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Dismembered but Not Disembodied:

The Girl's Body in Yumeno Kyūsaku's
Stories
a
Tomoko Aoyama
a
The Universit y of Queensland,
Published online: 28 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Tomoko Aoyama (2008) Dismembered but Not Disembodied: The Girl's Body in
Yumeno Kyūsaku's St ories, Asian St udies Review, 32:3, 307-321, DOI: 10.1080/ 10357820802294115

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 Asian Studies Review
September 2008, Vol. 32, pp. 307–321

Dismembered but Not Disembodied: The

Girl’s Body in Yumeno Kyusaku’s Stories

TOMOKO AOYAMA*
The University of Queensland
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The Gentle-Hearted Monster

Modern Japanese literature has been enriched by contributions from a number of
extraordinary and eccentric writers. Though still relatively obscure outside Japan,
Yumeno Ky usaku (1889–1936) is certainly one of Japan’s most outstanding and
larger-than-life literary figures – a ‘‘gentle-hearted monster’’, to borrow Nada
Inada’s term (1991, p. 460).1 In common with any of a number of characters straight
from his own fiction, it is impossible to pin Yumeno down to a single identity,
vocation or personality. At one point he was a soldier in the Imperial Guards (1908–
09), and later he became a Second Lieutenant of the Imperial Army (1912), although
his military career, like his tertiary education at Keio University (1911) and his
management of a farm (1913), was relatively short-lived. He also spent periods as a
homeless drifter (1914), a professional performer/teacher of traditional Noh theatre,
a vagrant Buddhist monk (1916), a newspaper journalist (1919–), an illustrator and a
novelist who contributed to popular and modernist magazines in the first decade of
the Showa period (1926–89). Despite Yumeno’s popularity as a mystery writer, after
his sudden and premature death in 1936 he was almost forgotten until the early
1960s. Critics unanimously agree that it was the 1962 essay by Tsurumi Shunsuke
that revived interest in Yumeno, particularly his magnum opus Dogura magura
(Dogra Magra, 1935).2
As Tsurumi has maintained for nearly half a century, Yumeno’s work is complex
and full of intriguing ambiguities and fascinating contradictions. During the
oppressive prewar years, it offered escape and consolation to his readers, presenting
as it did anarchistic cosmopolitan views often mixed, strangely and stunningly, with
ultranationalist and provincial views. With its wide-ranging themes, styles and

*Correspondence Address: School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, The University of
Queensland QLD 4072, Australia. Email: t.aoyama@uq.edu.au

ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/08/030307-15 Ó 2008 Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/10357820802294115
 308 Tomoko Aoyama

genres (mystery, horror, modernist meta-fiction, humour, science fiction, children’s

literature, biographies, poetry, reportage, interviews, and so on), Yumeno’s writing
has attracted and inspired generations of readers of various socio-political and
cultural backgrounds and convictions.3 Of the numerous possible readings of the
Yumeno literature, some have attracted much attention and become the focus of
Yumeno studies while others have remained on the periphery. For instance,
Yumeno’s personal links with quixotic ultranationalists such as his own father
Sugiyama Shigemaru (1864–1935) and his friend T oyama Mitsuru (1855–1944),4
and nationalist elements in Yumeno’s writing, have been the focus of a number of
studies of his work (e.g. Yamamoto, 1986; Matsumoto, 1993; Williams, 1999;
Momokawa, 2004; Tsurumi, 2004). There has also been interest in Yumeno’s
narrative structure, metafictional qualities, intertextuality and stylistic features
(Karigari, 1971; Tabata, 2005), as well as in his contributions to, and position in,

wider socio-cultural contexts such as modernism (Oishi, 1992; Kawasaki, 1993) and
scientism (Kawana, 2001, especially pp. 104–10; Nakamura, 2007). His interests in
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mental illness, psychology, ‘‘perverse’’ sexuality and criminology have also triggered
critical commentaries,5 as well as adaptations and parodies.

Neglected Girls
There is, however, a curious void in the quite substantial body of Yumeno studies.
The sh ojo [girls, young women] who are so prominent in Yumeno’s fiction have
generally been neglected in serious critical examinations of Yumeno’s texts – with
only a few exceptions.6 This neglect can be seen as part of the general paucity of
gender-related discussions in existing Yumeno studies. The numerous studies of
Dogura magura, for instance, concentrate on the (highly disturbed) psyche of the
male protagonists, more or less ignoring the significance of women characters and
their strong will, desire, passion and determination. The absence of the girl in
discussions of Yumeno’s work must also be attributed to the difficulty in categorising
the young women in Yumeno’s texts; they are far from the (stereo-)typical images of
the sh
ojo in prewar Japanese culture. Referring in particular to Yoshiya Nobuko’s
popular fiction for girls, Hana monogatari (Flower Tales, 1916), the pioneer of shojo
studies, Honda Masuko, explains the essence of the girl, especially her ambivalence,
liminality and transiency, with the onomatopoetic term hirahira [flitter, flutter]
(Honda, 1982, pp. 135–202). Honda also reminds us of the ‘‘thinness’’ and total
absence of the lower half of women’s bodies as they are represented in 1920s art (e.g.
that of Takehisa Yumeji). When this torso was ‘‘enclosed and decorated with ribbons
and bouquets’’, the sh ojo was born (Honda, 1982, p. 197).
Honda’s notion of hirahira encapsulates not only the aestheticised ephemerality of
the girl and her culture in wide-ranging forms and genres from late Meiji to the
present day, but also her subversiveness against the patriarchal norms. There have
been persistent tendencies, however, to view the girl as the mindless consumer and
consumed – by the desiring male subject and late capitalist society. Summarising
these general views ‘‘over the last couple of decades’’, Napier defines shojo as:

a shorthand for a certain kind of liminal identity between child and adult,
characterized by a supposedly innocent eroticism based on sexual immaturity,
 The Girl’s Body in Yumeno Ky
usaku’s Stories 309

a consumer culture of buying ‘‘cute’’ (kawaii) material goods, and a wistful

privileging of a recent past or free-floating form of nostalgia (2005, p. 148).

Napier does not include in her scope the highly developed girls’ magazine culture of
the early twentieth century or its postwar versions such as ‘‘Junior’’ novels and
‘‘Cobalt’’ stories, let alone representations of young women in other ‘‘popular’’ and
‘‘serious’’ genres more or less throughout the century.7 The sh ojo defined above,
therefore, is different from the subject of Honda’s study. Nevertheless the notion of
physical and sexual lack, immaturity or underdevelopment can be found in both.8
One may assume that this ‘‘lack’’ disappears as the sh ojo grows older. There is,
however, another kind of ‘‘lack’’: female genitals, as Elisabeth Bronfen notes, ‘‘have
[. . .] served as a privileged trope for lack, castration and split and by metonymic
association, as a trope for decay, disease and fatality’’ (1992, p. 11). As we see
shortly, these tropes are prominent in Yumeno Ky usaku’s fiction. However, as
Kawasaki Kenko notes, his representations of young women and their bodies are
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‘‘always excessive rather than lacking’’:

‘‘Women are weaker than men’’; ‘‘girls are smaller in physique than their
mothers’’ – as long as we base our judgment on lack like this, we will never be
able to perceive Yumenoesque girls . . . There is a girl with a gigantic body like
that of a woman from another planet. The girls’ bodies are always excessive
rather than lacking. The damned girls in Yumeno’s literature surely hold much
more power than girls who are born to be mothers (Kawasaki, 1990, p. 79).

This assessment forms the basis of my discussion here, for it subverts the widely
circulated contemporary view of the sh ojo as lacking in sexual maturity and
intellectual and physical power, if not in buying power. Furthermore it suggests the
girl’s rejection of the kind of associations attached to women’s sexual and
reproductive organs – paradoxically by focusing and exaggerating rather than
covering or avoiding them.
Some of Yumeno’s young women protagonists predate the recognised emergence
of shojo culture (which is outlined in Kawasaki’s essay in this issue), and are called in
the stories musume [daughter], a term that is usually associated with loyalty and even
subservience to the patriarchal family and nation. In popular orientalist views,
musume has further been associated and confused with images of Madame Butterfly
and geisha. Just as Yumeno’s sh ojo transgress the sh
ojo category, so do his musume
protagonists. Because they are radically different from the usual cultural
representations of sh ojo or musume, and perhaps also because Yumeno is neither
a woman nor a feminist writer, the subversion represented and implied in these
‘‘excessive’’ girls and identified by Kawasaki has not yet been widely recognised.9
Another closely related factor is the violence and death these girls are almost
always associated with in Yumeno’s texts. Unlike Yoshiya’s Flower Tales, whose
readership was clearly girls and young women, the Yumeno stories we discuss are
usually categorised as mystery or horror and are mostly published in popular
magazines such as Shinseinen (The New Young Man). Pervading the popular culture
of the 1920s and 30s were the ero guro nansensu [erotic, grotesque and nonsense]
themes, styles and motifs. Rather than simply paraphrasing each of the three
 310 Tomoko Aoyama

elements as ‘‘pornographic’’, ‘‘malformed or unnaturally unseemly’’ and ‘‘silly and

meaningless’’, Miriam Silverberg gives her own definitions:

. . . erotic connotes an energized, colorful vitality. Grotesquerie is culture

resulting from such deprivation as that endured by the homeless and by
beggars. Finally, nonsense makes a great deal of sense . . . The boisterousness
of popular vaudeville can, and in modern Japan did, challenge relationships of
domination of one class, culture, or nation-state by an other (Silverberg, 2007,
pp. xv–xvi).

As we shall see, these descriptions fit nicely with Yumeno literature. Even given this
cultural and historical context, however, the degree and nature of violence in
Yumeno’s texts are still quite extraordinary. There are so many grotesque scenes in
Yumeno’s stories that it is difficult to decide which is the most horrible. Men and
women of all ages are drawn into horrifying incidents, but many of the more
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spectacularly terrifying scenes involve young women (both sh ojo and musume) – not
only as victims of violent crimes and/or cruel fate but also as perpetrators and
murderers. Some of these women share certain characteristics – such as aggression,
promiscuity and independence – with the ‘‘Modern Girls’’, ‘‘Café Girls’’, and ‘‘Bad
Girls’’10 discussed in Suzuki (1989), Saito (2003), Sato (2003), Miller and Bardsley
(2005) and Silverberg (2007), among others. However, none of these studies
mentions Yumeno. Moreover, many other Yumeno girls either predate the sh ojo and
the Modern Girl or simply transgress even the Modern Girl’s transgressions.11
This paper examines just a few examples of the numerous extraordinary girls who
run about in Yumeno’s texts, crossing and annihilating many borders and limits.
Yumeno’s depictions of these young women contain elements that may incite sado-
masochistic and voyeuristic pleasure; nevertheless they also contain aspects that are
both highly performative and actively gender troubling. As the examples I discuss
below indicate, Yumeno’s stories may dismember the physical bodies of these girls
but they do not disembody the girls themselves.

Displaced Women and Their Bodies

In Silverberg’s examination of the mass culture of the 1920s and 30s there is a
chapter entitled ‘Down-and-Out Grotesquery’ (2007, pp. 203–30), which is placed in
a section on ‘‘honky-tonk’’ Asakusa culture, with ‘‘the energy, the tempo, and the
sensuous pleasures’’ (p. 177). Those who appear in the sub-headings of this chapter –
namely beggars, vagrants, juvenile delinquents, hawkers and ‘‘Foreigners as
Freaks’’ – are all familiar figures in Yumeno’s fiction (as well as in his own life).
His beggars, vagrants, juvenile delinquents and so on, however, are not centripetally
gathered in the ‘‘lower’’ part of Tokyo, Asakusa, where the corporeal pleasures are,
as Silverberg notes, inseparable from worship, as symbolised by Sens oji Temple.
Instead, the ‘‘down-and-out’’ people in Yumeno’s texts can be found all over the
place – in the city, in the country, inside and outside state and cultural borders.
Let me cite two examples. In a novella tellingly titled ‘Ningen s oseji’ (Human
Sausages, 1936),12 a young woman – not from Asakusa, but from Amakusa Island,
west of Kyushu – becomes one of the mistresses of an American gangster in St Louis
 The Girl’s Body in Yumeno Ky
usaku’s Stories 311

around the time of the 1904 World’s Fair and ends up, literally, in his sausage
machine, which has been specially designed for mincing human bodies. My second
example is from a short story entitled ‘Gaikotsu no kuronbo’ (Smutted Wheat for
the Skull), published in 1934 but set in the late 1880s.13 In this story, a young
vagrant girl, Hana, kills herself after killing her half-brother, who had murdered
their father and raped her.
Chronologically, the young women in these two stories would fit into the category
of musume, rather than sh ojo. Yet these young women are dramatically different
from the stereotypical and prescriptive meek and subdued daughters of the house.
To begin with, they have no house; they are displaced from the supposedly safe and
respectable home and nation, or more accurately, they never had a home or nation
that would acknowledge, nurture and protect them.
To cope with their displacement, both women have to use their bodies in their
own ways. The Amakusa woman is one of the women, usually known as karayuki,
who were trafficked out of Japan to work as prostitutes. As Vera Mackie points out,
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‘‘[t]he institution of prostitution supports the family system and existing gender
relations by providing a momentary sexual outlet free of emotional commitment,
which poses no threat to family bonds’’ (1988, p. 219). Contributing thus to the
nation and the family system, however, the karayuki women themselves were not
only taken out of their home village and country but also distanced from their own
and other families. In Yumeno’s story the situation is further complicated. Although
ordered by her American gangster pimp to assume a Taiwanese identity to lure the
narrator of the story, a Japanese carpenter, into the dangerous criminal zone of St
Louis, the Amakusa girl tries to save this pathetic young man. The pimp rewards her
bravery and kindness, however, with disposal in the despicable sausage machine.
This machine is not quite the same as the automaton and the ‘‘mechanical
uncanny’’14 that Nakamura discusses; nevertheless her more or less passing remark
that ‘‘if any human body in 1930s Japan could be described as ‘mechanical’, it was
the female body, specifically in the context of the reproductive organs’’ (2007, p. 26,
note 34) seems highly relevant here. What we must also note, however, is that in
Yumeno’s texts the girl’s body – dead or alive – does not remain in its silenced,
mechanised or institutionalised position; it communicates the narrative of violence,
violation and exploitation it suffered – often through a letter, a note or a testimony,
but even when verbal communication is impossible, by letting the parts and remains
of the body speak out somehow. In the case of the girl from Amakusa, now literally
made into sausages and packed in a tin, she is nearly eaten by the man she has
rescued – stopped only by a woman’s black hair found inside the sausage, along with
a piece of paper that looks rather like the unfortunate girl’s last note.15
The vagrant girl of the second story, Hana, belongs to the group of nomadic people
called sanka, or ‘‘Japanese gypsies’’. Like the burakumin, the sanka have been
subjected to terrible and systematic discrimination. The pioneering buraku liberation
organisation, Suiheisha (The Levellers’ Association, established in 1922) lodged a
strong protest against Yumeno and his publisher, condemning this story as
discriminatory. It is true that the sanka people are depicted here as a bunch of
beggars and criminals. The father, though now leading a life as a kind and humane
bar owner, accidentally killed a man when he was young, and this forced him into the
underworld, where he subsequently became a powerful boss. He is murdered by his
 312 Tomoko Aoyama

own estranged son, who is also a notorious criminal – and much more scheming and
cold-blooded than his father. Even the girl, also estranged from her family, is a
robber in the guise of a beggar. It is far too simplistic, however, to dismiss this as
reinforcing dark images and encouraging further discrimination against the sanka.
The father and daughter are in fact treated with empathy in the story. Hana,
especially, is depicted not only as stunningly beautiful but also as clever, agile and
skilful (in criminal and other artistry). Furthermore, she is proud, loyal and
honourable. She thus does not fit into any of the categories: sh ojo, musume, the
Modern Girl, the Bad Girl, or her particularly demonised sister, dokufu [poison
woman].16 With the police completely unaware of what has happened or what is
about to happen, she manages to kill her half-brother on police grounds and then kill
herself. The superintendent concludes that ‘‘those people’’ are just as incomprehen-
sible as Christians, and instructs his subordinate to put down insanity as the reason
for the girl’s suicide.17 It is quite clear whose side the reader is expected to take.
Yumeno spares us too much detail of the sausage machine. And the rape in the
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second story is only suggested. There are much more gruesome and graphic scenes in
other stories, in which women are literally dismembered,18 dissected,19 shot in the
groin with precious stones instead of bullets,20 and burned to death.21 These
horrendous deaths, however, disturb and unsettle, rather than reinforce, prevailing
hierarchical binaries such as male/female, active/passive, subject/object, perpetrator/
victim, spectator/spectacle, noble/common and so on. As already seen in the above
stories, identity shifts all the time – a kindly old man turns out to be a murderer; a
Taiwanese waitress is in fact a Japanese prostitute. In Yumeno’s texts nothing is
fixed and the twists and turns are used not simply for their horror-mystery effect but
to reveal the viewpoints of the displaced and marginalised.

The Girl’s Body, Desire and Vengeance

In Yumeno’s novels, young women (and occasionally young men) are depicted not
merely as an object of scopophilia but also as a subject/spectator with passionate
desires, even obsession. This may be combined with masochistic pleasure and/or
narcissism, but once the sh ojo (or musume) is determined to achieve or obtain
something, no one can stop her. Good examples can be found in the collection of
three stories entitled Sh
ojo jigoku (Girls’ Hell, 1936), throughout which the letter
form is fully explored. The second story, ‘Satsujin rire’ (Murder Relay),22 for
instance, consists of six letters written by a bus conductor girl Tomiko to her
girlfriend. Tomiko confides that she has fallen in love with the bus driver Niitaka,
who, she knows from another conductor friend’s letter, is a serial killer – a plebeian
Japanese Bluebeard, if you like:

Dear Chieko, don’t be alarmed. I’m completely in love with Niitaka. This is
certainly a desperate love affair. At the same time I really want to avenge poor
Tsuyako. Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could corner him, make him repent, and
even make him kill himself! (YKz, vol. 8, p. 351).

Her attachment to him grows and for a while naturally suppresses her desire for
revenge. But soon she realises his intention to kill her – just like his other victims – by
 The Girl’s Body in Yumeno Ky
usaku’s Stories 313

driving the bus too fast and too close to trees and telegraph poles on the roadside,
while she is standing on the step working as the conductor.23 However, it is Niitaka
who is killed – in an ‘‘accident’’ at the railway crossing. The conductor girl survives –
though she is determined to kill herself with his child inside her. We might recall
Kawasaki’s comment, quoted earlier, that ‘‘the damned girls in Yumeno’s literature
surely hold much more power than girls who are born to be mothers’’. Even in the
heyday of the ry osai kenbo [good wife, wise mother] education and discourse, these
girls have no illusions about motherhood, pregnancy, marriage and family, all of
which always lead to disaster and tragedy, or at least create difficulties, in Yumeno’s
texts.
Equally determined is the eponymous protagonist of another Girls’ Hell story
‘Kasei no onna’ (Girl from Mars). This girl, Utae, is so called because of her highly
distinctive physical characteristics: she is by far the tallest at her school and is
unbeatable in sports. She is embarrassed about her athletic abilities and hates her
excessive height. Eight years before the publication of this story, athlete Hitomi
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Kinue (1907–31)24 won a series of medals in national and international competitions

and became a national hero. Hitomi herself was much taller than the average for
girls at that time. She was nineteen – the same age as Yumeno’s ‘‘Martian’’ girl – in
1926, when she participated in the International Women’s Olympic Games in
Sweden. Fujimoto Megumi notes that this pioneering athlete’s physique and
physicality threatened the gender norm: the media often deridingly emphasised
Hitomi’s masculinity with descriptions such as ‘‘170cm, 56.25kg, the huge dark body
that looks like that of a man, with superbly developed muscles’’.25 While
emphasising that the story has no connection to the historical athlete, Fujimoto
argues that the discursive threat inspired Yumeno’s creation of the Martian girl.
Despite the ‘‘revolution in women’s sports’’ (Hitomi, 2000, p. 5), women elite
athletes were almost all schoolgirls (p. 12), as once they were older, women were
expected to marry and stay at home. Hitomi repeatedly uses the motherhood and
nationalist discourses to promote women’s sport. The first line of her book reads:
‘‘The aim of women’s sports can be explained simply: ‘to improve the maternal body
that creates second generation people for the nation’’’ (p. 1). Referring to a German
athlete in her late twenties who was expecting her third child, Hitomi writes:

This is such a wonderful example that I would love to thrust in the face of
those medical doctors and girls’ school headmasters here in Japan who spread
such unfounded rumour to society that modern athletic games are bad for
women’s health (Hitomi, 2000, p. 17).

Headmasters and doctors, whose power and authority directly affect women
athletes, are just as prejudiced as the press. While Hitomi’s aim is to fight against this
prejudice and advocate women’s sports and sporting women, Yumeno’s Martian girl
has no such mission. She is clearly stigmatised because of her excessive height and
other visible differences from her peers, as symbolised by her nickname. Overhearing
other girls’ conversation in the school toilets, Utae realises that it was the
headmaster who compared her – the invincible athlete – to a Martian. This
headmaster, though widely respected in the region as a devout Christian
educationalist, is a total hypocrite. For decades, he has been using his position to
 314 Tomoko Aoyama

take advantage of women, including his students and their mothers. In fact, his
victims include both Utae and the mother of the ‘‘Venus’’ of the school, the bright
and beautiful Tonomiya Aiko, whom Utae deeply admires. Utae finds out that when
Aiko’s mother was his student, the headmaster made her pregnant and then
arranged her marriage to his friend, Tonomiya. Furthermore, the headmaster and
his friends are also involved in many other kinds of crimes, misconduct and
corruption. We can see here a series of reversal and annihilation of hierarchical
binaries: the physical ability and strength become a disability and handicap; the
supposedly virtuous is the immoral; the seemingly privileged Aiko is unfortunate.
The headmaster unashamedly preaches at a graduation ceremony to his students,
‘‘children of [his] heart’’, to become loving mothers of pure and honest children of
their own and by doing so contribute to the nation. In his speech he also tells the
girls that they should be grateful to have been born women and thus exempt from
the fierce wars and battles of the men’s world: ‘‘Women’s beautiful instinct, their
purest love at home, is their sole and invincible weapon to use in their fight against
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the world of men’’ (YKz, vol. 8, p. 417). The ‘‘Martian’’ girl and Aiko certainly do
‘‘fight against the world of men’’, though in a completely different manner from that
advocated by the headmaster and the nation. In a letter addressed to the
headmaster, Utae writes:

I am a Martian girl, as you, Sir, labelled me. I am not an ordinary woman.

That’s why I’ve decided to carry out this surprise rebellion against the tyranny
of men in this human world, against the vice allowed only to men. Through
this May 15 Incident26 for women, I wanted to let everyone know that the
world isn’t just for men (YKz, vol. 8, p. 381).

Just as the bus conductor girl takes revenge for her best friend who was killed by
Niitaka, Utae’s revenge is for Aiko and her mother, as she declares in her will, which
forms the concluding paragraph of this story:

Dear Headmaster,
This is my thanks to you for making me a woman. At the same time I’d like the
dearest love of my heart, Miss Tonomiya Aiko, to be a dutiful daughter in a
true sense. Without clearing everything in this way, I cannot return to the
original nothingness. So please accept the last present of the Martian girl, her
black, burnt body. My body is eternally yours . . . spit, spit . . . (YKz, vol. 8,
pp. 430–31).27

The two girls ensure that all the hidden vices of the headmaster and his entourage
are made public through newspaper reports before Utae leaves this final ‘‘present’’.
Utae uses her body – dead and alive – to make this revenge most effective. Her
athletic talent and skills are useful for the first time outside the athletic field – for
chasing and scaring her target – for instance, by dangling upside down, pretending
to be a ghost, from the roof above the room where the degenerate headmaster and
his friends are having an orgy with geisha. Her large physique is also handy for
disguising herself as a man. The stigmatised, disadvantaged and sexually abused
body regains its power to carry out its revenge – only to be destroyed. Utae sets
 The Girl’s Body in Yumeno Ky
usaku’s Stories 315

herself alight in the school building. All identification is purposely removed from her
charred body, and the lower abdomen is especially carefully burnt. This is obviously
to hide her gender, but also to remove any evidence of her loss of virginity.28 Utae
thus erases the discursive ‘‘lack’’ attached not only to her but generally to women’s
sex organs. At the same time, this grotesque and mysterious body causes such media
sensation29 and police scrutiny that the headmaster and his accomplices cannot
escape or hide the truth.

The Girl’s Annihilating Power

Though equally self-destructive in the end, the passion and desire of Nina (Niina),
the young Russian woman in ‘K ori no hate’ (The End of Ice, 1933) is romantic
rather than grotesque. She takes an active role in secret political activities in Harbin
in 1920, during the Japanese armed intervention in Siberia. As Tsurumi Shunsuke
pointed out (1962/1975, p. 140), this intervention (1918–27) has special significance
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because it linked Japan to the two most important international upheavals during
the Taisho period (1912–26), namely World War I and the Russian Revolution.
The narrator of this story, Private Uemura, is stationed in Harbin. Like Sh ojo
jigoku and many other Yumeno stories, his narrative, too, takes the form of a letter –
a long, final letter to his best friend in Japan explaining how he has been made a
scapegoat for a series of incidents – including murder, embezzlement and espionage –
and has had to run away with a young woman called Nina, not just from the
Japanese Army but from both pro- and anti-revolutionaries. He is now about to
make his final one-way trip with her into the frozen sea off Vladivostok:

After midnight tonight we will set off in this troika. We will give the horse
some fine Korean ginseng and then we’ll pack four or five bottles of good
whisky in the handbag Nina is knitting. Then we’ll go to the loading slope on
the waterfront and from there sledge on the frozen ocean. Cloudless with a full
moon, the view will be wonderful (YKz, vol. 6, p. 147).

Notably, it is not the defector narrator, Uemura, but Nina who makes all the plans
and decisions, as well as collecting information, supplies and materials. Uemura
more or less follows her instructions. Nina is one of the most attractive sh ojo
characters in Yumeno’s novels. Her identity is very ambiguous. She claims to be half
Corsican and half Gypsy and to have been adopted by a Russian family. She is aged
19 and looks only about 14 with heavy make-up, but without make-up she looks 22
or 23. She is popular among Japanese officers who are ‘‘prone to sh o’’ [girl-
ojoby
sickness]30 (YKz, vol. 6, p. 15), but she is by no means a beautiful doll or a cute pet.
She loves dancing, knitting and drinking, but has many other talents – in languages,
arithmetic and driving, to name just a few. Moreover, she is good at disguising
herself – crossing gender, age, cultural, linguistic and political boundaries with ease.
She is fearless and passionate. To the narrator Uemura, whom she loves, she
declares:

I will come with you to the end of the world. Those who decide to kill an
innocent and honest person like you just because you’re in their way become
 316 Tomoko Aoyama

my enemies from the moment they make such a decision. Japanese authorities,
the White Russian Army, and anyone else who even faintly harms you will be
my enemy (YKz, vol. 6, pp. 108–09).

Just as the Martian girl uses her height to disguise herself as a man, Nina uses her
small physique and gender/cultural ambiguities to save Uemura’s life. She does not
hesitate, for example, to shave her head to look like a schoolboy (p. 114). Her
ambiguity is clearly different from the two-facedness of the deceitful villains we have
seen earlier, including the half-brother of the sanka girl, the bus-driving Bluebeard
and the headmaster, and of those who surround Nina and Uemura in this story. She
is not driven by sexual, imperialist or pecuniary greed; her ambiguity provides her
means for survival, but it also indicates the complexity and multiplicity of the girl.

How Do We Read These Girls?

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Yumeno was not a feminist as such, but his deep sympathy and empathy for
marginalised and displaced people and his admiration and longing for freedom seem
to have enabled him to create stories with unforgettable sh
ojo heroines who embody
powerful ‘‘gender trouble’’ possibilities. Some scenes are highly disturbing, and yet
they are closely connected with transgressing gender, cultural, national and other
boundaries. It is therefore puzzling to see comments such as this from Yumeno
specialist Nishihara Kazumi:

That they [women in Yumeno’s fiction] seem erotic may probably be because
they are types [teikei]. By ‘‘types’’ I mean the tyranny of the author’s ideas
[kannen]. These women themselves have no idea/concept. And thus deprived of
their own ideas, they can appear only as ‘‘madwomen’’ or ‘‘dolls’’ (Nishihara,
1992, p. 6).

Even Nina is regarded by this critic as ‘‘another kind of doll’’ – gender neutral and
simply representing the author’s ‘‘ideas’’ (Nishihara, 1992, p. 7).31 Another critic
and regular commentator on Yumeno, Horikiri Naoto, expresses his reservations
about the ultranationalist tendencies he believes to be evident in Yumeno’s late (i.e.
1935–36) works, ‘‘with the exception of Sh ojo jigoku’’ (Horikiri, 1992, p. 22).
Quoting Horikiri, Tabata warns against labelling Yumeno ‘‘ultranationalist’’,
‘‘nationalist’’ or ‘‘right-wing’’, because he was ‘‘anti-American in the sense that he
was opposed to corrupt capitalism; anti-Russian and anti-Communist in that he
loathed the darker aspects of Communism; anti-nationalist in that he was against
state conspiracies; and anti-science in that he was against the tendency of science to
dominate human beings’’ (Tabata, 2005, pp. 114–15). This is certainly true of Nina,
who pronounces: ‘‘I hate isms and ideology . . . There are only two things for me:
love and hate’’ (YKz, vol. 6, p. 109). Even though her comments that Japanese
military officers are too honest and gullible to compete with manoeuvring Russians
and scheming Chinese (ibid., p. 110) seem to confirm Horikiri’s criticism, the story
nevertheless clearly indicates that Japanese military gullibility (in other words
incompetence), combined with the greed and dishonesty of Japanese civilians in
Manchuria (e.g. an accountant, an interpreter and a restaurant owner), bring about
 The Girl’s Body in Yumeno Ky
usaku’s Stories 317

the downfall of Uemura and Nina. It is a fantasy, but a highly subversive fantasy in
the political context of 1935.
This article has demonstrated how Nina and other women – who are only a few of
the many extraordinary and resourceful women in Yumeno’s fiction – are anything
but dolls, unless they are the kind of dolls in ‘Oshie no kiseki’ (The Miracle of the
Pressed Doll Pictures, 1929) that cause and create gender, hereditary, marital and
other problems and disturbances. As for madwomen, we should remind Nishihara
of the truly stunning example in ‘Warau oshi onna’ (The Laughing Mute Woman,
1935, in YKz, vol. 4). The eponymous woman, Hana, is mentally disturbed, mute,
homeless and pregnant. Since her father, a crippled hinin [‘‘non-human’’, another
derogatory term for burakumin], committed suicide, she has no one to look after her.
Unlike other protagonists, this young woman cannot narrate her story in written or
oral form. Nevertheless she manages to reveal the truth about her pregnancy simply
with her body language and piercing laughter. Hana’s laughter is certainly as
powerful as that of Medusa (Cixous, 1976) or Yamanba (the mountain witch; see
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Viswanathan, 1996).
All of the girl protagonists discussed here use their bodies in one way or another
to destabilise gender, cultural and socio-political boundaries and hierarchies. Some
of them use the media discourse that would normally work against them or restrict
their freedom in acrobatic ways to cater to their ends, which could be revenge,
protest or the pursuit or revelation of hidden truth. Yumeno does not hesitate to
introduce vulgar or discriminatory language and violent scenes. One of the most
recurrent disturbances concerns reproduction and pregnancy. By depicting the
uncanniness, horror, and foreignness surrounding and caused by pregnancy,
Yumeno shows us again and again the falsehood of good wife, wise mother and
many other myths and constructions. These highly original and powerful girl
characters, however, have tended to be neglected or distorted by even devoted
Yumeno fans and readers. Even the Martian girl, for instance, loses her ‘‘grotesque’’
power, although in a way unsurprisingly, in the 1977 Nikkatsu roman poruno [soft
porn] directed by Konuma Masaru.32 It is high time to reclaim and recognise the
ojo in Yumeno’s literature, not from the conventional author-centred viewpoint or
sh
from the male scopophilic viewpoint, but from the viewpoints of the androgenous,
displaced but highly powerful sh ojo.

Notes
1. The term ‘‘kaibutsu’’ was used in earlier literary journalism. Yumeno’s brother-in-law, Ishii
Shunji, for instance, wrote a humorous piece entitled ‘Kaibutsu Ky usaku no kaib o’ (The
Anatomy of Monster Ky usaku, first published in 1936, just before Yumeno’s death in March
1936). ‘Sono kaibutsuteki sonzai’ (His Monstrous Existence) was Ishida Kazuo’s title for his
mourning piece in the special memorial issue (May 1936) of Tantei bungaku (Detective Novels).
Both pieces are included in Nishihara, 1975.
2. Tsurumi’s essay is included in Nishihara, 1975 and Tsurumi, 2001a. There is a complete (595-
page) French translation of Dogura magura (Yumeno, 2003), but no complete English
translation of this work is available. A synopsis in English by ‘‘Hiroshi Karigari’’, a pen name of
Sait
o Yukio in allusion to Doktor Caligari (i.e. Karigari Hakase in Japanese; the second word,
which means Dr, can also be read as Hiroshi when used as a male personal name), is included in
Karigari, 1971, pp. 1–33. Apart from the two articles Williams, 1999 and Kawana, 2001, one
book chapter (Nakamura, 2007), a very brief mention in Napier, 1996, p. 119, pp. 189–90, and
 318 Tomoko Aoyama

Lawrence Rogers’ translation of a short essay (‘Terrifying Tokyo’, in Rogers (ed.), 2002, pp. 14–
18), Yumeno’s work has been overlooked in English-language studies, and the few discussions
that are available concentrate on Dogura magura.
3. Tsurumi himself (b. 1922) is a philosopher, sociologist and literary critic, and has been vocal
about the difficulties he experienced in his childhood. Particularly interesting is his reading of
Yumeno’s Inugami hakase (Dr Inugami, 1931–32) from the viewpoints of school dropouts and
abused children. Tsurumi also proposes a reading of Yumeno’s children’s stories as a means of
understanding the writer’s attitude to the emperor system. Nada Inada (b. 1929), whose
comment about Yumeno as a ‘‘gentle-hearted monster’’ is quoted earlier, is a literary critic and
psychiatrist. Other devoted Yumeno readers include: writer Nakai Hideo (1922–93), actor-
playwright Kara J ur
o (b. 1940), poet Tsukamoto Kunio (1920–2005) and film director
Matsumoto Toshio (b. 1932).
4. Toyama was the right-wing political leader and founder of Gen’y osha (1881–1946). He was a
close friend of Yumeno’s father, who was also a powerful (though ambiguous) ultranationalist.
5. Apart from Dogura magura, Yumeno’s collection of tanka poems entitled ‘Ry oki uta’
(Grotesque Songs, included in Yumeno, 2001, vol. 6, pp. 275–318) has captivated generations
of readers and critics. See, for example, a tribute titled ‘Yumeky u no shi to ry oki uta’
(The Death of Yume Ky u and Grotesque Songs) written shortly after Yumeno’s death by
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Ky uketsu Mus ootoko (obviously a pseudonym, meaning a dreaming vampire), originally
published in the May 1936 issue of mystery magazine Purofiru, included in Nishihara (ed.), 1975,
pp. 129–30.
6. Kawasaki, 1990 has a chapter entitled ‘Kyokut o no shojo/shojo no kyokuhoku: Yumeno
Ky usaku kik o’ (The Girl in the Far East/ The Northern End [Ultimate] of the Girl: Travelling
through Yumeno Ky usaku). See also Fujimoto, 2000; It o, 2006; and Shin, 2007a and b.
Published in a coterie journal, Fujimoto’s fine article does not appear in the National Diet
Library OPAC search. I thank Fujimoto for making her article available to me upon my request.
7. This is clear from her statement: ‘‘Although the sh ojo genre used to be a popular genre confined
to manga and anime (especially in manga, which has been producing a wide variety of sh ojo
comics for decades), the sh ojo phenomenon now seems to permeate contemporary Japanese
culture’’ (Napier, 2005, p. 149). For ‘‘Junior’’, ‘‘Cobalt’’ and other types of girls’ fiction series
and sub-genres, see Sait o, 2002.
8. It must be noted that the etymology of sh ojo [ ] does not indicate lack in femininity. According
to Kojien, it was an eighth-century legal term for young women aged between 17 and 20, i.e. the
female equivalent of sh otei [ ], young men of 17–20, who were taxed a quarter of what seitei
[ ] [healthy adult males] were charged. Younger girls, aged 4–16, were called sh ojo [ ]. I am
grateful to Fran Martin for prompting me to this discovery through our email discussion in early
2006.
9. Besides Kawasaki, the only relevant discussions I have found are Fujimoto, 2000; It o, 2006; and
Shin, 2007a and b. All these articles are written in Japanese and all except Kawasaki concentrate
on Sh ojo jigoku (Girls’ Hell). In English-language material, as mentioned later, Nakamura
includes an interesting note on the role of the female bodies in Dogura magura, but states that it
is beyond the scope of her essay (2007, p. 24, note 34).
10. The most obvious and notorious ‘‘bad girl’’ would be murderer Abe Sada (see Silverberg, 2007,
pp. 83–85 and Christine Marran’s chapter ‘So Bad She’s Good: The Masochist’s Heroine in
Postwar Japan, Abe Sada’, in Miller and Bardsley, 2005, pp. 80–95).
11. Shin Ha-Kyoung (2007a and b) proposes an interesting reading of Yumeno’s text, linking it to
the decline of both the socialist movements and the Modern Girl.
12. The story was first published in the March 1936 issue of Shinseinen, just before Yumeno’s death
on the 11th of the same month. It is included in Yumeno Ky u, 1992, abbreviated
usaku zensh
hereafter as YKz, vol. 6.
13. The story was first published in the December 1934 issue of Oru  yomimono, included in YKz,
vol. 4.
14. As Nakamura summarises in reference to Freud, Rosemary Jackson, Homi Bhabha and Julia
Kristeva, ‘‘the uncanny always connoted a certain discourse of fear associated with the foreign
other’’ and ‘‘this idea was taken further [. . .] as a way to discuss the heterogeneity and paranoia
that exists within the borders of the nation’’ (2007, p. 21).
 The Girl’s Body in Yumeno Ky
usaku’s Stories 319

15. For a discussion of the theme and trope of cannibalism in twentieth-century Japanese
literature, see chapter 4 of Aoyama, Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature
(forthcoming).
16. See Marran, 2007 for detailed discussion of dokufu. Yumeno’s sanka girl is also completely
different from the celebrated vagrant girl protagonist of Kawabata Yasunari’s Izu no odoriko
(The Dancer of Izu, 1926), whose pure and immature physique satisfies the scopophilic pleasure
of the young male protagonist.
17. YKz, vol. 4, p. 362. The police also compare the sanka people to Jews. The story begins with a
kind of disclaimer: ‘‘It is around the late 1880s, when the police operation was still fairly
sweeping’’ (ibid., p. 337). Yumeno’s diary, cited by Nishihara Kazumi in his ‘Kaidai’
(Commentaries) for this story (ibid., p. 433), briefly mentions that during a meeting with the
Superintendent-General the author requested protection from Suiheisha. My interest here,
however, is in the text.
18. In ‘Ku o tobu parasoru’ (A Parasol Flying in the Air, first published in Shinseinen in 1929) there
is a detailed description of the body of a young woman, a nurse five months pregnant with the
baby of a villainous doctor, killed in a railway accident (YKz, vol. 4, pp. 186–87). This is one of
numerous Yumeno stories about a woman’s death that is connected to pregnancy.
19. A scene in Dogura magura, in the form of a horror film script, describes a mad scientist dissecting
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a young woman (YKz, vol. 9, pp. 304–08).

20. ‘Shigo no koi’ (Love after Death) in YKz, vol. 6, pp. 149–77. The girl in this story first appears
as a young man – a Russian soldier – but turns out to be a young woman who, the narrator
believes, was none other than Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.
21. ‘Kasei no onna’ (The Woman from Mars) in the collection of three stories entitled Sh ojo jigoku,
included in YKz, vol. 8. This work is discussed in the next section.
22. This particular story was originally published in the October 1934 issue of Shinseinen, while the
other two stories were written for the 1936 book that was published as the first volume of
Kuroshiro Shob o’s detective novel series.
23. Bus conductors, like telephone operators, typists and café girls, were regarded as typical
‘‘modern girl’’ occupations (see Suzuki, 1989, p. 475 and Sait o, 2003, p. 52). Kawasaki (1990,
pp. 73–74) regards the step of the bus where the conductor girl stood as the border between
inside (family, marriage, house) and outside (street).
24. I am grateful to Jan Bardsley for suggesting the link with Hitomi and the Olympics.
25. Fujimoto, 2000, p. 24, citing the obituary of Hitomi in the T oky o Asahi shinbun (3 August 1931).
Fujimoto also notes that reports on Hitomi’s athletic talent began to appear shortly after the
approach of Mars to the Earth, which attracted much media attention in August 1924 (ibid,
pp. 22–23).
26. On 15 May 1932 a group of young navy officers attempted a coup and assassinated Prime
Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi.
27. The last weird (and comic as in comic books) words are the onomatopoeia pe, presumably
indicating the Martian girl’s disdain and disgust for the headmaster.
28. In an earlier scene Utae’s father tells her that the doctor who tested her blood sample found that
she was no longer virginal(!) (YKz, vol. 8, p. 407).
29. As Tabata Akeo (2005) discusses in detail, Yumeno fully exploits various media discourses in his
work. The Martian girl story begins with a series of sensational newspaper reports, with
headings shown in a larger font, about the fire on the school grounds and the charred body of a
young woman.
30. ‘Shojobyo’ is the title of Tayama Katai’s short story published in 1907. It is available online at
Aozora Bunko: http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000214/files/1098.html, accessed on 17 December
2007. The story, which may be read as an early example of rorikon [Lolita complex] and bish ojo-
moe [obsessive yearning for beautiful girls], depicts a middle-aged man’s scopophilic obsession
with young women he finds on trains and in streets. See Levy, 2006, pp. 147–62 for a detailed
analysis of this text. Levy translates shojobyo as ‘‘maidenitis’’.
31. In contrast, Yumeno’s gender-ambivalent male protagonists such as the little boy in Inugami
Hakase are regarded as god-like and compared to the androgynous heroes of Japanese
mythology. See Matsuda Osamu, ‘Inugami hakase ni okeru kami naru mono’ in Nishihara (ed.),
1975, pp. 401–03.
 320 Tomoko Aoyama

32. While Yumeno’s novel contains no graphic descriptions of sex or rape scenes, the soft porn film,
as generically expected, adds many heterosexual and lesbian sex scenes as well as a sub-plot
about the Martian girl’s pregnancy and abortion, neither of which is in the novel.

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