoko

shumi no uki-moyō o motta kohaku-iro ya hisui-iro no kōsui-bin. Kiseru, shōtō,
sekken, tabako.
The writing style impresses with its almost excessively pleasurable richness; less
common kanji are used (for instance, Kajii uses the Chinese characters for
‘amber’ and ‘jade’, rather than using the more common hiragana (Japanese
phonetic) transcription), while the term kōsu i-bin (perfume bottles) is heavily
loaded with a large cluster of preceding clauses. Moreover, the goods on display
are described not through formal sentences but as a series of noun compounds
punctuated with full stops and commas but without final verbs. The overall effect
is to suggest a common approach between Kajii and the Aesthetic School
(tanbiha) of writers such as Satō and Tanizaki, who insisted on continuing to draw
on earlier more lyrical literary forms as a sign of resistance to other calls – insti-
gated principally by an earlier generation of Naturalist writers – to create a more
straightforward and bare language in keeping with the practical needs of the
modern age. Yet even here, Kajii’s incorporation of western exotic words into his
list mitigates any easy retreat into ‘traditional’ writing.
But this passage also addresses the writer’s relationship with his wider social
context by hinting at a fundamental fragmentation and inability to connect. This
is done specifically in the way it casts a critical light on the role of subjectivity as
a fixed and central point of narrative consciousness. While I have argued that the
mere enumeration of alluring consumer goods gives some degree of pleasure
and control back to the narrator, this is undermined by the text’s grammatical
structure that speaks of an unmistakable barrier between the objects of desire
and the desiring subject. The items presented to the observing self, such as ‘pipes,
daggers, soap, tobacco’, imply the promise of full ownership – this is, after all, a
shop with goods for sale – but their very definition as objects outside the confines
of the self consolidates a sense of separation between the two. It is perhaps for
this reason that the narrator had come to find his visits to Maruzen unbearable.
In other words, the very language of the text outlines a dynamic of unresolved
desire whereby both subject and external objects remain forever fragmented and
outside the possibility of re-integration. In short, Kajii’s writing may be seen to
touch on the theme of Self and Other not only in terms of an individual’s
108 Stephen Dodd
engagement with the external world but also in terms of a process fundamental
to the emerging consumer society in which the individual is located.
I hope to have shown that, though Kajii’s literary career was very brief, the
quality of his writing and the themes he touches on are well worth further study.
In particular, the relationship between Self and Other is a question that still
resonates in our own age.
References
Main text
Kajii Motojirō(1999) Kajii Motojirō zenshū (KMZ), vol. 3, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
Other references
Freud, Sigmund (1956) ‘The Uncanny’, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17, trans.
J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, pp. 219–52.
Harootunian, Harold (2000) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar
Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kobayashi Hideo (1967–69) ‘Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku’ (Literature of the Lost Home),
in Kobayashi Hideo zenshū (The Complete Works of Kobayashi Hideo), vol. 3, Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, pp. 29–37.
Lippit, Seiji (1997) ‘Japanese Modernism and the Destruction of Literary Form: The
Writings of Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, and Kawabata’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
Columbia University.
——(2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press.
Moretti, Franco (2002) ‘The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture’,
in Michael McKeon (ed.) Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, pp. 554–65.
Mori Ōgai ([1909] 1974) Vita Sexualis, trans. Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein,
Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.
Natsume Sōseki ([1914] 1957) Kokoro, trans. Edwin McClellan, Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.
Ryan, M. (1967) Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Shiga Naoya ([1921–37] 1976) A Dark Night’s Passing, trans. Edwin McClellan, Tokyo:
Kodansha.
Further reading
Kamakawa Katsuhiko (2000) Kajii Motojirōnō (On Kajii Motojirō), Tokyo: Kanrin shobō.
Kodama de Larroche, Christine (1987) Les cercles d’un regard: Le monde de Kajii Motojirō, Paris:
Maisonneuve et Larose.
Suzuki Sadami (2001) Kajii Motojirō no sekai (The World of Kajii Motojirō), Tokyo: Sakuhinsha.
Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Ulmer, Robert (1982) ‘The Private World of Kajii Motojirō’, unpublished PhD disserta-
tion, Yale University.
6 Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others
Paris and Shanghai
Douglas Slaymaker
Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), for all his flaws, remains a central figure of
twentieth-century intellectual life in Japan. By flaws, I refer to the critical weak-
nesses which overshadow the experimental sparkle of many works, particularly his
later, longer works.1 Then there is the taint of wartime collaboration, hardly miti-
gated by the incontrovertible appeal that nationalistic essentialisms held for him. I
would suggest, nonetheless, that the questions that inform his work plague us still:
the origin and shape of national and ethnic identities; the gendered operations
comprising those identities; and the colonial past that undergirds those identities (to
enumerate but three). Many other aspects of his writing, such as stylistic and artistic
concerns could be addressed as well, but I will concentrate here on the Others
that structure two novels, Shanhai (Shanghai, 1927–31 [2001]) and Ryoshū (Travel
Weariness, 1937–45 [1998]).2
These two novels marked significant changes in the direction of Yokomitsu’s
writings: for one, they are longer in form than earlier works and, for another, they
are located outside of Japan. Further, they form an apex that triangulates two key
sites of otherness: the Other of foreign cities and the Other of woman. A variety
of organizing themes lurk in the background of these works: modernity and an
accompanying urbane vision; the nation in a time and place of colonial expan-
sion; dread in the face of historical pressure; romantic and sexual attraction; and
death. I will focus on the imagery of the city and explore how women, who are
often a stand-in for home, because both ‘woman’ and ‘home’ represent the
nation for Yokomitsu, form a subset of the city as Other. Yokomitsu’s choice of
material highlights the importance of place where this Otherness is located: one
novel contrasts Japan to the Other of Asia via the city of Shanghai (Shanghai ), the
other contrasts it to the Other of Europe via the city of Paris (Travel Weariness).
The specter of the Western Other haunts these novels – whether the interna-
tionalism of Shanghai, a city often referred to, in Japan, as the ‘Paris of the East’,
in the early decades of the twentieth century, or Paris itself – because it forces
characters to confront their ‘Japan’ within world systems of power.3 Yokomitsu’s
characters quiver in ambiguity and anxiety as ‘Japanese’ at these various Other
places;4 these Others include both the city and women because, as I shall develop
below, both cities and women share imaginative space as the objects of desire in
Yokomitsu’s novels and for many in 1930s and 1940s Japan. Further, Shanghai
110 Douglas Slaymaker
correlated in many ways to Paris, and both Paris and Shanghai represented (was,
in one instance) an artistic capital of the world. This was especially true in the
pre-war Japanese imagination. These cities were metaphors for the worlds of
artistry, of decadence, which meant, for many at the time, the allure of women.
To speak of France, in Japan, was to evoke the cabaret revues, coffee shops, the
demi-monde, and public sexuality introduced to Japan during the 1920s (i.e. of
Taishō Japan).5 The simultaneous attraction and fear that accompany the
imagery of women in these two novels attend as well on the imagery of Paris
(and again, in Yokomitsu’s case this is both the Paris of France and the ‘Paris of
the East’, i.e. Shanghai). Women are consistently identified with, and in many
ways overlap precisely with, these geographic locales.
These various Others comprise but one half of an equation; the Self forms
the complementary term. Thus, issues of individual identity motivate these char-
acters, these works and, apparently, this writer. As Naoki Sakai has articulated in
another context:
The relation of the self cannot be determined unless the relation to the other
has already been determined. Not to mention Hegel on self-consciousness, it
is a rudimentary premise, when dealing with the problem of identity in
cultural and social contexts, that the relation to the other logically
precedes that to the self. What is at issue here, indeed, is not a dialectic of
the self and the other for individual consciousness, but a process in which
the comparative framework of Japan (the Self ) and the West (the Other) is
installed.
(1997: 51)
It is now commonplace to posit the need for an Other when defining a Self.
Yokomitsu’s choice of Others, and his descriptions of them, reveal the structure
of his imaginative universe while elucidating the public imagination of his read-
ership, which Sakai articulated as the ‘process in which the comparative
framework of Japan . . . is installed’ (ibid.).
That process can be seen in Shanghai, the novel, which, like Shanghai the city,
embodies for Yokomitsu (and, it seems safe to assume, for his audience) the allure
of risky high stakes and transgressive possibilities (freedoms) of capital and of
sexuality. This city forms an Other to individuals and to the nation with which
they identify; in this instance that Other is Japan. In 1930s imperialist Japan, for
example, the movements of individuals overlapped with movements of capital,
and Shanghai attracted both with its volatile markets and great riches. Further,
not only was it one of the most ‘international’ cities in the world, it was an Asian
city, which was far from insignificant in this time of imperialist fervor and
Orientalist anxiety. Many of the artifacts of the time, such as these novels, reveal
the anxiety of a culture engaged in fervid expansion on an imperialist model
even as it feared being overtaken by the Western imperial nations from which it
took clues. Shanghai may have seemed a middling place, not fully Asian but not
quite Western; if so, it resonated with Japanese concerns that it too was caught in
Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others 111
a place between. Stated another way, contained in the allure of Shanghai, a
product of successful enterprises of successful nations, were the anxiety-
producing threats to colonial enterprises – passions and desires that might
undermine those imperial advantages and reveal unseemly activities. That is,
Japan oscillated between its identity as a colonizing imperial power even as it was
a member of a subjugated, colonized Asia. The contradictions inherent in this
position increase the level of anxiety contained in the colonial structure; these
layers of anxiety become insistent as they pull Yokomitsu’s novels in contradic-
tory directions.
Shanghai was among the most contested of political areas early in the twen-
tieth century. Sometimes a colony, at all times part of an ‘informal empire’,6
Shanghai would have been known to many Japanese readers as ‘sin city’(mato) in
the pre-war years. ‘Mato’ was, for example, the title of a 1924 melodramatic short
story by Muramatsu Shōfū, set in Shanghai and reinforcing many of the stereo-
types associated with Shanghai, such as sex, violence, and danger. In this
historical context, imaginative associations extend to the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic
grotesque nonsense) of Taishō Japan and its themes of sexual license and free
rein given to desire.7 In the case of Shanghai, however, the associative complex
includes lawlessness, criminals, and political revolutionaries. Indeed, that this
decadence was much more than that of desire and wealth, and was often tied to
strong political passions and the threat of violence, gave Shanghai an edge
attractive to many in Japan (and other countries); this set it apart, for Japanese in
particular, from similar Western urban sites such as New York, London, or Paris.
The allure of wealth formed but part of Shanghai’s attraction; politics and possi-
bilities were equally integral to its appeal.8
Both of Yokomitsu’s novels reflect the political-historical moments of their
writing: Japan, for example, intent on proving its place in the world, found in
Shanghai a prime location to assert its political intent and international position
and, again, a location in Asia. Japan’s jockeying for position was boosted with
Europe’s First World War and the subsequent change in global demographics. As
foreign nationals were repatriated to Britain, Germany, or France for war service,
the Japanese population in Shanghai became second only to that of the British
(in 1915). Shanghai, and the Japanese industries that were growing there,
supplied war materiel and consumer goods in short supply in Europe, a situation
enhanced by Japan’s relative non-involvement in the conflicts of WWI. The
economic activity of Shanghai left a great impression on Yokomitsu when he
visited in 1928: ‘Everything here flows on silver’, he exclaimed with both awe
and disgust, going on to note how pawn shops stretched as far as he could see
(Inoue 1994: 55–6). The increased politicization of the Chinese populace, many
in resentment of the colonizers, both European and Japanese, meant the streets
of Shanghai were becoming armed.9 A critical factor worth noting, however, is
that there were no Japanese areas in the way that there were British, French, or
German concessions in Shanghai. The sparks that would ignite Shanghai’s political
powder keg flew from the May 30 incident of 1925,10 when British troops killed
eleven protesters in Shanghai; demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts followed in
its wake, throughout China. This event, with its Chinese violence turned on
Japanese factory owners, roots Yokomitsu’s imaginative vision for the novel. The
incident began by pitting Japanese factory owners and Chinese workers against
each other on the streets of Shanghai, and quickly spread to involve the other
nations represented there, such as the British forces.
This historical moment also ties to the literary record of other writers and
their works that are located in Shanghai: with Yokomitsu’s writing vis-à-vis Japan
forming one apex, we can consider the rich triangle formed by André Malraux’s
tale of France’s Asian and colonial Other in his La condition humaine (1933), as
characters move from the French colony in Vietnam to the political unrest of
Shanghai, and by Mao Dun’s Midnight (1933), which focuses on the societal
upheavals introduced to Chinese society at this time. Each of these three novels
takes up China’s Others of capital, urbanity, and political revolution. They do so
in close historical proximity, but focus on the issues from three different national
perspectives. Shanghai roots the action of all these novels, and provides the prism
that separates the strands of color comprising the different nations’ perceived
stakes in these locales.
International and capital exchange frame the novel Shanghai. For example,
Sanki, a central character, converses comfortably with the white Russian prosti-
tutes, so much a part of Shanghai’s contemporary allure. Seated by the Bund,
with the water of the Huangpu river in the background (and water is richly
symbolic in Yokomitsu’s Shanghai)11, Sanki and the prostitutes converse in English
and they discuss monetary exchange, revealing Sanki’s command of the interna-
tional idiom, English. The market for, and the exchange of, desire structures the
work, and bodies and sex are sold at every level.12 The variety of prostitutes
named reveals the layers of the bodily exchange: we see the one level that
includes the white Russians, the destitute Japanese expatriate O-Sugi, and the
flirtatious international sensation Miyako; we see it as well in other exchanges of
bodies, such as the coolies selling their physical labor, and in the corpses that are
being readied for the medical market. Related is the alluring Chinese woman
who happens also to be a main political activist and romantic temptation for
Sanki. She is dangerous and beautiful, the exotic woman who threatens home
and homeland because she is not Japanese, transgressive, as she moves across the
various political and ethnic borders thrown up before her. She also introduces
another level of disequilibrium to Sanki, who is drawn to women in need of care,
which seems to correspond to his associating these women with the homeland
which he is to protect. At the same time, the Chinese activist Quilan promises the
ecstasy of dissolution as she takes control of him and saves him in his helpless-
ness. This woman offers another organization to the relationships of men and
women, and the confusion this brings to the character reinforces the phantas-
magoric confusion of the Shanghai streets through which he pursues her.
Shanghai served as a no man’s land precisely because it was everyone’s land.
Great possibility and fabulous opulence existed side by side with abject poverty,
and no-one was concerned about the national origins of the individuals. The
possibility of escaping national identities constantly appears as one source of
freedom for these characters. As Komori Yōichi has noted, Shanghai was a place
of nationless souls, many traveled there to escape their own countries and shady
pasts, many with obscure and dubious travel papers, in a city with few adminis-
trators concerned about such details of legality (Komori 1988: 517ff.). This
milieu generates the richly imaged statement concerning Sanki: ‘But because he
was in Shanghai, the space his body took up was always a territory of Japan’
(Yokomitsu 2001: 45). Anxiety-filled imagery, in which body borders correlate to
national borders, is consistent through this work; in this case, Sanki’s body is an
occupied area, delimited by political boundaries. The exchange of bodies and
capital is caught in the first paragraph when Sanki says to the Russian prostitutes
(and I paraphrase) ‘Sorry ladies, but I’m broke’; to which they quip in reply: ‘No
money? Hell, we don’t even have a country.’ Bodies, money, and politics are all
quickly conflated on these streets.
Yokomitsu had written in the preface to the first edition of Shanghai that ‘the
impetus for writing this novel comes from a desire to know this pathetic East (Tōyō)’
(Yokomitsu 1987: 370). Yokomitsu had also described the colonialist projects of
the Western powers as the ‘first battle between Europe (Yōroppa) and the East (Tōyō) in
modern Asian history’ (ibid.) and he took away from his visit to Shanghai the
strong impression of ‘the piteous East in which I live’, that is, the East controlled
by the colonial powers (Inoue 1994: 54–5). Such equations replicate the Japanese
imperial discourse which posited a Japanese identity as part of an Asian identity
in a struggle against Western imperial domination, and which simultaneously
(and contradictorily) offered imperial Japan as the savior from that dominating
yoke. At the same time, Yokomitsu’s descriptions of other Asians contain all the
paternal disdain of a European imperialist traveling in Asia: nationals become
‘foreigners’ in their own land before the othering gaze of the tourist-traveler.
This is the site of one of Yokomitsu’s enduring issues – Japan’s positioning of
itself in the world – because it supports the ideology in which Japan is a part of
Asia unified against the West even as Japan sets itself up as the leader of Asia
and, in so doing, takes on all the characteristics of an imperialist state lording it
over colonies. In the context of these novels, such structures also, at the same
time and by imperial structural necessity, invoke the ‘freedom’ to identify with
the state, and the freedom to sacrifice oneself for a national/political identity.
Self-identity in a political ethnicity, or political relegation of individual identity,
occupied much of the intellectual discourse of pre-war Japan, and these
discourses infuse Yokomitsu’s writings.13
Colonial fantasy resides alongside colonial anxieties in Shanghai; both are
ratcheted up when Yokomitsu, and his characters, travel to the West. In this sense
Travel Weariness, the second of the novels I am considering here, set in France and
based on Yokomitsu’s European trip nine years after his stay in Shanghai, is
tantamount to traveling behind the enemy lines of the Western powers which
have rendered the East so pathetic in their powerlessness and loss of autonomy.14
Travel Weariness occupied the last decade of Yokomitsu’s life, but remained unfin-
ished when Yokomitsu died in 1947, at age 50. It traces the experiences and
crises of identity among an expatriate Japanese community in Paris during the
1930s. Yokomitsu had traveled to Europe to report on the Olympic Games in
Berlin, in 1936, a signal event in the history of colonizing and national aggres-
sion. In the following year, Japan invaded China, eventually to occupy Shanghai.
In the words of Hoshō Masao, ‘The mood of the times progressed from un-usual
(hijōji ) to Super un-usual’ (Hoshō 1967: 544). The historical events that form the
background of Yokomitsu’s Europe trip and their international ramifications
unfold, almost in ‘real time’, behind the action of the novel and intrude more
than once on the realm of the characters in Paris.
In Travel Weariness, the Other that provides the imagery for such enunciation is
France and the French experience. For example, Yashiro thinks only of Japan
while in France; on the ship traveling to France, ‘Japan’ filled his thoughts in
ways that increased in tandem to physical proximity to the port of Marseilles.
Thus, when he actually arrives in Marseilles, he is reluctant to disembark. The
Europe that he has never seen or experienced is now before him. He ‘desires to
quickly plant his foot on the monster (kaibutsu) lying before him’ (Yokomitsu 1998
26), yet he stays on board ship, in his cabin, looking at the lights of the shore.
Trapped behind its steel walls, frightened to venture out, for ‘in all the wide
world only the interior of this ship preserved the stuffy air of Japan; he thought
he would cry’ (ibid.: 38). The Other of France is more oppressive and fright-
ening, when right before his eyes, than it had ever been before departure.
Behind this immobilizing fear is an Orientalizing, and self-orientalizing, imag-
ination which plays a key role in Yokomitsu’s imagination, in a manner
reminiscent of the European writers analyzed by Edward Said:
In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than
a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have
its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from
someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an
amalgam of all these.
(Said 1979: 177)
Yokomitsu’s works occupy a different context than the Orientalists Said expli-
cates, but the rhetorical structure is the same. Yokomitsu draws from an
imaginative topos, a literary-cultural lineage which Said characterized, above, as a
‘congeries of characteristics’. While Said is charting the process among French
and British artists of the nineteenth century, it seems to me that a similar struc-
ture was developed by Japanese writers on France. In particular, the ‘congeries of
characteristics’ that formed the lineage from which Yokomitsu drew had been
established by previous Japanese travelers (namely novelist Shimazaki Tōson
(1872–1943) and artist Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968). Said’s explication of the
process of European Orientalism seems replicated in the production of knowl-
edge in Japan which also created a topos and a ‘set of references’ for the desired
locale. France was not a Japanese colony, but it was an important imaginative
Other that needed to be tamed. And Yokomitsu’s novels are but one example in
a lineage that also includes the work of Shimazaki and Fujita – one a literary
artist, the other a visual artist – who were participant in these and established a
15
landscape that reflects less of France and much more of Japan. That is, these
other locales are described and negotiated in ways that speak to Japan.
Yokomitsu, as Yashiro will do, also traveled on to Berlin and throughout Europe,
but we hardly hear about any of it. Paris (which is to say ‘France’) stole center
stage of his imagination.
Much of Travel Weariness is taken up with discussions between Yashiro, the
main narrator and something of a stand-in for Yokomitsu himself, and Kuji, his
foil. (That the Chinese characters for his name are read ‘Yashiro’, with its associ-
ations with State Shinto shrines, hardly seems coincidental.)16 Kuji is an advocate
of the rationalist scientific approaches he finds in the West, and argues for
Rationalism and scientific supremacy. He wants to cast off any and all traces of
‘backward’ Japan and denies any value to the Japanese ethic and way of thinking.
Yashiro, meanwhile, comes to stress the spiritual superiority of Japanese culture.
He does not deny the value of Western scientific rationality, only decries it for
vacuous soullessness. These two characters become ciphers in a dualistic argu-
ment, to borrow Dennis Keene’s phrasing (1980: 208–10).
As Yashiro characterizes his ongoing argument with Kuji, for example, he and
Kuji have been trying to weave two strands, the European and the Japanese, into
a single rope. The argument turns on which should be placed in prominence at
the head of that rope (Yokomitsu 1998 78). The struggle comes from trying to
determine which should be at the top and assume the dominant position. They
are unable to agree.
While the May 30th incident anchors Shanghai, in many ways the activity of
the Front Populaire, the Parisian labor strikes, and the dissolution of Blum’s cabinet
in Paris, played out in tandem with the Japanese incursions into China in the
1930s, anchor major sections of Travel Weariness. Yashiro’s sense of cultural inferi-
ority is exacerbated by the French lack of interest in these Asian events. News of
these events plays out like grand theater to the café habitués, with these distant
struggles for self-determination unfolding like a cycle of plays, further acts in a
long and distant drama. To make matters worse, Parisians cannot even distin-
guish between the Chinese and Japanese among them. Yashiro takes this
marginalization very much to heart. Kuji, by contrast, finds only shallowness in
Japan, in sharp distinction to the depth he discovers in France; at the same time,
he senses that what one sees in Paris is simply the surface of things behind which
lies an unfathomable depth of tradition. This means that if, as is claimed, to
know the past is to know the present, then given the depths of this past, Kuji has
no idea of what the present is like, much less the future. Kuji continues his
internal monologue in this direction and posits that history is tied to the issue of
land. If one is removed from the land of one’s birth, which is the root of one’s
identity, then one is assaulted by doubts and despair, he suggests. Land is the
most basic issue. He looks at the ‘foreigners’ on the terrace of the café. He
attributes the sadness he sees in all their faces to the fact that they are not in their
homelands. Even so, Kuji does not wish to return to his own homeland. There is
much here in France that he wants to research, yet the impossibility of his situation
persists, for even as he is burrowing into the rich mountain of jewels that houses
the object of his research, he feels he has not even begun to research the land of
his birth. Many say that in these modern times one must understand the West
before understanding Asia, but this strikes him as specious. He realizes that he
is searching for the jewel that is common throughout the world, the treasure that is
consistent throughout all cultures in all lands, or the common thread that unites
them all. At the same time, his anxieties are compounded when he finds that
‘civilized’ France also possesses a barbarous past with skeletons hidden in the
sacred cathedral closets of its tradition, a tradition he had taken as being
completely rational.
The reader finds that, along with these characters, many of these issues come
into focus when mail arrives from Japan. Every two weeks a ship arrives in
Marseilles bearing letters from families left behind in Japan, and with it new
groups of Japanese. These newcomers are given the cold shoulder by the old-
timers, those who have been in Paris for two or three years. These ‘old-timers’
are the most steeped in a ‘Europeanism’ that has them despise all that is
Japanese. They sneer at the shallow attempts of the newcomers to ape European
ways. Furthermore, from this European perspective they see only the many awful
barbarisms of Japanese society (as they are catalogued at this point): the great
numbers of poor among whom tuberculosis is rampant, the farming peasants
who must sell their daughters into prostitution, and the many cheap prostitutes
active in the areas marking the borders of economic progress. ‘Culture’ in Japan?
It is no more than an amalgam of European and American practices, they jeer.
As these despicable aspects of Japan are listed, Kuji wonders aloud if there is
anything of value in Japan. Yashiro, for his part, recuperates Japanese culture by
claiming that all these failings develop from beautiful aspects of Japanese society.
For him, ‘more than all those so-called negative points, in the midst of a nature-
loving Japanese civilization (bunm e i ) there was the very positive aspect wherein
the number of bad people was exceedingly small. This gave him more pleasure
than anything else’ (Yokomitsu 1998 136).
Yashiro is obviously the voice of essentialism, insisting that Japan is superior
because of a spiritual tradition. Yet the dissonance he experiences in the ancient
cathedrals of France vexes him greatly. France, as the center of Europe, occupies
the center of civilization, rational thought, and scientific enquiry; the grotesque,
tortured, bloodied, representations of the crucified Christ found in its cathedrals
therefore take him by surprise, and he is confused about how the advanced civi-
lization associated with France could have arisen from such expressions of
barbarity. ‘So this country’s culture also had, at one time, barbarities as well’,
Yashiro says to himself (ibid.: 32). This is a commonly expressed sentiment in the
novel; the ‘as well’ is critical, for it reveals the common-sense ‘of course’ that
Yashiro harbors concerning Japan’s barbarous past. Yashiro is not content with
finding commonalities between the two cultures, however; he goes on to express,
not just Japan’s equality in such shared aspects of history, but its superiority,
because Japan’s culture had remained pure throughout such historical phases;
these are his counter-arguments to his friend Kuji who would write off the whole
of Japan and wholeheartedly embrace the rationalistic scientific thinking of
France (as he articulates it). This seems the same trajectory that Yokomitsu
himself would ultimately follow: anxiety about the paucity of cultural capital in
the Japanese tradition leads to an over-emphasis on a Japanese essential, spiritu-
ally superior tradition.
This development of essentialist thinking also marks the characteristics where
the Other of the foreign city overlaps with the Other of Woman. On the ship,
Yashiro has met a young Japanese woman named Chizuko. He is too shy and
intimidated to speak to her, partly because of their class differences but mostly
because of his personality, but they become very close while in France. While on
board ship to France, she and Kuji had seemed on the most intimate terms,
complicating matters for Yashiro. This structure also introduces a triangulation,
in the manner of René Girard, as Chizuko is an Other for each of the men, and
their affection for her collapses into rivalry between them. As a result, they seem
less interested in winning over Chizuko, more in winning over each other. The
rivalry over this woman is not divorced from their rivalry over Japan: she is either
an embodiment of spiritual purity to be embraced heartily, or a decadent temp-
tation that draws one from the path of knowledge. Japan is often imagined as
‘woman’, and the rivalry over one woman often functions as a proxy for the
rivalry over the other.
Chizuko, like Yashiro, has a revelatory experience when she discovers the
barbarous chapters in France’s history. She had gone from Marseilles to London
to visit a brother in the diplomatic corps; she is now enjoying an extended stay in
Paris before traveling home via the US. While sightseeing in Paris she discovers
that, in the traditions of France, there are both admirable and frightening areas,
and these together form the tradition of France. The issues surrounding tradition,
given the questions foregrounded here, represent an enduring and compelling
theme throughout Travel Weariness. On further reflection, Chizuko realizes that
Japan too has both beautiful and frightening aspects to its tradition. Were this not
the case, she comments to Yashiro, the encounter with French tradition would
have been indescribably pathetic. Yashiro responds that Kuji would react
violently to such a statement, for Kuji will not allow anything of value in the
Japanese tradition, hardly even recognizing that Japan has a tradition of which
to speak. Chizuko counters by pointing out that, actually, Kuji had commented
just the other day that Paris was very fine, but that Japan was desirable as well.
Indeed, he had made these statements while viewing paintings by Fujita
Tsuguharu: ‘It was after coming to Paris that I first thought that Fujita was inter-
esting (se goi ) . He [Fujita] sure stirred things up in this city!’ she reports him as
saying.17
All in all, the relationship between Yashiro and Chizuko is one of the most
exasperating aspects of the novel, for across pages and pages of narrative Yashiro
is in internal agony over his desire to marry her and the possibility of losing her,
yet he cannot bring himself to admit this, much less speak directly to her about
it. Even so, after their friendship develops during her stay in Paris, they travel
together through Europe and he constantly goes over a marriage scenario in his
mind, but never discusses it with her. In the context of the times and the narra-
tive, the depiction of this man and woman traveling together is scandalously
suggestive. His friend Kuji assumes they have entered a de facto engagement.
Chizuko is an object of desire that remains unattainable because of Yashiro’s
inability to express his thoughts. The barriers keeping him from her are similar to
the barriers keeping him from France: any concession seems an insult to ‘Japan’.
In this relationship, the Other of foreignness meets the Other of woman: when
Yashiro thinks of Japan he thinks of marriage. As it plays out in his mind, he
realizes he feels compelled to marry a Japanese woman. It is not that he loves
Chizuko in this moment, he says to himself, simply that he finds Japan to be almost
unbearably pathetic; associated with the feminine, they both need to be cared for.
This begins a complex series of associations in which Japan is gendered female:
Yashiro’s desire for Chizuko parallels his desire for Japan, and Chizuko turns, at
times, into an embodiment of the traditional Japan. He acknowledges to himself
that his desire to marry her really has little to do with marriage, but as he
considers all the countries to which he will be traveling and the innumerable
women as ‘enemies’ he will meet in those places, the only real choice seems to be
Chizuko.
This would only be laughable in the sight of another, but Yashiro, desirous
as he was of the purity of blood, and aware of the pain it would cause to
have his virginity taken by a foreign woman, wished to acknowledge the
rightness of his choosing Chizuko.
(Yokomitsu 1998: 45–6)
Readers can be thankful that little of the novel reads this badly and, in general,
Yashiro’s friendship and concern for Chizuko seem more believably genuine. But
phrases like this call it all into doubt, not least for the way they play into, and
support, the colonizing, militarist rhetoric of the Japan in which Yokomitsu was
writing. So, while this phrasing hints at some critical distance by both author and
character, melodramatic essentialism does weigh down much of this novel.
There is some further novelistic subtlety added in the latter half of the novel,
when all the characters return to Japan. Yashiro’s ship docks, but even before
returning to his own home he goes out of his way to travel past Chizuko’s Tokyo
home. He cannot enter, cannot even approach the imposing gate. That is, the
gate to her home is a physical marker of their status differences in society and the
class issues that he could suppress while overseas, but which now prevent him
from approaching her in Japan. At the same time, however, this continual
drawing close and pulling back conforms to what George Bataille leads us to
expect as a response to the erotic (Chizuko as woman) and the sacred (Chizuko
as Japan), both of which Chizuko represents. The important feature of this
imaginary, as is consistent in tales displaying the push and pull of religious
ecstasy that Bataille identified in eroticism, is her feminine embodiment of Japan.
Bataille’s explanation of eroticism helps explain Yashiro’s obsession with making
Chizuko his wife (it may also explain his fear of her). It means her character must
bear great weight in the ideological web of the novel, representing woman, and
Japan, both of which are sacred and pure.
Other imagery continues the Bataillian vacillation in the face of the over-
lapped sacred and sensual, as the sacred associations become more explicit in
other contexts. For example, in a passage that introduces a Chinese national who
has studied for a long period in Japan and who is now resident in Paris, one reads
that when Chinese see Paris, they find it dead and empty. Yashiro responds that
his association of Japan is in the beauty of emptiness, a now worn association
that he develops with a confession: ‘Whenever I think of Japan, while here in
France, I think of a place empty of people; the Ise Shrine comes to mind’ (ibid.:
235).18 The emptiness of the minimalist temple complex exudes for him a purity
of love/affection (aijō) that is to be found in Japanese culture. Kuji ridicules him
for this, but Yashiro is not to be dissuaded, continuing that this peaceful beauty
resides, silently, within the people (minshū) of Japan. Kuji’s response is swift and
cutting: he draws attention to the stones of the Ise complex, which brings him back
to his favorite topic, the depth and splendor of France; he associates the stones
of Ise with the stony heaviness of France’s streets and buildings:
It lodged firmly in his breast with the heaviness of the stones of this city.
One could poke at it, one could blow at it, but it gave no sign of being
movable. Even the stone house in front of his eyes, now on its way to being a
pauper’s dwelling, shored up with metal plates, stained with a rusty run-off,
appears tinged with the sadness of blood.
(ibid.: 236)
At this moment he sees the softness of the muffler wrapped around Makiko’s
neck, and this saves him from this oppressive heaviness. (Makiko often joins
Yashiro, Kuji, and Chizuko in perambulations through Paris.) Blood, stones,
salvation by the softness of a woman’s clothing: this series of images will quickly
become a cliché when reiterated by postwar male writers. The dialectic of hard and
soft, masculine and feminine, civilized and cultured that Yokomitsu develops here
will quickly become entrenched in the Japanese literary heritage. One of the more
prominent expressions, for example, is the iterations within Endō Shūsaku’s
Ryūgaku (Foreign Studies, 1965 [1989]).
As a final point, I want to note the importance of Travel Weariness in the history
of Japanese writing about France. The themes that Yokomitsu articulated in this
work gained increasing importance in wartime Japan. The enduring obsession
with tradition and purity is one; the importance of place is another. This articu-
lation also contains a chronicle of the complex imagination of France within the
Japanese tradition. Additionally, the conflation of Chizuko’s femininity with
Japan is a rich one of great structural importance to the novel and also to the
imagination of France within Japanese writing. When thinking historically, I am
constantly reminded, as I read this work, how things have changed: Japan as
economic powerhouse and threat in the 1960s through the 1980s, recognized as
an important political, economic, and cultural entity throughout the world, was
unimaginable in Yokomitsu’s time. France served as a powerful imaginative
site for Japan throughout the twentieth century, often as the source of desire,
but also as an example of problems to avoid. As Japan wrestled with modern-
ization, many Japanese intellectuals found in France a culture that, like their
own, boasted a long literary heritage wherein the meaning of being ‘French’ or
‘Japanese’ proceeded from self-identification with that heritage. France, with its
otherness and exoticism, afforded for Yokomitsu a foil against which he could
explore the meanings of being Japanese and the degree to which he and his
cohorts should accommodate the West and become like the Frenchmen they saw.
In his important history of interaction with this Other of France, Watanabe
Kazutami has charted the changing imagery of France within Japanese writings
(1995). The imagery of France within Japan remained relatively stable before
and after the First World War; the imagery of Japanese within France, however,
changed radically across those decades. As a result, many Japanese experienced
those changes as personal dislocation. Watanabe finds that in the 1920s, Japanese
were treated as embodiments of japonisme , as exotic beings from a vacuous, albeit
artistic, culture, as individuals who could be blissfully self-absorbed and non-
political. (Fujita Tsuguharu, who figures in the pages of Travel Weariness, as I
noted above, supported this mythologizing.) Jean Cocteau, when he visited Japan
in 1936, seemed to seriously expect all the women to look like something from
Utamaro, for example. By the time that Yokomitsu writes, however, those days
are long past: the apolitical Japanese citizen is an impossible anachronism.
Japan’s increasing bellicosity and its invasion of China in 1937 occur during the
time Yokomitsu’s characters are in Paris. Japan is also host to rightist military
plots in this period. All these events occur after Yashiro and the other characters
have left home (an experience that parallels Yokomitsu’s own); and the interna-
tional ramifications of these events prompt a querying (and confused) gaze from
Europeans turned towards them and their country (albeit, as already noted, one
that exasperates Yashiro because that gaze seems disinterested). At the same time,
it is not at all clear to the characters themselves what is taking place at ‘home’.
Individual Japanese must now explain the political significances of their nation’s
actions. They represent, and must speak for, ‘Japan’, the country with which they
have a confused, sometimes tenuous, and often anxiety-ridden relationship.
Stated differently, Japan had become a country that fostered a wary awe where
before it was ignored by all except for aesthetes. Japanese in Europe are no
longer anonymous. Their relationship to Japan, and the accompanying associa-
tions among Europeans, have changed radically; that anxiety is reflected in this
novel. Further, as Watanabe explores, Japanese intellectuals and Francophiles
faced a real sense of crisis in the 1940s as France was divided and occupied, and
they feared that France was going to be no more: ‘That is, the France that had
been for Japanese intellectuals since the 1920s a utopia, the ancestral land (sokoku)
of intellect and literature no longer exists in that way; the fact of France’s defeat
enforced the turning of their eyes from France back to view Japan’ (Watanabe
1995: 193). Watanabe suggests in this an impetus for the looking back to Japan, a
‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki ).
As suggested by the above, then, there are in Yokomitsu, especially in these
two works, hints of what came to be a common development, the avant-garde
modernist for whom traditionalist and essentialist cultural thinking develops
deep and convincing resonances; whether or not this comprises a ‘return to
Japan’ is an issue I will put off until another occasion. Travel Weariness exudes a
nostalgia (as the title leads one to expect), a grumpiness and frustration that seep
from the author and come through his characters. The most compelling antidote
to the frustration and anxiety his characters feel is a greater identification with
‘Japan’. At the same time – and Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism
(2002) reinvigorates this imagery – the sense of homelessness one finds in the
writings of Kobayashi Hideo,19 which can be explained as a side effect of
modernism and its phantasmal, spectral disruptions, is very much present in
these works.20 Kobayashi is not the only intellectual to sense that ‘home’ has
disappeared, and that the native looks as exotic as anything ‘foreign’.
Nonetheless, what we find as a consistent driving force in these works is the
Other of the foreign and of woman.
Notes
1 For representative assessments, see Keene (1980: 187); and Ban (1999: 217 ff. and esp. 221).
2 For details of the publication process of these two novels, see Inoue (1994: 106–7);
Kindai Sakka Kenkyū Jiten Kankōkukai (1983: 431).
3 The reader quickly realizes that ‘Japan’ serves as a marker of both ethnic identity and
political nation, and not simply as a signifier of geographic islands bearing that appella-
tion.
4 And likely Yokomitsu himself, given the overlaps one finds in his diaries and letters
from this period.
5 For an elaboration of this, see Wada (1994).
6 See Duus (1989).
7 ‘Sexual violence, perversion, and gender ambivalence were among the frequent
themes of this genre’ (Mostow 2003: 49).
8 In this environment, many of Yokomitsu’s characters exhibit the qualities of Walter
Benjamin’s (1999) flâneur; their wanderings through the modern city associate a
further association with Baudelaire’s urbane character strolling the streets of Paris
(from which Benjamin drew his models), as an embodiment of the modern. In partic-
ular, in this context, the modernist lineage includes the meaninglessness of national
origin in the modernist imagination. The contradictory tugs exhibited throughout
these novels are also tethered to this spot, for at precisely the moment that nations and
a national identity are foregrounded in imperial land-grabs and world wars, it seems
that it is less the particular nation and more the idea of the international that comes
to the fore in modernist imaginations:
When literary history has stepped beyond national traditions, what it finds is not
the history of cultural interchange between the English-speaking nations but a
history of ‘cosmopolitanism’, of a culture which is ‘international’ rather than
‘inter-national.’ In particular, modernism, in poetry as in architecture, is repre-
sented as a movement no longer determined by local conditions but based on
discovering ways in which a universal ‘technology’ – free verse, the ‘image’, the
unconscious – could be applied everywhere the same.
(Craig 2002: 199)
Benjamin’s flâneur and Yokomitsu’s characters are all solitary characters negotiating
the undulating terrain of possibilities and pace of the city, alone in the midst of urban
masses, in ways parallel to the negotiations necessary for deciphering the meaning of
the self. Shanghai conforms, in many ways, to Benjamin’s goal in the arcades project:
‘Our investigation proposes to show how . . . the new forms of behavior and the new
economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth
century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria.’ The flâneur lives through these phan-
tasmagoria, ‘abandon[ing] himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace’
(Benjamin 1999: 14). In the frenetic swirls of bodies and commodities through streets
and ubiquitous pawnshops/arcades, the characters of Shanghai experience the city as
a surreal landscape replete with spirits and unsubstantial bodies. Theirs is the
modernist experience of phantasmagoria.
9 A sensibility captured in Kuroshima Denji’s (1930) novel, Busōseru shigai (The Armed
Streets).
10 For a detailed explanation of this event, see Clifford (1991), esp. Chapter 6, ‘China’s
Bastille: May 30th and its Background’.
11 The opening lines also refer to the water that constantly reappears, the river usually
muddied and filled with filth, carrying the carcasses of animals, the detritus of
commercial lives, of discarded babies even. This water is often not much like water
but a living being in its own right as it bubbles up with a viscous oily life, tempting O-
Sugi to abandon herself to its unknown depths.
12 Komori Yōichi has noted that none of Yokomitsu’s works have as much of the body in
them as this one (1988: 507).
13 See Sakai (2000), referenced above, for an essay that does much to unpack these
issues.
14 Such military imagery is found throughout Travel Weariness; Yashiro, the central char-
acter, for example, thinks of himself as a soldier who has readied for battle, i.e.
prepared for travel abroad, and now fears the confrontation with the enemy.
15 Indeed, Fujita provided the illustrations for the serialized newspaper version of Travel
Weariness. Some are reproduced in Nihon kindai bungakukan (1994: 79).
16 A sentiment corroborated in conversation with Watanabe Kazutami, 30 June 2003.
One thinks as well of Yokomitsu’s later articulation of nationalist-tinged Shinto purifi-
cation rites, such as misogi, cf. Nihon kindai bungakukan (1994: 83).
17 Yokomitsu (1998 (1): 98–9). By introducing the historical figure of Fujita Tsuguharu at
this point, Yokomitsu references a person (a spectacle, really) of multi-layered associa-
tions, one touched on above. Fujita was a well-respected artist in pre-war France; he is
most likely the first Japanese painter to make his reputation entirely outside of Japan
and to be able to live by his brush. He is noted in France for the ‘Japanese’ sensibility
in the cats and milky-white women that characterized his œuvre. Fujita (or ‘Foujita,’ as
he signed his work) appeared to have made the cross-over and to have become
French. He was a central figure in the Parisian smart set, a regular feature of the
gossip columns. (But his return to Japan during the war years and his production of
war paintings have complicated estimations of his art.) This ability to become
‘French’ holds great appeal for Yashiro. In the context of Travel Weariness, the
contrast with Shimazaki Tōson becomes more complicated as Shimazaki is the only
other named Japanese expatriate to appear in the novel. Se g o i is appropriate in refer-
ence to Fujita; the appeal he has in the context of this novel is the focus of a future
project.
18 The Ise Shrine is the ancient temple complex associated with the founding myth/
goddess of Japan and thereby with the imperial family.
19 For this essay and relevant criticism, see Anderer (1995). On the connection this has to
Yokomitsu, see Lippit (2002), esp. Chapter 2.
20 And this too takes us back to Benjamin’s (1999) flâneur.
References
Main texts
Yokomitsu Riichi (1998) Ryoshū (Travel Weariness), 2 vols, Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei
bunkō.
——(2001) Shanghai, trans. D. Washburn, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies.
Other references
Anderer, Paul (1995) Literature of the Lost Home , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ban, Etsu (1999) Yokomitsu Riichi bungaku no seisei: owarinaki yōdō no g yōseki (Yokomitsu Riichi:
The Origin of his Literature, a Site of Unending Activity), Tokyo: Ōfūsha.
Bataille, George (1986) Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. M. Dalwood, San Francisco:
City Lights Books.
Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Craig, Cairns (2002) ‘“Where is the Nation You Promised?”: American Voice in Modern
Scottish and Irish Poetry’, in Andrew Michael Roberts and Jonathan Allison (eds) Poetry
and Contemporary Culture: The Question of Value, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 185–207.
Clifford, Nicholas R. (1991) Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese
Revolution of the 1920s, Middlebury, VT: Middlebury College Press.
Duus, Peter (1989) ‘Introduction: Japan’s Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937: An
Overview’, in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds) The Japanese
Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.
xxii–xxix.
Girard, René (1965) Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Y. Freccero, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Hoshō Masao (1967) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Yokomitsu Riichi, Ryosh ū: Nihon bungaku
zenshhū II, vol. 13: Yokomitsu Riichi-shhū (Travel Weariness: The Complete Works of
Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Kawade shobō, pp. 533–49.
Inoue Ken (1994) ‘Hyōden Yokomitsu Riichi’ (Yokomitsu Riichi, A Biography), in Nihon
Kindai Bungakukan (eds) Shinchō Nihon bungaku arubamu: Yokomitsu Riichi (The Shinchō
Album of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Shinchōsha, pp. 2–96.
Keene, Dennis (1980) Yokomitsu Riichi, Modernist, New York: Columbia University Press.
Kindai Sakka Kenkyū Jiten Kankōkai (ed.) (1983) Kindai sakka kenkyū jiten (Dictionary of
Contemporary Writers), Tokyo: Ōfūsha.
Komori Yōichi (1988) Kōzōto shite no katari (Narrative as Structure), Tokyo: Shin’yōsha.
Lippit, Seiji M. (2002) Topographies of Japanese Modernism, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Mostow, Joshua S. (ed.) (2003) The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Nihon Kindai Bungakukan (eds.) (1994) Shinchō Nihon bungaku arubamu: Yokomitsu Riichi (The
Shinchō Album of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, New York: Vintage
Books.
Sakai, Naoki (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
——(2000) ‘Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism’, Cultural Studies
14(3–4): 463–530.
Wada Hirofumi (1994) Gengo toshi, Pari, 1862–1945 (Paris, the City in Language, 1862–
1945), Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten.
——(1999) Gengo toshi, Shanhai, 1840–1945 (Shanghai, the City in Language, 1840–1945),
Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten.
Watanabe Kazutami (1995) Furansu no yūwaku: kindai Nihon seishinshi shiron (The Desire of
France: A Treatise on the Spiritual History of Modern Japan), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Yokomitsu Riichi (1967) Ryoshhū: Nihon bungaku zenshhū II, vol. 13: Yokomitsu Riichi-shhū (Travel
Weariness: The Complete Works of Japanese Literature: Yokomitsu Riichi), Tokyo:
Kawade shobō shinsha.
——(1987) Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshū (The Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi:
Definitive Edition), 16 vols, Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha.
Part II
Internal others
7 Passing
Paradoxes of alterity in The Broken
Commandment
Mark Morris
[R]aces – these public fictions . . . race is not just a conception; it is also a percep-
tion.
(Matthew Frye Jackobson, Whiteness of a Different Color)
[T]heories of academic racism mimic scientific discursivity by basing themselves

upon visible ‘evidence’ (whence the importance of the stigmata of race and in
particular of bodily stigmata).
(Etienne Balibar, ‘Is There a Neo-Racism?’)
1958 M. STEEN Phoenix Rising vii. 176 Those who succeed in ‘passing’ live their
lives in mortal terror of being found out . . . 1961 Guardian 4 May 10/4 ‘Passing’,
the word used to describe Negroes merging indistinguishably into a white
community in America. 1973 G. D. BERRIMAN Caste in Mod World 10/2 The
response of Burakumin to their birth-ascribed status is that common to all low
castes: accommodation on the most part, and occasional ‘passing’.
(Oxford English Dictionary s.v. passing 1.a.)
Passing might seem to be, here in a still new century, something of an historical
relic of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, both as social fact and matter
for cultural expression. For instance, William Faulkner’s Light in August – perhaps
the classic tragedy of passing within the canon of American writing – was
published more than seventy years ago, in 1932. Its protagonist, Joe Christmas,
‘initially fixed by the gazes’ of rural Southern whites for whom ‘perception is
always linguistically mediated’ (Wittenberg 1995: 165) by the usual arsenal of
racist labels, eventually dies as unsure as the novel’s readers as to whether he is
black, white or mixed-race, pre-race, or post-race; Faulkner’s text seems never to
allow public fiction to find hook or alibi in any concrete reality. Yet certainly as a
theme in fiction and film, passing has yet to dislodge itself from the cultural
imagination, as a variety of recent expressions testify. A theme, once a fiction
enacted riskily as social fact, which once haunted Afro-American writers during
the first decades of the twentieth century and challenged American and other
film audiences from around the middle of the same century,1 just doesn’t want to
go away. It may pop up in genre fiction or genre film, as in Walter Mosley’s gritty
128 Mark Morris
classic Blue Dahlia (1990) – Hollywooded up only a bit in director Carl Franklin’s
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). More controversial, no doubt, is Philip Roth’s The
Human Stain (2000). Coleman Silk, a ‘black’ man who for half a century has
passed for ‘white’, manages to lose his academic post when a casual reference he
makes to ‘spooks’ is misinterpreted as a racist epithet directed at Afro-American
students. It would be pretentious to argue that Roth is no Faulkner, as though he
had ever tried to be one. The problem with The Human Strain may be that in this
bitter, self-indulgent work he is no Roth, either.
In Japan, as well, the theme and fact of passing have a long history. The work I
focus on in this chapter, Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai (The Broken Commandment),
was conceived during the years of the Russo-Japanese War and published in
1906 (trans. 1974). It is no doubt Japan’s best-known exploration of the suffering
undergone by a member of the country’s invisible minority, the burakumin.2 Yet, as
I will acknowledge below, even before Tōson, Japanese writers had made an
effort to treat the experience of burakumin in fictional form.
Passing has re-emerged in contemporary Japanese culture, this time from the
perspective of artists of a different minority, the resident Korean or zainichi
Korean community. Zainichi Korean author Kaneshiro Kazuki’s recent award-
winning story Go reached an even wider audience through an exhilarating film
version, which itself won a number of awards and was voted best film of 2001 by
the journal-of-record Kinema Junpō. The young protagonist, who passes under the
Japanese surname Sugihara, waits until the last moment, when he and his
Japanese girlfriend are about to consummate their affair; then a guilty conscience
compels him to tell her that he isn’t Japanese. The whole thing is conducted with
a lightness of touch that does not, even in a book and film aimed at the youth
market, disown the seriousness of what is at stake for anyone who chooses to pass.
Shimazaki Tōson once recalled, in an essay written several years after publica-
tion of The Broken Commandment, that while living in the mountains of Shinshū,
modern Nagano prefecture, teaching at the small school in the town of Komoro,
and drafting the pages that became this, his first major work of fiction,
the more attentive I was, the more I came to understand the characteristics
of the burakumin; and in the space of living a good seven years in the moun-
tains, I got so that I could distinguish burakumin even from among men and
women simply passing by.
(Shimazaki 1981: 152)
Of course, even though a burakumin in origin, Tōson’s focal character Segawa

Ushimatsu also passes – or seems to – right to the bitter end of his story. The very
title of the book tells us that he will break his father’s commandment to conceal
these origins; he will do so in a dramatic and troubling scene late in the work,
after many efforts to emulate his mentor Inoko Rentarō and openly declare his
identity. Once that statement is finally made, arrives one of the weakest endings in
novelistic history: a rich burakumin offers to make a home for Ushimatsu and loyal
girlfriend in Texas. Exeunt.
Passing in The Broken Commandment 129
I don’t have room here to do justice to the fundamental problems posed in the
act of stating ‘I am X’. I assume that any identity entered into via the pathways
of speech and discourse – however motivated by the force of the imaginary and
negotiated by historical contingency – is more or less a fiction. Some are better
than others. Some you create or at least freely embrace, the worst take shape as
the aftermath of real and/or symbolic violence. In this chapter I want more
modestly to consider some of the difficulties this focal character Ushimatsu
faced, particularly back in the Meiji period, in attempting to slip through the
interstices of the social text of his era as ordinary, normal, same rather than as
aberrant and other. In The Broken Commandment, the pressures of ideology seem
constantly to inflect burakumin figures other than Ushimatsu and threaten to
rebound upon him as well.
Ushimatsu is a teacher at a school up in the mountains of Nagano. He is
wracked from the outset of the book by anxiety and guilt. Anxiety at his possible
exposure as ‘eta’; guilt at the desperate need, which grows more insistent with
almost every scene, to reveal his origins and thereby break the commandment to
silence imposed upon him by his father.
The possibility of a surreptitious transition once gripped the imaginations of
Afro-American authors like Charles Chesnutt (The House Behind the Cedars, 1900)
and Nella Larsen (Passing, 1929); Philip Roth shows great ingenuity in detailing
how Coleman Silk performed such a feat in his youth during the 1940s and
1950s. Kaneshiro’s Sugihara in Go finally puts a halt to his evasions, although
neither story nor film ever has the confidence to confront an ultimately under-
standing girlfriend with his less than genteelly middle-class zainichi family.
However, Ushimatsu’s has been no sort of gradual, almost casual slipping into
a mainstream identity. Indeed, his father does not deal in the transitional:
The only way – the only hope – for any eta who wanted to raise himself in
the world was to conceal the secret of his birth. ‘No matter who you meet,
no matter what happens to you, never reveal it! Forget this commandment
just once, in a moment of anger or misery, and from that moment the world
will have rejected you forever.’
(BC: 9–10)
Ushimatsu’s father wills his son into a society from which he tries to efface all his
own connections. He retreats high into the mountains and lives alone, tending
cattle.
Where Ushimatsu has been commanded to silence, however, the other main
character in the story, Inoko Rentarō , is compelled in the opposite direction,
towards articulation and revelation. Ushimatsu is keenly aware of this burakumin
intellectual who writes and campaigns against the injustices inflicted upon his
people – their people. Ushimatsu opens Rentarō’s newly published book
Confessions and is immediately confronted by what for him is the most dangerous
short sentence in the whole language: ‘ware wa eta nari ’ (H: 15). ‘This new book
began with the words, “I am an outcast (eta )”’ (BC : 11). The lines which follow
130 Mark Morris
show how deeply engaged Rentarō is with the fate of what he embraces as his
community: ‘A vivid account followed of the ignorance and squalor to which the
eta had been reduced, with portraits of many fine eta men and women whom
society had discarded merely because of their eta origin’ (BC: 11).
And yet – and worse for Ushimatsu’s secret struggle – Rentarō had been just
like him. He had come from the same region of Shinshū and like him had
passed. He was teaching at the same teachers’ college that Ushimatsu later
attended when he was outed by some students. ‘Many refused to believe it,
though for differing reasons: a man of such character, they said – or a man of
such looks, or such brains and education, according to the speaker – just
couldn’t be an eta ’ (BC : 11–12). None of these fine opinions had saved Rentarō from
losing his job. The word, once pronounced and hurled at him with what Tōson
characterises as ‘racial prejudice’ (BC : 12), had stigmatised him body and
mind.
What does it mean to ‘be’ an eta – or, to use the less abusive terms, a shinheimin
or burakumin? This is a far more paradoxical proposition than Tōson and other
writers who, before and after The Broken Commandment, have written about
burakumin seem to have recognised. One aspect of the paradox concerns the
social history which produced and regenerated the fictive identity of eta/shin-
heimin/burakumin. For example, Kenneth Strong added a note to his English
translation at this point, observing ‘Shimazaki’s indiscriminate use of the terms
“race” and “class” in relation to the eta’ (BC : 12, n. 6). Tōson does use both jinshu
(race) and kaikyū (class), although the former is more common. Strong related the
shift in terminology to matters internal to the text. Ushimatsu’s father sent him
forth into Japanese society armed, and equally damned, by his commandment
but also equipped with a myth of origins that explained as it explained away the
history of these origins:
he had told him about their ancestors: how they were not descended, like the
many groups of eta who lived along the Eastern Highway, from foreign
immigrants or castaways from China, Korea, Russia, and the nameless
islands of the Pacific, but from runaway samurai of many generations back;
that however poor they might be, their family had committed no crime,
done nothing dishonourable.
(BC: 9)
Strong surmised that ‘foreign castaways’ might have been conceived in racial
terms by the author, ‘runaway samurai’ in class terms (BC : 12). It is worth
looking at this passage and what it says about Meiji era ideas concerning eta/shin-
heimin in some detail.
The folk-theory of origins related by Ushimatsu’s father is not something Tōson
invented or gleaned from written sources. It is, in the first instance, a product of
his own fieldwork. As he recalled in ‘Yamaguni no shinheimin’ (New
Commoners of Mountain Country, 1909), his most important essay dealing
with the creation of The Broken Commandment, while some of his information
concerning burakumin had been gathered via rumour and hearsay, Tōson had
also relied upon friends in the area to guide him to two local buraku hamlets,
one on the outskirts of Komoro, the other in the even smaller settlement of
Nezu. It was, for instance, by way of a Komoro neighbour that he claims to
have heard the story of a teacher at the teachers’ college in Nagano who had
been chased from his position once his background had been revealed. ‘It’s
said he was sensible, well-learned and also really an excellent character’
(Shimazaki 1981: 50). After passing through several teaching posts elsewhere in
the country, the man had eventually become principal of a middle school. ‘I
never met him but he was a most unusual person for a shinheimin; I was deeply
moved that such a person had emerged from that sort of class’ (ibid.: 51). Here,
as has been recognised by many interpreters, was one source for what would
become Ushimatsu.3
His interest in the excluded minority now piqued, Tōson decided to find out
more about the shinheimin of the region. A liberal-minded young resident of
Komoro agreed to introduce him to the headman of the town’s own buraku,
Yaemon. What Yaemon told Tōson is, at least as recorded in this essay, very close
to the origin myth placed in the mouth of that fictional headman, Ushimatsu’s
father. So to be a shinheimin/burakumin is not to be simply – historically and
socially – one kind/race/class of humanity at all. Yaemon’s tale is fairly repre-
sentative of the sort of origin theories which circulated among many halfway
sympathetic Japanese people and literate burakumin in the Meiji period. It is clear
that the story told by the old man works on one level as a myth of compensation,
a kind of collective ‘family romance’, as if to say, We may be saddled with an
ignominious label and identity, but we aren’t what they, mainstream society, say.
We are different within our difference, special and distinct from those other others
with their fishy origins and nasty ways. We have the blood of warriors in our
veins.4 Such beliefs once circulated widely in burakumin communities (McCormack
2002: 25, 35, 55, 76, 111, n. 78, etc.) and in the 1970s and 1980s were re-
invoked in the fiction of buraku-born Nakagami Kenji (Morris 1996: 45–8).
It is significant that the above myth suggests that at least certain groups of
Japan’s excluded minority are in fact foreign in origin. ‘In principle, (proto)
“racial”, “national”, or “ethnic” considerations did not determine people’s worth
in the Tokugawa system. The main Confucian-inspired criterion for moral
consideration revolved around whether one was “civilized” or “barbarian”,
(McCormack 2002: 92). Yet, within the Nativist thought of a scholar such as
Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and with increasing urgency in the writings of
Meiji nationalists, emerge the outlines of a wider ideological demotion of the
foreign: the foreign as Other and as necessary foil for an incipient sense of
Japanese identity forged against and in reaction to a variety of others: internal
others such as the Ezo northern barbarians, or the external otherness of China
and Korea. McCormack sketches the dialectic of alterity succinctly:
By representing ‘e t a ’ status people to have ancestral ties with certain

foreigners, these intellectuals placed those entities into a mutually supporting
132 Mark Morris
and reinforcing relation . . . antipathy towards ‘eta’ status people was justified
with reference to their ‘foreign origins’, and antipathy towards foreigners
was simultaneously encouraged and justified with reference to their links to
people of ‘eta’ status.
(ibid.: 108)
Perhaps more crucial for the cultural expression of burakumin as others are the
pseudo-genetic, racial aspects of the myth and of Tōson’s comprehension of it.
Noah McCormack’s work on prejudice and nationalism also reminds us that
the early-Meiji time of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ had not just been
when Japanese elites adopted and propagated ideas such as equality and
fraternity, but was also when scholars introduced Western scientific learning,
including theories of evolution, heredity, genetics and racial hierarchy, into
the Japanese intellectual sphere.
(McCormack 2002: 59)
The penetration of quasi-scientific notions about heredity and race is apparent

in the passage cited above, although Strong’s translation blurs the picture.
Ushimatsu’s father refers to ‘eta no shuzoku’ (H: 13): the phrase can be translated as
‘groups of eta’, yet the word denotes ‘ethnic’ (with all the contentiousness which
even that term, to say nothing of ‘race’, may involve) rather than any other kind
of small collectivity; the word itself is relatively specialised, often employed
within early modern comparative linguistics and anthropology. Shuzoku also
connotes a grouping close to that assumed by the word jinshu (race; the shu
morpheme is the same: see the significant discussion of race in Morris-Suzuki
1998: 79–109 and Dikötter 1997). In Tōson’s text, the fictional headman
speaks explicitly of ‘their bloodline (kettō) transmitted from runaway [i.e. surviving
the aftermath of a lost battle] samurai’ (H: 13): Strong has chosen to finesse the
matter.
Blood and bloodline became key terms in the increasingly racialised discourse
about eta/burakumin in this era.5 McCormack cites the case of a notorious law suit
in 1902, only a few years before the publication of The Broken Commandment. The
female plaintiff filed for divorce on the grounds of fraudulent misrepresentation:
her husband had claimed to be from a ‘kettō tadashiki ky ūke gō nō’, but turned out to
be a poor burakumin. McCormack translates the Japanese as ‘venerable and
wealthy peasant household’ (2002: 60), ‘venerable’ glossing the initial adjective
phrase, literally ‘of proper bloodline’. The regional court concerned upheld her
claim, and an appellate court rejected the husband’s appeal. One legal scholar,
while hardly sympathetic to what he persisted in referring to as eta and labelling
them ‘one of the lowest breeds (shuzoku)’, did fault the judicial process for having
‘distinguished “eta” status people from their occupations . . . and developed the
idea that there existed an “eta” bloodline’ (ibid.: 61).
Watanabe Naomi’s Nihon kindai bungaku to ‘sabetsu’ (Japanese Modern Literature
and ‘Discrimination’, 1994) has been instrumental in foregrounding the symbolic
violence inherent in the way many writers have represented burakumin from the
Meiji to Shōwa periods. He notes bitterly that the main cause for the persistence,
even in more recent times, of prejudice against burakumin has, from the late nine-
teenth century, been precisely the scientistic discourse concerning blood and
bloodline. Where a key figure of the Meiji enlightenment such as Fukuzawa Yukichi
might put the optimistic Encouragement to Learning before tens of thousands of equally
optimistic readers in 1872, by 1894 the pervasive influence of social Darwinism
would underwrite a text like Theory of Bloodlines (‘Kettōron’) (Watanabe 1994: 23).6
One other strong point of Watanabe’s study has been his analysis of the
shirushi (marks/signs/stigmata) by which many writers were content to mark off
and render essential the alterity of burakumin characters. Some of these stigmata
are pre-modern in origin, such as the inevitable beauty of female characters, or
the gross physical nature of bodily or facial features of the men. Others more
associated with the Meiji otherness machine include inexplicable wealth, the
markers of illnesses such as tuberculosis or, in the case of female burakumin char-
acters, madness (Watanabe 1994: 18–32), and signs of incest. A very old
connection, one that stretches back to medieval tales like those concerning the
legendary Oguri Hangan, was occasionally activated which associates the
outsider/eta with leprosy. One academic specialist in ancient history, writing in
1905, managed to combine the worst of several symbolic worlds in asserting that
‘as a result of unhygienic living conditions and incestuous marriages within
village communities . . . “e t a” (as well as beggars) were hereditarily afflicted by
“leprous bloodlines”’ (McCormack 2002: 67).
The discourse concerning blood is in itself a kind of intellectual marker of
modernity and mechanism for national identity, yet the problem with blood as
irrevocable origin of otherness is that it is invisible. Hence the way in which
ideology in early modern Japan re-enacted elements of the founding racialist
discourses of European, American and other earlier sites of nation formation,
and rendered the unseen seen.7
Writers before Tōson had deployed the sort of markers suggested by Watanabe
in various ways. Since the appearance of Watanabe’s work, several stories have
entered the wider discourse of literary studies. Here, I should like to look briefly
at three from among several dozen texts published in the decade preceding The
Broken Commandment: a brief story by Tokuda Shūsei, ‘Yabukō ji’ (Spearflower,
1896), Oguri Fūyō ’s ‘Neoshiroi’ (Make-up at Bedtime, 1896), and Shimizu
Shikin’s ‘Imin gakuen’ (A School for Émigrés, 1899). The first two were by young
writers just beginning their careers apprenticed to one of the main operators in
the late nineteenth-century literary field, Ozaki Kōyō. Both stories were published
in the same journal, Bungei Kurabu, in succeeding months – with the notable
difference that the second, by Fūyō, was pounced on by the censors for its titil-
lating treatment of incest.
‘Spearflower’ deals melodramatically with the fate of Akagi Mokusai, a doctor
of eta origins, and his marriageable daughter Orei. Their lives are disrupted, then
undone, by the machinations of evil step-mother-like servant Omaki. The
opening sketch of Mokusai is famously infamous:
134 Mark Morris
Mokusai was a gentleman, so fair and tall of stature that you could not
believe he was an eta. He was well fleshed, even his side whiskers were lush.
His eyes with their greyish brown pupils were rather too large and frighten-
ingly owl-like; beneath one of his huge, dangling earlobes was an ugly red
birthmark, a mark (shirushi) of his inescapable bloodline (chisuji).
(Tokuda 1937: 275)
On the one hand, we are presented with a man with origins in the buraku who
has managed to receive an education and achieve professional status, and even
open his own clinic. He might well pass, fair and tall and gentlemanly as he
seems to be. But local gossip fastens onto his facial stigmata and draws the
lesson of the age: the mark of a defective bloodline cannot be concealed, bad
blood will out. Later in the tale, when the awful Omaki tears into innocent Orei,
she too will refer to the birthmark, and go on to liken the girl’s refined pallor to
that displayed by one of Omaki’s friends, a victim of leprosy. Orei may be beau-
tiful (a compliment perhaps, yet as noted above, also a clichéd mark of
otherness), but as Omaki proclaims, ‘You can’t quarrel with the bloodline (chisuji)’
(ibid.: 292).
Oguri Fūyō’s ‘Make-up at Bedtime’ is equally melodramatic; the rococo flour-
ishes of his style, once meant to compensate for thinness of plot and character,
now make the story an exercise in tedium. The tale focuses on a brother and
sister who run a tobacconist shop. Both are well into their eligible years, and local
gossips find the younger sister especially odd. Hair style, bright clothing, too
much make-up – Okei seems mutton determined to pass as lamb. And of course
the narrator soon reveals what sort of passing lies behind the surface camouflage.
The siblings had, it seems, moved a number of times before settling into the
present central Tokyo neighbourhood. Okei’s older brother Sōtarō has been
trying to protect her from the secret of their burakumin origins. More complicated
still, Sōtarō has also been trying all along, and unbeknownst to her, to find Okei a
suitable husband; yet each time talks seem on the verge of success, out comes
their secret – still she remains in the dark – and kills any chance for the relation-
ship. When Okei happens to meet and fall for the scion of a local merchant
family, she doesn’t hesitate to seize the moment; she runs off to live with him,
leaving big brother amazed and beside himself with jealousy. And so it melodra-
matically comes about that rather than allow Okei to enjoy whatever slim chance
of happiness she might cling to, Sōtarō blunders off to the other man’s house
and, as Okei listens in from behind a sliding door, blurts out the secret: ‘Because
you know nothing, you’ve urged me to give her to you as your wife – but she and
I are shinhei(min)! We’re eta! – with our polluted bloodline (kegareta chisuji)’ (Oguri
1968: 157). By story’s end, the gossiping chorus of neighbourhood voices
returns and hints that Okei, now driven back into the exclusive company of her
brother, shows all the signs of pregnancy (ibid: 159). It appears likely that this
unpleasant little story was not in fact censored for the crude discriminatory treatment
of shinheimin but rather for broaching the subject of incest in a work of fiction
(Kitagawa 1985: 73–8).
Not all representations of shinheimin/burakumin were as predictably deroga-
tory as those noted above. Shimizu Shikin’s ‘A School for Émigrés’ may not itself
be a stylistic success but it is upbeat. A young woman married to an up-and-
coming government minister discovers, through a zigzag of plot surprises, that
her late mother had been a shinheimin; her mother died giving birth to her where-
upon her non-burakumin father had placed her with a respectable surrogate
family and tried to hide himself away – anything, in order that she might pass.
She herself feels none of the shame or turmoil about her origins of a character
such as Sōtarō – or Ushimatsu – yet she does have a great sense of guilt towards
her ambitious husband. Not to worry. The nice young gentleman refuses to
reject her, resigns his government position, and happily agrees to head off with
his spouse to Hokkaido where they will establish a school for shinheimin orphans.
Rebecca Copeland, in her landmark study of Meiji women writers, has
suggested the following: ‘Shūsei and Fūyō – both associated with the newly
evolving Naturalist school – were responding to a recent trend in literary circles
to focus on the way issues of heredity and environment influenced the formation
of a person’s character’. This does not override the historical fact that they ‘were
also intrigued by the more salacious aspects of the burakumin’s existence’
(Copeland 2000: 197). Further, it does seem plausible that Shikin’s heroine is
more symbolic, in an important sense, than realistic: ‘she uses the image of
marginalization metaphorically . . . to suggest her own position as a “new
woman” in Meiji Japan’ (ibid.). Such a tactic was, we know, very much in Tōson’s
mind as he created Ushimatsu as symbolic outsider rather than as focus for
informed social criticism. However, even in Shikin’s relatively liberal-hearted
narrative, the othering force of blood-ideology declares itself. Copeland observes
that the heroine’s mother, dying, had implored her husband to ‘wash the filth
from this baby’s blood’ (ibid.: 203).
Of the different burakumin figures whom Ushimatsu encounters, none are
more savagely marked with otherness than the young butcher’s assistants who
loom up in the middle of the narrative. A bull has killed Ushimatsu’s father; the
protagonist attends the slaughter along with Rentarō . Working under the guid-
ance of the head butcher are ‘ten young men, all of them obviously ‘new
commoners’, and poor, brutish specimens at that, marked out by the colour of
their skin. “Outcast” might have been branded on each coarse red face’ (BC:
109). This scene at the slaughterhouse reappears amid the pieces from Tōson’s
Komoro period notebooks he published as Chikuma River Sketchbook. In its patient
description of terrified animals converted into lumps of meat, it is a justly
famous exercise in lyrical horror (Shimazaki 1991). Yet not a word in this later
version, supposedly based on pre-novel notes, describes the young butchers as
anything but good at their job. In The Broken Commandment’s version of this scene,
it is as though the full force of ideology wrenched human figures into inhuman
form – as though one nightmarish suggestion of Tokugawa thinker Kaiho
Seiryō had become a discursive commonplace. Kaiho had imagined ‘eta’ as
barbarian in origin, and regretted that they had acclimated to the point where ‘it
is no longer possible to distinguish between good people and “eta”. In response to
136 Mark Morris
this problem, Kaiho suggested tattooing some identifying marks on the foreheads
of people of “eta” status’ (McCormack 2002: 101).
At the very beginning of the story there is Ōhinata, a wealthy man who has
come to Ushimatsu’s town for treatment at the local clinic. Rumour spreads
that he is an eta, and the other patients demand he be expelled. ‘No amount of
money can overcome prejudice of this kind’ (BC: 4). Tōson’s text is a bit more
specific: the prejudice is ‘jinshu no henshū ’ (H: 6), racial prejudice. Ōhinata is
literally sent packing. He will return as deus ex machina at story’s end to offer
Ushimatsu a way out of the dead-end in which his eventual breaking of his
father’s commandment will leave him. This first irruption of social prejudice,
however, is registered as such; it hardly prepares the reader for the clichés to
come.
After Ōhinata’s exit, we are immediately introduced to Ushimatsu. ‘Anyone
could see that Ushimatsu was a typical product of northern Shinshū, a well-built
young man’ (BC: 4). Once again Kenneth Strong’s generally excellent translation
seems slightly off target. In Tōson’s rather less declaratory grammar, ‘mita
tokoro . . . dare no me ni mo uketoreru ’ (H: 6), is a phrase I take to indicate that ‘as far as
visual judgment is concerned, anyone would take him to be’ a normal young man
of the region. This is less than an assertion of fact. Tōson – and therefore
Ushimatsu as well – is in an especially paradoxical position. We need to identify
with this focal character. Certainly, one of the signal features of the work is ‘the
remarkable intensity with which it narrated Ushimatsu’s inner life: the reader is
powerfully solicited to identify with Ushimatsu and to see the world through his
eyes’ (Bourdaghs 1998: 652). Yet Ushimatsu is not like ‘us’. Added to such a
minor qualification as to Ushimatsu’s ‘normality’ as noted above is his equally
oblique association with illness. Both Watanabe Naomi and, developing the
former’s arguments further, Michael Bourdaghs have traced the role of illness as
marker of otherness in the case of the reformer Rentarō (Watanabe 1994: 33;
Bourdaghs 1998: 647–53). He suffers from tuberculosis, and in associating closely
with him, Ushimatsu risks perhaps real infection. Simple figural, metonymic
contagion may be bad enough. ‘The concept of contagion . . . accompanies this
marker; it’s not for nothing that his colleague and friend Ginnosuke, who fears
Rentarō’s “bad influence”, wants all the time to link Ushimatsu’s troubled expres-
sion to illness’ (Watanabe 1994: 33). The last thing on earth Ushimatsu needs is
the probing albeit sympathetic questioning of his one friend other than Rentarō.
‘You looked so preoccupied . . . There must be something . . . What on earth’s the
matter?’ (BC: 34–5).
So Ushimatsu is enough like us to allow for readerly sympathy and identification
to function. But he is never identical to us. Bourdaghs has made clear the
mechanism by which Tōson squared the circle of identity, and permitted
Ushimatsu to pass and not quite pass. He looks back at that article by Tōson I
have quoted from already, ‘Yamaguchi no shinheimin’. ‘After taking the care he
had taken in studying buraku life and declaring that prejudice was in fact severe,
he concludes by saying that there seem to be two kinds of shinheimin: “high class”
and “low class” (he uses the English)’ (Bourdaghs 1998: 652).
As I see it, I believe that one can divide the shinheimin around Shinshū into
roughly two types. There are the enlightened shinheimin – one might even call
them ‘high class’ – and the ‘low class’, unenlightened shinheimin: those two
types. I think that the enlightened shinheimin are, in facial features, character
and speech, hardly different at all from ourselves . . . With the unenlightened
ones, as even among savages, savagery appears in the faces of the lowest
types, first of all their facial features are somehow crude . . . The bone struc-
ture of their faces appears to be different from ours. It is particularly striking
how the colour of their skin differs.
(Shimazaki 1981: 54)
Ushimatsu therefore is not simply Other but rather the Others’ other, differing
from the stereotypical eta/burakumin yet not like us. A double othering seems to
work something like a double negation: it may produce a positivity but it is a
deferred positivity, one on the rebound.
The rhetorical hedging which runs through the text – ‘as I see it’, ‘appears to
be’, etc. – repeats that used in the introduction of Ushimatsu. All this effort – not
only Tōson’s but that of his era’s discourse of same and other – to generate
perceivable difference in racialised terms, to convincingly hallucinate stigmata
onto face and skin. Perhaps the hedging is almost a sign of a less than clear
conscience, because where in The Broken Commandment similar sentiments are
expressed in the mouth of Ginnosuke, they make him sound rather foolish: ‘I’ve
seen plenty of eta. Their skin’s darker than ours – you can tell them at a glance’
(BC: 194). At which point in walks his friend Ushimatsu.
Ushimatsu is by no means the only protagonist in Japanese fiction who passes
for an ordinary, mainstream, run-of-the-mill, real, genuine – that is, invented –
Japanese person. Among non-Japanese Japanese authors, passing is an especially
important theme in the writing of zainichi Koreans. The Sugihara of Kaneshiro
Kazuki’s Go, mentioned above, has numerous antecedents. For example, in a
passage in Ri Kaisei’s ‘Mata futatabi no michi’ (Once Again on the Road, 1969)
where his own young protagonist Chol-o reveals his ‘real’ Korean identity to
his Japanese friend Saijō, things turn, as they often have in zainichi life and
literary expression, on the question of names – on the questions posed by names.
Chol-o and his family have been passing under the ‘Japanese’ surname
Chiyoda.
‘Saijō – my real name is pronounced Cho. It’s Cho.’

Chol-o rolled the sound around in his mouth, and glared at Saijō. Met by
Saijō’s puzzled look, Chol-o hurriedly took a scrap of paper and wrote down
the two surnames ‘Chiyoda’ and ‘Cho’.
‘Understand? This one’s my real name.’ . . .
Saijō placed the scrap of paper on the apple crate between the two of
them, thought a moment and asked, puzzled,
‘Yes but – what’s that s’posed to mean?’
‘I’m a Korean!’
138 Mark Morris
‘So what’s the matter with that? It would be odder if you were hung up
about it. Japanese, Korean – it doesn’t matter . . . ’
That Saijō hadn’t in the least changed his attitude to him as Korean gave
Chol-o a sharp momentary sense of joy. But at the same time, he felt
compelled to get him to understand him further.
‘No. It does matter. I have to be Korean (‘Chōsenjin de nakucha komaru nda yo’)!’
(Ri 1991: 119–20)
Ri goes on in this, his first major work of fiction, to recount his protagonist’s
encounter with The Broken Commandment in middle school. Chol-o recalls how
moving he found Ushimatsu’s dilemma born of his father’s injunction never to
reveal his origins. But he felt crushed by the final scene of abject confession.
‘Why did Ushimatsu have to go to Texas?’ He was assailed by a keen sadness,

and hammered the book with his fist . . . ‘I don’t want to end up like
Ushimatsu!’ How many times had he cried out those words within his heart?
Overwhelmed with a desire to protest against the author, he’d felt the tears
about to flow.
(ibid.: 120–1)
And years later while now openly active in a Korean association, Chol-o will still
worry that he suffers from ‘an Ushimatsu consciousness’ (ibid.: 131).
On the one hand, as John Lie has argued eloquently, ‘discrimination does not
disappear by confining people to the closet. In fact, the acts of passing may rein-
force discrimination’ (2001: 81). On the other, the position of the zainichi Korean
who chooses not to pass would seem to be far less self-corrosive than what the
fate of Ushimatsu, and other outed burakumin in fictional texts before and after,
might suggest. There is, after all, a Korea to which one can claim to be attached
as Korean, whereas the islands of abject discrimination associated with burakumin
status offer little solid ground on which to found an identity. Yet where Korea
ought to have been was, for several generations of zainichi Koreans, a southern
fragment ruled by dictators supported in turn by liberators who subsequently
treated the liberated (post-1945) much like an enemy population, while bestowing
democracy and lucrative contacts on the old occupier, Japan. Up North, things
were different. The passionate attachment to North Korea as utopia reached far
beyond the boundaries of official affiliations with institutions of the North
Korean-focused Chongryun. Sonia Ryang – who lived the experience along with
her family – has painstakingly demonstrated the costs of this hopeful gaze
North (Ryang 1997). Still, the assertion by Ri’s young character that his chal-
lenge is to be, to become, have to become Korean, in nuce announces the
optimistic core project of the male zainichi writers of Ri’s generation. There is
someplace to yearn for in order to shore up some sort of positive identity, and
better the one that you yourself dream than one foisted upon you.
I noted above that passing was a concept, an act, which engaged the writer
Nakagami Kenji. He may only have outed himself publicly as burakumin late in
his short life, yet he had acknowledged his origins rather openly in literary
discussions from the late 1970s. His fiction also makes the connection clear,
most straightforwardly in the last book of the ‘Akiyuki trilogy’ where the focal
character Akiyuki claims that identity (Nakagami 1983 [1993b]). In its
dangerous playing with blood, bloodlines, incest, clichés of male physical and
sexual prowess and so on, Nakagami’s writing always risked re-invoking rather
than subverting the language of otherness and discrimination. It seems to me,
however, unwise to wish him and his fiction away, although this seems to have
been the tactic of some intellectuals attached to the Buraku Liberation League
and more recently at least one articulate fellow traveller (Fowler 2000).
In a mémoire-travelogue-exploration-of-roots he published in 1978, Nakagami
recalled one woman he had come across in a small town in Wakayama prefecture.
She had successfully managed to have her children’s household (koseki) registration
recorded as different from her own buraku-associated one. This has been one of
the most significant dodges by which people from the buraku – urban or rural –
have managed to pass into mainstream society. What mattered to Nakagami was
her courage in concealment, in contrast to Ushimatsu’s tepid honesty. He wanted
to make a point the opposite of John Lie’s: ‘Here is a story that’d bleed if you cut
it’ (‘kitte chi no deru monogatari’), and he equated the vivid notion with ‘the effort
made to wipe away the brand of discrimination from oneself and from the chil-
dren of her womb’:
While listening to her story, I thought about Segawa Ushimatsu in

Shimazaki Tōson’s The Broken Commandment. If he’d been through a story
that’d bleed if you cut it then, I thought, it wouldn’t matter if he’d passed
(pasu suru), passed right along and lived with an innocent look on his face.
And on second thought, that Tōson’s story book is definitely conventional is
due to the fact that he makes him break the injunction and not pass all the
way.
(Nakagami 1983[1993b]: 162–3)
In a critical essay appended to Nakagami’s text, journalist Senbon Ken’ichirō recalled

the Nakagami of the mid-1970s, right after winning the Akutagawa Prize for
‘Misaki’ (The Cape, 1976 [1999]) and just before his long road back to
Wakayama. Nakagami told an anecdote about ‘a friend’, one whom the jour-
nalist recognised as Nakagami in third-person camouflage:
There’s this guy, he writes fiction, he’s alright. The writing’s coming along
but if he ever got into politics, he says he’d just have to use a bomb. Think
about the discrimination – bomb – that’s all . . . His wife knows all about it,
he told her when they got married and he’s just got to hide things. But,
he’ll say, he’s got this feeling, like there’s something taboo. A feeling that he
just doesn’t want to look at it – and so he’s halfway passing (out of the
buraku).
(ibid.: 333)
140 Mark Morris
One could in fact make a rather good anthology out of the comments of other
readers, real ones or literary characters, and their reactions to Ushimatsu:
voices wondering, demanding to know why Ushimatsu had to go to Texas or
why on earth he made such a grovelling confession. Let me conclude by
looking at just one fictional critic, a boy named Seitarō . He is a direct-method
vicarious reader depicted in Sumii Sue’s sentimental classic, Hashi no nai kawa
(River Without a Bridge, 1961–73 [1990]). He and friends Hideteru and Kō ji,
boys from a burakumin village in rural Nara prefecture, are discussing a book only
Hideteru has actually read:
‘In the end, what happened to the teacher?’

‘Oh, that teacher?’
Hideteru smiled at Kōji’s surprising question.
‘In the end the teacher goes to America. He apologises to the students he’d
taught and says he’s awfully sorry for having hidden till now his being an eta ’ . . .
Hideteru repeated his answer.
‘Yes, he says he’s sorry and apologises, sort of rubbing his forehead on the
desktop.’
At once, Seitarō grabbed his geta and slammed them together like wood
clackers . . .
‘He’s a useless bastard. Skip the apologies, better to knock the lights
out of the lot of them calling you eta. If it was me, I’d do the lot of
them.’
(Sumii 1961: 121)
And so, finally, in front of a classroom full of adoring young teenagers,

Ushimatsu breaks his vow and apologises for having passed. And being one of
the ‘high class’ doesn’t spare him his moment in the sun of abjection. It is still
a very moving passage, one too long to quote here. Strong’s translation
conveys the original well (BC: 228–32). The climax: ‘When you get home
today, tell your parents what I have said. Tell them that I confessed today,
asking your forgiveness . . . I am an eta, an outcast, an unclean being!’ (BC: 230).
Which is as much as to say, I am a fiction, I am the sedimented prejudice of my
nation’s struggling modernity; I am, however, about as good, normal, same as
my author was able to make me in this time and this place.
Notes
1 Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949) represents perhaps the first case of racial passing passing
into mainstream entertainment. At the time of writing, there is a review website that
almost makes up for the awfulness of the actual film: [http://www.angelfire.com/
film/robbed/pinky.htm] (last accessed Nov. 2004).
2 A note on terminology. In this chapter, I will generally use the word burakumin to
refer to members of the minority communities referred to in earlier decades by the
perjorative term eta or the Meiji era euphemisim shinheimin. The origins of the word
eta are obscure, although it is commonly written with two characters meaning
‘much filth/great pollution’. It is one of several abusive pre-modern terms which
outlived official Meiji appellations such as shinheimin, ‘new commoners’ and even the
later term tokushu burakumin, ‘people of the special neighbourhoods/hamlets’. The
latter is now commonly employed without the bitterly ironic ‘tokushu’ (special –
compare ‘separate’, as in the segregationist mantra ‘separate but equal’, or the ‘apart’
of apartheid) simply as burakumin, with buraku the term for neighbourhood or settle-
ment. While these are the terms I prefer to use, I will use both eta and shinheimin in
quotations and in contexts where more neutral vocabulary would ring false to the
language of particular authors and texts, and to the overall social context of late-
Meiji Japan.
Yanagita Kunio noted back in 1913 that, as soon as a new euphemism was intro-
duced, it was rapidly recycled into a malediction. ‘As long as that general way of
thinking persists which takes the buraku to be special, use a hundred different terms, it
will be of no help’ (Yanagita 1913 [1964b]: 370). Our own societies offer abundant
examples of how prejudice and discrimination leave their traces in messy, continually
redefined and essentially contested fields of meaning and acts of naming.
3 See BC : xxi–xxiii on this and other, literary sources.
4 The British locus classicus concerning legends about burakumin is A.B. Mitford’s retelling
of ‘The Eta Maiden and the Hatamoto’ (2000: 139–56). An equally classical family
romance is located at the end of the tale, one based on a well-studied genealogy
which attempted to anchor the lineage of the powerful boss of Edo eta and various
occupational guilds, Danzaemon, all the way back to Minamoto Yoritomo (ibid.: 155–
6). It is not surprising to find similar compensatory legends among the minority
pae kjong communites of Korea (Kim 2003: 18–19).
5 One variation on the theme of eta/burakumin as foreign other is found in theories
which maintained that the excluded groups of burakumin were remnants of pre-
Japanese peoples. One of the best-known advocates of this line of speculation, who
only reluctantly recanted his views later on, was Tōson’s friend and future founder of
Japanese folklore studies Yanagita Kunio. Yanagita seems to have been uneasy about
the presence among what he would eventually formulate as the ‘jōmin ’ – the ‘eternal’
Japanese peasantry – of the presence of a possibly alien, intractably different element
among the variegated sameness of the Japanese (Iwamoto 1990: 181). In a detailed
article published soon after the end of the Meiji era, Yanagita held onto the view that
for all the traditional occupations and settled locations associated with eta or hinin
(‘non-human’, another term used in the pre-modern era for low-caste, often non-
sedentary groups), they were fundamentally wanderers.
Theirs is a most thoroughly vagabond life; because the police are severe in
pursuing them, they bear their children on the road, produce the homeless, and
never can they become true citizens. And what I believe is that their wandering is
by no means a phenomenon that began due to oppression in our new era; it in
fact preserves the oldest form of special buraku life style.
(Yanagita 1913 [1964b]: 380–1)
Most startling may be the fact that at this stage in his thinking, he reckoned that out of
his conservative estimate of an excluded population of some 700,000, at least 100,000
were inveterate criminals (ibid.: 371, 387).
It is worth noting that the essay ‘Yamaguchi no shinheimin’ is both an apology
concerning the writing of The Broken Commandment and a defence of it. Its author notes
that his work had been criticised as flawed in the way it depicted discrimination
against burakumin. All that was overdone and implausible, had been the complaint
(Shimazaki 1981: 51). The critic he was replying to was Yanagita. Yanagita had
written, not long after Tōson’s book appeared, that while he appreciated the scenic
aspects of the style, it did read more like travelogue than novel. And there were many
points he couldn’t comprehend.
142 Mark Morris
For one, I find the conflict between new commoners and ordinary commoners far
too dramatic. It’s not that I’ve especially studied the eta of Shinshū, but from what I
have observed in other different regions, this kind of awful dispute doesn’t take
place.
(Yanagita 1906 [1964a]: 413)
On the relationship between Yanagita and Tōson, see the texts in volume 23 of
Yanagita’s collected works (1906 [1964a]: 403–14) and Iwamoto (1990: 174–85).
6 On the conjuncture of race and nation, and the influence of social Darwinism in
Japan, see Michael Weiner’s ‘The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-War
Japan’ (1997: 96–117). There is no doubting the increasingly conservative trend in
Fukuzawa’s thought. Yet the text of ‘Kettōron’ is very short: a few pages summarizing
a lecture. And it isn’t without humour, especially in noting how much more careful
some Westerners are about the horses they breed than the people they marry. See
Fukuzawa (1990).
7 As Etienne Balibar has formulated this intersection of race and nation in European
experience:
Race . . . inscribes itself in practices . . . in discourses and representations which

are so many intellectual elaborations of the phantasm of prophylaxsis or segre-
gation (the need to purify the social body, to preserve ‘one’s own’ or ‘our’ identity
from all forms of mixing, interbreeding or invasion) and which are articulated
around stigmata of otherness.
(1991: 17–18)
References
Main texts
Shimazaki Tōson (1906 [1974]) The Broken Commandment (BC ), trans. Kenneth Strong,
Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
——Hakai (H ) (1906 [1996]) Tokyo: Shinchōbunko.
Other references
Balibar, Etienne (1991) ‘Is There a Neo-Racism?’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein (eds) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, pp. 17–28.
Bourdaghs, Michael (1998) ‘The Disease of Nationalism, the Empire of Hygiene: Reading
Broken Commandment’, positions 6(3): 637–73.
Copeland, Rebecca (2000) Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan, Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press.
Dikötter, Frank (1997) ‘Introduction’, in F. Dikötter (ed.) The Construction of Racial Identities
in China and Japan, London: Hurst & Co., pp. 1–11.
Fowler, Edward (2000) ‘The Buraku in Modern Japanese Fiction’, Journal of Japanese Studies
26(1): 1–39.
Fujii, James (1992) Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative,
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1990) ‘Kettōron’ (Theory of Bloodlines), in Hirota Masaki (ed.) Sabestu
no shisō, Nihon kindai shisō taikei (Collected Works of Japanese Modern Thought: The
Ideology of Discrimination), vol. 22, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, pp. 260–3.
Iwamoto Yoshiteru (1990) Yanagita Kunio o yominaosu (Re-reading Yanagita Kunio), Tokyo:
Sekai Shisōsha.
Kawabata Toshifusa (1993) ‘Hakai’ no yomikata (How to Read Hakai), Tokyo: Bunrikaku.
Kim, Joong-Seop (2003) The Korean Paekjo ng under Japanese Rule: The Quest for Equality and
Human Rights, London: Routledge Curzon.
Kitagawa Tetsuo (1985) Buraku mondai o toriageta hyaku no shōsetsu (One Hundred Novels
dealing with the Buraku Issue), Tokyo: Buraku Mondai Kenky ūjō.
Lie, John (2001) Multi-Ethnic Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McCormack, Noah (2002) ‘Prejudice and Nationalism: On the “buraku” Problem, 1868–
1912’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Australian National University.
Mitford, A.B. (1871 [2000]) Tales of Old Japan, Ware: Wordsworth Edition.
Morris, Mark (1996) ‘Gossip and History: Nakagami, Faulkner, García Márquez’, Japan
Forum 8(1): 35–50.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (1998) Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Nakagami Kenji (1978 [1993a]) Kishū: Ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari (Ki Province: Tales
from Tree Country, Root Country), Tokyo: Asahi Bungei bunko.
——(1983 [1993b]) Chi no hate, shijō no toki (To the Ends of the Earth: A Time Supreme),
Tokyo: Shinchō bunko.
Oguri Fūyō (1896 [1968]) ‘Neoshiroi’ (Make-up at Bedtime), in Oguri F ūyō, Kosugi Tengai,
Gotō Chūgai, Meiji bungaku taikei (Collected Works of Meiji Literature: Oguri Fūyō, Kosugi
Tengai, Gotō Chūgai), vol. 65, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, pp. 151–9.
Ri Kaisei (1969 [1991]) ‘Mata futatabi no michi’, in Mata futatabi no michi, Kinuta o utsu onna
(The Road Again, a Second Time; The Woman Fulling Clothes), Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Roth, Philip (2000) The Human Stain, London: Vintage.
Ryang, Sonia (1997) North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology and Identity, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Shimazaki Tōson (1909 [1981]) ‘Yamaguni no shinheimin’ (The Shinheimin of the Mountain
Country), in Shimazaki Tōson zenshū (Collected Works of Shimazaki Tōson), vol. 10,
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, pp. 50–5.
——(1912 [1991]) Chikuma River Sketches, trans. William E. Naff, Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Sumii Sue (1961) Hashi no nai kawa (The River with No Bridge), vol. 1, Tokyo: Shinchō bunko.
Tokuda Shūsei (1896 [1937]) ‘Yabukōji’ (Spearflower), in Shūsei zenshū (Collected Works of
Tokuda Shūsei), vol. 1, Tokyo: Hibonkaku, pp. 271–93.
Watanabe Naomi (1994) Nihon kindai bungaku to ‘sabetsu’ (Japanese Modern Literature and
‘Discrimination’), Tokyo: Ōta shuppan.
Weiner, Michael (1997) ‘The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-War Japan’,
in Frank Dikötter (ed.) The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, London:
Hurst & Co., pp. 96–117.
Wittenberg, Judith Bryant (1995) ‘Race in Light in August: Wordsymbols and Obverse
Reflections’, in Philip M. Weinstein (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yanagita Kunio (1906 [1964a]) ‘Hakai o hyōsu’ (Reviewing Hakai), in Yanagita Kunio
zenshū (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 23, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, pp. 413–14.
——(1913 [1964b]) ‘Iwayuru tokushu buraku no shurui’ (Varieties of the so-called buraku),
in Yanagita Kunio zensh ū (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 27, Tokyo: Chikuma
shobō, pp. 370–87.
Further reading
An unrivalled short introduction to the topic of how burakumin have been repre-
sented in fiction is Fowler (2000). Probably the most interesting literary analysis
144 Mark Morris
of The Broken Commandment is that by James Fujii: see Chapter 3 of his Complicit
Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative. Chikuma River Sketches
(Shimazaki 1991) is an excellent companion to the novel. McCormack (2002) sets
a new standard for cultural historical work on the ‘buraku problem’.
Readers of Japanese may want to refer to the important paperback edition of
Hakai listed in Main Texts. It includes a number of interpretive essays. Invaluable
for the wider literary and social context is Watanabe (1994). Also useful, and
representative of more liberal-minded Buraku Liberation League intellectual
work, is Kawabata Toshifusa, ‘Hakai’ no yomikata (1993).
8 The Burakumin as ‘Other’ in Noma
Hiroshi’s Circle of Youth
James Raeside
One of the most vexed social issues of modern Japanese society is that of the so-
called burakumin community: those who were, and continue to some extent to be,
objects of discrimination because of their perceived descent from an inferior
caste. In the domain of modern Japanese literature, the plight of the burakumin
was famously depicted by Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) in his novel Hakai (The
Broken Commandment, 1904 [1974]); as well as by Sumii Sue (1902–97) in Hashi no
nai kawa (The River with No Bridge, 1961–63 [1990]). Tōson’s work introduced the
issue of the buraku to successive generations of Japanese, and is still frequently
used as a text in Japanese junior and senior high schools; Sumii’s is also widely
read, and both novels were made into successful films. However, given how long
and how earnestly Noma Hiroshi (1915–91) was involved with the burakumin
community and the cause of burakumin liberation, his name certainly deserves to
be added to the list of authors who strove to bring this issue to the attention of the
general public. Although none of these three writers were themselves of
burakumin origin, all of them wrote out of a strong feeling of sympathy with
members of the buraku groups and solidarity with their cause.1
The Broken Commandment depicts the plight of an individual member of the
burakumin community who has, following his father’s instruction, left to work as a
teacher, passing himself off as an ‘ordinary’ member of society; Sumii’s novel, by
contrast, traces the history of a whole buraku village in the Nara region. The first
volume begins just after the time of the Russo-Japanese War and ends with the
rice riots of 1918, and the subsequent formation of the suiheisha.2 It could be said,
in consequence, that these two novels cover the early history of the movement to
liberate the burakumin from the stigma, or at least the disadvantageous condi-
tions under which they lived; with Tō son’s novel covering the Meiji era, and
Sumii’s that of Taishō and early Shōwa. Noma’s work, Seinen no wa (The Circle of
Youth, 1947–71), set in the second decade of the Shōwa era (1935–45), leading
into the Pacific War, could be said to continue that history further into the twentieth
century.
Noma’s novel is based in part on his own experiences of working for the social
welfare department of Osaka City Council from April 1938 to October 1941.
This was the period between his graduation from Kyoto University and being
called up for military service, and one that, it need hardly be said, roughly
146 James Raeside
brackets the interval between the opening of conflict in Europe and Japan’s entry
into the larger theatre of world war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like all of
Noma’s novels, Circle of Youth is set within a very restricted time frame: the whole
action of the six parts unfolds during the two-month period between the
announcement of the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and the German invasion
of Poland. Thus the dark cloud of political events hangs low across the horizon
of the entire novel.
What does mark this massive novel off from the majority of Noma’s other
fictional works is the fact that it has two central protagonists. Beginning with his
first and perhaps best-known novella ‘Kurai e’ (Dark Pictures, 1947 [2000]), the
typical Noma hero is a young man agonizing between the twin poles of the
private and the public, politics and love. Perhaps this dilemma could most accu-
rately be represented as a choice between the development of the self and the
devotion of the self to a general cause, namely that of political activism. In the
case of Circle of Youth, these two identities are split between the two central char-
acters, Daidō Izumi and Yabana Masayuki.3 The novel mainly consists of
chapters told from the point of view of one or other of these young men, as they
pursue their overlapping but nonetheless distinct adventures in the oppressive
heat of Osaka in August and September of 1939. A third point of view is repre-
sented by Masayuki’s mother Yoshie, as she struggles to keep afloat her business
selling discounted tickets, as well as ministering to the members of her Buddhist
sect. In this brave and devout widow, striving to support her family, those familiar
with Noma will recognize another frequently recurring character, and one based
on Noma’s own mother.4
Circle of Youth is not only extremely long, but has a complex plot involving char-
acters drawn from the whole spectrum of pre-war Japanese society. All this makes
the task of reading it rather daunting, and the novel will probably be unfamiliar
except by name even to those with an extensive knowledge of contemporary
Japanese literature. Since the development of the plot and, in particular, the
changing relationships between the principal characters bear directly on the
theme of Otherness, it will be necessary to summarize the story at some length.
Before doing so, however, a few initial reflections on the concept of the Other
might be useful.
All formulations involving the concept of the Other – notably those of Sartre,
Lacan, Foucault, and Levinas – ultimately derive from the phenomenology of
G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), at least as it was so influentially explicated by
Alexandre Kojève (1902–68). The popularity of the concept with cultural and
literary critics, in particular, has caused it to spread over a very wide area. As
Peter Osborne remarks:
One particular cause of confusion has been a slippage between philosophi-

cally or psychoanalytically defined, internal symbolic conceptions of otherness,
on the one hand, and a variety of phenomenological forms of recognition of
actually historically existing differences between social groups, on the other.
Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that use of Lacanianism in social
The Burakumin as Other 147
and cultural theory is premised on a slippage between the socio-symbolic and
the Lacanian Symbolic.
(2000: 108)
It is hard to disagree that the terms and concepts of Lacan, in particular, are
often used in contemporary works of cultural criticism in ways that greatly
change or simplify their original significance. Nonetheless, given the first occur-
rence of the idea of the Other in Hegel’s phenomenology, and its role in the
explanation of human history via his master–slave paradigm, we might say that
the use of Lacan’s psychoanalytical terminology in postcolonialist and other trea-
tises demonstrates how long a shadow is cast by Hegel. Analyses of social and
historical events are bolstered by the vocabulary of a philosophy that seeks to
account for human behaviour at some fundamental level of identity.
One of the things that is interesting about Noma’s work in the context of the
discussion of Otherness, is that it engages so deliberately with both these internal
and external aspects of the Other. Circle of Youth depicts an actual historical and
social condition – that of the burakumin – while also engaging with the ‘internal’
drama of Otherness, in the attempt of individual beings to gain understanding
of themselves through the figure of another, to whom they are bound in emula-
tion and enmity. This second aspect is explored through the changing
relationships between a number of paired characters, those who might, following
the formula of René Girard, be described as ‘fr è re s en n em is’ (Girard 1972: 14).
Finally, the link between these paired characters is itself crucially related to the
existence of burakumin as a group, and the relation they have to the rest of society.
To illustrate, however, let us first turn to the complexities of the narrative.
Brothers and enemies

The closest parallel to the plot structure of Circle of Youth might well be that of
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in which the two central characters, represented as
symbolic father and son, move around the city during the same day. Although
they only fleetingly encounter one other, their experiences and thoughts are
strangely interlocked. As in Noma’s work, the narrative point of view enters
deeply into the consciousness of both characters. There is a similarity, too,
between the symbolism of their names. Whereas in Noma’s work a ‘straight
course’ (Masayuki) is opposed to ‘jetting spring’ (Izumi), Joyce has an artificer
(Daedalus) opposed to a natural growth (Bloom). On the other hand, Izumi’s
family name, Daidō, obviously sounds like Daedalus, while Bloom is echoed in
Masayuki’s surname, Yabana (meadow flower).5
One clear difference between Noma’s novel and Joyce’s is that, in the former,
the two young men know each other, and are aware of at least some of the links
between them. Initially they were friends and fellow political activists at Kyoto
University. Masayuki’s father, already long dead by the period of the novel, used
to be an employee at the electricity generating company of which Izumi’s father
is now the area director; at the same time, as we learn right from the opening
148 James Raeside
chapter, Masayuki was for some time the lover of Izumi’s younger half-sister Yōko.
Thus they are linked right across the important high ground of human experi-
ence which Noma was so keen to include in what he described as his ‘absolute
novel’ (zentai shōsetsu):6 they are connected on the intellectual, political, relational
(family), and affective (sexual) levels. Both young men are intelligent, although it
is clear that Izumi’s is the more quick and probing intelligence, whereas
Masayuki’s tends to be more plodding and methodical.
The major differences between the two derive from their family backgrounds.
Although Izumi’s upbringing is economically privileged, it is also emotionally
impoverished. With his father a rich and influential figure in the business world of
Kansai, he has grown up in want of nothing materially. However, he found out
in his early teens that he was not the true child of his father’s first wife, but the
adopted child of one of his father’s mistresses. After confronting his father with
his suspicions, he had felt for a time that he had let out all the skeletons in his
family closet, but an essential element in the plot of the book is Izumi’s gradual
uncovering of further secrets about his father – in brief, that he is a compulsive
womanizer who has had a string of mistresses, and has even used his influence to
marry off one of his recent mistresses to the son of a family acquaintance. Izumi
discovers that there is a kind of moral vacuum at the heart of the Daidō household,
which will eventually cause the whole structure of the family to implode.
However, the biggest difference between the two men, and one that governs
the nature of their behaviour throughout the book, is that Masayuki continues to
be politically active both in the left-wing organizations of which he is a member,
and through his official work for the Osaka City Office. Izumi, on the other
hand, has given up all activism, after being picked up by the police for subversive
activities while a student. Even this backsliding could be said to derive from his
family origins. Izumi was released from interrogation through the intervention of
his father, but he tells himself that his life might have gone very differently – in
other words, that he might be still be politically engaged like Masayuki – if his
privileged background had not offered him this way of escape. The thought has
a specific application to another crucial difference between Masayuki and Izumi:
Masayuki, whatever else, seems to be in radiant health, whereas Izumi has
contracted an apparently untreatable form of syphilis and now believes himself
to be degenerating towards insanity and death. The sense of disillusion and self-
dislike caused by the end of his left-wing activities, it is suggested, caused him to
plunge into a life of debauchery, which in turn exposed him to the disease. Thus,
as we first encounter him wandering late at night around the entertainment
district of Osaka, alternatively frightened and bitter, as well as being a frère ennemi
to Masayuki, he is also playing out the role of poète maudit.7
At the end of the book the opposition between the two is characterized in
symbolic terms by Izumi himself as the difference between life and death, sun
and shadow:
But it can truly be said that you are the day, bright noon. I am saying this
without a trace of irony. I envy you, nay I envy thee Yabana Masayuki,
but . . . you aren’t able to see that there are people who are the opposite of
you, people of the deep night, carrying disease.
(NHZ 11: 625)8
This is also a comparison that Noma takes up himself in more than one
commentary on his own work as, for example, in the following:
Yabana Masayuki is a character who takes his stand in life, and Daidō Izumi
stands within death. Yabana Masayuki is one of those who live in the bright
noon; Daidō Izumi is of the party of night and contemplation.
(NHS 10: 302)
Since he is not only marked by disease, but suffers waking delusions of insects
boring into his brain, or demons sitting on his shoulder, it is not difficult to see
why Izumi should be thought of as a creature of night and death. Masayuki’s
activities, as we learn from the description of his first day, seem to lie in the open
air and the light. He moves from his place of work to a meeting with his left-wing
friends, to one of the buraku districts of Osaka, and finally to his family home.
Although they are often in each other’s thoughts, the two characters meet only
three times during the course of the novel’s thousands of pages. The final and
most significant meeting is in the last section of the volume ‘Honoo no basho (1)’
(The Place of Flame (1)). Although these two enemy brothers are so much in
each other’s thoughts and are so well aware of the various links that join their
past lives, to the end they remain unconscious of the fact that everything in
which they are engaged during the period of the novel is linked through the hisa-
betsu burakumin.
Masayuki’s involvement with the burakumin cause is open and averred. His job
is precisely to meet and deal with the burakumin population of Osaka, officially to
try and assist in the official government policy of integration (yūwa). In fact, as we
realize from the first chapter set in the Osaka City Hall, ‘Entotsu’ (The
Chimney),9 as far as his superiors are concerned, his real job is to do the
minimum necessary to keep the burakumin areas peaceful and to stop the inhabi-
tants from rising in revolt. In this chapter he is anxiously questioned by his
immediate superior, Inoue, as to whether he thinks there will be an uprising in
Osaka similar to a recent incident in Saitama, when the buraku community
protested about prices and the unavailability of raw materials. However, because
of his left-wing sympathies, Masayuki is a kind of double agent. He really hopes
to foment the discontent that he is supposed to be working to avert, and the
answers he gives to his superiors regarding the mood among the buraku community
are often deliberately misleading.
The burakumin with whom Masayuki principally deals are those engaged in
shoe making and shoe repairing. They are currently greatly discontented because
the supply of leather under wartime conditions has dried up to almost nothing,
so that many of those in the trade have been idle for weeks. There are a number
of different jobs that have been traditionally associated with the burakumin, but
150 James Raeside
probably it is the handling of animal products that has remained the most
strongly symbolic of a kind of physical pollution.10
In the situation in which the shoemakers find themselves in Noma’s novel, war
profiteers are moving in to buy up all the remaining leather in order to force up
the prices, much as happened with the rice riots earlier in the century. So the
burakumin are in the doubly unfortunate position of being robbed of the labour
that they have traditionally practised and which was the ostensible grounds for
the discrimination against them, without seeing that discrimination itself being
lessened. In this situation their only hope lies in unity of action, and the leaders
of the burakumin community are mostly executives of the keizai kōseikai, or
Economic Regeneration Association. Masayuki, caught in the traditional
dilemma of the left-wing activist, reflects at one point that, by using what influ-
ence he has with the local government to ease the plight of the burakumin in the
areas under his responsibility, he may be actually helping to delay or defuse the
outburst of revolutionary anger that his political opinions ought to make him
want to encourage.
There is both within the novel and in historical fact, a considerable overlap
between left-wing activity and the burakumin liberation movement, and several of
the group to whom Masayuki feels closest, the keizai kōseikai of the Naniwa ward,
were former activists in the suiheisha movement, regarded as ‘reds’ by a suspicious
government and police force. However, it is made clear through a number of
encounters that Masayuki has with other members of the buraku community
during the course of the novel that burakumin are by no means all potential shock
troops of a proletarian revolution. There are some, such as the community
leader Kametada, who live quite comfortably by exploiting their fellow burakumin.
Similarly, in the rural burakumin community, Masayuki hears of a local loan shark
who obliges his debtors to sell their daughters into prostitution in order to pay
him back (‘Koyodo’ (Koyodo ward), NHZ 9: 277–301). Perhaps even more repre-
sentative of the way that the burakumin have come to be viewed in modern Japan
is the curious figure of Hanegarasu. He is one of those who most unashamedly
use the threat of burakumin pressure to extort money and favours from others. He
carries round with him a well-used packet of anonymous hate mail directed
against himself to shame and silence those with whom he comes into conflict. A
figure out of Balzac or Dickens, his huge frame wrapped in a large black coat
makes it clear that his unusual surname, meaning ‘crow-wing’, is meant to be
symbolic. Like a crow he is bold and astute but essentially he is a scavenger. He
openly admits to using the threat of burakumin censure to make a living, but does
nothing to promote the cause of liberation and equality.
The chapter in which Hanegarasu invades Masayuki’s place of work, discom-
forting his immediate superiors with his well-practised mixture of sentimental
rhetoric and veiled threat, is a very effective illustration of the way certain
burakumin groups worked, and also of the attitudes of those in ‘normal’ society
who deal with them. The chapter is entitled ‘Yūwaya’, alluding to the fact that
Hanegarasu is not concerned to actually achieve the yūwa or integration
intended by the term, but to exploit society’s or the government’s stated desire to
achieve integration to extort immediate benefits. As a method this works
11
because of two levels of falsity. On the one hand, since the eras in which The Broken
Commandment and The River with No Bridge are set, it had become more difficult to
openly express prejudice against the burakumin in Japanese society. However, that
prejudice still existed. As is clear from Hanegarasu’s tactics in the ‘Yūwaya’
chapter of the novel, those in officialdom, particularly those who are part of the
government department that deals with the burakumin, cannot possibly admit to
their prejudices, and it is because they secretly know that they do feel this kind of
prejudice that they can easily be intimidated. It is when the mask of hypocrisy slips
that pressure can be brought to bear particularly strongly. For example, it is
because a kempeitai ( Japanese Military Police) sergeant makes a dismissive remark
about the burakumin, before he realizes that he is in fact speaking to one of their
number, that the former suiheisha activist Morimura is able to discomfort the
officer on two separate occasions. The officer’s desperate attempts to assure
Morimura that he has, in a now famous phrase, ‘misspoke himself ’, are narrated
to some humorous effect, but this lapse on his part plays a crucial role in the
burakumin’s successful defiance of the police at the end of the book.
Normally those in official positions with whom Masayuki deals are more
circumspect. When they refer to the burakumin, they usually employ the kind of
allusive remarks that will prevent them being discomforted in this way. This is
specifically stated by the head of a local citizen’s office:
Because this citizens office is right in the middle of the buraku, it’s not just
social service work like that of other offices. We have to be absolutely sure
not to make any mistakes . . . so for that reason we have to be ultra polite . . .
It’s different here, you see. Right . . . they’re hard to handle . . . look what
happens if anything at all goes wrong. It all gets very awkward, you see.
(NHZ 7: 387)
When the burakumin are not present, they are mostly referred to indirectly by
means of such expressions as ‘mukō’ (over there) and ‘ano hitotachi’ (those people).
Simply to name them may be to invite a charge of prejudice.
Taguchi
Having come this far with the daylight or open encounter with the burakumin
issue, we must turn to the other side: the hidden or crepuscular encounter with
the burakumin. In other words, we must turn from Masayuki to Izumi. As a rich
and handsome young man, Izumi still has a number of friends, but by the period
in which the novel takes place, he has come to associate almost exclusively with
one person, called Taguchi Yoshiki. At the beginning, this person fills a position
halfway between a friend and a servant. He seems to be the kind of character
frequently accompanying debauched and moneyed young men: the hanger-on,
the favourite, always trying to think of ways to distract and entertain his richer
and more socially elevated friend. Taguchi is Poins to Izumi’s Prince Hal, and
152 James Raeside
yet, by the period at which the novel begins, Izumi has already begun to wonder
if Taguchi is not Mephistopheles and he Faust. One immediate reason for associ-
ating him with the tempter of old is that he is lame; another, the fact that his
physical disability is compensated for by a great nimbleness of tongue and a
startling ability to read the minds and wishes of others.12 Izumi says it was
sympathy for Taguchi’s lameness which first inspired their friendship and, when
explaining this to Masayuki, he tells him that he has always felt a sympathy for
people like Taguchi, recalling a boy he knew at school with a similar disability.
He develops this into what Masayuki rather dismissively characterizes as a
‘Philosophy of the Cripple’ (chinba no tetsugaku): essentially the idea that those
born with physical disadvantages engage more fully with life because of the
hurdles they have had to overcome.
Two things happen quite early in the account of Taguchi and Izumi’s rela-
tionship: one is that Izumi begins to suspect that Taguchi knows the secret of his
syphilitic condition, the other that Taguchi expresses a strange agitation and
almost fear when told that Masayuki is actively involved with the buraku commu-
nity. At this point the astute reader may already guess that Taguchi himself has
some secret link with the burakumin. From the moment when Taguchi openly
begins to blackmail him over his illness, Izumi starts to see that, whereas before
he has thought of him only as a ‘ko-akutō ’ (little villain), Taguchi actually repre-
sents a much deeper-laid evil. Izumi begins to discover, in other words, that
Taguchi is a master of extortion – one who specializes in getting close to his
victims, humouring them, learning their secrets and then applying the vice of
blackmail. He is, in fact, a much more sinister version of Hanegarasu, although
in the early stages of the story any relationship between them may appear only
typological.
From the beginning of the third part of the novel, Izumi is in active pursuit of
Taguchi who has somehow disappeared. After much difficulty he manages to
track down Taguchi’s home and visits it to find to his surprise that Taguchi has a
wife whom, in the three or more years of their association, Taguchi has never
mentioned. The wife, Sakiko, after making a number of complaints about
Taguchi’s manipulativeness and even physical cruelty, allows Izumi to look into a
chest of drawers in the back room containing leather sports equipment and
layers of uncut leather. At the end of Izumi’s visit she then offers to reveal some-
thing about Taguchi, adding that Taguchi would unquestionably kill her if he
found out she had divulged it. Izumi refuses to listen. He tells himself that, what-
ever secrets Taguchi may have, he wants to confront him with them himself, to
force him to confess to them from his own mouth. So he leaves without having
heard the vital secret.
These events are narrated in a chapter, placed roughly half-way through the
novel, entitled ‘Omote to ura to omote’ (Front and Back and Front, NHZ 9: 144–
225). The reader, having been primed by the scenes set among the leather
workers of the buraku districts in Masayuki’s tale, will probably think herself one
jump ahead of Izumi at this point. Taken with Taguchi’s earlier dismay at
hearing the buraku named, the presence of the leather in a chest belonging to his
father must suggest that Taguchi himself is of buraku origins. The reader may
also jump to the conclusion that the secret which Taguchi’s wife wanted to tell
Izumi was precisely this revelation about her husband’s ‘origins’.
Izumi is finally enlightened during a conversation with his father’s friend and
business associate Ōno Kinshū. The vital passage reads as follows:
‘That man Taguchi, he’s . . . it’s like this OK: e, eta right!’ His left hand lay
upon the table and, as he used that curious word ‘eta’, he drew it towards his
chest as if it were something that must at all costs be kept hidden and,
bending the thumb inwards, held the remaining four fingers together and
waved them up and down. He waited, gazing fixedly into the other’s face for
a reaction to the words that he had just uttered and the gesture he had
used – and for a smile to pass between them.
(NHZ 9: 482)
The thumb bent inwards to leave the four fingers pressed together is the yottsu-ashi
(four-legs) gesture, used to designate burakumin. It can be variously interpreted,
but it clearly indicates that those so designated are not quite full human beings,
are somehow closer to the beasts with which their trades are associated. Although
Izumi understands what is intended and immediately thinks to himself that this
must have been the secret that Sakiko had wanted to tell him, he reacts with cold
hostility to Ōno’s gesture, and to the implication that he will sympathize with this
kind of discriminatory treatment. Pressed by Izumi, Ōno backtracks with a string
of evasive expressions, very similar in overall effect, if not exactly in tone, to the
bluster and evasion of Sergeant Suzuki a little later in the novel. Ōno’s position
has been made all the more embarrassing because, knowing he was dealing with
someone who has no cause to love Taguchi, he thought it safe to express himself,
for once, quite clearly. He had hoped that his gesture would be met with a
knowing smile rather than this icy hostility.
Thus, at the mid-point of the novel, things seem to have been made clear, and
the link between the protagonists has been reforged through the issue of preju-
dice shown towards the burakumin. At this point, too, Izumi can be said to have
caught up with the probable perception of the reader: he believes he now knows
that Taguchi’s terrible secret relates to his birth. However, this discovery has the
unfortunate effect of complicating, rather than clarifying the issue of Taguchi for
him. As his stony rejection of Ōno’s insinuation shows, he has no wish to asso-
ciate himself with the kind of discrimination displayed by Ōno; in fact, this piece
of information about Taguchi suggests that he himself might be primarily a
victim rather a villain. Izumi is no longer inclined, as he was when he first began
to hunt for Taguchi, to associate him with the evil dreams and demons brought to
him by his disease. On the other hand, he knows that Taguchi has exploited
more people than himself, including the friendless common law wife of a fellow
syphilitic who has recently died. He also realizes he knows nothing about the
burakumin issue and determines to research into it. By chance, practically the first
people he meets after he has left Ōno are a couple of street shoe repairers who
154 James Raeside
trick him into having his shoes repaired when it is not necessary. At this point he
might have benefited from a little nugget of wisdom which Shimasaki, the chairman
of the Naniwa keizai kōseikai, passes on to Masayuki a few pages later:
In the buraku there are those who think they mustn’t do anything at all
wrong, who are always looking round and worryin’ that folk might be
watching; and then again there are those who are dead opposite, who plunge
ahead and do all the wrong they want, piling it up wi’out thinking it’s wrong
at all. Them are the two types.
(NHZ 9: 551)
Izumi does not want it to matter that Taguchi is from the burakumin, but he
cannot see that it does not. This is also because he is still convinced that he now
knows the great secret about Taguchi that his wife dared not tell him. He is so
convinced of this, in fact, that when he goes to visit her for the second time and
she again offers to tell him something about Taguchi that nobody else knows,
once again he refuses to listen.
The double secret: father at the heart of darkness

It is with the third stage of his investigations, described in the fifth and sixth parts
of the novel, that Izumi finally realizes that Taguchi’s great secret has only indi-
rectly to do with origins. The very heart of the darkness lies in his own father.
Taguchi’s wife is a former mistress of his father’s whom he married off to
Taguchi to get her out of the way. The second wife was aware of the arrange-
ment at the time, and even attended the wedding, as did most of those people
such as Ōno who had taken such pains to warn him off Taguchi. All these people
around his father are now involved in a scheme to revive the fortunes of a sake
brewery owned by Sakiko’s family, and Taguchi is blackmailing them into letting
him in on the deal. Thus what is hidden, the secret about which no-one can
speak, proves not just to be the stigmatized origins of one particular character,
but layers of corruption – financial and moral – which run right through
Japanese society. This makes it yet more obvious that the burakumin as a group are
made to stand for, or rather mask, all the corruption and prejudice that are
present in society. It is in a sense impossible to talk about removing them from
society because, if they were so removed, society would no longer exist in its
present form. They represent all the things that on the surface nobody wishes to
discuss but everybody knows to exist, without which things could not function as
they now do. These are also the things about which Taguchi, from his position as an
outsider on the inside, can blackmail people: infidelity, disease, and fraud.13
Izumi says at the end of the book that he no longer feels his earlier murderous
hatred towards Taguchi, because all that hatred is now directed towards his
father. And yet, in the penultimate chapter of the book ‘Honoo no basho (2)’, he
does in fact strangle Taguchi and then shoot himself. He has gone with the inten-
tion of simply forcing Taguchi to admit to the plots in which he has been
engaged, and then making him agree to give everything up and begin again.
Taguchi, not unexpectedly, refuses and comes up with a counter-threat of his
own, which finally closes the circle between himself, Izumi and Masayuki:
Taguchi has been investigating Masayuki’s activities and now threatens to inform
the secret police if Izumi does not let things drop. It is at this last provocation
that Izumi strangles him.
Hegel and phenomenology

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a work that is dotted with conversations about history,
the possibilities of revolution and the fate of democracy in Japan, the philoso-
pher whose name appears most frequently in Circle of Youth is that of Hegel. In
fact, two subsections of one chapter, ‘Kao-kao (face-face), consist of a discussion
of Hegel between Izumi and one of his friends (NHZ 9: 395–418). At that time
the friend, Saeki, remarks that Masayuki has moved on from the Philosophy of
Right to the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it is probably the latter work of Hegel’s
that has the most significance for the novel as a whole. Presumably because of his
recent reading, the possibility of seeing the relationship between Izumi and
Taguchi in terms of the master–slave theory presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology14
occurs to Masayuki in the final part of the book, when he has at last understood
something of the history of their relationship from Izumi’s half-sister Yōko:
That’s it, Hegel’s Master and servant: a master and slave relationship is the
only thing you can call it. However much Yōko says that they are absolutely
not linked together in some kind of scheme, there is a profound relation
between them that goes much deeper than that.
(NHZ 11: 254)
Many of the characters in Noma’s fictions tend to think in Hegelian categories,

especially the relationship between the universal and the particular. As discussed
earlier, the theory of master and slave, from which ideas of the universal and
particular are inseparable, underlies that of ‘the Other’ as later developed by
Lacan, Foucault and others, at least as it was explained in Kojève’s hugely influ-
ential Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Wilden 1968: 192–3; Bowie 1991: 80). And
yet Hegel’s optimistic belief in an ultimate Aufhebung, in which all opposition
would be resolved and the yearning of both parties for recognition at last
resolved, tended to disappear from the works of these later theorists.
In the first chapter of the last part, ‘The Place of Flame (1)’, Masayuki and
Izumi finally meet in one of the buraku districts of the city and talk about the
burakumin issue in general, as well as about Taguchi and how criminal burakumin
such as he ought to be viewed. This discussion naturally also widens out to the
issue of the universal and the particular. Hegel’s idea was that the slave can think
only in terms of the particular whereas the master can think only in terms of the
universal. This is one reason that neither masters nor slaves feel that their being
can be properly acknowledged. The master cannot acknowledge the slave, and
156 James Raeside
because he does not accept the slave’s being, he can find no one to acknowledge
him. The only way that this paradox can be resolved is when the slave finally
rises up, abandons servitude and becomes both equal and free. In this way he will
be both a universal and a distinct individual; yet to do this he must abandon faith
in any god and confront his own fear of death. Hegel believed that this had
happened in the French Revolution, and Masayuki obviously has this in mind
when he talks about citizenship to Izumi:
Today you went to the Naniwa Ward Citizen’s Office, right? The word
‘citizen’ that they use there is the ‘citizen’ as it arose in Europe, but they just
took the name: even though they call it a citizen’s office it’s all for social
work, integration work, ‘settlement’ work. If they were citizens in the
European sense, none of that would be necessary.
(NHZ 11: 628)
Thus, the burakumin are still not citizens even in the limited sense that this might
have in the context of Japanese society, not to mention the fuller meaning of citi-
zenship which, again according to Hegel, became current in Europe after the
French Revolution. The burakumin could be seen as the ultimate illustration of
Hegel’s paradigm of master and slave, in the sense that they are those who labour
but are not valued, are not recognized by their masters as equals. The fact that
they labour would be a sign that they have at one time chosen to surrender them-
selves to the master group in order to survive. Of course, if applied literally to
Japanese history or society, this would still require an explanation as to why there
are those who also labour but are not outcastes. Nonetheless, the idea that humans
in general can never know true freedom or equality until the slaves overcome
their fear of death and fight to achieve freedom and equality is one that can be
traced directly through Hegel to Marx and beyond, and explains why Marxist
ideas might seem especially welcome and appropriate to the burakumin movement.
In the discussion that he has with Masayuki before he goes off to meet
Taguchi, Izumi convinces Masayuki that in the present state of capitalist Japan
there is no jury which could be deemed competent to try Taguchi for his crimes,
essentially because the discrimination he has undergone at the hands of society
as a whole disqualifies society from judging him. Izumi then goes on to say that it
is precisely by killing Taguchi, that he could strip himself of any prejudice:
But I have come to think that I myself can kill Taguchi, and at that time I
can rid myself of my prejudice. That’s right – through that I can rid myself
of my prejudice and become the equal of Taguchi. Human beings are indi-
vidual existences, but they also exist as a species. It is because humans exist
as a species that it is possible to kill; and I am able to kill Taguchi.
(NHZ 11: 641)
To this Masayuki replies that, by this line of thought, one could justify war.
Izumi, however replies, ‘Not war, revolution . . . Of course revolutions don’t
massacre people in great numbers like wars. But it can’t be argued that revolu-
tions don’t kill anybody at all’ (NHZ 11: 641–2). At this, Masayuki ripostes that,
rather than revolution, Izumi is talking about suicide. From this they move to
Hegel and his theory that consciousness derives from desire (for what is desired
by the Other). Masayuki says that he is now preoccupied both with this and the
Asiatic mode of production; in truth, these are the main issues for him now –
together with that of the burakumin.
Any suggestion that Japan was still at an Asiatic stage of development would be
extremely dispiriting to people like Masayuki, but the very existence of the burakumin
might be taken as an indication that something of these conditions still prevails in
the narrative present, that the current state of society in Japan is very far from
being ripe for a proletarian revolution, and may not even have moved beyond the
stage of feudalism. This may be why Masayuki yokes together the burakumin and
the Asian issue. Izumi replies again, in his usual style, half-teasing and half-serious:
That’s right, you are the expert on the buraku, aren’t you? But it can be said,
can’t it, that the expert doesn’t always know his own area. Why do such anti-
social elements arise from those who are objects of discrimination? And not
just that, how can those anti-social elements within the buraku be resolved?
You aren’t able to put forward any concrete methods. Of course, in my
opinion, that is not at all surprising.
(NHZ 11: 642–3)
Thus, by his talk of revolution, Izumi appears to be trying to justify his elimina-
tion of Taguchi as an individual by seeing him as representative of a type.
Taguchi cannot be judged by Japan’s current laws, because the law, like his
father, is steeped in ordure. It is only special circumstances that allow him to
sacrifice Taguchi for the sake of the revolution, and only then at the further sacri-
fice of his own life. To this, Masayuki can only reply that he needs time, that in
time such dilemmas must be resolved; but, as a man dying of syphilis, time is one
thing that Izumi no longer has.
Conclusion
Nothing more different than these two drops of blood – and yet nothing is
more alike.
(Girard 1972: 61)15
If we allow ourselves a fairly loose definition of the ‘Other’ as meaning an alter-

native version of the subject, a rival entity which is seen as being hostile, opposed
and yet somehow closely related, Circle of Youth seems to offer a profusion of such
oppositions. Thus, Izumi and Masayuki are alternative versions of the same
intelligent youth, whose paths have crucially forked. By contrast, Izumi and
158 James Raeside
Taguchi are like enemy brothers, who both stand in some kind of Oedipal rela-
tionship to Izumi’s father, while Izumi has come to see Taguchi and his own
father as different facets of the same corrupt entity. All the burakumin, of whom we
learn that Taguchi is a member, are the ‘Other’ in relation to mainstream Japanese
society. The foregoing account of the plot of Circle of Youth, and in particular of
its final chapters, should have shown how the novel strives to bring all aspects of the
burakumin issue into its ambit. The division between night and day, Masayuki and
Izumi, marks the distinction between the social and psychological aspects of
burakumin identity. It is, as Izumi and Masayuki realize in their final debate, a ques-
tion of the universal and the particular or, to put it in more contemporary terms,
between history and the subject. Noma’s aim was clearly to bring these two major
aspects together at the end and to show they were necessarily intertwined. Izumi,
in search of a solution to his contest with Taguchi – the burakumin as rival and
double – comes to where Masayuki sits in the centre of a buraku district awaiting
a conflict with the power of the state: the burakumin as oppressed social minority.
As we have seen, in Hegel’s Phenomenology there is an imagined primal scene
where some humans agree to risk death and die and thus become masters, while
others avoid combat and become enslaved. The slave is no longer considered by
the master to be a subject – that is, an authentic, independent being worthy of
recognition; and thus he becomes merely subject, eternally working for the master
but never being recognized by him. Included in this idea already, therefore, is the
notion that only through acceptance of death will one become an authentic,
autonomous subject. The slave then has to try to find a way to win back his
authenticity, to be acknowledged as a subject in his own right. For Hegel, the first
attempt to resolve this problem was to propose a solution out of this world: jenseits
(the beyond), or the heaven of Christian doctrine. It was a fallacious doctrine, but
a necessary one that eventually led the slaves to understand that they could win
their freedom by facing down their fear of death, rejecting the need for heaven,
and attempting to achieve the same freedom and recognition by others here on
earth. In some way or other, all those following after Hegel in the European
philosophical tradition have had to produce their own account of the Other, one
that focuses on the relationship between the subject or conscious self with other
subjects. Lacan takes this to the point of arguing that the subject comes into exis-
tence already inhabited by otherness.16 For Lacan, there is no resolution to the
problem of the self. One is left with an endless signifying chain, or the endless
talk of those for whom there can never really be a cure.
Another way of accounting for the seeming paradox of Self and Other, and
one more closely focused on literary texts, is proffered by René Girard, in his
analysis of the violence and the sacred, and what he also calls ‘mimetic rivalry’.
The fundamental idea running through all his theories is that of displacing
emotions from the original object onto a third party. The same process operates
in the case of those seen as rivals in love, or sacrificial victims in the case of
violent conflict. In the latter case, Girard offers a model of an act committed on
one individual for the sake of the community as a whole. He cites a passage from
Hubert and Mauss concerning the act of ritual sacrifice:
One excused oneself for the act one was about to commit, one groaned for
the death of the beast, one wept for it like a relative. One asked pardon
before striking. One addressed oneself to the others of the same species to
which it belonged, as if to a vast family clan whom one was imploring not
to avenge the hurt that it was about to suffer in the person of one of its
members. Under the influence of these same ideas, the author of the murder was himself
punished. He was beaten or exiled.
(Girard 1972: 26, my emphasis)17
Here the idea of a whole species being avenged or satisfied through the death of
an individual seems to throw light on Izumi’s assertion that Taguchi may be
killed as the member of a species. This passage also contains the valuable insight
that the executioner, the conductor of the sacrifice, may himself become this
mixture of the polluted and holy and the ritual may require his punishment too.
This presents us with the idea of the control of primal violence by a ritualized
version of that violence, a ceremony in which that which is actually similar is simul-
taneously depicted as completely other. In other words, blood spilled in sacrifice is
purifying and healing, in total contradistinction to the polluting substance (blood
spilt in violent anger). In the case of the scapegoat, a community loads the beast
symbolically with all its sins and then drives it out. By choosing such a beast and
loading it with all they feel to be unclean and dangerous, they make it evil, profane;
and yet by choosing it they make it special, and in another sense sacred. By driving
it out, they emphasize it is not them, something Other, and yet by choosing it and
loading it with something of theirs – their pollution – they paradoxically stress
the relationship. In this sense, the burakumin can be – and frequently have been –
seen as a kind of scapegoat for Japanese society, perhaps one that was necessary
for society to create because it did not have a natural racial or religious minority
of its own. (The theories that burakumin were originally Koreans or slaves, or
indeed Koreans and slaves, are an example of retroactive racism.)
As the whole structure of this huge novel attests, while we have the individual
pairs of Others or frères ennemis represented by Izumi and Masayuki, Izumi and
Taguchi, and also the Daidōs (father and son), it is Taguchi who links these indi-
vidual pairings with the wider theme of the buraku as an Other group within
Japanese society as a whole. Taguchi represents a member of the buraku who does
not seek freedom, but rather whose actions make the buraku less free, both by
reinforcing the image of them as those who exploit and feed upon society and in
the direct sense that he is hindering the possibility of social and political progress
represented by Masayuki. Reverting to the final conversation between Izumi and
Masayuki, Izumi asks whether it is acceptable to kill someone whom one sees as
an enemy of society, even if one knows why they have become so. In other
words, what about Taguchi? As a part of a generalized picture of social oppres-
sion and prejudice, his resentment and desire for revenge on society seem fully
explicable from a psycho-social point of view. Yet, even having understood all
that, even having said in the so-often parodied words of left-leaning sociologists that
‘society’s to blame’, what do you do about the actual living individual now
160 James Raeside
threatening to cause more harm even to his fellow burakumin? To this Masayuki
cannot provide an answer and Izumi goes off to his final interview with Taguchi,
apparently hoping to try to force Taguchi to abandon his career of extortion. As
noted, this does not work, but by threatening Masayuki and therefore the work
that he is doing in support of the buraku movement, Taguchi apparently allows
Izumi a way out of his moral impasse. Even so, Izumi can only kill Taguchi
because he has fully accepted the imminence of his own death, and is willing for
Taguchi’s death to be immediately followed by his own.
If Taguchi were to be considered Izumi’s alter ego, in keeping with other Doppel-
gänger narratives such as Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray, this might be viewed as
the normal fate of one who attempts to destroy the Other that is himself: the
only way that one can resolve the split in one’s being/call back the projection of
oneself, is in death. On the other hand, if one reverts to the frères ennemis of Girard
who insisted that his version of the master–slave dialectic was essentially different
from Hegel’s (Girard 1961: 129–30), then Taguchi would become the scapegoat
sacrificed to assuage Izumi’s rage and resentment against another enemy brother,
who could only be Masayuki:
In the Old Testament and the Greek myths, brothers are almost always
enemy brothers. The violence which they seemed to be called by fate to
carry out against each other can only be dissipated on third-party victims:
victims of sacrifice. The ‘jealousy’ that Cain feels towards his brother simply
accords with that privation of some sacrificial outlet by which a character is
defined.
(Girard 1972: 14)18
As regards the origins of Izumi’s resentment, one possible answer, employing the
Cain and Abel analogy invoked by Girard, would be that Masayuki’s endeavours
seemed to have been acceptable in the eyes of the Lord and his were not. In
other words, Masayuki’s success in holding to his principles, in becoming the
person that Izumi wanted to be, causes his jealousy and resentment, and leads him
to destroy, not himself, but the person he most feared becoming: Taguchi. Yet
again, after Izumi has found out about Taguchi’s involvement with his family, he
repeatedly says that the person he now really wants to kill is not Taguchi but
his own father, who used Taguchi, and who is the source of the owai, the ‘muck’.
Although not aware of the latter’s buraku origins, Izumi had long regarded
Taguchi as not quite his equal. Then, when Taguchi began to threaten him, he
started to regard him as something inhuman but powerful – a demon sitting on
his shoulder. It is only paradoxically – by discovering that Taguchi is one of those
who are looked upon by mainstream society as being precisely both those things,
at once demonic and subhuman – that he sees to the heart of his own prejudice.
One could say that Izumi can kill Taguchi because the latter has now become a kind
of meta-scapegoat. Taguchi stands for the worst aspects of Izumi himself, as well
as standing for Izumi’s father, and his father stands for the corruption and abuse
of power in society, an abuse of power and corruption which in its turn has created
a group such as the burakumin. Although Taguchi is himself from the buraku, he has
turned his back on them, become one who sells out their cause for individual gain,
so that, by sacrificing him, Izumi is committing a kind of deed of expiation for the
bad side of the burakumin themselves. However, all this can only be done because
Izumi, who sees his own participation in all these evils, consents to act as both
executioner and victim. This is also accomplished through overcoming a fear of
death.
Whether what Izumi does offers any kind of solution for the problem of the
buraku – or hope for Japanese society in general – is not answered. If it can be
believed, again following the Hegelian model, that there will be a resolution after
a revolution, then that would be one form of consolation; though not one
offered explicitly in the novel itself. Girard, it is true, does offer a form of resolu-
tion that can take place within the novel. In certain works, he argues, the facing
up to death by one protagonist is itself a sign that both the hero and the author have
‘been caught in the structure of desires and escaped from it’. He continues:
The hero never frees himself until the end of the work, through a conver-
sion in which he rejects mediated desire, i.e. death of the romantic self, and
a resurrection in the true world of the novel. This is why death and disease
are always physically present in the conclusion and why they always have the
nature of a happy deliverance . . . the work is at once the narrative of, and
the recompense for, spiritual metamorphosis.
(Girard 1978: 4)
However, Circle of Youth does not end with the deaths of Izumi and Taguchi. The
final scene shows the withdrawal of the forces of oppression lined up against
Masayuki, though at night and in a ‘place of flame’. These flames may straight-
forwardly symbolize further conflict – revolution or the imminent world war.
However there is a final possibility: that they hint at Buddhist teaching – the
burning house of the Lotus Sutra symbolizing human suffering in this world of
illusion. In which case, the rejected jenseits of a Hegelian phenomenology might
reappear in the guise of a Buddhist version of salvation, and Yoshie, Masayuki’s
pious Buddhist mother, would have the last word after all.
Notes
1 Noma worked hardest for the burakumin cause during his involvement in the Sayama
jiken (Sayama case), in which a member of the burakumin community was found
guilty of murder on very questionable evidence (Noma 1976; Noma and Sayama
1997).
2 The suiheisha, whose name derives from the English Levellers, was an organization
established to fight for the rights of the burakumin and to actively oppose prejudice
wherever it was encountered. The first volume of Sumii’s novel ends with its formation,
and a whole chapter of Noma’s book turns around it: ‘Keikanki’ (The Flag with the
Crown of Thorns) (NHZ, vol. 9, pp. 537–75).
3 From this point I will refer to these two characters by their given names, Masayuki
and Izumi. This is in line with Noma’s own practice in the novel: he consistently refers to
162 James Raeside
them either just using the given name or the full name, and not by the family name. The
various relatives of both young men figure so prominently in the book that referring
to them by their family names alone would sometimes prove confusing. Moreover, as
explained in this chapter, the given names of both characters clearly have a symbolic
significance.
4 In some of his comments on his own work, Noma talks in terms of the novel having a
tripartite structure, cf., for example, ‘Seinen no wa no kansei’ (On Completing Circle of
Youth), NHS, vol. 10, pp. 301–3. However, although this may have been the writer’s
original intention, there is no question but that in terms of page length and narrative
focus Masayuki and Izumi greatly predominate over Masayuki’s mother. The total
number of pages recounting the experiences of Masayuki and Izumi both reach well
over a thousand pages each in the collected works edition (vols 7–11) whereas Yoshie’s
page count is only around 250.
5 Noma frequently refers in his criticism to the works of Joyce, notably expressing the
sense of liberation he received from reading Ulysses, for instance (NHZ, vol. 18, pp.
284–91).
6 For Noma’s comments on the absolute novel see, for example, ‘Shōsetsu no zentai to
wa nanika’ (What is the Absolute Novel?) (NHZ, vol. 11, pp. 701–4).
7 Izumi’s perception of the night-time city vomiting up its citizens in the first chapter in
which he appears, ‘Honoo ni owarete’ (Pursued by Flame), has a quite evident
Baudelairean ring (NHZ, vol. 7, p. 64).
8 All translations of Noma’s works are my own.
9 Circle of Youth is divided into six parts (bu), which are themselves each subdivided
into three (shō ), except for the shortest first part which only has two. Each shō is
then further subdivided into titled sections such as ‘Entotsu’. These titled sections
are then usually further divided into anything from five to twelve subsections.
Although the Japanese word shō is generally translated as ‘chapter’, I will use the
word ‘chapter’ to refer to the titled section, since this seems to fall more in line with
common English usage. The shō I will refer to as ‘sections’ and the bu as ‘parts’. The
reason for not calling them ‘volumes’ is that, in the NHZ – the only readily available
edition of Circle of Youth – the first two ‘parts’ are in the same volume (volume 7) while
the following four parts appear in the four successive volumes. Thus volume 8
contains part three, volume 9 part four, etc.
10 In a chapter entitled ‘Rekishi no Shūki’ (The Stink of History) (NHZ, vol. 7, p. 363)
Masayuki reflects to himself that people think the stink of leather is the stink of the
burakumin themselves. For references to leather-making as a traditional buraku activity
see, for example, Shimahara (1971: 15); Sabouret (1983: 24–5).
11 The ‘ya’ is a suffix normally used in the same way as the modifier ‘er’ in English as in
‘tipster’, and might best be translated ‘scammer’, as in ‘he’s on the integration scam’.
This corresponds to a whole range of semi-criminal activities of which Masayuki
makes a mental list earlier in the novel, including, for example, the ‘sawariya’ (acci-
dent-scammers), who deliberately try to get hit by cars in order to extort immediate
cash compensation from the driver.
12 The association of lameness with the devil or the tempter exists in many traditions, in
particular the ‘diable boiteux’ perhaps familiar to Noma through his reading of French
literature.
13 To the anglophone reader, this complex web of secrets may recall Charles Dickens’
Bleak House, where Izumi, playing Inspector Bucket for himself, is in the position of
uncovering all the secrets that link society from top to bottom – just as it turns out, in
Dickens’s novel, that disease and illicit sexual relations link everyone from the humble
crossing sweeper Jo to the great house of Lord and Lady Dedlock.
14 The relevant chapter in the Baillie translation is rendered as ‘Lordship and
Bondage’ (Hegel 1949: 229–40), although it will be evident that the account of
Hegel’s phenomenology given in this chapter largely follows Kojève’s interpreta-
tion.
15 ‘Rien de plus différent que ces deux gouttes de sang et pourtant rien n’est plus
semblable.’
16 Quoted in Bowie (1991: 81):
The Other is, therefore, the locus, in which is constituted the I who speaks with
him who hears, that which is said by the one being already the reply, the other
deciding to hear it whether the one has or has not spoken.
References
Main texts
Noma Hiroshi (1970–71) Noma Hiroshi zenshū (NHZ ) (The Complete Works of Noma
Hiroshi), 22 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
——(1987) Noma Hiroshi sakuhinshū (NHS ) (The Works of Noma Hiroshi), 14 vols, Tokyo:
Iwanami shoten.
Other references
Bowie, Malcolm (1991) Lacan, London: Fontana.
Girard, René (1961) Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Paris: Hachette Littéraire.
——(1972) Le violence et le sacré, Paris: Hachette Pluriel.
——(1978) To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1949) Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, London:
Allen & Unwin.
Kojève, Alexandre (1947 [1968]) Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard.
Neary, Ian (1989) Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-war Japan: The Origins of Buraku
Liberation, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Nichols, Jr., James H. (partial trans.) (1969) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Noma Hiroshi (1946) ‘Kurai e’ (Dark Pictures), NHS, vol. 1, pp. 11–84.
——(1947–71) ‘Seinen no wa’ (The Circle of Youth), NHZ, vols 6–11.
——(1955) ‘Joisu’ (Joyce), NHZ , vol. 18, pp. 284–91.
——(1970) ‘Shōsetsu no zentai to wa nanika’ (What is the Absolute Novel?), NHZ, vol. 11,
pp. 701–4.
——(1971) ‘Seinen no wa no kansei’ (On Completing The Circle of Youth ), NHS, vol. 10, pp.
301–3.
——(1976) Sayama saiban (The Sayama Trial), 2 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
——(2000) Dark Pictures and Other Stories, trans. James Raeside, Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press.
Noma Hiroshi and Sayama saiban kankō iinkai (eds) (1997) Sayama saiban: Kanpon (The
Sayama Trial: The Complete Version), 3 vols, Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten.
Osborne, Peter (2000) Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London and New York: Routledge.
Sabouret, Jean-François (1983) L’autre japon: les burakumin (The Other Japan: The
Burakumin), Paris: La découverte-maspéro.
Shimahara Nobuo (1971) Burakumin: A Japanese Minority and Education, The Hague: Mart-
inus Nijhoff.
Shimazaki Tōson (1906 [1974]) The Broken Commandment, trans. Kenneth Strong, Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press.
164 James Raeside
Sumii Sue (1989) The River with No Bridge, trans. Susan Wilkinson, Rutland, VT and Tokyo:
Tuttle.
Wilden, Anthony (1968) The Language of the Self, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Yoshino, I. Roger and Murakoshi Sueo (1977) The Invisible Visible Minority: Japan’s Burakumin,
Osaka: Buraku kaihō kenky ūjo.
9 Sincerely yours
Uno Chiyo’s A Wife’s Letters as
wartime subversion
Rebecca L. Copeland
The back and forth of letters, their desire for reply, their incomplete ownership
of information, their concomitant play on ideas of absence and presence,
and their apparently personal and private nature, model an interactive open-
ness (although one always knows, paradoxically, that this seeming openness
can be used for manipulation and deception).
(Bower 1997)
Ever since the twelfth-century woman warrior Tomoe quit the battlefield in
obedience to her lord’s command to seek her place among the women at home,
Japan has subscribed to the myth that severs the warlike man from the pacifist
woman. Men are warriors; women are wives. Men bear arms; women children.
Men are heroic; women self-effacing. War activates those gender distinctions that
in moments of peace are open to contestation. Agitation for equal rights, for
suffrage, and for liberated lifestyles is set aside out of respect for greater national
(read patriarchal) interests. Feminist agendas become luxuries. Men and women
pull together in the spirit of unification and strength, and the essentialization of
male – female gender roles is not only intensified, it is justified.
Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier, among others, note the
collaborative partnership between love and war (Cooper et al. 1989a: xiii). If man is
the warrior, then woman must signify that which is worth fighting for – the home,
the nation, the future. The idealized ‘woman’ motivates the carnage that is estab-
lished as her antithesis. Her placement at the ‘home front’, therefore, requires a
dynamic complicity in war and is itself an active performance of a political posi-
tion. Indeed, the rhetoric used to exhort her attention to her duties mimics that
applied to men. She is asked to be loyal, stalwart, and courageous in her battles
as a ‘home front warrior’. And yet, the very idealization of the home front, the
insistence that it carry the values and promised comforts that the battlefront
negates, disqualifies it from the rubric of war – and disqualifies home front
stories from categorization as war literature.
This chapter challenges the traditional presentation of war literature by reading
home front stories as an integral and complementary component of the war
narrative and thereby attributing to them the same degree of active politicization
166 Rebecca Copeland
expected of their counterpart. The positioning of home front stories within narra-
tives of war, moreover, legitimizes the female writing voice that has heretofore been
sublimated and silenced as secondary. What I intend with the term ‘home front
literature’ ( jūgo shōsetsu) are those works written during periods of war that are
centered in the home – as opposed to the battlefield.1 The latter includes the
categories more commonly understood as ‘war literature’, such as ‘military
campaign literature’ ( jūgun bungaku), ‘comfort literature’ (imon bungaku ), or litera-
ture written about or by natives of the Japanese colonies. ‘War literature’, in
almost all cases, foregrounds the activities of men with particular focus on
soldiers in distant or ‘other’ locales. ‘Home front literature’, by contrast, is
intended primarily for women and meant to represent – if not to romanticize –
the daily challenges that they face ‘behind the gun’.2 Expected to comfort and
entertain those awaiting the return of their menfolk, stories in this category typically
deal with contemporary, realistic situations and are required to provide appropriate
role models for their generally female readership by featuring women who are
resourceful, brave, and unwavering in their patriotic support of patriarchal struc-
tures.
My discussion of jūgo shōsetsu will focus on the 1942 novella ‘Tsuma no
tegami’ (A Wife’s Letters) by Uno Chiyo (1897–1996). Serialized in three install-
ments in the mainstream journals C h ūō k ōron (Central Review) and Bungakkai
(Literary World), the story is presented as a series of letters by a wife to a
husband off at war.3 Given the trend toward the autobiographical mode in
Uno’s works, contemporary readers would have assumed the letters derived from
real communication between the implied author and her husband, the writer
Kitahara Takeo (1907–73), who had been conscripted by the Military
Information Corps in 1941 and sent to Java the following year, just months
before Uno’s story appeared.4 As soon as the serialization was complete, the story
was bound in a black cloth cover with cherry blossom motif, and reportedly
many a wife sent the book off with her soldier husband as a surrogate for her
own love. While clearly meeting the expectations of a jūgo shōsetsu, the story
nevertheless subverts contemporary gender codes and the militarist agenda.
Offering a close reading of this work, I will examine the way Uno combines the
formulaic features of epistolarity with the expectations of home front literature
to unsettle gendered boundaries. In the process she opens within those bound-
aries a space for the creation of an individuated female voice, a voice that
constantly resists – even as it appears to acquiesce to – the pull of a collective
identity.
From modern girl to home front matron

Prior to the outbreak of war with China in 1937, Uno Chiyo had enjoyed a life
of casual decadence, occupying herself with dance parties, romantic trysts, and
games of mah-jong. Known for her own highly publicized love affairs, her
most successful work to date, Irozange (Confessions of Love, 1935 [1989]), had
capitalized on the self-indulgent hedonism of the late 1920s by presenting the story
Uno Chiyo’s A Wife’s Letters 167
of a Western-style artist who drifts aimlessly in and out of affairs with three
modern girls. In addition to her success as a writer, Uno had also established
herself as a shrewd entrepreneur and magazine editor, founding the women’s
magazine Sutairu (Style) in 1936, which featured articles on Western fashion,
dance, male–female relations, coiffures, and other ‘frivolous’ concerns.
Uno’s carefree excesses could not go unchecked in a Japan now dedicated to
total war. With all signs pointing toward moderation and self-denial, reprisals
were harsh for any who attempted otherwise. A magazine like Style, which
celebrated what was now considered enemy culture, was doomed. Even the
title – derived from an English word – was traitorous. Worse still, the attention to
female self-adornment and self-promotion was anathema to a nation now bent
on pressing women into soldiers for its domestic austerity campaigns.
‘Extravagance is the Enemy!’ women were warned. Permanent waves, cosmetics,
and Western clothes were banned. Even the Japanese kimono, if conspicuously
elegant, could invite reprisals. Tsutsumi Chiyo (1917–55), a now forgotten
woman writer of this period, depicts the way a sumptuously clad young
woman is harassed on a streetcar by a drunken man who accuses her of compro-
mising the national agenda with her costume.5 As the story concludes we learn
that the woman’s motives for dressing as she did were pure – she was greeting a
returning soldier – but the danger she invited nonetheless reflected the temper of
the times.
Uno would have to make adjustments if she were to continue her various
public enterprises. In 1941, she changed the title of her magazine to the slightly
more innocuous Josei seikatsu (Woman’s Life) and swapped her promotion of
Western values with articles more suited to the home front warrior. Practical
kimonos and cotton ‘farmer’s trousers’ now replaced her chic Parisian gowns,
and Japanese models substituted for her vampish Western women. In her
stories, matronly wives traded places with modern girls, and conversations with
war veterans and venerable craftsmen drew her attention away from the sala-
cious confessions of avant-garde artists. Uno’s modifications were subtle,
seemingly natural, and failed to draw attention to themselves. Despite the over-
whelming pressure on writers during this time to produce patriotic works, Uno
claims to have had no interest in the political battles swirling around her.
Unlike her many contemporaries, who traveled to the frontlines of battle in
search of literary inspiration,6 Uno stayed home. In an interview she was to say:
‘Everyone went off [to the front] and I was left behind. I did not stay behind
because I was against the war. I was neither for nor against it. It simply was
not in my nature to do such things.’7 But nor did Uno let the ‘barren years’ of
Japan’s wartime involvement force her to choose between silence and patriotic
slaver. In fact, at a time when many writers were finding it difficult to gain
access to print, Uno charted a creative path that saw her sustain and enhance the
several narrative experiments she had begun in the 1930s. Most particularly, she
continued working with genre forms that foregrounded narrative voice: inter-
views, narrative monologues, and in the case of ‘A Wife’s Letters’, the fictional
missive.
‘A Wife’s Letters’
The epistolary form was not a particularly unusual narrative choice for Uno. If
one considers poetry exchanges as ‘letters’, then the epistolary mode had been
prominent in the Japanese literary tradition for centuries. In more recent
times, the letter – whether real or fictional – had become a prominent device
for literary experimentation. Embedded in texts, framing texts, or functioning
as texts, the letter was used creatively as both a literary and critical device by
such literary luminaries as Natsume Sōseki, Kawabata Yasunari, and others. Uno
had been experimenting with the form since very nearly her first literary efforts.8
The form became particularly relevant to wartime writing, with its preference
for the immediacy of realistic modes of discourse (Cipris 1994: 27). Letters, with
their assumption of distance and separation and their ability to traverse borders
and enter realms beyond the reach of the sender, were an attractive medium for
wartime expressions, and were employed equally by male and female writers.9
Naturally establishing binaries of self/other; near/far; home/foreign, letters never-
theless rebel against the borders they invent by attempting to bridge and break
through – in short, to communicate. Letters open the self to the Other, make the
far seem near, and bring the foreign home. The ‘epistolary contract’ assumes that
letters will address a reader removed from the writer by time, place, or emotional
difference and raises the expectations that the letters will function as intermedi-
aries. It anticipates dialogue. Uno’s ‘A Wife’s Letters’, however, opens on a
moment of failed communication:
I am home now from Shinagawa. I reached the station after you had already
left, and when it finally dawned on me that I would not be able after all to see
you one last time, I was so overwhelmed that I came to a stop right there in the
middle of the road. What had come over me? And here I had only minutes
before been feeling such elation for this husband of mine whom I was sending
off with magnificent resolve to a distant battlefield on behalf of our great
country.
(UCZ: 269)
The opening paragraph establishes themes that will dominate the story: the
gendering of realms, the fallibility of communication between those realms, and the
profound sense of dislocation that the enforcement of these realms imposes. Less
obvious in the English translation, but readily noticeable in the Japanese, is the force
of the language selected for these letters. Deferential, gentle, uncertain – the hyper-
feminine language provides an appropriate counterpoint to the presumably
masculine soldier who decisively marches off in service to ‘our great country’. In
keeping with the abstraction of realms and roles that the characters assume, they
remain unnamed – identified only through their relations to each other as husband
and wife. Soldier, war correspondent, military doctor . . . the man’s affiliation with
war is left in ellipsis – as is the man himself. The title – the only marker in the
text of the epistolary form – leaves us, therefore, with the woman, the wife, alone.
Contrary to the epistolary contract that anticipates the to and fro of letters, of
correspondence, these letters become exactly what the title reveals them to be: a
wife’s letters. They are hers. And within the frame of the story they remain unan-
swered. We are not certain that they are read or even that they are sent. Serving
as a therapeutic exercise, the letters evidence the process the wife undergoes as
she adjusts – not to the man’s departure – but to her role as witness to his
absence, as witness, more importantly to her newly evolving presence. Slowly,
subtly the letters work to erase the husband from the wife’s text and to replace
him with her own fulsomeness, as she begins to thrive in the literal ‘No Man’s
Land’ behind the gun. The process is protracted. As the letters unfold, we see the
wife grow from her shock over her husband’s absence, through her fetishization
of that absence, and finally to her assertion of her own powerful presence.
The farewell formula

The wife enters this space on a note of dereliction. She has failed to see her
husband off. One of the important duties of women at this time, particularly of
wives, was to participate in sending men off to war. Civic-minded women’s groups
made a point of dispatching their members to stations and docks. Dressed in crisp
white aprons, their breasts emblazoned with a sash, their sole purpose was to
send soldiers and sailors off in glorious fashion (Wakita et al. 1987: 263). A
formula for these farewells developed – propagated by repetition in newspaper
accounts, stories, and films. Flags fluttered vigorously while choruses of banzai
filled the air. Amidst the fanfare, women would steel themselves against their tears,
and the departing soldier would not look back.
The send-off ritual was important as it marked, physically, the distinction
between spheres of home and battlefront and the separation of the man from his
family, notably from his womenfolk but also from other men who, due to age or
infirmity, were unable to heed the masculine call to arms. The moment the
soldier set forth – his face toward battle, his back to his family – the home
became, as the term jūgo denotes, that which was left ‘behind the gun’. The
departing soldier ceased to be an individual, to be someone’s son, father, and/or
brother. He became instead a member of the glorious Japanese Imperial Forces –
his transformation performed in front of his family. But Uno’s letter writer does
not witness this metamorphosis first hand. Unable to visualize her separation
from her husband, she is ill-prepared for her role as waiting wife. Rather than
celebrating the departing soldier, the letters that ensue focus on the neglectful
wife, foregrounding her emotions, her self-doubt. In questioning her ability to
perform her role appropriately, she questions the role itself. And yet her letters,
addressed to the departing soldier, present themselves as the very wifely solicitude
she seems to doubt:
Now I cannot understand how I could have left you the way I did this
morning. I was certain that I’d see you again, immediately, at Shinagawa
and so I said goodbye to you in front of the barracks without so much as a
second thought. Surely I said something to you then? Some word of
farewell? But now for the life of me I cannot remember . . . What had come
over me? Here you, my husband, were leaving home and joining a host of
other soldiers to board a train and then a ship that would carry you thou-
sands and thousands of leagues to a distant battlefield . . . Even when I saw
Mr. Yamauchi’s wife with her downcast eyes all I could think was ‘My, the
poor dear is so worried!’ as if hers was a situation completely separate from
my own! What on earth was I thinking?
(UCZ: 269–70)
The letter writer’s failure to recognize and respond appropriately to the momen-
tousness of the occasion is reflected in the demeanor of the other wife. Mr
Yamauchi’s wife serves as the perfect corrective to the letter writer’s negligence.
Afraid of giving way to tears, she keeps her eyes downcast. Silent, impassive, she
serves as a cipher for the unspoken sorrow that flows between herself and her
husband. And yet her performance is so alien to the letter writer that she finds
herself observing Mr Yamauchi’s wife from an outsider’s position ‘as if hers was
a situation completely separate from my own’. Indeed it is, and only in hindsight
does the letter writer realize that it should not have been. But by then, her
husband has already left.
As she watches him disappear into the barracks she realizes retrospectively
that ‘that moment would stand between us like a great barrier, marking the point
when you became the inhabitant of an entirely different world’ (UCZ: 270). Her
letters teem with references to boundaries and barricades – the barracks that the
wife cannot enter, the car that spirits her husband away, the phalanx of umbrellas
that block her view of him, palisades, ropes, and gates. The separation of their
worlds is intensified by the fact that there is no communication between them.
The wife’s uneasiness is registered, not in the fact that the husband has left
her – for they have parted before – but that his parting signals their enclosure in
completely separate realms, realms that the letters do not seem to bridge. Her
long, impassioned letters are not answered by anything more than a perfunctory
postcard, if they are answered at all. As she says of one of the postcards she
received ‘so clearly in your hand, it made me want more. I wanted to be able
to see all of you before my eyes – to see the gentle expression on your face and to
know what it was you were thinking at that very moment’ (UCZ: 290). The
husband’s inarticulateness frustrates the wife, forcing her to invent answers he
might have sent, and to read meaning into gestures and signs that earlier would
have been meaningless.
After she misses him at Shinagawa Station, a male friend who was more punc-
tual telephones to tell her that he had caught a glimpse of her husband’s train.
He recounts the scene to her:
The soldiers were on board, and from where I was standing it was impos-
sible to tell who was who. But when I rushed out onto the platform with
shouts of ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ your husband must have spotted me because I
saw a black gloved hand shoot up and wave in my direction. He was
signaling to me. His face was plump, and he looked well.
(UCZ: 280–1)
Unable to communicate with her husband by more traditional means, the wife
surrogates the interaction between the two men and reads the black-gloved
gesture as a sign meant only for her:
That’s when it occurred to me. That’s when I realized that even though you
uttered not a single word – that gloved gesture exchanged with another
person had been meant as a message to me. When I thought of it this way, I
felt so very fortunate. True, I had not spoken to you personally, but here –
through the voice of another – I learned you looked well and had set off
safely and this knowledge filled me with joy.
(UCZ: 281–2)
But the process of communication only reiterates the barriers between husband
and wife. He is now in a world of men, a world where women’s words hold no
valence and are replaced instead by action. The stereotypical image of parting –
the husband-turned-soldier marching silently away from his wife – has been
replaced by the black-gloved salute exchanged between men. This gesture
becomes the letter writer’s token of farewell – but only after she has rendered it
so by imposing her own message upon this man-to-man exchange.
Of note is the manner in which the wartime realms insist on the homosocial.
In the retrospective images we have of the husband prior to the war, he is situ-
ated among women – his mother, his former wife, and the letter writer. Images of
war present him with other men – on the train amidst a sea of men in soldiers’
uniforms, disappearing with other men into the barracks, climbing the gangplank
to the transport boat, marching with his unit – always in the company of men. In
her pre-war memories she and her husband conversed – about his mother, death,
religion. Now she watches from a distance as her husband talks with other men –
their voices just beyond reach.
The husband’s new world is unfamiliar to the wife and she cannot easily
accustom herself to it. A writer in his civilian guise, the wife packs a blank note-
book into his rucksack – assuming he will want to keep a journal – only to have
the notebook returned, unmarked. The husband’s softly draping kimono has
been replaced by a military uniform replete with boots and shiny buttons. When the
husband sends the wife a box from his new location containing the worn winter
clothes that he no longer needs, she is startled by the fact that, though the clothes
are familiar, the scent they carry is not. Nothing about him suggests even vestiges
of the man she once knew. Reflecting on her failure to send him off, the wife notes:
Can you possibly understand a woman’s feelings? The way her heart aches
at the loss? Amidst the cries of ‘Banzai!’ the sound of boots, the scent of the
earth, the glitter of swords, there you were marching away from me –
immersed in thoughts as intangible as drifting sea grass. Why weren’t your
soldier’s feelings conveyed to my heart with every step you took?
It must be because you were no longer just the man I love, the man who
belongs to one woman – to me. No. You were now that man – a man traveling
to a distant land for the sake of his country, charged with an important mission.
This realization carved itself into my heart so deeply no words could express it.
(UCZ: 273)
And yet, contrary to her instincts, and to her husband’s insistence, the wife’s
desire for her husband remains particularized. Anonymous – unnamed but for
the affectionate second-person pronoun the wife uses to address him, anata – he
belongs to her. And she refuses to see him as anyone other than her husband.
‘You were wearing your military uniform for the first time, with your shiny boots
and your sword at your side. I had not seen you so attired before, and yet I gazed
after you as if you were the same husband I was accustomed to seeing day after
day’ (UCZ: 271). She will not let him disappear into the national collective – the
press of men marching off to war. She resists turning him into a heroic myth.
Rather she clings to him as her own romanticized abstraction, making of him an
embodiment of her desire. When she receives her first postcard from him, and
realizes that he is still in Taiwan, she struggles to envision him. ‘I wanted nothing
more than to know what you looked like right then and there, and the more I
wanted this the less able I was to envision even vaguely the streets and towns of
Taiwan where you now were. So what did I do? I imagined you stopping by the
local seafood shop there and ordering some of the dried mullet roe that you so
enjoy’ (UCZ: 290). The only way the wife can imagine her husband is to make
him familiar to her, to domesticate his foreign setting. She strips him of his boots
and sword and surrounds him, not with military men, but with the neighborhood
fishmongers. She keeps him home. In that imaginary space where he sits before
her at her writing desk, he belongs to her. She describes her first night alone,
after the husband has departed for his military orientation:
As the day drew to a close, I sat in the empty parlor and faced my dinner
tray alone. I had just prepared the meal, and as I gazed at the teacup and
chopsticks I was so used to seeing, I felt that you were still here with me
and had only been called away on business. Suddenly my eyes opened to the
reality of it all. You were gone to war.
(UCZ: 282–3)
Absence embodied
As the letters unfold, the husband’s absence becomes a palpable presence –
weighing on the wife, taking on a near character quality in its own right. The
absent soldier was more than a motif in home front literature: it was its origination.
The home front comes to exist only when the soldier leaves for war. In Uno’s
story, the letter-writing wife admits, in fact, that ‘this great war that has been
raging for lo these many years’ (UCZ: 285) did not even exist for her until her
husband was called to the front. Not only does the leave-taking, therefore, carry a
profound ritualistic function, it marked a space in the home front for an
enshrinement of the soldier’s absence. This absence was glorified in contempo-
rary ceremonies marking the success of the holy soldier toiling on a distant and
largely unseen battlefield for the preservation of the home front. Wakakuwa
Midori has shown in her study of the illustrations from women’s wartime jour-
nals that the specter of the absent or sometimes unseen soldier dominates the
domestic scene. Amidst the gathering at a shrine dedicated to war dead, for
example, the eye of the viewer drifts over the bowed backs of the reverent masses
and is drawn into the hidden (empty?) interior of the shrine. The absence of the
war dead is palpable and centers the graphic moment, pulling all the other
figures into their orbit. In illustrations of home life, the absent soldier is often
represented through portraits or photographs that hang from walls. Off center, at
times blurry, the soldier’s image nevertheless animates the activities foregrounded
in the illustration. The ache his absence provokes is registered in the visage of
those who face the viewer – the wives and mothers left behind. They, like Mr.
Yamauchi’s wife in the scene recounted above, struggling to keep their emotions
in check, operate as a canvas upon which we clearly see, not the face of the
woman left behind, but the man she mourns.
Absence becomes a near fetish in contemporary literary works as well. In the
1940 ‘Seisen no takaramono’ (Treasure from the Holy War) by Ōba Sachiko,
while visiting a shrine to pray for her brother at the warfront, a young woman
encounters an older woman praying for her son. In an act of patriotic devotion,
the young woman offers to marry the woman’s son, even though they have never
met. When she learns that the soldier has already died in battle, she offers to
marry his heroic spirit – pledging herself to an absence. The power of abstrac-
tion, the mythologizing force of war rhetoric, is so great that through it even
emptiness is embodied.
In ‘A Wife’s Letters’, the husband’s absence is represented through a number
of provocative images. There is the empty station platform – an imposing rope
strung across it – that confronts the wife when she arrives too late to see her
husband off. The futility of her desire to exchange one last word with her husband
is signified by the empty boxcars across the tracks, filling with snow. Then there
are the empty estate grounds the wife views through a crack in the heavily bolted
gate. This is where her husband and his company took lunch before departing.
Scraps of paper and bamboo-leaf wrappers dance in the winter wind – fragile
but taunting reminders of the men who gathered there but are now gone. At
home the wife must learn to confront the empty seat across the dinner table; the
writer’s silent study; the unmarked notebook the husband returns. Most striking,
perhaps, are the worn winter clothes the husband ships home as his unit prepares
to depart Taiwan for warmer climes:
I refused to acknowledge that it would have been very unlikely for you to
have slipped a special message into such a package, and I began to spread
your clothes all about the room, determined to read in them some kind of
sign, something that would serve as a missive in place of a written note, and
then finally realizing my quest was futile, I buried my face in your clothes.
These garments had been next to your body until just a day or two ago.
But where was your scent? Why did it not cling to the fabric? All I could
smell was the faint odor of earth and dust. Well, that’s it then. Knowing this
package was sent to me from a great distance, I decided to accept its
contents as a substitute for my husband.
(UCZ: 292)
The husband’s separation from the wife has been marked in stages by the clothes
he has worn: the kimono of distant memory, the military uniform with its unfa-
miliar buttons, boots, and sword, and now the empty winter suit – a suit she had
had tailored for him particularly for this journey. But now it is returned to her
faded and frayed, barely recognizable as the same suit of clothing. The dried
blades of grass that cling to the wool jacket, even the odor that wafts from the
garments, are unfamiliar. Less than a treasured surrogate or katami of the distant
beloved, the clothing, like the images of emptiness described above, only serve to
underscore the fact of the husband’s missing.
Letters, too, limn what is not there. They draw attention to the absence of
the recipient – indeed, are necessitated by it. In writing letters the wife challenges
the boundaries of war. She expects her letters to carry the home front into the
warfront and in return to pull her husband’s realm back into hers. Through
letters the wife aspires to a momentary dialogue with the departed, conjuring
him before her, indulging in the illusion of his presence, breaking through the
barriers that have kept him from her – the ropes and gates and oceans. In turn,
the author of the story uses the epistolary style to challenge the dichotomies of
private and public – indeed those very realms that held men and women in
gendered counterpoint. The letter divulges the private in public.10 And yet,
addressed to the absent soldier, it nevertheless foregrounds the home front
author – the woman ‘behind the gun’, the writer with the pen.
An emerging presence
Deprived of any real answer from the husband – other than what the wife
conjures forth – the external readers of these letters are offered less an image of
the absent man than that of the writing woman – a woman who is identified only
by her relation to a man who is not there. The source of her identification
becomes his absence. Just as the letter writer views Mr Yamauchi’s wife as
someone completely unlike herself, so the absence of the husband in this story
resists fetishization. It is already filled. Her letters to him frame his absence and
in that space where he is not, she constructs herself.
The wife’s act of self-construction is performed within and against contempo-
rary expectations of what it meant to be ‘a wife’. Parallel to the man’s role in
battle, tending to the man’s absence becomes, the wife soon learns, ‘the woman’s
war’ (UCZ: 287). The wife accepts her role with composure. ‘I am a woman after
all, and I have had to learn to steel my heart for our separation – knowing that I
would be required to send to war the only person in the world I have – knowing
that I have no power to control the inevitable’ (UCZ: 283–4). She resigns herself
to the war on the home front, a war that for her did not begin until the day her
husband left.
For a nation immersed in ‘total war’, the participation of all its citizens in
advancing the war cause was vital. In order to impress upon women their impor-
tance to and responsibility for the national agenda, the government established a
variety of mobilization campaigns, such as the National Spiritual Mobilization
Movement of 1937–40 that exhorted women to conform more readily to their
‘natural’ roles as wife and mother. National success depended on the vigilance
and participation of the individual family unit – a unit now husbanded by
women. Advised that ‘population is a military weapon’, women were encouraged
to ‘marry early, give birth and support the nation!’ as one slogan had it.
‘Procreate! Multiply!’ another harangued (Wakita et al. 1987: 268). Matrimony
and motherhood became such an important measure of citizenship for Japanese
women that unmarried or late marrying women were tantamount to traitors
(Suzuki 1990: 267). So as to impress women with the importance of their roles,
the government co-opted battlefield discourse in its campaigns and applied it to
women – turning them into economic warriors, birthing soldiers – and making
motherhood and wifeliness a patriotic duty. Placing the housewife in visible
public positions – at the train station in her apron, for example – served to make
of her a national icon for female service. She thus became the lens through
which all other female activity was reflected and judged.
It is hardly surprising then that the female protagonist of ‘A Wife’s Letters’,
written in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s entry into the Asia Pacific War,
positions herself as just another housewife in a world without men. She attends
soldier send-offs and participates in neighborhood associations. At home she
busies herself with her wifely chores – planting a small vegetable garden and
keeping her husband’s empty study clean and ready for his return.
Really though, nothing has changed since you left. At night, I darn your
socks and mend your clothes and think to myself that I really am a fortunate
woman. When I remind myself that I am awaiting your return – even while
I am enjoying such a peaceful life – I am filled with bright pride.
(UCZ: 297)
As her husband draws further and further away – noted in the letters by refer-
ences to Kuala Lampur, Jahore, Java – the wife focuses less and less on him and
her longing for him and more on her own activities. ‘By now, you know, I’ve
grown rather used to your absence’, the wife writes. ‘Or perhaps I should say
I’ve grown quite adept at tending to your absence’ (UCZ: 297). Other wives,
other waiting women begin to fill the space he had vacated. In one particularly
poignant scene towards the end of the story, the letter writer observes the death
anniversary of her husband’s first wife. Had her husband been home, he would
have undoubtedly seen to the necessary arrangements. But, in his absence, she
and a neighbor woman call in a Buddhist priest and ensure that the proper rites
are performed. ‘Today [my husband’s first wife] is attended by two women she
never knew – the very thought was so profoundly touching that as I sat there
thinking how our fates had intersected, the tears began to course down my
cheeks’ (UCZ: 308). Behind the gun, the pen-wielding wife appropriates the
husband’s role in an act that reinforces her own self-sufficiency, independence,
and humanity.
Even as the orchestration of war insisted that women return to ‘the restricted
roles of childbearing and nursing and only the work that helps the war effort’
(Marcus 1989: 129), the space made available to women in the ‘No Man’s Land’
of the home front offered an ‘invigorating sense of revolution, release, reunion,
and re-vision’ (Gilbert 1987: 201). While presenting her devotion to her
husband – in the form of her impassioned letters – the wife nevertheless reveals
her complete independence from him. His absence allows her growth, and her
letters occasion a forum for the expression of her own subjectivity. Thus,
although the wife positions herself in terms of national patriotism, her letters
undermine this image by manifesting an individuated subject. Her ‘wifeliness’, it
would seem, is but a performance.
Subversive acts
To a large extent, all discursive acts are performative. But the epistolary – with its
implicit audience (both internal and external) and assumed dialogism fore-
grounds the performance of self-presentation. The epistolary author ‘(A) must
make his letter writer (B) speak to an addressee (C) in order to communicate with
a reader (D) who overhears’ (Altman 1982: 210). The letter writer’s struggles to
impersonate herself for an absent internal reader while a present external reader
eavesdrops from the wings are intensely self-reflexive. It is precisely this self-
conscious awareness of self-construction that opens up Uno’s work to subversion.
The letter writer’s constant obsession with the suitability of her actions draws
attention to their very unsuitability – even while she permits their continuation
with her apologetic review of them. ‘What had come over me?’ she asks again
and again in her letters. ‘How can I explain myself ?’ The wife’s self-interrogation,
motivated by her failure to participate in the appropriate farewell rituals of the
day, question not her inability to endure her husband’s absence but rather her
ability to do so and to do so well. Her letters pulsate with pride as she marvels
over her success. To endure – bravely but barely – a husband’s absence is, of
course, the wifely thing to do. It is also the patriotic thing to do. But far from
barely surviving, this wife thrives. She grows in the space her husband’s absence
has created. To compensate for her unseemly success, the wife struggles to
assume a stance of forlorn ‘wifeliness’. Her efforts are described so self-
consciously, her subterfuge slips through. For example, the day after her husband
ships out, she stops by the Asakusa Kannon Temple and buys a good-luck
charm. It was not an act she was accustomed to performing, but it seemed the
appropriate thing to do given the circumstances. ‘When, I wondered, had I
become a normal woman?’ (UCZ: 279), she asks herself. The answer, of course, is
that she has not. Her presentation of herself as such is merely a performance, a
performance that is strategically illuminated by reference to it.
The letter writer’s gendered performance is flawed by its perfection. Her keen
desire to place herself within the housewife fold is so sharp it draws attention to
itself. By layering her ‘wifeliness’ on with such broad strokes, like an onnagata with
his make-up, she signals its presence and thereby undercuts its authenticity.
Elsewhere I have written of the way Uno Chiyo used the imagery of make-up in
her texts to signify the hyperbolic performance of femininity that writing women
were required to assume in order to render themselves acceptable to a male-
dominated literary world.11 Make-up served as a mask that reflected, not the
woman’s innate interiority, but the internalized desires and wants of the male
beholder. Yet, by applying her mask in public, and thereby drawing attention to
its presence, Uno subtly challenged the system that would require it in the first
place. That is, the self-consciousness of her performance – the ‘I-know-you-
know-I-know’ circularity of knowledge that she presents – invites recognition of
subversion.
Of course, the production of subversion depends less on the writing than the
readings. Texts are frequently determined as subversive in contradiction to
authorial intent. I am not suggesting, therefore, that Uno Chiyo sat down with
pen and paper intending to pull a fast one over the Japanese government. She
herself denies any interest in political affairs. Moreover, her text was clearly
received as politically benign – bound as it was in a cherry-blossom motif and
packed off with departing soldiers as surrogates of love and loyalty. But Uno was,
nevertheless, a writer adept at poses and performances. In an essay she wrote in 1936
‘Mohō no tensai’ (A Genius of Imitation), she acknowledged the way she self-
consciously refashioned herself to meet and retain the gaze of whatever man was
in a position to give her what she desired – be it money, literary recognition, or
companionship. Her essay poignantly reveals the toll on women writers who feel
obliged to submit to editorial expectations and then feel inauthentic when they
do. Imitators, performers, wives.
Someday when I am older, will I be able to get rid of this impulse, this
wanting to be a ‘good wife’, without feeling lost? Would I then be able to
write my own story? I don’t wish not to be a woman, but I’d certainly like to
be a woman whose sense of purpose comes from within.
(Uno 1987: 196)
The impulse continues in ‘A Wife’s Letters’ where the female protagonist’s desire
to receive the recognition and approval of a militarized masculinity is marked –
not by powders and perfumes – but by the language she selects. Quintessentially
‘wifely’, the voice is nevertheless distinct, individuated by comparison to others in
her periphery: the stuttering bean-curd seller, the no-nonsense neighbors. The
performative quality of the wife’s ‘wifeliness’ is drawn sharper still by the refer-
ence Shinkichi, an incidental character, makes to a ‘love letter’ a country
bumpkin has penned for his horse. In imitation of a Tōhoku dialect, Shinkichi
reads: ‘Last year my horse got the call and I cried . . . Now I reckon he’s off on
some battlefield . . . I worry about him awful . . . I wonder if he thinks of me . . .
Now I’m working a two-man’s load for the sake of my country’ (UCZ: 300).
Grieving for war horses was a stock motif in war literature at the time.12 David
Rosenfeld, noting the prevalence of scenes depicting the plight of horses and
mules in Hino Ashihei’s works, suggests that the animals were used as metaphors
for the soldiers themselves.13 But in Uno’s story the use of the parodic voice in
this scene shifts attention away from the equation of horse and soldier and
centers it squarely on that of the bereft. The epistolary grief for the absent
horse – off in service at the warfront – completely mimics that of our letter-
writing wife. Moreover, the way the scene is presented in the story – as an
intentional imitation of someone other – highlights the performative potential of
the letter and the letter writer. Is Shinkichi’s voicing of the horse lover’s grief-
inscribed postcard any more exaggerated than that of the wife’s? She, too, has
provided a parody – her hyperbolic rendition of wifely servitude no less a perfor-
mance than Shinkichi’s playful pose: the countrified horse lover is as much an
oddity to Shinkichi as the submissive wife is to the letter writer.
Conclusion
‘A Wife’s Letters’ presents a paradox. The letters the wife writes position her
within the contemporary milieu of war – with its avowal of traditional roles for
women and its denial of individual identities. And yet the very act of writing
letters militates against the unspecified, collective consciousness the military state
would foster. The letter writer, in challenging her husband’s absence, asserts her
presence. She succeeds conversely in locating her own voice and demonstrating
her own volition where she becomes ‘the agent of her own experience’ (Bower
1997: 24). She uses her pen not only to bridge the gap between herself and her
husband, but to reaffirm, to rewrite herself. Linda Kauffmann notes:
The narrating heroine is intensely, constantly present as analyst, catalyst,

and creator of her own desire. Since every letter to the beloved is also self-
addressed . . . the heroine’s project – aided by her reading and her writing –
also involves self-creation, self-invention . . . [S]he transforms herself from
the archetypal Woman Who Waits into the Woman Who Writes.
(1986: 25)
In accord with the dictates of her time, Uno produces what appears to be a
patriotic work. She writes of a wife who ‘steels her heart’ in dutiful attendance
on a soldiering husband. She imbues her story with optimism as men are
sent to the front with vigorous flag waving, and military victories are celebrated
with rounds of banzai. But unlike Hino Ashihei, whose literate, sensitive persona
wanted nothing more than to be just a common soldier – slogging through the
mud like all the other men – Uno’s letter-writing wife maintains her difference
from those around her and is proud of it. Distinct from Mr Yamauchi’s wife, as
alien as Shinkichi’s horse lover – ‘I was special, quite unlike the normal women
around me’ (UCZ: 299), she notes. Pushed behind umbrellas, barricaded,
distant – the wife is constantly depicted in scenes that position her in solitude.
But far from appearing lonely, the wife – by her own admission – grows adept
in her singlehood, surrounding herself with her own thoughts, her own voice,
her own desires. The letters, though addressed to a man, are hers. The cele-
bration of the personal – in true feminist fashion – is decidedly political.
Notes
1 The term ‘j ūgo’ might translate more literally as ‘behind the gun’ or ‘after the gun’,
Therefore, when guns are directed at the home front in Japan – during the intensive
Allied bombings (which culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki) the term ‘j ūgo’ becomes fraught.
2 There were occasions when ‘home front literature’ was purposefully supplied to
soldiers. For example, in the Preface to Jory ū sakka jikkasen (Ten Selections from
Women Writers), edited by Yoshiya Nobuko and published in 1940, Naval
Commander Tashiro Kei notes that the ‘splendid and fine works collected herein . . .
when sent overseas will serve to encourage the brave martial spirits of soldiers at the
front’. One of the functions of home front literature was to remind the fighting man
of the fidelity and perseverance of the women back home.
3 The first installment appeared in the April issue of Chūō kōron. The serialization was
then moved to the August and September issues of Bungakkai.
4 The Military Information Corps initiated a strategy of drafting writers and
dispatching them to the warfronts where they were expected to file regular reports,
journalistic pieces, and stories – all intended to celebrate the heroic bravery of the
Japanese soldier. Kitahara was drafted in November 1941, just weeks prior to Pearl
Harbor. His unit, which included Ōya Sōichi, Abe Tomoji, and Takeda Rintarō,
shipped out in early January of the following year. By March they reached Java, where
he stayed until the following December. He returned to Tokyo in January 1943.
5 ‘Hōkiki’ (An Account of Honorable Spirits) appeared in Yoshiya Nobuko (ed.) Joryū
sakka jikkasen (Ten masterworks by Women Writers) in 1940.
6 Yoshiya Nobuko, the first woman to be dispatched to China as a professional writer,
was a close friend of Uno’s, having served as a ‘go-between’ at her wedding to
Kitahara in 1939. Among the other women writers to visit either the colonies or the
warfields were Hayashi Fumiko, Kubokawa (Sata) Ineko, Nogami Yaeko, Ōta Yōko, and
Masugi Shizue. Uno and her husband did travel to China in 1941. But their trip was
motivated by tourism and cut short when Uno had to rush home to attend her fatally
ill younger brother.
7 As cited in Copeland (1992: 58).
8 In 1924, she published ‘Imōto e no tegami’ (Letters to my Little Sister) and in 1927
‘Shōjo kara no tegami’ (Letters from a Girl). In the early 1930s, in keeping with her
experimentation with voice, she produced stories with an epistolary flavor narrated by
a boy, etc. In 1938, she wrote ‘Koi no tegami’ (Love Letters), which approximates the
same style and voice developed in ‘A Wife’s Letters’.
9 Prominent examples of other epistolary-style works from this era include Hino
Ashihei’s 1938 Tsuchi to heitai (Earth and Soldiers), written as letters by a soldier at the
front to a younger brother back home; and Hayashi Fumiko’s Sensen (Battlefront), of
the same year, addressed to her readers in the homeland.
10 With gratitude to Atsuko Sakaki for pointing this out at our June 2003 workshop in
Leeds.
11 See Copeland (1994).
12 Joan Ericson notes that in Hayashi Fumiko’s (1939) Hokugan butai (Northern Bank
Platoon) she embeds passages lifted from a soldier’s letter home in which he laments
the loss of his beloved horse, killed in battle. Hayashi accompanies the passage with
her own poem ‘celebrating the sacrifices of this noble steed’ (Ericson 1997: 81).
13 Far easier to escape the censor’s ire when bewailing the cruelty of an animal’s death
than a human’s. Rosenfeld writes: ‘The sad ends of these beasts of burden convey the
brutality of battlefield death without humanizing it too much’ (2002: 47).
References
Main text
Uno Chiyo (1978) ‘Tsuma no tegami’ (A Wife’s Letters), in Uno Chiyo zensh u- (UCZ) (The
Collected Works of Uno Chiyo), vol. 4, Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, pp. 269–310: Rebecca
Copeland (trans) in Van Gessell and Thomas Rimer (edo) (2005) Columbia Anthology of
Modern Japanese Literature: from Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945, New York: Columbia
University Press, pp. 779-797.
Other references
Altman, Janet Gurkin (1982) Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus, OH: Ohio State
University Press.
Bower, Anne (1997) Epistolary Responses: The Letter in Twentieth Century American Fiction and
Criticism, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Cipris, Zeljko (1994) ‘Radiant Carnage: Japanese Writers on the War Against China’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University.
Cooper, Helen, Munich, Adrienne Auslander and Squier, Susan Merrill (1989a) ‘Intro-
duction’, in Helen Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier (eds)
Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, pp. xiii–xx.
Cooper, Helen, Munich, Adrienne Auslander and Squier, Susan Merrill (eds) (1989b) Arms
and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press.
Copeland, Rebecca (1992) The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo, Honolulu:
——(1994) ‘The Made-Up Author: Writer as Woman in the Works of Uno Chiyo’,
Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 29(1): 3–25.
Ericson, Joan (1997) To Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature,
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Gilbert, Sandra (1987) ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great
War’, in Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret
Collins Weitz (eds) Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, pp. 197–226.
Havens, Thomas R.H. (1975) ‘Women and War in Japan, 1937–45’, The American Historical
Review 80(4): 913–34.
Katzoff, Beth Sara (2000) ‘For the Sake of the Nation, For the Sake of Women: The Prag-
matism of Japanese Feminisms in the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945)’, unpublished PhD
dissertation, Columbia University.
Kauffmann, Linda (1986) Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Keene, Donald (1978) ‘The Barren Years’, Monumenta Nipponica 33(Spring): 67–112.
Marcus, Jane (1989) ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’, in Helen M.
Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier (eds) Arms and the
Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, pp. 124–67.
Ōba Sachiko (1940) ‘Seisen no takaramono’ (Treasure from the Holy War), in Yoshiya
Nobuko (ed.) Jory sakka jikkasen (Ten Masterworks by Women Writers), Tokyo: Kōa
Nipponsha, pp. 41–72. Reprinted in Hasegawa Kei (2002) ‘Senjika’ no josei bungaku
(Women’s Writing ‘under War’), vol. 4, Tokyo: Yumani shobō.
Rosenfeld, David (2002) Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature,
Oxford: Lexington Books.
Suzuki Yūko (ed.)(1990) Gendai feminizumu to Yamakawa Kikue (Yamakawa Kikue and
Modern Feminism), Tokyo: Daiwa shobō.
Tsutsumi Chiyo (1940) ‘Hōkiki’ (An Account of Honorable Spirits), in Yoshiya Nobuko
(ed.) Jory ū sakka Jikkasen (Ten Masterworks by Women Writers), Tokyo: Kōa Nipponsha,
pp. 95–122. Reprinted in Hasegawa Kei (2002) ‘Senjika’ no josei bungaku (Women’s
Writing ‘under War’), vol. 4, Tokyo: Yumani shobō.
Uno Chiyo (1987) ‘A Genius of Imitation’, in Yukiko Tanaka (trans. and ed.) To Live and
to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913–1938, Seattle: Seal Press, pp. 189–96.
Wakakuwa Midori (1995) Sensō ga tsukuru joseizō: Dainiji sekai taisenka no Nihon josei dōin no
shikakuteki puropaganda (War and the Female Image: Imagistic Propaganda for the Mobi-
lization of Japanese Women during World War II), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
Wakita Haruko, Hayashi Reiko, and Nagahara Kazuko (1987) Nihon josei-shi (A History of
Japanese Women), Tokyo: Yoshikawa Hiroshi bunkan.
Further reading on Japanese literature of WWII

Cook, Haruko Taya (2001) ‘The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzō and
Japan’s War in Asia’, in Marlene J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor
Kerkham (eds) War, Occupation and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960, Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 149–75.
Frederick, Sarah (2002) ‘Bringing the Colonies “Home”: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Popular
Fiction and Imperial Japan’, in Janice Brown and Sonja Artnzen (eds) Across Time and
Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts, Conference Proceedings, Edmonton: University of
Alberta, pp. 61–4.
Hino Ashihei (1939) Wheat and Soldiers, trans. Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, New York,
Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart.
Keene, Donald (1964) ‘Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asian War’, Journal of Asian
Studies 23(February): 209–25.
Kleeman, Faye Yuan (2002) ‘What Did They See in the Tropics? Colonial Ethnography
and Gender in Nogami Yaeko and Kubokawa (Sata) Ineko’s Travel Writing’, in Janice
Brown and Sonja Artnzen (eds) Across Time and Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts,
Conference Proceedings, Edmonton: University of Alberta, pp. 189–94.
Lofgren, Erik Robert (1999) ‘Re/Configurations of the Self in the Early War Literature of
Ōoka Shōhei and Umezaki Haruo: Two Sengoha Authors’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
Stanford University, CA.
Rubin, Jay (1984) Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press.
Stahl, David C. (2003) The Burdens of Survival: Ōoka Shōhei’s Writings on the Pacific War,
Further reading on Uno Chiyo

Birnbaum, Phyllis (1999) Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo: Five Japanese Women,
New York: Columbia University Press.
Copeland, Rebecca (1988) ‘Uno Chiyo: Not Just a Writer of “Illicit Love”’, Japan Quarterly
35(2): 176–82.
——(2001) ‘Needles, Knives, and Pens: Uno Chiyo and the Remembered Father’, in
Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen (eds) The Father–Daughter Plot:
Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
pp. 215–37.
Uno Chiyo (1961) ‘Ohan’, in Donald Keene (trans. and ed.) The Old Woman, the Wife and
the Archer, New York: Viking Press, pp. 51–118.
——(1982a) ‘Happiness’, in Phyllis Birnbaum (trans. and ed.) Rabbits, Crabs, Etc,
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 133–47.
——(1982b) ‘To Stab’, trans. Kyoko Iriye Selden, in Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko.
Iriye Selden (eds) Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers, New York: M.E. Sharpe,
pp. 92–104.
——(1989) Confessions of Love, trans. Phyllis Birnbaum, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
——(1992) The Story of a Single Woman, trans. Rebecca Copeland. London: Peter Owen.
10 Foreign Sex, native politics
Lady Chatterley’s Lover in post-
occupation Japan
Ann Sherif
A translation seduces the reader by its offer of an encounter with Otherness:

scripts and texts, cultures and feelings, previously unseen, unknown, exotic. For
some readers, the foreign language itself may be so unfamiliar that they can only
fantasize about the appearance of a page of the original, or the book itself, or
even more, the potentially strange body of literature written in that language. If
the translated book not only claims foreign provenance, but also has the sugges-
tive title of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the allure increases a thousand fold.
The year is 1950. Translator Itō Sei and publisher Oyama Hisajirō collabo-
rate in the production of a Japanese version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley.
Even if Itō ’s Japanese translation bore little resemblance to the English text on
which it was based, most Japanese readers in 1950 could easily imagine the
appearance, the typeface, at least, of Lawrence’s novel in English. Some readers
would even have read Lawrence, before the war, when Anglo-European literature
was being assimilated into the modern Japanese cultural canon. With the rise of
militarism in the 1930s, however, the Imperial government rendered English an
enemy language, and proscribed British literature, along with the writings of
other Allied nations. After Japan’s defeat in WWII, English again become an
insistently familiar presence, the tongue of the Allied Occupation forces. Readers
in the 1950s could once again enjoy a veritable feast of translated literature and
film – not only British novels, but Sartre, Norman Mailer, and Hollywood.
Left to the readers, Itō’s translation of Lady Chatterley could have been a best
seller in Japan, but it was not the prerogative of individual readers to decide what
books from the outside would be accepted. Of the many foreign novels published
in 1950s Japan, only Lady Chatterley ended up being confiscated by the Tokyo
police and taken to court on obscenity charges. The prosecution and the defense,
needless to say, differed in their appreciation of foreign sex and native sex, as well
as of what constituted alien literature and native literature. Thus, a major subtext
of the remarkable public spectacle that was the Tokyo trial was the changing
vision of Otherness in literature, politics, law, and morality in the soon-to-be
sovereign nation.
In this chapter, I will examine the censorship court case spurred on by the
Japanese version of Lady Chatterley, and also consider the concepts of pornography
and its relationship to art in Modernism. The legal proceedings and the ensuing
184 Ann Sherif
public debate unfolded as a process through which Japanese readers, critics,
publishers, and the legal system sought to determine acceptable limits not only
for the depiction of sexuality in literature, but also the standards for free speech,
the new relationship between citizen and government, and the boundaries of
Japanese literature and culture. Before examining the legal case, I will explore the
reasons why this particular British novel rose to such public prominence in
postwar Japan. By understanding the extent to which print culture under postwar
capitalism was in flux around the world, we can also appreciate the Japanese
court case as part of a broader interaction of Cold War literary culture, politics,
and economy.
This chapter does not aim at a re-reading of Lady Chatterley as a text. Instead, I
am interested in the ways ‘a text becomes subject to the various, unstable forces
that shape the public sphere’ and the ‘competing interests’ that arise as part of that
sphere (McDonald 2003: 240). The trials offer us a rare, detailed view of the
ways a group of varied readers interpreted Lady Chatterley, and the formation of
meaning around this foreign (yet assimilated) text in post-Occupation Japan.
Following Chartier (1989) and McDonald (2003), I treat Lady Chatterley here as a
‘mediated material artifact’ and not only as an ‘abstract linguistic form’.1
Lady Chatterley as part of global capitalist print culture
English publishers urge me to make an expurgated edition, promising

large returns . . . and insisting that I should show the public that here is a
fine novel, apart from all the ‘purple’ and all ‘words.’ So I begin to be tempted
and start to expurgate. But impossible! I might as well try to clip my own
nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds . . . And in spite of all antago-
nism, I put forth this novel as an honest, healthy book, necessary for us
today. The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while.
(Lawrence 1959: 84)
Though D.H. Lawrence had in mind winning over an English readership with
these assertions about the importance of his ‘shocking’ novel Lady Chatterley, his ideas
would later have a great impact on Japanese readers in early postwar Japan.
From the 1920s through the 1950s, mainstream publishers around the world
viewed some of Lawrence’s novels as dwelling at the outer boundaries of
respectable, canonical fictions, even as his status as a canonical writer was fast
becoming institutionalized. In Japan, during the crucial transition from occupied
to sovereign nation, Lawrence’s final novel Lady Chatterley became the focus of a
legal and cultural debate concerning the Center and Other of literature, the
mainstream and the fringes of political involvement, and the limits of freedom of
speech.
In the 1930 essay quoted above concerning the controversy over his most
recent novel, Lady Chatterley, D.H. Lawrence explains his views on the impor-
tance of frankness in sexual matters, not only in the arts, but also in society.
Foreign Sex, native politics 185
Lawrence, of course, did not stand as a solitary advocate of open treatment of
sexuality at that time – indeed, Freud and James Joyce can be seen as like-
minded figures, and they, in turn, exemplify significant and widespread trends
in twentieth-century culture. As we shall see, Lawrence’s outspokenness would
eventually take discussion of the novel out of the relatively narrow realm of
literary critical discourse and into the courts of law, thus rendering public and
political the debate on morality and art that surrounded the novel. Along with
other Modernist writers such as Joyce, Lawrence’s fiction enjoyed considerable
media attention, and thus his books were ‘news that stayed news’ (McDonald
2003: 228). In legal venues around the world, Lawrence’s opinions and his
fiction, as well as his status as a High Modernist novelist of ‘undoubted artistic
integrity,’ came to be employed as a means of advocating for and legitimating
sexual frankness in art.2 Significantly, the several landmark trials concerning
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley – all test cases for determining the parameters of
obscenity in the postwar – came in the USA and its allies England and Japan
during the 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, when the
USA aimed at strengthening consumer markets at home and within its allies’
borders, as well as at offering evidence of a freedom superior to that of the
Soviet foe.
All the Lady Chatterley trials, whether in Japan, the USA, or Britain, show-
cased expert witnesses and defense attorneys who argued against the
classification of Lawrence’s frank and detailed evocations of sexuality as obscene.
Following the precedent set in the 1933 Ulysses obscenity trial in the USA, the
defense labored to ‘consecrate’ the novel as a whole, and especially those
passages deemed objectionable, by positioning them in the realm of art.3 Judges
provided legal confirmation of the sanctity of the unity of the work of art, thus
making respectable language in Joyce’s novel that had previously been considered
pornographic.4 The work of naturalizing pornography took place partly in
Joyce’s novels, and those of other High Modernists, but also in public and institu-
tional contexts, such as the legal system, journalism, and academia.
Yet it took decades for Lady Chatterley to gain the same acceptance as proper
literature. The proliferation of expurgated versions of Lady Chatterley (many of
them pirated) after the novel’s initial publication in 1929 had revealed that it was
somehow possible to remove the twelve ‘objectionable’ passages, and still have
some semblance of a novel.5 In contrast, Joyce’s highly unconventional and yet
seamless narrative approach, as well as the allusive qualities of the novel, made it
a notoriously difficult read, and thus more easily categorized as artistic (Brannon
2003: 12–19). In other words, the artistic merit of Lawrence’s novel was more
difficult to establish than that of Joyce’s Ulysses.
In contrast to the adulation accorded Joyce, an artist who could tame the
obscene with his impressive formal control of language, critics varied widely in
their estimation of Lawrence’s talents as a writer, describing him as a genius one
moment and a sloppy, repetitive writer the next. A novel’s imagined reader also
mattered: T.S. Eliot’s influential emphasis on the parallels to Homeric legend in
Ulysses assumed an elite reader with a classical education, one who would not be
186 Ann Sherif
considered a threat to the social order. In both cases, ‘censorship advertised the
work of Joyce and Lawrence far beyond the avant-garde audience’, but it was
Lawrence’s novel that the untutored reader found more accessible.6 Thus, criti-
cism and reader reception are both essential mechanisms in the transformation
from obscenity to art.
The controversy over Lady Chatterley’s status continued for more than two decades
after Lawrence’s death. This lack of generic clarity arose partly because Lawrence
had understood writing as a means of expressing his controversial ideas, and was
unwilling – and perhaps unable – to cloak himself with the mantle of pure
Romantic genius and virtuosity. Lawrence’s strong objections to many facets of
contemporary British society and morality, as well as his desire to improve his
country, fueled his conviction that he must produce a contentious novel, one about
which he felt certain that the censors would clamp down. In other words, Lawrence
regarded his art as efficacious, as having the potential to effect needed changes in
society – not, perhaps, as ameliorative of specific social problems, but with the
potential for healing grander maladies from which English civilization suffers.7
It was precisely this combination of Lawrence’s fiery optimism about sexu-
ality and concern for the nation’s future that attracted Oyama Hisajirō (b. 1905),
the publisher of the Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley, and Itō Sei (1905–69),
the translator. Having worked through the strict censorship system of Imperial
Japan, as well as under contemporary Allied Occupation censors, Oyama was
well aware of the risks inherent in issuing an unexpurgated version of a contro-
versial novel. Lawrence’s message of hope for the future, as well as the chaos of
print culture as the Occupation drew to an end, encouraged Oyama to take a
chance. Translator Itō Sei had studied European Modernism since the 1920s, and
so he anticipated the safety offered by invoking the category of high art from the
English-speaking world, no longer the enemy language.
As it turned out, Lady Chatterley, far from providing the artistic safe haven hoped
for, resulted in Oyama becoming one of the principal figures in the very first
Lady Chatterley cases.8 Several aspects of the Japanese trial anticipate the later
US and British trials of nearly a decade later. In all cases, the publisher stood
as the accused. All of the trials received huge publicity, and signified legal
confirmation of significant trends in capitalist cultural production. In the end,
though, the Japanese case really took on a quite different meaning from the
subsequent trials, one that, in the end, had little to do with the defining obscenity.
Instead, the Tokyo Lady Chatterley trial was the first opportunity since Japan’s
defeat in World War II for the literary community, publishers, the government,
and intellectuals to debate, in a public forum, the means of determining the
boundaries of respectability and morality, political authority, and the body.
The Tokyo case in brief

Novelist and critic Itō Sei first prepared a Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley
in 1935, about seven years after the novel first appeared in Europe.9 Considering
the extent of government censorship in 1930s Japan, it is not surprising that
Itō published only an expurgated translation of the novel then. Only in 1949,
four short years after Japan’s defeat in the war, did Itō entertain the request of
publisher Oyama shoten to produce an unexpurgated translation as the first
volume in a collection of Lawrence’s best-known novels.10 During this period of
Allied Occupation, publishers could not easily anticipate the police’s reaction to
new publications.
The initial release of the two-volume Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley in
1950 resulted in astonishing sales figures: volume 1 sold 80,029 copies, and
volume 2, slightly fewer, with 69,545 copies. Itō’s translation enjoyed these tremen-
dous sales in just two months, mid-April through late June, 1950 (Dantō 1957:
47). During the Occupation, texts concerning political thought, activism, A-
bombs, fraternization between GIs and Japanese, the image of the US and the
Occupation, all had been strictly censored by the Civil Censorship Detachment
(CCD) of the Occupation. The CCD, however, made public its official policy
that ‘it had no concern with material obscene or pornographic, providing that
material was not detrimental to Occupation objectives’ (Rubin 1988: 170; see
also Kockum 1984; Iida 1999: 233–54). In addition, the fact of the Allied victory
and the Cold War agenda of the USA and its allies had a profound effect on
political and artistic discourse (the Reverse Course crackdown on leftist writings
comes to mind).11 Nonetheless, in contrast to Imperial practice, when ‘total state
control of the arts was formed on a legal and organization-institutional basis’,
Occupation era censorship left some areas of cultural production relatively
untouched (Zuschlag 1997: 217). Thus, while the Lady Chatterley obscenity case
took place during the Occupation, it was in fact a Japanese legal case, and not
under the jurisdiction of SCAP.
The Tokyo police invoked Article 175 of the ‘still-operative Meiji criminal code,
which threatened purveyors of obscenity’ with a fine and, by postwar revision, a
possible prison sentence (Rubin 1988: 170).12 On 26 June 1950, the Tokyo police
made their first move in what promised to be a highly publicized prosecution.
They confiscated the few copies of Itō’s translation that were still in circulation.
The police charged both translator Itō and publisher Oyama Hisajirō with viola-
tion of Article 175. On 8 May 1951, the court of the first instance convened in
Tokyo Municipal Court, with the trial not ending until 18 January of the
following year, as the Occupation was drawing to a close.
Pornography as a process, as spectacle

In 1951 Tokyo, where the ruins of the fire bombings still remained part of the
cityscape, and reports of the Occupation’s Red Purge filled the newspapers, one
exasperated witness in the Lady Chatterley trial burst out, ‘Doesn’t the government
have more important things to do than talk about whether a single foreign book
is pornographic or not?’ Why, so soon after its defeat in a traumatic and tremen-
dously disruptive world war, did the courts have time to fuss about something as
seemingly trivial as ‘the private morality of the middle-classes?’13 Far from
irrelevant, the Lady Chatterley trial unfolded as a significant public debate over
188 Ann Sherif
Japan’s Others (sexual, literary, and political). At this juncture between Occupied
Japan and Independent Japan, the defense team insisted that the people, as readers
and writers, have a proper role in defining concepts of art and obscenity, public
and private, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens and the state.
As Lynn Hunt and Walter Kendrick have argued, pornography is most fruit-
fully understood as naming ‘an argument, not a thing’, an argument over the
divisions between public and private, as well as which forces within society have
the authority to regulate the boundaries of morality.14 Furthermore, the idea of
pornography has always been ‘historically shaped’ because its definition hinges
on a society’s tolerance for the ‘physical, sexual reality of individual selfishness’,
which, in turn, foregrounds a subject separate from ‘higher moral authority’. In
postwar Japan, as elsewhere, the link between obscenity and the profound polit-
ical implications of this understanding of the subject/citizen becomes
complicated by the fact that sexually explicit materials also ‘provoke . . . commer-
cial interest in the sense of profit’ (Pease 2000: 1–36).
Not surprisingly, the trial about sex and censorship became a darling of the
media. Newspapers effortlessly garnered attention by splashing the ‘obscenity or
art?’ headline in large print as often as possible. Yet spectators and readers did
not pay attention to the trial only because of the promise of titillation. Broad
interest came from all sectors of society, as shown by the diversity of spectators,
defenders, journalists, and witnesses. The nature and quantity of newspaper,
radio, and newsreel coverage also confirm the urgency of many themes explored
over the course of the trial. The literally hundreds of articles that appeared in
national and regional newspapers often emphasized the ‘ghost of the prewar
censorship system’, the ‘unfortunate bureaucratic spirit’ of the police, the ‘broad
implications’ of the test case, the political and moral ‘responsibility of writers’,
and a new ‘political consciousness’ evident in the process.15
Chief defense attorney Masaki Hiroshi made it publicly known that he agreed
to represent Oyama and Itō because he realized the trial would be a public
forum for him and for like-minded people to express their opinions on the value
of the new Constitution and freedom of speech. The trial, he pronounced with
relish, would be a test case – not only about obscenity, but also an opportunity for
the ‘citizen to judge the judges’ (Saiban: 27–30).16 Except for the translator Itō,
who was surprised at the full courtroom and the flashing cameras of the news-
paper reporters on the first day, most participants anticipated that the trial would
constitute a venue where their voices would be heard by the broad public, consti-
tuting a potentially significant stage in the building of Japan’s new democratic
capitalist culture and the articulation of new values. In postwar Japan, the trial
marks the debut of the writer as activist, the writers who saw themselves as ‘an
elite with an ability to create a following among the influential literate sector of
society in a way that was unsettlingly similar to the ambitions of the state itself ’,
to borrow Coetzee’s phrase (1996: 42).
For the reading public, the Lady Chatterley trial came as a novelty, as the first
big postwar ‘culture trial’ (bunka saiban) to focus on literature and politics.17 The
question of whether the Constitution itself would survive the post-Occupation
era, given the weakening of progressive forces by the Reverse Course, the depurging
of conservative forces by MacArthur, and Japan’s impending independence, loomed
heavily. An open courtroom, where the judge did not simply dictate the state’s
will, appeared in stark contrast to the pre-1945 system, when censorship of texts
had been done by administrative means, and literary trials were extremely rare.
Even when a censorship case did go to trial, the case would inevitably conclude
with a guilty verdict, a warning to the heedless.18
For most of the nine-month trial, spectators crowded the seats in the
cramped courtroom in central Tokyo, with many famous men and women
among their numbers: novelists Kawabata Yasunari (then head of the Japan
PEN Club), Hirabayashi Taiko, Sakaguchi Ango, Funahashi Sei’ichi, Ōoka
Shohei, Niwa Fumio, critics Yoshida Ken’ichi (son of Prime Minister Yoshida
Shigeru), Aono Suekichi, Nakamura Mitsuo, Usui Yoshimi, among others. The
court permitted Oyama and Itō to form an unusually large defense team, headed
by the well-known and idiosyncratic lawyer Masaki Hiroshi, and including
novelist Nakajima Kenzō (who was also the head of the Japan Copyright Council
and a leader in the Japan Writer’s Association), the Tamakis, two brothers who
had both become lawyers, and English literature scholar Fukuda Tsuneari.
Among those who eagerly participated as witnesses were social scientists,
Christian activists, scholars, journalists, high-ranking police bureaucrats, critics,
educators, professors, novelists, physicians, feminists, and grass-root activists. As if
in direct fulfillment of Lawrence’s wish that young people read his novel in order
to learn about sex correctly, the defense also called a 17-year-old high school girl
named Sone Chiyoko, who spoke with great intelligence about Lawrence’s
novels.19
A surprising array of people rallied to Lady Chatterley’s defense. Some, such
as critic Aono Suekichi, had been persecuted by the militarists for their Leftist
or liberal political beliefs. In contrast, Itō Sei had employed pro-Imperial rhetoric
during the war, and scholar Fukuda Tsuneari of the defense team, though
known as a maverick intellectual, had publicly stated his critical views of
Leftists.20 Perhaps some secretly saw participation in the trial as a form of peni-
tence for the literary community’s lack of resistance during the 15 Year War.21 For
others, the Occupation’s Reverse Course had blocked other avenues for
activism.
The identification of the free circulation of sexually explicit cultural products
with the level of freedom and democracy depends on the framework of a free
market, consumer-oriented capitalist society. The increasing importance of
publishers and their business practices in a market economy also come into play,
as censorship imparted an ‘aura’ to literary texts and increased their value as
‘symbolic capital’ (Ellis 1988: 35).22
In this context, the Japanese Lady Chatterley case differed from the later British
and American cases because the publisher Oyama had no way of predicting the
level of legal or financial risk involved, or the outcome of the trial. Until 1949,
the police had focused their censorship efforts almost exclusively on the kasutori
magazines (the ‘dregs’ or ‘pulp’, cheaply produced popular magazines on sexual
190 Ann Sherif
themes that flooded the market in the immediate postwar period). Of late,
Oyama knew that the police had met with considerable opposition when they
tried to ban texts outside of the kasutori genre, specifically, two best-selling novels:
Ishizaka Yōjurō ’s popular contemporary comic novel, and Norman Mailer’s
current US hit about WWII, The Naked and the Dead. Though Lawrence’s work as
a whole belonged to elite European literature, Lady Chatterley hovered on the edge
of respectability.23
One suspects that Oyama’s decision to release Lady Chatterley, Lawrence’s last
novel, as the first volume of a multi-volume edition of Lawrence’s selected works
may have been motivated at least partly by desire for publicity and profit. Yet it is
hard to find fault with the publisher, given the uncertainties he faced, especially in
comparison with the situations of US and British publishers.24 The American
publisher Grove Press proceeded with a complete Lady Chatterley only after the land-
mark Roth Supreme Court decision of 1957 had articulated the legal precedent
that pornography and sexually explicit materials were, for the first time, protected
under freedom of speech and the press. Similarly, the British Penguin publication
followed closely on a change in obscenity laws. Therefore, both the US and English
publishers issued unexpurgated editions of Lady Chatterley with a clear under-
standing that they would emerge victorious in major test cases of recently altered
legislation, and that they could enjoy considerable profits as millions of readers
were lured to the aura of the ‘freshly decensored’, yet now perfectly respectable,
text.
The appeal of D.H. Lawrence in early postwar Japan

That this crucial court case, on the crux of Japan’s independence in the Cold
War world, had to do with D.H. Lawrence’s ideas about sex and representation is
not entirely coincidental. During his lifetime, Lawrence (1885–1930) relentlessly
voiced his opinions about morality, politics, modernity, and art, in both his
literary works and criticism. He was aggressive, even abrasive, in anticipating
his opposition, which, broadly defined was contemporary British society. He
regarded the censor as an especially obnoxious symptom of the nation’s diseased
state. By the 1920s, publishers had already pegged Lawrence as dangerous
because of his early obscenity conviction for The Rainbow.25
Many generations of critics have analyzed Lawrence’s complex and often
contradictory thinking about sexuality, Christianity, empire, and gender, and I
will not survey his thought here.26 Several aspects of Lawrence’s thought and
career are, however, relevant to understanding the nature of the novelist’s appeal
to Japanese audiences soon after WWII. Lawrence was particularly outspoken
about his views on the connection between national identity, morality, and sexuality.
In the 1929 essay ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Lawrence analyzed the
nature of that link:
I cannot see any hope of regeneration for a sexless England. An England

that has lost its sex seems to me nothing to feel very hopeful about . . . [T]he
warm blood-sex that establishes the living and re-vitalizing connection
between man and woman, how are we to get that back? I don’t know. Yet get
it back we must: or the younger ones must, or we are all lost. For the bridge
to the future is the phallus, and there’s the end of it. But not the poor,
nervous counterfeit phallus of modern ‘nervous’ love. Not that . . . If
England is to be regenerated . . . it will be a phallic rather than a sexual
regeneration. For the phallus is only the great old symbol of godly vitality in
a man, and of immediate contact.
(Lawrence 1959: 123)
For Lawrence, then, his campaign about sex specifically had to do with saving
England, healing England. But healing England of what? The ravages of the
Great War, and the industrialization that had corrupted society and made possible
in Europe the unprecedented horrors that defined that war? The sexlessness of
England, for Lawrence, was symptomatic of the degeneration of the nation, and
the failure to recover a right relationship with the life force in the aftermath of
the tragedy of the war and of the age.27
Let us look at the opening passage of Lady Chatterley, the short first chapter of
this novel about an upper-class woman’s relationship with her husband’s game-
keeper Mellors. This initial chapter begins thus:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cata-

clysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new
little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now
no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the
obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had
brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must
live and learn.
(Lady Chatterley: 3)
And then the reader is introduced to Sir Clifford Chatterley:
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on
leave. They had a month’s honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders: to
be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war . . . dead. Too much death
and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an
anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife . . . But early in 1918 Clifford
was shipped home smashed, and there was no child.
(Lady Chatterley: 3, 14–15)
In Lawrence, then, the idea of the body and sex as a means of salvation from the
ravages of modern warfare/mass death comes in the aftermath (immediate or
not) of WWI. The trope of the impotent, war-wounded English aristocrat and
192 Ann Sherif
his wife who seeks solace and meaning in beautiful and potent relations with
men, resonated with gendered metaphors of Japan’s defeat and recovery.
In the 1929 essay, Lawrence makes grand claims about the power of sex: it
will cure England of its ills, make England’s people whole again, save them
from the fall.28 The defense team in the Tokyo trial correctly emphasized
Lawrence’s views of healthy sex as sacred and beautiful. They also touched on
what we can now see as Lawrence’s rather idiosyncratic understanding of what
constitutes sex: he views the phallus as sacred, and, in a narrative of progress, as
a means for England to move forward. Not only did Lawrence insist on the
primacy of the heterosexual bond, but he even condemned masturbation, the
‘nervous’ love, partly because of the secrecy it demanded, and partly because
the ‘grey’ and Puritan establishment and older generation condoned masturbation,
because it could be made secret.29 Regardless of the national and psychological
specificities of Lawrence’s claims about sex, his linking of the body, morality,
and recovery from national trauma found a receptive audience in Japan, which
was still reeling from the brutality of war and defeat. At the same time, the
Lady Chatterley case spoke to much more than the spiritual war wounds of citi-
zens.
Locally, other factors contributed to the interest in the Lawrence novel. First,
consider the translator of Lawrence’s novel, for his particular presence as a writer
and a thinker undergoes interesting and important shifts over the course of his
career. Like many aspiring novelists in the late 1920s, Itō fell under the spell of
Freud, Proust, and especially James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, and emulated
Modernist writers in his own fiction. Although a prolific critic and author of
novels and short stories, Itō’s most significant contributions lie perhaps in other
areas. For example, Itō worked as editor of a literary journal that introduced readers
to the works of Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley. He also undertook the daunting
task of translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Japanese during the early 1930s, and
published an expurgated translation of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley in the mid-1930s.
Whether we call Itō’s fervently nationalistic wartime writings in the 1940s
opportunistic, unprincipled, or blindly conformist, one is not surprised to find
that the man of letters happily rekindled his love for British Modernist literature
after Japan’s defeat (Keene 1984: 676). Somehow – perhaps because of his
Anglophilia – he escaped from being at the center of the discourse on war
responsibility and complicity. By 1950, Itō had already built a name for himself
as a prolific and important postwar novelist and literary critic. But the Lady
Chatterley trials, thanks to the mass media, propelled him to an even greater
fame. After the 1951 trial ended and as the case was under appeal, Itō Sei also
published a ‘documentary novel’ called Saiban (The Trial, 1958), which explained
in a style accessible to a broad readership, the workings of the legal process,
and described in detail the court proceedings. He became, by the mid-1950s,
one of the most frequently encountered voices in the literary world (Keene
1984: 683).
Thus, at the Lady Chatterley trials in 1951–52, Itō Sei certainly could speak with
confidence, not only about the novel under dispute, but about Lawrence too, and
what we now call Modernism. The distinguished literary scholars and critics
30
who came to the courtroom as special witnesses for the defense bolstered his
authority as a critic. The Modernist artists in whom Itō found inspiration as a young
man also harbored a conviction that literature could benefit society: ‘the belief
that the publication of a poem or the exhibition of a painting can so triumphantly
confirm the creator and so decisively serve the culture’ (Levenson 1999: 5).
Finally, Itō found himself drawn to Lawrence’s ideas about sex: ‘I want men and
women to be able to think about sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly’
(Lawrence 1959: 85).
Lady Chatterley had gained an aura unusual even among maverick Modernist
texts. In the Anglo-American countries, Ulysses, and other works that had initially
shocked audiences and critics in Europe and the USA, had gathered what
amounted to canonical status in the 1930s, when the Great Depression encour-
aged writers to seek the patronage of universities. In legal terms, as well, the courts
in early 1930s recognized Joyce’s Ulysses as art, and denied that it was ‘dirt for
dirt’s sake’. In Japan, in contrast, the canonization of Lawrence and other
Modernist writers (and all English language writers!) had been deferred by the
war.
Though not the most highly regarded of Lawrence’s novels, Lady Chatterley was
certainly the most controversial. One aspect of Lady Chatterley’s controversial
identity lay in its status as a contested book for over twenty years in some part of
the world or another, while other comparably explicit texts had gained legal
sanction and were freely distributed in the marketplace.
Finally, the literary marketplace, along with the increased scale of
publishing in the postwar period, were also important factors in Lady Chatterley’s
postwar fate. This novel was remarkable for the author’s high degree of involve-
ment with all stages of production and marketing, and advocating for his
works. From 1910 until the 1920s in Europe, a number of authors, such as
Joyce and Eliot, sometimes used private publishers, and had intimate relation-
ships with their patrons/investors (Rainey 1999: 35–62). Precisely because
Lawrence, anticipating a battle with British censors, took the publication on
himself (by publishing privately in Italy), he had a relationship to his novel that
many of his peers did not. As Richard Ellis has pointed out, ‘censorship
confrontations in the United Kingdom and the United States are publishers’ and
booksellers’ battles and . . . characteristically . . . publishers were the main court-
room protagonists’ (1988: 27). Given the extent of Lawrence’s involvement in the
actual production of the physical book called Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his
personal and artistic belief in the importance of the novel, the book’s notoriety
is not surprising, even after his death (Lawrence 1959: 83–4). In the Tokyo trial,
the importance of the book as a commodity and cultural product was made
clear when the publisher of the Japanese translation was found guilty of
marketing the Japanese version of Lady Chatterley as if it were salacious material,
while translator Itō Sei was found innocent. In subsequent appeals, the guilt of
the publisher was upheld, and Itō’s intent as translator was also found to be in
violation of Article 175.
194 Ann Sherif
Literary Others: pornography and art
The Lady Chatterley case offered an opportunity for the literary community to
reclaim, in a broad public forum, its ties with elite Anglo-European literature,
and in particular Modernism, as an integral part of Japan’s cultural heritage,
especially in the aftermath of the domestic turn inward (and expansionism
abroad) forced by the 15 Year War. The defense accomplished this redefinition
partly by identifying appreciation of Lawrence’s fiction as a gauge of the level of
Japanese culture. No less than the nation’s pride was at stake if Japan, in a public
forum, exposed itself as unappreciative of a European literary masterpiece. The
defense team knew full well that the critical reception of Lady Chatterley had been
mixed in the English-speaking world, but saw no advantage in sharing this
nuanced understanding with the prosecution. Through the democratic forum
that was the trial, a free press, and Itō’s book Saiban, the defense would share its
knowledge of Lawrence’s art and thought with all citizens.
In a strikingly original move, the defense skillfully employed social science
methods as a tool to distinguish Lawrence’s text from pornography. The trial
may have taught readers about democratic institutions, but Itō Sei also held up
the proceedings and his own journalistic novel about the trial as a means of
introducing the people to a broad range of literary critical theories and their
applications (Saiban: 5–6). Itō specified, furthermore, that he imagined the
‘general reader’ as his audience, and, as proof, he stressed that even the pricing of
the paperback edition of Saiban was intended to make the volume accessible to a
mass audience, reaching as many fellow citizens as possible (ibid.: 5–7).31 His
readers would learn about European-influenced literary criticism, but also ‘new,
American-style approaches’ of literary criticism (bungaku hihyō), ones based on the
disciplines of psychology and mass communication studies (ibid.: 6). Itō’s claim
here is a bit disingenuous because, although social scientific data and method are
frequently presented as evidence during the trial, it is not as part of a literary
critical endeavor. Rather, the defense’s use of psychological method and mass
communication studies had two purposes: first, to align the defense with a
rational, scientific world-view (in opposition to the prosecutor’s subjectivity); and,
second, to demarcate pornography from art.
The defense did not have to try hard to maintain this alignment with rational,
scientific scholars. As it turns out, the social scientists presented themselves to
Oyama before anyone knew that the publication of Lady Chatterley would result in
prosecution. As the second volume of the two-volume translation was going to
press, a Tokyo University graduate student named Kido Kōtarō contacted Oyama
and explained that he was doing research on sexual attitudes as part of his
studies in social psychology. Specifically, Kido planned to study the extent to
which Lady Chatterley would influence the attitudes of readers, and, to that end,
requested that Oyama include a reader’s survey in the forthcoming book. Kido
worked in collaboration with influential social psychologist Minami Hiroshi
(Hitotsubashi University), who at the time was involved in a study of Japanese
sexuality sponsored by the Democratic Scientists Association (Minshushugi
kagakusha kyōkai).32 The survey addressed readers’ attitudes towards Lady
Chatterley’s behavior, romantic love, and the descriptions of sexual acts in the
novel, as well as the issue of whether the book should be banned (or expurgated)
(Saiban: 133, 220–3). Although Oyama initially objected to the question about
banning the novel, in the end, he agreed to include surveys in 30,000 copies of
the second volume (ibid.: 133). Readers were also asked for their age, occupation,
and political party affiliation (interestingly, members of both the conservative
Jiyū Party and the Socialists and Communist Parties numbered high among
respondents).33
As the trial progressed, both participants and the newspapers took frequent
note of the survey as part of Lady Chatterley’s publication history. The vast
majority of the 3,000 respondents found Lawrence’s description of sex ‘beau-
tiful’, and opposed banning the book. The defense employed the results of this
study of reader response as a means of distinguishing Lady Chatterley from the
native kasutori magazines, and of positioning its clients on the side of science and
rationality. For the most part, media coverage of the case also sided with the
defense. Several newspapers, however, singled out the survey postcard as an
instance of the publisher attempting to ‘flatter’ readers into thinking that he
cared about their opinions. As a result of this upbraiding of Oyama as a greedy
entrepreneur, one of the psychologists involved in developing the survey wrote an
article in which he defended Oyama and explained that the goal of the survey
was scientific (Saiban: 222).
Despite the researcher’s clarification, the prosecution took full advantage of
the ambiguity surrounding the survey in order to criticize Oyama’s motives for
publishing the book in the first place, and for his decision to include the
survey. In the verdict, the judge would also use the survey as evidence of
Oyama’s pornographic intent in marketing the book. The guilty verdict did little,
however, to sully enthusiasm for the aestheticization of sex, a lasting legacy of
Lawrence and other Modernists.34 The combination of data from scientists,
along with cultural legitimation in the form of praise for Lawrence’s art by
prominent literary critics, further functioned to naturalize sexual explicitness in
elite art.
Throughout the trial, the defense relentlessly worked to disqualify the prose-
cution and the police from their assumed roles of cultural and moral arbiters.
Repeatedly, Masaki Hiroshi and colleagues portrayed chief prosecutor
Nakagome as uncultured, unable to string together a grammatical sentence, and
a sloppy, inaccurate reader of fine literature. In the public’s mind, this strategy
had the result of undercutting the prosecution’s attacks, and elevating the
more literate and cultured defense, people worthy of distinguishing art from
dirt.
The Other of the body and sex

While the new Constitution promised salvation of Japan, D.H. Lawrence’s
novel – regarded by some as ‘obscene’ – paradoxically suggested a means of
redeeming the spirits and morals of the citizens. The defense sought to define as
196 Ann Sherif
Other both the prosecution’s regressive values concerning sex and the libertarian
attitudes toward sexuality that had sprung up in the atmosphere of liberation
immediately after the defeat. Masaki Hiroshi of the defense team praised both
publisher Oyama and translator Itō Sei for the following lofty goal in publishing a
Japanese version of the Lawrence novel: they had undertaken production of the
unexpurgated translation because they were ‘overwhelmed by the decline in
morality, the loss of the elevated human spirit, the self destructive, decadent
trends, all of which are symptomatic of – or perhaps causes of – the spiritual and
material poverty of this nation in near ruins’. As an antidote to this spiritual,
decadent decline, Itō and his publisher offered a work of art to stimulate citizens
toward the recognition that human sexuality is ‘full of mystery, like the life of a
flower’ and also ‘sacred’ (Saiban: 40–1).
The defense team also placed considerable hope in the potential of the
Japanese version of Lady Chatterley to help Japanese people ‘regard sexuality as a
serious matter’ and, consequently, to raise the cultural standards of Japan. In
contrast to the prosecution’s insistence that no Japanese readers had the capacity
to read the novel intelligently, the defense offered the novel, with its pursuit of
‘beauty and truth’, as a means of elevating Japanese readers. In relation to
Lawrence’s thinking, a similar optimistic view of the power of sex had been
expressed by British critics in the early 1930s: ‘Lady Chatterley was to state a
cause for millions who search for a solution of the world’s problems through
normal sex’ (Pease 2000: 163). And, the defense pointed out, the prosecution had
not raised charges of obscenity against the escapism and explicit sex evident in
the wildly popular Japanese ‘entertainment novels’ (kōdan) (Saiban: 34).
The defense’s focus on Lawrence’s linking of sex and the fate of the nation
found a receptive audience in Japan for several reasons. The team had two
versions of sexuality that it deemed worthy of ‘Othering’. First, Lawrence’s
elevated vision of sexuality fitted with the aim of various constituents to find a
positive alternative to the kasutori magazines and decadent literature that had
dominated the market since the defeat. Lawrence’s linking of sex, tenderness and
subjectivity also reinforced the postwar revulsion at the memory of the imperial
regime’s conscription of bodies as well as its taboo on the senses. At a time when
neither the old Imperial values nor the moral standards of the Occupier presented
viable long-term models for sexuality, many trial participants referred to pressing
contemporary social problems, such as prostitution, lack of sex education, and
the morality of youth. Though not specifically articulated during the trial, there
also looms the gendered anxieties about the imposition of the Occupier’s sexual
desires and the mobilization of a segment of the female population as a ‘flood-
wall’ to protect the chastity of Japan’s woman (Dower 1999; Molasky 1999).
It is tempting to view the trial as part of a linear narrative of modernity and
progress, with the defense rejecting a feudal mindset that represses sex and advo-
cating instead an open and enlightened freedom of sexual expression that affirms
democracy.35 No one in the courtroom, however, advocated a libertarian-style,
absolutely permissive print culture, and for good reason.36 And, even though Itō Sei
anticipated that some of the female witnesses would offer the sharpest condem-
nations of Lady Chatterley, none of them did. They did, however, raise important
questions about sexuality and gender that most of the men did not. The testi-
mony of Azuma Masa, head of a reform school for girls, highlighted significant
class divisions between women. While praising the value of Lawrence’s ‘beautiful
ideas’, Azuma confirmed that the delinquent girls at her school lacked the literary
sophistication to read and appreciate Lady Chatterley. Their level of literacy
limited them to women’s magazines such as Romance. The novel, therefore, was
not within their grasp, either as civilizing or corrupting force (Saiban: 86–7). Even
Etsuko Gantret, a Christian and head of an activist group that fought against
prostitution and promoted prohibition, the purity of women, and world peace,
refused to condemn Lawrence’s novel as the prosecution had hoped (partly because
she would not evaluate something that she had not read).
Masaki, Itō, and their team welcomed most of all the illuminating testimony of
Kamichika Ichiko, a scholar of women’s social movements and head of the
publication The Women’s Times (Fujin taimuzu). When asked whether she had read
the novel, Kamichika responded that she had in fact borrowed the book from her
daughter. She identified the ignorance of ‘more than half ’ of Japanese women
about sex, as well as the imbalance between men’s excessive desire and women’s
inadequate desire (born of this lack of knowledge), as impediments to
women’s liberation. Praising Lawrence for writing clearly about sex, she declared
the novel suitable and beneficial for young women aged 17 and over. Kamichika
praised the use of ‘the power of literature’ to promote understanding of desire
and sexuality. A forceful speaker, Kamichika came close to making Prosecutor
Nakagome admit that the entire case was based on his woefully mistaken read-
ings of Lawrence’s novel (Saiban: 97–9).
Why were the police willing to place such great stakes in the Lady Chatterley
trial? For the Japanese government officials and the police, SCAP’s relatively
loose policy on sexually explicit materials meant that the local authorities could
stand as ‘authorizer of discourse’ for at least one facet of society – the regulation
of sexual expression in cultural production – while the Occupation had chosen
to control nearly every other area of print culture.37 Lest their corner on power
go unnoticed by the public, the police enlisted the media in order to publicize
their efforts at banning books (Kerkham 2001). The police had employed the
same legal statute (Article 175) to bring obscenity charges against Lady Chatterley
as it had for the amorphous categories of kasutori magazines. Both the prosecu-
tion and the defense frequently offered the genre of the kasutori magazines as a
negative domestic example of the representation of sexuality, even though the
genre had started to decline by the time the Lady Chatterley trials proceeded.38
Prior to the trials, the police seemed not at all eager to invite debate about the
standards for obscenity or the law itself. Instead, they handled all the obscenity
accusations in a manner remarkably reminiscent of the Imperial era – out of
court. The police expected a direct admission of guilt and an apology from
publishers and writers. When those in the kasutori business obliged, matters were
solved. When the police hauled in Oyama, however, he refused to agree to their
definition of Lady Chatterley as obscene.39
198 Ann Sherif
The police thus presented itself in the media as morally righteous because it
worked to rid society of morally degraded texts, but would allow no one to dispute
their interpretation of propriety. The police’s relationship with the kasutori industry,
furthermore, proved more complicated than the rigorous enforcement of Article
175 suggested.40 During the trial, the defense managed to reveal that some police
bureaucrats and prosecution witnesses had themselves published articles in kasutori
magazines.41
The defense team followed a careful strategy of portraying the prosecution as
ignorant heathens, offering as proof Chief Prosecutor Nakagome’s poor and
incomprehensible writing, his mistaken readings of Lawrence’s literature, and his
undisciplined body (specifically, his inability to maintain a poker face during the
proceedings). The prosecution could not even read Lady Chatterley as intelligently
as Sone Chiyoko, the 17-year-old high school student who had testified.
Following from this characterization, Masaki and Fukuda Tsuneari also
painted the prosecution as ‘sensual and subjective’ (kankakuteki, shukanteki) in its
efforts, in contrast to the defense’s qualities of ‘seriousness, responsibility, and
dignity’. Thus, many prominent men had sold articles to the kasutori magazines, but
they did not have the same haze of sleaze hovering around them as the prosecu-
tion did.42 Far from protecting the ‘public welfare’ guaranteed by the Constitution,
the police, through the act of accusation, had rendered a fine work of literature
‘pornographic’ (Saiban: 18, 22, 141, 406, 88).43 The world-view of the prosecution
and its witnesses (identified with the Meiji Constitution) posited sex as entertain-
ment, as dirty, as obscene. To make matters worse, the prosecution resorted to
witnesses who lacked the mental capacity to conceive of sex as an ‘idea’ (shisō)
(ibid.: 113–14). In his closing statement, Masaki dubs the aims of the police the
‘temptations of the devil that will destroy Japan for all eternity’ (ibid.: 406).
In the late 1940s, political scientist and theorist Maruyama Masao envisioned
the social sciences as bearer of enlightenment to the people, as the ‘guide to the
democratization of knowledge in postwar Japan’ (Barshay 1992: 367). During
the Lady Chatterley trial, Masaki and his peers demonstrated their superior under-
standing of the sexual morality of Lady Chatterley by offering ample empirical
evidence gathered by social scientists, thus positioning themselves in opposition
to the ‘sensual’ and illogical argument of the prosecutors. Thanks to the influ-
ence of social science – sociology and social psychology, in particular – they were
able to offer statistical analyses of the appearance of sexually explicit situations
in Lady Chatterley and those found in the ‘pulp fiction’ prevalent in the Occupation
era. In addition, the defense included as evidence clinical studies comparing the
quantifiable reactions of readers to such categories as ‘beauty of language’,
‘frankness of sexual description’, ‘value of the work as art’, and ‘degree of sexual
stimulation’ in Lady Chatterley compared with contemporary Japanese erotic books
(Saiban: 242).
Although Lady Chatterley received occasional comparisons with texts such as
Boccaccio’s Decameron and Edo period erotic books, most frequently it was the
contemporary, native kasutori magazine against which the British novel was obses-
sively measured. Most often during the trial, the kasutori genre was offered as a
monolithic entity, even when individual titles were given. The contemporary
discourse on sexuality was much more diverse than this simple binarism
suggests. The reading public could choose from kasutori that were pure pornog-
raphy, but also had access to cheaply produced, yet educational and progressive
magazines.
They also could easily obtain the philosophical literary decadence of novelist
Sakaguchi Ango and Dazai Osamu. Though Sakaguchi Ango attended the trial
as a spectator, his ‘carnal’ writing was never specifically mentioned, perhaps
because his harrowing tales show bodies too much in reaction to the trauma of
war, without offering positive visions for the future. Yet Sakaguchi’s illuminating
juxtaposition of the kokutai (national polity/body), as the state brutally regulated
every life of the body (as soldier, as mother and wife to soldier, as productive
worker), with nikutai (carnal body) resonated strongly with the defense’s argu-
ments. But the latter also proposed an alternative. A new sexual morality must be
part of the new democratic culture.
The Occupation authority’s motives in placing the regulation of obscene and
sexually explicit material in Japanese hands remain unclear. Certainly, it was not
because SCAP regarded sex as unimportant. Rather, perhaps the puritanical
Americans wished to avoid comment on the suppressed fact of extensive sexual
relations between its personnel and the occupied people. Perhaps the strident and
often hypocritical voices of the prewar US anti-vice societies still rang in their
ears, reminding them that representations of sex, far from being so trivial,
present a clear and present danger.
To others, however, the Occupation authority’s decision not to place restric-
tions on obscene and sexually explicit material raised great concerns. Activist
groups and publishers, whose motives were not necessarily regressive, also found
alarming the rush of kasutori. Some women’s groups grappled with the authori-
ties’ less than nuanced approach to monitoring publications pertaining to
sexuality.44 Publishers’ organizations early on registered their concerns about the
seemingly unchecked kasutori industry with the authorities. They may have
considered the high volume kasutori business as a financial threat, because it sold
hundreds of thousands of copies with low overheads. As Oyama Hisajirō himself
demonstrates, many publishers also wanted higher ethical and cultural standards
for the industry (Oyama 1982: 241).
What specifically did the defense want readers to learn about sexuality from
Lady Chatterley? We have noted Itō’s praise of Lawrence’s consecration of sex, and
Masaki’s regard for Lawrence’s desire to defeat the pornographic imagination, that
sees sex as dirty, taboo. Lawrence wrote:
The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it
the world is grey . . . But even I would censor genuine pornography . . . you
can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex and to the human
spirit. Pornography is an attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpar-
donable.
(Moore 1959b: 69)
200 Ann Sherif
The Other of politics
If government regulation of obscenity only partly concerns sex, and can be
more productively understood as a process of negotiating the locus of authority,
as well as the boundaries of public and private, citizen and state, then the
Japanese trial of Lady Chatterley was an instance of that very process made trans-
parent. As if to emphasize the trial participants as democratic citizens,
newspaper photographs of the trial show close-ups, not of book covers, but of
Itō and Oyama sitting on the wooden courtroom chairs, or crowded shots of
spectators. As further evidence of the centrality of the process of the trial and its
employment of the topic of pornography as a means of voicing many urgent
national concerns unrelated to sexuality, I offer the fact that the verdict (guilty)
ultimately had little influence on the representation of sexuality in subsequent
literature, film, and art.45 In addition, public opinion was highly critical of the
verdict.
As Jay Rubin has eloquently demonstrated, the defense was determined
[to] portray the prosecution as representative of the feudal, authoritarian,

class-bound, anti-individualist, anti-human mentality that had suppressed
thought and speech and the pursuit of individual happiness in prewar Japan
and which had been, as they saw it, ultimately responsible for leading Japan
into war.
(1988: 171)
Not only did the prosecution seek to deprive Itō and his publisher Oyama shoten
of their rights, the defense asserted, but the authorities exposed themselves as
particularly authoritarian by expecting ‘the people to tremble with fear in their
presence . . . Itō protested that under the new Constitution a defendant was to be
presumed innocent until proven guilty, not presumed guilty because he failed to
go along with the prosecutor’ as defendants often ‘fearfully did in the prewar
days . . . certain of the retribution if they did not confess guilt for a crime they
had no intention of committing’ (ibid.: 171). The defense questioned whether
those involved in the prosecution were, as people, capable of defending the newly
guaranteed rights, or if they adhered too strongly to the ways of the past. Those
advocating for Itō and Oyama held up the postwar Constitution as the sole
means of saving ‘this ruined nation’ (bōkoku).
In the later US and British trials, new legislation may have served as a catalyst
for bringing Lady Chatterley to court, but neither the political systems, nor the rela-
tionship between the authorities and constituencies – those who made the decisions
about boundaries – had changed radically. In Japan, by contrast, the Lady Chatterley
case stands clearly as the first postwar literary trial conducted under an entirely
new system of government, one imposed by the occupiers whose departure was
imminent.46 To understand the extent to which Japanese democracy was then in
a very early stage of ‘self-definition’, it is helpful to recall that Maruyama Masao
wrote bitterly in 1950 that there was ‘no democracy worth defending in Japan’ at
present.47
The trial therefore was a significant early opportunity for the diverse partici-
pants to present, in a public forum, their views on major distinctions between
public and private and human rights and to define concepts that, until Japan’s
recent past, had been distinct political Other: the sovereignty of the people, the
sanctity of the citizen apart from a national family, the individual’s determination
of the fate of her body, sexuality not in the service of strengthening the nation, an
unrestricted press, and an open marketplace. The assembled also asserted the
intellectual’s responsibility in setting moral standards for all of society. The new
Constitution had already established the institutional framework for democracy.
Democratic culture, however, took time to develop. In the early 1950s, the
‘normative core’ of democratic culture was ‘formed by social mobilization and
broad political criticism’. After 1955, with Japan’s economic miracle, the stabiliza-
tion of the LDP and the ongoing Cold War, this ‘normative core’ would instead
involve ‘consumer participation in an expanding GNP’ (Barshay 1992: 394).
The best-known text associated with the trial, Itō’s Saiban, states at the very
beginning that the author wished to provide an ‘easy-to-understand explanation of
the functioning of the law in postwar democracy’, as well as to clarify to the
readers the many ways that the law affects their everyday lives (ibid.: 5–6). Itō
himself had gone through this same process of re-education at the start of the trial,
as his knowledgeable defense team explained to him in detail the differences
between the pre-1945 legal system and the present one, the new role of the pros-
ecutors and the defense. Itō attributed some of his knowledge of the democratic
courtroom to an American movie in which a lawyer paces restlessly around the
courtroom as he cross-examines a witness (ibid.: 211).
In this trial, the defense admitted to only two possible political persuasions: on
their side proudly stood the advocates of the new Constitution, happy to have
sacrificed during the war to receive this gift from God (the postwar Constitution),
supporters of human rights, and hopeful for a new elevated morality and culture
for Japan. Only a few short years after the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Itō and
others who had in their writing supported the Imperial cause were doubtless
relieved to be included without question in the enlightened camp. Itō even
rhetorically positions himself with those who had been politically persecuted by
the Imperial government by comparing the present trial with those that had been
conducted in the ‘name of the emperor’. How had the leftist writers felt when on
trial, he wonders. He regrets that he never attended a trial of a leftist writer (but
not that he had never taken an oppositional stance himself) (ibid.: 13).
On the opposite side were the prosecution and the bureaucracy, still wallowing
in the Imperial mindset and ignorantly and blindly looking at the world through
the lens of the Meiji Constitution. Masaki leaped gleefully at the opportunity to
cross-examine Watanabe Tetsuzō, the one witness who showed no shame as he
praised the Imperial Rescript on Education, and further extolled the democratic
virtues of the Meiji Constitution (ibid.: 109–13). A Diet member who served on
multiple influential boards and committees, the reactionary Watanabe seemed posi-
tioned to influence many aspects of government policy and practice – a prospect
that alarmed Masaki.
202 Ann Sherif
In his closing statement, Masaki took the opportunity to blast the police by
linking them with a name that was an easy symbol of the evils of the militarized
state and the shame of Japan, former Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki (who was a scape-
goat during the War Crimes Trials, before MacArthur, in 1949, pardoned many
others accused of Class A war crimes). The police, he said, had the same primitive
ways of thinking as ‘that cruel Tōjō’ who had ‘whipped the Japanese people to the
brink of extinction’ and who was ‘regarded as a barbarian by people the world
over’. Even more insidious was the police’s desire to bind the Japanese people to
propriety and custom in order to keep them in a ‘primitive spiritual state’ (ibid.:
396).48
Masaki took it upon himself to remind the prosecutors, with their outdated
thought, that Article 21 of the new Constitution states ‘No censorship shall be
maintained’ (ibid.: 32). In the defense team’s eyes, however, the prosecution’s
worst crime was not its willingness to ignore the parts of the new Constitution
that did not suit its purposes. Rather, the police and the prosecution suffered
from the ‘sensual’ mode of thought that resisted rationality in political matters
and, as we have seen, disinterest in aesthetic matters.
In his 1949 essay, ‘From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics’, Maruyama
Masao warned against the dangers of connecting desire with politics and art:
Most of the writers who grind out carnal or sex-obsessed brands of literature
do so knowing full well that what they write doesn’t spring from everyday
events in the lives of ordinary people. And it’s the same for the reader. Isn’t it
precisely because the circumstances depicted are remote from his actual life
that he’s so attracted? In other words, literature constitutes a kind of
‘symbol’ of something he longs for.
(Maruyama 1957: 419)49
As a prominent public intellectual, Maruyama’s despair over the future of Japan’s

postwar democracy emanates from his reading of an unhealthy balance of the
culture/nature binarism (Thomas 2001). For Maruyama, the postwar grounding of
literature in desire, the body, and sensuality is potentially fertile ground for a fascist
revival, and prevents Japanese writers from creativity based on ‘free flight of imagi-
nation’, which would be the appropriate creative basis for a literature of
democracy:
It’s just that such literature takes the most sordid moments of our sensual
experience, multiplies the number, and, in doing so, magnifies them out of
all proportion. An imagination capable of such exaggeration appeared to be
soaring away in unhampered freedom, but actually it’s grubbing around on
its hands and knees in quite a commonplace world.
(1957: 250)
Maruyama’s influential articulation of anxiety over the tyranny of the sensual

and the body in Japanese literature helps us to understand why the defense of the
Lady Chatterley case might place considerable hope in the potential of the Japanese
version of Lady Chatterley to raise the moral standards of Japanese people. Not
only could the defense seek to assimilate a respect for sexuality as a ‘serious
matter’, but they also insisted on taking a rigorous approach that differed from the
sensuality (kankaku) in which fascism finds its basis, and with which, as we have
seen, they associate the prosecution. The determination of whether the trans-
lated novel should be regarded as ‘art or pornography’ thus related to the goals
of ‘civilizing’ a nation left bereft by defeat.
The centrality of literature can also be seen in Maruyama’s linking of literature
with political practice. Along with labor unions and other voluntary associations,
however, the literary realm was still dominated by patterns of thought and social
relations that Maruyama defines as pre-modern. Such emphasis on carnality
would hamper the ‘founding of a [proper] new civic society on the ruins of the
old order’, he argued (ibid.: 264, 252).
One outcome of the Tokyo trial was the revelation of constituencies and indi-
viduals who had interest in gaining the authority needed to participate in the
definition of a new morality in the framework of a representative democracy. From
1949, intellectuals and activists watched as the Occupation, with the help of conser-
vative Japanese forces, pursued its anti-communist Reverse Course and purged
labor activists, politicians, journalists and others. The trial thus became a safe venue
for intellectuals and journalists who wanted to voice their political views, but who
also feared a resurgent authoritarianism, especially given the ‘depurging’ that
accompanied the Red Purge.50 With the economy finally rallying as Japan profited
from the Korean War, publishers found paper more accessible and a larger
potential audience for their publications. As the erotic magazines had shown, sex
sells, but not all publishers shared the revelatory celebration of decadence evident in
those titillating rags. Another outcome was the clarification of the means by
which to participate in the public sphere; here we see that media spectacle was one
means.
In conclusion, the Tokyo Lady Chatterley obscenity trial was the first postwar
public forum in which writers and citizens could openly debate political, literary,
and sexual values. Although the trial was only one step in constructing a new vision
of what constituted postwar Japan’s Others, the debate that took place in the
courtroom and in the media mobilized rational thought and social scientific method
as a means of battling the subjectivity, carnality, and lack of critical faculties of those
representing the state. Despite the guilty verdict, the defense effectively confirmed
the High Modernist assumptions that aesthetic response should encompass
sexual response, and rejected the state’s unilateral attempt to posit subjectivity
divorced from sexuality. In the realm of sexuality, the defense rejected the police’s
cynical regard for sex as a dirty open secret, as well as the Occupation’s use of
sex as a distraction from the Reverse Course, and instead advocated a dignified,
informed approach to sex. Finally, in political terms, the defense team struggled
to pull Japan out of the chaotic decadence and carnal politics upon which the
regressive, recently depurged leaders might base their power. Instead, Masaki and
others who participated in the trial tried to demonstrate democracy as lived
204 Ann Sherif
democratic values and an evolving ‘political culture, not only as imposed institu-
tions’ (Kersten 1996: 6). Japan’s Lady Chatterley case was thus instrumental in
changing the centre and peripheries of postwar Japanese literature and politics,
and also in integrating Japan into a broader global cultural framework.
Notes
1 See McDonald (2003: 231–2). My approach is indebted to the scholarship of Roger
Chartier, Pierre Bourdieu, Maeda Ai, and Kōno Kensuke. See Bourdieu (1993); and
Chartier (1989), Maeda (2001), Kōno (1992).
2 ‘Appendix: United States District Court Decision on Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.
3 Pierre Bourdieu uses the term ‘consecrate’ (1993: 75, 254).
4 Allison Pease, Lawrence Rainey, and Jay Gertzman establish the significant shift effected
by the High Modernists in the generic categorization and aesthetic reception of
words, rhetoric, style, titles, themes, and institutional settings of modes previously clas-
sified as pornography.
5 For a publication history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, see Moore (1959b). Moore takes
note of the ‘recent Lady Chatterley trial in Japan’ and states ‘if the trial had its comic
aspects, well, sex has always been a subject that has thrown people off center – even
the poised ancients’ (ibid.: 26–7). Two delegates of the Japan PEN Club reported to
an international PEN conference in Scotland about the trials during the 1950s, and
the English press in Japan covered the trial as well.
6 Joyce Wexler (quoted in Brannon 2003: 32–3). Allison Pease notes that, between Ulysses
and Lady Chatterley:
Lawrence’s novel is more widely read outside of the university, distinctly because
of its reputations as pornography. Both novels could be said to be equally porno-
graphic in the sense that they position the reader as a voyeur to their
representations of explicitly sexualized bodies engaged in sexual acts, and engage
in equal amounts of historically accurate pornographic tropes and images . . .
[Lawrence’s] alignment of sexuality with health, and with a new social order
based on bodies as disinterested bearers of an unconstrained freedom, chal-
lenged his readers to agree.
(2000: 192–3)
7 [Lawrence] effected the incorporation of pornographic vocabulary and actions into
serious literature, high art, through attempting to reinscribe aesthetic disinterest as a
mode of bodily being. He did this as an extension of the sexological project that
equated bodily being with health, origins, and truth. Rewritten into the bourgeois
ideology of self-knowledge tempered with cultural value . . . sexual representation in
the novel, high and low, have become in the twentieth century the norm.
(ibid.: 64)
8 For detailed accounts of the Japanese case, see Itō (1958); Rubin (1985, 1988);
Kockum (1984); and Beer (1984). On the history of prewar Japanese censorship, see
Rubin (1984); Thompson and Harootunian (1991); and Screech (1999).
9 The first copies of Lady Chatterley entered Japan in the 1930s. One notable portrait of
Itō Sei is written by his son Itō Rei, who is a Lawrence scholar and who also did a
translation of Lady Chatterley (Itō Rei 1985).
10 From its start in the late 1930s and even, surprisingly, during the height of the mili-
tarist period, Oyama shoten had always focused its list on junbungaku (‘pure literature’
as opposed to popular fiction). During the Occupation, Oyama’s president Oyama
Hisajirō (b. 1905) quickly expanded his list to include European and American novel-
ists whom the militarist regime had banned.
11 See Dower (1999: 429–40, 432–3, 435). See also Braw (1991).
12 Rubin (1988) notes that early police use of Article 175 on a popular novel by Ishizaka
Yojirō resulted in public protest, and showed in a poor light the prosecutor’s
attempt to censor sexually explicit material written by a Japanese author. Thus, the
Tokyo police decided to use a translation of a novel by a non-Japanese author in
order to assert to citizens their power to control publication of literary materials.
13 Anthony West, quoted in Ralph (1990).
14 Hunt (2000: 357–8). Hunt writes about the emergence of the concept of pornog-
raphy as an aspect of Western modernity, but many of her insights also apply to
twentieth-century Japan. See also Allison (1996).
15 An invaluable source for the newspaper coverage of the Lady Chatterley trials is the
Nakajima Kenzō Archives in the Nihon kindai bungakkan, Scrapbook #28471, and
Newspaper Clippings #28465. Itō also lists coverage in newspapers and magazines
(Itō1958: 238–9).
16 Masaki had also taken part in the recent Mitaka trial concerning labor unions.
17 The Lady Chatterley trial was not, however, the first highly publicized legal case of
the postwar era, but was the first to focus on literature or art. In 1949, the famous
‘political trial’ (seiji saiban) known as the Matsukawa Incident dominated the headlines.
In the Matsukawa case, the prosecution attempted to blame labor union members for
a train derailment. Novelist Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968) wrote the well-known book
Matsukawa Saiban (Matsukawa trial, 1954–58). See also the special tenth anniversary
issue of Chūō Kōron: Matsukawa jiken tokushūgo (13: 8460), 1959.
18 On the Imperial censorship system, see Jay Rubin’s definitive work (1984).
19 In contrast, the majority of witnesses in the British Regina v. Penguin Books trial were
literary critics, literary scholars (including Raymond Williams), ministers, and also
included the obligatory 17-year-old Roman Catholic girl.
20 Suga suggests that Itō and Fukuda, known as conservatives, might have harbored
deep suspicions about the ‘enlightenment project’ of the early postwar era, and
that they only reluctantly advocated the trial as a challenge to reactionary forces that
threatened to revive the thinking of the Meiji Constitution (Suga 1988: 180–1). In my
opinion, despite Itō’s jingoistic pronouncements during the war, his youthful interest
in Lawrence, his views expressed in detail in Saiban, and his agreement to translate
Lady Chatterley in its entirety (at the risk of police reprisal) indicated that his belief
in the progressive emphases of the defense team was not entirely self-serving or
hypocritical. Kockum views the trials as a form of penance on the part of the literary
community that had not resisted brutal imperial censorship (Kockum 1984: 275–6).
For Fukuda as maverick, see Kersten (1996: 36).
21 Progressive historians employ the term 15 Year War, dating from Japan’s war with
China until 1945, rather than Pacific War (which ignores the war on the Asian conti-
nent) or WWII (which omits the military ventures starting in the 1930s).
22 Pierre Bourdieu uses the term ‘symbolic capital’. Ellis’ article details the involvement
of Grove Press and its owner Barney Rosset in publishing Lady Chatterley in the USA,
for which it was charged with violating obscenity laws in the important 1959 legal
case, as well as surveying the changes in the US publishing industry from the 1950s
through the 1980s. Ellis contends that ‘the anti-censorship campaigns of Grove
Press . . . and others need . . . to be placed in the context of publishing’s capitalisation
dilemmas in the mid twentieth century, and need to be seen as cashing-in on the
auratic authority of the freshly decensored’ (1988: 37).
23 Ishizaka later authored the wildly popular Aoi sanmyaku. SCAP refused to support the
police’s attempted ban on Mailer’s debut novel, doubtless because they wanted to read
about the experiences of US GIs fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. On kasutori
magazines, see Dower (1999) and Rubin (1985).
24 Because of the bad press surrounding the prosecution’s accusation that Oyama had
not obtained proper copyright permission from the Occupation authorities and Frieda
206 Ann Sherif
Lawrence, Oyama shoten went out of business. Oyama Hisajirō started another
publishing company soon thereafter.
25 Powerful anti-vice societies and their supporters in the USA, similarly, labeled
Lawrence as ‘a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would even obscure the
darkness of hell’ (Boyer 1968: 228).
26 Of the huge scholarly literature on Lawrence, recent useful collections of essays on
Lawrence include Fernihough (2001) and Poplawski (2001).
27 I also recognize the importance of reading Lawrence’s linking of sex and the nation
in relation to shifting social constructions of sexuality, narrative, and taboo. See
Saunders (1992: 163).
28 Lawrence’s hyperbolic claims about the power of sex reflect the extent to which the
author had to battle for open representation of sex, among the many ideas he sought to
communicate in his writing. It is also an index of the price he had paid by writing
purposely provocative texts and publishing them privately, without copyright protection,
which resulted in rampant piracy of Lady Chatterley and tremendous loss of income for
Lawrence.
29 Many scholars have explored Lawrence’s complex and often contradictory views
about sex.
30 What about Modernism in general and Lawrence in particular would Itō have found
so compelling? In his own fiction, Itō had experimented extensively with different
formal narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness. Much of Anglo-
European Modernist writing is characterized by ‘continually enacted negotiations
between new formal strategies and the unprecedented social matter that [artists in the
early twentieth century] sought to absorb’ (Levenson 1999: 3).
31 The 1950s also saw the rise of the inexpensive mass paperback market, and thus
publishers and authors could imagine a broader consumer base.
32 Oyama Hisajirō writes that the ‘Minshushugi kagakusha kyōkai’ had received a grant
of 50,000 yen from the Ministry of Education to conduct the study on sexual atti-
tudes. According to Oyama, he was reluctant, but was won over by Kido’s youthful
enthusiasm, as well as his desire to help a ‘new scholarly discipline’ (Oyama 1982:
275–6).
33 I am grateful to the Otaru Bungakukan for allowing me to study a copy of the survey
and the original edition of Itō’s translation.
34 Suga Hidemi notes the importance of the Lady Chatterley trial as the first big sex trial
in the postwar era, but stresses that the sexual attitudes expressed in the later Sade
and Yojohan trials differed considerably, in that they sought less to emphasize
sexual explicitness as an integral aspect of transcendent art (as in Lady Chatterley) and
focused more on affirming pornography itself (‘waisetsu, naze warui! ’) (Suga 1988: 180).
35 As the culture of the Edo period shows, erotica and pornography and a vigorous public
sphere can flourish even in an extraordinarily authoritarian regime. Elizabeth Berry
points out the possibility of a vigorous public sphere in an authoritarian regime, pred-
icated on severing the link between the ‘public sphere’ and the ‘telos of democracy’
(1998).
36 Indeed, half a century after the Tokyo trial, many of the questions raised about repre-
sentation and sex remain controversial: What are the differences between pornography,
obscenity, erotica, and art? Is there a causal effect relationship between erotica/
pornography and social behavior? Is pornography especially harmful to women?
While it is clear that women in particular have long been victimized by many varieties
of sexual exploitation and violence, feminists of different persuasions disagree about
the degree to which sexually frank texts and films deserve censorship. On the anti-
pornography vs. anti-censorship debates, see Cornell (2000); Williams (1989); Burstyn
(1985); and Cossman (1997).
37 In contrast to the CCD’s ‘hands off salacious materials’ policy, the propaganda
section of the Occupation, the Civil Information and Education (CIE), made public
statements in 1950 encouraging a ‘purge’ of eroticism. Practically speaking, however,
such statements served to encourage the Tokyo Police Department only, because the
CCD had already ceased operation (Rubin 1985: 102–3). Barshay uses the term
‘authorizer of discourse’ (1992: 389).
38 Kockum credits increased ‘control regarding the distribution’ of kasutori zasshi on the
part of the Japanese police in 1947–48 for the decline of the genre. By contrast,
Dower emphasizes the introduction of monthly magazines such as Fūfu seikatsu that
include serious ‘frank discussion of conjugal sex’ rather than lurid sexual liaisons
and ‘emphasized that the family was the fundamental unit of society’ (although he
recognizes that ‘Despite its serious objectives, Fūfu seikatsu proved susceptible to the
kasutori-magazine disease’) (Dower 1999: 164–5, 196). Given the historical circum-
stances of the kasutori’s flourishing, Fukushima Jūrō insists that the genre differed from
pornography. In other words, the thought of the immediate postwar, chaotic though it
might have been, infused these texts and their uses of the body.
39 A publishers’ association attempted to intercede on Oyama’s behalf, but the police
would not back off.
40 H. Eleanor Kerkham notes the publicity surrounding police efforts to control the
production and circulation of ‘obscene books’ (2001: 358, n. 102).
41 Masaki Hiroshi reveals that one of the prosecution’s witnesses contributed pieces to
the scandalous Ningen tankyū magazine, and was hauled in by the police, who in turn
used him as a witness (Saiban: 51–7).
42 The prosecution pointed out that defense lawyer Masaki Hiroshi had also written an
essay for the same Ningen tankyū. Masaki told Itō that in that essay he condemned
Prosecutor Nakagome. The attempt to sully Masaki passed unnoticed, while the
exposé of the prosecution’s dubious morality remained vivid (Saiban : 60).
43 In the British case, pornography ‘most certainly had corrupted those charged with
enforcing the law against it’ as police accepted bribes and became involved in the
‘thriving pornographic marketplace’ (Rolph 1991: xx).
44 Kerkham points out that ‘women’s groups were upset by the new freedom in this area
of publishing [pornographic materials]’ (2001: 341).
45 As Iida points out, for example, three other translators produced unexpurgated versions
of Lady Chatterley in the 1960s, 1970s, and then again in 1996. This last translation was
done by Itō Sei’s son, Itō Rei (Iida 1999: 234). Despite the 1950s US Supreme Court
guilty verdict, no legal action was taken against the subsequent translators or
publishers.
46 From Meiji through to 1945, even taking into account the brief but vigorous flour-
ishing of Taishō democracy, the Imperial government had consistently been an
authoritarian force that kept tight rein over cultural production, utilizing censorship
by administrative means and without means of appeal as one of its primary tools.
Such a high degree of regulation of cultural production by a central authority was, in
turn, the legacy of the Edo/Tokugawa period.
47 Kersten (1996: 269, 2). It is worth noting that Maruyama’s thought has heavily influ-
enced Japanese Studies in the US writing on the Occupation period; Rubin, Gluck
and Dower all use Maruyama’s readings of the early postwar period.
48 Not all present viewed the present state of Japanese democracy in such dim terms.
Oyama, for example, thought that the ‘postwar transformation’ had ‘given rise to
conditions suitable for the reception of Lady Chatterley ’ in Japan (Oyama 1982: 29).
49 Carol Gluck and John Dower also mention Maruyama’s essay in relation to the early
postwar decadent/kasutori/carnal literature boom.
50 See Dower (1999: 272–3).
208 Ann Sherif
References
Main texts
Itō Sei (1958) Saiban (The Trial), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō (references in the text are given as
Saiban ).
Lawrence, D.H. (1993) Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New York: Random House/Modern Library
(references in the text are given as Lady Chatterley).
Other references
Allison, Anne (1996) Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics and Censorship in Japan,
Barshay, Andrew (1992) ‘Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on
Maruyama Masao and Modernism’, Journal of Japanese Studies 18(2): 365–406.
Beer, Lawrence Ward (1984) Freedom of Expression in Japan: A Study in Comparative Law, Politics,
and Society, New York: Kodansha International.
Berry, Elizabeth (1998) ‘Public Life in Authoritarian Japan’, Daedalus 127(3): 133–65.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press.
Boyer, Paul (1968) Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America,
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Brannon, Julie Sloan (2003) Who Reads Ulysses? The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common
Reader, New York: Routledge.
Braw, Monica (1991) The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan,
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Burstyn, Varda (ed.) (1985) Women Against Censorship, Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre.
Chartier, Roger (1989) ‘Texts, Printing, Readings’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural
History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 154–75.
Coetzee, J.M. (1996) Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cornell, Drucilla (2000) Feminism and Pornography, New York: Oxford University Press.
Cossman, Brenda et al. (1997) Bad Attitude/s on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler
Decision, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dantō Shigemitsu (1957) ‘Chatarei saiban no hihan’ (Criticism of the Chatterley Trial),
Chūō kōron 72 (8): 45–56.
Dower, John (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W.W.
Norton.
Ellis, Richard (1988) ‘Disseminating Desire: Grove Press and “The End[s] of Obscenity”’,
in Gary Day and Clive Bloom (eds) Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Litera-
ture, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Fernihough, Anne (ed.) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence, New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Hunt, Lynn (2000) ‘Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800’, in Drucilla
Cornell (ed.) Feminism and Pornography, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 355–80.
Iida Takeo (ed.) (1999) The Reception of D.H. Lawrence Around the World, Fukuoka: Kyushu
University Press.
Itō Rei (1985) Funtōno shōgai: Itō Sei-shi (A Life of Struggle: Itō Sei), Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Keene, Donald (1984) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era Fiction, New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Kerkham, H. Eleanor (2001) ‘Pleading for the Body: Tamura Taijirō’s 1947 Korean
Comfort Woman Story, Biography of a Prostitute’, in Marlene J. Mayo and J. Thomas
Rimer with Eleanor Kerkham (eds) War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia
1920–1960, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Kersten, Rikki (1996) Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy,
New York: Routledge.
Kockum, Keiko (1984) Ito¯ Sei: Self-Analysis and the Modern Japanese Novel, Stockholm: University
of Stockholm Press.
Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshō (1995) ‘Itō Sei to Nihon no modanizumu’ (Itō Sei
and Japanese Modernism) (1995) Special issue of Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshō 60
(11).
Kōno Kensuke (1992) Shomotsu no kindai: media no bungakushi (The Modernity of the Book: A
Literary History of the Media), Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
Lawrence, D.H. (1959) ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Harry T. Moore (ed.) Sex,
Literature, and Censorship: Essays, New York: Viking Press.
Levenson, Michael (ed.) (1999) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Maeda Ai (2001) Kindai dokusha no seiritsu (The Birth of the Modern Reader), Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten.
Maruyama Masao (1957) ‘Nikutai bungaku kara nikutai seiji made’ (From Carnal Litera-
ture to Carnal Politics), in Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō (Modern Political Thought and
Behavior), vol. 2, Tokyo: Miraisha.
——(1963) ‘From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics’, trans. Barbara Ruch, in Ivan
Morris (ed.) Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, pp. 268–89.
McDonald, Peter D. (2003) ‘Modernist Publishing: Nomads and Mapmakers’, in David
Bradshaw (ed.) A Concise Companion to Modernism, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Molasky, Michael (1999) The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory,
New York: Routledge.
Moore, Harry T. (1959a) ‘D.H. Lawrence and the “Censor-Morons”’, in Harry T. Moore
(ed.) Sex, Literature, and Censorship: Essays, New York: Viking Press, pp. 9–30.
——(ed.) (1959b) Sex, Literature, and Censorship: Essays, New York: Viking Press.
Oyama, Hisajirō (1982) Hitotsu no jidai: Oyama Shoten shishi (One Era: A Private History of
Oyama Shoten), Tokyo: Rokko shuppan.
Pease, Allison (2000) Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Poplawski, Paul (ed.) (2001) Writing the Body in D.H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representa-
tion, and Sexuality, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Rainey, Lawrence (1999) ‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism’, in Michael Levenson (ed.)
The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–62.
Rolph, C.H. (ed.) (1990) The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited, New
York: Penguin Books.
Rubin, Jay (1984) Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
——(1985) ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the
Allied Occupation’, Journal of Japanese Studies 1(1): 71–103.
——(1988) ‘The Impact of the Occupation on Literature or Lady Chatterley and Lt. Col.
Verness’, in Thomas W. Burkman (ed.) The Occupation of Japan: Arts and Culture: The
Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Sponsored by The MacArthur Memorial, Norfolk, VA: General
Douglas MacArthur Foundation, pp. 167–88.
Saunders, David (1992) ‘Victorian Obscenity Law: Negative Censorship or Positive
Administration?’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (eds) Writing and Censorship in
Britain, New York: Routledge.
210 Ann Sherif
Screech, Timon (1999) Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan: 1700–1820, Honolulu:
Suga Hidemi (1988) ‘Yokuatsu no sochi ni tsuite: Chatarei saiban’ (The Apparatus of
Oppression: the Chatterley Trial), Shinchō (12): 180–3.
Thomas, Julia (2001) Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology,
Thompson, Sarah E. and Harootunian H.D. (1991) Undercurrents in the Floating World:
Censorship and Japanese Prints, New York: Asia Society.
Williams, Linda (1989) Hard-Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, Berkeley, CA:
Zuschlag, Christoph (1997) ‘Censorship in the Visual Arts in Nazi Germany’, in Elizabeth
C. Childs (ed.) Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, Seattle: University of
Washington Press, pp. 210–34.
Further reading
Clor, Harry M. (1969) Obscenity and Public Morality: Censorship in a Liberal Society, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, New York: Random
House.
Hunt, Lynn (1993) ‘Introduction’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity
and the Origins of Modernity, New York: Zone Books.
Hyland, Paul and Sammells, Neil (eds) (1992) Writing and Censorship in Britain, New York:
Routledge.
Nixon, Cornelia (1986) Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women, Berkeley, CA:
11 The way of the survivor
Conversion and inversion in Ōe
Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes
David C. Stahl
In contemporary societies, identities and ideologies are constructed and recon-

structed out of race, culture and history (Dower 1999: 558). How this is done,
especially following major armed conflict, has significant ramifications for
responsibility, atonement and nationalism. After Japan’s humiliating defeat in the
Asia Pacific War, a master narrative of national victimization exemplified by the
nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was formed, one that forestalled
confrontation with collective war responsibility. By means of this formulation, the
particular identity and victimhood of hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, were symbol-
ically appropriated for and attributed to the Japanese populace as a whole. In
Hiroshima nōto (Hiroshima Notes, 1965 [1981]),1 Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935) under-
mines this problematic conflation of national Self and Hiroshima Other, and
moves to replace it with a counternarrative urging the deliberate conversion of
the compromised former to the more authentic ways of life pioneered by the
latter (Kikuchi 1979: 102).2
Ōe’s reconstitution of postwar identity vis-à-vis hibakusha is closely intertwined
with critique of Japanese wartime and postwar ideology and politics. Through
inversion and decentering, he imaginatively reconstructs viable Hiroshima-based
alternatives (Ōe 1981b: 113–4, 121–3; Isogai 1985: 140–2). Leading up to and
during the war, absolute power and authority were concentrated in Tokyo, the
geographical center of Japan, and incarnated in the emperor, who was situated
at the top of the spiritual, ethical and political hierarchy. According to the
¯ , or ‘emperor system,’ everything of importance and value symbolically
te n no sei
centered on and radiated from the sovereign, while his subjects’ role was the
upholding of this structure. In Hiroshima Notes, Ōe presents the peripheral city
of Hiroshima as the legitimate postwar locus for serious consideration of issues
long neglected by the central government. By basing his reconfigured hierarchy
on humanism and ethics as opposed to political, military and economic power,
he effectively inverts the tennosei
¯ hierarchy so that hibakusha, the ultimate domestic
victims of imperial ideology and authority, rise to the top, and the emperor sinks
to the bottom. Before turning attention to these and related matters, it will be
useful to contextualize Ōe’s ambitious ethical project by considering the postwar
myth of collective victimization.
212 David Stahl
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and national victimization
According to John Dower, ‘the preoccupation with regards to their own misery
that led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others helps
illuminate the ways in which victim consciousness colors the identities that all
groups and peoples construct for themselves’ (1999: 29–30). Following total
defeat and unconditional surrender, Japanese people naturally dwelled upon the
hardships and losses they suffered when war ‘came home’ in the form of indis-
criminate incendiary bombings on major cities throughout the country and
nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In time, the latter came to be
recalled in collective terms:
More than battlefield casualties or the civilian deaths caused by conventional

strategic bombing, these two cataclysmic moments of nuclear destruction
solidified the Japanese sense of uniquely terrible victimization. The atomic
bombs became the symbol for a special sort of suffering – much like the
Holocaust for the Jews.
(Dower 1996: 66)
The foundation for the victimization narrative was put in place in Emperor
Hirohito’s historic 15 August 1945 radio broadcast announcing acceptance of the
terms of the Potsdam Declaration: ‘The enemy has begun to employ a new and
most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking
the toll of many innocent lives’ (Orr 2001: 39). And the successful political
campaign to exonerate the emperor of war responsibility by scapegoating
prominent military leaders such as Tōjō Hideki contributed substantially to the rise
of higaisha ishiki (victim consciousness). If a small group of ‘gangster militarists’
were to blame for the national failure and disgrace, then the emperor and his
loyal subjects had clearly been deceived, misled and betrayed by them (Dower
1999: 281). And ‘[f]rom this perspective, the people as a whole, and not just their
“departed heroes,” were war victims’ (ibid.: 490).
Nearly a decade would pass, however, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
fully incorporated into the myth of national victimization. It wasn’t really until
the Lucky Dragon Incident (1954)3 that Japanese people began to ‘remember’
these cities and identify themselves closely with hibakusha. As Orr explains: ‘by
the end of the Occupation many . . . began to integrate the Hiroshima experi-
ence into their own identity as Japanese . . . Radioactive fallout from the Bikini
tests helped all Japanese to experience the Hiroshima A-bomb victimhood as
their own’ (2001: 65). This self-serving conflation of collective Self and
Hiroshima Other was given direct expression in the Suginami Appeal, the mani-
festo of the nation-wide ban-the-bomb movement that emerged in the wake of the
Lucky Dragon Incident: ‘Now we, the Japanese people . . . have suffered for the
third time the egregious affliction of nuclear bombs’ (ibid.: 52).
As Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and hibakusha became integral to the victimization
narrative in general, and the burgeoning pacifist movement in particular, they
were progressively reified and transformed into icons of exceptional suffering
Ōe Kenzaburō: The Way of the Survivor 213
and victimization. Once abstracted (and depersonalized), they easily became objects
of political manipulation and contention. By the time Ōe arrived in Hiroshima
to report on the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in
1963, it was painfully obvious that political maneuvering would result in a major
split in the ban-the-bomb movement (ibid.: 60–3).
But Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained central to postwar ideology and
collective identity:
Japan’s unique experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave the Japanese

an exclusive and seductive claim to leadership of the world antinuclear
weapon movement. Although Gensuikyō , the organizational center of the
ban-the-bomb movement, was divided by political factionalism, all parties
spoke of nuclear weapons with a sense of mission based on shared atomic
victimhood. Cabinet ministers routinely declared Japan to be the ‘only
country in the world to have suffered an atomic bombing (sekai yuiitsu no
hibakukoku)’.
(ibid.: 36–7)
What is most striking and disturbing in all this is the virtual disappearance of A-
bomb survivors themselves. If hibakusha figure at all in such politicized discourses,
they do so more as appropriated symbolic objects than individualized human
subjects. And conspicuously absent from these partial formulations were not only
hibakusha, but also their perspectives on their experience of the bomb, how they
dealt with it and what they managed to make of it as they struggled to survive its
insidious after-effects. It is precisely to such neglected subjects that Ōe Kenzaburō
directs attention in Hiroshima Notes.
Hiroshima ‘outsiders’, Hiroshima ‘insiders’
Ōe himself was in the midst of a personal crisis when he accepted a request from
the literary journal Sekai to travel to Hiroshima to report on the Ninth World
Conference. His son, Hikari, had been born with a serious brain abnormality,
and Ōe had to decide whether to proceed with a risky operation that would leave
him severely handicapped at best. To make matters worse, his editor and trav-
eling companion Yasue Ryōsuke had recently suffered the loss of his daughter,
and both men had just learned that a mutual friend living in Paris had hung
himself after becoming obsessed with the prospect of a global nuclear conflict
that would destroy the world. This, combined with the anticipated disintegration
of the anti-nuclear peace movement, left Ōe profoundly devitalized, depressed
and melancholy (yūutsu ). After a week in Hiroshima, however, he encountered
sources of hope and inspiration. The key to recovery and renewal was direct,
personal interactions with A-bomb survivors.4
Ōe takes pains to maintain a clear distinction between himself and hibakusha.
In the ‘Prologue’ to Hiroshima Notes, he introduces a letter he received from
Matsusaka Yoshitaka:
214 David Stahl
People in Hiroshima prefer to remain silent until they face death. They want
to have their own life and death . . . Almost all thinkers and writers have said
that it is not good for the A-bomb survivors to remain silent; they encourage
us to speak out. I detest those who fail to appreciate our feelings about
silence . . . It is only natural, I think, that the anti-war people who spend only
one day in Hiroshima on August 6 do not understand the survivors’ feelings.
(pp. 4–5;19–20)5
Ōe’s Hiroshima essays were being serialized at the time he received this letter,
and he realized that he himself was the primary target of Matsusaka’s anger and
frustration. Nonetheless, Ōe is quick to acknowledge the legitimacy of this
Hiroshima ‘insider’s’ critique of himself as a Hiroshima ‘outsider’.
Ōe intentionally avoided conflating himself with hibakusha. His primary
concern was with intersubjectivity, with what they could teach him (and by
extension other ‘outsiders’) about himself, his values and how he could live
more genuinely and positively in the nuclear age, and what he could do to
help assuage their suffering, contribute to their causes, and make their experi-
ence meaningful. Through close, interpersonal relations, he sought not only to
become more critically self-aware, but also to reform himself by scrutinizing his
own image as reflected in the ‘mirror’ of his Hiroshima Other:
I was deeply impressed by the truly human way of life and thinking of the
people of Hiroshima, and I was directly encouraged by them. In contrast,
I experienced only pain upon exposing the roots of decadence and seeds
of neurosis growing deep within me from my relationship with my son in
the incubator. Thus it was that I came to want to employ Hiroshima and
the truly human people who lived there as files (yasuri) to work on my
inner hardness . . . I aspired to refine and reconsider my own thinking,
sensibilities and morality by employing Hiroshima as both file and lens.
(Ōe 1965: 3)
The significance of this deliberate repositioning and reconsideration of Self

vis-à-vis Hiroshima Other is best understood in terms of conversion. This, in
fact, is exactly how Ōe characterized his experience in the 1995 ‘Introduction’
to the English translation:
By the end of my first week in Hiroshima . . . my attitude toward my

personal life had been fundamentally changed. The Hiroshima experience
also completely altered my literary work. So in a single week a decisive turn-
about took place in my life – eschewing all religious connotations, I would
call it a conversion.
(p. 8)
Toward the end of Hiroshima Notes, Ōe leaves little doubt that this reorientation
had significant implications for identity: ‘By taking Hiroshima as the fundamental
focus of my thought, I want to confirm that I am, above all, a Japanese writer’
(pp. 182; 180).
Hibakusha experience and meaning

Ōe approaches hibakusha experience primarily in terms of profound, ongoing
suffering, silence and expression, despair and suicide, and survival and activism.
The first of these aspects has not been adequately appreciated. Hiroshima
‘outsiders’ have been reluctant to face the cost, in human terms, of the use of
atomic weapons. Fascination, even thralldom, with their incomprehensible power
has greatly inhibited realization of the full extent of the suffering they inflict. Ōe
repeatedly returns to the fact that Hiroshima ‘insiders’ stress that people should
not think of atomic bombs in an awed, detached and technical manner, but
instead do so in terms of human misery. In the words of hibakusha poet Shoda
Shinoe: ‘The atomic bomb is known to all the world, but only for its power. It still
is not known what hell the Hiroshima people went through, nor how they
continue to suffer from radiation illnesses even today, nineteen years after the
bombing’ (pp. 168; 166).
To enable a better sense of the existential experience of A-bomb survivors, Ōe
introduces a brief but poignant note composed by Miyamoto Sadao shortly
before his death: ‘I appeal from Hiroshima, where mankind experienced the atomic
bomb for the first time, for even today many people are suffering from leukemia,
anemia, and liver disorders; and they are struggling toward a miserable death’
(pp. 51; 62). Ōe interprets the last part of Miyamoto’s statement as follows: ‘this
does not mean to struggle in order to die, or to try to keep from dying or even to
struggle to gain new life; it means to struggle along the way toward a miserable
death, or until meeting a miserable death’ (pp. 87; 95).
Once hibakusha develop symptoms of radiation sickness, they face a terrible
decision. As Matsusaka explains:
I’m not sure which is the better means for hibakusha to regain their
humanity: doing everything they can to stay alive until the after-effects of
the atomic bomb finally end their lives or cleanly taking their own lives
like Haraguchi [Kikuya] and [another important survivor-writer] Hara
Tamiki.
(p. 8)
Ōe asserts that Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ have no right to judge those who would follow
the latter course. After describing how a young woman killed herself after seeing
‘myeloid leukemia’ written on her hospital chart, he states that: ‘None of us survivors
can morally blame her. We have only the freedom to remember the existence of
“people who do not kill themselves in spite of their misery”’ (pp. 76; 84).
Ōe is understanding of, and sympathetic toward, those who would act to bring
an end to their extraordinary suffering, but he is most strongly drawn to hibakusha
who find ways of carrying on proactively. What he finds so impressive and
216 David Stahl
inspiring is that, even after being subjected to one of the cruelest, most dehu-
manizing experiences in human history, they do not succumb to ‘victim
consciousness’. According to Ōe, the crucial factor in this regard is their
determination to make their traumatic experience meaningful (Lifton 1996:
176–7). Despite Matsusaka’s legitimate assertion concerning A-bomb
survivors’ fundamental right to silence, one cannot help but notice that it is by
breaking silence himself that he is able to effectively convey the feelings of fellow
hibakusha and, in so doing, perhaps also give significance to his own A-bomb
experience.
Held in Hiroshima in 1955, the First World Conference against Atomic and
Hydrogen Bombs gave hibakusha an important opportunity for public expression.
For Murato Yoshiko, it was a major turning point in her life. Exposed to the
atomic blast as a child, she was left with unsightly keloid scars on her face. Like
other ‘Hiroshima Maidens’, she stayed at home to conceal her disfigurement.
The discovery that there were others who suffered as she did, however, enabled
her to overcome her own shame and misery:
After the long, dark, and silent days of intense, isolated, individual suffering,
the First World Conference gave the people in Hiroshima their first chance
to speak out, and with each other. How often I heard them refer to it as ‘an
epoch-making event’. That conference not only gave direction to the peace
movement in Japan and in the world; it also gave the A-bomb survivors an
opportunity to regain their humanity . . . [it] occasioned a human revolution
among [them].
(pp. 161; 159)
Ōe characterizes Murato as a ‘typical unsurrendered hibakusha’, and he goes on to

describe her experience specifically in terms of conversion:
Grasping the opportunity afforded by the First World Conference, Miss

Murato recovered from the neurotic condition which had made her turn
toward the past and live in absolute privacy; she became capable of dealing
with the present and the future . . . The disfigured young girls who endured
the hot sun as they stood on the platform at the world conference, we must
realize, were persons who had experienced a conversion (kaishin) that made it
possible for them to admit openly their condition . . . Miss Murato spoke of
the peace movement participants’ wish that ‘other people not be made to taste
the same suffering’ as had the A-bomb maidens and other A-bomb
survivors.
(pp. 161–2; 160)
After discussing the varied responses of young women disfigured by keloid scar-
ring (seclusion, retaliatory wishes), Ōe reveals the inner dynamics of this self-
transformation: ‘They are people who take the misery inflicted upon them by the
atomic bomb and convert it from a passive into an active force; they use their
shame and humiliation as weapons in the movement against nuclear arms’ (pp.
100; 106).
A similar process was at work in the conduct of Miyamoto Sadao. When Ōe
first traveled to Hiroshima in the summer of 1963, he watched Miyamoto
emerge from the main entrance of the A-bomb Hospital to greet and encourage
peace marchers. In a ‘mosquito-like voice’, with head held high and straight ‘like
an Awa doll’ he made a simple statement: ‘I believe the Ninth World Conference
will be a success’ (pp. 24; 37). By the time Ōe returned the following summer,
Miyamoto had died of ‘general prostration’. Ōe reflects that:
Perhaps this small, zealous patient, at risk to his own already endangered life,
had chosen to contribute to the anti-nuclear movement by speaking a few
encouraging words; and thus he possibly hoped to cast away fear of his
impending death and the anxiety that his life would end meaninglessly on a
hospital bed.
(pp. 49; 60)
Ōe subsequently elaborates on the significance and broader implications of

Miyamoto’s willingness to expend the last of his vital resources contributing to the
ban-the-bomb movement:
He dared to remember history’s worst human misery, and he wrote down his
reflections on it . . . Rather than escape Hiroshima, he accepted it. For
whose sake? For the sake of all other human beings, for all who would
remain after he met his own miserable death. His passion stemmed from his
frank recognition that his own death was inevitable . . . If survivors would
overcome their fear of death, they too must see some way of giving meaning
to their own deaths. Thus, the dead can survive as part of the lives of those
who still live.
(pp. 105–6; 111)
Ethics, dignity and responsibility

Ōe was deeply impressed, inspired and encouraged by hibakusha who coped with
their suffering and misery by working for the benefit of others. He believed that
such exemplary Hiroshima ‘insiders’ were living repositories of the genuine
humanism, ethics and responsibility woefully lacking in the populace and
country as a whole. Ōe treats hibakusha not as abstracted symbols of collective
victimization, but as positive, individualized role models for the nuclear age. This
can be seen in his comments about Moritaki Ichirō, representative director of the
Hiroshima Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and leader of the
national organization of A-bomb survivors. Ōe characterizes Moritaki as an ‘old
philosopher’ who, in the words of his wife, ‘simply devoted himself to the anti-
nuclear movement and to the association of A-bomb survivors because . . . [he]
thinks that to do so is the moral imperative of our time’ (pp. 40; 53). He adds
that ‘There are those, then, who try to deal with these crucial problems in moral
218 David Stahl
terms; and I find it most inspiring that those who do so are among the true
Hiroshima people’ (pp. 55: 66).
John Treat has correctly drawn attention to the fact that the ‘ideas contained
in [Hiroshima] Notes, while uniquely Ōe’s own, are phrased in a lexicon rather
starkly and conspicuously existentialist in character’ (Treat 1995: 231). This
important aspect of Ōe’s work is readily apparent in his portrayal of an elderly
woman involved in the Hiroshima Mother’s Group, and Dr Shigetō Fumio, director
of both the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital and A-bomb Hospital. After
describing the former as one who ‘speaks her mind boldly’, he characterizes her
as follows:
Now, this old woman has no connection whatsoever with any authoritarian
belief or value system. She is a stubborn, independent-minded person who
bases her judgments on what she sees with her own eyes and hears with her
own ears. She has no use for dogmatic or conventional ideas; she has seen
too many people struggle to overcome difficulties which established ideas
and norms could not have solved anyway.
(pp. 73; 82)
His comments concerning Dr Shigetō are in a similar vein: ‘He strives to do his
best, but he does not appeal to or rely on external authority’ (pp. 94; 101).
Like other A-bomb survivors, Dr Shigetō and the elderly activist in the
Hiroshima Mother’s Group experienced the breakdown of external physical and
internal symbolic worlds that abruptly placed them in a state of extremity from
which they had to rebuild starting from ‘ground zero’. To Ōe, they did so in such
immediate, concrete and personal ways that they became paragons of postwar
humanism and morality:
In talking with A-bomb survivors . . . and hearing about what they have
been through and how they feel about things now, I have come to realize
that they, one and all, possess unique powers of observation and expression
concerning what it means to be human. I have noticed that they understand
in very concrete ways such words as courage, hope, sincerity, and even
‘miserable death’. The way they use these terms makes them what in
Japanese has traditionally been called ‘interpreters of human nature’, and
what today would translate as ‘moralists’. The reason they became moralists
is that they experienced the cruelest days in human history and have
endured nineteen years since.
(pp. 70; 78)
Consideration of Ōe’s treatment of particular hibakusha groups and individuals

facilitates understanding of why he would approach Hiroshima ‘insiders’ in this
way. The doctors’ immediate response to the nuclear catastrophe is a good case
in point. Their first thoughts upon realizing that they had survived themselves
were of others:
A handful of doctors, some of them injured and all surrounded by a city full
of casualties, had the brute courage to care for over a hundred thousand
injured people with only oil and mercurochrome. The very recklessness of
the doctors’ courage was the first sign of hope in Hiroshima.
(pp. 121; 124–5)
Ōe portrays Miyamoto Sadao and young hibakusha mothers in a similar light.
These individuals simply refused to allow their lives to be completely circum-
scribed by their exposure to the bomb. Eschewing the role of victim – the
adoption of which would have been completely reasonable and understandable
given the circumstances – they had the stoic fortitude to affirm themselves and
actively seek to shape their own destinies (pp. 171; 169). As previously
mentioned, Miyamoto Sadao dared to hope that the anti-nuclear movement
would succeed, and he sought to contribute to it in his own modest way.
Recalling his description, ‘people who go on struggling toward a miserable
death’, Ōe writes:
As I understand it, Mr. Miyamoto left this phrase with the strongest sense of
humanism, for he did not himself lose courage even while struggling for
nothing more than to give meaning to the time until his own death came. It
is just this understanding that the existentialists first made clear. In this sense,
Mr. Miyamoto is representative of the moralists of Hiroshima.
(pp. 87; 95–6)
The young mothers Ōe writes about were similar to Miyamoto in this regard.
They dared hope that, despite irradiation, they might still be blessed with normal
children. Ōe recounts the stories of two Hiroshima mothers who suffered oppo-
site experiences. The first, exposed to the bomb as an infant, was symptom-free
until diagnosed with leukemia about the time of her eighteenth birthday.
Despite her serious illness, she fell in love, married and tried to have a baby. In
the end, however, she died during delivery. Ōe is deeply impressed by this young
woman’s way of living: ‘I think such courage in the face of desperate anxiety
may be called truly human; it shows both human weakness and human strength.
I pray that this mother’s new baby will grow up healthy as a sign of true hope’ (pp.
47: 58).
While the other young hibakusha mother Ōe introduces survived delivery, her
baby did not. Upon being informed that her child was stillborn, she asked if she
could see it. When permission was denied, she lamented: ‘If only I could see my
baby, I would have courage’ (pp. 74: 83). Ōe is shocked and moved by this young
mother’s utterance:
I was astonished by the word ‘courage’ in her otherwise grief-stricken and

hopeless statement. The word belongs among those which have been given a
new depth of meaning by the existentialists. The hospital policy of not
showing deformed stillborn babies to their mothers is certainly humane.
Limits need to be maintained on what we are allowed to see so that we will
220 David Stahl
remain human. But if a mother wants to see her dead deformed child so as
to regain her own courage, she is attempting to live at the minimum limit
under which a human being can remain human. This may be interpreted as
a valiant expression of humanism beyond popular humanism – a new
humanism spouting from the misery of Hiroshima.
(pp. 74–5; 83)
The ‘new humanism’ Ōe writes about here demands the fortitude to squarely
face, acknowledge and accept the consequences, in excruciatingly human terms,
of the usage of nuclear arms. And the following question naturally comes to
mind: If the ultimate victims of such atrocious attacks have the strength and
courage to do so, how can Hiroshima ‘outsiders’, who in future could find them-
selves in similar straits, afford not to?
Ōe writes that dignity (igen) is the most important human quality he discovered
in Hiroshima (pp. 91; 98). This attribute, one shared by the hibakusha depicted
in Hiroshima Notes , stems from refusal to submit to despair or self-pity, taking
personal responsibility for their lives and acting in such a way as to make their
terrible suffering and losses meaningful. It is the product, in short, of a conscious
decision not to take on the role of passive victim or to blame others, but to live as
fully and productively as humanly possible:
People who continue to live in Hiroshima, instead of keeping silent or

forgetting about the extreme tragedy of human history, are trying to speak
out about it, study it and record it . . . Outsiders can hardly comprehend the
scope and intensity of the Hiroshima people’s feelings – including the
personal aversion to public exposure which they must conquer in order to
carry out this task . . . how modest and restrained they are in making their
testimony. It is by no means strange that all these Hiroshima people should
possess an unmistakable dignity. Only through lives like theirs do dignified
people emerge in our society.
(pp. 107–8; 112–3)
One clear indication of the presence of such dignity is the capacity to face and
openly interact with Hiroshima ‘outsiders’. As implied in the discussion of
‘Hiroshima Maidens’, this posed special difficulties for disfigured A-bomb
survivors. In order to appear calmly and confidently before people not directly
affected by the bomb, they had to accept their present condition and overcome
the intense shame they felt about it. For Ōe, dignity and shame are two sides of
the same coin. His handling of the experience of an elderly, disabled A-bomb
survivor who attempted to kill himself in front of the Memorial Cenotaph makes
this clear. Hoping that the stir caused by his public self-sacrifice would help
prevent the resumption of Soviet nuclear testing, he attempted, but failed to fully
carry through with, ritual suicide (seppuku). He was subsequently tormented by a
sense of failure and dishonor. His dignity, however, was substantiated by the
extent of his shame (pp. 98; 104):
[H]e surely had human dignity, despite his sense of failure. It is dignity
like this that captivates my mind. To put it bluntly, he was left with nothing
but human dignity. When I think of the old man’s failed suicide, his
ignored protest, his long time abed in the hospital, and then try to identify
what significance such a life had, the answer is clear: the value of his life
lay precisely in the human dignity that he achieved in his miserable old
age. Reduced to lying in a hospital bed with a big scar on his abdomen,
still he could face with dignity all people without keloid scars, that is to say,
all people everywhere who had no experience of the atomic bomb.
(pp. 92; 99)
The question Ōe implicitly asks here, of course, is: Can Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ do
the same for their hibakusha counterparts? Ōe subsequently addresses his readers
more directly: ‘How can we understand the sense of shame that the A-bomb
survivors feel about their experiences, without also being ashamed of ourselves?
What a frightening inversion (tentō) of feeling!’ (pp. 99; 105).
In preparation for turning to Ōe’s reconstruction of ideology and its implica-
tions for identity and action, it will be helpful to consider the crucial issue of
responsibility. His treatment of the experience and conduct of a young male A-
bomb survivor and a young woman from Tokyo reveals much about the
relationship between Hiroshima ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in this regard. When Ōe
revisited the A-bomb Hospital early in 1965, Dr Shigetō told him about a youth
who had recently died of leukemia. Much like the Hiroshima mother described
earlier, he had been exposed to the atom bomb as a child, but had not developed
symptoms of radiation sickness until coming of age. He, too, resolved to live out
the time remaining to him as positively and proactively as he could. He found a
job through the good offices of his doctors. He also fell in love and became
engaged. Before long, however, his symptoms worsened, he was rehospitalized,
and he died in agony.
Ōe reflects on this young man’s experience in terms of collective account-
ability:
Only a child of four when exposed to the atomic bomb, the youngster had
no responsibility for the war, nor could he have possibly comprehended the
sudden, vicious atomic attack. Yet, twenty years later, he bore the nation’s
responsibility in his own body. Even as a child of four he was a citizen of his
country; thus, he was embroiled in the tragic consequences of his country’s
worst decisions.
(pp. 153; 152)
These comments clearly suggest that while the young man in question did not
view himself as such, he could justifiably be considered a ‘pure victim’. Indeed,
his very innocence serves to accentuate Ōe’s conviction that responsibility is ulti-
mately a collective matter.
222 David Stahl
Ōe moves to bring this important point home through interpretation of the
actions of the young man’s fiancée:
[She] was a child of the postwar era of peace. Yet she chose, of her own
volition, to share the destiny of this young A-bomb survivor; and when
death took him, she tried to assume full responsibility for him by taking her
own life . . . By her action, this young girl overturned (gyakuten) the false
values of the nation – specifically, the betrayal of the powerless persons who
were sacrificed by the nation itself . . . She honored his death with the
dignity of her own, choosing a death so completely individual as to exclude
all trace of the nation that made her lover vulnerable when but a child to
atomic attack and in adulthood to fatal illness . . . Her feelings could have
been turned into bitter denunciation of us, the survivors and of our political
values and system. But the young girl left in silence, without recrimination,
as if to dismiss all charges against the world.
(pp. 153–4; 152–3)
The contrast between the conduct of this young woman and other Hiroshima
‘outsiders’ willing to symbolically appropriate hibakusha identity and victimhood
in order to evade honest confrontation with issues of individual and collective
war responsibility could hardly be more glaring. Conspicuous in Ōe’s ethical
reading of this young woman’s behavior is indictment not only of the nation as a
whole, but also of ‘us, the survivors’ and ‘our political values and system’. And it
is telling that he writes about her behavior in terms of ‘inverting’ distorted
national and political values and structures; this is precisely what Ōe himself
subtly does in Hiroshima Notes.
The way of the survivor

As Ōe was making his annual trips to Hiroshima between 1963–65, it must have
seemed that there was a high probability that atomic weapons would again be
used. He consequently sought to intervene and redirect his nation and people
by impressing upon them the unconscionable human cost of nuclear arms, and by
positing an alternative national ideology centered on Hiroshima. In contrast to
the explicit wartime aim of forcibly bringing the ‘eight corners of the world’
around to the particularistic Imperial Way (hakkōichiu ), the primary goal of Ōe’s
ideological campaign was to encourage people of themselves to take up the
universalistic ‘Way of the Survivor’.
According to Ōe, the most appropriate locus for the crusade against nuclear
arms was not the Imperial Palace or Diet Building in Tokyo, but the A-bomb and
Red Cross Hospitals in Hiroshima containing the ‘core of human misery’ the
first use of such weapons had produced. And the legitimate leaders of this new
postwar cause were not the emperor, neo-nationalist politicians or Self-Defense
Force officers, but dedicated Japanese citizens working at the local, grass-roots
level. Ōe implicitly places Dr Shigetō Fumio, and Chūgoku shinbun editorial writer
and activist Kanai Toshihiro, at the top of this reconfigured hierarchy based on
humanism, ethics and responsibility.
Ōe describes Dr Shigetō as a ‘big-hearted man of action with simple, peasant-
like features and a deep, frank voice’ (pp. 32; 45). He is ‘unadorned’, ‘unpretentious’,
a ‘genuine humanist’, and a man of great dignity (pp. 94; 101). What makes this
physician such an exemplary human being is his humanitarianism, ethics and
sense of personal responsibility. He arrived in Hiroshima to take up his position
as director of the Red Cross Hospital just days before the nuclear attack. He was
near the Hiroshima Railroad Station when the atomic bomb exploded, and he
was knocked to the ground and wounded. After struggling to his feet, he rushed
to the Red Cross Hospital, where he immediately began to coordinate and take
part in the relief effort. This experience ‘linked him to Hiroshima for life and
made him a genuine Hiroshima man’ (pp. 125; 128).
In contrast to the emperor, Dr Shigetō took personal responsibility for Hiroshima
and its tens of thousands of sick and wounded citizens:
[He] took upon himself the misery of Hiroshima and has continued to do so
for twenty years . . . Dr Shigetō is, I think, typical of all the doctors of
Hiroshima who have met the misery head on and have continued to struggle
with it patiently. The battle, for Dr Shigetō, is not confined merely to the
field of medical care; it is concerned with every difficult aspect of human
society, including politics.
(pp.132-3; 134)
Dr. Shigetō had the courage and fortitude to squarely face and fathom the depths
of the human suffering he encountered without surrendering to despair. Perhaps
the most difficult realities to contend with were the insidious after-effects of the
atomic bomb. Ōe portrays Dr Shigetō as the representative leader of a grounded,
recentered movement against nuclear arms and a crusade against a formidable
new enemy: leukemia. With regard to the former, Ōe notes that Dr Shigetō rarely
spoke of politics. When he did, however, he did not equivocate: ‘we must adhere
strictly to our policy of not possessing, producing, or permitting the entry of
nuclear weapons. And we must oppose their possession by other countries’ (pp.
168; 167). This statement amounts to a manifesto. Spoken as it was by a funda-
mentally apolitical A-bomb survivor who knew at first-hand the full human cost
of nuclear weapons, it carries enormous moral weight.
Dr Shigetō also worked tirelessly on the frontlines of the battle against the
terrible after-effects of the bomb. While directing two major hospitals, treating
patients and working to reform the health care system to better serve his
patients’ needs, he also personally supervised and engaged in ongoing research
into radiation sickness. He was, in fact, one of the first to help establish the statis-
tical correlation between radiation exposure and the incidence of leukemia. Ōe
praises Dr Shigetō and his colleagues for their mental flexibility in discerning the
true nature of their deadly foe. The ‘imaginative freedom’ characteristic of these
exemplary Hiroshima doctors stands in stark contrast to the mentality of Japan’s
224 David Stahl
wartime leaders who, in John Dower’s words, became ‘prisoners of their own
war rhetoric . . . Long after it had become obvious that Japan was doomed, its
leaders all the way up to the emperor remained unable to contemplate surrender.
They were psychologically blocked, capable only of stumbling forward’ (1999: 22).
Dr Shigetō was unequalled in terms of accepting personal responsibility for
Hiroshima and its survivors and facing up to and contending with the human
miseries of atomic weapons without despairing or succumbing to ‘victim
consciousness’. In fact, Ōe refers to him as the ‘archetype of the authentic man’
(Ōe 1965: 147; 147). And the implications of his doing so should be clear; if Dr
Shigetō is the very incarnation of humane, moral, authentic living in the nuclear
age, then it is only natural and proper for others to follow his lead.
Ōe also draws special attention to an exceptional Hiroshima ‘outsider’
committed to championing hibakusha causes. Through his depiction of the activi-
ties of the impassioned editorial writer and activist Kanai Toshihiro, Ōe identifies the
concrete actions that follow from his inverted, recentered ideological construct. It
is significant in this connection that Ōe characterizes Kanai as a man with ‘the
bearing of a sober-minded, lower-ranking samurai at the time of the Meiji
Restoration of 1868’ (pp. 56; 66). Such samurai, or shishi, were loyalists committed
to toppling the Tokugawa Shogunate and restoring the emperor to the center of
politics and national identity. It was largely due to their efforts and sacrifices that
the Meiji ‘revolution’ occurred. By associating Kanai with these men who played
such a pivotal role at a major turning point in modern Japanese history, Ōe
suggests that he too was committed to reforming politics and society. The aim and
means of Kanai’s mission, however, were different from those of his early modern
counterparts. As with Dr Shigetō , hibakush a were the focal points of Kanai’s
concern, and ‘restoration’ for him meant repositioning them at the heart of the
anti-nuclear peace movement and postwar national thinking. Rather than
resorting to brute force of arms, moreover, he depended on the power of moral
persuasion.
At the conference of academics and other intellectuals held in Hiroshima in
the summer of 1964, Kanai proposed the compilation of a ‘White Paper’ on A-
bomb survivors and damage. The aims of the White Paper were to educate the
world about hibakusha experience survey their actual living conditions throughout
the country, and provide them with adequate medical care and financial assis-
tance. With regard to the first, he was intent on conveying ‘the moans of the
surviving sufferers and the voiceless voices of the dead victims’ to both his fellow
countrymen and the world (pp. 165; 163). Kanai elaborates on this point as
follows: ‘The fervent desire of the A-bomb survivors now is, on behalf of all the
dead and all survivors, to make sure that the peoples of the world fully under-
stand the nature and extent of human misery, not just the destructive capacity, of
an atomic bombing’ (pp. 57; 68).
It was Kanai’s conviction that the compilation of a White Paper would not
only enable the central government – and by extension Japanese people – to take
more responsibility, and thereby begin to atone for the war, but also reunite and
revitalize the national peace movement by recentering it on hibakusha, and on
their experience and concerns:
Clearly the government of Japan is controlled by the conservative party;

but, just as clearly, the government does not exist solely for the conservative
party. Let us try, therefore, to win both conservative and progressive support
in the Diet for a law that affords adequate relief to the A-bomb survivors;
and for that purpose, we must persuade the government of Japan – the first
and only country to suffer atomic bombings – to prepare a White Paper . . .
and make its contents known around the world through the agencies of the
United Nations. In the pursuit of these goals lies hidden the potential for a
nationwide peace movement, for an undivided peace movement.
(pp. 59; 70)
Ōe draws special attention to Kanai’s White Paper proposal and to Dr Shigetō’s
call for a comprehensive medical survey of all second-generation children born
in Hiroshima. He writes about both in terms of providing ‘common ground’,
centered on Hiroshima, around which Japanese at the local and national level
can come together in solidarity. This would open up distinct possibilities for alter-
native forms of nationalism. Ōe’s comments on China’s first successful nuclear
test serve to stake out this new territory:
Until only yesterday, a great nation that had recently acquired the power to
possess nuclear weapons, chose not to do so. So long as it could but did not, it
projected an image of a nation that could take the lead in producing new
political ideas and ideals in this nuclear age. But now, in October 1964, as I
write this note, the People’s Republic of China no longer has that valuable
image.
(pp. 90; 97)
It follows that being a country with the ability to possess nuclear arms which has
refrained from so doing, Japan has the opportunity to press forward where its great
neighbor failed.
In the last paragraph of ‘An Authentic Man’, Ōe outlines more explicitly the
central elements of his Hiroshima-based ideological construct and its ramifica-
tions for collective identity and direction:
[T]he atomic bombing of Hiroshima is a symbol of negation – a symbol

that negates the achievements of all present and future nuclear powers,
including China. As a negative symbol, it also has a positive significance for
the Japanese people: it signifies a new sense of nationalism that has emerged
from the dedicated twenty-year struggle to survive all that Hiroshima means.
And for me, the best representative of that symbol and that struggle is
precisely the ‘authentic man of Hiroshima’.
(pp. 147; 148)
226 David Stahl
Reconstituted identity, ideology and collective obligation
In Hiroshima Notes, Ōe draws attention to the existence of hibakusha who
consciously eschewed the role of passive victim, refused to submit to despair and
self-pity, took personal responsibility for their lives and took up survivor missions
aimed at sparing others the miserable experience to which they had been
subjected. In so doing, he suggests that rather than anxiously maneuvering to
conflate the individual and national Self with the discrete hibakusha Other,
Hiroshima ‘outsiders’ should deliberately undergo a conversion to the authenti-
cally humanistic, dignified, responsible and viable ‘Way of the Survivor’.
Certain duties and obligations naturally follow from Ōe’s Hiroshima and
hibakusha-based reconstruction of postwar ideology and identity. First, the people of
Japan have an outstanding moral obligation to A-bomb survivors and the dead to
thoroughly learn and act in accordance with the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(Ōe 1981: 10). Internalizing these lessons necessitates honest, painful remem-
bering, and confrontation with and working through of their terrible human truths.
Ōe was well aware of the psychological and emotional challenges this posed:
We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon

as possible . . . We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not
strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the
extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.
(pp. 102; 107–8)
While this tendency is understandable, people forget, deny, ignore, downplay and
avoid the human consequences of nuclear arms at their own – and future gener-
ations’ – grave peril.
In the opening passages of ‘On Human Dignity’, Ōe addresses this issue directly:
In this age of nuclear weapons, when their power gets more attention than the
misery they cause, and when human events increasingly revolve around their
production and proliferation, what must we Japanese try to remember? . . .
In such a time as this, I want to remember and keep on remembering, the
thoughts of the people of Hiroshima – the first people and the first place to
experience full force the world’s worst destructive capability. Hiroshima is
like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind. Like all wounds, this
one also poses two potential outcomes: the hope of human recovery and the
danger of fatal corruption. Unless we persevere in remembering the Hiroshima
experience . . . the faint signs of recovery emerging from this place and people
will begin to decay and real degeneration will set in.
(pp. 90–1; 97–8)
In ‘Other Journeys to Hiroshima’, Ōe introduces and builds upon Kanai’s views to
identify the obligations of contemporary Japanese people. Kanai takes his compa-
triots to task for not facing up to the realities of the Asia Pacific War in general,
or Hiroshima in particular. He suggests that the human misery caused by war is at
the very heart of contemporary human affairs. Japanese people, however, have done
everything they could to avoid it, a movement that initially led to a ‘doughnut-
shaped’ world-view. Subsequent economic growth and affluence added a vertical
dimension to this figure, which in time resulted in a ‘pyramid-shaped’ world-view.
According to Kanai, ‘the deep, dark cavern inside the pyramid . . . has never been
filled. The human misery of Hiroshima continues to exist there’ (pp. 164; 162).
Building on Kanai’s imagery, Ōe articulates the collective responsibilities of the
Japanese people as well as the important ethical implications they have to hibakusha:
The Japanese people, as a vital part of their evaluation of their own history
and morality, must accept the duty of filling the empty cavern within the
pyramid of their affluent consumer society. Unless we perform this duty, we
shall not be able to prevent desperate people from committing suicide as
their way of asserting there is no longer any hope or salvation.
(pp. 164; 162)
In Ōe’s view, the Japanese people have a solemn obligation to their hibakusha
Others to help them give meaning to their exceptional suffering and victimization.
As he forcefully asserts in ‘On Human Dignity’:
Hiroshima as a whole must exert all its energy to articulate the essential
intellectual grounds for abolishing all nuclear weapons in such a way that all
of the survivors’ dehumanizing experiences – the misery, the shame and
humiliation, the meanness and degradation – may be converted into things
of worth so that the human dignity of the A-bomb survivors may be
restored. All people with keloids and all without must together affirm this
effort. What other human means can there be for liberating the A-bomb
survivors from their tragic fear of a miserable death?
(pp. 100; 106)
Ōe leaves no doubt that as far as honestly facing the terrible human costs of
nuclear arms, accepting personal responsibility, and taking up redemptive survivor
missions is concerned, the Japanese people have excellent role models in the ‘moral-
ists of Hiroshima’. All they need to do is remember and listen to them honestly
and respectfully, and follow and help extend the paths toward recovery, atonement,
reconciliation and renewal they have heretofore pioneered largely on their
own.
At the end of Hiroshima Notes, Ōe considers the possibility that radioactive
fallout from nuclear war may alter our blood so radically that our very humanity
itself might be lost. In light of this horrifying prospect, he unequivocally states
that ‘it is no longer optional for us to be “comrades of the A-bomb survivors” . . .
Being their comrades [is] the only way we can remain true human beings’ (pp.
185; 183). The choice of whether or not to side with A-bomb survivors in the
interest of humanity, or with politicians, big business and the military in reinvigo-
rated quests for global domination, control and exploitation, is still before the
228 David Stahl
Japanese, and by extension other peoples, today, just as it was forty years ago
when Ōe first ventured to Hiroshima to report on the Ninth World Conference
against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. Regrettably, the situation in Japan (and
elsewhere) has changed little during the two decades and more that have passed
since Ōe wrote as follows in his Preface to the 1981 English edition of Hiroshima
Note s:
In its Constitution, Japan has declared to its own people and to the whole
world that it renounces war forever. Yet, today, in and around the ruling
government party, there are movements afoot to revise the Constitution so as
to permit rearmament, which could in time include nuclear arms. The crit-
ical moment of decision has arrived, when it will be possible to judge
whether the Japanese have emerged from the tragic experience of
‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nagasaki’ to become a new people who truly seek peace.
In writing these essays it was my hope – indeed my faith – that the Japanese
people who join the A-bomb survivors in pressing forward along the difficult
and distant road toward eradicating all nuclear arms will win out over
those Japanese who would revamp the Constitution and have our country
turn back along the road toward becoming once again a military super-
power. If the forces for peace do not win, then it will be clear that we
failed to learn the bitter lessons of that tragic experience. And that failure
would be a betrayal of those people who somehow maintained their
human dignity amidst the most dreadful conditions ever suffered by
humankind.
(p. 16)
Notes
1 Ōe’s Hiroshima essays were published serially between October 1963 and March 1965
in the literary journal Sekai (World). In June 1965, they were collected into a single
volume under the title Hiroshima nōto and published by Iwanami shinsho.
2 For a contrasting, existentialism-based interpretation of Ōe’s relationship to hibakusha,
see Treat (1995: 229–58).
3 The Lucky Dragon Incident refers to deadly accident in which the crew members and
catch of the Japanese tuna boat, Lucky Dragon 5, were inadvertently exposed to radioac-
tive fallout from a hydrogen bomb test conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll on
1 March 1954. The radio operator of the fishing vessel, Kuboyama Aikichi, died seven
months later from radiation sickness.
4 Ōe initially went to Hiroshima to cover the Ninth World Conference against Atomic and
Hydrogen Bombs, but he quickly became disgusted by the ‘odor of politics’ surrounding
the proceedings. He subsequently devoted most of his time and energy to meeting and
speaking with, and listening to A-bomb survivors.
5 The first set of page numbers reference the Japanese original used for this study, the
second set the English translation. For reasons that will become clear in the chapter,
when quoting directly from the latter, I have globally substituted the word ‘survivor’
for the word ‘victim’. In the absence of other indications, a single numerical reference
means that I have done my own translating. I hasten to add, however, that when this is
the case, I have done so with the benefit of comparisons with Swain and Yonezawa, to
whom I hereby acknowledge my indebtedness and express my gratitude.
References
Main texts
Ōe Kenzaburō (1965 [1970]) Hiroshima nōto (Hiroshima Notes), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho.
——(1981 [1995]) Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa, New York:
Grove Press.
Other references
Dower, John W. (1996) ‘Three Narratives of Our Humanity’, in Edward T. Linenthal and
Tom Engelhardt (eds) History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past,
New York: Henry Holt & Co., pp. 63–96.
——(1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: The New Press.
Isogai Hideo (1985) ‘Hiroshima nōto: sōzōryoku e no tabi’ (Hiroshima Notes: Journeys towards
the Imagination), Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 50(8): 138–42.
Kikuchi Masanori (1979) ‘Sōzōryoku ni okeru seiji: Hiroshima nōto, Okinawa nōto ochu ¯ shin ni’
(Politics in Imagination: Concerning Hiroshima Notes and Okinawa Notes), Kokubungaku 24(2):
102–9.
Lifton, Robert J. (1996) The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, Washington,
DC: American Psychiatric Press.
Ōe Kenzaburō (1981) ‘Kakujidai no Nihonjin to aidenteiteii’ (The Japanese and Identity
in the Nuclear Age), Sekai 422(1): 107–23.
Orr, James (2001) The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan,
Treat, John W. (1995) Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Further reading
Davis, Walter A. (2000) The Holocaust Memorial: A Play About Hiroshima, Bloomington,
IN: First Books.
——(2001) Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Dower, John W. (1996) ‘The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory’, in
Michael Hogan (ed.) Hiroshima in History and Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 116–42.
——(1997) ‘Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia’, in Laura Hein and
Mark Selden (eds) Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear
Age, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 37–51.
Ibuse Masuji (1966 [1969]) Kuroi ame (Black Rain), trans. John Bester, Tokyo and New
York: Kodansha International.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni (2000) Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture,
1945–1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lifton, Robert Jay (1968 [1991]) Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press.
Nagai Takashi (1949 [1984]) Nagasaki no kane (Bells of Nagasaki), trans. William Johnston,
Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Nornes, Abe Mark (1996) ‘The Body at the Center: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, in Mick Broderick (ed.) Hibakusha Cinema, London: Kegan
Paul International, pp. 120–59.
Yoneyama, Lisa (1999) Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, Berkeley,
12 Free to write
Confronting the present, and the
past, in Shiina Rinzō’s The Beautiful
Woman
Mark Williams
If his friend and eminent scholar Saitō Suehiro is to be believed, the author
Shiina Rinzō (1911–73) listened to the infamous imperial radio broadcast at noon
on 15 August 1945 (in which the Japanese Emperor committed Japan to accep-
tance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration) ‘with no deep sense of emotion’
(nan no kangai mo naku) (Saitō 1980: 254). In one sense, such a muted response need
not detain us for long: Shiina would certainly have found himself in considerable
company as he found himself too emotionally drained at the moment of defeat
to feel anything but total exhaustion, both physical and mental. And yet, closer
consideration of the details of Shiina’s war would suggest more to this than
meets the eye.
Even allowing for the fact that few emerged from the war in East Asia
unscathed, the preceding fifteen years had been particularly traumatic for Shiina.
Arrested at around the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in
September 1931 on suspicion of harbouring left-wing sympathies that were
deemed to be in violation of the notorious Peace Preservation Law of 1925,
Shiina endured months of torture before eventually succumbing to the pressure
to secure his release by signing a document of tenkō (political apostasy). There
followed years of mundane activity, closely controlled by the military police
detailed to ensure that none of the converts (tenkōsha) should contemplate any
form of recantation, during which time Shiina found himself obliged to eke out a
living engaged in a series of menial jobs secured for him by the authorities. At
the same time, as the fighting intensified and escalated into war in the Pacific in
the early 1940s, he was obliged to confront military reality – and on a couple of
occasions he received a call-up, only to evade the draft through self-induced
illness. By the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945, Shiina had abandoned all ideas of
continued menial employment and was seeking to establish himself as the
‘literary voice of the masses’.1
In all of this, Shiina’s sense of self-identity as a tenko¯sha is crucial. As he himself
admitted on numerous occasions, the stigma of having capitulated in the face of
physical torture and, in so doing, of having betrayed his colleagues in the
Communist Party was real. But, as Patricia Steinhoff has noted, for the vast majority
of the tenkōsha, the pressure to apostatise was as much psychological as it was
physical: the ‘elemental desire to live’ may have been an important determining
Shiina Rinzō: Free to Write 231
factor, but so too were the ‘emotional ties which drew the tenkōsha away from the
Party and its ideology [and linked] that person to Japanese society’ (1988: 88). At
the same time, Steinhoff reminds us that, for all too many of those tenkōsha who
subsequently turned to creative literature – and there were many – release from
the physical shackles did not lead to ‘immediate reintegration back into society’;
instead, all too frequently, ‘this type of tenkōsha was left even more isolated and
alone after his break with the Party’ (ibid.: 91).
In keeping with the vast majority of his fellow citizens, therefore, Shiina found
himself, in August 1945, confronting the uncertain future with considerable
apprehension and misgivings. At the same time, however, when viewed in the
context of his subsequent œuvre, in which references to the political temper of the
times are conspicuous by their absence, Shiina’s lack of any ‘deep sense of
emotion’ in the face of the tumultuous events of August 1945 leads one to question
what had become of the political activism that had led to his arrest in 1931.
From the outset in 1945, the US Occupation made much of its guarantees of
freedom of speech and thought. And reading Shiina’s literature of the period, we
are constantly reminded of the consequences of the war on the lives of the ‘ordi-
nary citizen’ (the term ‘heibon na kokumin’ is a constant refrain). But these same
works are characterized by a marked absence of consideration of the geopolitical
issues of the day. The questions of war responsibility, of the role of the Emperor
as orchestrator of events, the ‘Reverse Course’ policy implemented during the
second half of the Occupation era: Shiina’s texts of the period remain remark-
ably reticent on such topics. But how are we to account for the apparent lack of
engagement with the political upheavals of the day in his literature?
As we begin the search for an answer to this question, we would do well to recall
Edward Said’s portrayal of all texts as ‘protean things; they are tied to circum-
stances and to politics large and small, and these require attention and criticism’
(Said 1994: 385). Indeed, for all the considerable criticism and discussion of the
relevance of Said to Japan or to East Asia, it is difficult to escape the basic tenet
that no statement can be totally neutral; as Marlene Mayo suggests, ‘no art, however
pure, can be created or understood apart from the politics of its time. Conversely,
the real significance of those same politics, sometimes half-hidden, can often find
distinctive and revealing reflections in the arts’ (Mayo and Rimer 2001: 1).
During the course of the ensuing discussion, I shall be examining the extent
to which ‘the politics of [the] time’ are reflected in the art of Shiina, traditionally
cited as the representative writer of the Sengoha (après guerre) literary coterie. At the
same time, I shall be considering the extent to which ‘these same politics . . . find
distinctive and revealing reflections’ in the author’s art, even in those texts that
appear, prima facie, far divorced from the politics issues and debates of the day.
The primary focus to this end will be on the novel, Utsukushii onna (The Beautiful
Woman, 1955), the work with which Shiina’s reputation as a writer ‘of and for the
masses’ (Takadō 1989: 250) was finally acknowledged and for which he received
the prestigious Ministry of Education Prize for the Arts.
The novel was immediately hailed as a natural extension of the shishōsetsu (I-
novel) tradition, a fascinating subtext that illuminates Shiina’s life during his days
232 Mark Williams
as a railway employee, one that ‘hints at the paradoxical sense of optimism’ that
the author experienced in the midst of his mundane existence and that ‘sheds
light on his decision to seek Christian baptism’ in 1950 (Saitō 1980: 54ff).2 We
have, however, travelled a long way from the ‘purified I’ of the prewar tradition
(as discussed in the Introduction to this volume), and there is a concomitant need
to resist the autobiographical mode of reading that it typically engendered.
Instead, building on the approach adopted by Reiko Auestad (2002) in her
reading of the novel Goshaku no sake (Five Cups of Sake, 1947) by Shiina’s contem-
porary on the literary scene, Nakano Shigeharu, I shall be seeking to turn this
around – seeking to deploy Shiina’s life as a subtext that can cast light on the
novel. In so doing, in pursuing the ‘socially symbolic’3 and ideological dimension
of the text that goes beyond the author’s life, an attempt will be made to restore
to the surface of the text the repressed social and emotional reality surrounding
the historical events of the day. In short, instead of seeking to re-establish the ties
between author and his work, or of reconstituting Shiina’s thought and experi-
ence through a reading of his text, the focus here will be on the underlying
structures of the work and its context – on what Michel Foucault describes as the
‘architechtonic forms’ that underpin all works of narrative fiction (1977: 118).
In search of such ‘forms’, consideration must first be made of the three
discrete time periods encompassed by the novel. The text itself was written in the
early 1950s as the US Occupation was drawing to a close, and published in 1955.
At the same time, for all the dearth of specific political contextualisation, there
are nevertheless sufficient references to locate the narrative present of the text in
the five-year period between 1937 (the novel begins with reference to the ‘China
Incident’) and 1942 (towards the end, there is a solitary reference to the attack on
Pearl Harbor, following which the protagonist, Kimura, receives two military
summonses, both of which he succeeds in avoiding as a result of self-induced
fevers). Such specific incidents clearly suggest a link – a true shishōsetsu-style juxta-
position – between the specifics of the narrative and autobiographical detail from
Shiina’s own past. But the situation is further complicated by the fact that much
of the detail surrounding the portrayal of Kimura as an ‘ordinary’ (heibon na)
railway employee is drawn from the author’s own time spent as an employee of
Ujikawa Denki Densetsubu, a period that extended from June 1929 until his
arrest in 1931.4
Given the momentous nature of global events in the years between the auto-
biographical detail in question, the narrative present, and the time of
composition of The Beautiful Woman, a shishōsetsu-style reading of the novel would
seek to discern, at least in part, some evidence of the author’s evolving response
to the rise and fall of militarism in Japan of the 1930 and 1940s. Instead, what
initially strikes the reader is the seemingly deliberate effacement – by an appar-
ently manipulative narrator – of all references to the author’s personal response
and preferences with regard to burgeoning events and the controversies
surrounding them. With the exception of the one or two solitary references to
specific incidents as the war escalates, Kimura is portrayed as oblivious to the
world beyond his immediate purview, the narrative focus seemingly uniquely
concerned with the protagonist’s increasingly desperate attempts to preserve his
status as a ‘normal’ member of what the narrator insists on referring to as the
‘runpen puroru’ (lumpen proletariat). In the circumstances, one might well ask,
should we not read the novel for the richness of what is there, rather than for
what, if anything, has been excluded? It was, after all, this ‘uncomplicated plot’
and ‘simple style’ that was specifically commended by the Minister for Education
in his citation for the Prize: ‘In The Beautiful Woman’, he suggested, ‘Shiina
succeeds in portraying a model of an ordinary man, seeking to live with integrity
amid the transitions in the social climate, thereby creating a new image of the
individual in postwar literature’ (cited in Takadō 1989: 135).
The question is one to which Said was particularly attuned. To be sure, he
acknowledges, there can be no justification for a ‘reductive’ reading in which the
‘richness of the text’ is overlooked. But, as he continues, ‘it is a much graver
mistake to read [such texts] stripped of their affiliations with the facts of power
which informed and enabled them’ (Said 1994: 195). The war may, then, be
conspicuous by its absence from Shiina’s text; it remains, nevertheless, an
unstated theme throughout, an example of what Hijiya-Kirschnereit describes as
‘omission as unstated presence’ (Schlant and Rimer 1991: 24) – and, in keeping
with all his fellow citizens in the wake of defeat in 1945 and of the end of the US
Occupation of mainland Japan in 1952, Shiina was encumbered with consider-
able emotional and political baggage. Before moving on to a closer examination
of Shiina’s literary depiction of the ruins of postwar Japan, therefore, let us
briefly consider the power relationships at work within this topos, and the crucial
developments by which these were affected in the years between the narrative
present of the novel and the time of composition.
A unique experience of colonisation

The landscape with which all Japanese were confronted as the US Occupation
was formally concluded in 1952 was one born of a singular history of colonisa-
tion. On the one hand, for much of the preceding half century, Japan had acted
as instigator of colonial policies, most notably in Manchukuo, Korea and
Taiwan, that had only been brought to an end with defeat in 1945. At the same
time, during the ensuing period, Japan had been under the yoke of what John
Dower describes as a ‘neocolonial military dictatorship’ (1999: 81). The result
was a generation that, while conforming closely with Said’s template for those
subjected to colonial domination (they did, perforce, ‘bear their past within
them – as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as
potentially revised visions of the past tending towards a post-colonial future’
(Said 1994: 256), sought simultaneously to come to terms with its own history of
aggression on the East Asian mainland.
As Shiina’s early postwar fictions most graphically show, the years following
defeat in 1945 were, for many, largely devoted to the daily struggle for survival
amongst the ruins of Occupation Japan. At the same time, there was no escaping
the constant reminders of Japan’s newfound status as occupied nation. There
234 Mark Williams
was, as Dower reminds us, ‘no historical precedent for this sort of relationship’;
Japan was experiencing the ‘last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known
as the “white man’s burden”’ (1999: 23). And yet, once installed in Japan, the
Occupation forces ‘set about doing what no other occupation force had done
before: remaking the political, social, cultural, and economic fabric of a defeated
nation and in the process changing the very way of thinking of its populace’
(ibid.: 78).
For all this, as Dower is quick to caution, the Occupation represented a
unique, lived Japanese experience, one that involved not merely reconstructing
the physical infrastructure of the ruined nation, but ‘rethinking what it meant to
speak of a good life and good society’ (ibid.: 25). The initial dream, shared by
both the occupying forces and the defeated Japanese, may have been of a
genuinely democratic revolution – and there can be little denying the widespread
vision of the US forces as an ‘army of liberation’ (ibid.: 26). But still, in the after-
math of defeat, the immediate meaning of liberation – of freedom – was, for
most Japanese, more psychological than political: part of Japan’s collective
response to the traumatic events was to succumb to an exhaustion and despair
that came to be known as the ‘kyodatsu condition’ (see ibid.: Chapter 3).
But this is not the whole story. Locked in a symbiotic relationship with the
misery, the resentment, the struggle for daily survival and purpose among the
ruins were the hopes, the dreams, the visions of a brighter future and the new
opportunities for liberation that, as Said is at pains to point out, often arise out of
the anger engendered by such a relationship of domination. At this point, it is
liberation and the pursuit of freedom, as opposed to nationalist independence,
that comes to represent the new alternative, a ‘liberation which by its very nature
involves . . . a transformation of social consciousness beyond national conscious-
ness’ (Said 1994: 278).
So where does this leave Japan in 1952? On the one hand, by the time of
withdrawal of Occupation forces, some semblance of independence – a degree
of cultural autonomy – had been acquired. Full democracy had not, however,
been restored. The Occupation forces may have been largely withdrawn, but the
ghost of empire and of complicity with the militarists had not been entirely laid,
leaving the ‘ordinary citizens’ still to articulate the nature of the power relation-
ship they shared with their new leaders. Japan remained, in short, a classic
example of ‘democracy in a box’ (Dower 1999: 561); or, in the estimation of the
New York Times, Japan was ‘free, yet not free’ (cited in ibid.: 553). To return to
Said’s model, what was now required, in order to avoid the old orthodoxies and
injustices, were ‘new and imaginative reconceptions of society and culture’ (Said
1994: 263). And it was here that Shiina and his contemporaries on the literary
scene came into their own – as they rapidly brought to the terrain a new ‘intellec-
tual and figurative energy’ (ibid.: 256), one that was ideally suited to the task of
‘repossession’ (ibid.) of their indigenous culture and of shaking off the sense of
themselves as ‘prisoners in their own land’ (ibid.: 258).
Said cites Yeats and Fanon as authors determined to give literary portrayal to
the misery and wretchedness of the repressed, with both equally committed to
the struggle for liberation – of both nation and individual – that accompanies the
process of decolonisation as a new political order comes to achieve moral hege-
mony. A similar interpretation can, however, be applied to the Sengoha authors
writing in the immediate aftermath of the Occupation – and to Shiina in partic-
ular. As a writer with first-hand experience of political detention and of tenkō and
who, in the evaluation of the critic Takadō Kaname, was ‘not just putting himself
in the shoes of the masses as he wrote – but was one of them’ (1989: 250), here
was an author ideally positioned to give expression to the long-suppressed voices.
The discussion that ensues will focus on Shiina’s treatment of the various
‘Others’ encapsulated by these voices. On the one hand, it will address the Other
represented by the marginalised masses, by those engaged in the delicate process
of casting off the shackles of subjugation in their search for greater individual
freedom. And, in view of Shiina’s background, who better to offer up a social
articulation of difference from the perspective of the ‘normal’ labourer – to take
what Foucault sees as ‘the first steps in the reversal of power and the initiation of
new struggles against existing forms of power’ (Foucault 1977: 214)? At the same
time, however, Shiina was closely attuned to Japan’s own position of alterity, one
born of its hybrid status as a recently defeated and occupied nation determined
(and encouraged) to make rapid progress in the process of cultural ‘repossession’.
Given such multivalency, the Other of Shiina’s œuvre is hard to pin down. Its
manifestations are, however, never far beneath the surface. The discussion that
follows will thus focus on the author’s deployment of the Self/Other dialectic in
its varying guises and, in so doing, will emphasise the author’s powerful, yet
rarely discussed, contribution to the contemporary debates concerning the nature
of freedom in the particular circumstances of postwar Japan.
The Sengoha as articulators of Otherness

As Ernestine Schlant notes in her survey of the artistic landscape of Japan in
1945, the literary scene was indeed lively, a phenomenon that she attributes less
to ‘an expression of hope or confidence in a new beginning’, more to ‘the vast
taking stock and sorting out of the war, the defeat and its consequences’ (Schlant
and Rimer 1991: 11). And, as she continues, this was a task required at both the
national and the individual level. On the one hand, there were those institutional
questions – those concerning responsibility for the war of aggression, the role of
the Emperor, etc. – that could not be avoided. At the same time, however, there
was a moral responsibility on each individual, even those who had not seen
active service (whether as a result of their age, health or for whatever reason), to
reconsider their own personal experience of the war – to question their right to
serve in some measure as the voice of the survivor, whilst simultaneously weighing
up their own potential contribution to the process of postwar reconstruction that
lay ahead.
The two issues could never be seen in isolation, however: they were linked,
inextricably, by fundamental questions regarding the nature of postwar freedom.
The nation may have been offered the promise of genuine freedom – of democracy
236 Mark Williams
(minshushugi, which, as Carol Gluck notes, rapidly became a buzzword, defined,
not politically, but socially with the meaning of ‘freedom’ (ibid.: 69)), and there
certainly was an intoxicating sense of freedom of intellectual access. But this was
an enforced freedom, one that, while allowing for the dreams, nevertheless
implied an alternative form of subordination. The question confronting all those
seeking access to the literary stage in the aftermath of defeat was of how to eval-
uate, and to give representation to, the duality of this liberty – as representing
both deliverance and subjugation – of how to depict the confusion, not only
concerning what they were being delivered from, but of what they, as citizens of
an occupied nation, were being subordinated to.
The challenge was clearly not one to elicit a uniform response – and literary
historians of the period have been meticulous in documenting the diverse paths
trodden by the gamut of authors active at the time.5 Much of this diversity is of
but tangential relevance to the issue at hand. What is of paramount relevance to
any discussion of the politics of representation of Shiina and his peers in the
Sengoha, however, is the split that emerged, within months of Japan’s defeat,
between those descendants of the prewar proletarian literature movement who
advocated, on the pages of their literary forum, Shin Nihon bungaku, retention of
the ideological, political novel, and those, most of whom had earlier been equally
vociferous in their support of leftist ideology and many of whom bore the same
scars of prewar tenkō as their more activist cousins, who nevertheless signed up for
the more artistic manifesto outlined by their spokesman, Honda Shūgo, in his
inaugural editorial for their literary journal, Kindai bungaku. At the vanguard of
Honda’s principles was an insistence on those old chestnuts, ‘Art for art’s sake’
and ‘nobility of spirit’. Equally prominent, however, was the ‘guarantee of
freedom from politics’ and a ‘quest for literary truth, unmarked by ideological
coloring’ (cited in Keene 1984: 971).
The division rapidly developed into literary warfare, one that has been closely
analysed by J. Victor Koschmann (in e.g. Schlant and Rimer (eds) 1991: 163–86).
At this point, let us focus on that element of this struggle most germane to
discussion of Shiina: the call by Kurahara Korehito, the eminent Communist
critic, for a literary voice for the masses. Kurahara’s plea was unequivocal:
Writers must recover the element of reality that has been missing from liter-
ature, and reproduce within literary works the true circumstances and voice
of the masses . . . To accomplish [this], it is first necessary that our writers
should know reality, and in order to know reality, they must live, fight, and
share happiness and misery with the masses.
(cited in ibid.: 170)
To Kurahara, the imperative for such writers was that they not only describe the
masses ‘without deceit or contrivance’, but also that, in so doing, they show them
‘the way out of their predicament’ and ‘instruct’ them in ‘life’ (ibid.). Kurahara
would here appear to be advocating nothing less than a return to social
activism – and there is much in this with which Shiina and his peers in the
Sengoha would have found empathy. Problems arose, however, with Kurahara’s
practical advice towards realising this goal: an author might strive to relate to the
masses by always ‘making the standpoint of the masses his own’ and by being
‘keenly aware of their suffering and joy’ (ibid.: 174). But, as critics such as Ara
Masato pointed out, most were not of working-class backgrounds – and were
thus in no position to portray themselves faithfully whilst remaining true to the
masses. To such authors, there could be no question of an unmediated literary
representation of the working-class masses from the viewpoint of the masses;
instead, insisted Ara, priority must be given to their own mediating presence: ‘To
investigate oneself thoroughly – this should be the starting point of literature
from this moment forward, and ultimately it is this endeavor which will connect
us in a literary sense with the masses’ (ibid.).
To Ara, there was little alternative. As individuals who had experienced the
wave of militarism and war in the 1930s and early 1940s as well as the subse-
quent ignominy of occupation, all were only too well acquainted with
‘despair . . . the abyss, and . . . hell’ (ibid.: 176). But it was precisely on these
grounds, as fellow sufferers, that they were best positioned to reach out in a
gesture of affirmation of, and solidarity with, the masses.
The lines of the argument had been drawn, the contribution of both sides
offering much to the burgeoning shutaisei (subjectivity) debate concerning the
most effective means available to the author to articulate, in meaningful manner,
the requirements of individual behaviour in the new postwar Japan. The ensuing
texts may have been dismissed by some as unmediated, as lacking in objective
focus; there were even those, like the influential critic Nakamura Mitsuo, who
were prepared to argue that nothing of literary merit emerged in Japan during
the seven years of US Occupation (cited in Rubin 1985: 76). For all this,
however, these debates and the literary texts they spawned did succeed in
capturing the popular imagination – and in calling into question the techniques
adopted by their prewar literary forebears in ways that were to exercise consider-
able influence on subsequent literary trends. As Dower suggests, ‘They may not
have constituted the basis for a genuinely revolutionary transformation of Japan,
but their challenge to old verities proved unforgettable’ (1999: 162).
Dower’s assessment suggests a group of writers whose literary contribution
was far more significant than Nakamura and some of his fellow critics were
willing to concede. At the same time, the incessant focus of these texts was on the
working-class masses – and it is in this sense, as voices of the marginalized and
oppressed, that their legacy is perhaps best assessed. Here was a generation of
authors committed to an activist stance in order to recover – and sometimes even
to invent – the culturally authentic voice of those on the margins of society,
those not actively involved in the process of implementing the democratic revolu-
tion that was being attempted around them. They represented, in short, the ‘voice
of the Other’, determined to take advantage of their position on the periphery to
create discourses that rejected the ‘hierarchical structures of power’, upon which
critics such as Ashcroft et al. see societies with a colonial past as constructed
(1989: 7–8).
238 Mark Williams
Ashcroft et al. make much of the crucial and invaluable role exercised by this
voice as counterbalance to that of mainstream society. And this same voice has
been carefully analysed, in its specifically Japanese context, by John Clammer in
his recent Japan and its Others. As Clammer reminds us, during the process of
social construction, the very cultural logic that serves to inform the criteria of
membership of mainstream society works equally against those who do not.
There is, suggests Clammer, a ‘logic of difference’ (2001: 6), one that he sees as
deliberately and consciously constructed by the ruling elite whose every action
had been to ‘other’ (as Lacan would have it) those outside the mainstream and,
by extension, to embroil those left outside in the asymmetric relationships that
this entails.
Throughout the period of war in East Asia, such construction had assumed
the form of representations of the Japanese nation as ‘one nation under the
Emperor’ (Dower 1999: 61ff.); those outside this embrace found little support,
increasingly reduced to the status of ‘outcasts’ in a land that Dower has cate-
gorised as a ‘harsh, inhospitable place for anyone who did not fall into a
“proper” social category’ (ibid.). Their status as outcasts, particularly in a society
that has traditionally sought to obscure a fundamental social diversity through
self-representations as ‘homogeneous’, is a recurrent trope in the literature of the
Sengoha – and is responsible, in large measure, for the ubiquitous portrayals of
this literature, by critics such as Nakamura Mitsuo, as overwhelmingly dark and
pessimistic. The Occupation-era narratives of Shiina represent classic exemplars
of this trait. Here, according to this logic, are the archetypal portrayals of the
wretched and fallen, desperately seeking to eke out a semblance of existence
among the ‘ruins’ of Japan in the immediate aftermath of defeat; it is in works
such as Shin’ya no shuen (A Midnight Banquet, 1947 [1970]) and Eien naru josho
(The Eternal Preface, 1948) with which Shiina announced his arrival on the
literary scene, we are informed, that we can find those qualities of otherness as
an unessential, negatively characterised object (cf. e.g. Takadō 1989 and Miyano
1989). What is missing from such evaluations, I would suggest, is the concomitant
vision of otherness as a more positive element, as a liberating concept, one in
which difference is celebrated and in which the existence of such an opposition
can be used as a means of positive affirmation as opposed to negative
rejection.6
Viewed thus, it is difficult to exaggerate the contribution of the Sengoha to the
dominant discourses of the day. With the call for freedom a universal refrain,
theirs was the voice of the ‘Other’ in which freedom was defined, not as the new-
found liberty as delineated in the postwar Constitution, but as the right to be
different, not from each other but from the impositions placed on them by
outside models. And in an intellectual climate dedicated to finding ways of ‘over-
coming the modern’ (kindai no chōkoku), who was better positioned to assume the
challenge that Clammer cites as integral to the postwar reconstruction effort in
Japan, the necessity ‘not of disembedding the individual from the social matrix,
but of creating a modernity based precisely upon the maintenance of the
integrity of the “holistic” social structure’ (Clammer 2001: 86)?
The literary depictions of the masses offered by the Sengoha are clearly of
intrinsic interest to historians of Occupation Japan. They also serve a more
general function – for, as Homi Bhabha has argued, it is from just such people –
from ‘those who have suffered the sentence of history’ – that ‘we learn our most
enduring lessons for living and thinking’. For Bhabha, the case is clear-cut:
There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of social

marginality . . . transforms our critical strategies. It forces us to confront the
concept of culture outside objets d’art or beyond the canonisation of the ‘idea’
of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of
meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and
practices, produced in the act of social survival.
(1994: 172)
The issue lies at the heart of the case study that follows. In the analysis of The
Beautiful Woman, particular attention will be paid to this ‘mode of representation
of otherness’ (ibid.: 68). But to what extent, in his relentless focus on the narrow
world of a solitary average (heibon na) worker, does Shiina succeed in drawing
attention to this ‘logic of difference’? And, even more significantly, how is this
logic maintained as Japan moves from its status as occupied nation to the
burgeoning economic force of the 1950s?
As noted already, in search of early literary considerations of the issue of
‘otherness’ in postwar Japanese literature one is inexorably drawn to the
Occupation texts of Shiina, those penned quite literally, amongst the ruins, in
which the paradox of despair and freedom is addressed in its most naked form.
Such texts belong firmly in the first of the three discrete, albeit overlapping,
stages of narrative development in postwar Japanese literature posited by Reiko
Tachibana, a period roughly coterminous with the seven years of US
Occupation, in which the primary concern of the Japanese literati was the ‘recre-
ation of immediacy’ (Tachibana 1998: 7). One immediate consequence of this
trend was the establishment of the tradition of the ‘othered’ protagonist, the
alienated individual, engaged in a desperate, if ultimately forlorn, attempt to
escape the margins of society. As with all such processes, however, development
was inevitably gradual – and it was only really during the second of Tachibana’s
developmental stages (approximating to the mid-1950s to late 1960s) that the
tradition takes secure root. By this stage, suggests Tachibana, the search for a
more detached perspective from which to reconsider recent experience served to
create a response, ‘not of visceral engagement’, but of ‘grotesque estrangement,
incongruity or ambiguity’ (ibid.: 8). Given the shishōsetsu tradition of autobio-
graphical, confessional literature, the emphasis in these texts may still be on
individual actions and internal conflicts as opposed to larger questions of guilt
and national culpability; in achieving a greater degree of detachment from their
overwhelming wartime experiences, however, these authors succeeded in
‘reassess[ing] history in relation to present events’ (ibid.: 119) – and in assuming a
more objective perspective on the issues of the day. Of these, most pressing to
240 Mark Williams
this group of authors was the nature of postwar democracy and freedom – and
nowhere is this more significant as a developing trope than in Shiina’s œuvre. Let
us continue, therefore, with a brief discussion of the concept of freedom as an
emerging focus in Shiina’s art.
The taste of freedom

For Shiina, the concept of freedom was integral to his art. As he acknowledged
in his essay, ‘Bungaku to jiyū no mondai’ (Literature and the Question of
Freedom, 1952), ‘Literature is only literature if it speaks of human freedom.
Without that, however skilfully narrated, it cannot exist as literature’ (SRZ 14:
365). And, as Shiina was the first to acknowledge, the determination to question
the meaning of the amorphous concept of ‘true freedom’ was closely connected
to his experience of being deprived of his physical liberty in the early 1930s. It
was while in jail, as he read voraciously the literary treatments of the nature of
human freedom by the likes of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, that he reflected at
length on what he would subsequently describe as his ‘lifelong theme’ (Satō 1973:
185). In this, he was clearly not alone: particularly amongst his fellow tenkōsha,
such considerations represented, not surprisingly, an overwhelming concern.
Where Shiina does have a unique contribution to make, however, is in his treat-
ment of this search for freedom at both the existential and the social level. The
former, with its focus on freedom as liberation from death and the fear of death
finds echoes throughout the literature of the tenkōsha. Yet for Shiina, this could
never be divorced from a vision of true freedom as liberation from misery and
from the concomitant conviction that it is only through social activism that the
individual can be relieved of the anguish and nihilism spawned by the war. His,
then, was a search for freedom, not so much from the world, but a freedom in the
world, one that is ultimately closely identified with the struggle for freedom of
the masses – and firmly rooted in their daily lives.
To Shiina, the former entailed a rejection of the world for its failure to fulfil
his dreams and, as he continued in his article, ‘Literature and the Question of
Freedom’:
We have no choice but to solemnly deny such freedom . . . because, come what
may, freedom from this world is an illusion, a fallacy. It opposes the reality
that we all belong to this world and can never be free from this world. If we
seek to brandish such freedom to rule the world, we aspire to absoluteness.
(SRZ 14: 379–80)
With this comment, Shiina was to establish a link, crucial to the reading of The
Beautiful Woman that follows, between the pursuit of true freedom and a rejection
of all absolutes (zettaisei ) – and he was to pursue this link in a series of articles
written at the time. Most significant of these was ‘Jiyū to kyōzon’ (Freedom and Co-
existence, 1962), in which he elaborated on his vision of true freedom as ‘both
subjective and objective’, and concluded:
These two freedoms are of two differing dimensions and different quality
and, as such, there is no way that they can be united. In other words, they
can merely co-exist. But, in order for them to co-exist, there must be
another freedom – a freedom that gives life to both my freedom and that of all
people.
(SRZ 19: 178)
The author is here giving voice to the concept he defined as the ‘third freedom’,
a ‘freedom which we, as humans, seek and in which we live, . . . a source of light’
(ibid.: 176). The ensuing state was ‘true freedom . . . the sine qua non for all human
existence’ (ibid.: 181).
Shiina’s personal identification with this struggle from the outset of his career
is not in question. What we do see, as his literary career progresses and as Japan
moves from the enforced liberty of the Occupation years to the first tentative
steps towards democratic self-rule in the 1950s, is evidence of an author increas-
ingly convinced of the attainability of such a dream. Before considering the
more optimistic vision as personified in The Beautiful Woman, a brief consideration
of this theme in Shiina’s earlier work is thus in order.
To Sumaki, protagonist of The Midnight Banquet and its sequel, Omoki nagare no
naka ni (In the Sluggish Stream, 1947), the search for freedom is all-consuming.
Forced to endure life in the physical ruins of Occupied Tokyo, he recalls with
nostalgia his days in prison, and confesses,
Now, when it rains all day long, I feel stifled. Even when in prison, I could
inhale the spray from the rain through the window and could watch
thoughtfully as the tall, red brick wall gradually changed hue to an ugly mud
colour.
(SRZ 1: 4)
Engaged in a struggle for his own physical survival, Sumaki searches desperately
for liberation from the rigours of day-to-day existence – and from the ever-
present fear of death – and chooses to do so by maintaining his distance from
those around him and by masking his emotions with an enigmatic smile. He is
‘devoid of all memories’; nor can he embrace ‘dreams of a shining future . . . all
that exists is the unendurable present’ (ibid.: 11). At this point, there would
appear to be little relief from his abject despair and his only recourse is to resolve
to ‘endure’ (taeru) his lot. Indeed, to Sumaki, ‘to endure is to live’; it is through
endurance that he ‘gains release from all burdens’ (ibid.: 30). He is portrayed, in
short, as desperate for liberation from what he perceives as the burdens of
mundane existence, a haunting reminder of the author’s conviction, expressed in
his diary of the time, that ‘the last freedom left to human beings is the freedom to
die’ (SRZ 14: 36). As already noted, however, there is already evidence, even in
these earliest Shiina narratives, of a light penetrating the darkness – of a protago-
nist struggling with the realisation that freedom is to be attained, not by divorcing
himself from the rest of society, but through a sense of solidarity with society.
242 Mark Williams
The transition is evidenced in Shiina’s next major novel, The Eternal Preface, in
which the main focus lies in the inexplicable sense of optimism experienced by
the protagonist, Yasuta, when confronted by his own impending death. Informed
by his doctor that he has, at most, six months to live, Yasuta evidences a previ-
ously uncountenanced passion for life, one that leads him to question his earlier
nihilism. Freed from the fear of death, Yasuta finds himself imbued with a new
sense of hope and liberation: he feels ‘somehow free, albeit this was a chilly sense
of freedom’ (ibid.: 334). Indeed, as Shiina acknowledged in his ‘Notes’ about the
novel, Yasuta is the ‘embodiment of a range of freedoms’ that he was seeking to
address in his literature: ‘freedom from emptiness, from death, from the sense of
meaninglessness and despair he discerned all around’ him (cited in Kobayashi
1992: 92). For Yasuta, then, the key to true freedom lies in his determination to
embrace life. In keeping with the times, however, he remains powerless in the
face of the gulf between absolute freedom and the shackles of his own mundane
existence – and it is to Shiina’s more mature works, written as the democratic
institutions established during the US Occupation began to take hold, that one
must turn for characters for whom freedom is perceived, not so much from any
constraining influences, as in some broader principle.
The template for Shiina’s revised perspective on freedom is provided by
Yasushi, protagonist of the novel Kaikō (The Encounter, 1952), a work that the
author himself described as his ‘most persistent pursuit to date of human
freedom’ (cited in SRZ bessatsu: 176). From the outset, Yasushi finds himself
embroiled in a series of tragic circumstances and, as with the earlier Shiina
protagonists, he initially suggests that it is ‘fear – the fear of death’ that remains
the controlling factor in this world of ours’ (SRZ 4: 210). Yasushi is, however,
blessed with an ability to smile on life and to pour scorn on those who threaten to
succumb to emptiness and despair in a manner far removed from the earlier
Shiina protagonists – and this is reflected in his definition of freedom:
Freedom is a sense of happiness secured for us by some eternal being.

Surely it is only through such freedom that, every day, I am able to accord
with the time of this earth, with the world and its history. Thus, it is more
important than my suffering, my happiness, even than the love I hold for a
woman.
(SRZ 4: 290)
The Encounter was written in the immediate aftermath of Shiina’s baptism into the
Protestant tradition and, particularly in view of the fact that each of the other
characters in the novel appears to personify one particular form of freedom,7
Yasushi’s fixation on ‘some eternal being’ as representing a more transcen-
dental form of freedom has led to widespread criticism of the novel as an overly
subjective depiction of the author’s personal ‘encounter’ with the ‘good news’ of
the Christian gospel.8 To such critics, it is in Shiina’s next novel, The Beautiful
Woman, that the author succeeds in achieving the critical distance between
himself and his creation and, in the symbol of the ‘beautiful woman’, one of the
most arresting configurations of the concept of true freedom in Japanese litera-
ture of the period.
Free to write: The Beautiful Woman

The Beautiful Woman was recognised, immediately upon publication as having
‘pursued the fundamental essence of human nature to a level more profound
than any that Shiina had achieved to date’ (Togaeri Hajime, cited in Takadō 1989:
135). Here was the faithful and unadorned depiction of the mundane daily
routine of the working classes that Shiina had struggled for so long to achieve;
here an implicit attack on those whose attempts to re-establish the trend towards
proletarian literature he saw as undermined by a preoccupation with ‘avant-
garde ideals’ (cited in Sasaki 1968: 132). At the same time, however, the work
represents no blind affirmation of the working classes. The ‘lumpen proletariat’
is here depicted with an unabashed candour, with the resulting vision by no
means entirely positive; in addition to its degradation at the hands of the bour-
geoisie, Shiina here reveals the misery, the cowardice and deceit of the working
class, criticising it, not from any negative motivation, but in the hope that he can
help thereby in leading its members towards greater freedom.
Integral to this attempt is the portrayal of the protagonist, the train
conductor Kimura, a man whose positive response to mundane reality is estab-
lished, from the outset, as in sharp contradistinction to that of all the other
characters. Superficially, all are immersed in lives that appear equally humdrum
and tedious and, in this, Kimura is no exception: he views himself as ‘unintelli-
gent, a simple, innocent man’,9 a ‘boring man, living quietly and in peace, totally
unconnected with the great events of the world’ (p. 336). Indeed, so continuous
has the monotony been that he comes to accept that he has ‘lived his life as
precisely as a watch’ (p. 336). Kimura is, however, content – and he confesses,
‘Even were it clear that the world would be destroyed tomorrow, it is enough that
I am on this train right now’ (p. 323). Throughout the novel, Kimura eschews
anything that might disturb such contentment – and it is this that leads to his
assertion, ‘Naturally enough, I loathe anything extraordinary. I hate excessive
unhappiness, but equally, I hate excessive happiness. It’s fair to conclude that the
devil dwells in every excess’ (p. 344). The result, for Kimura, is a belief that ‘the
only thing that I can be absolutely certain about is that there is no single
absolute – no one truth – in the world’ (p. 359), and it is to this conviction that he
attributes his stubborn refusal to join the Communist Party, which he dismisses as
a ‘group with a somewhat secretive and frightening façade’ (p. 293). To him, the
Party ‘reeks of death and absolute power’ (p. 308), remaining totally oblivious to
the inner truth and freedom of the individual.
There remains, however, one element of his daily existence that is established
as in danger of being rendered absolute by the protagonist: his love of work.
From the outset, the narrative portrays a man whose raison d’être is derived from
his job, a man seemingly capable of deriving absolute fulfilment from driving his
train along the track beside the ocean. While all around him persist in their
244 Mark Williams
search for release from their current mundane reality, Kimura rejects this posture
of confrontation and escape, determined to accept such normality and to ‘continue
living as the same me’ (p. 314). But Kimura is no mere Sumaki, determined
simply to ‘endure’ his lot. As he himself acknowledges:
Of course, I wish to improve my lot. But I wish to do this, not within

some other context, but in the midst of my own current circumstances.
This attitude towards life is the same in my relationship with my wife,
Katsue. Rather than separating from her and seeking out new possibilities, I
want to improve my situation within the framework of our existing relation-
ship.
(p. 374)
As with other characters, Kimura, too, is dissatisfied with his current destiny;
but, rather than seeking to escape, he attempts, through positive affirmation of
his present circumstances, to effect an improvement from within. He seeks, in
short, freedom, not from the world, but in the world – and it is this search that
is the source of much of the pain that he experiences in his relationships with
those around him. From the outset, for example, Kimura suffers anguish that
no-one, not even his wife, can fully understand him – and all his attempts to
come to terms with this distance, to accept that ‘it was hardly surprising that
people couldn’t understand me; I couldn’t begin to understand for myself
what it was within me that was making me so strange’ (p. 276), fail to resolve
the uncertainty he experiences. The ensuing figure is one who feels ‘both
saddened and overjoyed by myself who loved life, loved my wife and loved trains’
(p. 330).
As with earlier Shiina protagonists, however, the mixed emotions which
Kimura evidences are not merely the inevitable outcome for a protagonist pulled
by conflicting forces; equally, they are portrayed as integral to the narrative tech-
nique of effecting a division between opposing aspects of Kimura’s being – of
confronting him with a vision of his double, this in an attempt to highlight the
‘real being (hontō no shintai ) living quietly within him’ (p. 303).
Kimura is keenly aware of these conflicting facets of his being and sees this
symbolised in the way he is addressed in different ways by different people:
On certain occasions, I have been accused by those with left-wing sympa-

thies of being an unenlightened labourer, of living with a slave mentality, of
being cowardly or mean. On other occasions, it has been those of right-wing
persuasion accusing me of apathy, of a certain vagueness or of irresponsi-
bility. At the moment, I am dismissed as conservative by the more active
members within the labour unions.
(p. 268)
Given this confusion, Kimura struggles in vain to define his ‘true’ identity, and is
ultimately forced to conclude:
I am in no way proud of the fact, but not once in my life have I been true to
myself . . . Even while working as a conductor, I could not escape the feeling
that I was never quite able to be myself. In particular, when announcing the
name of the next station in a loud voice, I sensed that I was a cockerel
proclaiming a new dawn.
(p. 273)
It is clear that, as a loyal worker, much of the protagonist’s self-concept is deter-

mined by his relationship with his employer. But the more the company comes to
value his services, the more powerful grows his conviction that ‘I am not the sort
of man the company thinks I am’ (p. 281). Already, there is a clear digression
between the company’s favourable impression of its employee and Kimura’s view
of himself. At the same time, however, there is evidence of a growing acceptance
that the ‘self ’ he saw before him was as close to a composite subjectivity as he
was ever likely to achieve: ‘It was true that I had never once been true to my real
self. But, real self or not, I was the same person before and after my arrest. I was
just a man who enjoyed work and who loved trains’ (p. 337). Significantly, more-
over, this growing awareness is not limited to Kimura’s own self-assessment: on
several occasions, the protagonist expresses doubt as to whether he will ever be
able to fathom completely those with whom he comes into contact. Following
one of several moments of reconciliation with his wife, for example, Kimura
concludes, ‘I am proud to admit that I lacked the heart to believe in the figure of
the woman before me as the real Katsue’ (p. 337). To the protagonist, therefore,
‘true’ identity remains as elusive as ‘true freedom’, and it is to highlight this reali-
sation that Shiina incorporates the concept of the ‘beautiful woman’ as the
pervading symbol within the novel. Let us turn, then, to consideration of the func-
tion of this complex signifier.
During the course of the novel, Kimura is frequently confronted with the
mental image of this ‘beautiful woman’ – significantly, always on those occasions
when Kimura is most troubled by the shackles with which he perceives himself
constrained by those around him. She remains, however, more than a mere
symbol of dazzling freedom – and, as the novel progresses, so her function in
encouraging Kimura to sweep away the sense of emptiness in his heart and to
love his fellow human beings even more than freedom leads to increasing
emphasis on the spiritual significance of this vision. In the initial stages of the
narrative, therefore, she is variously described by the protagonist as ‘a being who
rescues me from my own strange self ’ (p. 274); ‘a being who blows away those
strange shadows and fills my heart with a sense of warmth and fulfillment’ (p.
279); ‘a being who provides me with my raison d’être and who allows me to experi-
ences the fullness of life in its entirety’ (p. 280); ‘a being who renders the
strangeness of nature and the strangeness of mankind into a powerful and bril-
liant existence’ (307); and as ‘a being who enables me to delight even in my
misery’ (p. 350). She is, in short, a source of encouragement to Kimura as he
seeks to assign meaning to the mundane and to restore a degree of normalcy to
his life.
246 Mark Williams
As the novel progresses, the ‘beautiful woman’ remains an enigma to the
protagonist. Increasingly, however, as he comes to acknowledge that it was ‘only
the laugh of that strangely beautiful woman’ that could ‘move’ him and allow
him to ‘relax’ (p. 426), so the narrative focus shifts from the physical attributes
that he has assigned to this image to her symbolic function – as representing a
source of brilliant light and power, one that will ultimately secure for him that sense
of freedom to develop as a more ‘human-like being’ (ningen-rashii ningen) (p. 359).
The result is the most complex signifier within Shiina’s œuvre – one that has
been subjected to widely differing interpretations by a variety of critics. To some,
the signified is vague: for example, she is seen by Hirabayashi Taiko as ‘a dream
of something’, and by Togaeri Hajime as ‘the beautiful woman who appears in
the dreams of any working class being’. To others, however, the effect is more all-
embracing: she is viewed by Honda Shūgo as ‘the symbol of the ideal of freedom,
of the sense of harmony with one’s neighbour and of supreme bliss; at the same
time, she is the symbol of that which alerts us to the fact that such ideals are ulti-
mately unattainable within this world’. It is this same spiritual dimension that is
emphasised by another critic, Sasabuchi Tomouchi, who defines her as ‘a being
who somehow reminds me of the spotless Virgin of the Catholic tradition’ (all
cited in Takadō 1989: 146).
For all the spiritual dimension – and the biblical terminology which her
portrayal is frequently couched – the ‘beautiful woman’ remains a classic symbol
of the ability of the individual to overcome mundane reality through confronta-
tion with what the narrator consistently depicts as ‘true freedom’ (hontō no jiyū)
The effect is stressed in the following passage, in which the close relation between
the beautiful woman and the protagonist’s daily routine is emphasised:
Regardless of what others thought, I unfortunately had no choice but to

continue to devote myself diligently to my job as a conductor. Diligently . . .
I want my reader to realise how difficult it is to continue to work so dili-
gently. But, though I realised it was slightly strange, I was easily able to
continue this pattern I had set for myself. It is also fair to say that, in this, I
was aided by the shōch ū that I would drink on my way home from work.
It was a store of meagre resources where employees of the company
would charge drinks to their account. It stocked everything from lemon pops
to Japanese-style rice cakes and one could obtain a modest meal there too. I
used to drink there, but in this, too, I was extremely serious and always drank
in moderation. As I sat there drinking, the vision of that beautiful woman
always came to mind. It was she who could rescue me from my own strange
self, but I had no idea what she looked like. All I know is that, whenever she
came to mind, my heart would be filled with a certain dazzling light and a sense
of power.
(pp. 274–5)
As a symbol of transcendence, therefore, the beautiful woman can be seen as

having assisted the protagonist through more than thirty years of routine life as a
railway employee: through her, he is able to reappraise external reality. At the
same time, as symbol of true freedom, she can also be viewed as representing the
voice of the protagonist’s conscience in its interaction with his inner being. On
frequent occasions, therefore, it is the beautiful woman who confronts the protag-
onist with an internal reality which, for whatever reason, he has been seeking to
deny, and the tendency becomes increasingly pronounced as the novel progresses –
as his marriage to Katsue is threatened and his relationships with the various
other women in the narrative are rendered increasingly complex. The more the
protagonist seeks to convince himself that he no longer loves Katsue, for
example, the more he is struck by an awareness ‘deep within his inner being of
that truly beautiful woman smiling at him in that strange manner of hers’ (p.
450). In similar manner, following the protagonist’s subsequent proposal of
marriage to Hiroko, the woman to whom, on his own admission, he turns in
times of trouble and despair ‘in search of salvation’ (p. 417) and who is able to
assist him ‘as though she were the true beautiful woman’ (p. 417), the narrative
concludes, ‘I felt the gentle gaze of that true beautiful woman in my heart. I was
overwhelmed by that gaze – because it brought home to me that I did not really
love Hiroko’ (p. 464).
On these and other occasions, it is the beautiful woman who motivates Kimura
and who heightens his awareness of his own true feelings; on others, she acts, almost
literally, as his guiding hand. The fact is not lost on the protagonist, who is ultimately
drawn to acknowledge that ‘if there were anything within me that could be called
“true”, it was not part of me, but belonged to the beautiful woman’ (p. 442).
Significantly, however, the appearances of the beautiful woman are restricted to
those occasions when the protagonist is interacting, either physically or mentally,
with the various female characters in the novel and this results, increasingly, in a
confusion of the two, a fusion of the conscious and unconscious women in his life.
At the outset of the novel, the distinction between the two is clearly
delineated – in the depictions of Kurabayashi Kimi, a friend from Kimura’s
childhood, whom he views as the ‘polar opposite (sei-hantai ) of the beautiful woman’
(p. 275) – and of whom he is led to conclude, ‘She certainly was a beautiful
woman, but she was not the beautiful woman I was seeking’ (p. 285). As the novel
progresses, however, such stark divisions are tempered to some extent as a fusion
takes place between the women in Kimura’s life and the symbolic entity he has
created, resulting, in most cases, in a straightforward juxtaposition of the two.
The following example involving Hiroko is by no means an isolated example:
In response to the pressure of Hiroko’s grip, I squeezed her hand. It was a

warm hand. But, at the same time, I was painfully aware of the image of
that truly beautiful woman . . . As I embraced her, I sensed that real woman
laughing as though pitying me.
(pp. 420, 463)
By the latter stages of the novel, therefore, the beautiful woman represents a
ubiquitous presence in all of Kimura’s relationships, the very vitality of these
248 Mark Williams
seemingly dependent on the workings of this symbolic source of energy. That it
is the latter who assumes the dominant role in such circumstances is, however,
clear from the following assessment by the protagonist of his relationship with
Hiroko:
It is perfectly true that I loved Hiroko, but I had never once accepted that I
loved her. And sadly, I was able to take delight from that. Why? Because,
were I to feel love for anyone, that strangely real and beautiful woman of
mine would start laughing . . . The only reason I could love Hiroko was
because of the beautiful woman.
(p. 426)
The link between Hiroko and the beautiful woman thus lies at the core of the
novel – to the extent that she is frequently seen intruding on the other relation-
ships in which the protagonist finds himself embroiled, including that with his
own wife, Katsue. Early in the novel, for example, as he embraces Katsue, the
protagonist is obliged to admit, ‘[As I held Katsue], I recalled the round face of
Hiroko as though she were the true beautiful woman’ (p. 386). Similarly, on redis-
covering Katsue following a period when she has disappeared with her uncle, the
narrative continues:
Katsue burst into tears. At that point, I recalled Hiroko; it was almost as
though betraying her were a point of honour to me. Needless to say, it was
that true beautiful woman who supported me on that occasion.
(p. 469)
To the protagonist, therefore, all his relationships are tempered by thoughts of

the beautiful woman – and this leads to her coming to assume a larger reality
than the woman physically present in his life. Through her, Kimura is reinforced
in his conviction that, given the nature of human freedom, none of these rela-
tionships is – or can be – perfect; equally, however, the beautiful woman represents
a constant reminder to the protagonist that none of these is beyond redemption.
It is, in short, as a result of her promptings that Kimura comes to reject all abso-
lutes – to look on ‘non-absolutes’ (futettei ) as ‘one of the many virtues in the
world’ (p. 397) – and, again, the issue is addressed in terms of the contrast delin-
eated between Kimura and the three women most prominent in his life, each of
whom is portrayed as the embodiment of an alternative vision of absolute
freedom.
First to influence the course of events is Kimi, who is now working as a prosti-
tute and presented as symbol of absolute, anti-social freedom. To Kimi, life is
seen in terms of black and white: she is ‘a woman who, when roused to hysteria,
assumed a frightening expression as much as to say there is a simple choice – that
between killing someone or succumbing to death oneself ’ (p. 289). In this, she
resembles closely Shiina’s narrator’s archetypal worker for whom ‘the only issue is
that between freedom and death’ (p. 296). In contrast to Kimi, and yet signifying
excess of a different nature, is Katsue, the protagonist’s wife and symbol of abso-
lute social freedom. From the start, Katsue’s tendency towards excess is manifest
in her frequent resort to the phrase ‘shinde mo’ (lit. ‘even were I to die’). But her
disposition towards excess is subsequently reinforced, in the protagonist’s mind,
by the rumours that start circulating about the couple:
People kept telling me that my wife was too good for me, and such comments
clearly incorporated a certain contempt towards me. But occasionally, I
would imitate my colleagues and make comments such as, ‘My wife really is
more than I deserve’. It was these various facets of Katsue’s personality, seen
by everyone as excessive, that I was unable to forgive.
(p. 329)
Significantly, it is not Katsue’s entire being which the protagonist is rejecting –

only the excesses which he perceives within her. He continues to love her in spite
of such excess, but acknowledges:
I continued to fight my wife because of the excess, which could even be

called absolutism, which she embodied. Even were this a quality which she
had acquired from the fascism currently in vogue or born of a fundamental
human quality, I felt I could not forgive such excess in my wife. For to me,
constantly striving to be a very human-like being, I realise that it is in such
excess that man, regardless of his good intentions, transcends human consid-
eration and assumes the face of the devil.
(pp. 358–9)
Hiroko, the third woman to be perceived by the protagonist as excessive, repre-

sents a freedom divorced from both of the above, a freedom which approximates
more closely to the protagonist’s view of absolute liberation. Thus, while both
Katsue and Kimi remain blissfully unaware of the qualities within themselves
that Kimura dismisses as ‘excessive’, Hiroko is portrayed as empathising more
immediately with Kimura, and as sharing with him a revulsion at excess, both in
herself and in others. ‘Everything about me is excessive’ (p. 458), she concludes
on one occasion as she examines her large breasts. But in contrast to Kimi and
Katsue, she can at least be seen as striving to control the worst of her own
excesses.
The absolutes embodied in the three women may differ. But, in succumbing,
albeit in varying degrees, to such excess, each stands opposed to the ‘true beau-
tiful woman’. The distinction is marked and, in portraying the beautiful woman
as the only woman capable of giving meaning to Kimura’s life, Shiina’s narrator
succeeds in establishing her as a powerful symbol, one that serves as an accurate
reflection of the nature of the freedom that remained an elusive dream in the
Japan of the narrative present, but that, by the time of composition, following
the withdrawal of the US Occupation forces, represented, in the public
consciousness at least, a nascent, if complex, reality.
250 Mark Williams
Conclusion
Several critics have commented on the carefully crafted distance between
narrator and protagonist that Shiina guards jealously throughout the novel. But
in this scrupulous delineation, there is another perspective – that of the author
himself – one that is all too readily overlooked, and yet which, however effaced,
nevertheless draws our attention to those ‘omissions as unstated presence’ with
which we began this discussion. The perspective is never foregrounded;
indeed, by this stage in his career, Shiina appears more concerned than the
majority of his peers in the Sengoha to restrict the focus of his prose narratives to
‘faithful’ depictions of ‘ordinary’ citizens of postwar Japan unencumbered by
personal ideology. As I have sought to show in the above discussion, however,
these ‘omissions’ cannot be totally ignored – and it is only in displaying Shiina’s
life as a subtext to the work that the ‘political’ significance of the novel is fully
appreciated.
Seen thus, as a literary portrayal of the renewed sense of freedom that coin-
cided with the end of Pacific War hostilities and that was honed during the years
of US Occupation, the significance of The Beautiful Woman is hard to exaggerate.
Compared, both with the earlier Shiina texts written among the ruins, in which
the visions of light attempting to penetrate the darkness ultimately emerge as
mere illusions, and with the works of many of Shiina’s peers in the Sengoha in
which protagonists experience an increasing sense of alienation from a society
seemingly bent on economic progress at the expense of individual liberty, the
light in The Beautiful Woman is of an altogether different dimension. Here is a
light, symbolized in the all-pervasive presence of the ‘beautiful woman’, that
enables Kimura to dwell more on the inherent goodness he has come to discern
within the individual than had been possible to Sumaki and the other earlier
Shiina protagonists. Here, as a consequence, is the light that enables him to expe-
rience freedom in society, by simultaneously mellowing his desire to seek freedom
from its dictates. Shiina’s apparent determination, particularly in his later work,
to focus on his former circumscribed self stranded, to cite the title of his 1953 novel,
‘on the other side of freedom’ (jiyū no kanata de), may have assured his reputation as a
‘master at portraying the ruins’ to which Occupation Japan had been reduced
(Kamei Katsuichirō, cited in Takadō 1989: 8). With a closer reading of The Beautiful
Woman, I would suggest, there emerges an author equally adept at giving literary
voice to the renewed optimism of the ensuing era.
Notes
1 SRZ 14: 97. All translations from this text are my own.
2 Such a reading of the novel is prominent in the writings of Saitō (1980), Sasaki
(1968), and on the pages of Shiina Rinzō kenkyū, the journal published by the Shiina
Rinzō kenky ukai
¯ (study group).
3 See Jameson’s (1981) notion of narrative as a ‘socially symbolic act’.
4 For such autobiographical detail, see the nenpu provided in Saitō (1980: 245–99), and
Shiina’s own autobiographical account (1967).
5 See, for example, Keene (1984) and Koschmann in Schlant and Rimer (1991).
6 For a discussion of this paradoxical vision of light in Shiina’s early work, see Williams
(2003).
7 For a discussion of this aspect of the novel, see Hinuma Rintarō, ‘Dōjisei no seiritsu’
(The Establishment of Synchronicity), in SRZ bessatsu: 181ff.
8 Cf. Takadō (1989) and Kobayashi (1992). For discussion of Shiina’s transition from
Communist activist to baptised Christian, see Gessel (1982) and Saitō (1980).
9 SRZ 6: 337; all subsequent citations from the novel are taken from this edition and
cited as page number only.
References
Main text
Shiina Rinzō (1955 [1971]) Utsukushii onna (The Beautiful Woman), in Shiina Rinzō zenshū
(SRZ ) The Complete Works of Shiina Rinzō, vol. 6, Tokyo: Tōjusha.
Other references
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge.
Auestad, Reiko (2002) ‘Nakano Shigeharu’s Goshaku no sake ’, Journal of Japanese Studies 28(1)
(Winter): 79–107.
Bhabha, Homi (ed.) (1990) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge.
——(1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Clammer, John (2001) Japan and its Others, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.
Dower, John (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, London: Penguin
Books.
Foucault, Michel (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed.
Donald Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gendai Nihon kirisutokyō bungaku zenshū (Anthology of Christian Literature in Contemporary
Japan) (1972–74), Tokyo: Kyōbunkan.
Gessel, Van C. (1982) ‘Voices in the Wilderness: Japanese Christian Authors’, Monumenta
Nipponica 37(4): 437–57.
Jameson, Frederic (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Keene, Donald (1984) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, vol. 1, New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Kobayashi Takayoshi (1992) Shiina Rinzō-ron: Kaishin no shunkan (A Study of Shiina Rinzō:
The Moment of Conversion), Tokyo: Seishidō.
Mayo, Marlene and Rimer, Thomas (eds) (2001) War, Occupation and Creativity: Japan and
East Asia, 1920–1960, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Miyano Kōo (1989) Katarienu mono e no tsubayaki: Shiina Rinzō no bungaku (Hints of the Unut-
terable: The Literature of Shiina Rinzō), Tokyo: Yorudan-sha.
Rubin, Jay (1985) ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature
under the Allied Occupation’, Journal of Japanese Studies 11(1): 71–103.
Said, Edward (1994) Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage Press.
Saitō Suehiro (1980) Shiina Rinzō no bungaku (The Literature of Shiina Rinzō), Tokyo:
Ōfūsha.
Sasaki Keiichi (1968) Shiina Rinzo¯ no bungaku (The Literature of Shiina Rinzō), Tokyo: Ōfūsha.
Satō Jun’ichirō (1973) ‘The Problem of Shiina Rinzō’, Japan Christian Quarterly (Autumn):
185–90.
252 Mark Williams
Schlant, Ernestine and Rimer, Thomas (eds) (1991) Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction
and Culture in West Germany and Japan, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press.
Shiina Rinzō (1967) Hito, seikatsu, dokusho: Watashi no seikatsu taiken (People, Life, Reading:
My Life Experience), Tokyo: Futami shobō.
——(1970–79) Shiina Rinzōzensh ū (The Complete Works of Shiina Rinzō), 23 vols, Tokyo:
Tōjusha.
Steinhoff, Patricia (1988) ‘Tenkō and Thought Control’, in Gail Bernstein and Haruhiro
Fukui (eds) Japan and the World: Essays on Japanese History and Politics in Honour of Ishida
Takeshi, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 78–94.
Tachibana, Reiko (1998) Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-century of Postwar Writing in
Germany and Japan, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Takadō Kaname (1989) Shiina Rinzō -ron: sono sakuhin ni miru (A Study of Shiina Rinzō: A
Textual Perspective), Tokyo: Shinkyō shuppan.
Takeda Tomoju (1973) ‘Jiy ū no shōnin: Shiina Rinzō’ (Shiina Rinzō: Witness of Freedom),
Seiki 272 (January): 68–77.
Williams, Mark (2003) ‘Shiina Rinzō: Imaging Hope and Despair in Occupation Japan’,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66(3): 442–55.
Further reading
Buruma, Ian (1994) The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London:
Phoenix.
Gordon, Andrew (ed.) (1993) Postwar Japan as History, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Koschmann, J. Victor (1996) Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Molasky, Michael (1999) The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory,
London: Routledge.
Sasaki, Atsuko (1999) Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction,
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Slaymaker, Douglas (2004) The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction , London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Part III
Liminal sites
13 Yuta as the postcolonial Other in
Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction
Leith Morton
Okinawan literature represents a conundrum when seen from the usual perspec-
tive of Japanese literature. The nature of this conundrum is easily
apprehended when we consider the categories of ‘self ’ and ‘other’, ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’ proposed as the main themes of this volume. Where should
Okinawan literature be located? This study attempts to answer this question
by examining a collection of novellas written by the distinguished Okinawan
writer Ō shiro Tatsuhiro (b. 1925), which were published in a single volume in
1992 under the title Gushō kara no koe (Voices from the Next World). The four
novellas are: Meiro (Labyrinth), first published in 1991 in the literary journal
Bungakkai; Mumyō no matsuri (The Dark Festival), first published in the same
journal in 1981; Zushigame (The Funerary Urn), first published in Gunzō in 1986;
and Fudō (The Shaman Way), first published in Bungakkai in 1992. Apart from
Shaman Way, which is set in the past, the other stories are all set in contemporary
Okinawa. However, all the novellas are concerned with yuta (shamans) and their
impact on the various microcosms of Okinawan society described by Ōshiro.
This study will concentrate on Labyrinth, while briefly considering the other two
contemporary stories. Shaman Way will not be analysed here, because its setting in
seventeenth-century Okinawa deserves a separate analysis.
The State of Okinawa

To simply argue that the writing produced by Okinawans is but another example of
a literature on the periphery is, in a sense, not only to deny subjectivity to the vast
literary output of that island chain often called the Ryūkyū islands (for the purposes
of this study, however, the appellation Okinawa will be used), but also to deny the
history of Okinawa. Hokama Shuzen, who has been one of the leading authorities
on Okinawan culture over the past fifty years or so, divides Okinawan literature into
two separate categories: first, classical literature encompassing writing from the first
centuries of the Christian era through to the nineteenth century. His second cate-
gory of modern literature begins from the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Further, this division is equally a linguistic one as classical Okinawan literature
was written in the languages of the Ryūkyū islands while modern Okinawan
256 Leith Morton
literature is written predominantly in the standard form of Japanese based on the
Tokyo dialect (Hokama 1986: 114).
How can a body of literature that predates by a very large margin most
national literatures of Europe be described as ‘peripheral’? Using such logic would
condemn German literature, for example, to the periphery. As Hokama notes, post-
World War II Okinawan literature has, in some measure, reclaimed its linguistic
subjectivity from standard Japanese, and continues to struggle with the problem
of how to incorporate and utilize the languages of Okinawa into its writing
(ibid.: 114). Modern Okinawan literature has had to deal with the consequences
of the deliberate destruction of the hitherto independent kingdom of the
Ryūkyūs, although that independence was always a matter of negotiation.
Donald Keene, in his recent biography of the Emperor Meiji, observes:
The status of [Okinawa] had long been ambiguous. In 1186 the shogunate
had given the founder of the house of Satsuma the title of jitō (manor lord)
of Okinawa . . . Internal warfare among the three kingdoms of Okinawa . . .
led one of the kings to send a mission to the Ming Court in 1372, asking
Chinese help in unifying the country; he also asked to become a feudatory.
The Chinese agreed and gave the country the new name of Ry ūkyū. This
change in relations with China did not end the long-standing tributory rela-
tionship with Japan.
(2002: 220)
And, as Keene later concludes, ‘The Ryūkyū kingdom had for centuries served
two masters, China and Satsuma, paying tribute to both. This was the only way a
small country with few resources and no military strength could maintain its exis-
tence’ (ibid.: 302).
However, in 1879, the kingdom was incorporated into the Japanese empire by
force. Can this be interpreted as a kind of colonization? Many Okinawans have
done so, and a significant portion of the literature of modern Okinawa has
been devoted to describing this situation as a tragedy. It is also important to
acknowledge that many Okinawans eventually came to have a more positive
view of the absorption of their nation into the Japanese collectivity. The
massive and heroic sacrifices Okinawans made in defence of the Japanese
empire, specifically in the battle for Okinawa in 1945, have been widely recog-
nized both within and outside Japan. Nevertheless, the fact remains that much
prewar Okinawan writing dwells on the prejudices and inequalities that
Okinawans suffered at the hands of the inhabitants of the Japanese mainland.
As an example, I might cite a typical story by the famous Okinawan writer
Yamanokuchi Baku (1903–63) called ‘Tengokubiru no Saitō-san’ (Mr Saito of
Heaven Building), written in 1938 and which was recently translated into English
by Takagi Rie (Molasky and Rabson 2000: 85–96).
The great ethnologist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) wrote his first significant
study on Okinawa entitled Kainan shōki (South Sea Notes, 1925) in part to counter
the ‘historical prejudice’ against Okinawa held by mainlanders, and also to
Yuta as the postcolonial other 257
argue for the preservation of Okinawan languages or dialects (one definition
of a language is ‘a dialect with an army’) in the face of the hostility of the
prewar Japanese government that banned use of Okinawan languages in
schools (Morton 2003: 66–9). Hokama Shuzen states that South Sea Notes played
a vital role in fostering scholarship on Okinawa among native Okinawan scholars
(Hokama 2002: 172–3). Yanagita’s study was the seed of the ‘discovery’ of
Okinawa by mainland intellectuals which, in the postwar era and especially since
the reversion of Okinawa from American to Japanese authority in 1972, blos-
somed into the great debate over the origins of the Japanese.
This debate was fuelled by Yanagita’s seminal study Kaijō no michi (The Ocean
Road, 1961) which argued for an alternative view of Japanese ethnicity arising in
Okinawa. A mere nine years later, in 1970, the Nobel Prize-winning author Ōe
Kenzaburō (b. 1935) published his Okinawa nōto (Notes on Okinawa) in which he
wrote that his journey to Okinawa was an attempt to ‘transform myself into an
un-Japanese Japanese’ (Ōe 1970: 16). It is noticeable that this quotation comes from
a chapter entitled ‘Nihon ga Okinawa ni zokusuru’ (Japan belongs to Okinawa).
Other authors, like the novelist Shimao Toshio (1917–86) and his author-wife
Shimao Miho (born in Amami Ōshima, part of the Okinawan cultural sphere), also
took up this theme, arguing for a new vision of Japan as a Pacific rather than an
Asian culture, thus coining the word ‘Yaponesia’ (Morton 2003: 43–4; Clarke
1985: 7–21; Sparling 1985).
In that sense, Okinawa and its culture became an ‘other’ inside Japan, a mirror
in which the Japanese could re-envision and re-interpret their own cultural and
literary tradition. Added to this already complex mixture of Japanese colonialism
and postcolonial angst and re-interpretation (or is that re-appropriation?), the
earlier American interregnum from 1951 to 1972, when Okinawa was administered
by the USA, gave Okinawan citizens the dubious privilege of a second colonization
of their culture. In the postwar era Okinawans had two postcolonial experiences
to contend with. Thus modern Okinawan literature can be categorized along
the lines summarized by Okamoto Keitoku in his work, Gendai bungaku ni miru
Okinawa no jigazo¯ (the Image of Okinawa in Contemporary Literature, 1996), where
Okinawan indigenous cultural influences, the shadow cast by America in the
postwar era and the post-reversion rediscovery of an even more nuanced sense of
Okinawan identity all combine to make hybridity the norm (Okamoto 1996).
Presently, I will examine the specific case of the novelist Ōshiro Tatsuhiro
whose own writing can be taken as emblematic of this hybridity and of the
otherness that resides within modern Okinawa itself. But first let us consider
briefly one of the most distinctive and celebrated characteristics of contempo-
rary Okinawan religious culture: yuta, the mantic females who are the subjects
of the stories by Ōshiro that form the focus of this investigation.
Yuta
The authoritative, multi-volume Shō gakkan Nihon kokugo daijiten (Dictionary of
Japanese, vol. 13, 2nd edn, 2002) defines yuta as a word indicating a shaman
258 Leith Morton
(kitōshi), usually female, found in Okinawa and Amami Ōshima. The dictionary
cites as a source Yanagita Kunio’s study Miko-kō (On Mantic Females), published
between March 1913 and March 1914 in his ethnological journal Kyōdo kenky¯ ¯ū
(Local Studies). In On Mantic Females, Yanagita mentions Okinawa on occasion,
but points out that the term was widely used from ancient times throughout
Japan to mean female shamans, as well as women who perform sacral duties in
shrines and a variety of related functions. He also mentions such cognate terms
as ichi, ichiko, agata, itako, moriko, and so on. Despite their various functions, these
words also refer to mediums (some female, some not) and shrine maidens and
different kinds of mantic female. We can thus conclude that the term is of quite
ancient origin and originally referred to shamans not only in Okinawa but in
numerous other regions of Japan (Yanagita 1990: 305–417). But as the Shōgakkan
dictionary entry notes, nowadays the word seems restricted in usage to Okinawa
and Amami Ōshima.
More recent research on yuta, such as that found in Takasaka Kaoru’s (1987)
edited volume of essays Okinawa no saishi-jirei to kadai (Okinawan Rituals: Case
Studies and Problems), presents a variety of perspectives that enrich and deepen
Yanagita’s earlier study, with the added strength that the focus is exclusively on
yuta in Okinawa. Takasaka himself argues that, unlike other more traditional
village priestesses, yuta are women without any specialized training in rites who
carry on this function because of the gradual disappearance of the older priestly
class of women. He cites evidence that the ritualistic language used by yuta is
borrowed from the rites intoned by older, more traditional sacral females (Takasaka
1987: 10, 22).
For the purposes of this study, probably the most important evidence relating
to the role yuta play in contemporary Okinawa is supplied by Tanigawa Ken’ichi,
one of Yanagita’s most celebrated and distinguished successors, who established
his own school of ethnology. Tanigawa is the author of numerous works on
Okinawa. One of his most recent books, Kami ni ōwarete (Pursued by God, 2000),
directly addresses the same issues treated by Ōshiro in the fiction that I will
examine here.
Tanigawa’s book is divided into four chapters or sections and an introduc-
tion. In the introduction titled ‘Tamashi no kiki’ (The Crisis of the Spirit),
Tanigawa explains that his book is an account of the ‘religious experiences’
(shūkyō taiken) of various Okinawan women (and a few men) who have become
possessed by God. Glossing the word yuta as meaning ‘shaman’, he writes that his
interest in Okinawan yuta was kindled by the knowledge that these women
undergo terrible trials and tribulations and this is crucial in their development as
yuta. The central person in these accounts is Nema Kana, a yuta who lives in
Hirashi on Miyako Island, one of the many islands that make up Okinawa.
Tanigawa describes the process of becoming a yuta, which is to be possessed by
God. Tanigawa compares this experience to the ordeal of Jesus Christ during his
forty days in the wilderness. Generally speaking, the women who are possessed
do not seek this out; in fact, they see themselves as having been forcibly taken
against their will by God. For example, on Ikema Island, women resisted this
process for several years; thus, until 1996 when Kana’s daughter was selected as a
tsukasa (celebrant) and accepted this burden, no yuta existed to perform the
various religious rites normally celebrated by the islanders (Tanigawa 2000: 4–20,
183–9).
In the Introduction, and at the end of the fourth chapter, Tanigawa writes in
the first person, so it is clear that readers are meant to assume that he is relating
real events. The accounts of the yuta are narrated in the third person, with
personal and place names given freely. However, the normal apparatus of the
ethnographer or cultural anthropologist, and the practice often adopted by
Tanigawa in other books (interview dates, sources, footnotes, citations etc.), are
absent. The book reads like a collection of stories.
The incidents in Nema’s life bear a remarkable resemblance to many of the inci-
dents and crises suffered by yuta in Ōshiro’s fiction. This is not because Ōshiro is
acquainted with Nema (this seems altogether too improbable), but because of the
common elements linking yuta together. Thus we are in a position to conclude
that, based on the evidence provided by Tanigawa, Ōshiro’s tales are indeed real-
istic, and very close to the actual life-histories of yuta themselves. In saying this, I
am assuming that Nema actually exists and the yuta whose stories are recounted
in Tanigawa’s volume are equally real. The similarity between Tanigawa’s real-
life yuta and Ōshiro’s fictional yuta also indicates how much research Ōshiro
himself may have done in creating his fictional accounts. This is not to argue that
fidelity to factuality in itself is a necessary criterion of literary evaluation, but,
knowing that Ōshiro’s stories possess such factuality enriches and deepens appre-
ciation of his technique, and further enhances readings of the stories.
Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, Okinawan dialects and yuta

Ōshiro Tatsuhiro came to prominence on the Japanese mainland in 1967 when
he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for his novella Kakuteru pātii (Cocktail
Party). However, he had been well known in Okinawa for a much longer period.
During the 1950s, Ōshiro was one of the central figures in the development and
formation of postwar Okinawan literature, quite apart from the several posts he
held in the government (often in positions relating to the preservation of
Okinawan culture). Okamoto Keitoku argues that Ōshiro’s early fiction often
took up autobiographical themes, a dominant strand of prewar and immediate
postwar Okinawan fiction, but after the publication of Cocktail Party which dealt
with Okinawan identity, US Occupation and the war (as Michael Molasky notes,
the central theme in postwar Okinawan writing until the 1970s), his range as a
writer expanded considerably (Okamoto 1981: 101–2; Molasky 2001: 3). Ōshiro
maintained a keen interest in traditional Okinawan culture and this emerged as
an important theme in his writing from 1960s onwards, especially in relation to
the role women play in modern Okinawa in maintaining and passing on traditional
cultural practices. His 1968 story ‘Kamishima’ (Divine Island), for instance,
features a woman called Futenma Yae as the main character (Yae is a noro, a
village priestess) and, the story deals in part with her religious responsibilities
260 Leith Morton
during the Asia Pacific War (Okamoto 1996: 64–7) Similarly, Ōshiro’s 1979 novel
Hanabanashiki utage no ato ni (After the Splendid Banquet) has another noro
called Akamine Matsu as its chief protagonist (Okamoto 1996: 205).
Ōshiro has been at least as interested in yuta as noro. Ōshiro himself defines
yuta as female shamans who differ from the kinds of female mediums such as
noro or itako (found in northern Japan), because they are quite ordinary people
who, for the most part, live quite ordinary lives. This information is taken from
Ōshiro’s own essay on yuta first published in 1991 in the Nishi Nippon newspaper
(Ōshiro 1992: 272–6). I will not summarize the essay here, as I have done this
elsewhere (Morton 1998: 65–78). Interestingly, Rabson who translated Cocktail
Party into English quotes Ōshiro as saying that his 1966 story ‘Kame-no-kō Baka’
(Turtleback Tombs) was more deserving of literary acclaim than Cocktail Party.
Turtleback Tombs, also translated into English by Rabson, deals with ancestral
graves, a matter closely related to the devotional duties of yuta, and yuta also
appear in this story (Molasky and Rabson 2000: 112).
Hokama Shuzen cited the sub-title of Turtleback Tombs, ‘jikken hōgen o motsu
fudoki’ (a topography written in an experimental dialect), to argue that with this
novel, Ōshiro gave a great boost to postwar Okinawan literature by attempting to
develop an Okinawan dialect that could be understood by mainlanders, and thus
could serve as a model for future writing in Okinawa. Hokama also draws atten-
tion to Ōshiro’s radio drama performed in 1952 that was written in ‘Nāfa
Yamatoguchi’ (Naha-mainland mixed dialect). This was a pioneering attempt to
realize a new approach to indigenous Okinawan culture (Hokama 2000: 89–91).
Ōshiro himself has spoken of his neologism ‘Yamato Uchināguchi’ (in standard
Japanese, ‘Nihon Okinawago’, or Japanese-Okinawan speech), which represents
his own attempt to develop a mode of writing in dialect that clearly reveals its
Okinawan origins while remaining intelligible to mainland Japanese readers.
This then becomes, in the hands of contemporary Okinawan authors and
speakers, ‘Uchinā Yamatoguchi’, a bastardized form of Okinawan dialect substi-
tuting for the real thing (Ōshiro 2001: 203–9).
Why do women feature so prominently in Okinawan culture? In a recent article,
the historian Kawahashi Noriko summarizes neatly the nature and significance
of the woman’s role in Okinawa. I will quote the relevant passage in full as an
understanding of this issue is crucial to any reading of Ōshiro’s fiction treating
women in general, and yuta in particular:
One of the most striking characteristics of Okinawan religious culture is its

gendered nature, and its allocation of authority to females. The complete
domination by women in the rituals of the various Okinawan social institu-
tions, such as household group, kin group, village community, and, formerly,
the state, illustrates that women monopolize control of the religious sphere
even when that sphere’s relevance extends to the whole society. As has been
observed by many researchers, non-subordinate roles of women in the
religio-cultural life of Okinawa significantly differ from those found in other
cultures, where women are traditionally excluded from religious leadership.
Ordinary Okinawan women serve conspicuous religious functions as
sisters and daughters on the one hand, and as wives and mothers on the
other. Okinawan women, regardless of the official priestesshood, are
assigned a culturally recognized role as spiritual guardians. In general, while
sisters are traditionally believed to fulfill the role of spiritual protector
toward their brothers throughout their lives, married women are assumed to
protect their household members as housewife-priestesses of the hearth
deity. That is, Okinawan religious culture appears to have chosen a partic-
ular modality of sacred beings in which women in general are imbued with
extraordinary strength.
(Kawahashi 2000: 86)
It is striking that Kawahashi offers this statement to argue against a 1990 book
on Okinawan women by Horiba Kiyoko that puts the case that women are
oppressed by men in Okinawa. In support of her thesis, Kawahashi cites the
anthropologist Henrietta Moore who notes that ‘When researchers perceive the
asymmetrical relations between women and men in other cultures, they assume
such asymmetries to be analogous to their own cultural experience of the
unequal and hierarchical nature of gender relations in the West’ (Kawahashi
2000: 91). This remark reminds us of the danger of simplistically and uncriti-
cally assuming an easy identification of the gendered other in Ōshiro’s fiction
with any putative equivalent in Western literature, whether textual or theoret-
ical.
Three novellas
The Dark Festival is the longest of the four novellas contained in Ōshiro’s volume
Voices from the Next World and, in some ways, the most complex of the three stories
set in present-day Okinawa (although it is not without its faults); consequently it
deserves a much more extended treatment than is possible in this study. However,
as it illuminates many of Ōshiro’s themes in a particularly instructive manner, I
will refer to it often – and so will begin with a brief summary of the plot.
Chapter 1 tells of a 39-year-old widow called Tawada Katsuko (her husband and
son have recently died in accidents) who has gone to a remote mountain with an
old yuta called Fukumoto Shizu to pray for her ancestors, descendants of the
powerful Aji clan. According to Shizu, Katsuko has neglected her religious
duties, and the implication is that this may lie behind the tragedies that have
befallen her. The two women argue over which graves are those of Katsuko’s
ancestors. Katsuko has the first of a number of increasingly violent (and at times,
erotic) visions, and fears she is becoming a yuta herself. She decides to relocate
her ancestor’s bones to the site nearby that, she has been informed by her vision,
holds the correct grave.
This leads Katsuko in the next chapter to relocate herself from her home in
Kadena to the village of Hamasaki to be near her ancestors. This event triggers
a series of political conflicts with an oil company as the villagers adopt Katsuko
262 Leith Morton
as their yuta, and in Chapter 3, the village decides, on Katsuko’s advice, to build a
magnificent tomb for the Aji on the mountain where, we later discover, an oil
plant is to be built. Katsuko herself becomes embroiled in the villagers’ lives, and
often doubts her visions (Ōshiro 1992: 64–105).
Chapters 3 and 4 continue to explore the impact of Katsuko’s visions on the
villagers and on Katsuko herself. Katsuko’s revelations, which lead her into
competition with Shizu, become apocalyptic nightmares foretelling the end of the
world, or at least the collapse of the ‘tomb’ mountain. They also enfold Katsuko
in sexual dream fantasies where she has passionate sex with a god-like man. One
remarkable scene in Chapter 4 recounts a vision where Japan is created:
God dipped his staff in the lower world. Whereupon a dark grey colour
resembling sea or mist formed and created a whirlpool. The staff stretched
to infinity. God gently stirred the lower world with his staff, and then lifted it
up. Drops fell from the tip of the staff. Katsuko seemed to have known from
long ago that this was how the world was formed. As if she has always
known it, the drops from the staff finally congealed and one island
appeared.
(Ōshiro 1992: 120)
In this passage, Okinawan legend seems to appropriate the Japanese creation

myth, as this description is very close to the Japanese myth of origin as
recounted in the ancient mytho-historical document, the Kojiki. Finally, in the
last chapter, Katsuko’s erotic fantasies take on material form with the appear-
ance of a handsome young man, one of the leaders of the anti-oil plant
movement. And in her visions he merges with her divine lover, or should that
be succubus? Overcome by violent, sexual revelations or hallucinations, and
also by the competing voices of her ancestors, Katsuko collapses on the moun-
tain, and readers are left with the following enigmatic ending: ‘Will she be buried
deep beneath the earth? How terrifying! Katsuko pressed her hands tightly
against her ears. The drone of the cicadas was suddenly stilled’ (Ōshiro 1992:
146).
In this short description, I have left out the many sub-plots contained in the
villagers’ tales that Katsuko interprets as part of her duties as a yuta. However, to
counterbalance the rather obvious blemish of Ōshiro almost mechanically
linking Katsuko’s visions to her unassuaged grief and loneliness – joining her
inner tormented psyche to the other-world of divine possession – the night-
marish, almost surreal quality of Katsuko’s revelations (we are never quite sure
which is vision and which is non-vision, and neither is Katsuko) invests the char-
acter of Katsuko with great power. Indeed, of all the yuta portrayed in the three
contemporary tales, Katsuko is the most impressive in the sheer incoherence and
dynamism of her emotional self. She is a woman on the very edge of sanity and
Ōshiro has spared none of his considerable rhetorical or stylistic skill in allowing
his language to approach poetry in its extravagant imagery and disjointed
rhythms.
Elsewhere I have published a study of Funerary Urn, so I will summarize in just
a few lines the plot of this work (Morton 1998). Funerary Urn deals with a woman
called Maja Etsuko who is in the process of becoming a yuta, an event triggered by
the revelation of her husband’s infidelity and the subsequent birth of a son to his
mistress. In addition, the Maja household is also under attack by another yuta who
demands that Etsuko find the resting place of her husband’s ancestors in order to
give the spirits of the dead (who are, in one sense, alive) peace. The birth of the
divine in Etsuko is the centrepiece of the novella, and the subsequent joining of
the material world and the spiritual world in her psyche (Ōshiro 1992: 147–209).
Labyrinth grapples with a similar theme. The chief protagonist of the story is a
young woman called Matsuyo who is of mixed-blood ancestry but looks exactly
like a typical blonde American girl. The irony is that Matsuyo was raised in rural
Yomitan by her grandmother and doesn’t speak a word of any language other
than her native Okinawan dialect. Matsuyo works in the evenings as a hostess in a
bar but she is, like Katsuko and Etsuko, possessed by the divine. Matsuyo senses
tragic events before they occur – of people about whom she has unhappy premoni-
tions. As she whispers to her bargirl friend Sachi, ‘that person . . . his outline is
starting to blur’ (Ōshiro 1992: 14). Matsuyo had her first episode of divine posses-
sion (kamigakari) when she was seven.
Sachi is in hospital with what appears to be bronchitis but her condition is
steadily growing worse. Matsuyo dislikes the atmosphere at the hospital; she finds
the hospital corridors treacherous in their uniformity, describing them as a
‘labyrinth’ (meiro) and she is convinced that unless she intercedes with Sachi’s ances-
tors by prayer, she will not recover. As Matsuyo’s grandmother told her, ‘Ugansu
(gosenzo) ga miimante (mimamotte) kudasaru yo’ (your ancestors protect you)
(Ōshiro 1992: 17). Although Matsuyo’s gifts differ somewhat from traditional yuta,
she is often asked for advice and her reputation as a yuta is slowly spreading.
Matsuyo grows increasingly concerned for Sachi. In the hospital, there is no
hinukan (in standard Japanese hi no kami ) signifying the fire god or oven god, a
fireplace where Okinawans place votive offerings to their ancestors on the ashes;
this makes it all the more urgent for Matsuyo to find an appropriate spot for her
prayers. From the beginning of the novella, Matsuyo’s beliefs and the modernity
of contemporary Okinawa as symbolized by the uniform, modern corridors of
the hospital (which lack a place where traditional Okinawan religion can be prac-
tised) come into conflict.
Matsuyo asks Tamai Akira, a high official at the Prefectural Cultural Affairs
office (which Ōshiro once headed), and her boyfriend of two years’ standing, for
help to access the US military base at Kadena where a traditional site of worship
is located. In a series of flashbacks, she recalls their first night together after she
went to see him because she believed the Emperor of Japan was going to steal
music from Okinawa. Explaining her anxieties to Tamai, she remarked that illog-
ical fears come out of nowhere but, if she prays as instructed by god, then they
disappear. She added: ‘I’m not a yuta . . . Despite the fact that people say I
am . . . I just pray to rid myself of these anxieties’ (Ōshiro 1992: 30–1).
However, in the present, she is stunned by Tamai’s refusal to help her gain
entry to the base, even after she has repeated her grandmother’s words to him,
264 Leith Morton
‘Yuta banish the punishments that ordinary people endure’ (ibid.: 34–5). Visiting
the hospital, Tamai even suggests she give up her advocacy of this issue with
hospital staff: choose Christianity or Buddhism instead, he suggests. Not long
after this conversation, Matsuyo has a vision of his death which is promptly real-
ized when he is killed by a car directly outside the hospital.
Her difficulties mount. Tamai’s successor says she is unlikely to gain permis-
sion from the Kadena base authorities as they would be shocked by the sight of a
pretty blonde girl – whom they would take as American – performing Okinawan
religious rituals in a military base. They may well arrest her as a spy, he warns
her. Matsuyo begs him, ‘Inside the wire netting [at the base] the past is waiting’,
she says. ‘If I can’t pray there, I have this feeling that lots of things will meet their
doom’ (ibid.: 57). The official’s nonplussed reply is similar to Tamai’s: if she were
performing Christian or Buddhist rites, then there would be no difficulty. In
tears, Matsuyo leaves with Junko, her seamstress friend.
But then she decides that if she wears a black robe like the Buddhist priests,
she may be able to gain access to the base and save her friend. So she asks
Junko to make her such a robe. Junko thinks the whole prospect of blonde,
female Matsuyo robed in black priestly clothing is quite absurd and muses that
she is witnessing a traffic accident between the past and the present, between
Okinawa and the USA. However, in the end, she accedes to her friend’s wishes
as she knows that Matsuyo truly is possessed by the divine, and there the novella
ends.
This long plot-summary leaves out many of the sub-plots concerning other
men, Matsuyo’s rivalry with a nurse at the hospital and various recountings of
her encounters with the divine in dreams, and in reality. Clearly, however, the
tone is not as forbidding as in The Dark Festival and Funerary Urn and Matsuyo’s
acceptance of her yuta nature is nowhere near as traumatic as Katsuko or
Etsuko’s struggles against their eventual fate. Both Katsuko and Etsuko almost go
mad with the pressure of the numinous upon their psyches but, in contrast,
Matsuyo after hearing the official’s advice about turning to other religions thinks
to herself, ‘when my god fills my head how can the Christian God or the Buddha
come into me?’ (Ōshiro 1992: 57).
The tone is, at times, whimsical, almost humorous, as in the bizarre vision
of Matsuyo dolled up in a Buddhist priest’s gear performing religious rites in a
US base. The whimsy is balanced by the utter powerlessness and frustration
Matsuyo feels at her inability to convince the authorities of the reality of her
visions and the urgency of her divine mission – though few doubt her sincerity.
The humour provides a key to how Ōshiro conceives of Matsuyo’s character.
Unlike Katsuko and Etsuko, she is not a tragic victim of circumstances or of
her faith in the unseen. Rather, she triumphs over both to emerge as a striking,
utterly self-possessed, and quite likeable individual. It appears that she
recovers from her lover’s death in no time at all, yet this can be attributed not
merely to her youthful ebullience but also to her abiding faith in whatever fate
the gods have chosen for her or for Tamai. His death was divinely preordained –
despite the warnings she gave him – and so nothing can be done about it.
Yuta as the subject of resistance
If Matsuyo is a representative of the ‘other’, then, it is also the ‘other’ of the
revival of traditional Okinawan culture that occurred post-reversion in 1972 – a
phenomenon documented by Kawahashi Noriko who writes how ‘some women
of Okinawa are imputing new meanings to their cultural heritage by reinstating
the significance of what was invisible through modernist eyes’ (Kawahashi 2000:
95). In this respect, Matsuyo actually fulfils the prescription of Yui Akiko, a
contemporary journalist on the Okinawa Taimusu newspaper, who wrote in 1992
that ‘Okinawan women’s consciousness, which has been contradictory and frag-
mented, has started to look for a new direction’ (ibid.). The new direction that Yui
foreshadows is the ‘magico-religious’ world explored by Ōshiro in this novella.
This reading would see Matsuyo as signifying a retreat from the contempo-
rary mainland abandonment of tradition, and a re-assertion of a singularly
female expression of Okinawan religious identity. Thus the ‘other’ (a.k.a. Matsuyo)
is standing on the edge of a new centre, which is the old centre of the Okinawan
religious world-view. However, such a reading is necessarily an abstraction from
the concrete particularity of the text. That particularity grounds the story in the
lively, fresh, youthful personality of Matsuyo, who has deep roots in her country’s
tradition despite her appearance (unless Ōshiro is implying that, in some sense,
her appearance is pivotal to her yuta status).
Ōshiro himself wrote about his investigations of yuta, and about this novella in
particular, in his volume of autobiographical memoirs Kōgen o motomete (Seeking
Out the Light-Source) published in 1997. For example, Ōshiro revealed that the
scene in which Matsuyo claims that the emperor was trying to steal music from
Okinawa is based upon a real incident reported to him in his capacity as a
government official (Ōshiro 1997: 292). Further, he notes that ‘to try to describe
the psychology of yuta was an entirely new, unprecedented venture for me and it
took me a considerable effort to do it’ (ibid.: 294). A few pages later, Ōshiro
states that Okinawan culture is originally a female culture – verified by
Kawahashi Noriko’s observations cited earlier – and that he personally feels this
strongly because of his upbringing (ibid.: 296). He elaborates upon the role of
women in Okinawa:
An important element of Okinawan female culture is yuta. I began to write a

series [of stories] about yuta . . . My intention in writing Labyrinth was to use a
mixed-blood woman with the mental abilities of a yuta as a symbol of
Okinawan culture attempting to survive modern civilization and the system
of US bases, all the while groaning in pain. The completed work is quite
different from my first draft but my editor said that it was
incomprehensible . . . Labyrinth was a finalist for the Kawabata Yasunari
Prize but it didn’t win. Yet the comments by the judges sounded exactly like
it had won. There was no resistance whatever to the [theme of] yuta and it
was accepted by the bundan (literary world) . . . Nevertheless, while the exis-
tence of yuta was recognized, they were understood as something with a
weird image – quite different from my own understanding of yuta . . . for us
266 Leith Morton
Okinawans, yuta are remote from our daily lives but we feel they possess a
taste of the unique nature of Okinawan culture.
(ibid.: 297–8)
Apart from the difficulties of getting Labyrinth published, noted here by Ōshiro, in
other places in his memoir he speaks of the strong resistance by his Tokyo
publishers to stories about yuta, and also the negative reactions of Tokyo-based
critics (ibid.: 294). This issue is worth examining in a little more detail as it
connects directly with the notion of the colonial or postcolonial Other. Ōshiro
has, in some degree, as he admits in his comments about the rewriting of Labyrinth,
had to subject his work to a process that can be described as a kind of ‘colonization’.
Yuta in their raw particularity need an explanatory context before they are accept-
able as literary subjects by mainland editors and critics. Without a detailed
documentary examination of drafts and changes forced by Ōshiro’s publishers, it
is impractical to do anything other than speculate about exactly what forms of
textual accommodation Labyrinth has been subjected to. Yet the very fact that this
process occurred, and Ōshiro has made several references to this in his memoir,
allows one to conclude that the ‘colonial’ nexus historically existing between
Okinawa and Japan has not entirely disappeared in the present, and that
Okinawan literature in general may well be subject to this postcolonial process.
The role of Matsuyo in respect of Okinawan and US culture adds a further twist
to speculation about postcolonial processes and Okinawan literature. First, Ōshiro
himself draws attention to this point in his memoir with his comment that
Matsuyo is ‘a symbol of Okinawan culture attempting to survive modern civiliza-
tion and the system of US bases’ (ibid.: 297). Is she such a symbol? Is the
author’s intention realized by his text? These are issues I will now investigate.
Matsuyo as the postcolonial Other

The first significant positioning of Matsuyo as a yuta in relation to the US occurs
when she is 25. The passage reads:
It happened on a fine day in the autumn in her 25th year. Matsuyo was
suffering from a headache and so didn’t go to work and was at home when a
small gasoline tank fell into the garden from a US plane flying above her
head. It was about the size of a large refrigerator but the instant it dropped
into the garden it looked bigger than the small shack with a corrugated iron
roof. Matsuyo saw her grandmother crushed beneath it, struck by a sudden
vision. Her grandmother was in the toilet at the time. Then, one morning a
month later, without any warning, her grandmother died asleep in her bed.
(Ōshiro 1992: 17)
This passage has an almost comic tone as the humorous touches illustrate (e.g.
the grandmother in the toilet when the gas tank hits the ground at exactly the
same time Matsuyo has her vision); but these incongruities, and the vision
which warns of her grandmother’s death, are predicated upon a gas tank
falling from a US plane. As every Okinawan is aware, US planes form a large
part of the make-up of the US bases that inhabit large chunks of various
Okinawan locales, including a large area of Okinawa itself (the most populous
of the islands that make up the island chain), and they constantly pass over-
head and frequently disturb the peace of the people on the ground. These
frequent US flights are one of the many irritants in the US-Okinawan rela-
tionship, and serve as a reminder of Okinawa’s unique and unenvied status as
the host for the vast bulk of the US forces stationed in Japan.
The next important reference to the USA comes in connection with
Matsuyo’s attempts to gain permission to enter the US base at Kadena to
worship. The passage reads:
It took a surprisingly long time for Matsuyo to obtain the permission that
allowed her to pray inside the wire-netting of the base. In the past she only had
to receive permission from the US military authorities but now she had to gain
permission from the Defence Agency of the Japanese government . . . after
listening to Yona Hanjirō’s [the patron of Junko, Matsuyo’s seamstress friend]
explanation, the Agency official indicated his understanding of the need for
a yuta to pray there because of the existence of shell middens or relics. He
understood but did not answer straight away because there was no prece-
dent.
‘Since the propellers of the B52s and Phantoms make such a loud drone,
will Matsuyo’s prayers be able to be heard by God?’ asked Yona on the
phone to Junko.
(Ōshiro 1992: 54)
Actually, Yona had misunderstood the advice that he received: the issue was not
the noise that the B52s made but rather the potential for military secrets, secret
information regarding military technology, being stolen. Junko has another
concern which the passage goes on to articulate:
Junko felt, in contrast to this, that despite the fact that Matsuyo was half
American, she was ignorant of things American and so inside the wire
netting, she might end up being run over underneath the wheels of the B52s
or being blown away by the jet-stream of the fighter planes.
(ibid.: 55)
Here again, in Junko’s comic imaginings, we see Ōshiro’s light touch, with the
description of Matsuyo as a helpless victim of the giant B52s. Or is this stark
realism? The other significant fact about this passage is that the Japanese military
authorities – and also the Okinawan Cultural Affairs Agency in the person of
Tamai, Matsuyo’s lover – act as agents of the American will, and perhaps, as the
passage implies, go beyond the Americans’ own intentions in their zeal to act as
colonial surrogates.
268 Leith Morton
Ōshiro thus allows us to view Matsuyo as a site of resistance both against the
American military occupation in its continuing role as a postwar colonial ruler,
which in the passage quoted earlier is represented by the constant US air traffic,
and also against mainland and Okinawan officialdom which perpetuates the
colonial legacy. As a yuta, Matsuyo represents the ancestral Okinawa belief in a
divinity that, despite its affiliation to various local religions on the mainland, is
nonetheless firmly rooted in the specific religious history and experience of
Okinawa. This is especially noticeable in the role that women play as yuta in
the maintenance of those same beliefs. In this sense, the reference to ‘modern
civilization’ as one of the forces that Matsuyo is resisting as a symbol of
Okinawan culture, made by Ōshiro in his memoirs, could signify some modern
Okinawans, such as those singled out in the passages cited above.
Thus, Matsuyo’s role is complex and ambiguous; she does not represent polar-
ized opposites so much as shifting currents within Okinawa’s exploration of its
post-reversion status. Matsuyo is an appealing, at times comic figure, who in her
innocence, essential goodness, and the steadfast nature of her very Okinawan faith
as a yuta, becomes more than mere symbol.
The sympathetic and vivid portrayal of her character by Ōshiro alerts us to
the power of his art, and to the possibilities inherent in literature. While we may not
share Matsuyo’s beliefs, nevertheless, the sympathy she evokes makes it possible
for readers to enter, if only in their imagination, into the other world of a female
shaman; her mantic nature is transformed by the power of language into yet
another mirror of the enduring and still mysterious entity called human nature.
Finally, has sufficient evidence been gathered to support Ōshiro’s own state-
ments about his novella? Does Matsuyo exist as the woman the author would
wish her to be? Two further quotations serve to confirm the strength of
Matsuyo’s convictions and her character. First, the following passage illustrates
the vitality of this extraordinary woman whose youth and energy represent a
stark contrast to, for example, the character of Etsuko in The Funerary Urn:
They came to Junko’s shop. While walking, unawares, Matsuyo took the lead
and guided Junko to her business. Junko was entirely passive. Nor did she
have any words in reply to Matsuyo’s declaration:
‘Make me priests’ robes. Black robes.’
Junko stared into Matsuyo’s gray eyes, then Matsuyo added,
‘I’m going shave my head. Really, I will. So I will go to prayer dressed in
black robes. I will cure Sachi’s illness, you’ll see.’
(Ōshiro 1992: 59–60)
In The Funerary Urn, Etsuko feels her head about to split open when confronted
by the combined demands of her family and the numinous. Katsuko’s visions
in The Dark Festival eventually appear to actually displace reality as she perceives it.
Matsuyo’s anxieties, her divinely inspired visions, drive her, as they do Etsuko and
Katsuko, to exercise her powers as a yuta. However, Etsuko’s ordeal threatens to
kill her – readers are not sure whether she can survive the transformation her
body is undergoing – and Katsuko’s visions drive her to the very borders of
insanity. By contrast, in Labyrinth, written a number of years after the earlier two
stories, Matsuyo’s contact with the divine simply hardens her determination, her
energy, which has the power almost to enslave her cocky friend Junko to her will.
Ōshiro assures us in his final sentences of Matsuyo’s almost certain victory
over the forces that oppose her:
The night turned to rain. In the half-darkness outside the window, one after
another, reflections from car headlights flashed by, rain pelted down
diffracting the gleaming light. No one can guarantee that an accident might
not occur. Yet Matsuyo, her head shaved, garbed in black, may well boast
nonchalantly that she could easily tell – better than before, dressed up like
this – whether an accident was about to happen.
(Ōshiro 1992: 61)
In these last sentences, there is a gentle humour that consistently informs the
novella from the first page. Not only does this comic element lighten the dark-
ness of the trauma caused by divine possession, but it acts as an ironic
counterpoint that allows the narrative voice (which fashions the expectations
of the readers, playing the role of the invisible readers’ friend) to inject a
charming, complex and mysterious distance into the portrait of Matsuyo,
which deepens and enhances her personality. She is no mere puppet of the
author, the narrator hints, because neither he nor we know exactly what she
will do.
References
Main texts
O¯ shiro Tatsuhiro (1992) Gusho¯ kara no koe (Voices from the Next World), Tokyo: Bungei
shunj¯u.
——(1997) Kōgen o motomete: sengo goj ūnen to watashi (Seeking out the Light-Source: The Fifty
Postwar Years and Myself), Naha: Okinawa Taimuzusha.
Other references
Clarke, Hugh (1985) ‘Japonesia, the Black Current and the Origins of the Japanese’, The
Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 17: 7–21.
Hokama Shuzen (1986) Okinawa no rekishi to bunka (Okinawan History and Culture), Tokyo:
Chūkō shinsho.
——(2000) Okinawa no kotoba to rekishi (Okinawan Language and History), Tokyo:
Chūkō bunko.
——(2002) Okinawa-gaku e no michi (The Road to Okinawan Studies), Tokyo: Iwanami
gendai bunko.
Kawahashi, Noriko (2000) ‘Seven Hindrances of Women? A Popular Discourse on
Okinawan Women and Religion’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 27(1/2): 86.
Keene, Donald (2002) Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World 1853–1912, New York:
Columbia University Press.
270 Leith Morton
Molasky, Michael S. (2001) The American Occupation of Japan: Literature and Memory, London
and New York: Routledge.
Molasky, Michael and Rabson, Steve (eds) (2000) Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature
from Okinawa, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Morton, Leith (1998) ‘The Spirit Within: Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s Funerary Urn (1986)’, Journal of
the Oriental Society of Australia 30: 65–78.
——(2003) Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Nihon kokugo daijiten (2002) (Dictionary of Japanese), 2nd edn, vol. 13, Tokyo: Shōgakkan.
Ōe Kenzaburō (1970) Okinawa nōto (Notes on Okinawa), Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho.
Okamoto Keitoku (1981) Okinawa bungaku no chihei (The Horizon of Okinawan Literature),
Tokyo: San’ichi shobō.
——(1996) Gendai bungaku ni miru Okinawa no jigazō (Okinawa in Contemporary Novels and
Drama), Tokyo: Kōbunkan.
Ōshiro Tatsuhiro (2001) ‘Kindai Okinawa bungaku to hōgen’ (Modern Okinawan Literature
and Dialect), in Sekai ni tsunagu Okinawa kenkyū (Okinawan Studies Linked to the
World), Naha: Fukki 25-shūnen dai-3 kai Okinawa kenkyū kokusai shinpojium jikkōiinkai,
pp. 199–210.
Sparling, Kathryn (1985) ‘The Sting of Death’ and Other Stories by Shimao Toshio, Ann Arbor,
MI: Center for Japanese Studies.
Takagi Rie (2000) ‘Mr. Saitō of Heaven Building’, in Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson
(eds) Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Takasaka Kaoru (ed.) (1987) Okinawa no saishi-jirei to kadai (Okinawan Rituals: Case Studies
and Problems), Tokyo: Miyai shoten.
Tanigawa Ken’ichi (2000) Kami ni ōwarete (Pursued by God), Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Watanabe Yoshio (1993) Sekai no naka no Okinawa bunka (Okinawan Culture and the World),
Naha: Okinawa Taimuzusha.
Yanagita Kunio (1990) Yanagita Kunio zenshū (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 11,
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
——(1997) Yanagita Kunio zenshū (Collected Works of Yanagita Kunio), vol. 4, Tokyo:
Chikuma shobō.
Further reading
Blacker, Carmen (1975) The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, London:
Allen & Unwin.
Morton, Leith (2004) Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry ,
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. George Allen & Unwin.
Rabson, Steve (trans. and ed.) (1989) Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas, Berkeley, CA: Institute
of East Asian Studies, University of California.
Weiner, Michael (ed.) (1997) Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, London: Routledge.
14 Modernity, history, and the
uncanny
Colonial encounter and the
epistemological gap
Faye Yuan Kleeman
Introduction
What exactly is the Other and can one ever fully ‘know’ this Other? Is an Other
that arose through the mediation of geopolitics, especially colonization, different
from an internal Other like Japan’s zainichi (resident) Korean, burakumin, hibakusha
(A-bomb victims), or Ainu communities? How about Others delineated by other
factors, like gender (social), class (economic) or race (biological)? What happens
when these categories overlap, reinforcing or canceling each other out? One
distinguishing feature of the external Other as colonial or imperial subject is the
necessity of incorporating him/her into the empire. This Other, so different from
the Lacanian view of the Other as the ultimate signifier of everyone the subject
is not, is an object to conquer, contain, know, incorporate and, eventually, assimilate.
Since the subject is defined by what it is not, the ongoing process of incorpo-
ration and assimilation of the Other means that the ‘I’ is in a constant identity
crisis, forced repeatedly to redefine itself on a broader canvas that can incorpo-
rate the former Other while seeking a yet more exotic Other through which to
define its boundaries. In fact, this assimilation process often brought unintended
consequences, as we see in the recent work of Leo Ching (2001), Oguma Eiji
(1995, 1998), and Komagome Takeshi (1996). The asymmetrical structure of
assimilation, with one side incorporating, absorbing, and reconfiguring the other’s
pre-existent identity, posed special problems for the colonizer.
Komori Yōichi sees Japanese colonialism as caught between two views of
colonialism. On the one hand, the Japanese largely ignored the external colonial
pressures that led to Japan’s rapid modernization and social transformation, a
state Komori characterizes as ‘colonial disregard’ (shokuminteki muishiki); on the
other, Japan actively pursued the colonization and assimilation of Korea and
Taiwan on the basis of what he terms ‘colonialist regard’ (shokuminchishugiteki
ishiki). In other words, Japan suppressed the sense of crisis associated with the
idea that Japan might have been colonized by the Western colonial powers and,
instead, focused upon the discourse of modernity as manifest in the spontaneous,
self-determined (jihatsuteki) mission of ‘bunmei kaika’ (civilization and enlightenment).
‘Colonial disregard’ was constructed through a process of erasure wherein the
Japanese concealed their internalized self-colonization whereas ‘colonialist
272 Faye Kleeman
regard’ was expressed through mimicry of the Western superpowers. Although
most Western media of the day still considered Japan an ‘underdeveloped
country’, the Meiji elite willingly accepted the mission of civilizing their fellow
Asians as part of their destiny (Komori 2001b: 15).
One way to assert one’s civilized status is to create a marginalized ‘primitive-
ness’ (yaban). Japanese colonialism is founded upon a Japanese brand of
‘Orientalism’ that turns against its Asian neighbors the superiority of a Western
modernity that it had only recently acquired for itself. This dualistic discursive
strategy, incorporating both assimilation and exclusion, was present throughout
Japanese colonialism.
Komori’s understanding leaves little room for individual agency because he
insists that the emergence of the individual subject of modernity was quickly
crushed and folded into the national (and imperial) projects of ‘enriching the
nation and strengthening the military’(fukoku kyōhei ) and ‘escaping Asia to enter
Europe’ (datsua nyūō ). Nevertheless, he succeeds in articulating the East/West
schizophrenia that is Japanese modernity.1 Drawing upon Fanon (Black Skin, White
Mask, 1952) and on Homi Bhabha’s psychoanalytical reading of colonial trauma
and ambivalence, Komori succinctly summarizes the dilemma of Japan’s moder-
nity: Japan’s blindness to its own internal colonization, and, as a compensatory
measure to erase the trauma of being colonized, its decision to direct its gaze
outward, toward external expansion and colonization.
Unlike the gradual decolonization that characterized the end of the British and
French colonial enterprises, the Japanese empire disintegrated at the end of the Asia
Pacific War as quickly as it had been formed. The immediately ensuing American
Occupation left no room for self-reflection upon the colonial experience; instead, a
discursive stratagem of subjugated victimhood permeated the post-war discourse.
Again, Komori refers to this phenomenon as neo-colonial disregard (shin-shoku-
minchiteki muishiki) and neo-colonialist regard (shin-shokuminshugiteki ishiki) manifested
in Japan’s rapid economic expansion in Asia (2001b: 130).
In this chapter I will examine the epistemological gap inherent in colonial
encounters within the specific context of the emergence of the modern subject. I
will use the writing of Satō Haruo, focusing on the novella Jokaisen kidan (A Strange
Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan, hereafter referred to as the The Tale of the
Fan, 1925) as well as a body of works produced after his trip to colonial Taiwan.
Satō Haruo was perhaps the last modern writer to embody the quintessential
quality of a gentlemanly connoisseur or bunjin, a quality that exemplified his
Meiji predecessors such as Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki. Through a long and
prolific career, Satō exerted a literary influence on various genres and many later
writers. At the forefront of experimental Taishō modernism, he was also identified
by the reading public as someone with close ties to the traditional literary heritages
of both Japan and China. He personifies in his writing both Komori’s ‘colonial
disregard’ and ‘colonialist regard’. These multiple positionings, at times progressive
and reactionary, make Satō a complex and intriguing writer.
Satō began his trip to the colonies with some hesitation, but it yielded a corpus
of work that is both revealing and unsettling: revealing, in the sense that we see a
Modernity, history, and the uncanny 273
Taishō liberal intellectual grappling with conflicts between his liberal humanist
stance and the imperial agenda, and yet disquieting in that it also exposed the
Orientalist limitations of Satō and, to an extent, Japanese intellectuals in general.
I will use Satō’s writings on Taiwan and southern China to explore issues such as
the fluid boundary separating the civilized and the barbaric, the negotiation that
ensued between the modernity of the colonizer and the native traditions of the
colonized, and specifically, how the colonizer deals with pre-colonial native history
in which the colonizer played no part while trying to forge a shared present, and
ultimately craft a common historical narrative for the future. These colonial
records (some eye-witness accounts, some adaptations of native tales, and some
fictional creations) provide a fertile ground for examining the dynamic of what
Mary Louise Pratt has called the ‘contact zone’ (1992: 13–15).
The dualistic positioning of Satō Haruo

Satō Haruo (1892–1964) was one of the most prominent writers and poets of the
first half of the twentieth century.2 His family maintained a tradition of
Sinological scholarship, which he developed by gaining a wide familiarity with
Western literature; he also published translations from a variety of foreign
languages. Satō’s productive career spanned half a century from the late 1910s to
the mid-1960s. From his earliest poetic debut in the literary journals Mita bungaku
and Subaru and his first novel, the fashionably trendy Supein inu no ie (House of the
Spanish Dog, 1918), to the lyric he wrote for the 1964 Olympic ceremony theme
song, Satō was an established authority on the Japanese literary scene. By serving
on the selection board for the Akutagawa Prize from its creation in 1935 to 1962,
he played a decisive role in shaping the direction of modern Japanese literature
and he acquired a well-earned reputation for nurturing new writers. His house
was a constant gathering place for many writers, new and old, and he was said to
have trained three thousand disciples (mondei sanzen).
An energetic author, Satō excelled at fiction and is best known for his novels
and short stories, but he wrote memorably in a variety of genres: poetry, literary
criticism, travel journals, essays, drama, translations and adaptations (hon’an),
biography,3 folk tales, and children’s tales. Nakamura Shin’ichirō esteemed this
versatility, saying of Sato Haruo: ‘he alone among all the contemporary writers
explored the potential of literature from multiple viewpoints, carried this experi-
ment through in his word, and left us with a most versatile oeuvre’.4 Born and
raised in a prominent physician household with a tradition of Chinese learning
(kangaku) in Shingu, Wakayama, Satō made his name in the literary world with
romantic early modernist depictions of pastoral and urban life, elegies strongly
influenced by William Blake and Goethe such as Den’en no yūutsu (Gloom in the
Country, 1918) and Tokai no yūutsu (Gloom in the City, 1922). Satō was also known
to be well versed in the Japanese and Chinese classics. His modern renditions of
medieval essays like Hōjōki and Tsurezuregusa as well as his special passion, Edo
works like Ugetsu monogatari and Saikaku’s tales, are still preferred by discrimi-
nating readers. His comprehensive knowledge of the Chinese prose and poetic
274 Faye Kleeman
traditions is evident in his many translated collections of Chinese poetry, such as
Shashinshū (Carriage Dust Collection, 1929), Chinwai gahō nō ryōki (A Chronicle of
Cooling-off on Painted Boats on the Qin and Huai River, 1935), and the postwar
Gyokutekifu (Melody for the Jade Flute, 1945). Translator of the beloved Italian
children’s fable Pinocchio, he also compiled a Shina dōwashū (Collection of Chinese
Fairy Tales). For his adult readers, he translated Xiyouji (Journey to the West, SHZ
32), Shuihuzhuan (The Water Margin, SHZ 34), and Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenth-
century martial epic Pingyaozhuan (Chronicle of Taming the Demons).5 In the
most recent version of Satō’s Complete Works (SHZ 1998), volumes 28 to 34 are
devoted to his translated and adapted works. While roughly 20 percent are
related to Japanese literature, less than 30 percent are of European literature,
and more than half are materials based upon Chinese sources, an indication of
the author’s commitment to continental culture. In the essay ‘Karamono no innen’
(My Affinity with Things Chinese), Satō refers to himself mockingly as ‘the last
Sinophile’ (Shina aikō no saigo no hitori ).6
The reluctant traveler and the imperial eye

Though the study of colonial policy had been established as an academic discipline
and incorporated into the law school curriculum as early as 1909, it primarily drew
the attention of the elite – scholars, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, and
leaders of industry leaders – and had not yet penetrated the consciousness of
everyday people.7
In the summer of 1920, Satō made his first trip abroad, traveling to Taiwan
and the southern coastal area of China. Much has been written about Satō’s
reasons for taking the trip, focusing on his affair with Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s wife
Chiyo, the later Mrs Satō in the wife-swapping ‘Odawara Incident’.8 In his travel-
ogue ‘Kano ichinatsu no ki ’ (A Record of That One Summer), he glossed over the
affair and attributed his motivation to ‘some depressing matters’, ‘the friendship
of an old buddy’, and ‘the phantom of the Southern country (nankoku) which I
have yet to see’ (1936: 253). After his return to Japan, he wrote various pieces –
fiction, essays, and travelogues – based on his experiences. The most famous
work to come out of this was the The Tale of the Fan.9 It is often cited as an exem-
plary piece of exotic writing, and Satō himself proclaimed the story one of his
five favorites.10 As an established writer of the TaishōRomantic movement, his story
helped draw attention to the colony.
Satō Haruo’s writings on colonial Taiwan were not in the form of a casual travel
journal like the more famous Mankan tokorodokoro (Here and There in Manchuria
and Korea) by Natsume Sōseki or Shina yūki (Record of a Trip to China) by
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke.11 The first piece to appear was an account of a two-week
side trip to south-east China (Amoy and Zhangzhou), entitled Nanpō kikō (Record
of a Journey to the South). Satō’s curiously harsh attitude toward what he saw in
China is revealed in his complaints about the inattentive sloppiness of the bell-
boys, the filth and odor of the cities, and the anti-Japanese posters plastered
throughout the city of Amoy. He also published some short stories inspired by his
experiences in China, such as ‘Kō Gojō ’ (Fifth-Daughter Huang) and ‘Hoshi’
(Star),12 but they are far outnumbered by works growing out of his stay in
Taiwan, including travelogues, essays, and short stories. Compared to the critical
and, at times, contemptuous gaze he directed at China, his depictions of the
colony are more complex, studied, and subtle; often they reveal a measured
sympathy toward the aboriginal peoples and native Taiwanese intellectuals.
There was a sizable temporal gap between the publication of Satō’s writings
on China, a foreign state and a former and future enemy, and those on Taiwan,
reflecting the political sensitivity of writings relating to Japan’s colony. His first publi-
cations on Taiwan adapted local tales such as ‘Eagle Claw Blossom’,13 the children’s
story, ‘Inago no dairyokō’ (The Locust’s Great Journey),14 and the indigenous
legend, Machō (Devilbird).15 His travel journal, which one might expect to be the
first product of the trip to see the light of day, did not appear until five years later.
The potential sensitivity of this material is evident in his record of his visit to
the aboriginal village called Wushe (Japanese Musha).16 He visited shortly after the
Saramao incident, a small-scale armed uprising by the indigenous people that
foreshadowed a much larger, more brutal mutiny a decade later in the so-called
‘Musha Incident’. Though rumors claimed that more than one hundred Japanese
had been killed, Satō’s sympathies clearly lay with the indigenous people. He notes
the economic hardships suffered by the village and reveals a sense of ambivalence
and regret upon seeing local schoolchildren struggling to grasp remote concepts
such as metropolitan Tokyo and the Emperor. It is no wonder that when this
travel account was reissued in book form in 1936, it was promptly banned.
In 1932, a full twelve years after his journey and a year after the Manchuria
Incident, Satō published another travel account, Shokuminchi no tabi (Journey to
the Colony),17 in which he recalled the various local elites he had met and his
many conversations with them concerning issues such as modernity, colonization,
and cultural identity. Satō tried to maintain his position as a detached observer
who would listen and provide a forum for the natives to express their views on
various subjects. The careful selection of memories and the array of characters
presented give this piece the feel of social science, as if he were laying out a
taxonomy of the colonized, from the passive resistance of an old poet who refused
to meet him to members of the younger generation who aggressively pursued
news of new cultural trends in Japan. Satō felt the need to tell a fuller story of the
colony, not just to satisfy the metropolitan readers’ insatiable curiosity about the
indigenous inhabitants, but to offer a more nuanced account that would encom-
pass his encounters with Taiwanese intellectuals.18
From exotic text to colonial text: re-reading The Tale of the Fan
Of the dozen works that resulted from Satō’s journey to the colony, The Tale of the
Fan is the best known and artistically most accomplished piece. Structurally, The
Tale of the Fan uses a multiple story-within-a-story structure, interweaving a frame
story of the reminiscences of the narrator in the present time, with a main narrative
depicting his encounter with a native youth some time earlier, and a retelling of
276 Faye Kleeman
the native pioneer history in the past. Hailed as one of the top ten ‘exotic’ stories
in modern Japanese literature, the story has been read as a pure romantic love
story with a Chinese element.
The critical terms most commonly associated with the work are exoticism
(ikoku jōsho) and Chinoiserie (Shina shumi). The general tendency is to read the text
in line with the generic category of works that include foreign subject matter in
the narrative, such as Akutagawa’s Nagasaki Christian tales (kirishitan mono) or
Kitahara Hakushū’s poetry on the southern barbarians (nanban), noted for
portraying the exotic and the unfamiliar (Tsuboi 2002). Though ikoku bungaku as a
literary critical term has lost its currency, it was a legitimate and often used term
during the Taishō and pre-war Shōwa eras. This categorization isolated the
unknown, the ‘other’ factors, domesticated them through indigenous linguistic
and artistic forms, and kept the unknown element at bay for a distant, but safe,
aesthetic appreciation.
The dominant reading of The Tale of the Fan, first published in 1925 in the
journal Josei, has been as an exotic, romantic tale for the female reader, with enough
uncanny twists and turns to chill their spines. What makes The Tale of the Fan a
quintessential exotic text is its intertextual fusing of the Occidental and the
Oriental. A contemporary critic, Shimada Kinji (1901–93), who was teaching at
Taipei Imperial University at the time and later returned to found the
Comparative Literature department at Tokyo University, promoted the piece as
setting the standard for ikoku bungaku. Rather than focusing upon the obvious use
of the Chinese ghost story, Shimada pointed out the influence of nineteenth-
century symbolism, noting similarities to Edgar Allen Poe’s eerie Fall of the House
of Usher in its depiction of natural landscape and to Oscar Wilde’s play Lady
Windermere’s Fan in leitmotif and plot construction (Shimada 1976: 220). Yoshida
Seiichi locates Satō in the Japanese Romantic school and groups him together
with ‘decadent’ writers such as Izumi Kyōka and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (Yoshida
1979: 201–318). This aesthetic reading remained dominant through the pre-war
and postwar period, with the main focus on the tangled love stories and scant
attention paid to the story’s colonial setting.19
It is only recently that we begin to see the text being problematized and reconsid-
ered as a piece of colonial literature (Izumi 2002; Yao Qiaomei 2000, 2001a,
2001b). By deconstructing a metropolitan narrative and displacing it with a
reading that includes the margins of the empire, critics have sought to expand
the potential significance of the text. This hermeneutic procedure begins with a
close reading – founded upon the textual skills of literary interpretation – and then
aims to go beyond the superficial influence of certain epistemological or narrative
strategies (or in some more assured renditions, epistemology itself) to make evident
the racialized and genderized justifications for colonialism implicit in the text.
The entanglement of culture and history

The story begins with an excursion made by the unnamed protagonist and
narrator, a Japanese journalist stationed in the colony who has befriended a
native youth called Segaimin (literally, ‘one who lives outside the world’)20 who
writes classical Chinese poetry. After seeing the famous Red Hill Pavilion,21 the
two wander into a desolate fishing village, where the narrator, a journalist with a
sense of modern poetic sensibility, expounds upon his conception of the ‘beauty
of the ruined’ (1966: 247). The theme of decaying beauty was already present in
his first popular story, ‘House of the Spanish Dog’, in which the narrator
wanders into a Maeterlinck-like woods with his dog, where he finds a mysterious,
deserted Western-style house, a poetic glimpse of a European-inspired haven that
would continue to haunt him.
The focus of the story is the significance of the past to the present. Although
the complex, multi-layered history of the fort and the seaport surrounding it is
not lost on the narrator, he insists:
The reason I was so moved by the beauty of Anping seaport was not neces-
sarily its rich history. No matter who the person is or how much they know
about this place, all one needs to do is set foot here to see the deterioration of
this town. Anyone who has a heart would be aware of its melancholy beauty.
(ibid.: 227)
Segaimin’s enthusiastic commentary on prominent geographical features and

historic sites falls on deaf ears:
In fact, I was so young at the time that I was totally uninterested in

history. When I saw my friend Segaimin who was, like me, an unattached
young man, relating the past with such reverence, I could only come to the
conclusion that a poet infused with Chinese blood is indeed a different
breed.
(ibid.: 229)
The modernist narrator, a progressive intellectual with a passion for artistic

pursuits, vehemently rejects history, both his own and the native history of
Taiwan, and insists that such knowledge is unnecessary in order to be moved by
the beauty of decay. This aestheticized understanding of material culture
resonates with the roughly contemporary discourse of the arts and crafts move-
ment (mingei undō ), which Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) founded after
‘discovering’ the folk art of Korea and which, I have argued, Nishikawa Mitsuru
(1908–99) pursued in Taiwan at about the same time.22 Much as in Yanagi’s
discourse on rustic, utilitarian beauty (yō no bi), objects are decontextualized and
dehistoricized in order to graft them onto a nostalgic imagination of a lost
pastoral Japan, the modern aesthete protagonist of The Tale of the Fan divorces
objects from their context and appreciates the ruin as a mere object of beauty.
This disconnection of the object and its history, the colonial disregard and the
colonialist regard, quickly yields to a racial discourse. The narrator attributes the
native youth’s interest and his own disinterest to the racial difference between
them.
278 Faye Kleeman
The two protagonists, continuing their adventure, chance upon an aban-
doned mansion. Though it is old and dilapidated, the vestiges of past glory
and extravagant luxury still captivate the narrator. The locals inform them that it
had been the mansion of a local merchant named Shen, reputedly the richest
man of his day in southern Taiwan. Although the gold and vermilion posts are
tarnished with time, its original splendor can easily be seen. The protagonist
reinforces the disjuncture in his mind between an object’s history and its aesthetic
value.
Were I a true connoisseur, I probably would have jeered at the dubious

taste of this colonial nouveau riche. But exposure to wind and rain had given
the place a rustic air and saved it from distasteful vulgarity. Further, since
only a portion of the structure remained, it freed the imagination; before
lamenting the elements of disharmony, one should delight in the exotic
atmosphere.
(ibid.: 236)
The pair are astonished to hear a woman’s voice from upstairs. Having been
stationed in the colony for three years, the narrator has acquired some famil-
iarity with the native language, but this is clearly not the Amoy dialect spoken by
most. His native companion, who hesitantly identifies it as Quanzhou dialect,
thinks the voice is saying something like ‘Why? Why could you not have come
earlier?’
Startled, the two quickly leave the ruins. An old lady, after hearing of their
bizarre encounter, tells them the haunting story of the old manor. Shen, the last
owner, was a fourth-generation immigrant from the south-east coast of China.
His family had amassed great wealth through various devious and cunning
methods, including cheating others out of their land. In karmic retribution for
their outrageous behavior, the merchant fleet that had brought them handsome
profit and an opulent mansion was destroyed overnight in a thunder storm, then
misfortune continued as death claimed one member of the family after another.
Eventually, Shen’s daughter was left alone, impoverished, and dependent on the
charity of her neighbors for food. She grew despondent and then deranged,
waiting for a fiancé whom she had never met but to whom she was nevertheless
promised by her father. The fiancé and his ship never arrived and the locals
recalled seeing her dressed in gorgeous wedding attire, talking to herself and to
her imagined future husband.
The narrator and his native friend disagree on how to interpret their spine-
chilling encounter. While Segaimin genuinely believes they had experienced
something supernatural, the narrator dismisses it as superstition, observing:
It seems that Segaimin truly feels there is something uncanny about the
dilapidated mansion in Baldheaded Lane. Come to think of it, the story
sounds so Chinese. A beautiful woman’s spirit left behind in an old aban-
doned house is a clichéd motif in Chinese literature. The Chinese people
must feel a particular affinity for this kind of story, but for me, it just won’t
do. If I were attracted to anything in that house, it would be that everything
in the house was large in scale with garish colors. If I could really convey
what about it appealed to me, it might be something like a toned-down
version of Ukiyoe master Yoshitoshi’s frenzied painting. The characters in
his paintings are of the robust continental type, and there is a certain moder-
nity in its barbaric character, in which the beauty of the subject coexists with
ugliness. A ghost tale is usually set either on a moonless night or under the
bright moon; that this one happened in the daylight, under the bright hot
sun, is its only redeeming feature. Still, it is totally unpersuasive as a ghost
story. In spite of this, Segaimin is totally fascinated by it. No, rather he is
actually terrified by it! Perhaps he thinks he actually had a conversation with
a ghost.
(ibid.: 245)
The journalist narrator puts on his detective’s hat and argues, over the protests of
Segaimin, that the voice they heard must have come from a living woman and
was directed toward someone other than themselves:
‘But what about all those people in the village who heard the same words
uttered by the same voice through all these years?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Because I did not hear what they heard. It was
probably people like you, who are fond of ghosts, who heard it. But for me, I
don’t care a hoot about things that happened in a past that have nothing to
do with me personally . . . Segaimin, you are just too much of a poet. It’s
one thing for you to immerse yourself in old traditions, but remember, in the
moonlight things reveal themselves vaguely. I can’t tell if it is beautiful or
ugly, but one can see clearly under the sun!’
(ibid.: 246–7)
Here, a casual conversation about apparitions between a rationalist Japanese

journalist and a traditionalist native poet turns into a critical discourse on
national culture and aestheticism. Contrasts are made, mostly by the narrator,
between the old (belief in the old ghost tale) and the new (logical, scientific
reasoning against it). By placing this seemingly innocent story within the colonial
context, the text exposes its deep implications for imperialism and the colonial
process. Thus a discussion of whether an ancient ghost exists suddenly takes
an unexpected turn, from a casual conversation about the uncanny into a discur-
sive explication of a much larger subject: the historiography of the past. Ghost
stories are narratives bound by an unresolved past and a troubled present.
Reading ghosts and specters as codified symbols gesturing to the past (history),
the narrator (the colonizer) rejects, or perhaps is incapable of hearing, a voice
from the past that spoke to the native people long before Japanese colonialists
set foot on the island. The narrator repeatedly averts his eyes from the relics of
the past (in this case, the ghost story and the dilapidated ruins) and attempts to
280 Faye Kleeman
neutralize history by redirecting his gaze to an apolitical, universalized
aestheticism. The disparate perceptions of the ruins, what the narrator sees and
what the native youth Segaimin sees, reflect a disparity in the interpretation of
history, in this case the pre-colonial history of Taiwan.
The aesthetic conception that something spiritual continues to live on in

perished ruins is something rather traditionally Chinese. If I may say so, and
don’t get angry with me, it seems the taste of a state that has perished
(bōkokuteki shumi). How can something that has already perished still go on
forever? Don’t we say it has perished precisely because it is no longer there?
(ibid.: 247)
The protagonist continued his speculation, again contrasting the cultural (i.e.
Chinese) and scientific (i.e. a perished state ceases existence) rationales while
Segaimin protested loudly against this view: ‘To have perished and to be in
ruins are not the same, are they? Sure, something that has perished is indeed
gone. But there remains a living spirit in ruins that is on the verge of perishing’
(ibid.). Here the discussion of aesthetics takes an ontological turn, and we are able
to perceive an epistemological gap between the narrator and the native youth. Of
course, the narrator and the native are both creations of the author, and
Segaimin has been set up as a straw man to counter, however feebly, the
narrator’s self-assured discourse on the history and culture of a conquered
other. Satō was careful not to create in the role of colonizer an insensitive, arro-
gant character. Rather, he portrayed a modern young man, attuned to an
unusual aesthetic and impatient with the past, who on various occasions
displayed an impatience toward the colonial authority and an admiration for
his native friend. The protagonist repeatedly shifts the focus of his conversa-
tion with Segaimin from history to aesthetics, as when he dismisses the
supernatural historiography of the site as an anachronistic feature of Chinese
culture, and links the garish luxury of the abandoned mansion to the animated
paintings of the artist Yoshitoshi. The question then is whether this erasing, or
to be more precise, eliding of history by the narrator, is an intentional act, or an
indication that he is incapable of perceiving a past that does not belong to him.
A scene at the beginning of the narrative prefigures the impenetrability of the
Other. When the two men have first arrived at the dilapidated Red Hill Pavilion
and the history buff Segaimin is busily consulting an ancient map in order to
identify various historically significant sites, the narrator, indifferent to the man-
made architecture, instead gazes toward the ocean:
Spreading out before my eyes was the muddy sea. It was yellowish brown in
color and countless small waves rolled in, one row after another. There are
words such as ‘ten layered’ and ‘twenty-layered’ (toe hatae) but nothing in our
vocabulary could describe the layer upon layer of waves that rushed in then
drew back. These waves stretched out to the horizon, and all were pushing
in to the place where we stood . . . Even the tropical sun just before noon
would not reflect off the mucky surface of the waves. This strange sea
without reflection . . . Burning white beneath the bright noon sun. A sea that
absorbs all the light . . . Amidst this landscape of violent movement not a
single sound reverberated. From time to time, a humid, dull breeze like the
breath of a malaria patient would brush through. All these images
congealed into an inner landscape. The symbols multiplied, filling me with
an uneasy feeling like that aroused by a nightmare. No, it was not just the
scene. After coming into contact with this seascape, there were two or three
times when, recovering from a hard night of drinking, I was frightened by
nightmares of dreary seashores.
(ibid.: 229–30)
This is not a casual observation by a random tourist. The disturbing seascape

seems inhospitable and foreign to this stranger in a strange land. The dark water
swallows up the light of the sun and a pall of silence hangs over the constant
movement of the waves. The alien landscape of the colonial Other summons
nightmarish visions of a terrifying inner landscape. On a conscious level, the
narrator is able to dismiss the uncanny remnants of the past by resorting to his
modern, rational world-view, but on a more visceral level they impact upon
his unconscious and surface in his dreams.
Despite their racial and cultural differences, the narrator and Segaimin share
a certain aversion toward the colonial government. The native’s aversion is
rooted in a nationalistic identification with his native culture (and history),
whereas the Japanese narrator’s attitude has grown out of the anti-authoritarian
instincts of a carefree young man. The dialogue between the two men reveals,
not just the juxtaposition of colonial subject/object positions, but also the colli-
sion between modern rationalism and the pre-modern allure of fantasy and
enchantment. The story seems to turn a corner and change its somber and
pensive tone into a fast-paced detective tale.23 The urgent debate centering on
national and cultural identity developed in the first part of the narrative turns
into an exploration of ‘who did it?’
Genre and (colonial) modernity

Here I will turn from a close reading of the story to consider some issues related
to modernity and genre. Although the cultural discourse between the colonialist
and the native is framed in a prototypical haunted house tale, the second half of
the story takes a different direction. Satō was well acquainted with Chinese
collections of macabre tales such as Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales Told while
Trimming the Lamp) and Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales of the Idle Chamber),
which were immensely popular among Edo readers. On the other hand, he was
also fascinated by the new literary forms available to him. The launching of the
magazine Shinseinen by Morishita Uson and Edogawa Ranpō in 1920 provided a
public space for the new genre of mystery and detective stories and this newly
imported genre became all the rage among an increasingly urbanized readership.
282 Faye Kleeman
Like his mentor Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Satō was greatly intrigued by this new type
of storytelling. He wrote several short stories and a detective novel, Shanghai,24 in
the format, and also authored a string of critical essays on the subject. In the
essay ‘Tantei shōsetsu to geijutsumi’ (Detective Novels and Artistry, SHZ 19: 340–
3), the author lists three reasons why it can be called a new artistic form: its
unfailingly logical structure, the stimulating excitement of pursuit, and its evoca-
tion of the pleasure of the uncanny. For Satō, the detective story is the perfect
form because it combines sensual pleasure (like Chinoiserie) and scientific logic.25
Ikeda Hiroshi, in his study of the detective genre and colonialism, makes a
case for reading the introduction and development of both British and Japanese
detective stories within the context of empire (1997: 6–45). He points to genre
writers such as Oguri Mushitarō (1901–46) and Kigi Kōtarō (1897–1969),
exploring the way their wartime experiences outside of Japan shaped their detec-
tive writings. He focuses, in particular, on Hikage Jōkichi (1908–91),27 a popular
mystery writer in the immediate post-war period who often set his gritty murder
mysteries in Taiwan, where he had been stationed as an imperial soldier; his
stories always involve sexual and cultural conflicts with the natives. Ikeda praises
Hikage’s writing as the first to confront the reality of colonialism and first to rein
in the ‘exotic’ (ikoku jōsho) reading of Japan’s colonies (2002: 52–3).
The new genre also influenced more established mainstream authors. In a post-
colonial reading of Natsume Sōseki’s Higan sugi made (After the Equinox, 1912
[1985]), Komori Yōichi illustrates how the expansion of the empire broadened
the imagination and possibilities of the young romantic protagonist Keitarō, who
dreams of making it big either as an adventurer (to Manchuria), a plantation
manager (in the South Seas), or a detective (all over the colonies).26 Komori sees
such new professions as detective as non-productive pursuits for idle intellectuals
who once had no place within the Japanese capitalist system but now found a
way to survive in the newly acquired territories; by contrast, Ikeda argues that
the investigation of the enigmatic unknown, encountered in the newly expanded
empire, was central to the detective genre. In any case, both connect the growth
of the genre not only to Western scientific discourse, but also to the expansion of
both the geopolitical and mental boundaries of modern Japan, and to the insa-
tiable appetite for the unfamiliar of a rapidly urbanizing domestic populace.
In Civilization and Monsters, Gerald Figal (1999) persuasively argues that
monsters, ghosts, the supernatural, the fantastic and the mysterious, which are
not usually associated with modernity, were in fact essential elements in the
construction of a modern world-view in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Examining
the treatment of supernatural themes in a variety of media and genres, he
reveals their role in the Meiji state’s attempt to incorporate folk beliefs into a new
modern national culture defined by modern medicine, education, and the newly
reconstituted imperial institution. The fantastic, as Figal asserts, is always present
in Japanese modernity and has had an untold influence on its development.
Figal focuses on the Meiji writer Izumi Kyō ka and sheds light on his
struggle with internal conflicts arising out of contesting traditional and modern
world-views. Perhaps representing what Thomas Rimer has referred to as a ‘new
Taishō mentality’, Satō’s cosmopolitan stance reflects the self-assured modern
author’s freedom to appropriate the past, including the fantastic, traversing past
and present and mixing old and new genres (Satō 1993: 2–3). The problematic of
the modern state – what to do about the past and how to tame it – that Figal
brings out in his book was less a quandary for the Taishō sensibility. The impasse
perceived in The Tale of the Fan is simply overcome with the introduction of a new
genre. Thus, the shift of narrative mode from Chinese ghost story (fantasy) to
modern scientific inquiry into the truth (detective genre) can be seen as Satō the
modernist’s critique of colonial backwardness. With the narrator actively taking
on the role of investigator, eager to solve the mystery, the dialogue is disrupted,
Segaimin retreats to the background, and is rarely heard of again. The triumph
of rationalism over the ancient superstitions elides the colonial reality and the
subaltern Segaimin is thus rendered silent.
Gender, modernity, and colonialism

I have so far focused on the issue of the incongruity of the national-cultural iden-
tity within the context of a specific colonial encounter. As we decipher the
second half of the narrative, we shall see that the issue of gender looms large.
As it turns out, the narrator was correct in identifying the voice they heard as
that of a living woman, who was using the abandoned manor to rendezvous with
her lover. He exults in the triumph of science and rationalism over irrational
superstition, though his euphoria proves to be short-lived. The story quickly
develops into a complicated detective novel full of intrigue involving the protago-
nist’s efforts to solve the mystery.
To prove his theory that he had not encountered a ghost, the narrator drags
the reluctant Segaimin back to the manor. This time they resolutely proceed
upstairs and there find an ivory fan upon which is inscribed the Zhuanxin
chapter of Ban Zhao’s ‘Precepts for Women’.28 This leads the narrator to specu-
late as to the original owner of the fan and its more recent use:
The elaborate design was appropriate for something that a parent might give
his beloved daughter when she becomes a bride – it must have been from the
Shen family, that fan. Then I imagined that reckless, ignorant girl from a
poor family in Baldheaded Alley. Guided by her instincts, she had no fear of a
house associated with such gruesome legends. Oblivious to what sort of
person had experienced what sort of death on it, she lay upon that stately
bed, grasping that fan with its inscription on wifely virtues, playing with it,
using it to blow cool air on her sweat-drenched lover.
(Satō1966: 256)
Not long after, a young man is found to have committed suicide in the aban-
doned manor. The narrator does some further digging and finds that the body
was the lover of the maid of a local merchant. Her employer had betrothed her,
against her will, to a Japanese national, and her native lover, out of desperation,
284 Faye Kleeman
had hung himself above the ancient bed they had shared. It was this maid whom
they had heard in the upper room several days earlier, awaiting her tardy lover.
She is distraught at having been discovered and requests that the fan be returned
to her. The narrator decides not to expose her affair to the public and terminates
his detective work. A few days later, the maid follows her lover in death.
While the dominant focus in the first part of the narrative is on a dialogue
about the aesthetics and interpretation of history as mediated by different
modern cultures, gender assumes an important role in the second half of the
story, where Satō shifts his attention to the female figures of the tale. The frame
stories of the colonial encounter of two men, mediated by two colonial histories
(the early history of immigration from China to Taiwan and the current
Japanese colonial rule) that echo each other, serve to set up the real drama in the
narrative: the two female figures and their actions that perpetuate the narrative
movement.
The inscription on the fan is an ancient code defining proper conduct for
women. A fan, left by the deceased and perpetually waiting bride half a century
ago and signifying unfailing chastity and virtue, now falls to another girl who
carries out a secret rendezvous at the haunted mansion. The narrator is quite
taken with the idea of an amorous couple using this abandoned mansion for
their illicit trysts. The juxtaposition of modern (in the sense of pursuing free
love), lower social class lovers occupying the same bed in which the elite Shen
maiden had passed her days upholding the dictates of feudal ethics appealed to
his fantasy and, while he did not believe in the ghost stories surrounding the
manor, he enjoyed the air of precarious drama they imparted to the deserted
building. Both the Shen maiden, determined to wait for her betrothed year after
year, and the young maid who refused to accept an arranged marriage because
she had already given herself to another, can be said to be following the spirit of
The Tale of the Fan, if not their actual letter.
A traditional conception of female virtues like chastity and loyalty to male
relations links the two women in this tale. Satō Haruo inscribes into their texts a
conventional, Confucian view of gender. Although colonial subjects like
Segaimin have undergone a profound transformation in their thinking (witness
Segaimin’s feeble defense when faced with the protagonist’s contempt for
Chinese culture and history), gender dynamics remain unchanged. In fact, the
standard that applied to native women in the colonial situation, that ‘a chaste
woman does not serve two husbands’ (zhennü bugeng erfu), comes from a larger
quotation that also requires that ‘a man does not serve two masters’ – but Satō never
asks this loyalty of the native male characters in the story.29
The life of the two ill-fated women reveals a fundamental truth about the
oppressed status of women within both the feudalistic order of traditional
Taiwan and the colonial context. Within the patriarchal system of traditional
Taiwanese society, women seldom had the freedom to determine their own fate.
This tale of a maid who can only respond with suicide to the imposition of an
undesired marriage could easily be cast as a modern protest against the feudal-
istic disenfranchisement of women. These two women, though clearly disparate
in social status, seem to be equally burdened by a centuries-old relic of patriarchal
30
feudal society, which regulated women’s conduct with the Precepts encoded on
this exquisitely carved ivory fan, an object loving parents passed on to their
daughters to remind them of their daughterly and wifely obligations.
Satō, however, withholds his judgment on these two female figures, idealizing
Miss Shen as ‘a woman who eternally seeks for tomorrow, kept alive by her mad
obsessions’ while romanticizing the maid as ‘a wild (yasei) young girl who defies
convention’. For Satō , the maid, then, is an unrealized and frustrated modern
subject, who was aware enough to dare to challenge social rules in pursuing the
love of her heart. By contrasting the chaste Ms Shen with the feral, passionate
maid, the author seems again to distinguish the feudalistic and the modern.
Nevertheless, both women are crushed by the burden of their female gender: one
under the expectations of patriarchal/feudal society (her betrothal to a rich
merchant in order to consolidate the family fortune); the other mediated by the
colonial condition (betrothed to a Japanese by her boss). Many critics applauded
Satō’s progressive stand on women’s issues as represented by this sympathetic
depiction of Taiwanese women under feudalistic oppression.31 But the narrative
strategy of mapping a fundamental gender injustice onto the modern ideal of
free and passionate love is not dissimilar to Satō’ s displacement of history in favor
of aestheticism in his dealings with Segaimin.
The protagonist’s tightly guarded modern identity (entailing colonial regard)
ruptures when he catches a glimpse into the lives of these two women. In sympa-
thizing (identifying) with the colonial subject, he must confront the impact of
Japanese colonialism upon the locals. In this empathetic moment colonizing
subject and colonized object merge, boundaries of Self and Other blur, and a
moment of crisis arises for his modern identity. The narrator knows that the
more he looks into the death, the more he will have to confront the colonial
reality that he has been avoiding so far. He abruptly terminates his investigation.
Certainly, the young journalist is as frustrated with the colonial government as
the unenlightened native. Having come into possession of the fan, the narrator
holds the key to solving the case, but decides against it. The death of two contempo-
raries jars him. It is almost as if he finally perceives the implications of colonialism
for the native lives that disrupt his heretofore unperturbed modernist outlook of
the world. He seeks solace by returning to the metropole.
Conclusion
I have been reading The Tale of the Fan mainly from the point of view of the
Japanese protagonist, closely (perhaps too closely) aligning him with the author
Satō’s metropolitan modes of representation.32 Certainly, the protagonist is not
Satō, who, if anything, is as much Segaimin as he is the protagonist. The author
also greatly identifies with the two female characters. But characters are nothing
but creations of the author, who, combining an assortment of local tales he came
to know on the trip with his own encounters with various native intellectuals,
reconstructs an imagined encounter with the Other. On this journey to the colonial
286 Faye Kleeman
South, Satō, like many writers and other visitors to that region, was intrigued by
the indigenous people, who passed a primitive subsistence deep in the mountains.
His documentary-style travel writings (kikōbun) on this subject were, and still are,
the best of their kind. They are objective, dispassionate, and yet utterly empa-
thetic toward these people located at the bottom of the colonial totem pole,
enduring hardship from both their colonial rulers and the native Han inhabitants.
In his Bunmeiron no gairyaku (Summary Discourse on Civilization), Fukuzawa
Yukichi had categorized European nations and America as ‘civilized’ (kaika),
Turkey, China, Japan, and other Asian states as ‘semi-civilized’ (hankai) nations,
and Africa and Australia as ‘barbaric’ (yaban) realms. Satō Haruo applied a
similar taxonomy to Taiwan, with the Japanese colonizers as representatives of
civilization, the ethnic Chinese inhabitants as the semi-civilized, and the aborig-
inal peoples as barbaric. This reflects a shift from a Meiji understanding of the
world system to a Taishō epistemology of the new world order. Seen in this light,
the body of works produced by Satō as a result of this trip does not, as many
Japanese critics maintain, constitute a masterpiece of ikoku bungaku (literature on
foreign lands), nor, as many Taiwanese critics like to proclaim, does it subtly
promote an anti-colonial agenda, though in his criticism of some aspects of
Japanese rule, he does advocate a sort of ‘benevolent colonialism’ as part of his
modernist world-view (Izumi 2002). Rather, we see in these writings a young
Satō Haruo negotiating his own position among the influences of tradition
(represented by Chinese fantastic beliefs that echo pre-modern Japanese beliefs),
modernity (which entails a liberal world-view inconsistent with superstition,
racial discrimination, or colonialism), and nationalism (which linked him to the
Japanese imperial enterprise). The Tale of the Fan, like Satō’s other writings from
this period, attempts to triangulate among these forces, one reason for its narrative
complexity and lack of a single, unifying point of view.
Satō Haruo began his career as a passionate young poet. From his lament for
the unjust death of the activist Ōishi Seinosuke at the hands of the imperial state
in Gusha no shi (Death of an Idiot, 1910)33 and his vision of a harmonious Utopia
in Utsukushii machi (Beautiful Town, 1919) to his morally ambiguous ruminations on
the colonies in the 1920s, Satō Haruo’s writing set him apart from other
Taishō writers. His high-profile participation in the nationalistic Japan Romantic
School beginning in the mid-1930s, and in particular his wartime writing on China,
which supported the racist discourse of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity
Sphere, reflect a later stage in his intellectual development. But that’s another story.
Notes
1 There is an immense literature on modernity and the formation of the subject in
Japan. The discourse on modernity has been pursued from various academic disci-
plines and has focused on features ranging from social and political history to literary
and cultural domains such as the fantastic (Napier 1996), ethnography (Ivy 1995), folk
belief (Kawamura Kunimitsu 1990), and madness (Matsuyama Iwao 1993). While a
schema of east–west, modern–pre-modern dichotomies prevails in these critical
engagements, the more recent trend is to avoid the binary construction of the two
elements and probe the complexity and complicity of the two sides. This more
synthesized and integrated view can be seen, for example, in Kawamura’s take on the
folksy fantastic as crucial to the ideological and institutional construction of ‘modern
Japan’, or in Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters (1999), in which he asserts that a
discourse on fantastic (fushigi) was at the heart of the historical configuration of
Japanese modernity. I will come back to Figal’s line of reasoning later.
2 On Satō Haruo, see Hata Kōhei (1997: 22–6, 32–5); Keene (1984: 631–44); Oketani
Hideaki (1987: 248–309); Satō Haruo (1994).
3 His biographies of Yosano Akiko, Kyoko mandara, and another Taishō writer Nagai Kafū,
Shōsetsuka Nagai Kaf ū , remain the most creative and readable biographies of the two
authors.
4 Cited at http://www.city.shingu.wakayama.jp/haruo1.htm, last accessed Nov. 2004.
5 The translation was said to have been prompted by the Meiji author Kōda Rohan,
who gave Satō Haruo a copy of the book in the Chinese original. In the introduction
to The Sick Rose, J. Thomas Rimer talks about Sōseki and Ogai’s influence on Satō, but
this translation was Satō’s homage to the Meiji Sino-Japanese literary tradition espoused
by Kōda Rohan, a writer with a similar kangaku background to Satō Haruo himself.
6 In Shina zakki (Miscellaneous Writings on China), Tokyo: Daidō shobō, 1941.
7 Kang (1996: 92).
8 In early 1920, Satō Haruo, then an up-and-coming Romantic poet and writer, was
suffering a bout of depression. He returned to his home in Shingu, Wakayama, for a
rest and there met his childhood friend Higashi Kiichi, who was at the time practicing
medicine in Takao (now Gaoxiong), Taiwan. At Higashi’s invitation, Satō accompa-
nied him on his return to Taiwan. They left Wakayama in June and arrived in the
colony on July 5. Satō returned on October 15th of the same year, extending an orig-
inal short trip to more than three and a half months. His arrival was reported in the
local newspaper and he was treated as a VIP by the colonial government throughout
his stay. Some suggest the trip was prompted by the frustration he felt about his
nascent romantic affair with Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s wife Chiyo and the subsequent
discord with his live-in lover, the actress Maiya Kayoko. In fact, after his return from
the trip, he quickly separated from Maiya Kayoko and the next year openly severed
his ties with Tanizaki. For details of his trip to Taiwan, see Fujii Shōzō (1998: 79–87)
and Shimada Kinji (1976: 214–18); for the relationship with Tanizaki, see Oketani
Hideaki (1987: 279–81) and Hata Kōhei (1997: 23–35).
9 Translated into English by Edward Seidensticker as The Tale of the Bridal Fan in Japan
Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1962).
10 See Itō Hideo (1991: 218–19).
11 Sōseki traveled to Manchuria and returned to Japan via Korea in 1910. The six-week
sojourn was recorded in Mankan tokorodokoro, which was serialized in Asahi shinbun,
beginning shortly after his return. A decade after Sōseki’s expedition, Akutagawa took
a four-month jaunt to China as an overseas observer for the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun in
1921.
12 Kaizō 3.3 (March, 1921); reprinted in Satō Haruo (1998, 433–53). ‘Hoshi’ includes a
story published separately in the January issue titled ‘Fifth-Daughter Huang’.
13 Chūō kōron 38.9 (August, 1923); reprinted in SHZ (19: 165–7).
14 Dōwa (September, 1921).
15 Chūō kōron (October, 1923).
16 Kaizō 7.3 (March, 1925): 2–34.
17 Chūō kōron 47.9 (September, 1932): 92–132 and 47.10 (October, 1932): 1–14.
18 For further discussion on ‘Journey to the Colony’, see Kawahara Isao (1997: 3–23).
19 For a detailed account of the reception of the work during the colonial period, see
Koizumi (2002) and Fujii (1998).
20 The name means ‘person outside the world’, and clearly is something like a penname
or ‘fancy name’ (hao). In fact, several articles were published under this name in
288 Faye Kleeman
various literary journals, leading to speculation as to the true identity of the author.
The prevailing theory is that it is the penname of the writer Qiu Yonghan, but Qiu
has denied it.
21 A famous historical site in Taiwan, this red brick fort was built by the Dutch in the
early sixteenth century. It was later the headquarters for the Ming loyalist army led by
Zheng Chenggong (i.e. Coxinga). During the Japanese colonial period, it was used as
an army hospital and colonial office building. The name Chikanlou ( J. Sekikanrō), the
Red Hill Pavilion, was said to be from a word pronounced ‘chakam’ in the local aborig-
inal dialect which referred to the coastal area where the fort was built. After the war, it
was designated a national monument and the building itself has come to symbolize
the multiple colonial histories overlaying the island since the fifteenth century.
22 For the arts and crafts movement and Japanese colonialism, see Kleeman (2001a, 2001b).
23 The story was included in Itō Hideo’s Taishō no tantei shōsetsu (1991) as one of the
representative detective tales of the early Taishō period. See Itō Hideo (1991: 214–24).
24 See SHZ (10: 239) for Shanghai. Other famous stories, such as ‘Nyonin funshi’ (A
Burning Woman), were also framed in a detective narrative.
25 See also Satō’s articles ‘Tantei shōsetsu sakka no hyōgenryoku’ (SHZ 24: 120–1) and
‘Tantei shōsetsu shōron’ (SHZ 19: 273–5).
26 Hikage’s Naibu no shinjitsu (The Internal Truth, Kōdansha, 1959) and Ōoke no hitobito
(The People of the Ō Family, Tōto shobō, 1961) are prime examples of his colonial
mysteries. Hikage’s books are now rather hard to find and there is a reader-initiated
reprint (fukkoku) movement to make more of his works available to the public.
27 For discussion of the detective genre and Natsume Sōseki’s literature, see Komori Yōichi
(2001a: 57–62) and Uchida Ryūzō (2001: 1–66).
28 On Ban Zhao (ca. 48–ca. 116) and her precepts, see Swann (1932); Chen (1996).
29 The full quote, which makes clear the link between male and female conduct, is from
the Record of the Historian (ca. 100 BCE): ‘A loyal vassal does not serve two lords, a chaste
woman does not change to a second husband’. See Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju ed.)
82: 2457.
30 Native Taiwanese society was highly stratified, with nine upper classes and nine lower
classes being the general understanding. A household maid belonged to the lower seventh
rank and was treated like property of the household who could be freely traded by her
owner (Kataoka Gen 1913).
31 Positive readings include also Taiwanese critics such as Yao Qiaomei (see Yao 2001a,
2001b) who sees the death of both the maid and the lover as ‘the birth of Taiwanese
nationalism’.
32 Certainly, for an author like Satō, who had studied in depth the literature and culture
of the now colonized Chinese culture, questions of transculturation, such as how his
constructions of subordinated others had been shaped by those others, needs further
scrutiny.
33 This is Satō’s first published work, published in Mita bungaku while attending Keiō Univer-
sity. Ōishi Seinosuke was an activist from his home town who, together with Kōtoku
Shūsui, was accused of plotting to assassinate the Meiji Emperor in the so-called
‘Great Treason Incident’.
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Satō Haruo (1936) Musha (Wushe), Tokyo: Shōshinsha.
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Mitsuru and Bungei Taiwan: The Orientalist Gaze), Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu tongxun
11(1): 135–46.
——(2003) Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South, Honolulu:
290 Faye Kleeman
Koizumi Tsukasa (2002) ‘Zai-Tai naichijin sakka no Jokaisen kidan juyō ikikata: “Taiwan” o
kataru fuan’ (The Reception of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan by Japanese
Expatriate Writers in Taiwan: The Anxiety of Discoursing Taiwan), Nihon Taiwan
gakkai gakujutsu ronbunshū 4, pp. 53–64.
Komagome Takeshi (1996) Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō (Cultural Unification by
Colonialist Imperial Japan), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Komori Yōichi (2001a) ‘Sōseki bungaku to shokuminchishugi’ (Natsume Sōseki’s Literature
and Colonialism), Kokubungaku 46(1): 46–62.
——(2001b) Posutokoroniaru (Postcolonial), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Kurokawa Sō (1996) Gaichi no Nihongo bungaku-sen (Selection of Japanese Language Litera-
ture of the Colonies), vol. 2, Tokyo: Shinjuku shobō, pp. 39–52.
Matsuyama Iwao (1993) Uwasa no enkinhō (The Much Talked-About Perspective). Tokyo:
Seidōsha.
Nakajima Toshio and Kawahara Isao (eds) (1998) Nihon tōjiki Taiwan bungaku Nihonjin sakka
sakuhinsh ū, 6 vols, Tokyo: Ryokuin shobō.
——(1999) Nihon tōjiki Taiwan bungaku Taiwanjin sakka sakuhinsh ū, 6 vols, Tokyo: Ryokuin
shobō.
Napier, Susan J. (1996) The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, London: Routledge.
Oguma Eiji (1995) Tan’itsu minzoku no kigen (The Origins of the Unitary Race Theory),
Tokyo: Shin’yōsha.
——(1998) Nihonjin no kyōkai (The Boundaries of Japaneseness), Tokyo: Shin’yōsha.
Oketani Hideaki (1987) Bunmei kaika to Nihonteki sōzō (The Cultural Enlightenment and the
Japanese Imagination), Tokyo: Fukutake shoten.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, New
York: Routledge.
Satō Haruo (1993) The Sick Rose: A Pastoral Elegy, trans. Francis B. Tenny, Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawai’i Press.
——(1994) Satō Haruo, in Torii Kuniaki (ed.) Sakka no jiden (Authorial Lives), vol. 12, Tokyo:
Nihon tosho sentā.
——(1996a) ‘Machō’ (Devilbird), in Kurokawa Sō(1996), pp. 39–52.
——(1996b) Beautiful Town: Stories and Essays by Sato¯ Haruo, trans. Francis B. Tenny, Honolulu:
——(2000) ‘Musha’ (Wushe), Kawahara Isao (ed.), Nihon shokuminchi bungaku seisenshū: Taiwan-
hen (A Collection of Japanese Colonial Literature: Taiwan), Tokyo: Yumani shobō.
Schwarz, Bill (1996) ‘Conquerors of Truth: Reflections on Postcolonial Theory’, in Bill
Schwarz (ed.) The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, London and
New York: Routledge, pp. 9–31.
Shimada Kinji (1976) ‘Gaichiken bungaku no jissō’ (The True Condition of Literature
in the External Territories), in Nihon ni okeru gaikoku hikaku bungaku kenkyū (Compara-
tive Studies of Foreign Literature in Japan), vol. 2, Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, pp. 112–
259.
Suda Chisato (2001) ‘Satō Haruo to Chūgoku bungaku (jō)’ (Satō Haruo and Chinese
Literature, Part One), Bungaku 2(4): 176–93.
——(2002) ‘Satō Haruo to Chūgoku bungaku (ge)’ (Satō Haruo and Chinese Literature,
Part Two), Bungaku 3(3): 174–89.
Sugimori Masaya (1964) ‘Jokaisen kidan-ron: Nihon kindai bungaku ni okeru Chūgoku
bungaku no zaigen’ (A Discussion of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan:
Chinese Literary Source Material), Gogaku bungakkai kiyō 2: 78–90.
Swann, Nancy Lee (1932) Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China, New York: Russell.
Tsuboi Hideto (2002) ‘Hyōshō to shite no shokuminchi’ (The Colonies as Symbol), in
Komori Yōichi et al. (eds) Iwanami kōza kindai Nihon no bunka-shi, vol. 5, Hensei sareru
nashonarizumu 1920–30 (A Cultural History of Modern Japan, vol. 5: Changing Nation-
alism, 1920–30), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Uchida Ryūzō (2001) Tantei shōsetsu no shakaigaku (The Sociology of Detective Novels),
Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Unami Akira (2003) ‘Teikoku-ron’ (Discourse on Empire), Gengo bunka 20: 3–10.
Yao Qiaomei (2000) ‘Jokaisen kidan no hyōka to Satō Haruo bungaku no genjō’ (Evaluation
of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan and the Current State of Satō Haruo’s
Literature), Shokō 11: 100–15.
——(2001a) ‘Shokuminchi Taiwan ni miru joseizō: Satō Haruo Jokaisen kidan ni okeru
chijo to gehi’ (The Image of Women in Colonial Taiwan: The Shen Daughter and the
Maid in Satō Haruo’s Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan), Shakai bungaku 17: 79–92.
——(2001b)’ ‘Jokaisen kidan no seiritsu o meguru shiron: sōsaku mochiifu o chūshin ni’ (A
Thesis on the Creation of The Strange Tale of the ‘Precepts for Women’ Fan: Focusing on
Creative Motifs), Shokō 12: 72–84.
Yoshida Seiichi (1979) Tanbiha sakka-ron (Discourse on Decadent Authors), in Yoshida Seiichi
chosakush ū (The Writings of Yoshida Seiichi), vol. 10, Tokyo: Ōf ūsha.
Further reading
Fulford, Tim, Kitson, Peter J. et al. (eds) (1998) Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire,
1780–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Iijima Kōichi (1997) ‘Fushigi ni anakisuto to en no atta Satō Haruo’ (Satō Haruo and his
Amazing Connection to Anarchism), in Nihon no beru epokku (Japan’s Belle Epoque),
Tokyo: Rippū shobō, pp. 141–57.
Kang Sanjung (1996) ‘“Tōyō” no hakken to orientarizumu’ (The Discovery of the Orient
and Orientalism), in Tabunkashugi no kigōron (The Semiotics of Multiculturalism), Tokyo:
Tōkai University Press, pp. 117–34.
Kawamura Minato (1989) Ajia to iu kagami: kyokutō no kindai: ‘Sho¯ wa’ no kuritikku (The Mirror
called ‘Asia’: Modernity in the Far East: A Critique of ‘Shōwa’), Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Kimura Kazuaki (1997) ‘Kieta “Niji” Satō Haruo no Kantō daishinsai’ (The Rainbow that
Disappeared: Satō Haruo’s Great Kantō Earthquake), in Yukio Kurihara (ed.) Bungakushi
o yomigaeru (Reviving Literary History), Tokyo: Inpakuto shuppankai, pp. 183–97.
Shimomura Sakujirō (1994) Bungaku de yomu Taiwan (Taiwan through its Literature), Tokyo:
Tabata shoten.
——et al. (eds) (1995) Yomigaeru Taiwan bungaku (Recalling Taiwanese Literature), Tokyo:
Tōhō shoten.
Tarumi Chie (1995) Taiwan no Nihongo bungaku (Taiwan’s Japanese-Language Literature),
Tokyo: Goryūū shoten.
15 ‘There’s no such place as home’
Gotō Meisei, or identity as alterity
Atsuko Sakaki
‘I’ is already a relationship itself – nothing other than a relation; ‘I’ is self-
consciousness itself, and a relation is a product of the self-consciousness.
(Gotō 1983: 168)
First of all, I seek a world with a structure in which there are ‘I’ and the ‘Other’
who tries to prove that ‘I’ is only semantic. Then, I seek the reality of the
following: lightness, if ‘I’ in such a world has lightness of being; humorousness, if
‘I’ is humorous; ambiguity, if ‘I’ is ambiguous.
(Gotō 1972: 208)
Perhaps what’s missing in action is your reality?

(Gotō 1973b: 143).
Gotō Meisei (1932–99), like his world-famous contemporary Abe Kōbō (1924–
93), was a returnee from a former ‘colony’ of the Empire of Japan. For Abe, the
original landscape was that of Manchuria. In Gotō’s case it was the present-day
North Korea where he was born and grew up. Having experienced the end of
the Asia Pacific War at the age of thirteen, just as he planned to proceed to the
Military Academy, Gotō hardly had any opportunity to develop a sense of
belonging. The experience of living in an ethnically mixed environment and
being forced to leave Korea, newly occupied by the Soviet Army, in order to
‘return’ to a Kyūshū which didn’t feel like home inspired him with the recogni-
tion that there is indeed no set originary ethnic identity that endures. This idea
recurs throughout his fiction produced in many stages, most notably reincar-
nating in a cluster of stories on life in an apartment megaplex (danchi), a place
that he views as an incidental destination of drifters, or the exile land. His studies
of Nikolai Gogol (Warai no hōhō, aruiwa Nikorai Gōgori (The Method of Laughter,
or Nikolai Gogol), 1981), Dostoevsky (Dosutoefusukii no Peteruburugu (The St.
Petersburg of Dostoevsky), 1987), Ueda Akinari (Ugetsu monogatari kikō (Literary
Travels to Sites in The Tales of the Rain and Moon), 1975), Franz Kafka (Kafuka no
meikyō: Akumu no hōhō (Kafka’s Labyrinth: The Method of Nightmares), 1987),
Nagai Kafū (many essays over a course of time), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō¯ (Kono hito o
miyo (Ecce Homo), serialized in 1990) and other Japanese and non-Japanese
Gotō Meisei, or identity as alterity 293
writers are very effective in articulating the intangibility of one’s origin (and
orientation). Overall, his case constitutes a valid antithesis to the theory of ‘Nihon
kaiki’ or ‘the ultimate return to Japan’.
In this chapter, I will center on one of the novels that suggest an autobio-
graphical pretense, namely Hasamiuchi (Double Jeopardy, 1973), with some
references to other writings by Gotō, in order to substantiate this sense of home
as an artificial concept, and the role that language plays in it.1 Gotō’s musings
come very close to those of Jacques Derrida at times, who might function as a
potential frame-setter.
Double Jeopardy consists of many storylines that are incidentally and intermittently
recalled by the narrator-protagonist (‘I’) named Akaki Jirō, from the archive of
his memory which is as fallible as that of anyone else. As we know empirically, an
instance of the past may revisit us at any moment, triggered by an unexpected
exposure to something (using the terminology of Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of
Sense (1990), I would like to describe this as a ‘fossil’). The narrative flow is
constantly interrupted by such unpredictable arrivals of recollections. Or rather,
to put it more precisely, the narrative itself is formed by a number of interruptions,
which may discursively overlap each other, digress from each other, and subside
into each other. In short, these storylines can begin without notice and may not
end with closure. Each may even unfold concurrently with another storyline,
alternating with or embedding within each other, and ending sooner or later
than the other. A given story may be repeated or continued after an interval of
something unrelated. Furthermore, each account of a given incident in the past
may not be verified; in fact the narrator constantly admits to his inability to
remember the circumstances (when, where, why, who, what, and how) correctly, and
the attempted account itself is often replaced with the narrator’s self-questioning.
Given the level of uncertainty as to a given incident’s time, place, and reason of
occurrence, and any part that other individuals might have played in the inci-
dent, the being of ‘I’ seems vague and intangible to the extent that he may
thwart the reader’s expectation in the narrator-protagonist of an autobiography.
Nagashima Takayoshi, a literary critic who has written an inspiring essay on
Gotō, articulates and analyses the enigma of this novel as follows:
The impossibility of the narrator ‘I’ and the scribbler ‘I’ as a stable and self-
contained entity coincides with the impossibility of narrativity of the
question ‘What is “I”?’ and the impossibility of the novel based upon narra-
tive time (or accountability).
(Nagashima 1986: 97)
This observation is profound, not only in terms of the nature of this particular
novel, and the genre of the novel, but also in light of the theme of this volume.
The narrative in a conventional sense is predicated upon the belief that the main
character has his or her unique qualities of which he or she is aware and by
which he or she abides, and thus has a distinct and discrete story to tell which the
reader will find to be narrated in chronological order and in causal terms.
294 Atsuko Sakaki
Nagashima points out that this belief is a myth, and that Gotō’s narrative is
precisely about both the impossibility of self-identification and the impossibility
of the narrative which are, in fact, dependent upon each other. While many if
not most of Gotō’s stories share the same aim, Double Jeopardy is a prime example
in its articulation of ambiguity and complexity of identity and narration.
With the recognition of the novel’s resistance to accountability in mind, to
summarize the plot briefly, it is about a middle-aged man, Akaki, who tries to
remember, with the help of others, where, when and why he lost an overcoat he
used to have when he was young and new to Tokyo. The overcoat, though
bearing some historical and personal significance as we shall see later, does not
seem to possess any mark of personal attachment or monetary value. Suddenly
one day, the narrator-protagonist is seized by the question of how he lost it and,
for inexplicable reasons, he begins an arduous search for it. In the process, the
reader is taken to different stages of his life to date, consisting of his boyhood in
North Korea back when it was occupied by the Japanese, and then by the
Soviets, his high school days in Chikuzen, Kyūhū, his move to Tokyo to attend
college, and his life with his own family in the suburbs of Tokyo in the present.
Since the story takes many sudden turns into different side-stories and time
spans, I shall not follow the story from beginning to end. Instead, I will order my
chapter according to issues that I have set up for my analysis: naming, languages
and relocations. By doing so, I will occasionally revert to the same segments in
the story which make different points in light of different issues.
Relatively speaking: identity as dependent upon relations

The narrative in question begins and ends with the narrator-protagonist standing
on Ochanomizu Bridge and reflecting upon the bridge in a way that others who
merely use it in order to walk across would not do. His reflections deserve our
careful attention as they lead us to general considerations of the ways we might
identify places:
The bridge bypasses the railroad of the National Railway. What is the name
of the bridge? Ochanomizu Bridge? Probably.2 But I am not one who is
motivated enough to walk [up to the end of the bridge] from about the
middle of the bridge where I stand, in order to verify the name. It is just that
one day, I realized that I didn’t know the name of the bridge that I was
standing on.
Suddenly I muttered the name of Shirahige Bridge. Azuma Bridge,
Komagata Bridge, and then . . . Genshin Bridge? Of course they are all
from Nagai Kafū’s Bokutō Kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River,
1937 [1972]). St. Isaac’s Bridge. This is from Gogol’s ‘The Nose’. It is the
bridge to which Yakovlevich, the barber, sets out with his heart palpitating in
order to discard the nose of the collegiate assessor, Kovalyov, which he
discovered, that morning at breakfast, caught up in his slice of bread.
Indeed, a bridge needs a name. It would not do if Kafū, who chooses alleys
and back streets in order to avoid encountering policemen as much as
possible as he goes to Terashima, crosses ‘a certain bridge’ whose name he
does not know. Yakovlevich, the barber, too, is afraid of police vigilance;
after all what he hides in the rag in his pocket is the nose of the Collegiate
Assessor. Given his state of mind, the bridge over which he was finally able
to force himself to toss the nose still wrapped in the rag, had to be St. Isaac’s
Bridge over the Neva, no other bridge. It should not be simply ‘a certain
bridge’ in St. Petersburg – that would not do.
It’s not only the case with bridges . . . However narrow and obscure, alleys
[in A Strange Tale ] have their own names. At least Kafū must have known
them. Even if a given alley really did not have a name, the reader is left with
the impression that at least Kafū had known the name. This applies to the
case of the barber with a nose in the rag hidden in his pocket. What envi-
able stories they are! I have to confess I wish I could write down the names
of bridges, backstreets and alleys. I could not help but wish I could inter-
sperse my fiction with those names, all through the text.
However, the reality is that I do not even know the name of the bridge
that I am standing upon. It is partly because I am a country bumpkin. A
country bumpkin? Yes, let us put it that way for now. Indeed, it is not only
this bridge whose name that I do not know. I do not even know Shirahige
Bridge, Azuma Bridge, Komagata Bridge, or Genshin Bridge. It is not that I
have never crossed them; probably I have not noticed even though I have
crossed them. This is of course my own fault – it’s due to personal reasons.
Yet, it is also true that Tokyo itself confuses me. To begin with, there are
many bridges over no river. What would happen if we name all the pedes-
trian bridges over roads? Of course there would be someone who would
remember the name of each and every bridge – surely there would be
someone who would be determined to memorize all the names no matter
what. But would Kaf ū write such a bridge name in his fiction? It is impos-
sible to imagine Kafū crossing a pedestrian bridge to visit Terashima district.
It does not need me to say that it is impossible to write of Kafū’s bridges. At
least I am not qualified to imitate his practice. It is not only rivers that prolif-
erate; an infinite number of unnamable bridges proliferate all over Tokyo.
(Gotō 1998: 9–10)
It is important to note that the narrator here is not being indulgently nostalgic,
lamenting changes that have happened from Kafū’s time till the narrative
present. ‘I’ is not one who would dwell upon a nativistic glorification of the
culture’s past. The persistent references to Gogol should be sufficient to resolve
any misunderstanding of the narrator’s take on locality as geopolitically charged.
As for his consciousness of temporality, the narrator goes beyond longing for ‘the
good old days’ when things had appropriate names:
Even though nameless, riverless bridges may have proliferated all over
Tokyo, still the bridge upon which I now stand should be named one way or
296 Atsuko Sakaki
the other. It is simply that I happen to be oblivious to the name of the bridge
I am standing on.
(Gotō 1998: 10)
Thus, the narrator-protagonist realizes that he has not explored the possibility of
finding such a discrete entity as the name of the bridge, a possibility that he
could have explored. The oblivion, as well as his reluctance to go up to the post
where the name of the bridge must be inscribed, suggests the irrelevance, if not
insignificance, of the name to the narrator, and perhaps, by extension, to
everyone. It is not that bridges do not have their names any longer; it is that a
perceiving subject does not pay attention to names any longer. His circumstances
do not let him accept as something of importance any stable relationship
between a thing and its name. He is too keenly aware that names do not repre-
sent what the things are; the relationship between names and things is far more
ambiguous and complex. As Tokuyoshi Atsuyori puts it:
If the place where one’s identity exists is the place where one word certainly
signifies one thing and vice versa, that is, where the signifier and signified
correspond to each other in an elementary manner, then Gotō Meisei who
lost his homeland . . . is thrown out of the place where the signifier matches
the signified, as he comes to realize, by encountering a variety of languages,
that a word can be incommensurate with a thing.
(1979: 185)
While this may be a ‘loss of innocence’, a sobering departure from the land of
peaceful unity between things and names, it is an important step to take in real-
izing that the said unity is only an illusion. Names by no means represent things
innocently. Naming is an act of possession, an exertion of authority and a claim
to legitimacy, and thus always political:
All culture is originarily colonial. In order to recall that, let us not simply rely
on etymology. Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition
of some ‘politics’ of language. Mastery begins, as we know, through the
power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations.
(Derrida 1996: 39)
The act of forgetting names and of not seeking to restore them, an act that we
saw above as chosen by the narrator-protagonist of Double Jeopardy, then, may
be deemed an inadvertent resistance to the coloniality of the naming in its
legitimating function. That things are deprived of their names in the
perceiving subject’s consciousness may liberate them from the imposing forces
of definition. At least partly by virtue of losing the name of Ochanomizu Bridge
(albeit for a moment and only in the consciousness of the narrator-protagonist),
the bridge is freely connected to other bridges, namely literary precedents in
Kafū and Gogol. In other words, by not being identified metaphorically, the
bridge earns a metonymical identity: it is defined in terms of its relation to
others.
The metonymical identification is the case with characters in Double Jeopardy as
well. Soon after the text of Double Jeopardy opens, the narrator-protagonist intro-
duces himself in probably the most succinct self-portrait in the entire novel, as
follows:
I am not a businessman who gets up early every morning. I am a man stuck

at my desk throughout the night, night after night, as though I were a
watchman in the apartment megaplex, in a corner of a three bedroom
apartment in a five-storey building in the megaplex. It’s not that I have been
asked to work as a watchman – it’s my own choice to stay awake all night. I
am not a professional Russian-Japanese translator, working on Gogol’s ‘The
Overcoat’, either.3 Still, I have kept thinking to myself: ‘the overcoat . . . over-
coat . . . overcoat’, over and over again, for twenty years straight, ever since I
came to Tokyo out of a rustic town in Chikuzen in Kyūshū, wearing that
former Japanese army infantryman’s khaki overcoat. I am one who has been
longing to write my own ‘Overcoat,’ no matter what, even if it were an act
of imitation. In short, I am I . . . in the original sense of the word.
(Gotō 1998: 25)4
‘I’ is ‘semantic’, as he puts it in the passage quoted as an epigraph to this essay –

nothing more nor less than that. It cannot be defined in terms of employment,
affiliation, or task, as one normally is in human society. The only way to define ‘I’
is as an agent of thought (obsessions, aspirations) and action (imagined or real),
just as ‘I’ in any sentence constitutes the subject of the predicate.
When we examine the nature of the narrator/protagonist’s thought and
action, one thing becomes clear: his self-identification relies upon his relationship
to Nikolai Gogol’s short story, ‘The Overcoat’. Obsessed with the story, he stays
up all night, evidently writing something at his desk in his home. At least that is
what he claims about himself. Hiraoka explains the constitution of ‘I’ in Double
Jeopardy as follows:
‘I’ is a man of no quality, and thus has to be named after Akakii Akakiivich
as Akaki Jirō. Hence, the novel about him has to be a parody of ‘The
Overcoat’, and he [as the protagonist] has to go on hunting an overcoat in
order to ‘write my own “Overcoat” no matter what’.
(1979: 188)
Hiraoka thus suggests that the focal point of the narrative is not biographical
information that refers to some quality that the narrator-protagonist possesses,
but his desire to correspond to ‘The Overcoat’. In other words, it is not one’s
own essence, but the relationship to one’s literary predecessor, and a foreign one
at that in this case, that establishes one’s identity, such as it is. In fact, this rela-
tion-orientedness itself is indebted to ‘The Overcoat’. The naming of Akakii
298 Atsuko Sakaki
Akakievitch is just as incidental; the name, meaning ‘Akakii, the son of Akakii’, is
contingent upon the people’s inability to find an appropriate given name for him.
In the end of a futile search for a name, his mother decides upon simply recy-
cling the child’s father’s name, hence the identification between the given name
and paternal name. Just as the name is handed down from father to son, it
inspired the name of a literary descendant. The name in either case does not
claim to represent any original quality of the character, but is meant to suggest
whose trace he is. In short, ‘The Overcoat’ and Double Jeopardy are connected to
each other in terms of the lack of essence in the protagonists. Each of them
comes into being only as a trace of someone else, thus negating the notion of the
Self as autonomous of the Other. One’s identity, if any, consists of the
‘différance’5 from a predecessor which itself is not to be called the original, as is
manifest in this particular case with Akakii.
Double Jeopardy is replete with such examples of identities as traces. Many of
the characters are identified as slightly different from others, as names are
misheard, coincided, or misunderstood. When Akaki pays a visit to the family of
the landlady of a room that he used to rent as a student, he is greeted with the
voice of the wife of her son, a woman whom he has never met, through the
intercom outside the entrance. As the former landlady herself is out, Akaki asks
for her daughter, Takako, to which the woman’s voice replies that she is Takako.
In fact, it is not the same Takako; the landlady’s daughter and daughter-in-law
happen to have the same name (though written with different Chinese charac-
ters). Since her face is invisible, he does not realize that it is a case of mistaken
identity. The mistake is only possible through oral communication, in the
absence of letters and faces. When Akaki mentions a friend from earlier days,
Kuge, to the landlady who comes home, she mishears the name and refers to him
as Koga, which happens to be the name of another friend of Akaki whom she
knew. Then, when Akaki explains that he is looking for the overcoat – gaitō in
Japanese – she thinks that he is referring to another friend, in light of the context
of the conversation up to that point, and says that it’s an unusual name, compared
with ‘Naitō’, a common surname. Names thus do not connote their bearers’
essences; names function as metonymies, in their relation to other names.
The narrator-protagonist’s action, as Hiraoka suggests above, is not a manifes-
tation of some internal volition, but a result of the plot’s requirement. Akaki has
to be concerned with the overcoat, in order to be a trace of Akakii Akakiivich
whose overcoat is the driving force of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’. As Hiraoka notes:
The selfhood was formed in part by Gogol and yet has become something
other than Gogol . . . Thus, to write of the present place of presence is to
write a parody of Gogol . . . all the books read and all the knowledge
acquired intersect with, and cancel out, each other . . . the place that has
failed to form an original landscape, or the place where one’s identity was
not lost but has never been formed, where the narrator-less speech echoes
from somewhere and then dissipated. One’s own language, the language that
alone is absolute to oneself, or the language that one should speak, has never
been found. One’s own land where one should be has never been encoun-
tered. In just the same way, the place where the language of one’s own has
not been owned echoes only the words of others.
(1979: 194–5)
Here, Hiraoka seems to come very close to Jacques Derrida. So does Nagashima
in the following assertion: ‘I’ exists within the revolving language, as accumula-
tion of différance of relations with others and relations with quoted/cited texts
(Nagashima 1986: 97).
Derrida expounds upon the theory of the monolingualism of the other, which
means:
that in any case we speak only one language – and that we do not own it. We
only ever speak one language – and, since it returns to the other, it exists
asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other.
Coming from the other, remaining with the other, and returning to the other.
(Derrida 1996: 40)
There is no selfhood autonomous of the other. It is always already connected to

the other, a thesis that texts embody most eloquently, as we saw above.
Languages of incidentality
The narrator’s connection to the Russian language, however, is neither natural
nor necessitated. It is incidental and arbitrary once again. He is ‘not a profes-
sional Russo-Japanese translator’. At one point in the narrative, out of context,
he is suddenly visited by a speech he heard in the past, during the Soviet Army’s
occupation of North Korea shortly after Japan’s surrender:
‘Japanese woman, give me that!’

‘Give me the watch!’
. . . This was the first time I had ever heard Russian spoken – the first
Russian speech that I had ever heard; never before had I heard of the first
syllables of Pushkin, Gogol, or Dostoevski being uttered . . . The Russian
names that I had known back then were only Pyotr and Nikolai. Pyotr, but
not Pyotr the Great; of course not. Nikolai, but not Nikolai Gogol. They
were White Russians who came to my father’s store to buy wheat and sugar.
They didn’t speak in Russian; they spoke in broken Japanese.
(Gotō 1998: 208–9)
Note that the speech was overheard, not addressed toward the narrator himself.
Hence, the first encounter with the language was doubly incidental. There is
further complication of the language-based identity occurring here, on the site of
translingual practices. The understanding of the phrases uttered by Soviet
soldiers must have arrived at the narrator, either instinctively from the context
300 Atsuko Sakaki
(the Russians were snatching the Japanese woman’s watch), or retrospectively
from the knowledge of the language later acquired. In short, the speech issued
and speech received are not one, but are either hypothesized or imagined, distant
or deferred. The narrator’s listing of the Russian authors also is telling of the
mediation of the Japanese translation of Russian names: it is not the initial (‘P’,
‘G’ or ‘D’) but ‘the first syllable’ (in the Japanese syllabary, ‘Pu’, ‘Go’ or ‘Do’) that
the narrator uses to represent the names of Pushkin, Gogol, or Dostoevski. The
addition of vowels domesticates the foreign names, rendering them unrecogniz-
able to native Russians. These names are originally Russian and yet no longer
Russian, just as Double Jeopardy is inspired by ‘The Overcoat’ and yet is not ‘The
Overcoat’.
Furthermore, Pyotr and Nikolai are denied their respective identification with
the historical figures who share their given names. The coincidence of Nikolai
reconfirms the precedence of the name over any knowledge of Gogol that seems
so essential to the present-day narrator. The Nikolai whom Akaki knew before
learning of Gogol is to Akaki not the same as the Nikolai thereafter.6 The recog-
nition of the difference (‘not Nikolai Gogol’) that comes after the acquisition of
the knowledge has become a part of the identification of Nikolai that Akaki used
to know. Thus, one is defined by what one is not. Also, what one is does not
represent a constant entity, but rather a being susceptible to changes that may
come about without reason to the person as in this case. The Pyotr and Nikolai
that the narrator knew prior to 1945 are then introduced as customers of his
father’s general store in North Korea: the Russians who have fled Russia and live
in North Korea, buying essential commodities in a Japanese-owned store in
North Korea where they speak in neither Russian (the language of the lost home)
nor Korean (the language of the current home), but in Japanese, which they have
not even mastered. The endless sequence of negativity and displacement verifies
the hypothesis that it is impossible to define one’s identity in an affirmative and
consistent way. One can only be defined by way of what one is not, or what one
happens to be doing at a given moment.
Another language that plays a formative part in theorization of languages as
identity-makers in Double Jeopardy is Korean, the language of the territory that
was ‘annexed’ to the Empire of Japan and in which Akaki – as well as Gotō –
grew up. Even though he is not forced to learn the language, as the use of
Japanese is legitimated, he acquires the language well enough to sing some songs
in the language. Between Japan’s defeat and the communists’ takeover of those
Japanese residents’ properties, the Akaki brothers do away with a large number
of musical albums among other relics of the Japanese colonizer’s everyday life in
Korea by burning and burying them in the backyard. Following the lead of his
elder brother, Akaki sings those songs in Korean, knowing that the new lyrics are
charged with anti-Japanese and/or anti-imperialist messages. These are songs
that originally had Japanese lyrics to promote the spirit of the imperialist nation:
‘Hohei no honryū’ (The Essence of Infantry) and ‘Chōsen hokkyō keibi no uta’
(Song of the Guards on the Northern Borders of Korea) survived Japan’s defeat
and Korea’s independence, yet in a curious way: the lyrics were changed into
those which are either derogatory of the Japanese or informed of communism,
while the music remained the same. It is not as though the brothers sing the new
versions in order to escape any censorship from Korean authorities; they are alone
in the backyard, with no vigilance. It is a voluntary act, which complicates one’s
sense of identity according to the nation and language. If anything, the message the
elder brother tries to send is that one’s identity defined by nationality is arbitrary
and fragile, and thus deserves to be mocked. The almost instinctive memoriza-
tion of the Korean lyrics suggests how physically the protagonist and his brother
had mastered the language, even though it is not exactly their ‘mother tongue’,
undoubtedly with the help of music which is putatively universal.
Upon his ‘return’ to Kyūshū, Akaki (the younger brother) realizes that the
Japanese which he has been speaking is distinctly different from the dialect of his
alleged homeland of Chikuzen, and he tries hard – and almost successfully – to
master the Chikuzen dialect in order to ‘naturalize’ to his ‘native land’. However,
he remains unable to master the inflection of ‘j’ for ‘z’:
Having been born in North Korea and having since led my life using colo-
nial Japanese until the first grade in high school, I lacked the ‘Chikujen’
accent. Of course I had acquired the Chikuzen dialect almost flawlessly in
the six years in high school. I was able to quarrel or talk dirty in the dialect.
But the ‘jenjen’ for ‘zenzen’ (meaning ‘absolutely not’) is something that I
absolutely (‘jenjen’) could not handle.
(Gotō 1998: 48)7
That he needs to try to acquire a native tongue which, as he aptly points out, ‘is not
supposed to be acquired or mastered’ (ibid.: 200) calls into question the common
belief that speech is a most intrinsic marker of one’s cultural identity. When he
says, ‘I was a rustic fellow from Chikuzen, Kyūshū, without the “Chikujen”
accent’ (ibid.: 48), it is not only his own regional identity, but the notion of identity
itself that becomes questionable.
Upon Akaki’s move to Tokyo, another language surfaces as a medium of further
questioning of the role that languages play in the process of self-identification. The
reason that the narrator goes to Tokyo for the first time is to take an entrance
examination – to a school at which ‘Futabatei Shimei studied Russian’ (ibid.: 47).8
He fails the examination, because, he hypothesizes, he was not able to translate
the Japanese idiom ‘Hayaoki wa sanmon no toku’ (literally meaning ‘An early
riser earns three-mon more’) into English as ‘The early bird catches the worm’
(ibid.: 7). It is not as though he remained bitter about the failure, but the sentence
(transcribed in katakana) recurs several times in the text, which confirms its signifi-
cance other than in terms of the narrator’s career. The fact that one needs to be
proficient in English in order to study Russian in college encapsulates an aspect
of the cultural orientation of postwar Japan: English has become the primary
foreign language in postwar Japan where pro-Americanism predominates. One’s
position in postwar Japanese society depends partially on one’s command of, and
position vis-à-vis English.
302 Atsuko Sakaki
Akaki’s elder brother embodies the ambiguity of the identity of the new
Japanese, as he worked for a US Army base in Kyūshū:
My elder brother was a watchman on the U.S. Army base in Kashii . . .

From the molding of the six-mat room, the jeep-coloured, Occupational
Army employee’s uniform was hung. A badge was sewn on top of the big
chest pocket with a lid, with the logo of ‘Civilian Guard’. But then what
was he to ‘guard’, exactly? The American families living inside the camp?
Or the prostitutes swarming the camp? . . . Attired in the jeep-coloured
US Army civilian guard’s uniform, my brother would commute from a
house in the town that had formerly housed Japanese army officers’ fami-
lies.
(ibid.: 56)
The location of the brother’s affiliation, or alleged loyalty, is rendered

ambiguous, especially by introducing the definition of the area of his residence
in the past. He does not seem to be concerned with the irony as much as is the
narrator. The family of three (including the mother) discusses an overcoat that
the mother had found for her younger son as he was about to leave for Tokyo for
the examination. It was one of those overcoats made specifically for the former
Japanese imperial army soldiers, leading him to ask:
Which was more appropriate for the former Japanese army officers’ town,
the former Japanese imperial army infantryman’s khaki overcoat, or the US
Army civilian guard’s jeep-coloured uniform, hung from the molding?
Regardless, either no doubt painted a vivid picture of a family in Japan after
its defeat . . .
‘Oh well. You’d always wanted to become a soldier since you were a kid,
so this may be just as well.’
(ibid.: 56–7)
The coexistence of the two uniforms embodies the confluence of the past and
the present, the imperial Japan and the military US in Japan of the early 1950s:
Where on earth had my mother acquired this overcoat? It was not second-
hand. The khaki overcoat was not of the officer’s kind, but brand new . . . I
was looking at the overcoat, with a strange feeling hard to define. My
brother seems to have seen through my thoughts. Without getting up from
the floor, with his arm supporting his head, with a move of his chin, he
gestured to the uniform of the US Army civilian guard, hung from the
molding.
‘If you don’t like that overcoat, perhaps you could go to Tokyo in this?’
I suppose this is what my brother wanted to say: Are you still thinking of
the old man? Time you had forgotten him! He’s nobody.
(ibid.: 61–2)
Wearing the infantryman’s uniform of a former Japanese imperial army after the
dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the imperial army constitutes an instance
of incongruity – displacement, deferral, différance – and results in irony.
The elder brother suggests that, if Akaki minded the irony so much that he
couldn’t wear it comfortably, he could get a second-hand American serviceman’s
overcoat from the military base in Japan where he now works. He was sending a
wake-up call to the protagonist who, he thought, was still entrapped in the old
sense of loyalty to their father who had been an army officer, and to the nation that
was no more. Instead, however, the protagonist – or the narrator, in retrospect –
seems to be more concerned with the incongruity itself, the irony of inadver-
tently representing what he does not intend to represent by wearing the clothes that
were unmistakably charged with specific meanings that he no longer endorses.
It is not as though Akaki is firmly against, or for, a particular ideological/polit-
ical position from which he views those who stand apart critically. Rather, he is a
man who sees through contingencies of ideological/political constructs while
admitting to their co-presence in the process of his self-identification. When the
younger of the Koga brothers, acquaintances from Chikuzen who had lived in
Tokyo longer and thus looked after Akaki who was new in town, suggested that
Akaki should perhaps join him in practicing karate, the elder of the Koga
brothers said in the Chikuzen dialect: ‘Bakarashika, chi!’ twice, once to his brother
and again to Akaki, with a grin on his face. This led Akaki to the following reflec-
tion on the state of culture in Japan, in terms of language and ideology:
Needless to say, ‘bakarashika, chi!’ is a Kyūshū idiom – unique to the

Chikuzen region to be specific. It is extremely difficult to translate this
phrase into standard Japanese. It is not only difficult, but next to impossible.
The problem of course is with the last ‘chi!’ ‘Chi!’ is, first of all, emphatic.
But that’s the easy part. ‘Chi!’ is also non-personal, plural. In other words, it
connotes a self-explanatory logic: that is, it is pointless to even address it at
this point. In addition, ‘chi!’ has a nuance of self-caricaturizing and, simulta-
neously, a nuance of disdain toward the listener. The grin Koga the elder
sent to me must be a facial version of this nuance.
It is not as though I would remain dissatisfied no matter what, until the
Chikuzen idiom is grammatically anatomized, or until it is translated into
standard Japanese. Still, it may not be entirely meaningless to approximate
‘chi!’ to a standard Japanese expression as much as possible.
‘How ridiculous! How could anyone, other than yourself, seriously devote
oneself to karate, in this age of democracy? Right, Mr. Akaki?’
This is not perfect, but surely it is not inaccurate, either. It’s fair to expect
to earn 85% for this liberal translation. Koga the elder graduated from
Takushoku University during the war. Koga the younger is a member of the
karate club at Takushoku University whose name was still banned [by
GHQ , as it was invested with the right-wing nationalist ideology] after
Japan’s defeat.
(ibid.: 109-10)
304 Atsuko Sakaki
The idiomatic expression in question is profoundly ironical: while it is unmistak-
ably regional (hence, the narrator’s difficulty in translating it into standard
Japanese), its ‘non-personal, plural’ subjectivity purports a commonality of
perception. Thus, the expression thrives upon linguistic discrepancies while
promoting cognitive universality.
The purported universality is supported by the ideology of democracy which,
under the circumstances of the postwar, US-occupied Japan, has to be accepted
and applied by everyone – hence the ‘non-personal, plural’ address. It is not,
however, as though everyone in Japan were a blank sheet on which democracy
was drawn completely anew. In fact, anyone’s circumstances are ambiguous and
complex with potentially contradictory ideological/social affiliations, as the
narrator surmises in the following passage:
Koga the younger did not insist on my taking up karate because of

‘bakarashika, chi!’ There is no question about it. He was as old as my elder
brother who worked for the US army base in Kashii. My brother subscribed
to the Akahata. Koga the younger is a member of the karate club at
Takushoku University. As for me, I was neither. I was a man, who had come
to Tokyo with the former Japanese infantryman’s khaki overcoat, who was
formerly a prospective student at the Japanese Army Junior Academy . . .
Who on earth was I? . . . I was indeed an ambiguous ‘young man’.
(ibid.: 111)
Dodging the fault lines of ideologies, ranging from Communism to the remnants
of right-wing ultra-nationalism, Akaki stands apart – not aloof or in despair, but
simply confused. Note the conversion of the past and the present in his self-
portrayal: his current presence is anachronistic, as encapsulated in his attire,
while his past presence was no less untimely, as he was never a student at the
academy – his self-identification during the war hinged upon his aspiration to
become a student there (and then an officer), and not upon what he was then
and there. In short, the ambiguity about him is not to be attributed to the specific
political circumstances into which postwar Japan was thrown: at any time, in any
place, he cannot be identified by applying a single, homogeneous and straightfor-
ward standard. Being ambiguous is the status quo for him, and perhaps for
anyone else, ‘non-personal and plural’.
As these historical stages that Japan had gone through lend the backdrop for
the protagonist’s endless process of self-identification, Gotō does not neglect to
put in perspective the narrative present as well. Deducing from the fact that the
narrator has lived in his current residence for about ten years since 1962, the
frame of reference is around 1972. Even though Akaki is evidently living a
stable life, financially secure enough to live comfortably with his wife and two
children in an apartment near Tokyo, it does not mean that he has arrived at any
conclusive definition of who he is. To limit the scope of his still on-going self-
inquiry to reflections on national cultures, his ambiguity has, if anything,
increased. As the narrator recalls the origin of the army overcoat which is now
remembered as missing, he wears an overcoat ‘of pure wool of fine quality,
manufactured in England . . . in a very subdued colour, between gray and blue’
(Gotō 1998: 17). This evidently bourgeois taste that the choice of fabric, colour
and tailorship attests to suggests yet another context in which Japan revises its
cultural identity: capitalist global trade relations that connect every part of the
world as long as there is a flow of money. The new overcoat tailored in England
and imported from England is an emblem of Japan’s wealth and willingness to
embrace commodities from all over the world. It is not exactly oblivious to the
commodities’ countries of origin as, in this instance, ‘England’ carries some
weight as a marker of prestige in the tailoring industry, but the countries and
areas are transformed into brands attached to manufactured goods. Japanese
consumers are as much participants in this game of late capitalist global
consumer culture as English or other manufacturers. The Japanese who wear
the English overcoats are as culturally ambiguous as the English manufacturers
who sell their products to Japan. Just as Double Jeopardy is dependent upon, and
yet distinguished from, ‘The Overcoat’, the Japanese man’s identity is in part
determined by the English overcoat that he wears, and yet he does not
completely become an Englishman: he becomes something else, something yet
different.
Gotō maintains consistently in his numerous essays that Japan has neither a
pure origin nor an essence to begin with, as Japan is culturally hybrid (konketsu)
and torn apart from within (bunretsu), proposing as a metaphor for Japan the
model of an oval (‘daen’, as opposed to a circle, or ‘en’) which has not one but two
centers.9 His take is unique in that he questions the validity of the quest for
cultural or ethnic identity itself which, in his opinion, is an illusion that is always
already absent.
Itinerant life
From this moment, the narrator is haunted by a question that suddenly hits
him: when and where did he lose the overcoat? He launches an investigation. It
is important to note that he is not in search of the overcoat itself: his question,
and the subsequent quest, is thus abstract. He does not need the old overcoat
now. Nor does he hold any grudge toward anyone who might be responsible
for the loss. In fact, the whole reason that he decides he must reconstruct the
circumstances of the loss of the overcoat may well be his desire to write his
own ‘Overcoat’ à la Gogol, a desire that Hiraoka articulated as we saw above.
Akaki’s wondering/wandering in order to identify the time and location of the
loss, however, does yield a ramification that is important in our study of iden-
tity: preparation for the search leads him to a realization that he had relocated
himself fourteen times since he first moved to Tokyo. Gotō’s status quo is as a
stranger, no matter where he may be, rather than being someone who belongs
somewhere other than where he happens to inhabit at a given moment. Hiraoka
extends Gotō’s metaphor of Captain Gulliver as an incidental traveler as
follows:
306 Atsuko Sakaki
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, one drifts away to a place not of
one’s own choice, thrown into an unpredictable company of people . . . The
place in which one happens to be is not the place that one is supposed to be.
Still, one has no choice other than to be anchored in the present place of
residence, as there is no place where one should be.
(Hiraoka 1979: 177)
What sets Gotō apart from those who dwell on the transience or impermanence
of life as celebrated in classical Japanese literature is his tireless curiosity toward
physical and mundane details of the lived space, and his commitment to comedy
rather than to tragedy or lyricism. Gotō does not dismiss the temporary abode
because it is not one’s home; rather, he suggests that the lack of belonging is the
only status quo. With the understanding that the origin is not lost, but has never
existed, he stays away from dramatizing the lives of city dwellers, for either
aesthetic or social agendas, and instead investigates how the minutiae of life (e.g.,
floor plans, plumbing, vertical and horizontal compositions of apartment build-
ings, laundry and washing dishes) affect the course of life and the ways residents
register events in their lives. His persistent attention to detail appears almost
revealing of affection toward the place of residence. As Hiraoka puts it, he seems
‘determined to make the place that one happens to be in at the moment into the
place that one is supposed to be in’ (1979: 179).
Instead of indulging himself in nostalgia or romanticizing his status as a self-
styled wanderer, Gotō seems to be complacent with the lack (and not loss) of roots,
and determined to paint a comical picture of human beings as intrinsically itin-
erant:
Let me clarify: I am not being sentimental [about the loss of homeland]. On

the contrary, it’s such an abstract business. It is true that Eikyō, my home-
land, suddenly became ‘a foreign land’ upon the defeat of Japan. But it is
not as though the land (mountains and rivers) had become extinct. What
had become extinct is only the artifice that it was Japan. In short, I was able
to learn of the artificiality of the nation, at the cost of the experience of loss
of homeland.
(Gotō 1973a: 16)
As Nagashima puts it ‘[w]ithout privileging the consciousness of deracination as

an experience, [Gotō] abstracted it into the understanding of the world as an
artifice and/or relation’ (1986: 92).
Gotō ’s portrayals of ‘hikiage-sha’ (returnees from ‘colonial’ territories of the
Empire of Japan, in his case, Korea), ‘tanshin funin sha’ (virtual bachelors; men
temporarily relocated out of town on work assignments), and ‘danchi-zoku salarii-
man’ (businessmen commuting to work from apartment megaplexes in the
suburbs), are not simply autobiographical, but rhetorical: these figures, obviously
neither travelers nor natives, encapsulate the curiously ambiguous relationships
that modern urban residents maintain with their own abodes. In ‘Mumeishi no
hanashi’ (The Tale of Mr. No Name), Gotō inserts a short piece entitled ‘“K” to
no musubitsuki’ (My Connection to ‘K’, 1970), a piece on his affinity for K of
Franz Kafka’s The Castle. In this essay, he says that as a returnee from North
Korea himself, he has written four or five pieces of fiction centering on a male
returnee from North Korea. The narrator then has the following disclaimer to
offer nonetheless:
The most important thing is that they have begun to forget the fact they are
returnees. Needless to say, it is not that they are trying to forget it. Neither is
it that they have completely forgotten the fact. But they are not returnees
who have been rooted in a certain part of their past, or their experience as
returnees, or who act according to their identification as returnees. I, too,
have not lived under the rubric of Gotō Meisei, a returnee . . . I suppose that
kind of [self-identification] is articulate and persuasive. But I have not done
so simply because, just like the male characters in my fiction, I have often
forgotten this particular characteristic.
(Gotō 1970: 167)10
This does not mean, however, that characters in Gotō’s novels do not make any
concerned effort to restore a lost part of their past or reflect upon its signifi-
cance. Rather, it is precisely in the process of a search for one’s past that one
realizes it does not exist as a continuous extension of time that in its entirety
defines one’s identity. In a short story, ‘Musubitsukanu mono’ (Unrelatable
Things), a chance encounter with a snake and the killing of it that the protago-
nist conducts reminds him of another, similar incident in the past, like a memory
flash:
The snake that the man encountered was the first one that he saw in
Japan. It was a Japanese snake that the returnee to Japan saw face to face the
first time in twenty-five years since his return. Therefore, we can deduce that
the satisfaction that he experienced was due to the fact that the man who
had killed the Korean snake and the man who lives in Japan in the present
were connected to each other for the first time by the killing of the Japanese
snake.
(Gotō 1971b: 103)
It is an incidental action that identifies a man in Japan with a man who was in
Korea in the past. The continuity and homogeneity of identity are effectively
dismissed, while two separate moments, each in a different country, are tied to
deduce an identification of the agents of two actions that are analogous to each
other.
Indeed protagonists in Gotō’s stories do reflect on lapses in memory that make
it impossible to reconstruct one’s personal history based on chronology and the
causality of past events. Encounters with people, places and moments in time are
tangential and incidental, with the reasons behind them difficult to identify. In
308 Atsuko Sakaki
fact, these characters do not believe their questions will be answered in the first
place. Still, they continue to ask questions, producing numerous possible answers
without solving the questions. The title of one of his stories, ‘Gimonfu de owaru
hanashi’ (A Tale That Ends with a Question Mark), speaks loudly of the orientation
of Gotō’s fiction: it concerns the unknowability, intangibility, and unidentifiability
of human experience, and yet never disengages questions. Indeed, Gotō’s charac-
ters are itinerant not only in a geographical sense but also in a cognitive sense:
they never settle. Rather, they exist only in the process of searching for self-iden-
tification.
Conclusion
It seems as though the following passage by Derrida lends itself well to my
reading of Double Jeopardy in particular, and to Gotō Meisei’s writing in
general:
In its common concept, autobiographical anamnesis presupposes

identification. And precisely not identity. No, an identity is never given,
received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic
process endures. Whatever the story of a return to oneself or to one’s home
[chez-soi], into the ‘hut’ [casa] of one’s home (chez is the casa), no matter what
an odyssey or Bildungsroman it might be, in whatever manner one invents
the story of a construction of the self, the autos, or the ipse, it is always imag-
ined that the one who writes should know how to say I. At any rate, the
identificatory modality must already or henceforth be assured: assured of
language and in its language. It is believed that the problem of the unity of
language must be resolved, and that the One of language in the strict or
broad sense be given – a broad sense that will be stretched till it includes all
the models and identificatory modalities, all the poles of imaginary projec-
tion in social culture.
(Derrida 1996: 28)
As we have seen, Gotō’s narrator-protagonist does not ‘know how to say I’ – let
us recall that for him ‘I’ is only semantic – and yet he knows that he does not
know. He also knows he is not ‘given’ any identity. Still, he cannot but place
himself in an ‘interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process’ of identifica-
tion. In this chapter, I have looked at references to some of the ‘identificatory
modalities’ such as names, languages, nationhood, and places of residence, which
all turn out to be ‘imaginary’ and yet ‘assured’ and ‘enduring’. While they all
suffer twists, misplacements, misunderstandings, fallible memory, lack of motiva-
tion to resolve any mystery, coincidence and other complications, they do haunt
us ‘phantasmatically’. Gotō demonstrates effectively the artificiality, the contingency
and ambiguity of identity-makers, while showing how dependent we are upon
these constructs in our own search for identity that is the obsession of our
modern sensibility.
Notes
1 Let me add a word of clarification as to the nature of the ‘autobiographical pretense’
that I here mention as shared in common by some of Gotō’s works. They should be held
as discrete from the body of works labelled ‘shishōsetsu’ (I-novel) precisely in terms of
the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘the Other’, even though Gotō knew and even expected
his reader to draw parallels between events in his fiction and those in his life as publi-
cized in his essays (a mechanism for which his stories might qualify for the genre of
shishōsetsu). In ‘Sanbun no mondai’, Gotō defines shishōsetsu as ‘a world that has materi-
alized by way of eliminating the Other altogether in order to express “I”’, while
defining the world of his own fiction as ‘where the “Other” who ignores “I” matters –
and where, inspite of that, “I” who cannot afford to ignore the “Other” of such an
orientation matters’ (Gotō 1972: 204). Thus, the lack of ‘relation’ between ‘I’ and ‘the
Other’ that Gotōsees as definitive of the shishōsetsu is not relevant to Gotō’s fiction.
2 The narrator has guessed right. Ken Tadashi Ōshima posts a photograph taken from
Ochanomizubashi (which naturally does not show the bridge itself) in his architectural
historical study of yet another bridge across the same river, Hijiribashi (Saint’s
Bridge), named after the (Confucian) Yushima temple and the (Russian Orthodox) St
Nikolai’s church (Ōshima 2001: 1). Incidentally, the narrator of Double Jeopardy fails to
remember the name of Hijiribashi as well (Gotō 1998: 256).
3 In fact, Gotō himself published a translation of ‘The Overcoat’, a collaborative work
with Yokota Mizuho, a scholar and translator of Russian Literature, in 1978.
4 Gotō differentiates himself from many others who left their respective hometowns for
Tokyo in his essay, ‘Sanbun no mondai’, as follows:
Needless to say, I was not a Tokyoite. However, neither was I a native of the
countryside with a pride in the native land with which to confront and crush with
Tokyo. I was deprived of all qualifications as a country bumpkin, too.
(Gotō 1972: 206)
5 Derrida’s term, originating from Of Grammatology, connotes both ‘difference’ and

‘deferral’, thereby highlighting the centrality of a process in the constitution of a
notion by way of comparison with another. The term is quite appropriate for Gotō’s
fiction as it concerns confluences of temporality and spatiality.
6 Given the significance that the name of Nikolai has earned since Akaki read Gogol, it
seems rather odd that St Nikolai’s church in Ochanomizu, a cultural landmark in the
vicinity of the bridge Akaki is standing on at the narrative present, is not recalled in
this genealogy of the name. (I thank Nori Morita for pointing out this fact that origi-
nally had escaped my attention.) The building, famous and conspicuous with domes
typical of the Russian Orthodox Church, is mentioned in the last pages of Double
Jeopardy (pp. 243 and 253), as the narrator recalls a previous appointment with
Yamakawa, whom he had met in a coffee shop near Hijiribashi from where the shrine
is visible (see Oshima 2001: 13 for a photograph, and 14 for a woodblock print, of the
shrine and the bridge). Neither is St Nikolai’s church ignored in Gotō’s (1978) novel,
Yume to yume no aida (Between Dreams). Connections between the two novels are
obvious: Gotō’s protagonist is called Yamakawa; he used to wear a Japanese army
overcoat, and he is a teacher and translator of Russian literature; he is currently trans-
lating ‘The Overcoat’ into Japanese, a story after which he, like Akaki, wanted to
model his own fiction. The lack of a mention of St Nikolai’s church, where the name
of Nikolai is discussed, may thus be surmised as intentional, perhaps to the effect of
further suggesting the narrator’s obliviousness and, by extension, the incidentality of
memory which lets one overlook something obvious, relevant and present.
7 In ‘Sanbun no mondai’, Gotō speaks of ‘Hyōjungo-magai no shokuminchi Nihongo’
(Colonial Japanese as pseudo-standard Japanese) as follows:
310 Atsuko Sakaki
[Colonial Japanese] was relativized in two senses. First, it was relativized vis-à-vis
Korean. At the same time, it was a relative Japanese vis-à-vis dialects that were
native languages of Japanese residents who gathered (in North Korea) from
various regions of Japan. It was not an absolute Japanese at all.
(Gotō 1972: 205)
Gotō continues to relate his experience of moving from one version of Japanese to
another – from colonial Japanese to the Chikuzen dialect to the Tokyo dialect, always
finding the newer version as relative to the previous.
8 It was 1952 when Gotō took the entrance examination to Tokyo Gaigo daigaku or
Tokyo College of Foreign Languages, Futabatei’s alma mater, at which he had intended
to study Russian. Eventually, he went to Waseda University.
9 Hanada Kiyoteru reminds us that Futabatei Shimei, whom Gotō admired to the
extent that he tried unsuccessfully to go to his alma mater (as did his protagonist,
Akaki), also uses the metaphor of daen (oval) for a centreless being in ‘Sono omokage’.
See Hanada (1959: 240–1).
10 Karatani Kōjin’s following observation is in keeping with Gotō’s own:
[Gotō] does not give a special meaning to [the fact that he is a returnee]; one
does not live treasuring such an experience, but rather one tries to forget it and
indeed matures while forgetting it. Returnees are eager to ‘naturalize’ into main-
land Japan – only literary men privilege such an experience.
(Karatani 1974: 238)
References
Main text
Gotō Meisei (1998) Double Jeopardy, Tokyo: Kōdansha bungei bunko.
Other references
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, Constantin
V. Boundas (eds), New York: Columbia University Press.
––––(1996) Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Genten (1986) Tokushū: Gotō Meisei (A Special Issue: Gotō Meisei), Genten: Gendai Nihon
bungaku kenkyū 7: 4–97.
Gogol, Nikolai (1992a) ‘The Nose’, trans. Gleb and Mary Struve, in The Overcoat and Other
Short Stories, New York: Dover, pp. 58–78.
––––(1992b) ‘The Overcoat’, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (originally as ‘The Cloak’), in The
Overcoat and Other Short Stories, pp. 79–103.
Gotō Meisei (1970) ‘“K” to no musubitsuki’ (My Connection with ‘K’), Shinchō 67 (10): 166–7.
——(1971a) ‘“Mumeishi” no ronri’ (The Logic of Mr. No Name), Tenbō 152: 114–22.
——(1971b) ‘Musubitsukanu mono’ (Unconnected Things), in Kakarenai hōkoku (The
Unwritten Report), Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha.
——(1972) ‘Sanbun no mondai’ (The Problems of Prose), in Gotō Meisei shō, Shin’ei sakka
sōsho, Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, pp. 204–8.
——(1973a) ‘Chōsen keikensha no kansō’ (Observations by a Returnee from Korea), in
Tokushū: Nikkan kakuryō kaigi e no ginen (Special issue: Concerning the Japan-Korea
Ministerial Meeting), Asahi Jaanaru 15(51): 14–17.
——(1973b) ‘Yukue fumei’ (Missing in Action), in Gimonfu de owaru hanashi (The Tale that
Ends with a Question Mark), Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha.
——(1978a) Yume to yume no aida (Between Dreams), Tokyo: Shūeisha.
——(1978b) ‘Hana’ (The Nose), in Gōgori (Gogol), Sekai bungaku zenshū (Collected Works of
World Literature), vol. 35, Tokyo: Gakushū kenkyūsha, pp. 91–120.
——(1983) Shōsetsu – ikani kaki, ikani yomu ka (The Novel: How to Write and How to Read
It), Tokyo: Kōdansha gendai shinsho.
Hanada Kiyoteru (1959) ‘Daen gensō: Viyon’ (The Oval Fantasy: Villon), in Fukkōki no
seishin (The Spirit of Restoration), 2nd edn, Tokyo: Miraisha, pp. 237–46.
Hiraoka Tokuyoshi (1979) Bungaku no dōki (The Incentive for Literature), Tokyo: Kawade
shobō shinsha.
Karatani Kōjin (1974) ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary), in Gotō Meisei, Pan nomi ni arazu (Not
Only Bread), Tokyo: Kadokawa bunko, pp. 238–43.
Nagai Kafū (1972) ‘A Strange Tale from East of the River’, trans. Edward Seidensticker,
in A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories, Tokyo and Vermont: Tuttle.
Nagashima Takayoshi (1986) ‘Gotō Meisei ron: “watakushi” o meguru shudai’ (Gotō Meisei:
Themes Surrounding ‘I’), in Genten (1986), pp. 84–97.
Nakamura Shin’ichirō (1994) ‘Akutagawa Ryūnosuke no baai’ (The Case of Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke), in Nihon kindai bungaku o dō yomuka (How to Read Modern Japanese Litera-
ture), Subaru 16(12): 218–29.
Nakano Kō ji, Iijima Kōichi and Gotō Meisei (1978) ‘Gaikoku bungaku to watakushi no
kotoba’ (Foreign Literature and My Own Language), Waseda Bungaku (8th cycle) 23: 4–
17.
Oketani Hideaki (1974) ‘Rekishi no bōryoku ni aragau nama no kioku: Gotō Meisei Double
Jeopardy’ (Raw Memory in Resistance to the Violence of History: Gotō Meisei’s Double
Jeopardy), Subaru 15: 90–7.
Oshima Ken Tadashi (2001) ‘Hijiribashi: Spanning Time and Crossing Place’, Architecture:
Re-building the Future, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 8: 1–21.
Yokota Mizuho and Gotō Meisei (trans.) (1978) ‘Gaitō’ (The Overcoat), in Gōgori (Gogol),
Sekai bungaku zenshū (Collected Works of World Literature), vol. 35, Tokyo: Gakushū
kenkyūsha, pp. 149–83.
16 Beyond language
Embracing the figure of ‘the Other’
in Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi
Catherine Ryu
Introduction: Koreans in Japan

Since its creation in 1935, the Akutagawa Award has been regarded as one of
the most prestigious literary recognitions in Japan.1 Of its recipients, there are
four writers – Ri Kaisei (b. 1935), Yi Yang-ji (1955–92), Yū Miri (b. 1968), and
Gen Getsu (b. 1965) – who carry the label of ‘zainichi Korean’. Zainichi means
‘residing in Japan’, and the term ‘zainichi Korean’ refers to those Koreans who
have established their residence in Japan. As an index of legal status, zainichi
Korean is used specifically to identify Koreans in Japan as ‘aliens’. That is to say,
zainichi Koreans are regarded as foreigners, even if they were born in Japan.
While naturalization is a legal option available to them, this path has not been
readily taken due to complicated reasons, political and otherwise.2
The particular shape and tone of zainichi Korean issues in contemporary
Japan need to be situated in the unique modality of these two countries’ interac-
tions, the origin of which lies far beyond their colonial encounter (1910–45).
Culturally speaking, beginning from as far back as the sixth century, Korea, due
to its proximity to China, served as a conduit of Buddhism and Confucianism to
Japan, together with other attendant components of culture, such as art, litera-
ture, and architecture. Contemporary Korea and Japan still share the same
Chinese cultural heritage, including Chinese characters known as hanja in
Korean or kanji in Japanese. Linguistically, Korean and Japanese exhibit a striking
degree of similarity. Ethnically, it is not always possible to differentiate Koreans
from the Japanese based on physical appearance alone. Geographically, Korea
and Japan lie, in global terms, a stone’s throw away. It takes less than two hours
to fly from Tokyo to Seoul. Yet Koreans commonly refer to Japan as ‘a country
that is simultaneously far and near’. This saying symbolically encapsulates the
thorny relationship between these two nations.
From the Korean perspective, Japan’s colonization of Korea is but the latest
and most comprehensive expression of Japan’s long-cherished dream of taking
over its neighbor and long-time cultural mentor. The Japanese warlord Toyotomi
Hideoyoshi (1536–98), for instance, launched an invasion of Korea, which was
then called ‘Choson’ (1392–1910), as the pathway for his China campaign. This
military aggression, which lasted for seven years from 1592 to 1598, was, in Peter
Beyond language 313
Lee’s words, ‘unparalleled in its brutality, devastation, and hardship for the
[Korean] people’ (2000: i). The infamous legacy of Hideyoshi’s war atrocities still
remains in the form of the so-called ‘nose and ear mound’ (mimizuka), which was
built solely of the severed noses and ears of the Koreans that the Japanese troops
had brought back as evidence of their successful military campaigns (Lee 2000:
38). Moreover, during this invasion, 20,000 to 30,000 Koreans, including
scholars, artisans, technicians and women, were forcibly taken to Japan.3 Japan’s
modern colonization of Korea for over thirty-five years meant exploitation of
much greater magnitude, especially during the intense military mobilization from
1941 to 1945. About 1.4 million Koreans were taken to Japan in the year 1941
alone for construction, manufacturing, mining, and agricultural work. By the
time of Japan’s defeat in 1945, Koreans constituted one-third of Japan’s indus-
trial labor (Cumings 1997: 177–9). Nearly two million Koreans remained in
Japan after the war,4 and this group formed the initial nexus of today’s zainichi
Koreans, approximately 700,000, that is, more than 0.5 percent of the Japanese
population (Fukuoka 1996: 10).
Even after more than half a century since Korea’s liberation from Japan in
1945, the relationship between these two countries remains strained due to a set
of complex factors such as the enduring political antagonism between Korea and
Japan,5 South Korea’s newly emerging status as a major player in the interna-
tional arena with initial financial and technological assistance from Japan, North
Korea’s increasing isolation as a perverse communist nation,6 and Japan’s collec-
tive amnesia concerning its own history vis-à-vis Korea.7 Moreover, in Japan as
well as in North and South Korea, the very existence of zainichi Koreans has
been a major focus of hotly debated issues of nationhood and national identity,
not to mention national pride and honor, as each government tries to deal with
the questions of repatriation, legal protection, and human rights pertaining to
this group – an ineradicable reminder/remainder of the colonial legacy.
It is against such a complex political, economic, and historical backdrop that
zainichi Korean issues have been debated and taken shape in Japan. At the same
time, the impact of the physical presence of zainichi Koreans on Japan’s national
consciousness cannot be overlooked. Policy-makers, scholars, critics, and zainichi
Koreans themselves endeavor to define the significance of zainichi beyond its
legal denotation, precisely because the term zainichi functions as more than a
label of transparent marginality attached to Koreans in Japan. The presence of
zainichi Koreans has necessitated a more finely calibrated notion of ‘Japaneseness’
than had they not existed at all. At the level of perception, zainichi Koreans
confound the very physical and linguistic distinction between the Japanese Self
and the Other. A great majority of zainichi Koreans, who were born and raised in
Japan, can easily pass as Japanese, betraying no foreign inflection in speech and
appearance. Consequently, only in the discursive field can the differentiation
between the Japanese Self and zainichi Koreans be fully delineated and zealously
guarded.
The particular relation between zainichi Koreans and the notion of the
Japanese Self can be further illuminated in terms of a ‘set theory’. To form a
314 Catherine Ryu
finite set (as opposed to an infinite set), some elements must be excluded from it.
In fact, what constitutes a set is not what is included, but rather what is excluded
from it. The reified notion of the authentic Japanese Self is in effect a discursive
form of a finite set. Some elements must be thrown out from this conceptual,
and concrete, set of the Japanese Self in order to mark its boundaries, without
which there would be no set at all. Zainichi Koreans function precisely as one such
element – ‘the Japanized Other’ – that is thrown out so as to generate an exclu-
sive set of the authentic Japanese. Zainichi Koreans thus exist outside the notion
of the Japanese Self and are simultaneously an indispensable constituent of that
very notion. As such, zainichi Koreans’ full assimilation of the Japanese language
and culture does not necessarily destabilize the notion of the Japanese Self.
Rather, Japanized zainichi Koreans serve as a concrete demonstration of what is
indeed not the ‘authentic’ Japanese Self.8
The notion of zainichi Koreans as ‘the Other to the Japanese Self ’ is, however,
problematic. The stability of the Japanese Self requires a stable presence of the
Other, against which the myth of Japan’s homogeneity (i.e. mono-ethnic nation
state based on a single blood/race) can be projected. Yet zainichi Koreans them-
selves do not form a homogeneous Other. The originary definition of this ethnic
group as a diasporic community of people who were initially forced to migrate to
the enemy’s territory can no longer generate a unifying force to harness the
complex reality and the heterogeneity of zainichi Koreans. As the number of this
group continues to grow (they now include second, third, and fourth genera-
tions), new generations, born and raised in Japan, hold less than tenuous links
with what have been regarded as legal and cultural ethnic markers such as
Korean names, Korean citizenship, and the ability to speak Korean or familiarity
with Korean customs.9 That is to say, the reality of zainichi Koreans, with its
growing diverse attitudes toward interracial marriage, naturalization, citizenship,
homeland and Japan, cannot be dictated or contained by Japanese society’s
desire to marginalize zainichi Koreans merely as an indispensable but static
Japanized Other.
Despite the growing gap between zainichi Koreans’ prescribed role as ‘the
Other’ and the changing reality of this group, polyphonic literary voices of
zainichi Koreans are still bound to the monolithic category of zainichi bungaku
(zainichi literature). Canonized only as zainichi bungaku, this body of writing repre-
sents the voice of ‘a marginalized Other’ in Japanese national literature. Not
surprisingly, zainichi bungaku has been interpreted mainly through a postcolonial
or diasporic framework. Such a critical rigidity, and its subsequent theoretical
marginalization of zainichi bungaku, only reproduce and reinforce the existing
hierarchy between Japanese national literature and minority literature. The fact
that some zainichi Korean authors have received such prestigious literary recogni-
tions as the Akutagawa Award does not necessarily mean that Japanese society
now recognizes and confers full membership on zainichi Koreans. Their literary
productions are still read only as reflections of the lived experience of an ethnic
minority in Japan. In short, current critical discourses on zainichi bungaku mirror
and buttress the notion of zainichi Koreans as what I would term ‘a monolithic
Beyond language 315
imaginary Other’. The main objective of this chapter is therefore to demonstrate
how it is necessary and possible to theorize and articulate the complex psycholog-
ical interiority of zainichi Koreans beyond the reductive binary paradigm of the
Japanese Self and the contrastive Other. Specifically, this chapter offers, as a
study case, a critical analysis of the 1988 novel Yuhi (Yuhi) by Yi Yang-ji, a
second-generation zainichi Korean and the recipient of the 100th Akutagawa
Award in 1988.
Re-reading Yuhi
Yi’s award-winning novel Yuhi has been read as a classic instance of zainichi
bungaku that deals with the psychological trauma unique to zainichi Koreans. This
trauma is attributed to the linguistic and cultural oscillations between the two
opposing poles of identity – Korean and Japanese – that zainichi Koreans
presumably experience in the process of their search for identity. At first sight,
the novel does seem to yield to such a reading, as it concerns a second-generation
zainichi Korean woman named Yuhi, who, at the age of 27, goes to Korea to
study Korean language and literature. Only one month before graduating from
the prestigious S. University, however, Yuhi abruptly returns to Japan. Her
sudden departure from Korea, together with her recurring linguistic escapes to
the comfort of the Japanese language during her stay in Korea, has been inter-
preted not only by critics and scholars, but to a large degree by the Korean
characters in the novel itself, as a sign of Yuhi’s failure to fully embrace the
Korean aspect of her identity.10
The full import of the novel Yuhi, however, should not be drawn merely from
its subject matter. That is, Yuhi’s return to Japan cannot be characterized as ‘a
failure’, without an examination of its significance within the totality of the novel.
By the time the novel begins, for instance, Yuhi has already returned to Japan,
and the story is presented as the narrator’s self-analysis, as it were, of her past
relationship with the absent Other. Through this act of self-analysis, the
narrator – the niece of Yuhi’s landlady and the self-appointed manager of Yuhi’s
Korean studies – gradually overcomes her initial disappointment with, and anger
at, Yuhi’s apparent betrayal of Korea. Over a three- to four-hour period immedi-
ately following Yuhi’s departure, the narrator re-enacts and experiences Yuhi’s
‘agony of language’11 as if it were her own, and is able to traverse the linguistic
divide that she herself has initially placed between herself and Yuhi. By the end
of the novel, the narrator fully identifies herself with Yuhi through her visceral
experience of Yuhi’s pain and dilemma in a form akin to spirit possession – a
phenomenon beyond the realm of Language and the divide between Self and
Other.
The implication of the narrator’s change of heart vis-à-vis Yuhi and the partic-
ular channel through which it occurs is, in my view, the key to understanding Yi
Yang-ji’s formulation of Self and Other. Since Yuhi is first and foremost a psycho-
analytic drama of Language, I borrow, for my reading of the novel, critical
insights and vocabulary developed by Lacanian psychoanalysis in which
316 Catherine Ryu
Language is the focal point of both theoretical and clinical reflections.12 As will
be seen in this chapter, the second half in particular, Lacanian illuminations on
Language and Subjectivity can be productively employed to delineate Yi’s novel-
istic rendition of Self and Other, the theoretical significance of which lies beyond
the relation between the Japanese Self and zainichi Koreans as the Japanized
Other.
Mapping language matters in Yuhi

The novel Yuhi is a monolingual text written mainly in Japanese with some high-
lighted Korean expressions. While the localized use of Korean expressions in the
novel is significant in and of itself, its full significance can be revealed only in
light of the author’s overall conceit of the novel. Specifically, the entire realm of
Yuhi pivots on the reminiscing mind of the first-person narrator, an unnamed
native Korean woman. She is what I would term an ‘exophone’ narrator – a
narrator who is in the state of ‘exophony’, that is, ‘being outside of one’s mother
tongue’.13 What is extraordinary about this exophone narrator is that she does
not possess any Japanese language skills, despite the fact that she tells her story in
Japanese. Through this narrator’s storytelling, the reader is thus forced to
encounter and experience an alternate linguistic reality in which an assumed
relation between national language and national identity turns into a logical and
linguistic knot.
To begin with, the reader is unexpectedly and belatedly informed of the
narrator’s lack of Japanese language skills about seventeen pages into the novel.
Her complete lack of Japanese proficiency is quietly revealed in her recollection
of a conversation she had with Yuhi. In this conversation, Yuhi calls the narrator
from the airport to mention that she is entrusting her journal to the narrator:14
‘You said your departure was at four o’clock, right?’

‘Yes.’
‘It’s soon then.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, it’s in the dresser on the left side of your room, as you were saying.’
‘Yes.’
‘I shouldn’t read it, though, right?’
‘ . . . but, you probably won’t be able to understand it. It’s in Japanese.’
(Yi Yang-ji 1989:22)15
Just as the narrator’s newly gained knowledge of the existence of Yuhi’s writing
in Japanese stirs her desire to take a look at it, the revelation of the narrator’s
lack of Japanese ability compels the reader to take a second look at what has thus
far been taken to be a transparent system of signification – that is, the Japanese
language of the text as a direct reflection of the narrator’s thoughts.
In Yuhi, the author has actually created the novel’s own particular system of
signification based on the premise of the narrator’s language skills, or the lack
Beyond language 317
thereof. The native Korean woman’s position as first-person narrator is plausible
only if the reader makes a conscious mental leap over the received notion of
national language and national identity. If the narrative consciousness (i.e. what
is accessible to the reader) is constituted solely through the monolingual first-person
Korean narrator’s thought, the Japanese language that the reader encounters
and experiences in the novel must be figuratively understood as the narrator’s
Korean language in disguise. Or the reader must assume that this Japanese novel
is already a translation of the original text in Korean. In either case, what is ordi-
narily taken to be a transparent relation between one’s language and nationality
is turned opaque with the reader’s recognition of the ‘translational and transna-
tional’ undercurrents the Korean narrator brings to the Japanese language.16 This
host language is now forged to echo and resonate with the language of the Other,
Korean, thereby acquiring a porousness that it would not otherwise possess.
The author, however, does more than merely replace the Korean narrator’s
mother tongue with Japanese. Rather, Yi has generated a new link between the
Japanese language and the mode of its inscription. In the entire novel, the
narrator mentions a single instance of Yuhi’s spoken Japanese, ‘ii nioi’ (delicious
smell), twice in the same paragraph (p. 53). As Ueda Atsuko rightly points out,
this phrase is written in katakana, underscoring its ‘foreign origin’ (2000: 140–1).
By transcribing Yuhi’s Japanese utterance in katakana, the narrator presents it as a
foreign sound, rather than as an expression to which she can relate semantically.
In other words, Yuhi’s spoken Japanese is inscribed in the novel as the language
of the Other to the narrator.
The narrator’s inscription of Yuhi’s written Japanese is unique in another way.
Since the narrator’s Korean is already coded as Japanese, the author constitutes
Yuhi’s ‘authentic’ Japanese as that which cannot be represented by the actual
Japanese script, while it can be fully described in Japanese by the Korean
narrator. In fact, not a single word of Yuhi’s Japanese journal of 448 pages is
reproduced in the novel, even though the narrator’s knowledge of this writing,
her desire to read it, and her act of reading it constitute the novel’s entire plot.
That is to say, instead of leaving Yuhi’s Japanese as a complete void, Yi inscribes
it in the narrative solely through the pressure that the presence of Yuhi’s writing
exerts upon the Korean narrator’s mind. With such an unconventional method of
inscribing Yuhi’s written Japanese, the author explores how the so-called
‘national language’ can be potentially transformed into an intensely personal
means of veiling and unveiling individuals’ subjective truths and desires. To the
Korean narrator who believes that Yuhi’s journal contains the secret reasons
behind her sudden decision to return to Japan, the impenetrability of the
Japanese language literally prevents the narrator from attaining what she desires
the most – the key to the innermost chamber of Yuhi’s heart. Similarly, to Yuhi,
her lengthy Japanese writing mirrors the inaccessibility of the Korean language
she has personally encountered and experienced. Her Japanese writing expresses
what is impossible for Yuhi to articulate in the Korean language. The complete
textual omission of Yuhi’s Japanese journal thus symbolically represents the
intersection between the Korean and Japanese languages in their mutual inability
318 Catherine Ryu
to enunciate what both Yuhi and the narrator personally regard and desire as
truths. In this way, the textual lacuna of Yuhi’s Japanese writing metaphorically
embodies that which lies outside the purported ideological arena of national
language and national identity.
In the novel’s system of signification, the Korean language, too, performs
multiple functions in various forms. Korean expressions are included, to a limited
degree, in katakana, adding a new aural quality of ‘Otherness’ to both Korean
and Japanese. Significantly, the only time the actual Korean script han’gul is
employed in the novel is when the narrator recalls and mimics Yuhi’s fragmented
and distorted speech in Korean. That is to say, when the narrator uses Korean, it
is represented as the language of the Other. Since Yuhi is a zainichi Korean
woman, Korean is her ‘supposed’ mother tongue in relation to Japanese, her
‘foreign’ mother tongue. To native Koreans like the narrator, Yuhi’s unnatural
Korean is a telling sign of her Otherness, her Japanized Korean self. The
Otherness of this foreign tongue in the narrative is not only visually amplified by
the presence of the katakana reading written alongside the Korean letters, but also
semantically layered with the accompanying Japanese translation.
Moreover, the narrative tension coagulates around Yuhi’s Korean utterances,
tugging, tearing the textual surface around them, and revealing an otherwise
hidden psychological dimension of the narrator. When she mimics Yuhi’s Korean
words, what the narrator actually hears is not necessarily Yuhi’s voice but her own.
Such conflict-ridden Korean utterances as ‘This country’, ‘People of this country’,
‘I am a hypocrite’, ‘I’m a liar’, ‘Our country’, and ‘I can’t love our country’ (pp.
82–3)17 may seem to portend Yuhi’s eventual rejection of a Korean identity.
However, it is important to keep in mind that these words have been filtered
through the narrator’s reminiscing mind, while she physically moves toward, and
finally interacts with, Yuhi’s writing in Japanese – a painful reminder of Yuhi’s
absence in Korea.
In other words, the resurfacing of the Korean language in the narrative signi-
fies the return of what the narrator has repressed or disavowed – her perception of
Yuhi’s negative reception of Korea, its language and its people. Precisely because
the narrator retroactively recognizes Yuhi’s Korean words as the foretelling
symptoms of her sudden decision to return to Japan, the narrator’s anxiety
attaches itself to her recollection of Yuhi’s Korean expressions. Since what Yuhi
truly meant to say remains unknowable, her Korean words actually function as
newly discovered reminders of the narrator’s own unquestioned belief that
Yuhi’s mastery of the Korean language is the only viable solution for her identity
dilemma. These reminders reflect the narrator’s obsessive desire to completely
expunge the Japanese language from Yuhi and make her wholly Korean, more
like a mirror image of the narrator herself. Yuhi’s Korean words thus symboli-
cally carry the psychological tension the narrator has brought to her relationship
with Yuhi. That is to say, despite the fact that this exophone narrator’s mother
tongue, Korean, is entirely erased in the narrative, she has retained her ideolog-
ical ties with her national identity and national language. In short, she is first and
foremost a postcolonial Korean national with strong anti-Japanese sentiments.18
Beyond language 319
That is precisely why the implication of the narrator’s complete change of heart
vis-à-vis Yuhi by the end of the novel is critical to our understanding of the author’s
articulation of Self and Other, an issue to which I turn in the next section.
Beyond language: embracing ‘the real of Yuhi’

Yi Yang-ji’s engagement with the issue of Self and Other in Yuhi moves beyond
destabilizing the received notion of national language and national identity by
means of the exophone narrator. This explains why even an exhaustive mapping
of the complex linguistic strategies deployed in the novel does not fully encompass
the narrative reality of Yuhi. There exists yet another dimension to the narrator’s
interactions with the absent Other Yuhi, which exceeds the very notion of
Language, let alone that of national language, whether that national language be
Korean, Japanese, or a combination of the two. Throughout the novel, the narrator
speaks of what I would call her ‘visceral experience’ of Yuhi, which functions as
the ultimate catalyst for this Korean woman’s complete identification with Yuhi.19
As will be seen, an in-depth analysis of the narrator’s bodily experience of the
absent Other, in conjunction with the narrator’s self-analysis of her past relation-
ship with Yuhi, sheds a new light on the author’s meditation on Self and Other.
The Lacanian notion of ‘the real’ is particularly useful in analyzing the
narrator’s visceral experience of Yuhi. The significance of the real emerges only
in contrast to that of ‘the symbolic’, another major component of the Lacanian
universe, which is founded on one’s relation to Language. As one learns to speak
Language, one experiences it as ‘the Other’, that is, something other than oneself
(Fink 1995: 5–7). Only by learning to express one’s self through Language can
one enter the realm of ‘the symbolic’. For instance, when an infant learns to
speak, that is, when it learns to coincide its desire with that of its parents by
speaking their language, the infant can express its hunger by using a food-related
word, which functions as a linguistic symbol for its urgent bodily need. This need
may or may not be understood properly by the parental Other, if expressed only
through the infant’s physical outburst, crying. ‘The symbolic’, put simply, is that
which can be represented or symbolized by Language. More concretely, the
symbolic can be understood as that which constitutes the governing orders and
principles of what we generally refer to as social reality. Once one enters the
symbolic, that which existed prior to this entry is retroactively conceptualized as
‘the real’. The real can be understood as that which cannot be represented or
symbolized by Language, or as that which resists any symbolization via
Language. The real, however, can still be encountered or experienced in the
symbolic through its remainder or reminder, such as Freudian slips. These
reminders are manifestations of one’s unconsciousness, the part of oneself (i.e.
one’s desire as opposed to the Other’s desire) that has been repressed in the
process of being constituted in and by Language, which Lacan views as the sole
channel for entering the symbolic (Fink 1995: 24–31).
The Lacanian notion of the real has direct relevance to the significance of the
narrator’s visceral experience of Yuhi in the novel. The figure of Yuhi that the
320 Catherine Ryu
Korean narrator retroactively constructs through her bodily recollection can be
understood as what I would term ‘the real of Yuhi’, the Yuhi that cannot be
represented by Language alone. Not surprisingly, the narrator’s experience of the
real of Yuhi begins with her recollection of Yuhi’s voice, the unique essence of
which cannot be mediated by Language, but must be directly experienced. The
centrality of Yuhi’s voice to the narrator is evident from the beginning of the novel,
which starts with: ‘Since Yuhi’s phone call, I have become restless’ (Yi Yang-ji
1989: 7). This call is later revealed to be the one Yuhi made at the airport
concerning her journal written in Japanese. The disembodied voice of Yuhi over
the phone is not only symbolic of Yuhi’s physical absence in the narrator’s life,
but is also the last reminder of Yuhi’s desire to return to Japan, the polar opposite
of the narrator’s wish to retain her in Korea. The narrator’s awareness of Yuhi’s
‘Otherness’ has become even more heightened with the unexpected emergence
of Yuhi’s Japanese writing. It is in the midst of her emotional and psychological
turmoil – disappointment, despair, and anger – that the narrator recalls Yuhi’s
voice over the phone on her way home to retrieve the writing in question:
An empty taxi sped toward me, and I flagged it down and got in. As soon as
it started to move in the direction of the house, my restlessness returned with
the swiftness of a forgotten thought suddenly resurfacing. Yuhi’s voice. The
voice I heard over the phone. This voice pressed itself down upon me with
such a sense of immediacy that I felt almost as if she were talking to me
right now. Each time the taxi came to a sudden halt at a traffic light, Yuhi
appeared behind my fluttering eyelids. No sooner had the taxi started to
speed up again than her figure retreated.
(p. 7)
Here, the narrator experiences Yuhi’s voice as a separate living entity, apart from
the narrator herself. It nevertheless exerts such power over her mind that she
responds to it not merely as a disembodied voice, but as a physical being with
agency of its own. With the figure of Yuhi appearing and disappearing before
her mind’s eye, the narrator is forced to repeatedly experience, at each stop light
on her way home, the anxiety of separation from Yuhi – the experience the
narrator chose to avoid by breaking her promise to accompany Yuhi to the
airport precisely because it would have been too painful. Thus, the narrator’s
perception of, and response to, the figure of Yuhi, brought on by her recollection
of Yuhi’s voice, embody this Korean woman’s unarticulated feelings of guilt and
despair, as well as her desire to postpone an ultimate recognition of Yuhi’s
absence in her life.
By the time the narrator reaches home, Yuhi’s voice has grown more potent,
generating an even more palpable presence of Yuhi in the narrator’s mind:
Yuhi’s voice in my memory pierced right through my back. Along with the
voice, too, appeared her gaze. I could feel the movement of Yuhi’s gaze in
that voice. Led by her voice and gaze, I turned around. There stood Yuhi
Beyond language 321
beside me. It then all came back to me with clarity – Yuhi’s profile as she
had gazed up toward the top of the hill. Just like that day six months ago, I
stood with Yuhi, looking up at the rocky mountain range in the distance.
(pp. 8–9)
The narrator now experiences Yuhi’s voice as a more invasive physical force than
before, penetrating directly into her body. Moreover, this voice brings out another
aspect of Yuhi, her gaze, which again cannot be represented by Language but
must be experienced viscerally. With the combined force of Yuhi’s voice and
gaze, the narrator begins to interact with the specter of Yuhi with a vividness and
intensity akin to those of hallucination. Through her encounter with a briefly
sustained illusion of Yuhi, the narrator can momentarily dissolve the temporal gap
between the past and the present, the distinction between reality and memory,
and the evidence of Yuhi’s presence and absence.
Moreover, it soon becomes clear that the voice in question is not Yuhi’s voice
over the phone but her voice from a more distant past, six months ago, when
their relationship began:
‘Pa’ui’ (Rock).20
Recalling Yuhi’s voice, I whispered the word, trying to imitate her
pronunciation as closely as possible. Yuhi’s voice came back to me – her
voice that had sounded all the more awkward as she had tried to enunciate
the word correctly by overemphasizing the vowel ‘ui’.
(p. 9)
The significance of Yuhi’s Korean utterance to the narrator is already apparent,

even without the knowledge of Yuhi’s comments on the naked appearance of the
rocky mountain range as a portrayal of the Korean people’s soul, which the
narrator recalls toward the end of the novel (p. 122).21 ‘Pa’ui’ is the first Korean
word in the novel to be transcribed in han’gul. Moreover, through this word,
Yuhi’s voice has become particularized. No longer just a voice, it embodies a
particular person. It is the voice of a shy zainichi Korean woman who is self-
conscious about her Korean pronunciation. To the narrator, the Korean word
‘pa’ui’ is thus both a reminder of Yuhi and the embodiment of her Otherness
evident in her foreign accent. Yet the narrator’s self-conscious act of enunciating
the word ‘pa’ui’ in Yuhi’s particular manner erases this native Korean woman’s
initial perception of Yuhi’s linguistic Otherness. In fact, the narrator’s act of
imitating Yuhi’s pronunciation expresses her desperate attempt to fill Yuhi’s
absence at least through an evocation of Yuhi’s unique voice.
Significantly, by the time she reaches Yuhi’s room to retrieve the journal in
question, the ephemeral presence of Yuhi’s voice and gaze has congealed into a
physical body, ‘a small lump’, within the narrator:
I let out a long sigh. My memories of Yuhi had turned into a small lump,
and I could feel its movements in the deep recesses of my heart. Whenever
322 Catherine Ryu
some happening of the past or a certain facial expression of Yuhi floated
into my mind, this small lump would burst open, sending my heart into such
a flutter.
I looked around this quiet room, empty of Yuhi’s presence.
The thick envelope still remained on my lap. While looking at it, I traced
its surface with the tips of my fingers.
‘U.Ri.Na.Ra’ (Motherland).22
I wrote these four Korean letters, voicing each in a faint voice. Again, my
anger rose and my body started to shake. Trying to suppress the trembling, I
closed my eyes. Even so, the shaking wouldn’t stop. I stood up firmly and
opened the window on the left side of the room. A cold wind swirled in little
by little. I took a deep breath. I felt as if Yuhi were in the room, sitting at the
desk. And I saw myself taking a deep breath, standing before the window,
just as I had done once before when I opened the window and said to Yuhi,
‘How about some fresh air?’
(pp. 55–6)
What the narrator identifies as ‘the small lump’ differs by nature from Yuhi’s
voice and gaze. Unlike Yuhi’s voice and gaze, with which the narrator can
interact or even imitate, a physical lump, a small foreign body lodged within the
narrator, suggests the solid presence of Otherness and its impenetrability. Yet,
not unlike Yuhi’s gaze and voice, it is not without agency. It is actually the
narrator’s perception of the lump’s movements that further activates her reminis-
cences of Yuhi and generates the narrator’s involuntary physical responses to this
Otherness within. Moreover, through her newly gained awareness of the Other’s
presence within, the narrator begins to view herself from a different perspective.
In the scene recollected in the passage above, the narrator’s present moment of
taking a deep breath in Yuhi’s room does more than bring back a particular
moment associated with her past action in connection with Yuhi. As if in an out-
of-body experience, the narrator’s own actions in the past and the present
simultaneously appear before her eyes. It is as if the narrator’s ordinary percep-
tion of time and space had dissolved, situating her consciousness outside the
confines of her ego and linear temporality. From this new vantage point, the
narrator encounters and recognizes herself as ‘an other’ mirrored in the reflec-
tion of Yuhi, the absent Other.
The closer the narrator physically approaches Yuhi’s writing in Japanese, the
more strongly the narrator feels the unity between herself and the Otherness
within:
That day, nearly six months ago, I really should have paid closer attention to
more things and done more for Yuhi. Realizing this only now, I felt a sensa-
tion of pain prickling the small lump named Yuhi that lodged in the recesses
of my heart. Almost all my memories of Yuhi were made in this room
around her desk, the one right here. It is as if the desk squarely lay on the
core of the small lump, supporting Yuhi. I couldn’t help feeling that each
Beyond language 323
memory came to be formed and written, one by one, on this very desk, to
which I found myself irresistibly drawn.
(p. 71)
The small lump, which initially stood for Yuhi’s voice, her gaze, and then the
narrator’s memories of Yuhi, is now explicitly identified as ‘Yuhi’. The physical
and psychological barrier between the narrator and Yuhi, including Yuhi’s
personal items such as her desk, has grown permeable and porous to a greater
extent than before. The narrator thus feels what ‘the lump/Yuhi’ feels, which in
turn makes it possible for the narrator to move beyond a mere visceral experi-
ence of Yuhi’s presence and pain. The narrator’s initial anger over Yuhi’s
apparent betrayal is now transformed into a profound regret at not having cared
sufficiently for Yuhi during her stay in Korea. In short, the narrator is better able
to look at the past six months from Yuhi’s perspective, even though this Korean
woman’s oscillations between anger and regret do not subside completely until
the very end of the novel, that is, only after she has completed her slow ambula-
tion through ‘the House of Memories’, as it were, visiting each niche associated
with Yuhi.
By the time the narrator finally begins to examine Yuhi’s writing in Japanese,
on page 71 of the 126-page novel, the small lump has taken on a particular
image of Yuhi in the mind of the narrator. This figure of Yuhi, which has
emerged from the narrator’s recollection, exhibits a remarkable degree of consis-
tency, even though that consistency lies precisely in contradictory complexity and
ambiguity. For instance, Yuhi, at the age of 27, imparts the impression of being a
small boy – awkward, unsteady, and frightened. Yuhi’s gaze is at once childlike
and wise; she is vivacious and withdrawn by turns. Yuhi over-enunciates certain
Korean sounds while swallowing others. Despite her astonishing power of
memory, she makes simple grammatical mistakes.
Through a series of recollections, the narrator has thus built a sense of
complexity that Yuhi embodies as a person – a complexity, the scope of which
can only be suggested by pointing out the binary qualities Yuhi manifests. She is,
however, not merely an enigma created by blurring categories of identity such as
gender, age, and personality types – all the categories that belong to ‘the
symbolic’ in Lacanian parlance. Rather, the various aspects of Yuhi – the tone of
her voice, her facial expressions, her gaze, her peculiar Korean pronunciation, and
her study habits – are various expressions of the essential core of what the
narrator perceives to be Yuhi as a unique individual. This figure is indeed ‘the real
of Yuhi’ that the narrator has been able to recover retroactively in Yuhi’s absence.
Finally, the author Yi’s notion of Self and Other is most clearly manifest in
the unique way she deploys the real of Yuhi as the key to unlocking the meaning
of Yuhi’s journal written in Japanese. As previously discussed, Yuhi’s writing in
Japanese is featured as an ellipse in the narrative due to the exophone narrator’s
particular relation to the Japanese language. Precisely because Yuhi’s Japanese
cannot be symbolized by the Japanese script in the novel’s own system of signifi-
cation, her journal can be viewed as ‘the real of the Japanese Language’. The
324 Catherine Ryu
narrator’s approach to this writing includes three different stages, the significance
of which can be elucidated through the Lacanian notions of the imaginary, the
symbolic, and the real, respectively.
The first stage of the narrator’s reading occurs on the level of the imaginary,
as she interacts with the text specifically as an image – the physicality and visu-
ality of the text itself. Its thickness, the way it is bound, and its actual length (448
pages) communicate to the narrator the time Yuhi has put into the writing, the
seriousness of her endeavors, and the exhaustive nature of her writing. The first
stage is also the moment of visual recognition: the way it is bound looks just like
other reports Yuhi has submitted to school. However, even before the narrator
turns the front cover page, this sense of familiarity is assaulted by a manifestation
of Yuhi’s ‘Japaneseness’. She used the regular lined stationery lengthwise – a
clear sign of what it contains: Yuhi’s Japanese prose written vertically.23 The
moment the narrator turns the front cover, her eyes are met with a text written
entirely in Japanese – ‘from beginning to end, from the very first page’ (p. 72).
Such a tangible expression of Yuhi’s ‘Otherness’, which the narrator truly did
not wish to encounter or confirm, is overwhelming and forbidding precisely
because of the narrator’s inability to penetrate it. Yuhi’s text, with its density and
its length, is a veritable wall of the Japanese language behind which her private
thoughts are safely hidden from the narrator’s reach, despite their skin-close
proximity to her.
The second stage of the narrator’s approach to the text occurs on the level of
the symbolic, that is, through Language. She attempts to tap into the forbidden
realm of Yuhi’s thought and mind through a small crack – the narrator’s knowl-
edge of Chinese characters common to both Japanese and Korean written
languages. However, this hermeneutic practice of interpreting the text based on
abstract ideas represented by familiar Chinese characters proves to be hardly
adequate. The failure of this particular method signifies that the ultimate
meaning of Yuhi’s writing cannot be derived from the knowledge of shared
abstract ideas, that is, the realm of the symbolic. Rather, the significance of the
writing lies in the inaccessible subtlety of the Japanese language that contextual-
izes those recognizable abstract thoughts.
The narrator’s perception of the real of Yuhi plays a central role in the third
stage of her hermeneutic approach to Yuhi’s writing, the real of the Japanese
language:
I couldn’t read Japanese at all. The only part I could decipher was the
Chinese characters I was familiar with. I tried to imagine the content of
Yuhi’s writing by following and perusing these Chinese characters. Soon I
gave up. It was fruitless. Still I couldn’t just look away from the writing.
Yuhi’s words were breathing.
They seemed to emit voices and stare back at me.
Just by looking at them, I felt I was hearing Yuhi’s voices, piling up one
after another in my head. I felt as though the thickness of these voices was
coursing through my veins.
Beyond language 325
Yuhi’s handwriting wasn’t exactly smooth.
There was a hint of roundness to it, but somehow a touch of stiffness and
angularity came with it. As such, her handwriting seemed to resemble the
impression of Yuhi’s appearance. That uniqueness of impression – neither
feminine nor masculine – was hard to characterize.
I then recognized that the peculiarities of Yuhi’s Japanese handwriting
were exactly the same as those I’d seen in her Korean handwriting.
The impressions of the two different scripts Yuhi used to write, Korean
and Japanese – they both suggested a practiced hand; they somehow seemed
mature. Yet they appeared unstable as well – just like Yuhi herself. They
couldn’t hide their anxious breathing, it seemed.
(pp. 72–3)
The narrator’s response to Yuhi’s handwriting echoes her earlier interactions

with ‘the small lump named Yuhi’. Just as the narrator has involuntarily reacted
to the stimuli activated by her memories of Yuhi, she now responds to the phys-
ical presence and power of Yuhi’s Japanese text. The narrator is moved by some
power beyond her control – the voice of Yuhi’s writing that enters and takes
possession of her. In her altered state, the narrator experiences Yuhi’s writing as a
living body with a voice and a gaze, not unlike those of the real of Yuhi. The
narrator now generates the meaning of the text through a dialogue of mutual
gazes and recognitions, as if she were conversing with Yuhi face to face. Guided
by Yuhi’s familiar voice, the narrator perceives her Japanese writing as a readable
sign, the significance of which lies in its physical appearance, and not in the
symbolic meaning conveyed through the Japanese script. Instead of struggling
with Yuhi’s unintelligible Japanese text, the narrator interprets the visuality of
Yuhi’s handwriting and its changing expressions. The narrator, an inept reader of
the Japanese language, is thus transformed into a perceptive interpreter of the
varying subtlety and tonality of Yuhi’s moods and feelings engraved in her
Japanese handwriting.
By the time the narrator leaves Yuhi’s room – the most sacred sanctuary of
the narrator’s memory of Yuhi – to have dinner with her aunt, the narrator is
more than a sensitive reader of Yuhi’s writing. A fluid sense of unity flows among
the living body of Yuhi’s text, the small lump named Yuhi, and the narrator:
The words from Yuhi’s writing were tied together in my heart. I felt like I
was embracing Yuhi who had turned herself into those words. Strings of
words – those words that had been burned and engraved into my eyes –
passed before my eyes like strings of pictures.
What I heard were the sounds of those words; the words themselves
seemed to have turned into voices and reverberated. The sensation of
holding Yuhi’s writing permeated my body, touching the small lump within
the innermost reach of my heart. The sound of Yuhi resonated throughout
my body.
(p. 88)
326 Catherine Ryu
What pervades this passage is a sense of the narrator’s newly gained affection for
Yuhi as she holds the writing in Japanese, the very object that initially provoked
in the narrator an irrepressible feeling of betrayal and anger. Now the narrator’s
entire body houses the real of Yuhi, and not just ‘the small lump’ in her heart. It
is as if the narrator had surrendered her entire being to the power of the Other,
that is, the combined force of Yuhi’s voice, her gaze, her handwriting, and the
small lump named Yuhi.
The narrator’s warm embrace of the real of Yuhi paves the way for the
climactic moment of the novel, its final scene. This scene captures what I would
call a ‘moment of the real’ – a moment when the boundaries between the
Korean and Japanese languages, and between Self and Other, are rendered irrel-
evant through the narrator’s complete identification with Yuhi:
I slowly blinked and whispered – ‘Ah’. Yuhi’s writing appeared. Yuhi’s hand-
writing of han’gul, too, floated on top of her Japanese writing.
Unable to walk, I stood paralyzed at the bottom of the stairs, as if
someone had taken away my crutch of language. Yuhi’s two different writing
scripts turned into fine needles, and these sharp needles pierced my eyes.
I could not finish the rest.
Only the lingering ‘Ah’ remained in my throat, and no further sound
issued forth. Pricked by a bundle of wriggling needles, I felt a burning
sensation in my throat, which was searching for the next sound and trying to
voice it.
(p. 126)
What makes this particular textual moment so memorable is the sheer inten-
sity of the narrator’s visceral experience of Yuhi in the form of acute pain.
Throughout the novel, the narrator has experienced Yuhi’s voice and gaze as
an external force that penetrates deeply into her body. However, this is the first
time that the narrator actually experiences Yuhi’s perception of language – both
Japanese and Korean languages and their scripts – as an instrument that
inflicts pain. The final sound ‘Ah’ the narrator utters is in fact the crystalliza-
tion of Yuhi’s agony of languages. Through this utterance, the narrator fully
re-enacts and experiences Yuhi’s dilemma of not being able to determine to
which language this sound belongs, the same sound ‘Ah’ being the first syllable
of both the Korean and Japanese scripts. However, the irreducible sound ‘Ah’ is
not bound to the realm of the symbolic. Rather, the sound that remains
caught in the narrator’s throat is a fragment of the real – ‘a word that is not a
word’ (kotoba ni naranai kotoba, p. 124). It is perhaps a voice, perhaps a breath, as
Yuhi once explained to the narrator (p. 123). As such, it is that which resists
any symbolization via Language. The novel thus comes to an end when it can
no longer be written, since to do so would mean that the narrator must reinstate
the divide between the Japanese and Korean languages, between a Korean
national and a Japanized zainichi Korean Other, and finally between herself and
Yuhi.
Beyond language 327
Conclusion
The novel Yuhi concerns, first and foremost, the narrator’s change of heart vis-à-
vis Yuhi. This change of heart is of great import because it has occurred through
the narrator’s successful reading of Yuhi’s Japanese journal against her claim that
the narrator cannot understand it. However, Yuhi did not say, ‘On’ni ni wa yomenai
n da kara’ (because you can’t read it), but instead, ‘yomenai hazu da kara’ (because
you probably won’t be able to read it). It is against the premises of hazu (i.e. one
is not expected/not supposed to) that the narrator has carried out her
hermeneutic enterprise, perhaps better than if she could actually read Japanese,
but without being able to empathize with Yuhi’s personal pain. I take Yuhi’s
words to mean that it is not entirely impossible for the narrator to read her
journal written in Japanese, if the narrator is no longer who and what she has
been. And this native Korean woman, the product of postcolonial Korea’s
nationalistic ideology with its accompanying coercive and oppressive forces, did
change. By the end of the novel, she has come to fully recognize and embrace
Yuhi ‘as she is’24 – a unique being – an individual whose identity cannot be
bound to a particular nation state and its associated language. In short, the
narrator has come to embrace Yuhi’s Otherness, her irreducible difference,
without judgment.
In the final analysis, the novel Yuhi functions as a literary metaphor for what
Bruce Fink terms ‘the Lacanian twist’ or ‘the ability to see something beyond the
symbolic where philosophy and structuralism see nothing but the same old thing’
(1995: 123). In fact, the very conceit of the novel and the experience of reading
Yuhi truly exceed the bounds of logic. Through the reminiscing mind of the
exophone narrator, who does not speak any Japanese but nevertheless delivers
her story in Japanese, the reader is able to share the narrator’s perception of the
real of Yuhi. Even though this zainichi Korean woman exists only as a specter in
the narrator’s mind, the reader comes to possess, by the end of the novel, an inti-
mate knowledge of Yuhi as an individual, as if through a direct encounter with
her. Yuhi’s physical presence in effect eclipses that of the narrator precisely
because the narrator – a purely narrating voice without any specific physical
features of her own – ultimately comes to take on the subjectivity of Yuhi, the
absent Other. In this sense, the reader’s vivid encounter with Yuhi is an effect of
the alternate virtual reality created by the author’s deployment of spirit posses-
sion as a means of blurring the ontological and linguistic sense of Self and
Other. Through such Lacanian twists, Yi Yang-ji expands the theoretical hori-
zons for the ongoing critical discourse on the Japanese Self and the contrastive
Other by pointing to ‘something Real’ beyond Language, that is, beyond the
distinctions of Self and Other.
Notes
1 The Akutagawa Award for fiction was established to commemorate Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), one of the most influential authors of modern Japanese
literature. The award is given biannually. Ri Kaisei (Yi Hoeso ng) became the first zainichi
328 Catherine Ryu
Korean recipient for Kinuta o utsu onna (The Woman Who Fulled Clothes, 1971 [1986]),
followed by Yang-ji for Yuhi (Yuhi, 1988), Yū Miri for Kazoku shinema (The Family
Cinema, 1996), and Gen Getsu for Kage no sumika (A Dwelling in the Shade, 1999).
2 In this chapter, I use ‘zainichi Korean’ as an inclusive term for all Koreans who have
established their residence in Japan, including those who have become naturalized. A
slightly lengthier and more descriptive term, ‘Resident Koreans in Japan’, is
commonly used for Koreans in Japan since Norma Field’s first coinage of the term
(1993: 640–70). The Japanese nomenclature zainichi Kankokujin refers only to Koreans
and Korean descendants who have self-identified as South Korean nationals. Those
Koreans whose political affiliations lie with North Korea remain as stateless subjects,
and are identified with another term, ‘Chōsen’, as in zainichi Chōsenjin. As Sonia Ryang
(2005: xviii) points out, ‘Chōsen’ does not indicate any nationality. The word
‘Chōsen’, however, carries derogatory connotations. For a survey of the historical
development of the zainichi identity and its legal, political, and cultural implications
for zainichi Koreans and Japanese government policies, see Fukuoka (1996: 1–15),
Kashiwazaki (2000: 13–31), and Tai (2004: 355–82).
3 Lee (2000) points out that Kitajima Manji (1982) regards the number of captives
given by Naitō Shunpo as ‘a drop in the ocean’ (1976: 171, n.100).
4 Kim (1997), cited in Tai (2004: 357).
5 For instance, the dispute between Korea and Japan over the territorial sovereignty of
Dokdo, or Takeshima, has flared up again as recently as April 2005.
6 North Korea’s recurring nuclear posturing, not to mention this regime’s infamous
abduction of Japanese nationals, has been viewed as one of the many reasons behind
North Korea’s negative publicity in Japan and the country’s increasing marginaliza-
tion in the global arena.
7 The Japanese textbook controversy over Japan’s colonial aggression and comfort
women issues is symptomatic of the unresolved tension and problems between Korea
and its former colonizer.
8 Tai (2004: 355–82). My view of the relationship between zainichi Koreans and the
authentic Japanese Self coincides with Tai’s argument that current Japanese govern-
ment policies, which are designed to encourage zainichi Koreans to take ‘the Korean
Japanese option’ (i.e. Japanese nationals who possess Korean ethnic background), in
effect reproduce Japan’s earlier colonial discourse of ‘ethnic hierarchy and assimila-
tion’ between Japanese nationals and colonial subjects.
9 Kashiwazaki (2002: 1–21). Given the demographic shift among zainichi Koreans
themselves, and the recognized practical merits and demerits of possessing a
particular passport (i.e. a Japanese or a South Korean passport as opposed to a
North Korean passport), zainichi Koreans’ act of choosing Japanese citizenship,
once regarded as a cardinal sin, can no longer be condemned simply in reductive
binary terms such as political loyalty or disloyalty to homeland or to the colonizer.
10 Since Yuhi began to receive critical attention, Yuhi’s ‘failure’ has been a major focus of
orthodox readings of this novel both in Japanese and Western scholarship. For
instance, Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke (1988, cited in Ueda 2000: 128), one of the selection
committee members for the Akutagawa Award, speaks of the story in terms of Yuhi’s
disappointment with Korea and her return to Japan. Aoyama Minami (1994: 118)
introduces Yuhi in a similar vein, focusing on the heroine’s disillusionment (genmetsu)
with her ‘homeland’. Likewise, Carol Hayes (2000: 126) states that ‘[T]he main focus
of Yuhi is the failure of Yuhi’s return to her motherland as seen through her inability to
settle the linguistic dispute raging within her.’ John Lie (2001: 350) views Yuhi’s return
as ‘a sign of defeat’, thus echoing again conventional readings of the novel. Sonia Ryang
(2005: xx) summarizes the novel as ‘the story of a zainichi Korean girl studying in
South Korea, a story that doubles with her [Yi Yang-ji] own, as Yi herself went to
South Korea to study, only to be spurned by her fellow Koreans for being too
Japanised’.
Beyond language 329
11 Glissant (1990 [1997]: 107). To describe the narrator’s perception of Yuhi’s tormented
relationship with the Korean language, I am borrowing the Martinician writer
Édouard Glissant’s phrase, ‘an agony of language’, which he uses in the context of
Crèole languages and cultures.
12 My Lacanian analysis of Yuhi in this chapter is a further critical elaboration of my
previous reading of the novel (Ryu 2004), which focused mainly on the feasibility of a
Lacanian approach to zainichi bungaku.
13 Tawada (2003). The term ‘exophone’ is my neologism, which is based on Tawada Yōko’s
notion of ‘exophony’. I would like to thank Suga Keijirō for introducing me to
Tawada’s idea and her literary practice of exophony.
14 The nature of Yuhi’s writing in question is not explicitly stated in the novel, but I refer
to it as Yuhi’s ‘journal’ based on her own description: ‘a collection of writings I have
done since I came to live in the house’ (p. 21). I also regard her writing as a journal in
the sense that it is a record of Yuhi’s private moments. Even the narrator has been
completely unaware of the existence of this personal production of Yuhi.
15 I use the Kodansha publication of Yuhi (1989) as the main text for my analysis of
the novel. The English translations of the original text cited in this chapter are my own.
16 The complex linguistic effect generated by the author’s use of an exophone narrator
is not simply that of polyphony, heteroglossia, or multilingualism. To indicate how the
Japanese and Korean languages permeate and echo each other in the novel, I am
borrowing the notion of omniphony as articulated by Suga (2005). Suga describes
omniphony as the conception that language is ‘a porous, multilayered body that is
constantly shot through by transnational, translational flows’.
17 Nearly all Yuhi’s Korean utterances are linked to the narrator’s memories of Yuhi’s
traumatic experiences during her stay in Korea. While Yuhi’s Korean key utterances
listed in my discussion appear one by one throughout the narrator’s recollection of
Yuhi, they all recur in the same textual space (pp. 82–3), as the narrator remembers
Yuhi’s most serious mental breakdown – her late night drinking episode – prior to her
decision to return to Japan. This particular reminiscence occurs while the narrator
looks around the room, after having finished examining Yuhi’s writing. Shortly after-
wards, the narrator goes downstairs to have dinner with her aunt.
18 Yuhi features a limited number of native Korean characters, including the narrator,
her aunt, and the real estate agent who initially introduced Yuhi to the family.
Another Korean character is the narrator’s cousin, that is, Yuhi’s landlady’s married
daughter whose room Yuhi is renting. This daughter, who now resides with her
husband in the USA, is symbolically present in the novel. Only toward the end of
the novel does the landlady’s one-sided phone conversation with her daughter
appear after dinner on the evening of Yuhi’s departure (pp. 116–17). Yet another
symbolic Korean character is the aunt’s late husband whose function is to embody
Korea’s anti-Japanese sentiments. The reader learns about his thoughts and speeches
only through the aunt’s incessant recollections of his life. Significantly, the narrator’s
aunt once observes that the narrator is very much a nationalist, like her late husband
who came from one of the leading families of anti-Japanese movements during the
colonial era (p. 95). To fully illuminate the narrator’s relationship to the Korean
language and its connection to postcolonial Korean national ideology, a separate analysis
is necessary.
19 As far as I am aware, the visceral aspect of the narrator’s recollection of Yuhi has
received no critical attention, even though I believe it to be the most critical component
of the entire novel.
20 In the original text, the translation of the Korean term is given with the Chinese char-
acter for iwa (rock).
21 Before revealing Yuhi’s comments on the naked appearance of the rocky mountain
range, the narrator has made several allusions to Yuhi’s references to the same moun-
tain range (pp. 9, 55, 85, 117).
330 Catherine Ryu
22 In the original text, this Korean term is written in han’gul accompanied by a katakana
gloss. The significance of the term urinara is given with a two-Chinese character
compound, meaning ‘mother’ (haha) and ‘country’ (kuni ). However, a literal translation
of urinara would be ‘our country’.
23 Nowadays Korean, not unlike English, is conventionally written horizontally. To the
Korean narrator, the altered orientation of the regular stationery signals that Yuhi
used it for her writing in Japanese.
24 Yi (1993a: 665). The author Yi Yang-ji herself speaks of how writing the novel Yuhi
helped her see that the zainichi struggle between Korea and Japan, or homeland
and mother tongue, ultimately intersects with none other than the fundamental ques-
tions of human existence, such as the courage and power to embrace reality ‘as is’.
References
Main text
Yi Yang-ji (1989) Yuhi (Yuhi), Tokyo: Kodansha.
Other references
Aoyama Minami (1994) ‘Eigo ni natta Nippon no shōsetsu: Yi Yang-ji no Yuhi’ (Japanese
Novels in English Translation: Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi ), Subaru 16(5): 118–23.
Cumings, Bruce (1997) Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: Norton.
Field, Norma (1993) ‘Beyond Envy, Boredom, and Suffering: Toward an Emancipatory
Politics for Resident Koreans and Other Japanese’, positions 1(3)(Winter): 640–70.
Fink, Bruce (1995) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Fukuoka, Yasunari (1996) ‘Koreans in Japan: Past and Present’, Saitama University Review
31(1): 1–15.
Glissant, Édouard (1990 [1997]) Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation), trans. Betsy
Wing, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Hayes, Carol (2000) ‘The Cultural Identity in the Work of Yi Yang-ji’, in Sonia Ryang
(ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge.
Kashiwazaki, Chikako (2000) ‘Politics of Legal Status: The Equation of Nationality with
Ethnonational Identity’, in Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the
Margin, New York: Routledge, pp. 13–31.
——(2002) ‘The Diasporic Experience of “Zainichi” (chaeil): Changes and Challenges in
Comparative Perspective’, paper presented at the International Conference on the
Korean Diaspora and Strategies of Global Network, Korea University, Seoul, Korea,
11 October.
Kawamura Minato (1989) ‘“Zainichi” sakka to Nihon bungaku: so no kadai to genzai’
(‘Zainichi’ Authors and Japanese Literature: Issues and the Current Situation), in Kōza
Shōwa bungakushi, vol. 5, Tokyo: Yūseidō, pp. 25–34.
Kim Tae-gi (1997) Sengo Nihon seiji to zainichi Chōsenjin mondai (Postwar Japanese Politics and
the Issue of Koreans in Japan), Tokyo: Keisō shobō.
Kitajima Manji (1982) Chōsen nichinichiki, K ōrai nikki: Hideyoshi no Chōsen shinryaku to sono
rekishiteki kokuhatsu (Chōsen nichinichiki, Kōrai nikki: Hideyoshi’s Invasion of Korea and
Historical Indictment), Tokyo: Soshiete.
Lee, Peter H. (ed.) (1986) Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories, Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawai’i Press.
——(2000) The Record of the Black Dragon Year, Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies,
University of Hawai’i.
Beyond language 331
Lie, John (2001) ‘Narratives of Exile and the Search for Homeland in Contemporary
Korean Japanese Writings’, in Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak and Poshek Fu (eds)
Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, pp. 343–58.
Naitō Shunpo (1976) Bunroku Keichō -eki ni okeru hirojin no kenkyū (A Study of Korean
Captives during the 1592–8 Wars), Tokyo: Tokyo University Press.
Ri Kaisei (1972) Kinuta o utsu onna (The Woman Who Fulled Clothes), Tokyo: Bungei
Shunjū.
——(1986) The Woman Who Fulled Clothes, trans. Beverly Nelson, in Peter H. Lee (ed.)
Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Ryang, Sonia (ed.) (2000) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge.
——(2005) ‘On Korean Women in Japan: Past and Present’, in Jackie J. Kim (ed.) Hidden
Treasures, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. xiii–xxvii.
Ryu, Catherine (2004) ‘Zainichi Literature through a Lacanian Gaze: The Case of Yi
Yang-Ji’s Yuhi’, in Michael F. Marra (ed.) Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation
in the Study of Japanese Literature, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 5,
pp. 95–107.
Suga Keijirō (2005) ‘Writing Omniphone in Japanese’, paper presented at the 2005 Asso-
ciation for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, 31 March.
Tai, Eika (2004) ‘“Korean Japanese”: A New Identity Option for Resident Koreans in
Japan’, Critical Asian Studies 36(3): 355–82.
Takeda Seiji (1983) ‘Zainichi’ to iu konkyo: Ri Kaisei, Kin Sekihan, Kin Kakuei (‘Zainichi’
Evidence: Ri Kaisei, Kin Sekihan, Kin Kakuei), Tokyo: Kokubunsha.
Tawada Yōko (2003) Exofonii: bogo no soto ni deru tabi (Exophony: Traveling Outward from
One’s Mother Tongue), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Ueda Atsuko (2000) ‘“Moji” to iu “kotoba”: Yi Yang-ji [no] Yuhi o megutte’ (The Word
‘Moji’ (character): On Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi), Nihon kindai bungaku 62: 128–43.
Yi Yang-ji (1993a) ‘Watakushi ni totte no bokoku to Nihon’ (What Motherland and Japan
Mean to Me), trans. An U-shik, in Yi Yang -ji zenshū (Collected Works of Yi Yang-ji),
Tokyo: Kōdansha, pp. 648–68.
——(1993b) Yi Yang-ji zenshū (Collected Works of Yi Yang-ji), Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Yū Miri (1997) Kazoku Shinema (The Family Cinema), Gunzō (December): 7–48.
Further reading
Fukuoka, Yasunari (2000) Lives of Young Koreans in Japan, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.
Nelson, Beverly (1977) ‘Korean Literature in Japan, A Case Study: Ri Kai Sei’, in David
McCann, John Middleton and Edward J. Shults (eds) Studies on Korea in Transition,
Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai’i, pp. 126–59.
Wender, Melissa (1999a) ‘Broken Pasts, Uncomfortable Presents: Tales of Yū Miri and
“Comfort Women”’, in Eiji Sekine (ed.) Love and Sexuality in Japanese Literature, Proceedings
of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 5, pp. 321–33.
——(2000) ‘Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965 – 2000’, PhD
thesis, Chicago University.
Yoneyama, Lisa (2000) ‘Reading against the Bourgeois and National Bodies: Transcultural
Body-politics in Yū Miri’s Textual Representations’, in Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in
Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, New York: Routledge, pp. 103–18.
Yū Miri (1998 [2002]) Go¯rudo russhu (Gold Rush), trans. Stephen Snyder, New York: Wel-
come Rain Publishers.
Index
A-bomb survivors: disappearance of 212; ‘Americanness’ 68, 263–4

ethics, dignity and responsibility anarchist poetry 97
217–22; experience and meaning And Then (Natsume) 51
215–17; as Other 271; overview 12, 13, Anglo-European literature 183, 194
211; reconstituted identity 211, 226–8; Anti-Western critique 78–9
silence of 214–5, 216; as symbol 212–3; anxiety 45, 99, 101, 103, 106, 109–11,
way of the survivor 222–5 113, 117, 120–1, 202, 211, 219, 320
Abe Jirō 106 après guerre 235–40, 250; see also The
Abe Kōbō 292 Beautiful Woman (Shiina); Sengoha
absence 13, 169, 172–6, 178, 318, 320–2, Ara Masato 237
327 architechtonic forms 232
Africa 286 art, politics and 231
African Americans 25–6, 74n.18, 127–129; art/pornography 194–5, 203
black/white 66–70; see also slavery arts and crafts movement 277
‘Against Rhetoric’ (Greenlaw) 34 Ashcroft, Bill 237–8
Ainu 271 Asia, Japan’s positioning in 113
Akutagawa Award 139, 259, 273, 312, Asia, as construct 5, 20; as Other 14–15,
315, 329n.1, 330n.10 109, 113
Akutagawa Ryunosuke
¯ 25, 45, 101, 274, Asia Pacific War 2, 175, 211, 238, 230,
276 260, 272, 292
aliens 22, 312 assimilation 26, 30, 271–2, 314
alterity 71, 127, 131, 133, 292 audience 33, 66, 84–5, 166, 183, 184, 188,
Amami Oshima 257 193–6, 281
America 10, 20, 24, 46, 286; colonial past Auestad, Reiko 232
68–70; direct contrast 59–63; external Aufhebung 155
observation 66–70; freedom of speech Australia 286
190; inversion 63–6; liberated authenticity 106, 158, 177
America/repressed Japan 59–60, 63, autobiography 232, 239, 259, 265, 293, 308
66, 71, 74n.11, 74n.15; see also
Occupation, USA Balibar, Etienne 127
American Hijiki (Nosaka) 24 ban-the-bomb movements 212–13, 216,
American lifestyle 28–30, 62 217, 219, 223, 228
American Other 59, 63, 66, 70–1 Bataille, George 118–19
Index 333
Baudelaire, Charles 27, 122n.8 Buraku Liberation League 139
Balzac 27 burakumin: distinguishing 127–8; gestures
Beardsley, A.V. 94n.10 153; hidden encounters 151–4; history
Beasley, W.G. 17n.3 of 145; liberation movement 149–50;
The Beautiful Woman (Shiina): free to write numbers of 143n.5; open prejudice
243–9; mode of representation 239; 150–1; origins of 130–1; as Other 271;
overview 13, 231–3; significance of overview 11, 12, 13; phenomenology
250; beautiful woman symbolism 155–7; rights of 162n.2; as scapegoats
246–7, 250 159; suffering of 128; use of term
beauty: and decay 277; mermaids as beau- 142n.2
tiful 87–8; myth and 81; race and Bushidō 61–2, 79–80
74n.15, 84–5
Bedtime Eyes (Yamada) 24 cafés 25, 115
Benjamin, Walter 122n.8 canon 27–8, 184, 193
Berry, Elizabeth 209n.35 capital exchange 112
Between Dreams (Gotō) 311n.6, Carrier, James 3
Bhabha, Homi 7, 8, 239, 272 The Castle (Kafka) 307
Bikini tests 212 censorship 60, 77, 183, 185–8, 189–90,
Bildungsroman (Moretti) 99 199, 202
binary structure models: abandoning 14, centre/periphery 11, 13, 14–5, 23, 184,
46, 199, 315, 327; direct contrast 204, 211, 237, 255–6, 265
59–63; external observation 66–70; Chandos letter 31–2, 34
inversion 63–6; overview 11; Chartier, Roger 184
phenomenology and 3–5; semantics 22–3 chastity 283–5
black/white 10, 66–70 Chesnutt, Charles 129
Blake, William 273 Chiba Shunji 87
bloodlines 13, 68, 132–4, 139, 157, 227, children’s self-image 6
263, 277, 314 China: as construct 19–20, 131; cultural
Blue Dahlia (Mosley) 128 heritage 82, 86, 272, 273–4, 312; exoti-
the body 13, 76, 81, 84, 195–9, 113, 186, cism 75–6, 83, 84–5, 276; France and
201, 202, 319–23, 325 119; influence of 19–21; invasion of
boundaries: expansion of 2, 11; fluidity of 114, 115, 120; nuclear tests 225;
25–6, 42, 96, 104, 273, 285, 326; Okinawa and 256; Others 43, 112;
permeability 47, 52 Representation 93n.2, 93n.3, 274–5,
Bourdaghs, Michael 136–7 286; taste for 93n.3; violence against
Bower, Anne 165 Japanese 111–12
Bowie, M. 164n.16 Chinese language 20, 324
British Empire 42, 70, 272, 282 Ching, Leo 271
The Broken Commandment (Shimazaki) 12, Chinoiserie 276, 282
128–30, 135–8, 140, 145 chivalry 79
brothers and enemies 147–51, 157–8, 160 Christianity 20–1, 76, 77–8, 116, 158, 190,
Buddhism 47, 48–9, 161, 264, 312 232, 242, 246, 258, 264
Bungakkai (journal) 80, 255 cinema 100
bunmei-kaika 57, 71 Circle of Youth (Noma): brothers and
buraku 142n.2 enemies 147–51; double secret 154–5;
334 Index
Hegel 155–7; hidden encounters cuisine 60, 61–2
151–4; internal/external others 147; cultural inferiority 115–16; see also inferi-
overview 12, 145–6, 157–61; resolution ority complex
161; sections 163n.9; tripartite structure culture/nature 202
163n.4
citizenship, choosing 330n.9 Dadaism 97
Civil Information and Education 209n.37 Dance, Snail, Dance (Ōba) 24
Civilization and Monsters (Figal) 282 The Dark Festival (Ōshiro) 255, 261–2, 269
civilized/barbarian 116, 131, 272, 273, Davis, Miles 25
286 Dazai Osamu 199
Clammer, John 238 Death in Venice (Mann) 27, 36n.11
Clark, John 89 Decadent fantasy 82–3, 86, 94n.7, 94n.10
Cocktail Party (Ōshiro) 259–60 decay, beauty of 277
Cocteau, Jean 120 democracy 59–60, 68, 71, 188, 196, 199,
Cold War 184, 185 200–4, 234, 236, 241, 242, 304
collective responsibilities 221, 227 Derrida, Jacques 5, 293, 296, 299, 308,
colonialism: anxiety and 110–11, 113, 272; 310n.5
and identity 2, 7, 256, 271–2, 296, 312; desire 10, 17n.10, 58–9, 76, 80, 84, 85–6,
as compensation 21; exoticism and 87, 109, 118, 172, 197, 319
93n.3, 275–6, 282; genre and 281–3; detective stories 281–3
overview 2, 8, 12–15; power 71; unique Devil in a Blue Dress (film) 128
colonization 233–5; views of 271–2 dialect: see Japanese language
comfort literature 166 dialectics of difference 3, 6, 19, 21–3, 110,
Communist Party 195, 230–1, 243, 304 119, 238
concentric circles: dialectics of difference Diary of a Vagabond (Hayashi) 25
21–3; Kyōko no ie case study 26–34; limi- diaspora works 23–4
nalities and practicalities 23–6; Dickens, Charles 163n.13
otherness formed and formulated difference 4–6, 21–3, 71, 76, 80–1, 102,
19–21; overview 5 131, 133, 147–8, 238
La Condition Humaine (Malraux) 112 dignity 220–1, 226
Confessions of Love (Uno) 166–7 direct contrast 59–63
Confucianism 59–60, 61–2, 74n11, 76, 79, Discourses of the Vanishing (Ivy) 45
131, 284, 312 discrimination 66, 68–70, 75, 133, 134–5,
consciousness 103–4 138, 145, 150–4, 156, 256–7
Constitution, postwar Japanese 188–9, ‘discursive act’ 6
198, 200–4, 228, 238 disfigurement 12, 216, 220–1
consumerism 105–8 distances 6, 26, 36n.6, 58
conversion 2, 12, 214, 230–1, 236 see also Divine Island (Ōshiro) 259–60
tenko Doppelganger 47, 50, 52, 103, 160, 244
‘contact zone’ 273 Double Jeopardy (Gotō): itinerant life 305–8;
‘Cool’ (Tanikawa) 25 languages of incidentality 299–305;
Cooper, Helen 165 overview 293, 294; relations 294–9
cosmopolitanism 122n.8 Dostoevsky 240, 292, 299, 300
Craig, Cairns 122n.8 Dower, John 209n.38, 212, 233–4, 237
‘critical approach’ 7–8 dreams 49–51, 262, 264, 280–1
Index 335
Drifting in Space (Natsume) 46 external others, overview 9–11, 147; see also
Other
East Asian Other 44, 113
East/West 10, 272 The Faint Smiles of the Gods (Akutagawa) 45
economic status 1, 11, 119, 148, 197, 271 fantasy 42, 76, 81–3, 89, 97, 99, 101, 262,
Edo period 77, 209n.35, 198, 273 283
Edogawa Ranpo 281 Fanon, Frantz 234, 272
Egypt 70 farewell formula 169–72
Eliot, T.S. 185–6 father figure 60–1, 129, 145, 147–8
emperor system 211, 238 Faulkner, William 127
empire, definition of 17n.3 feminised Other 9–10, 44–5, 51, 17, 118
empire, expansion of 2, 13–5, 222, 256, 271 feminism 165, 179, 189
The Encounter (Shiina) 242 ‘A Few Hours in Singapore’ (Nagai) 70
endlessness 158 Fifteen-year war 194, 230
Endō Shūsaku 24, 119 Figal, Gerald 282–3
England 190–2 fin de siècle 11, 27, 30, 33–4, 83
English history 47–9 Fink, Bruce 327
English language 45, 9, 61, 183, 301 First World Conference 216
English Romantic influence 46, 56n.1 First World War 111
English tailoring 305 Five Cups of Sake (Nakano) 232
enlightenment 37n.19 , 57, 132, 198, flagellation 80
208n.20; experience 33–4 flame symbolism 161
entertainment novels 196 fluidity 5, 11, 22, 42, 99–100
epistolary form 168–9, 176, 182n.9 ‘A Fool’s Life’ (Akutagawa) 101
equality 59, 62, 71, 116, 132, 150, 156 Forbidden Colors (Mishima) 27
Ericson, Joan 182n.12 ‘foreign’: as Other 109, 117, 131, 183, 312,
eroticism 78, 118–19 317, 318, 321; foreign castaways 130–2;
essentialisation 3, 7, 8 foreign delegations 20, 36n.1, 58;
essentialism 109, 116–17, 118 foreign languages 20; foreign literature
eta 129–30, 132, 142n.2 12, 23–4,183, 276, 286; foreign objects
The Eternal Preface (Shiina) 242 24–5, 28, 106; foreigner, image of 2,
ethics, dignity and responsibility 217–22 26, 28, 58, 84, 89, 115
ethnicity 11, 12, 113, 251 Foucault, Michel 6–8, 76, 146, 155, 232,
Eurocentrism 84 235
Europe 10, 20, 25, 46, 57, 70, 77–8, 81, France: and theory 8; external others 70,
109, 114–5, 286 112; French colonialism 272; history
European canon 27–8, 256 115–16, 117; as imaginative site 120;
Europeans 9, 84–6 Japanese within 120; as Other 113–15;
evolution 133 streets and buildings 119
exile 292 freedom: duality of 236; and slavery 156;
existentialism 32, 240–2 liberated America/repressed Japan
exophony 316, 330n.13, 331n.16 59–60, 66, 71, 74n.11, 74n.15;
exoticism 93n.3, 275–6 meaning of 234–5; in Shiina 240–3
expatriate Japanese: in New York 59–60, freedom of speech 184, 188, 231
62–3; in Paris 113–4, 116 French Revolution 156
336 Index
Freud, Sigmund 103, 192 Guests from Afar (Sono) 24
‘From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics’ Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 305–6
(Maruyama) 202 Gunzō (journal) 255
Frosh, Stephen 42
Fujii, James 46 Haga Tōru 95n.12
Fujita Eichi 46 hard/soft 119
Fujita Tsuguharu 114, 123n.17 Harootunian, Harry 105–6
Fukuzawa Yukichi 57, 286 Harris, Richard 25
Funerary Urn (Ōshiro) 255, 263, 269 Hashikawa Bunzō 27
Futabatei Shimei 58 Hayashi Fumiko 25
Futon (Tayama) 79, 82 Hazama Kafumi 46
heaven 158
gap theory 7, 57, 58, 70, 71 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 146–7, 155–7, 158, 161
Gardner, William 25 Heian period 80
genbun itchi 100 heredity 132, 133
Gen Getsu 312 hibakusha: see A-bomb survivors
gender: gender distinctions 165; gender hierarchical structures 3–4, 211, 222–4,
dynamics 59, 62, 63–6; gender politics 261
12; gender, race and 71, 76; gender high culture 25
roles 61, 62, 64–5, 66, 76, 165, 178, High Modernism 185, 203, 206n.4
259, 283–4; gendered Other 9–10, 12, Hikage Jōkichi 282
14, 47, 271; male/female 10, 44–5, Hino Ashihei 178–9
50–2, 63, 66, 80, 119, 165, 261; perfor- Hirabayashi Taiko 246
mance of gender 76–7, 176–7 Hiraoka Atsuyori 296–9, 305–6
genres 23, 281–3 Hirohito, Emperor 212
German research 22, 36n.4 Hiroshima: destruction of 211, 212, 226;
The German Spy (Tanizaki) 24 Hiroshima Maidens 216–7, 220;
ghosts 44, 48, 50–1, 279, 282 Hiroshima Mother’s Group 218, 219;
Girard, René 58, 72n.3, 147, 157, 158–9, Hiroshima Other 211, 214, 226;
160 insiders/outsiders 213–5, 217, 220–1,
Glissant, Edouard 330n.11 222, 224, 226; see also victimization
Gluck, Carol 236 narrative, ‘victim consciousness’
Go (Kaneshiro) 128, 129, 137–8 Hiroshima Notes (Ōe): ethics, dignity and
Goethe 273 responsibility 217–22, 226–7; experi-
Gogol, Nikolai 292, 294, 297, 298, ence; and meaning 215–17; national
299–300 victimization 212–13; overview 12, 211;
Goossen, Ted 25–6 reconstituted identity 226–8; way of the
Gotō Meisei 14–15, 292–308, 310n.1; see survivor 222–5
also Double Jeopardy (Gotō) historical approach: see concentric circles
Gray, David 38, 41, 51 historical Other 44
Great Kanto Earthquake 96 history: critique of 59, 68, 277, 279–80
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere history and memory 212, 226–7, 255,
286 279–80, 307–8
Greek classics 27, 51, 81, 105, 160 history, neutralizing 276–81
Greenlaw, Lavinia 34 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 31–2
Index 337
Holland 85 installments 26
Hokama Shuzen 255, 256, 257, 260 institutions as Other 25 see also Other
home, as construct 98, 168, 169, 293, 306, interliterary references 25
314, 322 internal others 11–13, 147
home front stories 165–6, 181n.2 intertextuality 45
homelessness 98, 115, 121, 292, 296, 306 inversion 63–6, 211, 222, 224
homosocial 171 Ise Shrine 119, 124n.18
homosexuality 76 Iser, Wolfgang 27
Honda Shūgo 236, 246 Ishizaka Yōjurō 190
Horiba Kiyoko 261 Ito, Ken 58, 73n.3
horse symbolism 178, 182n.12 Itō Sei: documentary novel 192, 194, 201;
Hoshō Masao 114 high art 186; Modernism 208n.30;
human rights 201, 313 translated text 183; trial outcome 193
The Human Stain (Roth) 128 Ivy, Marilyn 42
humanism 218–20, 223, 227–8 Izumi Kyōka 42, 43, 276, 282
Hunt, Lynn 188, 207n.14
hybridity 15, 20, 87, 235, 257, 305 Jackobson, Matthew Frye 127
‘January First’ (Nagai) 59–63
‘I’ 1–2, 292, 293, 297, 308 ‘Japan’: as construct 4–5, 10, 20, 238, 306,
I-novels 1–2, 17n.1, 32–3, 97, 100–1, 231 314;
Ibsen 27 definition of 2–3, 11, 13–4, 23, 57, 58,
identification 120, 285, 308, 319 113, 257, 286
identity: and nation 1–3, 13–5, 57, 63, Japanese language 9, 15, 17n.7, 255–7,
106, 112–3, 120, 215, 224, 256–7, 283, 299–301, 303, 312, 314, 315, 316–9,
313, 317–8; and blood 13, 132–3; and 323–7
language 255–6, 312–5; and memory Japanese literary theory 8, 75, 194
293–4, 307–8; and place 98–9, 296, Japanese militarists 89, 118, 120, 169, 183,
298–9; and relations 294–9; appropria- 212, 224, 234, 237
tion of 211, 222, 271; as construct 129, Japanese Self 5, 7, 13–5, 23, 58, 59, 106,
308 110, 111, 116, 118, 226, 313–4, 316,
identity crisis 2, 7, 13, 100–1, 113, 271–2, 327
285, 315, 318 Japanese values 61–2, 76, 115–6, 222
Ikeda Hiroshi 282 Japaneseness 4–5, 13–5, 23–6, 120, 257,
illness 133, 136 272, 313, 324; see also essentialism
illustrations of war 173 Japanization 13–5, 314, 316, 318, 326
imagination 114–15 japonisme 120
Imperial Rescript on Education 201 jazz 25
implicit readers 27–8 Jekyll and Hyde 160
‘In Praise of Shadows’ (Tanizaki) 24, 84 Joyce, James 147, 163n.5, 185–6, 192
‘In the Forest’ (Nagai) 66–70
incest 133, 134–5 Kafka, Franz 292, 307
India 70, 84 Kajii Motojirō 9, 10, 11, 96–108
individual and society 1–2, 12, 107–8, 241, kakioroshi shōsetsu 26, 36n.8
272, 327 Kanai Toshihiro 223, 224–5, 227
inferiority complex 46, 57, 58 kanbun 20
338 Index
Kaneshiro Kazuki 128, 129, 137–8 Lacan, Jacques: endlessness 158; languages
Karatani Kōjin 8, 311n.10 15, 315–16; mirror stage 6, 46;
Kauffmann, Linda 178 overview 6, 7–8; symbolism146–7, 155,
Kawabata Yasunari 97 158, 271, 319, 327; ‘the real’ 319, 323–4
Kawabata Yasunari Prize 266 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence): body and
Kawahashi Noriko 260–1, 265 sex 195–9; capitalist print culture and
Keene, Dennis 115 184–6; court case 183–4, 186–7;
Keene, Donald 20, 256 overview 12; politics 200–4; pornog-
Kelsky, Karen 17n.9 raphy and art 194–5; publication
Kendrick, Walter 188 history 206n.5; translation 183; war
Ken’yūsha 80 and salvation 191–2
Kerkham, H. Eleanor 209n.40, 210n.44 Lady Windemere’s Fan (Wilde) 276
The Key (Tanizaki) 94n.11 lameness 152, 163n.12
Kigi Kōtarō 282 Landscapes of the Heart (Kajii) 96, 101,
kimono 61, 167, 171, 174 103
Kindai bungaku (journal) 236 languages 20, 17n.7, 312; and identity
Kinya Tsuruta 89 298–9, 301, 303–4, 315; beyond
Kipling, Rudyard 10 language 319–26; of incidentality
Kitahara Hakushu 276 299–305; Koreans in Japan 316–19
Kitahara Takeo 166 Larsen, Nella 129
Kobayashi Hideo 1–2, 98, 121 Latin American magic realism 44
Kockum, Keiko 209n.38 Lawrence, D.H.: appeal of 190–3; expur-
Kojève, Alexandre 146, 155 gation 184–5; national identity and
Komagome Takeshi 271 morality 190–1; overview 12; power of
Komori Yōichi 8, 14, 21, 113, 271–2, 282 sex 208n.28; sex stimuli 199
Korea, as colony 2, 17n.3, 233, 312–3, Lee, Peter 312–13
327; as Other 131, 313–4, 317–8, 326, ‘Lemon’ (Kajii) 96–108
327; invasion of 312–13 letters 165, 168–9, 176
Korean–Japanese writers 9, 11, 24, 128, Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 146
137, 312, 314–5 Lie, John 2, 17n.8, 138
Korean language 17n.7, 300–1, 312, 314, life/death symbolism 148–9, 158
315, 317–9, 321, 323–6 Light in August (Faulkner) 127
Korean passing 137–8, 313 liminal sites 9, 11, 13–15, 23–6
Koreans in Japan 312–15 Lippit, Seji M. 40–1, 100–1, 121
Koschmann, J. Victor 236 ‘Literature and the Question of Freedom’
Koyano Atsushi 77 (Shiina) 240
Kurahara Korehito 236–7 ‘Literature of the Lost Home’ (Kobayashi)
Kurahashi Yumiko 43 98
kyodatsu condition 234 London 41, 43, 44–6, 57, 111
Kyoko no ie case study 26–34 ‘Long Hair’ (Nagai) 63–6
Kyushu 292, 297, 301 Loti, Pierre 10
Love 78, 80, 119, 165, 191, 195
Labyrinth (Ōshiro) 255, 263–5; postcolonial Lucky Dragon Incident 212
other 266–9 see also Other; yuta as
subject of resistance 265–6 see also yuta McCormack, Noah 131–2
Index 339
McDonald, Peter D. 184 Micronesia 2, 16n.3
McGrane, Bernard 21 The Midnight Banquet (Shiina) 241
magazines 189–90, 196, 197–9, 209n.38 Midnight (Mao) 112
magic realism 44 military campaign literature 166
The Magician (Tanizaki) 94n.10 Military Information Corps 166,
Maher, John C. 17n.7 181n.4
Mailer, Norman 184 military symbolism 113, 123n.14
Mainland 255–7, 259, 260, 268 mimetic rivalry 158–9
‘mainstream’ Japanese 9, 11, 158, 238; and Minami Hiroshi 194
passing 12, 131 minimalism 119
‘Make-up at Bedtime’ (Oguri) 133, 134–5 minority 9, 26, 128, 131, 158, 159, 314
The Makioka Sisters (Tanizaki) 24 mirror stage 6; see also Lacan
male/female 10, 44–5, 50–2, 63, 66, 80, Mishima Yukio 5, 24, 26–34
119, 165, 261 missions to the West 20
Malraux, André 112 Mita bungaku (journal) 273
Manchuria 2, 52–3, 230, 233, 275, 282, Mitford, A.B. 143n.3
292 Miyamoto Sadao 215, 217, 219
Mann, Thomas 27, 36n.11, 37n.18 mobility/fluidity 99
On Mantic Females (Yanagita) 258 modern girls 82, 94n.8, 166
Mao Dun 112 Modernism 10, 43, 97, 121, 185–6, 192–3,
marginalisation 66–70 194, 195, 272
marks/signs/stigmata 133 modernity: dilemma of 272; gender
marriage 175 283–5; genre and 281–3; literature of
Maruyama Masao 198, 202–3 290n.1; youth and 99–100
Marxism 20–21, 156 montage 101
Masayuki Akiyama 60 Moore, Henrietta 261
masochism 64–6, 82 Moretti, Franco 99
mass communication studies 194 Mori Ōgai 57, 58, 77, 79, 100, 272
masses, representing 235, 236–9, 243 Morishita Uson 281
master/slave 147, 155–6, 158 Moritaki Ichirō 217–18
materialism 105–8 Mosley, Walter 128
maternal servitude 60–3 mother 6, 60–3, 78, 171, 175
Matsukawa Incident 207n.17 motherland see home
May 30 incident 111–12 Motoori Norinaga 131
Mayo, Marlene 231 mukō gawa (the other side) 41–2
Meiji, Emperor 256 multiple realities 100, 101–4
Meiji literature 9, 10, 57, 58 Munich, Adrienne 165
Meiji period 1, 10, 14, 17n.9, 57, 76–7, Murakami Haruki 39–52; Natsume and
129, 132, 145, 272 45–51
Meiji Restoration 45, 77, 224 Muramatsu Shōfū 111
Meiji-Taisho shift 286 Murato Yoshiko 216
Meirokusha 57, 71, 73n.1 Musha Incident 275
memories 97, 98–9, 293, 307, 321, 325, 327 Myers, Ramon H. 17n.3
mermaids 87–8, 95n.12 Myojo (journal) 80
The Mermaid’s Lament (Tanizaki) 76, 82–9 mystery stories 281–3
340 Index
mythic references 51 Nitobe Inazō 78–9
Noma Hiroshi 12, 145–61, 162n.1; see also
Nagai Kafū: 9, 292, 294–5; gap theory Circle of Youth (Noma)
57–71; ‘In the Forest’ 66–70; ‘January non-‘Nihonjin’ 9
First’ 59–63; ‘Long Hair’ 63–6; ‘Orient’ normative structures 59–63
17n.11; overview 10, 11 noro 259–60
Nagasaki, destruction of 211, 212, 226 North Korea 14, 138, 292, 294, 299, 300,
Nagashima Takayoshi 293–4, 306 313, 330n.6
Nakagami Kenji 139 Nosaka Akiyui 24
Nakamura Mitsuo 31–2, 237 Notes on Okinawa (Ōe) 257
Nakamura Shin’ichirō 273 ‘Nothingness and Substance’ (Nakamura)
Nakano Shigeharu 232 31–3
The Naked and the Dead (Mailer) 190 nuclear bombs 212, 215
Naoki Sakai 110 nudity 76
Narcissus 31, 37n.18
narrative development stages 239 Ōba Minako 24
‘nation’ 23, 65, 68, 71 Ōba Sachiko 173
National Spiritual Mobilization Movement objects as Other 24–6 see also Other
175 obscenity trials 184–5, 189–90, 203
national victimization 212–13 Occident 21
nationalism 75, 132, 192, 286, 304 Occident/Orient 57, 276
nationalist versions 43 Occidentalism 3, 74n.13
‘nationality’ 13–4, 23 Occupied Japan: 183–4, 272; and
Natsume Sōseki: 9, 39–52, 57, 58, 272, Okinawa 257, 259, 266–8; freedom of
274; ghosts 52–3; mermaids 87–8; speech 187–90, 197, 199, 231; identity
Murakami and 45–51; new women crisis 2; morality 196, 199, 203; narra-
79–81; Otherness 24; postcolonialism tive development stages 239; overview
282; youth 100 13–14, 233; pessimism 238; unique
naturalism 80, 135 colonisation 233–5; victimhood 212, 272
Negro 25, 127 The Ocean Road (Yanagita) 257
Nema Kana 258–9 Ōe Kenzaburō: 9, 211–28; existentialism
neo-colonialism 272 218; humanism 219–20; ideology 222–5;
Neo-Sensationalism 96–7 melancholy 213–15; overview 12; post-
A New Day at Midnight (Gray) 38 war identity 211; reconstituted identity
new women 79–80, 82, 94n.8, 135–6 226–8; transformation 257; see also
New York 29, 63, 111 Hiroshima Notes (Ōe); ‘Prize Stock’ (Ōe)
Nietzsche 27, 240 Oedipal stage 6
night/day symbolism 148–9, 158 see also Ogawa Yōko 25
symbolism Oguma Eiji 271
Nihon e no kaiki 1, 15, 21, 120, 293 Oguri Fūyo 133, 134
Nihonjinron 4–5, 13 Oguri Hangan 133
nikutai bungaku (carnal literature) 13 Oguri Mushitarō 282
Ninth World Conference 213, 217 Okakura Tenshin, 77–8, 257
Nishihara Daisuke 93n.3 Okinawa: 14, 267; battle of 256; as colony
Nishikawa Mitsuru 277 256, 257, 259, 266–8
Index 341
Okinawan language 257, 260 pacifism 212–3, 217, 223, 228
Okinawan literature 255–9, 266 Paris 109–10, 113–5, 119
Okinawan minority 9 passing: black/white 127–8; burakumin
Okinawan Other 257, 265 28–30, 133–6, 154; as entertainment
Okinawan Rituals (Takasaka) 258 142n.1; ideology 129; Japanese/
‘Orient’ 10, 70, 114 Korean 128, 137–8, 312, 313; overview
Oriental Other 70 12
Orientalism 3, 8, 10, 58, 75–6, 82, 84–5, passports 330n.9
93n.3, 272–3; and gender 9–10; and Pater, Walter 27
race 88–9 patriarchy 60–3, 165–6, 284–5
Orientalism (Said) 75 Peace Preservation Law 230
origins, myth of 153, 160, 257, 262 Pearl Harbour 146
Orr, James 212 Pease, Allison 207n.6
Osborne, Peter 146–7 Peattie, Mark R. 17n.3
Ōshiro Tatsuhiro 9, 14, 255, 259, 259–69; peripheral literature 256
see also Cocktail Party (Ōshiro); Labyrinth permeability 5, 42, 47, 52
(Ōshiro); Voices from the Next World (Ō Persia 70
shiro) phantasmic Other 40–1, 43
Other: and sex 12, 195–6; as construct Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 155
5–7, 14, 23, 71, 158, 238; colonial The Picture of Dorian Grey (Wilde) 27, 82,
Other 13–5, 271, 280–1, 285–6; defini- 160
tion of 97, 157, 195–6, 271; Edo Other Plato 27
77; external Others, overview 9–11, Poe, Edgar Allen 276
147; conceptions of 3, 5, 19–22, 39, poetry 42, 97
146–7, 155, 271, 280, 319; feminised police 197–8, 207n.12, 208n.23
Other 9–10, 41–2, 51, 17, 118; politics 2, 12, 68, 200–4, 231, 236
Hiroshima Other 211, 214, 226; histor- Pollack, David 19
ical Other 44; institutions as Other 25; pornography 185, 188, 194–5, 199, 203
internal others 11–13, 147; Korean possession 104, 263, 315, 327
Other 131, 313–4, 317–8, 326, 327; postcolonialism 8, 257, 266–9, 282
objects as Other 24–6; Okinawan postmodernism 41
Other 257, 265; phantasmic Other 42, Potsdam Declaration 212, 230
43, 46; postcolonial other 266–9; repre- power 6–7, 66–71
sentation of 3, 6, 238, 239; types of The Power of Form (Rose) 39
8–9, 21–2, 24, 51, 183, 188, 314; Pratt, Mary Louise 273
Western Other 40, 41–2 pre-Raphaelilte influence 43, 45, 51, 52n.1
other side 38–9, 44 prejudice 132–3; see also discrimination
Othering 49, 70, 71, 135, 137, 196, 238 private publishers 193
outcasts 238, 239 ‘Prize Stock’ (Ōe) 26, 40
Oyama Hisajirō 186, 189–90, 194–5, Proletarian Literature 96–7, 101, 236
209n.32, 210n.48 prostitutes 58, 71, 76, 102, 112–3, 116,
Oyama shoten 207n.10, 208n.24 248–9
Ozaki Kōyō 80–1 Protestantism 21, 242
Proust 192
Pacific War 145, 175, 230, 250 purified ‘I’ 1–2, 232
342 Index
Puritanism 59–60, 192 Russian language 299–300
Pursued by God (Tanigawa) 258–9 Russians 112, 113, 299–300
Pushkin 299, 300 Russo–Japanese War 57, 71, 77–8, 128,
145
Rabson, Steve 25, 260 Ryuk
¯ yu¯ islands 255–6
race: as construct 127; beauty and 74n.15,
84–5; and nation 68, 69, 132–3, sadism 65–6, 80
143n.6, 144n.7; in America 66, 67–70; Said, Edward: 10, 13;authority of 93n.3;
notions about 132; sexuality and 76; Orientalism 114; overview 7, 8; power
sympathetic portraits 89; 233–4; reception of work 75; reconcep-
racial difference 4, 11, 84, 115, 271, 277 tualizing society 234–5; text and
Racine 27 context 231, 233; Western perceptions
racism 25–6, 66–70, 128, 136, 286 93n.2
radiation 212, 215, 219, 223–4, 227 Saint of Mount Koya (Izumi) 39, 40
readers see audience Sakagami Hiroichi 69
‘the real’ 319, 323, 326 Sakaguchi Ango 199
reality 39, 100–1, 236–7, 259, 327 Sakhalin 2, 15n.3
rearmament 228 Salome (Wilde) 86
reconstruction 238 samurai 79
Record of a Voyage (Kurahashi) 40 Sanshirō (Natsume) 24, 79–80, 81, 87–8
Red Purge 187–8, 203 Santarō’s Diary (Abe) 106
religion 77, 258–9, 260–1; and identity Saramao incident 275
265, 268 Sartre 146
repatriation 1, 9, 11, 313; see also returnee Sasabuchi Tomouchi 246
representation 3, 6, 7, 15, 190, 200, 238, Satō Haruo 9, 14, 103, 107, 272–5; see also
239, 285 The Tale of the Fan (Satō)
responsibility 221, 227; see also war satori (enlightenment) 33–4, 35n.19
complicity, war responsibility Satsuma, house of 256
Return to Japan 1, 21, 120–1, 293, 306–8, SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied
311n.10; see also Nihon e no kaiki Forces) 187, 197, 199; see also
returnee 292, 301, 306–7, 315 Occupation
Reverse Course 189, 203, 231 scapegoat 158–9, 161, 212
revolution 156, 161 Schlant, Ernestine 235
Ri Kaisei 312 ‘School for Foreigners’ (Shimizu) 133, 135
Rimer, Thomas 282–3 scientific learning 132
ritual sacrifice 159 Second World War 1, 145–6, 167, 181n.1,
The River with No Bridge (Sumii) 140, 145 181n.4; 183, 190–2
romantic fiction 78, 80 Seidensticker, Edward 58
Romanticism 46, 274, 276, 286 Self: and the body 10–11, 13; definition of
Rose, Gilbert 39 1, 23, 59, 97, 174, 297, 308; problema-
Rosenfeld, David 178 tisation of 2–3
Roth, Philip 128, 129 Self/Other contrast 2, 3–5, 11, 71, 110,
Rousseau, Jacques 25 168, 211, 212, 235, 315–6
Rubin, Jay 44, 51, 200, 207n.12 Self/Other relationship 5–7, 12, 14, 15,
Rushdie, Salman 41 21, 25, 34, 39, 42, 48, 52, 96, 99, 104–5,
Index 343
107, 110, 158–60, 255, 285, 292, 299, shuzoku 132
319, 323, 326, 327; see also boundaries side/other side 5, 15, 38–9
self-sacrifice 78 Silence of the Lambs (Harris) 25
Senbon Ken’ichirō 139 Sin City (Muramatsu) 111
Sengoha 231, 235–40, 250 slavery 66, 68–70
Senuma Shigeki 46 Smith, Zadie 41
set theory 313–14 Snyder, Stephen 66
settings, categories of 23–4 Social Darwinism 57, 133, 143n.6
sex, power of 59, 191–2, 196 social sciences, enlightenment and 198
sexology 76 Socialist Party 195
sexual deviancy 63, 76, 192 soldiers 40, 52–3, 67, 68–9, 165–6,
sexuality: body and sex 195–9; competing 169–75, 178–9, 302–3
sexualities 76–7; liberation of 64, 66, Some Prefer Nettles (Tanizaki) 89
80–1, b 184–5, 191–2; inversion 63–6; Sono Ayako 24
race and 76; ambivalent sexuality 11, South Korea 313; see also Korea
39 South Sea Notes (Yanagita) 256–7
shaman 254–69 ‘Spearflower’ (Tokuda) 133–4
The Shaman Way (Oshiro) 255 Specimen of a Ring-finger (Ogawa) 25
Shanghai (Sato) 282 spiritual values 106
Shanghai (Yokomitsu) 109–13 Spivak, Gayatri 7, 8
Shiga Naoya 25, 32, 104 Squier, Susan 165
Shigetō Fumio 218, 221, 223–4 St Nikolai’s church 310n.6
Shiina Rinzō 230–50; as convert 230–1; Stagl, Justin 36n.6
and freedom 240–3; ordinary citizens state power 6, 67, 68, 69, 71
250; overview 13; pessimism 238; see Steinhoff, Patricia 230–1
also The Beautiful Woman (Shiina) stereotypes 25–6
Shimada Kinji 276 stigmata 133
Shimao Miho 257 Strong, Kenneth 130
Shimao Toshio 257 Style (magazine) 167
Shimazaki Tōson 57, 114, 127–40, 145; Subaru (journal) 273
foreign castaways 130; new women subject 100, 107, 272, 281–2, 285, 297
135–6; overview 12, 145; research substance/nothingness 31–3
130–1; shinheimin 137; see also The Suga Hidemi 209n.34
Broken Commandment (Shimazaki) suiheisha 145, 150, 162n.2
Shimizu Shikin 133, 135 Sumii Sue 140, 145
Shin Nihon bungaku (journal) 236 Summary Discourse on Civilization (Fukuzawa)
shinheimin 142n.2 286
Shinseinen (journal) 281 supernatural see uncanny
shishōsetsu (I-novel) 1–2, 17n.1, 32–3, 97, symbolism 29–31, 146–7, 319, 327; atomic
100–1, 231, 232, 239 symbols 212, 217, 225; beautiful
shizenshugi 80 woman symbolism 246–7, 250; flame
Shoda Shinoe 215 symbolism 161; flower symbolism 30–1;
Shōwa period 96, 145 horse symbolism 178, 182n.12; lame-
showing/seeing 13 ness symbolism 152, 163n.12; national
shukusei 44 symbols 60, 266; night/day symbolism
344 Index
148–9, 158; water symbolism 112, Travel Weariness (Yokomitsu) 109, 113–20
123n.11 travel writing 57, 58, 71, 274–5, 285–6
Treat, John 218
Tachibana, Reiko 239 The Trial (Itō) 192, 194
Taishō period 17n.9, 21, 25, 76, 82, 96, triangular desire 58, 73n.3, 117
111, 145, 272 Tsuboi Shigeji 97
Taiwan 2, 14, 17n.3, 173, 233, 272, 273, Tsuruta Kinya 38–9, 35n.5
274–5, 277; indigenous people 275, 286 Tsutsumi Chiyo 167
Takadō Kaname 235 tuberculosis 96, 97, 99, 116, 136
Takamiya Toshiyuki 95n.12 Turkey 286
Takasaka Kaoru 258 Turtleback Tombs (Ōshiro) 260
The Tale of the Fan (Satō) 274; culture and
history 276–81; gender 283–5; re- Ueda Akinari 292
reading 275–6 Ueda Atsuko 317
Tales of America (Nagai): conclusion 70–1; ukiyo-e 80
‘In the Forest’ 66–70; ‘January First’ Ulysses (Joyce) 147, 185–6, 192, 193,
59–63; ‘Long Hair’ 63–6; overview 10; 163n.5, 207n.6
Western modernity 57–9 uncanny 39, 40, 41, 44–6, 103, 271,
Tales of France (Nagai) 70 278–9, 281, 282
Tanigawa Ken’ichi 258–9 Uno Chiyo 9, 12, 165–79; see also ‘A Wife’s
Tanikawa Shuntarō 24, 25 Letters’ (Uno)
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 9, 10, 24, 39, 75–89, unstable self 102–4
96, 100, 107, 274, 276, 282, 292; see also urban space 98
The Mermaid’s Lament (Tanizaki) USA: and Okinawa 257;
Tawada Yōko 330n.13 Chinese/Japanese representation
Tayama Katai 79 93n.2; US military 67–8, 263–4, 265,
technology 99 266–8, 302, 304; obscenity trials 185;
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Mishima) see also America, Occupation
24, 26–7
Ten Nights of Dream (Natsume) 46–8 vengeance 158–60
tenkō (political conversion) 2, 12, 21, 230, ‘victim consciousness’ 211, 216, 219, 220,
236 221–2, 224, 226
Toby, Ronald 36n.1 victimization narrative 212–13, 216, 227,
Togaeri Hajime 246 272
Tōjō Hideki 202, 212 violence/sacred 158–9
Tokuda Shūsei 133 virginity 76, 77, 118
Tokugawa period 80, 131, 224 visibility 13, 69–70, 127–8, 137, 212, 216
Tokyo as home 98 visions 104–5, 261–2
Tokyo War Crimes Trials 201–2 Vita Sexualis (Mori) 77, 79, 100
Topographies of Japanese Modernism (Lippit) 121 Voices from the Next World (Ōshiro) 255, 261
The Tower of London (Natsume) 44–6, 51
Toyotomi Hideoyoshi 312–13 Wakakuwa Midori 173
tradition 117, 119 war: war atrocity 313; war complicity 2, 7,
translation 9, 12, 20, 43, 130, 183, 193, 49, 51, 75, 109, 165, 200, 226–7, 234;
273–4 war dead 51, 173; war horses 178,
Index 345
182n.12; war literature 50, 165–6, 284–5; Western woman 63–4, 66, 79;
169–72; war responsibility 2, 211, 212, see also yuta
221, 224–5, 227, 231, 233 women as writers 11, 12, 17n.9, 135,
warlike men 165 165–6, 174–6, 177–9
Watanabe Kazutami 120, 123n.16 women’s rights 78
Watanabe Naomi 133, 136 Wonderful Fool (Endō) 24
water, symbolism of 112, 123n.11 see also working-class, representing 236–9, 243
symbolism world literature 27–8
wealth 133
Weiner, Michael 4, 143n.6 xenology 22
West: as construct 5, 9, 10, 20, 57; as
model 57, 58, 75, 76–7, 80, 116–7, 272; Yamada Eimi 24, 26
delegations to 20 Yamanokuchi Baku 256
Western colonialism 113 Yanagi Muneyoshi 277
Western objects 24–5, 28–9, 167, 277 Yanagita Kunio 142n.2, 143n.5, 256–7,
Western Other 40, 41–2, 47–8, 58–9, 258
70–71, 82, 88, 109–10 ‘Yaponesia’ 257
Western thought 61, 76–7, 80, 115, 261, Yi Yang-ji 9, 15, 312, 315, 331n.24
282 Yokomitsu Riichi 10, 43, 109–21
Westernization 58 Yoshida Seiichi 276
“white man’s burden” 234 Yoshimoto Banana 43
White Teeth (Smith) 41 Yoshiya Nobuko 181n.6
whiteness 68, 84, 85–6 Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke 330n.10
‘A Wife’s Letters’ (Uno) 168–9; absence youth, modernity and 99–100
embodied 172–4; emerging presence Yū Miri 312
174–6; farewell formula 169–72; Yuhi (Yi): language matters 316–19;
paradox 178–9; subversive acts 176–8 overview 15; re-reading 315–16; ‘the
Wilde, Oscar 10, 27, 82, 86, 276 real’ 319–26
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami) Yui Akiko 265
48–52 yuta (female shaman) 14, 255, 257–9,
women: as Other 10, 12, 53, 109–10, 117, 265–9; yuta as subject of resistance
118, 121, 166; class 197; double stan- 265–6
dards 76; erotic/sacred 118–19, 196;
home and 109; home front 165–75; zainichi bungaku see Korean–Japanese
homeland and 112; marriage and writers
117–19, 283–5; natural roles 62, 165, ‘zainichi Korean’ 11, 128, 137, 271, 312,
175; new women 79–80, 82, 94n.8, 314, 326, 327, 329n.2 see also Korean–
135–6; in Okinawan culture 257–61; Japanese writers, Koreans in Japan
physique 74n15, 81; respect for 63, Zamora, Lois Parkinson 44
77–8; rivals for 117; suppression of Zola, Emile 25
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Representing the Other in Modern

Rachael Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Colgate

Mark Williams is Professor of Japanese Studies and Head of the Department

Japan’s Minorities Japanese Education Reform

Japan and Britain in the Globalisation and Women in the

Edited by Rachael Hutchinson and

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

ISBN10: 0-415-36186-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36186-6

Introduction: Self and Other in modern Japanese literature 1

1 Hermes and Hermès: Othernesses in modern Japanese literature 19

2 Meet me on the other side: Strategies of Otherness in modern

3 Who holds the whip? Power and critique in Nagai Kafū’s

4 ‘Foreign bodies’: ‘Race’, gender and orientalism in Tanizaki

5 Self and Other in the writings of Kajii Motojirō 96

6 Yokomitsu Riichi’s Others: Paris and Shanghai 109

7 Passing: Paradoxes of alterity in The Broken Commandment 127

8 The Burakumin as ‘Other’ in Noma Hiroshi’s Circle of Youth 145

9 Sincerely yours: Uno Chiyo’s A Wife’s Letters as wartime subversion 165

10 Foreign Sex, native politics: Lady Chatterley’s Lover in post-

11 The way of the survivor: Conversion and inversion in Ōe

12 Free to write: Confronting the present, and the past, in Shiina

13 Yuta as the postcolonial Other in Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s fiction 255

14 Modernity, history, and the uncanny: Colonial encounter and

15 ‘There’s no such place as home’: Gotō Meisei, or identity

16 Beyond language: Embracing the figure of ‘the Other’

Rebecca L. Copeland is Professor of Japanese Literature at Washington

Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is Professor of Japanology (Literature and

Faye Yuan Kleeman is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the

Susan Napier is Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of

Adrian Pinnington is Professor of Comparative Literature, The School of

James Raeside is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Keio

Catherine Ryu is Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at

Ann Sherif is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Language at

David C. Stahl is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film and

Mark Williams is Professor of Japanese Studies and Head of the Department

Overview of the book

Part I External Others

Part II Internal Others

Part III Liminal Sites

Note on the text

Circle 1: Othernesses formed and formulated

Circle 2: Dialectics of difference: methodological considerations on the

Circle 3: Japaneseness and liminalities: practical considerations

You are a cool Negro, Miles.

Circle 4: Mishima Yukio’s Kyo-ko no ie as a case study

Mishima then explains the key episode in Hofmannsthal’s work, a scene in

Steady, Chandos. We are out of rhyme.

I looked on her as she looked at me

The choice of title for my chapter is inspired by Leeds’ connection to popular

because ghosts make absence present, they foreground magical realism’s

I found twentieth century London gradually disappearing from my mind and

A writer from a developing nation, he had learned to base his definition of

Direct contrast: ‘January First’

Acquiring such preconceived ideas from such an environment, I finally

I don’t care if it is just a superficial hypocrisy, a formality – if the husband

When Kaneda sees a girl freely enjoying a picnic of sandwiches or an apple, or

The invisible third-person narration is tinged by a subjective observation,

Inversion: ‘Long Hair’