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Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko's Chihi to ran

(Breasts and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyô, playful
words and ludic gestures

Reiko Abe Auestad

To cite this article: Reiko Abe Auestad (2016) Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko's Chihi to ran
(Breasts and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyô, playful words and ludic gestures, Japan Forum, 28:4,
530-548, DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2016.1189448

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Published online: 28 Jul 2016.

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 Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko’s
Chihi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008):
Higuchi Ichiyo ^, playful words and
ludic gestures
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REIKO ABE AUESTAD

Abstract: A slim and yet powerful novella, Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs,
2008) helped the author, Kawakami Mieko, launch her career in the Japanese
literary establishment by winning her the Akutagawa prize. The novella revolves
around a middle-aged single-mother, struggling to eke out a living for herself
and her teenage daughter as a bar hostess in Osaka. The bond between them is
severely tested under the pressure of the precarious living conditions in the post-
bubble, neo-liberalist Japan of the 2000s. This essay explores the absorbing and
affective aspect of the novella by drawing on Rita Felski’s ‘positive aesthetics’
and Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘nonhuman actors’. With a focus on the
movement of affect/feelings, the analysis traces how ‘non-human actors’ of all
kinds and shapes in the novella, from the female characters, chatty style of
speech in Osaka dialect, the kanji used in them, the protagonist’s obsession with
breasts, images of Higuchi Ichiy^ o, to a carton of eggs, interact and connect in a
way that make a difference, facilitating innovative life-adjustments as the
narrative unfolds the reading which should, in turn, enhance our
understanding and appreciation of the text.

Keywords: Kawakami Mieko, Chichi to ran, Higuchi Ichiy^

o, non-human
actors, affect

We are always doing our best at living.

(Kawakami Mieko cited in Holloway 2014, p. 13)

Even those whom you would think of as being defeated are living beings
figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what
optimism they have.
(Berlant 2011, p. 10)

Japan Forum, 2016

Vol. 28, No. 4, 530 548, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2016.1189448
Copyright Ó 2016 BAJS
 Reiko Abe Auestad 531

Introduction
Even though Kawakami might be better known among non-Japanese readers for
her later novellas, Dreams of Love, etc (2013) and March was Made of Yarn
(2012), which have appeared in anthologies in English, it is with Chichi to ran
(Breasts and Eggs, 2008) that she won the Akutagawa prize in 2008, and made
her breakthrough into the Japanese literary establishment.1 A little more than a
hundred pages in length, and yet a powerful, emotionally rewarding work, the
novella received positive responses not only from the Akutagawa prize commit-
tee, but also from other critics and readers.2 The story is centered on a middle-
aged single-mother, struggling to eke out a living for herself and her teenage
daughter as a bar hostess in the post-bubble, neo-liberalist Japan of the 2000s.
Despite the tough living conditions that have put a strain on the bond between
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the mother and the daughter, the affective drama that takes the center stage is
enacted with amazing vivacity and gusto in chatty, Osaka dialect. Narrated in
long and winding sentences that flow seamlessly to the garrulous rhythms of
Osaka speech in dramatic presence, the novella invites us, as it were, to become
part of the ongoing exchange that transpires between mother and daughter.
My argument in this essay is that Breasts and Eggs, with its strong affective invita-
tion to take part in the ongoing exchange in the novella, is a text that allows the
reader to experience ‘what it may feel like’ to be a female member of the precariat in
Japan.3 And it does so, moreover, in a way that promotes both empathy and critical
awareness. Put in narratological terms, my claim is that the novella has a high degree
of ‘narrativity’, an enabling force that inspires an affective response in the reader
an attribute in the text that is activated through the process of reading. In other
words, the ‘feeling’ of participation in the unfolding of the text is a ‘qualia’ that
materializes through interaction between the text and the reader (Abbott 2014).
The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how the text achieves this, with myself
as a reader, by using an approach inspired by Rita Felski’s ‘positive aesthetics’,
which encourages a mode of reading that does more justice to the affective and
absorbing dimension of our ordinary reading experiences.4 Her project is moti-
vated by her concern that ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, which has dominated
the field may deprive the text of its agency to solicit other kinds of reading,
‘positive’ ones, in particular. She worries that overemphasis on the ‘context’
(‘hidden ideological causes’ and ‘motives’) and critical distance can impoverish
our reading by imposing a predetermined pattern of causal relationship on the
text and dictating our reaction. To make amends, she suggests opening up our
horizons by being more receptive to multiple ways in which the text moves the
reader to make new alliances in the world, which are often affectively oriented.
I find her approach appealing not only because I share some of her concerns,
but also because I believe, as she seems to suggest, that our response to the text’s
call to ‘feel’ can lead us to other lines of mental activities.5 It can trigger changes
in our perceptions, and even prompt us to become engaged. ‘Affective
engagement’ can be ‘the very means by which literary works are able to reach,
 532 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

reorient, and even reconfigure their readers’ (Felski 2015, p. 177), as she force-
fully argues.
In practical terms, she finds a resonance and an ally in Bruno Latour’s ANT
(actor-network-theory) which, as a philosophy of relations, makes a point of seeing
‘agency’ as ‘distributed among a larger cohort of social actors’ by including not
only humans but also ‘nonhuman actors’ as part of social networks (Felski 2015
p. 152). The notion of distributed agency gestures toward a new way of looking
at relations between many different kinds of entities, which together act as
‘co-creators’ of meaning (Felski 2015, p. 173).6 Defined simply as ‘anything that
modifies a state of affairs by making a difference’, Latour’s nonhuman actors
include all sorts of objects regardless of scale, size or complexity, from ‘speedbumps’
to ‘literary devices’ (Felski 2011, p. 582). Actors only acquire agency in their capac-
ity as ‘mediators’ ‘via their relations with other phenomena’, and not because of
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their predetermined ideological/historical status or meaning (Felski 2011, p. 583).7

To illustrate the point, Felski refers to his example of the relationship between
‘silk and nylon’. Treating it merely as an ‘allegory for divisions between upper
and lower-class taste’, is to ‘reduce [it] to illustrations of an already established
scheme’, and ‘bypass the indefinite yet fundamental nuances of color, texture,
shimmer, and feel that inspire attachments to one fabric or the other’ (Felski
2011, p. 583). A good example of an ideologically loaded phenomenon that can
solicit a similarly reductive reading in Breasts and Eggs is the mother’s obsession
with breast augmentation.8 Rather than taking it to be a symptom of the uncon-
scious ‘something’ hidden under the surface of the text to be unveiled (the castra-
tion complex, fetish, na€ıve complicity with capitalism, etc.), we should more
fruitfully consider it a ‘nonhuman actor’ that, by eliciting emotions, intervenes,
and mediates in the relationship between the mother and the daughter in the
novella. Seeing it this way should enable us to appreciate the nuances in the feel-
ings that the breast enlargement provokes in the characters, their finely grained
‘shimmer’, as it were, in a way that inspires us to observe their interaction with
care, as a matter of concern, rather than something to be ‘debunked’.9
Taking a cue from Felski and ANT,10 this essay explores how different nonhu-
man actors in the text generate attachment or/and antipathy, (re)connect or/and
disconnect as they interact. I find the idea of treating all kinds of ‘things’ as an
equally important part of the network useful, because it enables my reading to
focus on ‘affects’ as they are triggered by these highly heterogeneous actors
spontaneous and often contagious feelings that are brought out in the open as a
result of their interaction.11 The ‘affects’ thus instigated, in turn, move and circu-
late (like ‘social fluids’) among characters and objects, generating a new constel-
lation of alliances or non-alliances, pulling the (willing) reader into its affective
orbit.12 In what is to follow, this essay traces affective networks that come into
being both between and across these ‘nonhuman actors’; from the intertextual
links to, and images of, Higuchi Ichiy^ o (1872 1896) and Takekurabe (Child’s
Play, 1895 1896) (which function as ‘leaks’ in time to make the text resonate
with the past), the three characters (Makiko, Midoriko and Natsu), Midoriko’s
 Reiko Abe Auestad 533

notes, the kanji in them, Makiko’s oshaberi (babbling on), ‘breasts’, female bodies
in the public bath, and to various objects in the kitchen, which precipitate a
cathartic explosion of ‘ludic’ gestures and feelings in the climactic scene. And
last, but not least, the chatty, lively Osaka dialect that accentuates the playfulness
of the ongoing exchange. Needless to say, my participation as the reader and the
author of this essay necessarily leaves its traces as an actor in the analysis itself.

Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008)

What do you do when the material conditions of your life deteriorate, and the
outlook for the future seems overwhelmingly negative with no easy solution in
sight? And if you are a single-mother in today’s neo-liberalist Japan where the
possibility of a decent job for an unskilled worker is close to zero? Breasts and
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Eggs addresses these questions, offering a few alternative ways of coping, with
playful and innovative twists. The setting is post-bubble Japan in the early millen-
nium, where neo-liberalism has created a new class of temporary workers called
the precariat. The protagonist, a female prekari^ ato a middle-aged single
mother, Makiko, with her teenage daughter, Midoriko, under her wings, is doing
her very best at making ends meet. Tired of juggling different part-time jobs with
low-pay, she has settled for working regularly as a hostess-cum-kitchen-help at a
run-of-the-mill snack-bar in Osaka. Midoriko, trying hard to cope with the
changes of puberty is estranged from her mother, and refuses to speak at home.
One day, rather out of the blue, Makiko announces her wish to have a costly
breast enlargement operation. The mother’s escalating obsession with breast
enlargement and her fantasy about the ‘good life’ become what Lauren Berlant
(2011) calls ‘cruel optimism’ sustaining her optimism, but at the same time
preventing her flourishing by creating a rift with her daughter.13 The text follows
the mother and daughter as they visit the mother’s equally underprivileged sister,
Natsu, in Tokyo, where Makiko ‘plans’ to have an operation. The frame story is
narrated by Natsu, who becomes a mediating figure for the two; Natsu’s narra-
tion is interrupted by Midoriko’s notes scattered throughout the novel.

Presence through Intertextuality: Higuchi Ichiy^o (1872 1896)

The main narrator, Natsu, whose name reminds us of Higuchi Ichiy^ o,14 writes as
if she is speaking to us, in long, run-on sentences, incorporating dialogues and
inner-monologues into her narration. She does this through the repeated use of
continuous forms (reny^okei) followed by commas, and the omissions of subjects
wherever possible, in a style reminiscent of Ichiy^ o’s Child’s Play albeit in a
more colloquial (genbun-itchi) version. Ichiy^
o, who died of tuberculosis at the age
of twenty-four in an impoverished female household, was also a prekari^ ato of a
sort, an obvious source of inspiration for Kawakami. In this experimental
pseudo-classical prose, Natsu’s narrative voice overlaps with a collective voice
 534 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

from Ichiy^ o’s past, bringing us in touch with her ‘reality’ as well. Throughout the
novella, there is, indeed, a sense of ‘presence’ that springs up from what might be
called the materiality of writing, a nonhuman actor, which connects us with Ichiy^ o
and her literature. It is a kind of ‘presence’ that a historian, Eelco Runia, argues
we seek in history, memory and commemoration, or art in general. It is not
‘meaning’ we pursue, he says, ‘but what for lack of a better word [he] will call
“presence”’, a magical feeling of ‘being in touch’ with reality, a ‘whisper of life
breathed’ anew ‘into what has become routine and cliched’ on the manifest level
of meaning (Runia 2006, p. 5). Natsu’s narration, which dominates the novella,
becomes a perfect medium for circulating this ‘magical feeling of being in touch’
with a bygone time, allowing it to color the entire atmosphere in each scene.
And there are also special kanji (such as ‘iya’ 厭) and images (5000 yen note,
and menstruation) that evoke Ichiy^ o’s ‘presence’. The novella opens with Mid-
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oriko’s notes in chatty Osaka dialect, which, with strong negative feelings on dis-
play, declare writing as a therapeutic respite from school and home. The kanji
she finds most congenial to her current feelings, she says, is iya 厭, rather than
the more usual iya 嫌, which means only ‘dislike’. She practices writing the more
difficult iya 厭 because it expresses a truly hateful feeling, which the other iya 嫌
lacks. The preferred use of this rather old-fashioned kanji 厭, which Ichiy^ o had
also used to describe Midori’s depression in her Child’s Play, functions as a ‘kind
of “leak” in time through which “presence” wells up from the past into the pre-
sent’, to borrow Runia’s words (厭 is neither in the j^oy^o nor t^oy^o kanji). In a well-
known scene in Child’s Play, Midori, the female protagonist sinks into melan-
choly as she considers her forthcoming destiny as a courtesan, presumably after
experiencing her first menstruation:
If only I can go on playing house forever with my dolls for companions, then
I’d be happy again. Oh I hate, hate, hate this growing up! Why do things have to
change?
(Higuchi 1981, p. 285, emphasis added) Higuchi Ichiy^ o’s Child’s Play from
1895 1896, in a 1981 English translation.15
As if to echo this scene, the kanji, iya 厭 (hate), adorns the pages of Midoriko’s
notes throughout the novel, while she worries about her first menstruation which
is yet to come.16 In the same article on ‘presence’, Eelco Runia draws attention
to the concept of metonymy, which he believes is a more ‘suitable tool’ for evok-
ing ‘presence’ than metaphor, because metonymy is all about ‘a presence in
absence’. Metonymy involves displacement of words or images from one context
to another, often causing a slight feeling of ‘out-of-placeness’, but at the same
time, alertness in the reader. Ichiy^ o’s prose, kanji, and Midori’s words are
‘displaced’ from the past to the present, from the Meiji period to the Heisei era,
and in this metonymical move, their ‘presence’ springs up at us in a way that
alerts us to their ‘absence’ at the same time. It is through this effect of defamiliar-
ization that the reader is brought into contact with what is not there, the absence
that is made present, as it were.
 Reiko Abe Auestad 535

Just as Midori in Child’s Play, Midoriko is on the threshold of adulthood (they

are both 14 years old), and has recently become aware of what it means to men-
struate, and to become sexually active and fertile. Just like the children in Child’s
Play, Midoriko has been forced to witness the hardship in life because of her
mother’s ‘precarious’ working situation, and her ‘hate’ encapsulates her emo-
tional response to it all. It is, nevertheless, a repetition with a difference, a
‘presence in absence’. While menstruation and womanhood suggest sexual servi-
tude for Midori, they suggest for Midoriko a possible pregnancy and the prospect
of being burdened with a child a child such as herself, without whom she
believes the lot of her mother would have been much better. With other intertex-
tual references, such as the neighborhood of Yoshiwara where Natsu lives, and
Makiko’s occupation as a hostess, the text is animated by the presence of melan-
choly ‘welling up’ from the past, not only from Child’s Play but also from other
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classical literary writings by women in which Child’s Play is rooted.17

The list of classical texts embedded in Child’s Play is long, but as many critics
have pointed out, two scenes in Child’s Play stand out with their obvious visual,
intertextual links to the Wakamurasaki chapter of the 11th century Genji monoga-
tari (The Tale of Genji). In one of them, Midori is seen through a gap in the fence
by Nobu, the priest-to-be, whose burgeoning love for Midori is hinted at a
visual image that overlaps with the famous kaimami scene in which Genji spots
the young Murasaki for the first time and takes a fancy to her. Later, the melan-
cholic Midori, ambivalent and confused about her future, is seen by another
male, Sh^ ota the playmate. Or rather, Midori is not in the mood to see or be seen
by anyone and she sulks, lying about on the futon. Sh^ ota’s interest for Midori is
not yet explicitly sexual, but as the son of a wealthy loan shark, he is also posi-
tioned to become a potential customer of the pleasure quarter in the future, and
his ‘gaze’ is suggestive, to say the least. The scene also evokes the image of the
sulking Murasaki lingering in bed after having consummated the relationship
with Genji for the first time, as Genji peeps in.18
By removing the word, thing or image from one context, and placing it in
another, metonymy both ‘connect[s] and juxtapose[s]’ contexts, ‘distanc[ing]
itself from, as well as draw[ing] attention to both’ the original and the new con-
texts (Runia 2006, p. 22). Through the overlapping images of the male gaze play-
ing across the bodies of Murasaki and Midori, the gaze tied to both Eros and
economic power comes into focus. In Breasts and Eggs, however, the agency of
the gaze is displaced to Makiko herself, who simply cannot take her eyes off other
women’s bodies, especially their breasts:

Makiko sat in the bathwater with her gaze glued to all the female bodies that
came and went, she stared so intensely that I got embarrassed sitting next to
her, and whispered, ‘Don’t stare like that’, but she only gave me a half-hearted
‘Yeah’… while her eyes restlessly followed bodies that came, bodies that went,
bodies in the water, bodies coming up from the water, bodies wrapped in soap
 536 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

suds… Everywhere there was skin, a gallery of nakedness where faces, which
usually play an important role for recognition, almost lost meaning, here it was
bodies that moved, bodies that talked, bodies that thought, as if at the center
of each action unfolding around me was only body…
(Kawakami 2010, pp. 51 52)
After our usual bath, we decided to try what they call a ‘milk bath.’ While we
sat there, I saw Makiko greedily taking in all the impressions that she can get,
of moving breasts here, there and everywhere, as if her eyes are automatically
drawn to them. And I sort of ended up doing the same without thinking
(Kawakami 2010, pp. 54 55)19
Smitten by the competitive spirit of neoliberalism, Makiko does not avert her
eyes in shame like her ‘literary sisters’. Put another way, Makiko’s affective
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investment in the ‘good-life’ fantasy is so intense that it holds at bay other affects
(such as shame) which may otherwise have been present. Through this multiple
palimpsest, the ‘gazes’ (and specific ‘patterns of adjustment’ to crisis, which Ber-
lant speaks of) with different layers of historical and social contexts become alive
and present.
Natsu, the narrator, on the other hand, is looking at Makiko looking at other
women, and through this double structure of the gaze, Natsu’s ambivalent,
shameful and yet concerned attitude toward Makiko’s tragi-comic obsession is
thrown into relief. It is as if Natsu is watching over Makiko’s ‘fetish’ with care
and caution. As noted earlier, even if a desire for ‘bigger boobs’ might be a candi-
date for the accusation of ideological co-option, or fetishism, it is an ‘actor’, too,
in the sense that it makes you do things in a way that makes a difference. It trig-
gers a wide range of affective responses in Midori, Natsu, as well as in Makiko
herself, which, in turn, impact the pattern of interaction among them with conse-
quences. It is, thus, a matter of concern which deserves to be taken seriously, a
perception on a par with Natsu’s attitude toward Makiko as expressed above.
Natsu’s critical commentary after the bath scene takes the form of an account
of an equally tragi-comic conversation she has heard somewhere a conversa-
tion between two women, one who expresses a desire for breast enlargement,
and the other who takes her naivete to task from the ‘feminist’ perspective. The
latter criticizes the former for being co-opted by phallocentric ideology, and the
former responds by insisting that it has nothing to do with men:

All I’m saying is, if I fantasize about bigger boobs, that’s entirely my business…
It’s you who are complicating the problem by bringing up phallocentrism and
all that stuff… Tell me, then, what about the make-up you have on your face,
in your enlightened opinion, how do you explain its ‘positioning’ toward male
chauvinism we are all infected with? Have you thought about that? … The
enlightened one answers, you don’t get it, do you? Make-up and breast
enlargement are two entirely different matters. … Make-up was originally
 Reiko Abe Auestad 537

invented to protect us from supernatural forces, a collective ritual to exorcize

evil spirits. It’s human wisdom, part of our culture!
(Kawakami 2010, pp. 42 43, 44)
Natsu summarizes the memory of this conversation as ‘not especially interest-
ing, and old-fashioned’, which can be viewed as an implicit ‘snub’ at ‘feminism’
(and ideological critique of phallocentrism) as it was preached back in the 1970s
when women still had faith in their cause. Now that evidence of ‘ideological co-
option’ is so ubiquitous, there is perhaps less need to resort to a ‘symptomatic
reading’ to reveal what is plainly visible everywhere.
Breasts and Eggs not only invites us to experience how it might feel to be a
female precariat in post-bubble Japan where neoliberalists have won the ground,
but also remind us that little has changed with regard to women’s marginalized
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position in general. By metonymically juxtaposing, and breathing new life into

various precarious contexts surrounding women of the past and present, and the
‘patterns of adjustment’ that they develop, the novella awakens in us feelings of
deja-vu, frustration, surprise, as well as empathy, animating the past in the pres-
ent, the presence in the absence, enabling us to connect with Murasaki, Midori,
Midoriko, and Maki across time and space.20

Playful words and ludic gestures

It should be noted that Makiko’s obsession with breast surgery did not come
completely out of the blue. Rather, it might be considered a form of response to
Midoriko’s refusal to speak and her insistence on communicating through writ-
ing. In her phone conversation with Natsu, in which Makiko brings up her plan
for breast augmentation for the first time, Natsu expresses her concern for Mid-
oriko as she suspects that their relationship has been strained. Natsu notes that
Makiko evades talking about Midoriko, even as she acknowledges the problem.
Thinking that Midoriko is obviously so much more important than Makiko’s
‘breasts’, Natsu tries to intervene in Makiko’s babbling on about the surgery, and
notices its emotional impact in her sister’s voice:
When our conversation touched upon Midoriko by chance, the energetic
stream of words from Makiko suddenly stopped, and the tone of her voice
changed into something that feigned liveliness, perhaps as an attempt to cover
up an awkward moment. She came with a vague comment that it’ll be alright,
before she starts again in a conspicuously lively tone, we have begun corre-
sponding with pen and paper, you see, and I said what do you mean, pen and
paper?, and she says, yeah, I mean I talk, but she only writes, you know.
Doesn’t say a word. She hasn’t done that for ages, half a year, maybe. I said
isn’t half a year kind of long? To which she says, yeah maybe it is, but she asked
her in the beginning what was wrong, and tried all kinds of things, but she has
been the same ever since…
(Kawakami 2010, pp. 15 16)
 538 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

Makiko continues that she has tried every possible way to coax her daughter
into talking again without success. She is at her wits’ end, but has more or less
resigned herself to the status quo. As the change in her tone of speech that ‘feigns
liveliness’ in Natsu’s observation gives witness to, however, Midoriko’s silence
obviously pains Makiko, and her vulnerability comes to the fore. Her idea of
breast surgery might be seen as her desperate attempt, if not conscious, at attract-
ing attention from Midoriko. Within the both mentally and physically narrow
confines of the mother daughter dyad, in which one refuses to speak, the other
must counteract with a new move, something creative with a ‘power of variation’
which can induce more forms of ‘live action’. The ball is in Makiko’s court, as it
were, and it is her turn to get it rolling. The text juxtaposes their respective
moves, alternating between Midoriko’s notes and Makiko’s oshaberi reproduced
by Natsu in the intermediary position.
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In his discussion of what we can learn from animal play, Brian Massumi argues
that instinct, in contrast to the stereotypical view of it as something primitive and
automatic, in fact ‘bears witness to a self-driving of life’s creative movement’, ‘a
self-expressive autonomy of vital creativity’ (Massumi 2014, p. 13). Evoking an
example of two wolf cubs playing with each other by ‘nipping’ instead of ‘biting’,
he elaborates on how their ‘ludic’, playful gesture, whose success hinges upon
the mastery of the minimal stylistic difference between the two, carries an ele-
ment of meta-communication, and of reflexivity. ‘In a single gesture, two individ-
uals (animals) are swept up together and move in tandem to a register of
existence where what matters is no longer what one does, but what one does
stands-for’ (Massumi 2014, p. 5). By extension, a ‘ludic’ gesture among humans
can be seen as a performative way of negotiating one’s position vis-a-vis the other,
an invitation to induce a qualitative change in the nature of the deadlock which
they experience, in the face of yet another anticipated crisis, or whatever it is in
their environment that requires their action. In the gap between ‘what one does’
(nipping) and ‘what one does stands-for’ (biting), a room for creative variation
opens, offering an opportunity for ‘a surplus-value of life’ and change (Massumi
2014, p. 12). I believe this notion of play is useful for understanding the ‘ludic’
character interactions in Breasts and Eggs.
As the only one among the nine members of the Akutagawa prize committee
who did not like Breasts and Eggs, Ishihara Shintar^ o complained about its failure
to convey the ‘significance of breasts as a metaphor for the female protagonist’,
and her ‘endless, self-indulgent oshaberi’ which he found ‘disagreeable and
annoying’ (Ishihara 2008). Despite the negativity, his comments are illuminating
in their own way, and point toward two aspects of Makiko’s obsession that are
worth examining: the gratuitousness of the breast surgery as such and the self-
indulgent nature of her oshaberi. Despite the almost banal, ordinariness of the
fantasy about bigger ‘boobs’, it is not clear at all what Makiko expects to gain
from them and why she is willing to spend a fortune on them. There is a sense
that the idea came to her as a whimsical fancy, rather playfully, qualifying her
 Reiko Abe Auestad 539

oshaberi about it to be a variant of a ‘ludic’ gesture. Natsu, the narrator, speaks in

a chatty Osaka dialect in a long, run-on sentence, reproducing quite literally
Makiko’s speech in its original colloquial form, the ‘chattiness’ included. The
self-indulgence in Makiko’s oshaberi which Ishihara finds annoying is more pro-
ductively seen as a token of its playfulness, a ‘stylistic excess of play’, as when she
first calls her sister to announce her interest in breast enlargement:
Makiko started out saying: ‘I’m thinking about getting a breast enlargement
operation done you see.’ The purpose of the phone call must have been to ask
me ‘what I think about it’ since that seems to be the only reasonable justifica-
tion for why she should be making a long-distance call in the middle of the
night after a long day’s work, but there was no readiness or preparedness on
her part for asking for my opinion or comments at all. She was overexcited,
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feeling thrilled about the idea itself, on the one hand, and apparently thinking
to herself, incredulously, ‘do I really dare seriously?’ on the other hand. And I
think it was this that gave me the strange feeling of the time gap between us
(Kawakami 2010, p. 13).21
Makiko’s excitement comes from the gap between the fact of breast enlarge-
ment itself and the incredulous supposition that this might be possible for her,
and it is the oshaberi mode of speech reproduced by Natsu in narration, its sty-
listic excess of play, that sustains that excitement. The whole talk about breast
enlargement can be seen as a form of ‘play’ a ‘lived abstraction staged in
play’ to borrow Massumi’s (2014, p. 9) words. In other words, Makiko is nei-
ther trying to convince her sister of the significance of breast enlargement, nor
asking for her opinion. Rather, she is playfully letting her oshaberi run its
course with Natsu as a playmate, and its significance lies in the performative
effect of the expression itself rather than any content it may have. Put another
way, with her attempt to ‘play with’ her stubbornly silent daughter, Midoriko,
in a stalemate, she invites her sister, Natsu, to play the game instead, to keep
the ball rolling, as it were. The breast operation serves as an excuse for the
mother and the daughter to come and stay with Natsu in Tokyo, and the play-
ful interaction among them eventually leads to a course of innovative ‘live
action’, which helps them break the deadlock in the final scene, as we will see
in what follows.

The climactic scene in the kitchen

Even though Midoriko’s communication with her mother is sporadic, the
reader has access to Midoriko’s notes, in which she frankly discusses her feel-
ings. In her notes, she refers to one of the last arguments she had before she
stopped talking the argument that eventually led to her ‘why the hell did
you have me then?’ thoughtlessly uttered on the spur of the moment, which
she later regrets:
 540 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

It all started when my mother was seen riding a bicycle in her work outfit, that
hideous purple one, and boys in my class made fun of it in front of everyone. I
feigned indifference by kind of smiling for everyone to see, but I hated myself
for it. A lot of things happened, and my mother, in the end, shouted at me
with tears welling up, ‘What do you expect me to do? We’ve got to eat, you stu-
pid.’ I ended up blurting out ‘You’re still responsible for having had “me”!’
(Kawakami 2010, pp. 63 64, emphasis added)
The notes give glimpses of the maelstrom of contradictory feelings that Midor-
iko harbors for her mother, and provide us with a certain insight into the reason
for her silence. Midoriko is torn between her sympathy for her mother, who is
working her butt off to put food on the table, on one hand, and her embarrass-
ment about her job in mizush^obai (nighttime entertainment business), on the
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other. As it is clear from the quote above, she feels embarrassed about her moth-
er’s flashy outfit, and does not want to expose her to her classmates’ curious
gaze. Feeling ashamed of feeling that way about her own mother, and exasper-
ated by her frustrations about the living conditions, for which she does not know
whom to blame, she prefers to withdraw into her own safe, private haven of her
notes.
In the final chapter, Midoriko and Natsu wait for Makiko, who went into town
to meet up with her ‘friend’. She said she would be back by five, but she doesn’t
come home at six, or at seven. While they continue to wait for her to join them
for dinner time passes, until it’s past nine, and they worry. Her cell phone is in a
rusuden-mode, and they become seriously concerned. When Makiko finally
comes home, apparently tipsy and nonchalant, telling them that she has just
been to see Midoriko’s father, awkward moments of silence follow, with feelings
of all sorts swirling inside their respective heads, feelings that do not find an easy
outlet; their earlier concerns about Makiko’s safety being wasted, anxiety about
the impact of this meeting on Makiko, about the ‘meaning’ of her tipsiness, and
so on. Natsu observes Midoriko quietly sneaking into the kitchen and turning on
the tap water in the dark, which triggers the first series of unmotivated, ludic
gestures.
Natsu follows Midoriko into the kitchen, and while she hears the sounds of
water pouring from the faucet, its echoing against the metal in the sink, and the
gurgling sounds of the whirlpool down the drain, Natsu takes a bottle of old
French dressing out of the fridge, and throws the content into the sink. The sen-
sory images of the sink, the thick, white, liquid of stale French dressing, and Mid-
oriko and Natsu standing silently in the dark through long, subject-less,
punctuation-less sentences effectively convey the mounting tension filling the air.
Pursuing Midoriko, Makiko finally breaks the silence by pouring her heart out:

You never have ears for what I have to say anyway, and you think I’m stupid,
don’t you? That’s fine with me, just keep on treating me like a moron. Refusing
 Reiko Abe Auestad 541

to talk, that’s fine with me, just keep on writing in your precious little notes
until we both die…
(Kawakami 2010, p. 96)
The tension ends in an explosive cascade of feelings, when Midoriko acciden-
tally pokes Makiko’s eyes with her fingers. Seeing Makiko’s blood-shot eye, Mid-
oriko, for the first time in months, opens her mouth to speak. Trembling, she
shouts at Makiko, begging her to ‘tell the truth’:

‘What on earth do you mean by the “truth”?’ said Makiko, laughing loudly, as
if to show off her amusement, and then turned to me, saying: ‘Did you hear
that, Natsu? What a surprise, what does she mean by the “truth”? Can you
please translate that for me?’ While I thought it was not such a good idea to
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laugh away her bewilderment and anxiety like that, Midoriko herself remained
quiet, still looking down, breathing heavily, as Makiko continued to laugh. Just
as I thought she was going to cry, however, Midoriko looked up, took in a big
breath, and pried open a pack of eggs sitting on the side of the sink, held one
egg in her right hand and raised it high. Wow, she’s going to throw it, I
thought, and at that moment, tears gushed out of her eyes, and she threw the
egg at her own head. Crush… with an unfamiliar sound of crushing, a yellow
yolk flew in the air, splattering all over.
(Kawakami 2010, p. 98)
Awestruck, Makiko laughs instead, as if to hide her confusion, which prompts
Midoriko into a new series of unmotivated actions: she takes eggs out of the car-
ton, and throws them at her own forehead. With the sound of crunching egg
shells, of Midoriko’s excited voice, the sight of egg yolk, egg white running all
over, mixing with Midoriko’s tears, Makiko joining in the action, the situation
unfolds, while Natsu thinks to herself how they all ‘lack words’, and that ‘the
kitchen is dark, and the food waste stinks’. They lack words, as Natsu says, but
they somehow sense the desperation in the situation, which gives them a decisive
affective push forward, bringing them out of the deadlock.
The scene can be read as an exemplary case study of ‘freedom of affect’ and its
unpredictable trajectory, which affect theorists have discussed freedom of
affect to ‘combine with, modulate, and suppress other affects’ (Sedgwick 1995,
p. 134). As noted, Midoriko’s refusal to speak is basically about not wanting to
share her intimate feelings, in which shame definitely is a significant component.
Midoriko not only feels ashamed of her mother’s silly obsession, but feels guilty
about it, amplifying her original shame. As is obvious from the scene at the public
bath, Natsu, too, feels vicarious shame for Makiko’s fetish. Hence, there is a tacit
affective alliance between Midoriko and Natsu, as illustrated when they stand
together in the dark kitchen, staring into the sink. Shame, however, is premised
on ‘identification and empathy’ (Sedgwick 1995, p. 159), and you are not likely
to feel it for someone you do not care about. Midoriko and Natsu obviously do,
and in the climactic scene, the balance tips over in favor of empathy when
 542 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

Midoriko sees her mother in pain. A strong feeling of shame, which had been sen-
sitizing her perception of Makiko is ‘switched off’, as it were, and dissipates.
Empathy quickly fills the scene through ‘automatic mimicry’ of one another
(Makiko throwing eggs at herself in response), changing the entire atmosphere in
the kitchen.
Throwing an egg at someone is a belligerent act, a symbolic attack or protest,
which is not uncommon. By throwing eggs at herself rather than at her opponent,
Midoriko signals that it is a playful act and is not meant to hurt or insult for ‘real.’
By shouting on the top of her lungs, babbling on about the truth, and crying at
the same time (with what Massumi calls ‘vitality affect’), she nevertheless suc-
cessfully conveys to her mother the seriousness of this ludic gesture (‘We’ve got a
situation, Mom!’) in the register of affect that Massumi calls ‘categorical.’22 Even
as Makiko dismissively ‘laughs’ at Midoriko’s ridiculous demand for ‘truth’,
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because for her there is no such thing, Makiko correctly assesses the affective
truth of the situation. Enthusiasm emanating from Midoriko hits both Midoriko
and Makiko at the same time, establishing a ‘transindividual’ link, sweeping
them up together in a playful act of egg-throwing, inducing a qualitative transfor-
mation in their relationship.
The innovative improvisation in this scene is played out in the ‘hinge’ between
‘nonverbal and verbal expression’, as ‘bodies and words pass into each other,
coupling and struggling’ (Massumi 2002, pp. 15 16). The limits of possible
expression are being stretched and tested, and it is as if they instinctively and
intuitively know the rules of the game they have never played before. With
enough ingenuity to allow space for maneuver, each manages to improvise a way
of responding to chance changes in the environment, by throwing eggs at oneself
together. And Natsu’s long, run-on sentences in narration, incorporating the other
female characters’ speech in it, beautifully captures it all, as the event unfolds in
her kitchen. I should also add that the Osaka dialect that they speak accentuates
the ludic in this climactic exchange. As Kinsui Satoru, a role-language specialist,
points out, Osaka speech is often associated with playful humor, garrulousness,
and pretenseless, candid forthrightness (Kinsui 2002, pp. 82 85). He argues
that the speaker of Osaka dialect often takes advantage of these qualities to play
the role of a ‘trickstar’23 spurred on by their awareness of the now marginalized
status of their own speech, which was a major language in premodern times.
Midoriko, Makiko and Natsu, marginalized female Osaka-ites, spontaneously
play the tragi-comic role of a ‘trickstar’, improvising ludic forms of live action
together with gusto to make a difference.
With ‘I’ll go home with Mom’ as the last word, Midoriko leaves Tokyo, hold-
ing a 5000 yen note (with a picture of Higuchi Ichiy^ o) as a talisman from Natsu.
The truth status of ‘telling the truth’ hardly matters, but with the help of ludic
words, enthusiasm and gestures, they have intuited what is at stake in intimate
relationships. Their playful, creative synergy has helped them confront the affec-
tive present head-on, to carve out a future that both can bear with a hint of opti-
mism; as ‘cruel’ as it might be, it is optimism nevertheless. With echoes from
 Reiko Abe Auestad 543

Kawakami’s own words, ‘we are always doing our best at living’, Breasts and Eggs
allows us, those of us who are willing, to hope. It invites us to hope that there is
room for creative improvisation and intervention, making not only survival, but
also flourishing possible, by sustaining enough optimism to ‘make life bearable’,
even as ‘it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently’ (Berlant 2011,
p. 14). And last but not least, the elimination of eggs, as it were, is a symbolic ges-
ture, indeed, evoking a metonymic association with numerous ‘egg cells’ going to
waste every month, and with the constraints and potentials of the female body
that they embody.

Epilogue
In the final chapter, a cathartic emotional explosion involving Midoriko and
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Makiko is triggered through a series of ‘ludic’ gestures, accompanied by sponta-

neous verbal reactions and feelings, and helps them break out of the impasse by
creating a web of affective exchange that connects them and makes a difference.
My overall analysis has focused on how the affective interaction among the char-
acters is brought to life and animated via nonhuman actors in the text, which
include the materiality of writing, intertextual associations with Higuchi Ichiy^ o,
and its sensory imagery of playful gestures, and feelings. As noted in my intro-
duction, however, the context and the general reader are also nonhuman actors,
albeit only two among many, and I will use some words on them before ending
the article. In 2008, the same year Kawakami won the Akutagawa prize for
Breasts and Eggs, Kobayashi Takiji’s The Crab Cannery Ship (Kanik^ osen 1929)
became a best-seller, a sensational event considering a gap of about eighty years
since the time of its original publication. It is symbolic that a proletarian novel
from one of the most notoriously oppressive times in modern Japanese history
resonated with readers in the early millennium the reader contemporary to, if
not the same as, those reading Breasts and Eggs.24 Kobayashi’s The Crab Cannery
Ship, with its terribly grim depiction of inhuman working conditions aboard a
crab cannery ship, apparently struck a chord with young ‘precariat’ readers such
as Amamiya Karin.25
With about 800 or 900 yen per hour, you cannot live on the freeter salary even
if you work full-time, and the only way out for many women without the possibil-
ity of regular employment was and still is to enter the so-called mizush^obai related
line of occupation, as Midori and her sister in Child’s Play, and Makiko of Breasts
and Eggs have done (or Kobayashi Takiji’s girlfriend, Taki did in the 1920s’ rural
Japan). This context has no doubt made the emotional impact of the novel more
poignant for some readers, even though it obviously does not have the same effect
on every reader, as the reader too is an ‘actor’. As noted earlier, Ishihara Shintar^
o
was not moved by the novel, if not totally annoyed, whereas, I might add, a
thirty-five year old Norwegian translator (who has, incidentally, also translated
The Crab Cannery Ship into Norwegian) took the initiative to translate it into
 544 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

Norwegian, because he was enthralled by the reading experience that enabled

him to imagine how it might feel to ‘live in’ a female body (Tørring 2013, p.
156). True to the spirit of nondiscrimination of different ‘actors’, I would suggest
that the disparate reactions to the novel be seen as a token of the vibrant openness
of the reader text exchange and the web of emotional networks that they create
(or not create).
For some of us, with a sensibility for precarious living, and a disposition for an
affective mode of reading, the novella awakens feelings of deja-vu, mixed with
frustration, resignation, as well as empathy and hope raising at the same time
our critical awareness of the material conditions in the post-bubble, neo-liberalist
Japan of the 2000s. We do not need to stop, when we respond to the text’s call to
‘feel’ and empathize. Reading can inspire us not only to feel, but also think differ-
ently, and even change our routinized way of dealing with things. In other words,
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an emotionally immersive mode of reading, while reading, can turn into a more
reflective mode of reading, as we reflect upon our experience of the reading
itself.26 As counterintuitive as it may sound, I would argue that empathy and crit-
ical awareness are allies rather than enemies, as critique needs engagement to be
truly effective. In light of the continuing (if not worsening) predicament of the
members of the precariat in Japan in the new millennium, what we need perhaps
more than anything else is an attitudinal change to make us more inclined to care
and be engaged, which would be the first step in the right direction.

Acknowledgments
An earlier and shorter version of this essay was presented as part of the panel on
‘Negative Feelings’ organized by David Holloway and chaired by J. Keith Vin-
cent at the 2015 AAS (Association for Asian Studies) conference in Chicago,
both of whom deserve a special note of thanks. Thanks are also due to Alan
Tansman, Linda Aas, Ika Kaminka, Grace Ting and Rebecca Copeland for their
comments at various stages of writing. Thanks, also, to Christophe Thouny for
recommending Brian Massumi.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. Kawakami has also won the Takami Jun Prize for her poetry collection Mizugame (Water Jar,
2013), and the Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Prize for her short story collection Ai no yume toka (Dreams
of Love), from which the two aforementioned novellas have been translated. Since Chichi to ran
(Breasts and Eggs), she has firmly established her reputation as a writer by winning the Mura-
saki Shikibu Literary Prize and the MEXT Award for New Artists for her critically acclaimed
 Reiko Abe Auestad 545

novel, Hevun (Heaven, 2010), which takes up with great sensibility the current issue of ijime
(bullying) at school.
2. ‘Dai hyakusanj^ u hakkai akutagawa sh^ o: Senpy^ o no gaiy^ ^
o’ (2008) and Otake (2008). If you
‘Google’ the title, you find positive reviews and blogs by numerous readers.
3. In Japan, the term, precariat, is used synonymously with ‘the working poor’ which emerged in
the 1990s, typically represented by so called ‘freeters’ who lack full-time employment and
social benefits that go with it. See Standing 2011, p. 9.
4. See Felski (2011, p. 582). Her ‘positive aesthetics’ can be seen as part of the trend in literary
studies to shift a focus away from the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ or ‘symptomatic reading’ in
what some have identified as an ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ turn.
5. As Rita Felski notes, however, this sort of affective reading is a mode of engagement that
requires an attitudinal and affective disposition on the part of the reader. It is ultimately up to
the reader whether or not to respond to the ‘call’ of the text (Felski 2011, p. 575).
6. Heather Love also refers to Bruno Latour’s ANT as giving useful insight in reading literature
‘Close but not Deep Reading’ (Love 2010).
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7. One of Latour’s rather absurd example includes a brute physical relation that obtains, however
fleetingly, between ‘your remote control’ which permits you to become a ‘couch potato’ and
yourself, that has an impact on your life as part of the network (Latour 2005, p. 77).
8. Fujita Hiroshi, a famous Lacanian psychoanalyst, argues that not only the female protagonist’s
obsession with breast augmentation, but also her never-ending talk, late menstruation, and
egg smeared face are all symptoms of the author’s repressed castration complex (Fujita 2008).
9. Bruno Latour argues for taking ‘candidates for the accusation of antifetishism’ seriously as a
non-human actor, because they ‘too act, they too do things, they too make you do things’ and
suggests seeing them as matters of ‘concern’ rather of ‘debunking’ (Latour 2004, pp. 232-233).
10. I borrow the notion of ‘nonhuman actor’ as is presented in Rita Felski’s works based on her
interpretation of Latour’s ANT (Felski 2011 and 2015).
11. I use the term, affect, to mean a feeling or intensity that affects one’s body and is not yet con-
nected to something meaningful, distinguishing it from emotion, which suggests something
that has been interpreted and given a meaningful content. My focus in this essay will be on the
side of affect rather than emotion. The definition of affect and emotion varies depending on
the discipline and critic, and my use of affect relies on Jonathan Flatley (2008).
12. The fluid social is a metaphor Latour (2005, p. 79) uses to emphasize the fleeting nature of the
social realm made visible only when new associations are being made.
13. See her introduction (pp. 1 21). She analyzes affective and aesthetic responses in literature
and films to the dramas of life-adjustment that unfold ‘amid talk of precarity, contingency,
and crisis’ with a focus on what she calls ‘cruel optimism’ a form of ‘good life’ fantasy in
which something you desire is in fact an ‘obstacle to your flourishing’. Her point about ordi-
nary people’s continuous struggle to develop skills for life-adjustment finds a fruitful parallel
in the ‘good life’ fantasy that takes a center stage in Breasts and Eggs.
14. Ichiy^o was her pen name, and her real first name was Natsu. After the death of her father, she
had to make ends meet with the help of her sister and the mother in a poor neighborhood near
Yoshiwara, which provided a backdrop for many of her stories, including Child’s Play. A self-
avowed fan of Higuchi Ichiy^ o, Kawakami Mieko translated Child’s Play into modern Japanese.
See Ikezawa (2015).
15. Higuchi (1981, p. 285), slightly adjusted. I have used the first person pronoun and the present
tense instead of the third person and the past. See Higuchi (1895 1896).
16. Midoriko uses this kanji, 厭 iya, repeatedly in her notes (pp. 10, 23, 32, 46, 79, and 99). It
should also be noted that Kawakami adds the same kanji, 厭, in the opening passage of her
modern Japanese translation of Child’s Play even though it is not in the original. See Kawakami
(2015). See also ‘Kawakami Mieko san, Ichiy^ o ch^oyaku’ (13 March 2015), Yomiuri Shimbun.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/book/news/20150303-OYT8T50178.html
 546 Higuchi Ichiy^o, playful words and Ludic gestures

17. The title, ‘Takekurabe’, is taken from the waka exchange between childhood sweethearts in
‘Izutsu’ of Tales of Ise.
18. Timothy J. Van Compernolle has an insightful analysis of the kaimami scene with reference to
The Tale of Genji. See Compernolle (2006, pp. 170 173).
19. Kawakami (2010). All translations from Breasts and Eggs are mine. I provide some of the origi-
nal Japanese texts to illustrate how Kawakami’s long, run-on sentences echo Higuchi Ichiy^ o. I
have also included large chunks of translated texts because the novella has not been translated
into English in its entirety. Parts of it have been translated by Louise Heal Kawai in ’from
Breasts and Eggs, for the online magazine, Words Without Borders (Italics), August 2012.
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-breasts-and-eggs [Accessed 25.5.2016].
Makiko wa yu ni tsukatteiru aida, furoba o ikiki suru onna no karada o nameru y^ o ni kansatsu
shi, sore wa tonari no watashi ga ki o tsukau hodo buenryo ni shisen o uchi tsuzukeru node,
chotto Maki chan, misugi, to omowazu kogoe de ch^ uisuru mo…sono me wa haittekuru kar-
ada, yuni tsukaru karada, deru karada, awa ni kurumareru karada o jikkuri to sewashinaku
ounode atta… toku ni shaberu kotomo naku tada yuge no naka o id^ osuru on’na no karada o
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damatte mitsumete irunode…kono hadaka no genba ni oite wa, fudan nara kanari no wariai
de shikibetsu no omomi o motsu kao toiu bui ga tonto usure, koko de wa karada jitai ga aruki,
karada jitai ga shaberi, karada jitai ga ishi wo mochi, hitotsu hitotsu no d^ osa no ch^
uo^ ni wa kar-
ada shika naiy^ oni miete kuruno yatta. (pp. 51 52)
Hito t^ori ga sunda ato, mata miruku buro ni tsukaru kotoni shite, sokode wakatta no wa
Makiko wa miy^ o toshite miteiru toiu wake dewa naku, shizen ni me ga suwatte shimau toiu
kanji de ari, tachi kawari ire kawaru mune wo sara ni gangan ni me ni ireteiru node, watashimo
nantonaku sore ni naratta. (pp. 54 55)
20. You can perhaps argue, with Berlant (2011), that it is through these feelings that we are able to
apprehend the conditions of ‘crisis ordinariness’, and the ethos of ‘cruel optimism’ across time
and space. See also J. Keith Vincent (2016), where he identifies ‘cruel optimism’ in Ichiy^ o’s
Child’s Play.
21. ‘Atashi h^oky^ o shujutu wo uketai nen kedomo’ toiu naiy^ o de atta. ‘Sore ni tsuite anta wa d^ o
omouka’ toiu koto ga, watashi ni shinya Makiko no shigoto ga owatte kara wazawaza no
ch^okyori no denwa o kaketekuru mokuteki de atta hazuyanoni, sokoniwa saisho kara saigo
made watashi no kans^ o ya iken nado o uketoru yoy^ u mo y^ oi mo nai y^ osu deatte, Makiko wa
‘mune o fukuramasu’ toiu koto, aruiwa ‘sonna koto ga majide jibun ni dekiru noka’ no, sono
sakaime de itaku k^ ofun shiteiru y^ode, achira deno jikan no keika no hayasa to kochira no sore
to dewa, kekk^ o na hagure ga aruy^ o ni kanjita mono yatta. (p. 13)
22. Masumi distinguishes between two registers of affect, the vitality affect which concerns the
‘how’ of the performance, and the categorical affect, which is the ‘what’ of the play. See Mas-
sumi (2014, pp. 25 26).
23. Kinsui draws on Christopher Vogler’s definition of ‘trickstar’ as someone who embodies the
energies of mischief and desire for change in The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers
(Michael Wiese Production, 2007).
24. Yoshimoto Takaki (2008) discusses the link between the two historical periods as the generally
impoverished conditions for Japanese workers.
25. Amamiya has become a spokesman for the working poor movement: I was ‘struck by how the con-
ditions depicted in the novel mirrored the current desperate situation of young workers’ (Ama-
miya and Beck 2010, p. 252). It is no coincidence that it has given rise to a generation of authors
who write novels that deal with the life of fur^ıt^
a (Okada Toshiki, Kakuta Mitsuyo, Abe Kazushige,
Hoshino Tomoyuki just to name a few). Also see Rosenbaum (2014) and Holloway (2014).
26. Dorothy Hale identifies ‘oscillation between immersive and reflective modes of reading’ as a
necessary component in the new ethics of reading advocated by Martha Nussbaum and Judith
Butler, however different as they are in other respects (Hale 2009, p. 901).
 Reiko Abe Auestad 547

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Reiko Abe Auestad received a BA in English and American literature from Sophia University, an
MA in Japanese literature from the University of Wisconsin, and a PhD from the University of
Oslo, where she currently works as professor. She is the author of Rereading Soseki: Three Early
Twentieth Century Japanese Novels, originally published in 1998; its digital version is now available
from the CEAS Reprint Series for Rare and Out of Print Publications at Yale University. She has
recently published two articles on Natsume S^ oseki’s Kokoro, and is editing Japanese and English
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 21:45 04 August 2017

anthologies of essays on Soseki with Alan Tansman and J. Keith Vincent. Her most current
research project, ‘Affect and Speech Act in Modern Japanese Literature’ (working title),
examines novels by among others Natsume S^ ^ Kenzabur^
oseki, Oe o, Kirino Natsuo, and Kawakami
Mieko. She has also published essays on the family politics and welfare system in Japan and
Norway from a comparative perspective (‘Long-Term Care Insurance, marketization and the
quality of care’, Japan Forum 2010). She may be contacted at r.a.auestad@ikos.uio.no.