This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud 9780804772518

Citation preview

This Perversion Called Love

This Perversion Called Love Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud

margherita long

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Long, Margherita, 1967–   This perversion called love : reading Tanizaki, feminist theory, and Freud / Margherita Long.    p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8047-6233-5 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro, 1886–1965—Criticism and interpretation. 2.  Feminist literary criticism—Japan.  3.  Psychoanalysis and literature—Japan.  I. Title. PL839.A7Z7665  2009 895.6’344—dc22 2008055251

For Marguerite Wisner Ward, Margherita Ward Raymond, Marguerite Raymond Long, and Marguerite June Hoblitzelle, my maternal genealogy

Contents

Author’s Note      ix Acknowledgments      xi Introduction      1 1. Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism: Tanizaki’s Aesthetic Essays and the Inexorable Western Superego      13 2 . The Problem with Parody: Masochism, the Death Drive, and the Laws of Thermodynamics in “Sato- Haruo” and The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi      40 3. Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name: The Language of Abjection in Arrowroot, Nakagami, and Irigaray      69 4. The Sadism of the Scopic Regime: Portrait of Shunkin, Feminist Film Theory, and Tanizaki’s Cinema Essays      103 Conclusion: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Performativity but Were Afraid to Ask Tanizaki      133 Notes      149 Works Cited      162 Index      173

Author’s Note

all translations from the Japanese are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. The romanization of Japanese names maintains the Japanese order (surname followed by given name).

Acknowledgments

i would like to thank my professors at Princeton University for their challenging seminars and generous support during the early stages of this project. I am grateful to Hosea Hirata for imparting his love of modern Japanese poetry in all forms, to Richard Okada for sharing his enthusiasm for the brilliance of Tanizaki’s narratives, and to the late Earl Miner for his unfailing encouragement and steadying goodwill. Funding from the Japan Foundation’s Inter-University Center Language Fellowship and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program provided me with invaluable time and training in Japan. I thank Professor - for sponsoring me at the Department of Comparative Kawamoto Koji Literature and Culture at Tokyo University, and Professor Ueno Chizuko of the same university for her lively graduate seminars in feminist theory. I was fortunate to be one of the early researchers to benefit from one-onone tutorials with Professor Komori Yoichi, whose generosity with foreign students has since become legendary. I am grateful to him for the sessions that resulted in my first readings of many of the texts discussed here, and for the example of his commitment to the politics of close reading. My deepest debt of gratitude is to two feminist mentors. Elizabeth Grosz was my senior colleague in the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo. She offered the graduate seminar on Irigaray that transformed my thinking about sexual difference and psychoanalysis, and gave me the confidence to strike out in a new and, for my personal feminism, much more meaningful direction. I cannot thank her enough for the force of her thinking and the sustenance of her support. Elizabeth Weed was director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University when I was fortunate to be a postdoctoral fellow there. Elizabeth’s gift of intellectual nurturance was profoundly empowering, and her mix of theoretical insight, institutional savvy, and personal warmth have continued to make all the difference for me.

   Acknowledgments Other institutions that provided generous support include the East Asian Studies Department at New York University, where I wrote Chapter 1; the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council, which provided funding for research on Chapter 4; and the University of California at Riverside Center for Ideas and Society, where I completed Chapter 3. For the opportunity to present my work in public forums I would like thank Alan Tansman, Michael Bourdaghs, Eun Kyung Min, the faculty organizers of the Modern Japan Workshop, and the graduate student organizers of the Other Orientalisms Lecture Series at Brown University. I am grateful to Asada Akira for inviting me to present an early version of Chapter 3 as a keynote address at the Kumano University Annual Summer - Yuri Furuhata, and Akiko Ishii Seminar in 2004, and to Takazawa Shuji, for translating the paper I presented on that occasion. For their incisive readings and contributions at various stages I offer heartfelt thanks to Tom Lamarre, Nina Cornyetz, Christine Marran, Hosea Hirata, Greg Pflugfelder, Tom Keirstead, Andrea Spain, Nori Morita, Eric Cazdyn, Jonathan Mark Hall, Anne McKnight, Keith Vincent, Miryam Sas, and Rey Chow. Rey’s interest in the project was especially exciting; I gained a lot of momentum from our conversations during my year at the Pembroke Center at Brown. From the project’s beginning, Nina Cornyetz has been a source of unwavering support and professional advice. I am grateful to Christine Marran for sharing her apartment in Osaka during a summer of Nakagami research and, much more, for the staying power of her friendship. I thank Julie Rousseau for her loyalty and incredible generosity of spirit. Alex Juhasz and Carina Johnson lent their publishing insights and the gift of their closeness in Los Angeles. Jonathan Mark Hall has been a valuable interlocutor and dear friend. Brett de Bary gave sage professional advice at a crucial point in my career. Eve Zimmerman has been the warmest of sempai, in Shing u- and in general. I am grateful to Carol Gluck for her interest and suggestions. Senda Yuki has been a source of feminist and maternal inspiration. Masako Ono has always made me feel well sheltered and well befriended. I am lucky to have been part of the extended Oda family for more than twenty years. I would like to thank Ken K. Ito for kind words at an early stage, and Anthony Chambers for his correspondence. I would also like to acknowledge Chambers’ beautiful translations of Tanizaki, which have been invaluable. At Stanford University Press, special thanks go to Stacy Wagner, Tim Roberts, Alice Rowan, and Jessica Walsh. The University of California at Riverside has provided a wonderfully collegial place to bring the project to fruition. For their intellectual and personal camaraderie I thank Michael Foster, John Kim, Leslie Winston, Jim Tobias, Michelle Bloom, Sabine Doran, Ken Rogers, Setsu

Acknowledgments   

Shigematsu, Jodi Kim, Reiko Sato, Kyoko Sagawa, Yoshiko Hain, Susan Antebi, Sang Hee Lee, and Mariam Lam. I am also grateful to many senior colleagues for the grace of their guidance: Tom Scanlon, Henk Maier, Margie Waller, Theda Shapiro, Katherine Kinney, John Ganim, and the late Emory Elliott. To my sister, Kate; my brother, Ted; my mother, Margy; and my late father, Jim, I owe so much of the voice that animates these pages. Without their support and confidence I would never have brought the project to completion. My husband, Chuck, provided the safe space in which it all came together, finally. Our daughters, June and Helen, keep me invested in questions of love and feminism.

This Perversion Called Love

Introduction

this book was born from the conviction that Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- is saying something exciting for feminism, and from the equally strong conviction that I didn’t know what. The project began in the 1990s when in the United States there was a great deal of feminist interest in perversion. Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) had just proposed that masochism contests the “dominant fiction” of male power and privilege. Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994) argued that fetishism offers a nonphallic model of feminist fantasy. Diana Fuss’s Identification Papers (1995) showed how orthodox identities are constantly undone by the psychoanalytic process of identification itself. Most exciting of all were Judith Butler’s books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993). Exceeding the paradigm of two sexes to speak of what seemed like an infinity of genders, Butler argued that sex was a cultural construct, and that as such it was inherently vulnerable to cultural perversion. As one of my favorite lines from Gender Trouble explained, “If there is no radical repudiation of a culturally constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to ‘do’ the construction one is invariably in” (31). In his famous explorations of masochism and fetishism, Tanizaki definitely seemed to be “doing” his male and female constructions with the performative flair that Butler celebrates. Especially in the works on which I wanted to focus, from what Nakagami Kenji calls Tanizaki’s “overripe” period in the 1930s (“Monogatari” 130), relations among and between the sexes seemed no less perverse, and no less promising. The problem was that Japanese feminists were not impressed. The same period in the early 1990s saw the publication of two withering critiques, one by Saegusa Kazuko in Ren’ai shosetsu no kansei (The trap of love novels), the other by

   Introduction Ueno Chizuko, Ogura Chikako, and Tomioka Taeko in Danry u- bungakuron (Theory of men’s literature). According to Saegusa, Tanizaki portrays women as toys, or as goddesses, but he is unable to conceive of them as fellow subjects, and this dooms him to being a “man who cannot love,” “a writer who cannot write love novels” (65).1 The authors of the second book draw similar conclusions, observing that Tanizaki’s novels treat women as a “category” rather than as separate individuals, so credible heterosexual relationships are missing from his work (234).2 In the 1990s, this focus on love seemed boring to me. Wasn’t femininity as “category” precisely the point? Didn’t heterosexual love smack of heteronormativity? At that time I argued that perversion in Tanizaki is fascinating for the way it critiques the same gendered categories that it stages so deliberately. A colleague recently summed up how I was feeling then. Her comment reflects how strong an influence Butler, especially, still has on many feminists in the American academy. “First of all,” she said, “there’s no such thing as nonperverted love, and even if there were, who would want that?” She was reacting to the title of this book, a title that marks the coming-full-circle of my thinking both about Tanizaki and about feminism. True, Tanizaki shows that modern subjectivity makes nonperverted love impossible. But in the end I did want that, and I thought Tanizaki did too. Continuing to read his narratives together with psychoanalysis, I sensed that what had seemed boring in Saegusa and the Danry u- bungakuron trio might actually be the key to a much more compelling feminist reading. In our impatience to skip from two sexes to a myriad of genders, had we disavowed the fact that perhaps even “two” was a lie? In other words, was it worth “doing” the construction “toy” or “goddess” if those categories represent not femininity but an overdetermined male projection? The more faithfully Tanizaki recites what turn out to be classically psychoanalytic terms for perversions such as masochism and fetishism, the more clearly we see that modern subjectivity can define femininity only in a dichotomy with masculinity, as its opposite, complement, or lack. This means that even in Tanizaki’s most “perverted” scenarios we are dealing not with sexual difference but with what French philosopher Luce Irigaray calls “sexual indifference.” Does femininity really exist if all we have are men and their self-patterned others? Saegusa and the Danry u- bungakuron authors attribute the scandal of the missing woman to Tanizaki in particular. This book, however, proposes that Tanizaki’s insight is to expose that scandal’s universality. Precisely because he shares their interest in a nonperverted love, his writing explores the degree to which such a love remains impossible in a monosexual economy. It seems safe to say that when theorists like Silverman and de Lauretis

Introduction   

seek feminist solutions within the psychoanalytic paradigm, it is because they hold that paradigm to be accurate and inescapable, the “mother tongue of our modernity,” as Joan Copjec puts it (Imagine 10). On the one hand, a Japanese author who reproduces many of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis without reading Freud could be taken as proof of this claim.3 Oedipus has simply followed capitalism in its global travels, in a manifestation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s claim that in modernity “we are all little colonies, and it is Oedipus that colonizes us” (265).4 On the other hand, Tanizaki’s fascination with perversion can also be taken as evidence of his critical stance toward modern subjectivity, and of his first step in imagining an alternative. He was, after all, writing from a nation that had only recently and only partially joined the ranks of the world’s great powers. In the years leading up to and including the Fifteen Years’ War, many of Japan’s intellectuals were still hoping to use what Harry Harootunian calls this “doubling” of modernity to advantage, addressing its ills dialectically rather than simply being absorbed into them. No doubt his time and place played key roles in keeping Tanizaki from a stance of simple resignation. There is also the fact of his having derived the various formulae of psychoanalysis from his own modern urban milieu rather than from readings. Leo Bersani has explained that what enables him and many others to read Freud progressively is the “fractured, incomplete and self-contradictory” nature of the texts in question. Bersani writes, “Our interest in Freud even suggests that we are drawn to theoretical texts to the extent that their theoretical positions fail to be formulated” (10). One of the joys of learning psychoanalysis from Tanizaki is that we can cut to the chase. His theoretical positions are formulated with often staggering clarity, and there is no equivalent of a Jacques Lacan to come afterward and insist, for instance, that feminists should make peace with psychoanalysis because phallus and penis are not the same. Although this book proposes that we learn psychoanalysis from Tanizaki, and learn it critically, I imagine there will still be resistance to positing the universality of modern subjectivity.5 Universality has been a hotly contested concept among feminists, Butler primary among them. “The universal” is regarded as a hegemonic category for relegating difference to a constitutive outside that is never recognized for its role in sustaining the binary. It is interesting to note, however, that the critique of universalism has been less straightforward for Japanese feminists, who often find themselves erased by its binary schema. Ehara Yumiko describes “a strange distortion of postmodern feminism in Japan” (63) that calls on feminists to reject both the universalist conceit of a Japanese modernity indistinguishable from Western modernity and the competing nativist conceit of a unique Japanese culture. “What is at stake,” she writes, is “the

   Introduction very possibility of a feminism that questions modernity from the position of a subject situated in the locus called Japan” (64). Along similar lines, Ueno Chizuko points out that although “Japanese feminism is under the cultural injunction to distance its arguments from Western thought in order to prove that it is not an importation” (qtd. in Kano, “Toward a Critique” 546), the overdetermined femininity of the Japan that gets constructed in opposition to the West is always claimed by male intellectuals, leaving Japanese women with no position. “Unless a third way is presented,” Ueno says, “the pendulum movement between the two poles of Orientalism [that is, “Western thought”] and reverse Orientalism [that is, ‘Japan as unique and “feminine” ’] will keep swinging for a while” (546). I think Luce Irigaray may be offering one such “third way” with her theory of sexual indifference. In postmodern feminism as Ehara concisely defines it, the idea is to critique a universalism that “grants the privilege of being considered human only to those who fit the masculine standard, while [affixing] to others the label of remaining within the natural order of their sex” (61). Thus, postmodern feminism rejects the idea of “the natural order of sex” because it is not natural but rather the product of a marginalizing masculinist discourse. We can see why historicization plays such an important role in this approach. To give sex a history is to show that what is held to be physical and to change only with the slow calendar of human evolution is actually cultural and changing continually, with intersecting discourses about race, class, sexuality, and so on. The historicist approach has been enormously productive for mapping the gendered terrain of all the fields it has influenced. When Irigaray advocates a different approach, it is not to supplant this one but to point out that it leaves certain problems unaddressed. To the degree that “sex” really is constructed as the disprized other to a universal masculine, no amount of exposing its historical contingency will change the fact that it is born from what she calls “the logic of the one” (To Speak 231). We think we are starting with two entities, but because one defines the other solely in terms of itself, we are not actually talking about difference. According to Irigaray, the task is not to deconstruct the binary or historicize its disprized term but to ask what was sacrificed by its construction and how to find language to describe it. In other words, Irigaray’s “third way” is to ask how we start writing the history of something that has never existed. I hope that, in the end, whether or not readers accept my claim that Tanizaki and Freud are talking about the same subjectivity will depend not on misgivings about positing universals but on the strength of the parallels I draw between the two writers. For feminists, these parallel perversions are of paramount importance because it is only by discerning them that we are able to see how Tanizaki is imagining a beyond. This beyond

Introduction   

does not come in the form of the “eternal woman” (ei’en na josei) already exhaustively documented in studies of his literature. It has nothing to do with her predictable combination of mother, lover, prostitute, and savior. The same “eternal woman” dominates Freud as well, and we already know the perverse history of her “love.”6 Instead, Tanizaki’s beyond is unexpected and elusive, sometimes even impossible; I do not find it in all the works I analyze. For it is no small feat not just to “do” but to do more, to do other, than the constructions we are already in. At the same time, we appreciate why Tanizaki wanted so badly to try. With his overripe novels and stories from the 1930s, he begins to write the history of a love that is much more loving, more worthy of the name. The chapters in this book unfold in order of increasing attention to this new and different love, with two early chapters documenting the inescapability of perversion, and two later chapters focusing more on what exists beyond. Chapter 1 offers a psychoanalytic look at the intellectual climate of 1930s Japan. It reads three Tanizaki essays famous for celebrating the finer points of Japanese aesthetics and cultural values: “In’ei raisan” (In praise of - (Love and sexual desire), and “Geidan” shadows) “Ren’ai oyobi shikijo” (Speaking of art). In these essays there is an undertone of suffering not usually acknowledged when Tanizaki’s work is classed with other “culturalist” writing that extolled Japanese uniqueness in the 1930s. I argue that Tanizaki shows this suffering to be the product of Japan’s successful Westernization, and that what makes his essays so interesting is the way he documents that suffering in excruciating little pockets of national selfloathing tucked intermittently into his own writing on culture. Using Freud’s writing on “moral masochism,” I show Tanizaki to be portraying a severe authority that has been internalized as the prerequisite to Japan’s emergence as one of the world’s civilized nations. Operating as a stern Western superego, this authority issues the contradictory injunctions “You must be like me!” and “You may not be like me!” These impossible commands keep the nation’s intellectuals in a state of endless anguish, even as they are born of the satisfaction of Japan’s desire to Westernize. In turn, the same anguish makes seeking refuge in the comforts of “Eastern tastes” that much more attractive. I suggest that what Tanizaki accomplishes by putting the pain and its fetishistic antidote side by side is to rewrite the “essentialism” of Japanese culturalism as a palliative response to the nation’s crisis rather than as any pure or prior identity. Such a reading has the advantage of distinguishing Tanizaki from other culturalist writers with whom he is often grouped. I argue that “Love - F udo: Ningengakuteki and Sexual Desire” is a spoof on Watsuji Tetsuro’s

   Introduction k osatsu (Climate: an anthropological study) and thus challenges Watsuji’s justification of Japanese imperial aggression rather than endorses it. I also propose that “Speaking of Art” is saying something quite different from what Kobayashi Hideo claims in his 1933 essay “Literature of the Lost Home,” where he dismisses Tanizaki’s “return to the East” as an atavistic desire unthinkable for a new generation of cosmopolitan critics like himself. However, my objective in beginning the book with an essay on Tanizaki and empire is not primarily to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on Japanese imperialism. Rather, my aim is to pursue the consequences of Tanizaki’s realization that to be a Japanese intellectual in the 1930s was always already to be a masochist. When we appreciate his experience of interwar subjectivity as an experience of mandatory perversion, we begin to see how he would have been led to ask whether it is possible, even in a domestic frame, to experience a subjectivity and a sexuality that were not perverted, and in which perversion itself did not turn out to reveal, rather than a proliferation of genders, the total erasure of women. Chapter 2 begins with a reading of a solemn autobiographical essay that Tanizaki wrote for the best friend to whom he ceded his wife in what is - jiken) of 1930. Published known as the “wife-passing incident” (Saikun j oto in 1931, “Sato Haruo ni ataete kako hansei o kataru sho” (An account of the first half of my life, for Sato- Haruo) shows the author coming to terms with the idea that domestic homosocial intimacies in the personal sphere are no less vulnerable to melancholic hauntings by the rival than intellectual intimacies in an international frame. What interests me about this essay is that Tanizaki wrote it at exactly the same time he wrote the first two installments of his boisterous faux-historical novel about a masoch- o- hiwa (The secret history of the istic sixteenth-century samurai, Bush uk  Lord of Musashi, hereafter The Secret History). Could the two texts, so different in tone, be related? The chapter proposes that the second text pushes the consequences of the first to their logical conclusions, translating the inertness of a wife who could be passed but not loved into the universality of a female “subjectivity” that is incapable of interaction and therefore perversely attractive to men whose attempts to sever male relations always end in failure. The chapter also presents Tanizaki’s portrait of the samurai alongside Freud’s account of the death drive to show how both authors describe aggressivity according to a hydraulic model. That is, the death drive originates from within and must be either spent in the world as destructiveness or channeled back inward as guilt. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud points out that modern conscience is thus in the business not of ending aggressiveness but only of sending it back to where it came from in the persona of an internalized lost male love. In The Secret History, Tanizaki

Introduction   

shows that this model of conscience makes aggression’s most “civilized” itinerary synonymous with a snarl of painful homosocial identifications epitomized by the distinctly modern injunction to “follow one’s lord in death.” He also shows that it is precisely this snarl that makes “femininity” seem like an attractive alternative in the mind of his protagonist, a samurai who longs to become a noseless, hacked-up “woman head.” With this image, I think, Tanizaki provides an unforgettable icon for Freud’s claim that “masochism, as people say, is truly feminine” (“Femininity” 117). As The Secret History illustrates, it is “truly feminine” to the exact degree that we are talking about what Freud calls “primary masochism”—the phenomenon of the death drive simply failing to leave the body. To the degree that we are talking about “secondary masochism”—which happens when civilization sends aggression back to the self—we are still in the realm of masculinity. The chapter argues that these are the impoverished terms for sexual “difference” as The Secret History presents them. Why then does Tanizaki posit these terms at the start of his novel and proceed to use a tone so hyperbolic and over the top as to suggest a parody? Analyzing William Haver’s argument for the novel’s success as a parody, I introduce an observation by Irigaray to ask whether the novel might actually be staged as the deliberate failure of parody. According to Irigaray, Freud’s model of the libido is disturbingly resonant with the first and second laws of thermodynamics. This means that on some level the explosive nature of the death drive always feels incontrovertible, the stuff of “hard science.” Irigaray maintains that, scientifically and militarily, the history of the twentieth century has been the history of these first and second laws, of tension, release, and the return to homeostasis. Against Haver, I argue that The Secret History is a historical novel only in the sense that it is the history of our violent present and, barring any definition of femininity that would allow for actual difference, our violent future as well. My hope is that this feminist framing of the novel will open new directions for thinking about war and aggression in the field of Japanese studies at large. Two examples come to mind. In literature, many of us admire James Fujii’s reading of Soseki’s Kokoro, which relates the novel’s canonization to the way it averts its gaze from Japanese military expansion in Asia to focus on the domestic tragedy of a modernity so severed from history as to rob its Sensei of any legacy to leave his student save suicide. In Chapter 2 I agree that junshi is a fitting metaphor for the circuit of punishing male identifications that Freud says is commensurate with modern “civilization.” However, if this circuit, as Tanizaki suggests in The Secret History, is the self-directed version of an aggression for which the only alternative is to be directed outward, is it still true that novels of homosocial suffering

   Introduction like Kokoro remain aloof from the problem of military aggression? It seems to me that when Kokoro documents what Fujii calls the “chain of institutionalized patriarchy and death that threatens to persist in Japanese society” (148), it is also documenting the threat of death that will persist in and between all modern societies as long as we fail to challenge the “science” of a death-driven libido that makes men choose between harming the self and harming the other. A second example, related to the first, comes to mind because this book was written when George W. Bush was enacting an increasingly dangerous series of responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Philosopher Ukai Satoshi has written a trenchant critique of Bush’s “war on terror”: In its bid to counter bin Laden’s slogan “Hiroshima in America,” the slogan of an America that proclaims its right to the preemptive use of nuclear weapons can only create a second or third Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or a second or third Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the world. It is precisely in order to intervene in the automatic reflex between these two slogans, bin Laden’s and Bush’s, that we seek a critique of terrorism. (251)

Nothing could be more welcome than the intervention of which Ukai speaks. However, part of his strategy is to show that the distinction between what has and has not been considered “terrorism” has proven entirely arbitrary across the imperialist conflicts of the twentieth century, so the task is to learn how to “think of the differences between violences without recourse to binary oppositions” (240) and to effect “a critique of violence that is not simple condemnation” (242). I can’t help asking: Why can’t we simply condemn violence? If condemnation is untenable, is it only because, as Ukai argues, nonviolence always turns out to be implicated in a larger scheme of violence? Or could it also be, as The Secret History shows, that nonviolence is shunned because it is conceived as feminine? Because it is commensurate with the bloody woundedness of a short-circuited death drive? The noseless “woman head” that represents the novel’s fantasy of reprieve from the endlessly internalized violence of a “civilized” male subjectivity is a brutal index of how little femininity and feminism have been allowed to contribute to a debate in which, as Ukai points out, “the term human beings means citizens” and “[t]hose who are citizens are actually combatants” (247). Irigaray is routinely dismissed for the essentialism of her claim that female sexuality could offer an alternative to the common sense of this equation between “human being” and “combatant.” One of my aims in presenting Tanizaki’s psychoanalytic account of the intransigence of aggressivity is to underscore how much is at stake in her proposal. Chapter 3 considers Tanizaki’s contribution to the feminist debate on

Introduction   

maternity. Yoshinokuzu (Arrowroot) juxtaposes its narrator’s search for the Japanese imperial line with his friend’s search for his maternal line. In some tantalizingly brief statements scattered across his writings from the late 1970s, Nakagami Kenji hinted that the mother might be a member of Japan’s buraku underclass (hisabetsu burakumin). Expanding Nakagami’s thesis in the 1990s, Watanabe Naomi and Komori Yoichi embraced Tanizaki’s novel as a brilliant treatise on abjection that shows how the process of tracing her family line converges with the process of tracing the discrimination on which Japan’s emperor system is founded. This chapter asks, Do we have to make the mother into a burakumin to make her political? And is this really what Nakagami is doing? I begin the chapter with a reading of the childhood singing games of the friend, Tsumura, to propose that Arrowroot provides a textbook example of the psychoanalytic truism that to acquire language is to give up one’s relation to the maternal body. I sketch Julia Kristeva’s theory of “semiotic” articulation as a means of recouping that lost relationship, and I show how Tsumura’s anthem “Cry of the Fox” is semiotic. Then I take issue with Kristeva, introducing Irigaray’s competing claim that the semiotic, with its attendant feeling of abjection, is not a way back to the mother so much as proof that we have sacrificed her anew. In my reading, Arrowroot maps out the debate between Kristeva and Irigaray by contrasting the ill-named mother love of Tsumura with the much more loving encounter with the maternal origin staged in Yoshino by Tsumura’s friend the narrator. Writing the narrator’s “return” in a quasi-biologistic vocabulary of skins, membranes, and mucous, Tanizaki exceeds the psychoanalytic paradigm to explore a maternal relation of safety and mediation rather than danger and pollution. I use Irigaray to argue that such a relation is essential to a subjectivity not founded in the dereliction of the other, and I reinterpret Nakagami’s elusive remarks to suggest that he too is invested in a language that would acknowledge indebtedness to origins rather than erase them. Of all the readings in this book, it is the one in this chapter about which I feel strongest, but also most nervous. I imagine readers will be interested in the argument that abjection is a dead end for feminism, but I expect resistance to the argument that Arrowroot is experimenting with what Irigaray calls an “elemental” vocabulary, “suggest[ing] to women a morpho-logic that is appropriate to their bodies” ( je, tu 59). For American feminists trained after Judith Butler’s work became paradigmatic, the very mention of such a vocabulary evokes automatic opposition. If we make the mistake of giving the feminine content, saying what it is rather than keeping it an open question, will we not “ground” feminism? Will we not break into factions, arguing over which differently classed, raced,

   Introduction or gendered “femininity” has the right to claim that category for itself ? Acknowledging Irigaray’s importance, Butler has made peace with her, but only to the degree that Irigaray can be championed for her “radical citational practice” (Bodies 37) vis-à-vis the great philosophers, and for keeping the question of sexual difference a “dense moment of irresolution within language” (Undoing 177). When Irigaray exhorts us to invent words that speak the mother’s body independent of irresolution, outside the injurious terms of the symbolic, Butler withdraws her support.7 In response, much has been written in defense of Irigaray’s recent, noncitational work, emphasizing that what she means by “morphology” is not any empirical female body but an idealized and mostly unrealized embodiment invested less in its own identity than in an ethics of relationality. Rather than use these defenses to shelter my reading of Tanizaki from a Butlerian critique, I want to use Tanizaki to reconsider the intellectual climate that makes such defenses necessary. What can we learn by approaching this feminist debate from the perspective of 1930s Japan? Arrowroot reveals a Tanizaki who had already sensed in 1931 that if he wanted access to a “mother love” worthy of the name, he would need to do more than re-cite and subvert what he already knew. For what he already knew— and what we still know all too well—was subjectivity founded in the dereliction of a mother who then haunts us with anxiety, phobia, and disgust. The question is not whether feminists will argue about who may claim this maternity, but whether feminists will be able to imagine an alternative to a maternity that no one should want to claim. In Japan, debates among psychologists, ethnographers, sociologists, Marxists, and even Deleuzeans have gathered momentum at regular intervals during the last half-century, intent on characterizing the nation as a bosei shakai or “maternal society.” As Tomiko Yoda has shown, however, claims that Japanese society promotes cozy mother-child dynamics such as intimacy, indulgence, and protection are always accompanied by claims that the same dynamics make Japanese society infantile, suffocating, and pathological.8 Given the inevitability of its abject inverse, the “maternity” of this society is both a political and a psychic liability. If we are not willing to consider an outside to its discourse, to go back to mother-as-origin and conceive of a different relation to her, we will continue to rob ourselves of the opportunity to conceive a model of subjectivity not always already founded in the dereliction of its very first other. Chapter 3 embraces Irigaray’s elemental vocabulary to point out that until such a model is found, other ethical projects will remain severely compromised. Chapter 4 turns its attention to the problem of vision in order to propose that Tanizaki anticipated many of the most intense debates in feminist film theory in a series of cinema essays from the 1920s and in a famous

Introduction   

novel about self-blinding from 1933. The film essays have recently received a great deal of attention in English. Joanne Bernardi’s Writing in Light (2001), Eric Cazdyn’s The Flash of Capital (2002), and Thomas Lamarre’s Shadows on the Screen (2005) all provide compelling accounts of what Tanizaki wrote during a fervent period of cinemaphilia when he was scripting, producing, and directing movies for the Taisho- Katsuei film company in Yokohama. What these books downplay or attempt to reconcile, however, is the cinematic disappointment that caused Tanizaki, by 1935, to remark that he had “long since stopped caring about cinema.” The occasion for his remarks was the news that his novel Shunkinsh o(Portrait of Shunkin) was being made into a movie. This chapter argues that the novel, not the essays, may well represent Tanizaki’s most trenchant writing about cinema. Reading it this way, I propose not only that the seeds of his cinematic discontent had been sown a decade earlier, but also that they were sown precisely around feminist issues of power and pleasure in the visual field. The chapter traces the debate in feminist film theory over two laws of human vision as described by psychoanalysis—first, that we always sense something lacking in a given representation, and want to see exactly what is missing; and second, that representation is itself compensation for the absence of the missing object. I discuss how three feminist film theorists—Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, and Joan Copjec—have grappled with the way cinema equates “woman” with lack and absence. All three theorists accept that psychoanalysis is telling the truth about how we see, and therefore remain within a psychoanalytic paradigm. In contrast, I show Tanizaki rejecting that paradigm even as he recognizes its intransigence in brilliant scenes of Freudian fetishism. Using Gilles Deleuze’s work on disavowal, I propose that self-blinding in Portrait of Shunkin represents a repudiation of Freudian subjectivity, with the novel’s multilayered narrative indicting subjectivity’s foundational cruelty. I also discuss the sadism of a dominant strain of criticism surrounding the novel, showing that some powerful figures in Japan’s genteel “national literature studies” have embraced a reading that casually repeats the very sadism that Tanizaki’s text critiques. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler remembers the “high” she felt reading French feminism in the 1980s, when the importance of sexual difference to ascendant discourses such as psychoanalysis meant that accounts of the speaking subject could no longer ignore the subject’s sex. She explains: To understand the exhilaration of this theory for those who were working within it, and for those who still do, one has to understand the sea-change that took place when feminist studies turned from being the analysis of “images” of women

   Introduction in this or that discipline or sphere of life to being an analysis of sexual difference at the foundation of cultural and human communicability. Suddenly, we were fundamental. Suddenly, no human science could proceed without us. (208)

Despite her excitement, Butler remembers being dismayed by French feminism’s heterosexism, and wanting a theory of gender trouble to write about “the lives of those who live at some distance from gender norms” (207). In this book I argue that Tanizaki’s own attempts to “trouble” gender only expose the absence of heterosexuality, and the difficulty of ever achieving much distance from the norms that that absence imposes. I also argue that among French feminists, Irigaray is better read not as a theorist of “sexual difference at the foundation of cultural and human communicability” but as a theorist of how sexual difference is erased by that foundation. Nevertheless, Butler’s account of the exhilaration she felt in the 1980s moves me deeply, because I think the principle behind it still applies. We are foundational. It is just that what Irigaray calls the derelicted “maternal-feminine” is buried a little more deeply in the foundation than we thought. For Tanizaki, the 1930s were the moment of exhilaration when it all became clear. As long as psychoanalysis remains the lingua franca of our modernity, the good and bad news for feminists is that this moment of exhilaration will continue.

  r 

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism: Tanizaki’s Aesthetic Essays and the Inexorable Western Superego

1

most of what tanizaki wrote as nonfiction in the late 1920s and 1930s he wrote as zuihitsu, or “following the brush” essays. A classical literary form, the zuihitsu seemed appropriate for his “return to the classics” (koten kaiki) period, when he is supposed to have abandoned his youthful interest in crime fiction, stage plays, cinema, and novels about sexual perversion in favor of traditional Japanese genres, allusions, and settings. “When we are young we are interested in imported art and literature,” he wrote, “but in the long span of a lifetime such a period can last ten or twenty years at most [and . . . ] with the onset of old age I have gradually returned to Eastern tastes” (“Geidan” 433). Describing these tastes in odes to Japanese architecture and food, the classical language, and the traditional culture of western Japan, Tanizaki made regular contributions -o- k oron - and Kaiz o. - His “return” coincided with a to such journals as Ch u  larger intellectual shift from the cosmopolitanism of the 1920s to the “culturalism” (bunkashugi) of the 1930s. An attempt to come to terms with what Harry Harootunian has called the “doubling” of modernity, culturalism struggled to understand what it meant for Japan to repeat and rework a capitalist modernization that had taken place first in the United States and Western Europe (Disquiet 111). In its more progressive forms, it used vestiges of native culture as a vantage point from which to critique capitalism’s ills and to reject Japan’s classification as somehow still lagging, still insufficiently Westernized on a scale of global modernity. In its more conservative forms, and increasingly as the war approached, it imagined culture as an escape—an “overcoming” of capitalism, modernity, and the West. The various “returns”—to Japan, An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese Culturalism” in positions east asia cultures critique 10.2 (Fall 2002): 431–469.

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism the East, and the classics—staged by intellectuals in the 1930s belong to the latter kind of culturalism. With noted exceptions, this is the sense in which I use the term here. Culturalism was associated in literature with - or culthe Japan Romantic School and with writers of the bungei fukk o, 1 tural revival, of the mid-1930s. On the whole, however, it was less a literary movement than a broad philosophical inquiry across a range of disciplines, including the ethics of Watsuji Tetsuro- (1889–1960) and Nishida - (1870–1945), the folklore studies of Yanagida Kunio (1875–1962) Kitaro. - o- (1888– and Origuchi Shinobu (1887–1953), the aesthetics of Kuki Shuz  1941), and the history of Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) and Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). This chapter reads three of Tanizaki’s best-known culturalist essays to consider an undertone of suffering in them that is not usually acknowledged. Written in 1933–1934, “In’ei raisan” (In praise of shadows) has long served as a synecdoche for everything Tanizaki said about traditional aesthetics during the 1930s. Written in 1931, “Ren’ai oyobi shikij o” (Love and sexual desire) discussed the aesthetics of sex in particular, and in so doing staged an important disagreement with Watsuji Tetsur o’s F udo: Ningengakuteki k osatsu (Climate: an anthropological study, hereafter Climate). Written in 1933, “Geidan” (Speaking of art) gained notoriety as the target of a review essay by Kobayashi Hideo called “Koky o- o ushinatta bungaku” (Literature of the lost home).2 In each of the three essays, suffering is evident in dalliances with images—racial abjection, sexual inferiority, artistic exhaustion—that contradict Tanizaki’s otherwise exquisite defense of Japan’s “East” vis-à-vis Euro-America’s “West.” I suggest that taking these dalliances seriously means watching the Japanese uniqueness that is celebrated by culturalism emerge as a kind of fetish, an alternative focal point that both diverts attention from and compensates for the trauma of the pain that lies behind it. In this chapter I aim first to show that this pain finds intermittent expression in the essays, then to ask what purpose it serves. If exposing it means exposing the contingent, fictional nature of Japanese uniqueness, it is tempting to read the essays as a critique of culturalism. However, it becomes hard to explain why they have lent themselves so well to camouflage and been so fully co-opted to the culturalist agenda. If pain is the issue, it is also tempting to read the essays as part of a masochistic project. In this case, however, it is hard to explain why the essays would engage seriously with the palliative discourse of Japanese uniqueness at all. The task of this chapter is to suggest that Tanizaki is unique among his culturalist peers for recognizing the interrelationship of cultural pain with cultural fetish. My argument is that he sees the latter arising from the former, and that he provides elegant and detailed narratives of Japanese beauty

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

precisely because he has so vivid a sense of the trauma they are working to obscure. The chapter traces this trauma through Tanizaki and his interaction with Watsuji and Kobayashi in an effort to show that he conceives of it as a byproduct of modern Japan’s founding identification with the West. This is not to say, however, that it represents a uniquely Japanese kind of suffering. The advantage of reading Tanizaki’s zuihitsu psychoanalytically is that it allows us to understand the endlessly beleaguered psyche as a normative and inescapable part of modernity—itself the implicit target of Tanizaki’s critique.

A Western Superego That Insists “You Must Be, You May Not Be!” “Enjoy your nation as yourself ” is a phrase that Slavoj Zizek uses to describe the logic of fundamentalism in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Following Jacques Lacan, Zizek argues not only that the nation can be analyzed like the individual psyche, but also that in fact it must be so analyzed if we are to understand the irrational, extradiscursive “kernel” that allows nationalism to function: A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices. To emphasize in a “deconstructionist” mode that Nation is not a biological or transhistorical fact but a contingent discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices, is thus misleading: such an emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency. Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. (Tarrying 202)

Zizek’s assertion that a kernel of enjoyment must be present for the nation to function is slightly misleading. Along the lines of the objet petit a, whose founding absence structures the symbolic order in the Lacanian account of subjectivity, Zizek’s “kernel of enjoyment” is not present but rather “extimate,” the trace of a guilty pleasure that the nation must make absent in order to come into existence. Should this remainder fall back into the symbolic, the result is analogous to national psychosis: “The necessary consequence of [the kernel’s] overproximity to reality,” Zizek explains, “is a ‘derealization’ of reality itself. Reality is no longer structured by symbolic fictions [ . . . a]nd it is here that violence comes onto the stage” (Metastases 76). Although nationalism may present “the privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field,” in other words, such an eruption takes place only in extreme cases. Most of the time the nation keeps enjoyment at bay, spinning the symbolic fictions and national myths

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism that its absence enables. In this sense, Japanese culturalism is not an aberration but rather a historically specific instance of fiction-production that is unique not in how it works but merely in what it says. To address culturalism’s claim that one might return to uniquely Japanese or Eastern tastes, we need to consider the specificity of the “enjoyment” to which it is opposed. Zizek’s designation of the kernel of enjoyment as the sine qua non of nationhood is based on Freud’s theories on the origins of social groups in Totem and Taboo. For Freud, social groups operate like individuals in that both require a foundational renunciation of sexual license in order to manage the natural aggression that would otherwise prevent peaceable human life. Following Charles Darwin, Freud imagines a moment in human development when a dominant primal father in any given group kept all the women to himself. Frustrated in their desires, a mob of brothers murdered and cannibalized him, agreeing that henceforward none of them would have access to the clan women. Eliminating incest and initiating exogamy, their act created a social group founded on laws that had the surplus effect of producing parricidal guilt. In all of the clan brothers there remained an “ideal” that commemorated both “the unlimited power of the primal father” and their retrospective penitence—a postparricidal “readiness to submit to him” (148). Identifying with one another by means of their identification with this contradictory ideal, the clan brothers were bound by ambivalence. They feared and admired the murdered father’s sexual license, but they also killed him for making them submit to it. Afterward, in identifying with both aspects of his person, they simultaneously idealized and renounced his outlawed pleasure. When Zizek speaks of a “kernel of enjoyment,” he is speaking of this forbidden but, for the community, necessarily internalized and idealized paternal enjoyment. When Tanizaki speaks of Japanese nationalism, he tends to imagine paternal enjoyment as Western, the guilt of identifying with it as Japanese, and like Freud, the responsibility of managing both guilt and enjoyment as the job of an agency called the superego. Let us consider the superego first. In “civilized” man, the paternal ideal is set up in the psyche through a process that is less bloody than cannibalism, but still almost as violent. In The Ego and the Id, Freud explains how the ego ideal joins the child’s psychical apparatus as the “heir” to his Oedipus complex. Faced with the daunting task of renouncing the sexual license with his mother that had defined his existence to that point, the little boy “borrows strength” from his father in a paternal identification that introduces a superego, or conscience, into his ego (34–35). As an unconscious source of censorship, this superego (“ideal”) memorializes the father by exhorting the boy both to emulate the father’s moral strength

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

and to refrain from the object to which that strength entitles him—the mother. In one of the most famous lines in his essay, Freud writes, “[The superego’s] relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept ‘you ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘you may not be like this (like your father)— that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative’ ” (35). As with the scenario in Totem and Taboo, the result of this founding identification is an eternity of bewilderingly contradictory injunctions—one dangling the temptation of paternal enjoyment, the other preempting it with inexorable guilt. As Kaja Silverman has noted, the severity and distress of the superego are “so considerable as to call fundamentally into question the notion of a ‘healthy’ subject” (Male 192). Seeing things more historically, Tanizaki imagines Japan’s distress in the context of its guilty encounter with a specifically Western superego. “In Praise of Shadows” offers a good introduction to this tendency in its use of almost Oedipal terms to describe Japan’s modernization. The essay recites a version of the story in which Japan is said to have lived in its own state of repletion prior to the Meiji Restoration, recognizing outside authority and relinquishing solipsistic satisfaction only when suddenly coerced: [T]he West arrived where it is by following its own natural path, whereas we faced a superior civilization and had no choice but to incorporate (toriireru) it. Changing our course from the one that allowed us to flourish for thousands of years, we encountered no small number of obstacles and difficulties. Had we been allowed to proceed freely we might not have come much further in terms of material progress than five hundred years ago. [ . . . B]ut we would have taken a path that was suited to our own nature. (524)

We notice an ambiguity as to whether Japan’s state of undifferentiated premodernity should be located thousands of years in the past or merely five hundred. It is as if the past itself is all but unknowable given the speed and totality of what has happened since Japan’s encounter with the West. “Probably as much has changed in our country in the sixty years since the Meiji Restoration,” Tanizaki says, “as in the three or even five centuries prior to that” (555). Cataloging the ways in which European technologies have infiltrated every aspect of Japanese life, his essay describes a project of full-scale identification and internalization. Freud notes that the superego’s domination over the ego is more strict the more rapidly the ego’s satisfaction succumbs to repression. Here Japan’s accelerated transformation does give rise in Tanizaki’s imagination to a particularly painful encounter with the West’s contradictory injunctions, “You must be like me, you may not be like me.” The nation yearns to achieve recognition as “one of

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism the world’s civilized nations” (bunmeikoku no ikkoku), but it feels guilty, and not entirely legitimate. As the first non-Western nation to identify with the West, Japan imagines its ideal to be poignantly inimitable, and ruthlessly judgmental. “The shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego” (“Mourning” 249), Freud says of this kind of identification, and Tanizaki shows such shadows lurking in his own psyche and in those of his fellow culturalists. In this context we begin to see how Tanizaki might read culturalism in the 1930s as a return not to Japan as it existed prior to forced emulation of the West but rather to “Japan” as it evolved as a fetish to act as palliative. The fiction of some always-available Japanese uniqueness, in other words, is necessary to keep at bay the suffering demanded by a Western superego. So it is not, psychoanalytically speaking, that the fiction of pure Japaneseness corresponds to nationalistic enjoyment. As Zizek explains, to “enjoy your nation as yourself ” is tantamount to indulging only the “you must be” half of the internalized injunction: the violence of unbridled sexual and political license. The point that Freud makes with his theory of the superego is that this is exactly what the modern psyche is designed to prevent. The same agency that says “you must be (Enjoy!)” also says “you may not be,” thus creating a constant stream of guilt and suffering. In Freud this suffering, like the superego from which it issues, remains mostly unconscious. In Tanizaki, however, it comes to light in the little pockets of excruciation to which his zuihitsu are so often drawn, and from which they always avert their gaze again, in haste.

In Praise of Racism: Reading “In Praise of Shadows” “In Praise of Shadows” uses no image more frequently than that of layers. There are layers of darkness around ink paintings in the Japanese alcove, layers of shadow under eaves at the Japanese temple, and layers of mystery in the sheen of lacquerware, the glow of jade, and the patina of silver. There are even layers of sweet and salty opacity in jellied bean miso, and soy sauce. Tanizaki’s descriptions are lovely, and paste (y okan), his claim that appreciating shadows is an “Oriental” quality would seem straightforwardly culturalist if it were not for passages like this: Of course in all truthfulness “the glow of antiquity” is actually the glow of grime. The Chinese word shutaku (soil from handling) and the Japanese word nare (familiarity) both refer to the sheen of oil left by years of repeated touching—in other words, to filth. If “elegance is frigid” one could also quip that it is squalid. There is no denying at any rate that within the gachi (tastefulness) we like so much there is an element of the unclean and the unsanitary. I may rightly be called defensive for saying so, but is it not true that in contrast to Westerners who

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism    root out and eliminate every last particle of dirt, Easterners preserve it and make it beautiful? (527–528)

Komori Y oichi has called attention to the odd shift in tone in such passages to propose that they hold the key to the essay at large. “Although it is often said that Tanizaki discovered Japanese beauty,” Komori says, Tanizaki is actually “taking up all the most wretched, gloomy elements and depicting them in an excessively aesthetic way, showing how they have been integrated into Japanese life, and attempting to grasp the fetishism of the Japanese people who have integrated them” (Komori and Hasumi 19–20). Komori’s attention to fetishism is crucial, but I wonder if it might be taken farther. Is Tanizaki really showing wrechedness and aesthetics to be synonymous? Or could aesthetics be a response to wretchedness, its fetishization functioning to divert attention away from a prior trauma? In the preceding passage, “wretchedness” draws attention to itself as the product of an impossible identification that demands both that Japan adopt the Western obsession with the clean and the sanitary, and that impossible standards (eliminate every last particle of dirt!) will ensure failure. Given that this identification sets up an endless loop of painful selfjudgment, it is no wonder that protective layers of grime should come to seem welcome in comparison. Recourse to “our own culture” and “our own arts” comes only after the encounter with the harsh superego, but its role as a defense against the trauma of the encounter is no less necessary as a result. In a more traditional reading, It o- Sei has called “In Praise of Shadows” “an epoch-making treatise on the essential qualities of Japanese culture” (Tanizaki 168). What we notice when we reread the passages he uses to support his point, however, is that these “essential qualities” are painfully racialized and far from beautiful. Quoting from a passage on lacquerware, It o- praises Tanizaki for his description of the vessels themselves, and for his “firm grasp of the heart, the workmanship of the artist of old who labored so intently over their beauty” (168). He is impressed by Tanizaki’s ability to set aside how lacquerware looks to modern eyes and inhabit the eye of the traditional craftsman, who would have thought only of lacquerware’s magical effects in the darkness of traditional Japanese rooms. What It o- does not mention (even while praising Tanizaki’s “firm grasp”) is how closely the lacquerware passages link the visual with the tactile and the epidermal. He quotes, “traditional lacquerware is coated in black, brown, or red [ . . . ]—colors built from layer upon layer of darkness, as if born spontaneously from the blackest corners of the room” (169). The character for coating is the same as the character for skin—hada—and Tanizaki strengthens the association by traversing this coating with pulsating blood vessels:

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism Imagine how much charm would be lost if there were no lacquerware in the shadowy room to reflect a world of dreams in the dim light cast by candles, as the flickering of their shadows beats the pulse of the night itself. The lacquerware threads its own emaki design through the darkness, as if a spring had welled up and begun darting in tiny streams across the tatami, capturing the light of a single lamp now here and now there, transmitting its luster in a web of faintly glowing rivulets. (530)

The room comes alive as if in a network of darting capillaries, throbbing, and Tanizaki completes the image by noting that what he likes most about lacquerware is how it feels, full of soup, when he cradles it in his palms and raises it to his lips. Droplets condense in faint traces of sweat on its surface, and as the weight of warm liquid shifts slightly from side to side, he feels he is holding “the pudgy flesh of a newborn baby” (531). Lacquerware, in other words, is a metaphor for Japanese skin. As the essay considers how the wrinkled skin of an old priest is set off by the gold brocade of his robes, or how the dusky hands, neck, and face of the n oactor peek charmingly from beneath his gorgeous costume, the darkness of Japanese skin is echoed in the “murky depths” of lacquerware’s sheen (531).” Our ancestors made woman into an object indistinguishable from darkness,” Tanizaki writes, “her face alone gleaming like gold or motherof-pearl against a dark body of sallow lacquer coating” (546). Sometimes the tint of the lacquer finds a counterpart in the melanin of an Asian complexion, as when red, brown, black, and white layers of varnish line up in symmetry with the “ruddy,” “blackish-brown,” and “yellow-tinged ivory” complexion of the child actor (541). Curiously, the effect is erotic: Tanizaki says he can understand why the Ashikaga shoguns used to fall in love with the boy actors in their n o- troupes. Shortly after finishing The Ego and the Id, Freud coined the term moral masochism to describe a perversion in which the ego reaps gratification from the cruel treatment of the superego. Critics tend to agree, however, that moral masochism is less a perversion than a troubling account of the psyche’s normal operations. Leo Bersani classes the setting up of the superego and its permanent aggression “on the dysfunctional side of human development” and concludes that “the narcissistic pleasures of primary identification are inseparable from masochistic pleasures” (97). As Tanizaki continues to discuss the “skin of the yellow races” ( oshoku jinshu no hada), his imagery moves closer and closer to moral masochism, and in - quotation elides: “traditional such a way as to highlight a phrase that It o’s lacquerware is coated in black, brown, or red, and nowadays there is also something called white lacquer” (529, italics added). The significance of It o’s illision becomes clear if we consider Tanizaki’s account of what it felt like to mingle with white foreigners in Yokohama in the early 1920s:

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism    [N]o matter how white a Japanese woman may be, there is always a faint shadow to her whiteness. So as not to compare poorly with Western women, she may cover every bit of exposed flesh—her back, her shoulders, her underarms—with white powder. But she can never blot out the darkness that lies sunk in the depths of her skin. It is clearly visible, like dirt settled at the bottom of clean water when viewed from on high. Dingy little crevices catch the darkness, especially around her nostrils and neck, in the hollows of her spine and the spaces between her fingers. [ . . . ] When one of us joins a group of Westerners it is like an inky stain appearing on a sheet of clean white paper. From our perspective too the interloper is an eyesore, and the feeling unpleasant. With this in mind, it is easy for us to empathize with the psychology that in the past caused the white races (hakuseki jinshu). . . . I do not know the situajinshu) to reject the colored races (y ushiki tion today, but at the time of the [American] Civil War when the persecution of blacks was at its most severe, hatred and scorn extended not only to blacks but to children of mixed blood, their children, and their children with whites. . . . Not even a child who at first glance appeared no different from a pure-blooded white, but who had a black relative two or three generations back, could escape the unmerciful gaze bent on detecting even the slightest trace of color hidden beneath immaculate white skin. When we consider this too we understand how deep the jinshu).  relationship is between shadows and our own yellow race (wareware oshoku (547–548)

This is probably the most jarring of the essay’s exposures of the “enjoyment” (you must be like me!) half of the Western superego’s injunction. Just as Zizek predicts, with enjoyment comes violence, as identification with “the white races” casually endorses the aesthetics of slavery. Exposing the other (you may not be like me!) half of the same injunction are Tanizaki’s intimate observations of Japanese nostrils and necklines, which belie his claim that this racist psychology existed only in the past. Detailing their dingy crevices, he shows that his generation has internalized the same unmerciful gaze that persecutes blackness in the American South, and has done so too completely to sing Japan’s “praises” from anywhere but the “on high” of the same racist perspective. We begin to see the uncomfortable connection between the shadows that supposedly lend charm to “our own yellow race” and the ones that make unpleasant smudges on clean white paper. To consider their deep relationship is to perceive the skin of the shoguns’ boy actors to be sexy in the same awful way that the skin of the modern woman is shamefully, indelibly soiled. If “nowadays there is also something called white lacquer,” it corresponds to nothing so much as to the powdered skin of these Japanese partygoers, with their complexions built from layer upon layer of a hue that, despite how white it is, can only look to modern eyes as though it were born from the blackest corner of the room. To give a racialized reading of the moral masochism in “In Praise of

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism Shadows,” it is also important to remark on the curious figure of Albert Einstein. The physicist appears in a discussion of how Tanizaki thinks loudspeakers and electric lights are ruining full moon festivals held on the grounds of autumn temples. Einstein would ostensibly agree; he is remembered to have remarked on wasted electricity during a train trip through the Japanese countryside with Tanizaki’s friend, the editor of Kaiz o- magazine. Tanizaki recalls his friend explaining Einstein’s concern by way of standard anti-Semitism: Jews are simply thrifty and naturally attuned to such things. Still, it seems unlikely that stereotypical thrift is what forged the link in Tanizaki’s imagination between anti-Semitism on the one hand and regret over culture under siege by technology on the other. “In Praise of Shadows” laments that by lagging behind the West, Japan lost its chance to develop different scientific discourses—unimagined theories of “things like electricity, light, and atoms”—that could have complemented rather than eradicated “the spirit of the nation” (523). On the surface the essay endorses the idea that ethnicity can remain bifurcated from technology— that the Japanese race can remain separate from Western science as if in - (“Japanese spirit, Western technolcontinued observation of wakon y osai ogy”), the slogan that managed Japan’s anxiety during the Meiji period. But given that atomic physics and the nature of light are already at issue, Einstein’s appearance seems hardly haphazard. He is a Jew, but his most intimate thoughts have become synonymous with the laws of Western science.3 If Tanizaki imagines Einstein’s remarks on the ill-use of electricity to be tinged with sadness, could it be because Tanizaki’s Einstein recognizes his own collusion with the culture of the West and therefore with Western anti-Semitism? In other words, might Einstein, in his very person, embody the inextricability of ethnic thought from its own persecution? Inventing his own science, Einstein did what Tanizaki wishes Japan could have done, but he is no less compromised as a result.

Muggy Love, Clammy Passion: Reading “Love and Sexual Desire” One of the most concise and authoritative English-language accounts of Japanese culturalism in the 1930s is Harry Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita’s “Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century.” The essay begins with intermittently sympathetic readings of early Marxist critiques of Western capitalism and technology by Kita Ikki (1883–1937) and Miki Kiyoshi. It then moves to increasingly critical portraits of attempts by the Kyoto School, the Bungakukai group, and the R oman-ha writers to “overcome modernity.” Tanizaki

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

is positioned at the temporal and ideological midpoint of this trajectory, with fellow cultural particularists Yanagida Kunio and Watsuji Tetsur o. He is said to share a conviction on the importance of climate and living space with philosopher Watsuji, whose Climate had begun to appear as separate essays in the journal Shis o- (Thought) in 1929. Calling Tanizaki “perhaps the most elegant representative” of those who believed in a “determinant relation between ‘geography’ and ‘indigenous aesthetic style,’ ” Harootunian and Najita quote from “In Praise of Shadows” to identify a writer for whom shadows are “vital to the cultural tradition of the Japanese” (753). Noting some irony, they nonetheless find the essay “reminiscent” of Watsuji, claiming that it “dramatize[s] the contrast between Japanese and Western comprehensions of the world” (754). Although “In Praise of Shadows” does flirt with the idea of a link between geography and culture, a better essay for reading Tanizaki against Watsuji along these lines is “Love and Sexual Desire,” which describes the effects of Asia’s muggy climate on indigenous ways of sex. Written in the spring of 1931, “Love and Sexual Desire” never uses the katakana - but its resonance with the monsoon essays that Watsuji was word mons un, writing at the same time is hard to miss. In 1928 Watsuji returned from a state-sponsored trip to study philosophy in Germany. He had traveled in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia on his way both to and from Japan. Once home he began an anthropological study of climate and culture, dividing the world into three major types and using travel anecdotes to il- the Middle Eastern desert (sabaku), lustrate the Asian monsoon (mons un), and the European meadow (makiba) models of human geography. Of the three, only the monsoon model receives its own chapter in Climate, in an extended discussion of how the monsoon in China differs from the monsoon in Japan. To put these climate writings into dialogue with “Love and Sexual Desire” is to sense that Tanizaki is “reminiscent” of Watsuji because he is performing a rereading. For Tanizaki there is no way to comprehend “Japan” as a Japanese without provoking the internalized severity of harsh Western judgment. But Watsuji maintains just the opposite: climate is a miraculous indigenous force that has always protected Japan from psychic incursion.4 Taking issue with his friend’s conceit, Tanizaki mimics Climate’s method to rewrite indigenous experiences of weather as hopelessly overdetermined by the moral masochism imposed by a nonnative superego. On the most obvious level, Watsuji’s book sets out to identify geospecificities that are unique to the area in question. At the same time, the need to account for global flows of power and influence forces Watsuji to attempt something more difficult: to make “climate” show that dignified

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism accession to foreignness is both possible and entirely voluntary. In a passage from the end of a chapter from Climate called “Three Types,” Watsuji offers a distilled version of his method: When humans come to an awareness of the deep roots of their existence and express this awareness objectively, their methods are limited not only historically but also climatically. There has yet to be a spiritual awakening that was not thus limited. Yet it is precisely by means of climatic limits that the keenest selfawareness can be achieved. (A Climate 117) 5

Watsuji calls on the concept of climate for an enormous amount of theoretical mileage. On the one hand, it limits “self-awareness,” keeping cultures from fully knowing and expressing “the deep roots of their existence.” On the other hand, it also determines whether cultures will be able to discern their limits. Some places are naturally good at recognizing what they lack; others are oblivious. Japan turns out to be extraordinarily good. Most important of all is that in comparison with history, climais the superior discipline for realizing and overcoming tology ( f udogaku) limits, with both the realizing and the overcoming completely self-initiated. Watsuji writes that “awakening to the nature of one’s own character brings knowledge of how to overcome its limitations; it further opens the way to an understanding of characters different from one’s own and to the supplementation of one’s weaknesses with other’s strengths” (133). Weaknesses merging with strengths to produce overcoming is a dialectical movement, and Climate does proceed this way implicitly, from the Middle East as thesis to Europe as antithesis and Asia as synthesis. What interests Watsuji about the desert is its climatically induced imperialism. Because people of the desert live every day in opposition to deadly dryness, he says, they reify not nature but “the oneness of man in his struggle against nature” (54). Oneness being the key to success, the desert god requires absolute submission. Thus Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all variants of a culture formed out of both aggression, against nature, and submission, to God. The holy books of all three traditions purport to tell “the history of mankind as a whole” (113) and their borders bristle in anticipation of conquest and forced submission to the desert universal. Much more civilized, Europe is endowed with a “lenient and rational” meadow climate, and is thus inclined to philosophies of order and reason, at least in the Mediterranean. In the meager sunshine of Northern Europe, meadow culture amplifies its “ceaseless striving toward the light” but also experiences a certain “agony of gloom” (113). Yet because they are so preeminently reasonable, Europeans are fully cognizant of their own agony and, historically, were ready to embrace the aggressive elements of the desert when Christianity offered them the chance.

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

Watsuji writes, “This complete spiritual conquest was only possible because Europe’s agony of gloom responded to the terror of the desert” (113). Unlike a normal “conquest,” the adaptation of Christianity was possible because Europeans commanded a deep understanding of the desert’s “willful, personal one God,” and were eager to supplement their climatic agonies with a faith that would allow a “transcend[ence of ] race and land” (112). With envy, Watsuji identifies this knack for self-healing hybridism as the key to “the great cultural achievements of Western Europe” (113).6 Implicitly, that what healed Europe should also make it imperialist is also deeply admired. Positing Asia as the synthesis of desert aggression, European “agony of gloom,” and “the deep roots of [Asia’s] own existence” is no easy task given the colonized and demoralized status of many Asian nations in the late 1920s. Watsuji’s solution is to sketch Japan as its own microclimate, subject only to the redemptive features of an otherwise ill-fated monsoon geography. In places like India and Southeast Asia, he says, annual monsoons must be met with resignation despite staggering humidity and wilting heat, for without the moisture there would be no life. As a result, “the distinctive character of human nature in the monsoon zone can be understood as submissive and resignatory” (20). Similarly, places like Indonesia and Malaysia are so blessed with nature’s generosity that they have no incentive to make cultural progress or to recognize their own backwardness. This is why they become “easy prey for and ready lackeys of the Europeans after the Renaissance” (23). The crucial difference for Japan is that its monsoons take place in a temperate climate. Watsuji offers a loving homage to the nubile flexibility of Japan’s bamboo under snow, unique in all Asia for its resilience to cold and ice (135). For him it is proof that the same moisture that makes the rest of Asia passive makes Japan lithe. Even more admiration is paid to the quintessentially Japanese typhoon, because the monsoon’s unpredictable and more savage northern cousin conditions the island to face bombardment first with resigned exhaustion but then always with recovery to greater feistiness and strength (135). According to Watsuji, this constant stretching to the outer reaches of endurance produces a populace keenly attuned to its cultural limits. The logic seems to be that Japan’s skill at turning weather-based forms of hostile invasion to its own advantage has always preempted the possibility where political and cultural incursions are concerned. Climate serves as a kind of inoculation against history. Using this logic to assert cultural dignity through climatology, Climate alternately confirms and generates some of Japan’s most enduring jingoisms. For instance, the restoration of the Meiji Emperor happened not because the threat of Western colonization helped topple the Tokugawa shogunate but because Japan’s devotion

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism to family unity as symbolized by the Sun Goddess demanded the restoration of her earthly kin (155). Similarly, modern Japanese imperialism is not undertaken as a late entry into the global race for colonial wealth and diplomatic leverage. Rather, it represents a much older religious “one-ness” in the nation, evidenced in the “considerable military force[s]” that were already invading Korea at the end of the sixteenth century (149, 150). Addressing the problems of Christianity, Western science, and a host of other interlopers, Climate simply recasts them as invited guests. They were welcomed because Japan decided it had a “craving” (katsub o- ) for elements - 120). Watsuji ends his “Three it inherently knew itself to lack (118, F udo Types” chapter on exactly this note of desire, boasting of Japan’s lusty propensity for self-supplementation: “No other land in the Orient displayed - quite so intensely” (118, F udo - 120). this yearning (katsub o) Volatile sentiments such as “yearning” are extremely rare in Climate, so it is easy to imagine why Tanizaki would be drawn to this image in particular. Contradicting his friend’s famous treatise, he holds that Japan’s innate capacity for desire is woefully inferior to that of the rest of Asia, to say nothing of Europe. Further, this is because Japan has had so much success supplementing its weakness with others’ strengths, or at least the West’s strengths. Playing with the formal aspects of culturalist writing as genre, “Love and Sexual Desire,” like Climate, builds its argument for geocultural uniqueness by marshalling a wide and often random range of moments from the Japanese past. Here, however, no attempt is made to camouflage the narrowly modern parameters of this mode of historicism. To illustrate the timelessness of the nation’s weak sexual constitution, the essay offers this tongue-in-cheek anecdote about Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616): I remember reading a piece of advice on women’s etiquette in some book or other—I’m fairly certain it was from Tokugawa Ieyasu—that the secret to remaining in a husband’s affections is not to remain endlessly in his bed, but to return to one’s own bed as quickly as possible after marital relations. Such advice reflects Japanese people’s fundamental dislike for lustful indulgence, but to hear such things said of a man like Ieyasu, unparalleled in mental and physical strength, is a bit surprising. (257) [ . . . ] So long as they are Japanese, husbands probably sense the truth of Ieyasu’s advice even more keenly than their wives. [ . . . ] The causes are no doubt various, but the fact remains that Japanese men fatigue comparatively quickly. It may be that the fatigue affects us mentally, convincing us that we have acted disgracefully, with gloom and passivity the result. Or it may be that our heads start out stuffed with traditional thoughts of love and sex as vulgar, so that, conversely, it is our melancholy mind that influences the flesh. In any case, it is clear that we are a race of people unable to withstand the more vigorous carnal pleasures. One finds this corroborated by prostitutes at international port cities like Yokohama

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism    and Kobe. According to them, Japanese have much weaker desire than foreigners. (259)

Tanizaki’s coy use of the nature-nurture riddle reveals that the long span of nativist tradition supposedly connecting him to Ieyasu, and indeed to all men “so long as they are Japanese,” is comically short. He asks, Are Japanese men feeble on account of their race ( jinshu) or on account of their - Either answer would allow for a properly timeless, untradition (dent o)? adulterated Japan, but clearly neither answer is correct. Japanese men are feeble on account, quite literally, of prostitutes at international port cities. These are the women whom modern capitalism has positioned in the most strategic places for judging Japanese men against their global competitors. Accordingly, they are the ones who know. To hear of Ieyasu’s sexual weakness is “a bit surprising” not because the military hero was otherwise so virile but because the current moment is one in which remembered remarks by hired sex workers are what decide such things. “Love and Sexual Desire” continues: “We are just as strong of mind and body as any Westerners—one look at history past and present tells us that. The fact that we are not as robust in matters of sexual desire is conditioned less by physiology (taishitsu) than by weather (kik o- ), climate ( f udo), diet (shokumotsu), and housing ( j ukyo)” (260). By “weather” and “climate” Tanizaki means almost exclusively “humidity,” which he describes with relish in the unphilosophical vocabulary of onomatopoeia. Words like beto beto (sticky), nura nura (slippery), jime jime (soggy), and poya poya (clammy) drip onto his pages in a fit of sweaty exertion. Not only is his Japan not exempt from the tropical humidity that Watsuji says sinks the rest of Asia into languor, but it is even more resigned and passive, sexually, than its Asian neighbors. This “climatically” induced passivity is tricky because, Tanizaki says, these neighbors tend to have much hotter and stickier weather than Japan. Yet it makes sense: unlike Climate, “Love and Sexual Desire” is not squeamish about acknowledging that the relationship between Japan and the rest of Asia is illogical precisely because ultimately it has nothing to do with weather, and can be sorted out only through triangulation with the West. In deadpan application of the climatological method, the essay examines two purportedly unique and interrelated geocultural properties: humidity and the physical vigor for indulging carnal pleasures: - and South One would expect people in the humid countries like India (Ind o) China (Minami Shina) to be even less hearty in such pursuits, but somehow this does not seem to be the case. They eat much richer food and live in more gracious homes than we do, seeming to live much more lustily (akudoku) as a result. If we consider India’s current situation, however, or how many times ancient China (Koten Shina) was conquered from the north, we can’t help wondering

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism whether it is because they are always exhausting their vigor in passion. People in countries with rich resources can well afford it, but people like we Japanese— born to a poor island nation, active, short-tempered, proud—are fundamentally unable to imitate such zeal. For better or worse, our country would never have stood the test of time were it not for hard work and diligence, the warrior honing his military skills, the farmer toiling in the fields, all laboring slowly, endlessly, throughout the year, without a rest. If we had relaxed even a bit, if we had carried on in the idle style of the Heian aristocracy, we would doubtless have been Moninvaded by neighboring powers and met the same fate as Korea (Ch osen), golia (M oko) and Vietnam (An’nan). This is as true now as it was in antiquity; we are a resolutely obstinate people. The fact that today we boast a place among the world’s great powers even as an Asian nation is due precisely to having refrained from indulging our carnal pleasures (akudoi kanraku). (263)

This passage is fascinating for the way it reads Watsuji’s humidity in a psychoanalytic frame. Humidity is supposed to be a climatic limit that keeps the Asian libido in check, but Tanizaki shows that it functions more like a paternal prohibition issued by “the world’s great powers” against any arrogation of Western sexual entitlement. It is as if humidity forces Japan to obey a global incest taboo by which only the Western father can have the mother—or more simply, have sex, have passion, indulge completely. We remember that in Freud’s scenario it is in order to prompt the resolution of his son’s unacceptable desire—his Oedipus complex—that the idealized and later internalized father demands both “you must be like me” and “you may not do everything I do (with Mother); some things are my prerogative.” Here Tanizaki offers a Japan that mouths its lessons compliantly. Unlike China and India, whose indulgences go sternly punished when they are colonized, Japan obediently acknowledges itself to be “fundamentally unable to imitate” the zeal of Western countries with “rich resources.” In Freud’s scenario, the little son, faced with submission or castration, gives up immediate gratification in exchange for the promise of eventual recognition, which is supposed to come with the organ he is now careful not to jeopardize. Again Tanizaki’s portrait matches exactly. His Japanese son is flushed with the pride of having just achieved that recognition from his Western father, and according to exactly the same rules: “The fact that today we boast a place among the world’s great powers . . . is due precisely to having refrained from indulging our carnal pleasures.” In stark contrast, India, China, Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam, unconvinced that carnal pleasures are someone’s else’s prerogative, refuse to obey the West’s prohibition. Unwilling to submit, they are indeed castrated insofar as they can never have but can only be possessions of the truly powerful. What fascinates Tanizaki is that they enjoy themselves so lustily anyway.

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

If the rest of Asia lives so well, how can it be that only initial abstinence brings eventual indulgence? More important, how well is Japan really living? Undermining culturalism’s justification for continental Asia’s colonization, “Love and Sexual Desire” offers admiration of a distinctly anticolonial and anticulturalist sort. As Stefan Tanaka has shown, the early 1930s were a time when prevailing attitudes held that China was in decay, senile and lethargic, its classical cultural achievements long since passed on as inheritance to a young and vibrant Japan. Identifying itself as the modern pinnacle of the culture of the East, Japan was busy using this identity to justify its leadership within the organic whole that was Asia at large (198– 199). In contrast, “Love and Sexual Desire” portrays Japan as a strapping adolescent only in relation to a strict Western parent whose authority goes unrecognized elsewhere. As the only country in Asia to identify with the West, it is not the pinnacle but the nadir of a culture that carries on much more successfully, and more lustily, in its absence. A less well-suited leader for China, or for any part of the continent, is hard to imagine. “Love and Sexual Desire” thus rereads Japan’s status as “one of the world’s great powers” by emphasizing the excruciation, not the honor, that comes from intimacy with the West. Riffing on the humidity motif, the essay describes the dank, sweaty languor that thwarts love even in Japan’s most famous summer resorts: Everyone says that in the region around France one’s skin is never sticky because perspiration evaporates immediately, even in peak summer heat. This is exactly the sort of place where it is possible to lose oneself in insatiable desire. [In Japan] bodies drip with sweat and heads start to ache even if one remains completely motionless, so that wanton pleasures never even come to mind. In the evening calm of the Inland Sea, all it takes is a tiny sip of beer to turn your whole body clammy, the collar and cuffs of your cotton robe greasy, and your joints completely achy, even though you are only lounging about. At such a time romance is really the last thing on your mind, and the very thought of marital relations fills you with deep gloom. (262)

Tanizaki clearly thinks that Japanese people are capable of indulging their own unique sort of “insatiable desire.” It is just that theirs is a desire moving toward masochism rather than the much milder gratifications of the French countryside. His rereading of Climate comes off well because it is able to produce vividly compromised, colonized images through what appears to be a loyal application of Watsuji’s lesson that it is “precisely by means of climatic limits that the keenest self-awareness can be achieved.” With only the slightest shift in perspective, climatic limits yield insight into not the nubile strength but the sexual lassitude and endless fatigue of Japan’s “unique typhoon character.” Like the cruel Western

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism superego whose bidding it performs, typhoon humidity takes fast action, like a vigilant police squad, the moment the first sip of summer beer is swallowed.

Literature of the Lost Politician: Reading “Speaking of Art” Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) is often hailed as the founder of modern Japanese criticism. His relation to the politics of culturalism has been widely scrutinized, perhaps most famously by Karatani K ojin (1941–) and Nakagami Kenji in Kobayashi Hideo o koete (Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo). Having gained recognition as a critic equally sensitive to Japanese and Western literature, Kobayashi would stage his own “return to the classics” as the war approached, immersing himself in medieval Japanese texts. He would be a major presence at the Overcoming Modernity symposium in the summer of 1942, when philosophers and intellectuals gathered in Kyoto to discuss Japan’s modernity in light of the new war against the United States. Kobayashi would continue to edit Bungakkai (Literary world), the Romantic School magazine known for its right-wing politics, from its relaunching in 1933 and well into the postwar years. According to Karatani, what characterizes Kobayashi’s writings at each stage is a - u) uniquely Japanese indifference to meaningful cultural intercourse (k ots  with non-Japanese ideas, and accordingly an insensitivity to their effects. What I hope to offer by reading Kobayashi alongside Tanizaki is a glimpse of the critic avoiding cultural intercourse not from indifference but from a very canny sense of fear. Tanizaki serialized “Speaking of Art” under the title “Gei ni tsuite” in the March and April 1933 issues of Kaiz o- (Reconstruction), and Kobayashi reviewed it in May in Bungei Shunj u- (Arts quarterly). Kobayashi’s title, “Literature of the Lost Home” (Koky o- o ushinatta bungaku), responds to a phrase that appears twice in Tanizaki’s work, “literature that (re)discovers home” (koky o- o miidasu bungaku). Ostensibly Kobayashi wants only to identify and distance himself from a culturalism he deems both straightforward and benignly outdated. The Japanese “home” is lost, Kobayashi says, and Tanizaki attempts to rediscover it in vain. The problem, however, is that Kobayashi is simply too good a reader to miss the essay’s undertone of suffering. Several times he is drawn to passages that suggest his uncomfortable intimacy with Tanizaki’s exposure of what culturalism masks, and he averts his attention only afterward, in the classic double take of disavowal. “Speaking of Art” introduces literature that rediscovers home as one of many indigenous art forms that distinguish Japanese gei (art) from Western geijutsu (art). Geinin, Japanese artists, are supposed to exhibit none of the

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

characteristics of Western artists: pride, cunning, avarice, and a thirst for fame. Japanese artists are single-mindedly devoted to the “way” of their calling, like guileless children absorbed in a self-made world (430). Straightforward to the point of naïveté, they are incapable of theorizing their own skill and so modest as to appear servile. As a result they live in extraordinary peace, the likes of which no Western geijutsuka is likely to attain (430). What is more, this same sense of peace is communicable to audiences and creates a “oneness” that is unique to Eastern theater traditions. One way Tanizaki supports this point is by relating how, when he worked at the Taish o- Katsuei movie studio in the early 1920s, there was no enthusiasm for making trendy U.S.-style comedies. It was said that they appealed only to urban youth, whereas the common people, the minsh u, want tragedy. Thus the studios were after films that would “make them wring out their handkerchiefs” (433). Tanizaki explains: “With tragedy there arises a feeling of oneness between the viewer and the viewed, and only at such moments is the audience able to feel empathy, and warmth. What we Japanese like is this sort of cozy kindheartedness” (433). At this point we are no longer surprised to come across this sort of startling masochistic moment, when cozy Eastern tastes turn out to be perversely bound up with the pleasures of mass suffering, and “peace” is weirdly synonymous with servility. If the masses are wringing their handkerchiefs in collective grief, prostrate in tragedy, can the harsh Western superego be far from the scene? A consummate close reader, Kobayashi is probably well aware of such moments. As Hosea Hirata has noted, many of Kobayashi’s most famous essays open by describing an instant of shock, bliss, or euphoria prompted by the aesthetic object in question. For Hirata, this is what makes Kobayashi so powerful: his “openness to the seduction of trauma, of primary madness, which continually tries to overwhelm our psychic defenses” (225). As Hirata also notes, however, “Literature of the Lost Home” is remarkable for setting itself apart from any such trauma, opening instead with an account of the author’s inability to experience the home that Tanizaki describes (237). Plucking himself from the ranks of Tanizaki’s “Japanese” audience, Kobayashi claims that, for his generation, gei is not jeopardized but is already eradicated as such. “Can we fear that anything remains to be taken away,” he asks, “we who have lost a feel for what is characteristic of the country of our birth, who have lost our cultural singularity?” Eager to disavow cultural loss, he continues, “Yet given the chance, would we not rather lose completely what those writers of a preceding generation, for whom the struggle between East and West figured crucially, [ . . . ] never succeeded in losing?” (54).7 To lose the West as rival, or not; to be inhabited by a never-ending struggle, or not: Kobayashi pretends that the

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism answer is easy, but only for him. Tanizaki’s generation is never given the chance to choose. It is locked in endless combat, and in such a way that Kobayashi is already indirectly disqualifying the “peace” that Tanizaki claims for Eastern art. Is this unacknowledged awareness what compels him to absent himself so resolutely? The closing lines of his essay are emphatic in this regard: It is a fact that ours is a literature of the lost home, that we are young people who have lost our youthful innocence. Yet we have something to redeem our loss. We have finally become able, without prejudice or distortion, to understand what is at the core of Western writing. With us Western literature has begun to be presented fairly and accurately. At this juncture, it is indeed pointless to call out for the “Japanese spirit” or the “Eastern spirit.” Look wherever we might, such things will not be found. Or what might be found would prove hardly worth the search. And so Mr. Tanizaki’s notion that we must “return to the classics” will not readily be embraced and passed on. It speaks simply to the fact that Tanizaki himself has chosen a certain path and matured in a certain direction. (54)

Unlike Watsuji, Kobayashi acknowledges Japan to have suffered a certain loss, but he maintains that that loss has nothing to do with him. “We” who have rid ourselves of the rivalry that dogged our elders now engage the West with cool objectivity, “without prejudice or distortion.” What struggle existed has vanished, together with the lost home. “Peace” comes from cosmopolitan “fairness” and worldly “accuracy.” Kobayashi’s tone is strikingly overconfident. Karatani calls it “boldness trembling with cowardice” and remarks that it makes Kobayashi’s texts al- u” - 116).8 “His works are thoroughly managed and most unreadable (“K ots controlled,” Karatani observes. “The words jettison all excess and strive to make themselves eternal, when what is actually important is what he leaves out” (114). According to Karatani, Kobayashi may claim to understand the “multiple designs” entering Japan from Europe, but in fact he never truly interacts with them.9 They remain on the level merely of “influence,” their feeble reception symptomatic of a larger national tradition of non-engagement and intellectual isolation (119–120). In Kobayashi’s review of “Speaking of Art,” the stance of impervious nonengagement that Karatani identifies is clearly in evidence. Reading the review alongside Tanizaki’s essay, however, one finds traces of the very erasures that Karatani mentions. What these erasures suggest is that Kobayashi’s impervious stance is reactive rather than preemptive, disavowing the discoveries of meaningful intellectual engagement—both with Tanizaki and with Tanizaki’s West—only after their traumatic impact. The first erasure is in the opening lines of “Literature of the Lost Home.” Kobayashi begins his essay with a long quote from “Speaking of Art,” giving the passage in full until Tanizaki’s discussion settles on

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

politicians. At that point he substitutes ellipses for a few sentences and jumps ahead: Our politicians are taken to task for their lack of literary sophistication, or for being oblivious to what is happening in the literary world, but does the blame not lie with the literati themselves? That is to say, these politicians are not necessarily indifferent to the literary arts. . . . Still, their taste runs, if not to the Chinese classics, then to the Japanese classics, and not at all toward modern literature. (46)10

The lines that Kobayashi elides are these: That is to say, these politicians are not necessarily indifferent to the literary arts. The likes of our esteemed Inukai Bokud o- hardly need mentioning, while even a boor like Mr. Hamaguchi Osachi is said to have loved reciting the Hekigan roku. Former Prime Minister Wakatsuki is always tinkering with his latest attempt at Chinese poetry, and surely there are many others in the cushy post of elder statesman who pass their days absorbed in reading. Still, their taste runs, if not to the Chinese classics, then to the Japanese classics, and not at all toward modern literature. (442–443)

Spending one’s days absorbed in reading is a motif that runs throughout “Speaking of Art.” In a passage that Kobayashi also quotes, Tanizaki describes what older Japanese want to read. It should be “staid and deeply subtle,” imparting “safety and trust” as it erases the “regrets of old age.” It should convince aged readers that “there is no sadness or hardship in the world,” that “everything will turn out well.” In short, what modern Japanese literature has failed to produce are exactly these sorts of books, “life-long companions” with which one can pass one’s days in reading, gleaning “comfort from youth to old age as we peruse them by lamplight” (444). Ostensibly such books, available only in the form of Japanese and Chinese classics, are exactly what Inukai, Hamaguchi, and Wakatsuki enjoy. By omitting the names of the three politicians, Kobayashi has merely cut some examples to streamline an already long quotation. Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi (1870–1931), however, was long dead by May 1933, when Kobayashi published his review of Tanizaki. For his opposition to hard-line nationalists Hamaguchi had been shot by a right-wing youth late in 1930. He turned control of his cabinet and party over to Wakatsuki Reijir o- (1866–1949) and died of his wounds in August 1931. Declining confidence in the Diet prevented Wakatsuki from taking strong punitive measures against those who carried out the Manchurian Incident on September 18 of that year, and his cabinet resigned in December. It was replaced by a government led by the third of - was his pen Tanizaki’s politicians, Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932; “Bokud o” name), who presided over increasingly dire economic conditions and had even less success curbing the militarists’ activities. In the famous May 15

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism Incident of 1932, Inukai too was assassinated.11 In sum, by the spring of 1933, Wakatsuki was the only one of the politicians mentioned by Tanizaki who was still living. Hamaguchi would have been dead for almost two years when the second installment of “Speaking of Art” appeared in April. Inukai would have been in his grave for only eleven months, with the anniversary of his death about to be observed by a public no doubt still in shock over its violence. If we assume that readers knew these facts, it becomes difficult to read “the cushy post of elder statesman” in a straightforwardly culturalist light. By eliding the passage, Kobayashi elides Tanizaki’s exposure of the pain behind culturalism. He elides the fact that “Speaking of Art” casts Inukai, Hamaguchi, and Wakatsuki in the roles of traditional Japanese readers to whom a more “artful” modern literature would be appealing. Three men more in need of the comfort and soulful sustenance of gei are hard to imagine! At the same time, the choice of these particular politicians links the very existence of “literature that rediscovers home” to Japan’s most conspicuous national traumas in the 1930s. Erasing the passage, Kobayashi erases Tanizaki’s exposure of the cause-and-effect relationship between Japan’s emulation of the militarized Western formula for being “one of the world’s civilized nations” and the Eastern tastes that become necessary as analgesics when that formula exacts its violent toll. Interestingly, the dead statesmen are not the only ones identified as the sort of elder Japanese who yearn to spend their days in the comfort of the classics; a fourth figure is included in this set. As Kobayashi himself notes, the subject of lampside reading by aging gentlemen who can stomach nothing but Oriental texts is quite explicitly the first-person Tanizaki, “as I, too, near the age of fifty”(444). Achieving oneness not with Eastern peace but with murdered politicians, Tanizaki installs himself in the same vulnerable position denied by culturalism’s “comfort,” thereby emphasizing its hidden masochism. Immediately following the quote that neglects to mention politicians, there is another interesting omission in Kobayashi’s review. In April 1933, Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) had recently returned from Tokyo, having lectured on socialism in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. Two of Shaw’s Tokyo - along with Tanizaki’s speeches had appeared in the April issue of Kaiz o, second installment of “Speaking of Art.” In the first speech, Shaw recounts his relationship with Friedrich Engels and speaks in his capacity as one of the founding members of Britain’s socialist Fabian Society. In the second speech, he gives his impressions of a n o- play performed in his honor and speaks in his capacity as a “fellow artist” who cannot understand the play’s words but nevertheless intuits its “artistic intention” (Shaw

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

314–315). Only two paragraphs from the start of his review of Tanizaki, Kobayashi quotes from the second of Shaw’s speeches, explaining that he will use it by way of synopsis. “Looking over Tanizaki’s two installments of ‘Gei ni tsuite,’ ” he writes, “it occurs to me that although the author’s style is gentle, his conviction is quite fierce. Although on the surface the writing is mild and vague, what he says is very definite. To abstract this fierce conviction, these definite opinions, I translate from Bernard Shaw’s - (“Koky o” - 287). Using the English that speech at the Kudan N ogakud  o” - Kobayashi includes the had appeared with a Japanese translation in Kaiz o, following block of Shaw’s English in his Japanese text: Ladies and Gentlemen! Humanity is hopeless! Many of those who are artists, however bad, declare that they cultivate art for the sake of humanity. This is not so. Let us leave to the Philistines of the outside world the pretense that everything they do is for the good of humanity. (287)

That Shaw’s dire proclamation should come to mind in connection with Tanizaki’s “definite opinions” is already a clue that the quote’s function is not straightforward. Despite his feigned condescension, Kobayashi never openly equates his compatriot’s culturalism with humanity’s hopelessness. Instead he attributes it to the blandly inoffensive “fact that Tanizaki himself has chosen a certain path and matured in a certain direction.” At the same time, however, humanity’s hopelessness and the artist’s inability to fix it are identified via Shaw as the very stuff of Tanizaki’s “fierce conviction.” How can this be the case if what Tanizaki wants is a more accessible modern literature to comfort the masses? The discrepancy is especially instructive given that Kobayashi admits that Shaw is not up to the task of summary. Although both Shaw and Tanizaki live in an age of global turmoil, nevertheless “the long string of deep emotions arising from Mr. Tanizaki’s own life experience bespeaks an altogether different, difficult-to-unravel something that forces - 287). Kobayashi spends the a feeling of gloom and oppression” (“Koky o” rest of his essay disinheriting this missing something, but it is interesting that he does define it indirectly when he uses Shaw’s voice to mimic Tanizaki’s internalized Western superego. That is, although “Speaking of Art” purports to describe a purely Japanese aesthetic, Kobayashi shows how the geinin Tanizaki comes to life only to the degree that he is ventriloquized by the geijutsuka Shaw. The dynamic is oppressive given that “Speaking of Art” mentions “Bernard Shaw Okina” in particular as an example of the heartless, “razor sharp” geijutsuka who knows nothing of Eastern peace (435–436). By turning around and installing Shaw as the authoritative voice of Tanizaki, Kobayashi reveals his own ability not only to recognize but also to reenact the masochism of the definition of gei in

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism “Speaking of Art.” Gei is the something that forces a feeling of oppression. It is the residue that remains after the European has finished speaking for the Japanese. It is the gloom that only the Asian knows. If it is “difficult to unravel” it is because it is difficult to acknowledge. Some sectors of humanity are simply more hopeless than others, their most cherished national customs inextricably intertwined with suffering. Unable to endure it, Kobayashi refuses to name it. Instead he borrows Shaw’s English, using the language of cosmopolitanism to achieve European identification and disavow Japanese pain. In the process, however, he suggests he knows full well that for Tanizaki the two are interrelated. In the last paragraph of “Speaking of Art” Tanizaki notes that his “remarks on gei have wandered far off course, ending in discrepancies and incoherencies,” and he apologizes for offering them at all: “Of course if I were a true geinin I would say nothing on such matters and tend to my own work” (454). The disclaimer attempts to put distance between the “Japanese” remarks and the internalized Westernness of their speaker. However, when in this essay we do see Japanese authors producing art, Tanizaki makes it hyperbolically clear why it is impossible for geinin to create gei in the absence of introjected Western arts and Western artists. Comparing modern Japan’s literary artists with their counterparts in Europe and Russia, Tanizaki characterizes Western writers as so relentlessly ambitious that one can never feel at home with their works. The excitement and density of detail are so strong as to put enormous strain on their recipients. August Strindberg writes with an ardor at once angry, clamorous, and agitated. Gustave Flaubert’s works are so taut as to make one yearn for reprieve. The Russians, albeit slightly more Eastern, are still far from approachable. Choking their readers with impenetrable bulk, all lack the pathos (nasake) of Japanese gei. Accordingly, Tanizaki says, intimacy is impossible. Yet all the while his metaphors communicate the opposite, insofar as Western masterpieces are never far from the Japanese body: “Appreciating” Western works is like being invited to a neighbor’s house and being served an enormous European feast in an imposing Western-style room. There is nothing wrong with the cuisine, it is indeed delicious, but afterward nothing appeals so much as a simple bowl of ochazuke. The offerings of writers such as Zola and Balzac are like a feast within a feast, serving up goose liver, calves’ brains, suckling pig, and all sorts of other delicacies culled from land and sea—dozens of courses between hors d’oeuvres and dessert. Although one thinks everything is beautifully prepared, one also wonders, “Am I really going to be forced to eat all this?” Just looking at the menu is enough to make us melancholy, and we ready our antacids and laxatives. (184)

For Tanizaki, the greater the Western writer, the more invasive the art.

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

Yet by his own admission he is in no position to end his cultural gluttony. His example suggests that none of his peers is either. In modern Japan every literary upbringing requires the mandatory yet painfully constipating ingestion of a whole canon of Western authors whose training would never call on them to take in the greatest of Japan. Centered on the digestive tract, and in particular its exit, Tanizaki’s portrait of East-West intimacy is markedly homosocial. The Japanese body knows “deeply human pathos” because it is painfully engorged with Strindberg, Emile Zola, and Shaw. The difference between Tanizaki and Kobayashi is that one inquires after this painful engorgement actively while the other keeps his fearful interest hidden.

Cultural Suffering Is Male Suffering Tanizaki’s constipated writer recalls Freud’s patient the “Wolf Man,” whose “bowel began, like a hysterically affected organ, to ‘ join in the conversation’ ” (“Infantile Neurosis” 67). It is remarkable that Tanizaki, who never traveled outside Japan save for two trips to China, should illustrate the effects of identification with the West so vividly at the level of the body. Although the people in question are distant, the suffering they produce is immediate and physical. The eyes of a partygoer cloud with shame, the libido of a husband wilts, the intestines of a reader fill to bursting. Describing this suffering, my own remarks have wandered a bit in the course of this chapter. I began by proposing that Tanizaki’s culturalism is a palliative response to suffering, but we have seen, in his accounts of Japanese art, Japanese love, and Japanese shadows, that superego guilt and its culturalist antidote are not always so easy to distinguish. When they are not shot through with contradictions and sudden anguish, culturalist celebrations can sometimes function as a balm for the poor beleaguered ego. The more we read, however, the more we appreciate that it is impossible for Tanizaki to think about any essential Japan except with a self-critical psyche that has internalized inexorable Western standards. As a result, the retreat to culturalism always risks exacerbating the very suffering it is supposed to counteract. In the end, Tanizaki’s culturalism attests to his realization that to be a Japanese intellectual in the 1930s is always already to be a masochist. Reading the aesthetic essays this way has the advantage of avoiding a critical impasse described by Thomas Lamarre, who questions recent attempts to use the “oddness” of the essays to argue that Tanizaki is subverting cultural nationalism.12 Lamarre cautions against “resolv[ing] the ambivalence of Tanizaki’s text with a simple choice between nationalism and

   Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism its subversion,” and he notes that nationalism may well be compatible with the various forms of subversion it spawns (13). In this chapter, by shifting the terms of the debate from Tanizaki’s ideas about nationalism to his ideas about the modern psyche, I have tried to locate him in a more cosmopolitan frame, and to suggest that he deserves to be counted with those rare culturalists who actually succeeded in using Japan’s “doubled” modernity to critique modernity itself. In Harry Harootunian’s account, the work of these other culturalists forces Japan’s modernity to return “as the revenant to the ‘original’ to haunt the modernities that had both supplied the model Japan employed in its own transformation and excluded its possibility by assigning it to either colonialism or some form of imitation and the status of a copy” (Disquiet 22). What Harootunian is describing is the same “you must be like me” (the West supplied the model) and “you may not be like me” (the West excluded Japan by assigning it the status of a copy) dynamic that we see Tanizaki documenting with his cruel Western superego. Harootunian argues that Japanese intellectuals managed to “haunt” this original in part by refusing to obey it. In the “disquiet” of their relation to history, they offer proof that “the here and there of modernity are coeval” (17). Tanizaki of course describes the haunting in the opposite direction—it is always the West that has taken up residence inside the Japanese psyche. But does this make his account of Japan’s coeval modernity any less critical? As we will see in Chapter 2, the Westernness of the superego is unique to Tanizaki’s aesthetic essays. When he describes the modern Japanese psyche in a domestic frame, the superego is just as inexorable, but no longer foreign. For Tanizaki, in other words, what characterizes the contemporaneity of Japanese and Western modernity is not the superego’s Westernness but its harshness: its constant contradictory injunctions, and the way they prove so difficult to disobey. Where Tanizaki can be said to go further than his fellow “good” culturalists is in pointing out that this difficulty is intimately bound up with its homosociality. As Freud’s model of a son and his paternal imago predicts, “you must be, you may not be” is a distinctly male kind of suffering. This is borne out in Tanizaki’s aesthetic essays. In “In Praise of Shadows,” women are objects of national beauty, or filth, as the case may be, but never themselves the victims of an inexorable Western superego. In “Love and Sexual Desire” they provide the occasion for Japanese men to feel inferior vis-à-vis Western men’s sexual prowess and entitlement, but we get no sense that they too might harbor sexual anxieties. In “Speaking of Art,” women’s roles as intermediaries are dispensed with altogether as the psyche of the Japanese artist is transgressed directly by his intellectually overbearing Western counterpart. Clearly the absence of women from the moral masochism of culturalism is not incidental. But what are we

Suffering Through Japanese Culturalism   

to make of it? How does it inform Tanizaki’s broader critique of modern subjectivity? In the next chapter, as we turn our attention from Tanizaki’s culturalist writing to his fiction and autobiography, we will find that women suffer from a masochism all their own, and that the intransigence of this other, “feminine” masochism makes loving women even more perverse than loving nation.

  r 

The Problem with Parody: Masochism, the Death Drive, and the Laws of Thermodynamics in “Sato- Haruo” and The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi

2

in the summer of 1932 Albert Einstein sent a letter to Sigmund Freud asking if there were any way “to deliver mankind from the curse of war.” The League of Nations was promoting exchanges between intellectuals from different fields, and Einstein chose Freud because he saw war as a problem of the struggle between human instinct and human civilization. Given man’s “lust for hatred and destruction,” Einstein asked, is there any hope of a “mental evolution” that would bring us beyond war? Although Freud answered in the affirmative, his remarks were not upbeat. Drawing from his argument in Civilization and Its Discontents, he explained that the process of civilization was commensurate with the process of “psychical modifications” by which men learned to channel the death instinct inward. Rather than directing it onto objects, the pacifist internalizes aggression, so a decrease in war means an increase in individual suffering. “You will notice,” Freud wrote to Einstein, “that it is by no means a trivial matter if this process is carried too far: it is positively unhealthy” (“Why War?” 211). If Einstein had read Japanese, he might have been interested to find an - o- hiwa almost identical answer in the first installment of Tanizaki’s Bush uk  1 (The secret history of the Lord of Musashi”). Tanizaki’s faux historical novel, the serialization of which began in October 1931, a little less than a year prior to the Freud-Einstein correspondence, opens with a modern narrator pondering the portrait of a samurai from the Sengoku (1482– 1615) period. Why does he have such a pained expression on his face?

The Problem with Parody   

The narrator deduces that the more sadism a warrior has at his disposal for military valor, the more masochism he will have to endure should he fail to direct it outward; and this samurai, the Lord of Musashi, has failed to a “positively unhealthy” degree. Irrelevant as protection, his armor seems to have trapped the “demon of his misery” inside a cold, civilized shell, making him suffer “like a prisoner moaning in cruel fetters” (191). Of course Tanizaki’s tone could not be more different from Freud’s. Campy and over the top, his salacious narrator (“Can it possibly be true?”) sniffs out sexual secrets with the same enthusiasm he attributes to the authors of the fake historical documents that form the basis of his narrative. “Discovered” this way, the samurai’s masochism seems entirely discursive, generated not by returning sadism but by the very investigators who seek it out with prurient delight. “Am I projecting? (ki no sei ka?)” (191) the narrator asks himself, and the answer is, obviously, yes! When we first begin The Secret History, the urge to read it as a parody of masochism is overwhelming. As the story develops and the scope of the hero’s masochism expands from the “moral” masochism of returning sadism to the “feminine” masochism of a castration fantasy, the outrageousness of both the perversions themselves and the tone used to narrate them only increases. The result is that form and content appear to compete. As readers, we want form to win. We want parody to undermine the modern logic that one must either aggress the other or suffer as a masochist. We also want it to subvert the relationship between femininity and castration. But is it up to the task? This chapter reads The Secret History alongside two contemporary texts to argue that the problem with parody is that its objects, here, are impervious. The first of the two contemporary texts is by Tanizaki himself. Written at the same time as the Secret History, “Sato- Haruo ni ataete kako hansei o kataru sho” (An account of the first half of my life, for Sato- Haruo) seems worlds apart in tone and subject matter. A melancholy zuihitsu addressed to the author’s best friend, the essay presents itself as a kind of olive branch - reconciliation after almost a deon the occasion of Tanizaki and Sato’s cade of fighting over Tanizaki’s wife, Chiyo. I read it, however, as evidence that one of the most intense masochistic relationships in Tanizaki’s - The essay writing in the 1930s is the one he describes having with Sato. chronicles Tanizaki’s experience of their so-called “love triangle” as a bewilderingly dualistic affair. The more the two men try to sever relations, the more they end up locked in the same intrapsychic combat identified in Chapter 1 as a kind of moral masochism. At the same time, the harder Tanizaki tries to love Chiyo, the more she recedes into nothingness, powerless to intervene in her husband’s homosocial misery. In the Secret History, if “femininity” becomes synonymous with the absence that

   The Problem with Parody is castration, can Chiyo’s parallel absence be unrelated? Likewise, if masculinity in the Secret History is synonymous with the snarl of male identifications that facilitate the return of aggression to the self, can Tanizaki’s struggle with Sato- be incidental? Tanizaki’s faux historical novel makes masochism seem funny by projecting it backward, arbitrarily. In contrast, - makes it seem tragic by underscoring how projection is it“Sato- Haru o” self the mark of a modern psyche for which masochism is the opposite of arbitrary: involuntary and omnipresent. The second contemporary text that the chapter puts into dialogue with the Secret History is actually a cluster of texts: the essays from the 1920s and 1930s in which Freud develops the ideas about aggression that are so chillingly presented in his correspondence with Einstein. Why must peace come only at the price of individual suffering? Despite the “civilized” assurances that Freud offers Einstein, how well do they really bode for peace? The serial publication of The Secret History began just one month after the Japanese invasion of China that marked the beginning of the Fifteen Years’ War. This fact alone drains much of the humor from the question of whether a Japanese warrior experiences the choice between inward- and outward-directed aggression as a zero-sum choice. What is more, to look closely at how both Freud and Tanizaki develop this zerosum formula is to appreciate that it gains much of its purchase not from the discourse of psychoanalysis but from the “hard science” of physics. As Luce Irigaray points out in “A Chance to Live,” the hydraulic logic of male libido in Freud’s accounts of masochism follows the first and second laws of thermodynamics. This makes it much more challenging to parody than what Foucault dismissed as the “ars erotica” of psychoanalysis! Focusing on the problem of sexual indifference, I show how both Freud and Tanizaki theorize “femininity” as a self-annihilating intensification of masochism’s misery rather than as any true alternative. Although Tanizaki is much more critical of this “femininity” than Freud, the ultimate lesson of The Secret History is still dire: “civilization” is incapable of extending subjectivity to half its members. In this way, the chapter presents a Tanizaki for whom the persistence of aggression and war are intimately related to the absence of the feminine, and to the impossibility of heterosexual love. Read together, The Secret History and “Sato- Haruo” advocate shifting our focus, if we care about ending violence, from the level of relations between warring states to the level of the very possibility of relations between the sexes. This is an argument that Irigaray makes in such works as An Ethics of Sexual Difference and I Love to You. In these texts she asks whether we can ignore the fact that it is impossible for a male “I” to love a female “you” and still expect to practice ethical relations in other, wider contexts. Of all the feminist theory

The Problem with Parody   

debates that Tanizaki’s work anticipates, this may be the most significant for the discipline of Japan studies, which tends to treat problems of gender as if they were ancillary to problems of nation rather than foundational.

Trying to Quit Sato- Haruo In studies of Japanese literature, the details of how Tanizaki’s best friend came to marry his first wife are exceedingly well known. Here is the basic chronology, in list form: 1915 Tanizaki marries Ishikawa Chiyoko (known as “Chiyo”). 1917 Tanizaki and Sato- become friends. 1918–1919 With Tanizaki’s backing, Sato- publishes some of the works for which he is still best remembered: Den’en no y uutsu (Rural melancholy) and Utsukushiki machi (Beautiful town). 1920 Tanizaki has an affair with Chiyo’s sister, Ishikawa Seiko, whom he has cast in his film Amateur Club. While they are busy filming in Yokohama, Chiyo and Sato- spend a great deal of time alone at the Tanizaki house at Odawara, where Sato- is staying after his second divorce. - smitten by Chiyo’s “pathos,” asks to marry her. Tanizaki 1921 Sato, first agrees, then reverses his decision. Tanizaki and Sato- or “severance of relations.” The press effect a public zekk o, dubs the scandal of the two affairs and the public break the “Odawara Incident.” 1926 The zekk o- ends. 1930 Friends and family receive a postcard announcing that a “joint agreement” has been reached whereby Chiyo will - The press calls this scandivorce Tanizaki and marry Sato. dal the “Saikun j oto jiken,” or wife-passing incident. 1931 Tanizaki marries Furukawa Tomiko.2 Tanizaki published “Sato- Haruo” in the November and December 1931 -o- k oron. Ten years after the Odawara Incident and one year issues of Ch u  after the wife-passing incident, the essay explains why he changed his mind on the first occasion, and how he came to change it back on the second. Ostensibly, the purpose of writing an open letter was to issue a public justification for the “sin” of having kept Sato- and Chiyo apart for so long. “Those who suggest it would have been better to have made up our minds ten years ago,” he writes, “don’t understand the terrible power

   The Problem with Parody - no osorubeki kizuna no chikara]” (311). Yet the of the marriage bond [ f ufu long essay hardly mentions this “bond,” and even a cursory account of its formal qualities suggests how little power it held for Tanizaki. After being married to Chiyo for fifteen years, why does he address an “account of the first half of [his] life” to someone else? Now that he is married to Tomiko, why is he still writing to Sato- in the style of a tortured love letter? Breaking the text into short installments, he begins each with the affectionate “Sato-kun” and uses the intimate “kimi” throughout. - when “severed Much of the essay recounts his feelings during the zekk o, relations” between the men were supposed to allow for one last chance at a love between Tanizaki and Chiyo. However, during this period of what we might call enforced heterosexuality, Tanizaki’s relationship with Satoonly intensified, while his connection to his wife became that much more tenuous. As he describes his suffering, it is hard not to recall the preface to - zuihitsu, the special-edition collection of essays in which Tanizaki Ish oan would republish “Sato- Haruo” in 1932. There he calls upon readers to puzzle out meanings that may not “take shape logically” but that nevertheless give his writings from the early 1930s “a certain unity” (1–2).3 What immediately presents itself as illogical here is a curious tone of selfcensure. The essay opens: Sat o- kun, I have always hated sentimentalism, and accordingly there has been a dearth of sentimental elements in my writings—a point that has drawn your criticism on several occasions. But in recent years, perhaps because of age, I sometimes find myself in a sentimental mood. As people reach forty-five or forty-six, the effects of their various exploits in youth come home to roost, in the body and in the mind, and it seems the time has come to take stock of the first half of my life, now past. None of my reckless behavior has failed to leave its impression—not one of the many brazen acts to which I gave my young self over, impetuously—and now I find that what was excessive in the past remains always bound in excess so that, to the degree they can never be cut free and left behind, they only haunt me more with the passage of time. I suppose this is why I have naturally been made to think back over events of the past, moved to a state of mind to ponder the traces of my deeds. . . .  (309)

Although the essay promises to detail “brazen acts” and “reckless deeds,” - affair we find only a brief account of why Tanizaki acquiesced to Sato’s with his wife, and only fleeting references to Tanizaki’s affair with his wife’s sister. In contrast, the themes of excess and haunting are everywhere in the essay, though their proper object is initially obscure. What is the cause of the accumulated “sentimentalism” that Tanizaki is driven to ponder? The tenacity of a haunting that intensifies over time is a classic symptom of melancholia as Freud defines it. In “Mourning and Melancholia,”

The Problem with Parody   

he explains that mourning involves bringing up memories and expectations associated with a lost love so that they can be “hypercathected” elsewhere, until finally the libido that had been directed toward the lost object is spent (245). With melancholia, in contrast, the libido formerly directed outward is withdrawn into the ego to establish an identification with the forsaken object. Freud offers a sweet imaginary conversation between the ego and its new component to account for why this happens: “When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object’ ” (Ego 30). If, however, there is unfinished emotional business, the fact that the ego now houses a precipitate of the lost love creates conflict between the ego and its censoring agency, the superego. Barraging the ego with the accusations it would like to have directed at the object, the superego is responsible for what, on account of identification, appears to all the world to be a devastating loss of self-regard. Freud explains: [M]elancholia [ . . . ] show[s] us the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second. This second piece is the one which has been altered by introjection and which contains the lost object. [And] the piece which behaves so cruelly [ . . . ] comprises the conscience, a critical agency within the ego, which even in normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, though never so relentlessly and so unjustifiably. (“Group Psychology” 109)

If during their zekk o- Sato- had become a precipitate in Tanizaki’s ego, it would explain why introjection had led from an initial removal from pain to a much more lasting and active exposure. “The shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego,” Freud says, his gloomy metaphor a marker of the self-chastisement (“reckless,” “impetuous,” “brazen”) that is melancholia’s signature effect (“Mourning” 249). One of the clues that Tanizaki’s forsaken object corresponds to Satois his own use of the shadow metaphor. He recalls that after Chiyo met - a pathos always present in her character grew so intense as to overSato, take him, like a sad melody he had to try harder and harder not to hear. In the late 1910s and early 1920s he was trying to write with cheer and bold color, a “literature without shadows” (in’ei no nai bungaku) (318); but he says that being with Chiyo made writing this way increasingly difficult, until finally he was overwhelmed by the same shadows he would soon be famous for praising. “I am sure you will say it is because a tearful place - “and I do have a lies hidden in my own nature,” he says, addressing Sato, weak spot for sentimentality, like a chord that echoes when fingered even softly; but the fact remains that it developed on account of her, and came to cast its shadow (kage) on my writing . . . ” (318–319). Unable to isolate

   The Problem with Parody himself from her sadness, Tanizaki credits Chiyo with an agency belied - “This is how by his inability to mention it without also mentioning Sato. she came to influence me;” he continues, “this is how I came to tie such - shadow has fallen through a strange bond with you” (319). It is as if Sato’s Chiyo, the woman unable to block its trajectory even while she directs its destination. Tanizaki remarks, “when I think about her now you are always standing behind her like a shadow (kage)” (325). Freud’s model of melancholia describes a succession of fallings and an accumulation of shadows unique to the individual whose ego they come to constitute. It is strange to think of shadows as sedimentary, because by nature they mark an absence rather than a presence. That the blockage of light can nevertheless accumulate, a deprivation resulting in a surplus, is nicely resonant with the counterintuitive economics of identification itself. In “Sato- Haruo,” these economics make themselves felt in Tanizaki’s recollection of the contradictory anxieties that plagued him during the - At times he worried that if he did pass his wife along to his friend, zekk o. it would create for him and Sato- a situation of paradoxical overintimacy. Chiyo’s new husband might demand that she forget the old. Unable to comply, she would try hard nonetheless, spending her whole life struggling against Tanizaki’s memory. The image troubled him deeply: “I shuddered with pathos to imagine her in this position, to imagine indeed my own position in her mind through it all” (320). In other words, he was worried not about being locked in lifelong struggle with Chiyo but rather about having to endure the same relationship from his position in her mind with the man who demanded his impossible erasure. At other times, the prospect of passing Chiyo to Sato- also conjured images of abandonment. Tanizaki worried that he would be unappreciated and underrepresented in Sato- and Chiyo’s new household. Addressing this fear, he protests, “after we parted I wanted her to look at you and have it be like seeing me, to look at me and have it be like seeing you; or if that sounds rude: what I wanted was for her to know that I exist within you” (344). The concern that he will never find a way to end the relationship is countered by the concern that he and Sato- might not forever coincide. Having severed relations with Sato- as an external object, Tanizaki intensifies his relation to him as a specter in his own mind, and is tormented with simultaneous feelings of being both too intimate and not intimate enough. Technically speaking, these contradictory anxieties are not symptoms of melancholia. In Freud, both normal and melancholic introjection are unconscious, with any “relentless” relations between the superego and the ego’s precipitates remaining unknown to the subject who suffers them. This is why melancholia manifests itself only as self-chastisement. Here Tanizaki and Sato- clearly maintain separate personae inside Tanizaki’s

The Problem with Parody   

-o- K oron’s mind—but this is the point. In the course of indulging Ch u  readers’ desire for highbrow gossip, Tanizaki seems to have come to an alltoo-conscious awareness of the ruthless afterlives of lost male loves—afterlives he would amplify in his psychic profile of the Lord of Musashi. Serializing his profile of the young samurai in November 1931, the same month in which he published the second installment of “Sato- Haruo,” he would push the counterintuitive economics of intrapsychic raging to their logical conclusion, and emphasize their masochism. Before turning to The Secret History, it is worth lingering with the Satoessay to remark on Tanizaki’s extraordinary desire for Chiyo to know that he “existed within” his friend. A similar desire for self-sameness ap- He cites a lack of trust pears in his account of why he first split with Sato. as the reason for the break, and relates his disappointment on realizing that he and Sato- were in fact not “the same entity in body and spirit” (343). “I know I was wrong to want you to understand me as well as I understand myself,” he recalls, “but being so misunderstood made me incomparably sad” (310). After the zekk o- ends, when he has gotten the surplus intimacy he said he wanted, he seems equally troubled: “Since [your marriage to Chiyo] a connection has formed between us that is all the more difficult to sever, a tie that will bind us together for the rest of our lives” (316). The contradictory anxieties of coinciding too much and not enough with Sato- represent nothing so much as the master anxiety of coincidence itself. Tanizaki’s account of the first half of his life is an account of this coincidence: sameness, immediacy, consumption, and occupation. Technically speaking, these are symptoms of a properly psychoanalytic condition, namely, the condition known as male subjectivity. “Too much, not enough” is the classic distress, as Leo Bersani puts it, “of being inhabited, and even constituted, by the wholly inaccessible and wholly inescapable, alien and alienating objects of our desires” (97). For feminist theory, the implications of approaching male subjectivity from this angle may be somewhat unexpected. Since Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women,” exchanges like wife-passing have generally been understood to be bad for women and good for men.4 Irigaray is often read to have developed the same point in her early essay “Women on the Market,” from This Sex Which Is Not One. In her more recent work, however, in which ethical love becomes a primary focus, Irigaray states unequivocally that the nonaggressive eros she wants to promote is not possible in any couple, including a male couple,5 as long as intersubjective relations remain a matter of “reducing him/her to what is mine” (I Love 110). In her utopian vision of relations between lovers, “whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other” (Ethics 13). If we recognize

   The Problem with Parody - bond the inverse of this description—“exactly ocin Tanizaki and Sato’s cupying the place of the other” being precisely the name of their game— it becomes difficult to speak of what they have as a triangle relationship “mediated” by Chiyo. On the contrary, what the two men face is a problem of too little mediation. Their unloving intimacy is so intense and so overdetermined as to make the very idea of zekk o- impossible from the start. Reading between the lines of “Sato- Haruo,” we sense that realizing this impossibility may have been the true impetus for Tanizaki to end the farce of “severed relations.” He passed his wife to his friend not with the hope of escaping homosocial misery, but with the recognition that there was no escape.

- Theorizing Failed ZekkoHasumi, Komori, and Kono: If wife-passing and homosocial misery are fully compatible, why has recent criticism hailed the decision to pass the wife as progressive? In a published conversation with Komori Y oichi, Hasumi Shigehiko contrasts wife-passing in Tanizaki to the dominant tradition of violent homosocial relationships left to modern Japanese literature by Natsume S oseki (1867–1916). “In the case of one woman and two men,” Hasumi observes, “S oseki would have the two men fight it out until one annihilated the other. But in Tanizaki’s case [ . . . ] you never get a tragic ending because, in cases where it is not possible for the various parties to coexist peacefully, it is perfectly fine just to yield” (“Tanizaki raisan” 12). The verb that Hasumi uses for “yield” is yuzuru, the Japanese reading of the first character in the kanji compound “j oto,” used in “wife-passing incident” (saikun j oto jiken). The idea that yielding is an ingenious evasion of tragedy is echoed by Komori, who points out that the name of the male protagonist in Tanizaki’s 1924 Chijin no ai (A fool’s love) is written with - is a compound of two kanji, which in the same character. The name J oji verb form read yuzutte osameru—“deal with the problem by handing [the woman] over.” Komori explains: When two men are fighting over a single woman, the premise is that they share a system of beliefs. However, if one of them does not meet the other in battle within that system . . . then the question of winners and losers can never arise. What Tanizaki does is destroy the fantasy that men’s values concerning sex (otoko no sei no kachi), which they think women are expecting, are homogeneous. In one - yields [his woman], but in another he does not yield, respect [the character J oji] and in this we see Tanizaki’s special way of building relationships. . . . [A]t an extremely unique level he is able to sustain interaction and continue living within relationships that otherwise would be destroyed. At the same time that he yields at one level he possesses at another. I think that Chijin no ai is wrapped in layers

The Problem with Parody    and layers of these minutely differentiated spheres of relationality. (“Tanizaki raisan” 12)

- as a “yielder” is attractive, but it is hard to Komori’s emphasis on J oji consider Chijin no ai in light of lessons learned from the Sato- Haruo essay and agree that the text treats “men’s values concerning sex” as mere - own sexual values are fantasy, and easily destroyed. We know that J oji’s inseparable from his geopolitical values. In the unforgettable scene where he is masochistically thrilled to dance with the white Russian Madame Schlemskaya, the same introjected Western superego discussed in Chapter 1 is telling him that his face is dark, his hands are greasy, and his breath is foul. He is clearly embattled, locked in the struggle that is literalized at the end of the novel as he yields his lover, Naomi, to a string of real Western men in Yokohama. Is this not the “fool’s love” of the title? A love - and the men from whose far-frombetween the racially humiliated J oji fantasmatic racial values he is at no point at liberty to sever himself? An equally humiliating class dispute animates the fool’s love that binds him to the Keio University students who treat Naomi as their shared possession. Throughout it is hard not to agree with Ueno Chizuko’s assessment in Theory of Men’s Literature that the status of Naomi herself is little more than that of “pet” (150). When Komori speaks of the heterosexuality that tries to exist at an “extremely unique level” in “minutely differentiated spheres of relationality,” he seems to suggest that “male values” can be not so much transcended as outsmarted, by means of interstices and lacunae. Is it because the underlying problem of homosocial rage is too intractable that he attempts to find loopholes in the law rather than address it directly? - Taeko in her bizarre acThis would seem to be the case with K ono count of another Tanizaki text about “yielding.” Tanizaki wrote Kami to hito no aida (Between humans and gods) in 1923 and 1924. The story begins with two men in love with the same woman. They agree that one of them shall have her, but once he is married the husband demands that the friend take equal responsibility for “comforting” the wife. Then he falls into the habit of returning home drunk to jeer accusations of adultery. Bewildered and enraged, the friend eventually murders the husband and - cites the text as evidence of her longstanding takes his own life. K ono - no yokub o, - or “affirmative desire.”6 According theory of Tanizaki’s k otei to K ono, Kami to hito no aida is a monument to Tanizaki’s abiding loy- Having himself behaved as badly as the husband in his novel, alty to Sato. Tanizaki senses that his friend Sat o- may harbor murderous intentions too. By producing a public version of the story in which the husband is so abominable as to deserve the treatment he receives, Tanizaki is writing a testament to protect Sato- in the event of a homicide. His “affirmative desire” allows him to turn the prospect of a personal loss into the reality

   The Problem with Parody of an artistic victory, in the form of the novel itself, and into revenge, in the form of an injunction for Sato- to follow him in the event of his death - sees no contradic(“Yogenryoku” 183). What is instructive is that K ono tion in using murderous homosocial rage as evidence of the “desire to affirm.” We could hardly ask for a more vivid account of masochism than two men whose abiding “friendship” produces so much abuse, humiliation, torture, and murder. Focusing on a text that depicts such toxic alloys of aggression and eros (the friend kills the husband with an overdose of aphrodisiacs!), K ono’s argument that positive value can be wrung from homosocial animosity seems ludicrous in comparison with Komori’s and Hasumi’s. In the end, however, it underscores the very same points: the futility of seeking relief from miserable male relations in wife-passing, and the difficulty of even imagining an alternative. Here it is satisfying to note Nakagami Kenji’s critique of K ono in “Monogatari no keifu” (Genealogy of monogatari). Although he mentions only the title phrase of her study of Tanizaki and not her name, the reference is unmistakable. “It is not that Tanizaki had a desire to af- no yokub o- ),” Nakagami writes. “Rather, law and system (h o- to firm (k otei seid o ) are what affirm this world, affirm desire, even affirm perverse desire[. . . . ] None of this has anything to do with Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- the individual” (136). Nakagami can seem vague when he speaks of “law” and “system”—terms to which we will return in Chapter 3—but here, as we make the transition from male relations in the Sato- Haruo essay to male relations in the Secret History, I think Nakagami’s h o- and seid o- can be shown to correspond quite compellingly to Freud’s “system” of human instincts, and to the first and second laws of thermodynamics that that - has no choice but to “yield” to such laws! system reflects. No wonder J oji Tanizaki’s male protagonists are not yielding of the woman. As Nakagami intuits, they are yielding to the laws of hard science.

Freud and the Laws of Thermodynamics In his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud changed his mind about the nature of the instincts that govern life. Throughout the history of biology, he says, “everyone assumed the existence of as many ‘basic instincts’ as he chose” (51). However, in order to be precise about the economics of psychic life—about how different qualities and quantities of excitation are both produced and processed—Freud had narrowed them to the binary pair “ego instincts” and “object instincts,” as in hunger and love, respectively. Then, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he consolidated both hunger and love under the class of “sexual instincts or Eros” and in-

The Problem with Parody   

troduced a second class, the instinct for death. Ah, the death instinct! So much about it is strange. First, whereas Darwin has conditioned us to think that life is driven by change and development, Freud proposes that there is also an “inertia inherent in organic life,” an urge that wants “to restore an earlier state of things” (36) and to “conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic” (“Economic” 160). Second, the instinct to death is supposed to be pleasurable. According to something Freud calls the Nirvana principle, or principle of constancy, “unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution” (Beyond 8). This is why “[t]he dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli” (55). Third, although Eros is supposed to be half of Freud’s instinctual equation, he often assigns it a secondary role, as in this passage where he dismisses a cluster of self-preservative ego-instincts as mysteries that can finally be abandoned as unsolvable: [In light of . . . ] the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death [ . . . ] the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts [of Eros] whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination—so hard to fit into any context—to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. (39)

For those of us who study Japan, the idea that an organism wants nothing more than to “follow its own path to death” sounds surprisingly similar to the sentiment behind seppuku. More on this shortly. Here the point is that the first major scandal of the death drive is this concept of immanence. Freud is arguing that the energy of death—and of killing, as we shall see—arises not sporadically, in response to danger or necessity, but constantly, as what living organisms necessarily generate by themselves, against themselves. We are ourselves the origin of what kills us. The single biggest threat to our existence comes from within. When Freud first introduces the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his tone is speculative. Ten years later, however, when he makes it the foundation of his theory of culture in Civilization and Its Discontents, he speaks with conviction and censures himself for failing to achieve that conviction sooner: “I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness”

   The Problem with Parody (119–120). Of course he does understand; he compares his own resistance to that of his colleagues who “continue to reject the idea of an inborn human inclination to badness, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well” (120). The first thing to notice is the escalation of terms during the decade between the two texts. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle we read about inertia, stability, and constancy. In Civilization and Its Discontents the vocabulary shifts to aggressivity, destructiveness, and cruelty. What accounts for the change? A number of compelling historical explanations focus on Freud’s own experience of war.7 However, because Freud’s theory of the instincts functions as what Elizabeth Grosz calls a “hydraulics,” aggression was bound to enter the picture as soon as the conversation widened to consider what happens when the death drive moves from inside to outside (Space 202–203). Focusing on this movement in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud introduces the second scandal with which the death drive is associated: the idea that human civilization requires men to send their aggressiveness “back to where it came from”—to their own egos (123). This is the topic of his correspondence with Einstein, with which this chapter began. Now we can appreciate the problem from a wider angle. Civilization needs the individual to introject his aggression, but the individual will only perish that much more quickly if he complies. By directing it outward, Freud writes, “the organism [can] destroy some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding” (119). The observation that this dire zero-sum game obeys the first and second laws of thermodynamics comes from Irigaray. She develops it in an essay on Chernobyl, where she laments that Freud’s theory turns out to be depressingly resonant with what we regard simply as scientific fact. The first law of thermodynamics is also known as the “law of conservation of energy.” It describes how energy flows across the boundary separating a system from its surroundings according to a strict accounting system. If “heat” is a form of energy corresponding to a definite amount of mechanical work, then “the change in a system’s internal energy is equal to the difference between heat added to the system from its surroundings and work done by the system on its surroundings” (“Thermodynamics”). How nicely this same rule holds for Freud’s instinct to aggressiveness! Changing only a few words of the first law of thermodynamics, we can create a summary of the main argument in Civilization and Its Discontents: “[T]he change in a subject’s self-destruction is equal to the difference between aggression introduced back from its surroundings and destruction done by the subject on its surroundings.” Meanwhile, if thermodynamics’

The Problem with Parody   

first law gets at the heart of civilization’s dilemma, its second law gets at the heart of the same dilemma as lived by the individual. Associated with the concept of entropy, which means disorder or randomness, the second law of thermodynamics describes closed systems that do not exchange energy with their surroundings. It says that, left to themselves, such systems will always proceed in the direction of increasing entropy. Thermal equilibrium wants to restore itself, bound energy wants to be unbound, and things want to fall apart: “[A]ll closed systems tend toward an equilibrium state in which entropy is at a maximum and no energy is available to do useful work” (“Thermodynamics”). The universe itself is often used as an example of a closed system that will ultimately suffer a “heat death” as its entropy increases and all things settle motionlessly into one final, uniform temperature. The parallel to Freud’s account of the universal biological tendency to inertia, stability, and inorganicity could hardly be more striking. What is interesting is that, in thermodynamics as well, this tendency toward death is self-generating and self-fulfilling. As Herbert Marcuse has observed, all of this points to a rather “explosive basis of civilization” (7). The modern subject knows that it is more civilized to suffer than to aggress the world. Because he also knows that he is operating in a zero-sum economy, however, it seems only natural that he would forgive himself a certain measure of self-preservative discharge. As Irigaray summarizes wryly, “It must ‘pulsate,’ it must ‘explode,’ otherwise it goes limp, it falls apart” (“A Chance” 21). This is even more true for the subject of psychoanalysis than for the closed system of thermodynamics. Being alive, the subject never stops generating more instincts, more death. So it is not surprising that Freud’s science, like thermodynamics, uses a precise accounting system for keeping track of aggressivity’s abundance. Studying his system, we come into view of some key ideas about sadism and masochism that I think are Tanizaki’s as well. One stunning consequence of Freud’s discovery of the death drive is that sadism and masochism stop being perversions and become just two more “economic problems” associated with its expenditure. As we familiarize ourselves with Freud’s accounting system, we notice that sadism and masochism play key roles in a surprising number of transactions. For the sake of clarity, let us begin by listing four main kinds: 1. The instinct for aggression and death never leaves the body (primary masochism). 2. It leaves the body bound in a low-ratio alloy with Eros. 3. It leaves the body bound in a high-ratio alloy with Eros (sadism). 4. It leaves the body along the lines of number 2 or number 3 but returns, unbound (secondary masochism).8

   The Problem with Parody The most common and supposedly harmless way for aggression to be spent corresponds to number 2 in the list: in “fusion” with Eros. Pressed into the service of the sexual function, the death instinct goes out toward its object bound up as an “alloy” that registers as sadistic only if the death-Eros ratio tips too far in favor of the former. In general this does not happen; Freud calls aggression that remains in the shadow of Eros “serviceable” because it helps forge sexual relationships and thus bind society together. Another common way for aggression to be spent is in a higher-ratio alloy with Eros, number 3 in the list. War, cruelty, humiliation—man being “wolf to man” (Civilization 111)—are all manifestations of this sadistic combination of abundant destructiveness bound with just enough Eros to bring it out into the world. Meanwhile, another, smaller portion of the death instinct never leaves the body but manages to bind itself inside, to narcissistic libido in the ego, corresponding to number 1 in the list. “It is in this portion,” Freud says, “that we have to recognize the original, erotogenic masochism” (“Economic Problem” 163). Also known as “primary masochism,” it stands in important distinction from the “secondary masochism” that results when aggression that was once directed outward returns, “defused” from the Eros with which it departed—number 4 in the list. Secondary masochism is the kind that matters most to my argument that both Freud and Tanizaki equate aggression’s most “civilized” itinerary with a snarl of miserable homosocial relations. Still, a number of things are unclear. What makes secondary masochism different from primary masochism? Why is it pleasurable? What role does the superego play? Freud says it would be easy to assume that returning aggression simply joins the portion that never left, if it weren’t for the problem of guilt. In fact, his entire theory of secondary masochism pivots on a certain limit case: the weird phenomenon by which “it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness” (Civilization 126). Thinking hydraulically, Freud reasons that what ends up as a surplus of self-reproach must have begun as a surplus of desire to aggress. In other words, it is precisely those people with the strongest destructive instincts—the largest reserves of aggressivity—who find themselves having to process that same quantity internally when it comes back to them on account of “cultural suppression.” How do they do it? It is in order to solve this mystery that Freud introduces what Bersani calls his “extraordinary addition to his theory of the origin of the superego” (22). Recall from Chapter 1 that Freud attributes the severity of the superego to the subject’s having introjected a source of morality who intones “you ought to be, you may not be.” According to the melancholic formula, the son’s relationship with his father sours on account of disappointment—the

The Problem with Parody   

father’s prohibition of the mother—and the subject internalizes his lost love. In the case of the superego, the very first introjection, this amounts to internalizing a model of social custom, an “ego ideal.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, however, Freud reconsiders the whole process from a more economic perspective, reasoning that when the son encounters disappointment in his relationship with his father, there must be an “instinctual defusion” of the sort typical of any such disappointment. “The erotic component no longer has the power to bind the whole of the destructiveness that was combined with it, and this is released in the form of an inclination to aggression and destruction” (“Ego” 55). In the case of the son’s love for the Oedipal father, the original stream of fused instincts (an example of number 2 in the list) is subsequently joined by a new stream with a much higher ratio of aggression (an example of number 3), because the son would have built up so much hostility toward the man who denies him “his first but nonetheless most important satisfactions” (Civilization 129). When both streams “defuse,” setting free their Eros and returning their aggression to its original owner, the results are spectactular: “By means of identification [the son] takes the unattackable authority into himself. The authority now turns into his superego and enters into possession of all the aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it” (129). We saw in Chapter 1 that the role of the superego is to exercise this aggressiveness upon the ego in the form of accusations of guilt. Now we have a new account of why this guilt is pleasurable. The superego’s derivation is such that its considerable severity first originates as, then satisfies, the subject’s own animosity toward his heretofore “unattackable” father. What an unbearable snarl of hostility! Yet this is how human “conscience” turns out to be both a permanent residue of the very first time aggression was turned back on the self, and a mechanism for making every subsequent return masochistically satisfying.

All Too Modern Junshi:The Lord of Musashi’s Psychic Profile The most depressing part of this story is that the father should have so much power to attract, personify, and administer aggression, and so little power to prevent it. Yet to the degree that the death drive obeys the laws of science, there can be no question of destructiveness not being generated. This is why, amazingly, modern “conscience” is in the business not of stopping cruelty but only of redirecting it. The genius of Tanizaki’s The Secret History is to indict this scandal by amplifying it in the psychic profile of his protagonist. At age twelve, H oshimaru (as he is known prior

   The Problem with Parody to his coming-of-age) is trapped in a castle under siege and doomed to follow his lord in death. He has not one but two fathers, equally overand bearing as the voices of his “warrior’s conscience” (bushi no ry oshin), equally obvious as targets of the boy’s hostility (220). The first father betrayed him by sending him to live as a hostage in the castle of an enemy general as part of a peace treaty. The second father, to whom he owes his upbringing, is that enemy general, and his castle is about to fall. These are two of the most powerful men in all Japan. Yet the best they can provide their son is the identification that will structure the “manly death” (isagiyoi saigo) he lives every day knowing he must soon self-inflict (220). Given that he embodies both the second (he will follow his own path to death) and first (death’s displaceable energy will thereby be “conserved”) laws of thermodynamics, it is fitting that H oshimaru’s name means, literally, “Young Master of the Law.” As readers, we get trapped with H oshimaru in the castle of aggression suddenly, as if by ambush. In the novel’s boisterous preface and book 1, the mood is the opposite of entrapping: irreverent, high-spirited, hilarious. How are we supposed to understand this shift? It is tempting simply to ignore it, because the wit of the opening is so irresistible.9 It is important to note, however, that Tanizaki achieves both the humor of the opening and the despair of book 2 by exploiting the same premise—namely, the narrowly modern parameters of first his narrator’s and then his readers’ thinking about masochism. In the preface and book 1, when the narrator projects a modern vocabulary for masochistic desire (higyakuseiteki seiyoku) backward into history, it seems ridiculous and fictional. In book 2, however, when the text presents us with a term (seppuku) whose masochism is supposed to be safely consigned to the past, it feels oppressively familiar and real. The effect is possible precisely because the preface and book 1 have trained us so well both to diagnose “perversion” and to recognize it as exclusively modern. Tanizaki’s fake history, which initially seems so funny and wry, ultimately points to the impossibility of historical consciousness, to the utter inaccessibility of a mind-set to which masochism would not seem all too relevant and immediate. The preface sets the tone. Imitating the “official histories” (seishi) from which it says the secrets of its protagonist’s sex life were omitted, the narrator starts with a daunting block of the annotated Chinese—kanbun—in which Japanese histories were written until the nineteenth century. Into this arcane diction he then imports a glaringly incongruous neologism to write of the Lord of Musashi, “he is said to have truly been the most ferocious of his age. But a priest relates that the Late Lord was also a masochistic sex pervert. Could it possibly be true?” (183). The juxtaposition seems to answer its own question, because clearly there was no such word

The Problem with Parody   

as “masochistic sex pervert” (higyakuseiteki hentai seiyokusha) during the Sengoku period. Tanizaki’s original preface, replaced by kanbun in the 1935 hardcover edition, makes the same point in modern Japanese: As readers are well aware, the phrase “masochistic sexual perversion” is a modern invention. Even in the West it would seem there was no term for it prior to Sacher-Masoch. Accordingly, it seems unlikely that a corresponding word existed in Japan three and four hundred years ago. No doubt it was largely for this reason that our protagonist was able to keep his weaknesses hidden and avoid ruination by both friend and foe. If he had lived in our day, when a penchant for the strange and perverted is all the rage, he would probably have had his secret sniffed out by the public in no time and had no choice but to betray himself. (“Dai ikkai” 23–24)

The narrator is peddling an obvious fake with the well-placed confidence of someone who knows his product will nevertheless sell, and sell well. He owes his confidence in part to his venue: the popular magazine Shinseinen was closely associated with the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic gro- period.10 Fond of “sniffing out” tesque nonsense) boom of the early Sh owa erotic secrets and sexual anomalies, its readers were nothing if not proof of Foucault’s claim that “[w]hat is peculiar to modern societies . . . is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35). In book 1 Tanizaki carries this “ad infinitum” phenomenon back into history as well, mirroring his narrator’s modern sleuthing in the sleuthing of the sixteenth-century authors of two phony source texts. One is a serving monk named D oami. The other is a maid (who becomes a nun) named My okakuni. Both texts offer firsthand accounts of the Lord of Musashi’s sex life, and both accounts turn out to be motivated by their author’s own libidinal investments (“it is easy to imagine that the nun would write something like this to comfort the physical longings of a life of solitude” [187]). So the humor stems from what seems to be a self-reflexive conceit. The text knows it is generating the very waywardness it surveils, and it knows that that very generation is motivated, to borrow Foucault again, by the modern coincidence of “scientia sexualis” with “ars erotica.” Talking about the sex lives of Sengoku warriors is titillating. At the same time it is harmless fun, because it is total fiction. Or is it? In book 2 readers find out that the Lord of Musashi’s masochism corresponds to the fantasy of becoming a severed, noseless head— a “woman head” (onna kubi) robbed of the single “protuberance” that makes all the difference between passive woundedness and active masculinity. This discussion no longer has the ring of harmless fiction. Yet even before we encounter the “woman head,” the mood has darkened. In the Foucauldian scheme of things, modern sex is something “that emerges in

   The Problem with Parody the very process of being questioned, monitored, watched, spied, searched out, palpated, and brought to light” (45). This string of verbs fits the activities of the novel’s various interlocutors, including us now, to a tee. As we monitor and palpate, we can’t help noticing that H oshimaru is already a masochist before he becomes a masochist. He is a “secondary masochist” whose modern masculinity is hardwired to equate civilization not only with the turning around of death upon the self, but also with one total, final turning to end all turnings. If, as Freud says, the price men pay for civilization is “permanent internal unhappiness” (Civilization 129), then ritual suicide—junshi —is its perfect literalization. Tanizaki captures the insanity of this “cultured” injunction to self-injury by putting it in the mouth of H oshimaru’s father’s representative, a samurai whose lower social status means he has to elevate the twelve-year-old with polite language when reminding him to kill himself: “when the time finally comes, do not honorably forget what I have humbly been telling you again and again” (220). As readers we recognize this as truly modern, and truly perverse. Yet we can no longer agree with Foucault that it is the product of overzealous sexual surveillance in the ero-guro tradition. Like Tanizaki’s readers in 1931, we remain too intimate with the feeling of this military moment for it to have emerged simply in the process of being spied on. Has it not been there all along, in a “scientific” model of subjectivity that justifies aggression by insisting that if it does not erupt, the subject himself will have to suffer? H oshimaru’s impulse, like Tanizaki’s impulse at the time of the zekk o, is to opt out. He wants to disinherit the death drive from his two fathers, their “faces full of valor and burning with the desire for conquest”(225). He wants to distinguish himself from two boys exactly his own age who “stand their ground with the single intention of following their lord in death” (228). He does of course, in his daring break from the castle and in his murder of the general of the attacking forces. But why does The Secret History insist that this is possible only because he has decided to become a “woman”? The logic provides an interesting link between the Sato- Haruo essay and this novel about the young samurai. In “Sato- Haruo,” Tanizaki recalls that his inability to interact with his wife, Chiyo, made him fear he had begun to treat her like an inert object. He describes his shock when he explained his conundrum to a friend, only to be assured that it is perfectly fine to regard one’s legal wife as an alcove decoration (tokonoma no okimono). Eager to distance himself from such thinking, he protests, “What I offered her may have been selfish, but I never made her into an alcove decoration” (338). Now, in The Secret History, he appears to turn the same dilemma to his protagonist’s advantage. It is true that to be male is to be incapable of severing one’s homosocial ties, but it is also true that to

The Problem with Parody   

be female is to be incapable of establishing any such ties whatsoever. What a relief that would be! The fantasy of “becoming woman” is the fantasy of being absolved of male loyalties and identifications. As a severed head, young H oshimaru can forgo relating to men and instead be passed around between them as a lifeless spoil of war, an inert decoration.

The “Truly Feminine” Masochism of Tanizaki’s “Woman Heads” Of course it is not a feminist move to give the name woman to that which is merely the absence of the male norm. Irigaray calls this move “sexual indifference.” What makes Tanizaki’s “woman heads” so interesting is the precision with which they prove Irigaray’s point. Irigaray argues that as long as we define femininity in the same terms as masculinity, according to the same economy and the same laws, we lose our best opportunity for thinking beyond a model of energy that mandates tension, release, and return to homeostasis. This model allows sexuality “no freedom or future other than a repetitive, explosive, non-evolutive one” (“A Chance” 25). What better first step toward a different model, she asks, than to consider that “female sexuality is less subject to alternations of tension-discharge, to conservation of required energy, to maintaining states of equilibrium, to functioning as a closed circuit that opens up through saturation” (Ethics 124)? Statements such as these are what earn Irigaray her “essentialist” reputation. As Margaret Whitford points out, however, Irigaray is arguing not that women have no death drive, but only that their relation to negativity “is likely to be structured differently from that of men” (145, emphasis added), and that we will never know for certain as long as we are in tacit agreement with Freud’s claim that there is only one libido and it is male.11 If each sex were acknowledged to have its own economy of the death drive and its own libido, Irigaray predicts, the flexibility necessary to fathom this actual difference would give rise to nothing less than a new science—a new concept of the “numerical itself,” “[p]ouring forth in a flow which disconcerts entropy, reopens the world and regenerates the organism” (“Limits” 110, 106). Tanizaki uses some utopian language of his own when he describes H oshimaru’s reprieve from secondary masochism. Until now we have heard nothing about H oshimaru’s mother. Her irrelevance to his psychic profile recalls Irigaray’s point that the patricide that inaugurates culture and morality through paternal identification in Totem and Taboo is founded on the unspoken and “even more ancient murder” of the mother (Sexes prepares to discover the “secret paradise” where he 11). Yet as H oshimaru will experience pleasures supposedly “unavailable to the normal man,” he

   The Problem with Parody strikes out precisely in the direction of women, a “different species” that beckons to him “like a flower garden seen for the very first time” (198). When the women take him to the attic room where they groom enemy heads for inspection, initially he is attracted not to the heads themselves but to the way they contrast with the vitality of the women combing, shaving, and anointing them. Will femininity be allowed to offer the option of life? We know at least that being with these women lets H oshimaru escape from the network of paternal identifications that send aggression back to the self as guilt. Setting out for the attic room, he senses keenly that his eagerness is not appropriate for the son of a samurai, the heir of a daimyo. no fuan) as he batHe feels shame and an “anxiety of conscience” (ry oshin tles “something that tries, more vehemently with every step” to pull him back (210, 211). Returning, he is filled with “self-hatred” ( jiko ken’o) (215). This is classic secondary masochism, expressed in classically modern psychoanalytic terms, and it gives way, in the women’s attic room—to what? Because the text has trained us so well as sexual detectives, it is not long before we realize that the place where H oshimaru finds himself is neither secret nor a paradise. As the “dewy” vitality of the girls and women morphs into a maw of abject body parts, their plump pink cheeks, oily white fingers, and wet red mouths become indistinguishable from the “accumulation of death” that the countless heads represent (212). Fantasizing that “that is me,” H oshimaru becomes not an inert decoration but the embodiment of a very active kind of death, his face “agonized” and “pleading” (213, 214). The text reveals that for a thoroughly modern subject like H oshimaru, the only exit from secondary masochism is the more immediate relationship to the death drive that is primary masochism. Tanizaki waits until the third night to give the name “woman” to this short-circuited relationship to aggressivity. When he does, he provides one of the strongest parallels to Freud in all of his writing. The parallel is not just that for both writers femininity is synonymous with what happens when aggression fails to leave the body. The parallel is also in the comically simplistic logic by which they maintain that that failure is determined by the presence or absence of a single protuberance. On the third night, H oshimaru’s reaction to a head with its nose cut off reads like a parody of the reaction Freud discusses in “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” H oshimaru thinks: If only the middle of the face had affixed to it the noble curve of a beautiful tall nose it would have looked like the head of a model young warrior (tenkeiteki na wakamusha) as if carved by a puppet master. But for some reason the nose seemed to have been cut away by a sharp blade, cleanly erased from between the eye-

The Problem with Parody    brows to above the mouth, bone and all. If the original had been a pug nose, then lacking it might not have seemed so strange, but this gallant, proudly jutting - o), - this face which should by all rights (t ozen) have mien (nakadaka na hiideta y ob  had a sculpturesque protuberance (ch okokuteki na ry ukibutsu) soaring from it, had had that essential feature sliced off, leaving in its place a flat red wound (hirabettai akai kizuguchi) so that the face looked even more hideous, and even more ludicrous, than that of the average ugly man. (216)

Seeing this wound, H oshimaru soars into an ecstasy more intense than any he felt before the severed head turned unmistakably feminine. What is remarkable is that that intensity, “endless” and “inexhaustible,” corresponds to nothing so much as the intensity of penis envy that Freud says girls feel when they reflect on their own castration after a parallel momentous discovery. Tanizaki’s scene is a kind of drag performance, with H oshimaru in the role of the girl who “makes her judgment and her decision in a flash” (“Psychical” 252). Just like Freud’s girl, who “has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (252), H oshimaru, with equal speed, laments “if only there were a beautiful tall nose!” “This proudly jutting mien by all rights should have had a sculpturesque protuberance!” But whereas Freud’s girl’s “self love [is] mortified by the comparison with the boy’s far superior equipment” (“Femininity” 126), H oshimaru embraces the “narcissistic sense of humiliation” (“Psychical” 256) because it is so clearly marked as the only route of egress from being a “model young warrior” with a “proudly jutting mien.” It is fascinating, in Freud, to trace how the “missing” penis conspires on several different levels to ensure that femininity and primary masochism correspond. First there is the matter of the superego. In “Femininity,” Freud famously explains how the little girl comes to hate her mother, holding her responsible for her own lack of a penis and entering into her Oedipus complex with her father “like a haven of refuge” (“Femininity” 129). Once there, she has no reason to leave. She has no penis to lose to castration, so she is not receptive to the threats that force her male counterpart to resolve his Oedipus complex. The girl’s Oedipus complex thus has a tendency to linger indefinitely: “Girls remain in it for an indeterminate length of time; they demolish it late, and, even so, incompletely” (129). With no enforceable prohibitions to provoke aggressiveness against her father, the girl has no occasion to take his unattackable authority into herself, and thus never acquires a superego, or at least not a harsh one. Freud writes, “In these circumstances the formation of the superego must suffer; it cannot attain the strength and independence which give it its cultural significance, and feminists are not pleased when we point out to them the effects of this factor on the average feminine character” (129). If H oshimaru were to read these lines we can imagine him pricking

   The Problem with Parody up his ears. No superego? Does that mean no turning back of aggression? Are women allowed simply to leave their destructiveness at large in the world? As the gory “woman heads” teach him, the answer must be no. In an enigmatic line from “Femininity,” Freud mentions “the suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially” (116). It remains for his colleague Helene Deutsch to spell out the details of what this “constitutional prescription” entails. Freud praises Deutsch’s 1930 paper “The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women,” in which she supports his famous claim that “masochism, as they say, is truly feminine” (“Femininity” 116) by explaining with astonishing matter-of-factness how the “turning in the direction of masochism is part of the woman’s ‘anatomical destiny’ ” (414). Of particular interest is the way she describes the moment of the little girl’s “discovery” as if it coincided with the dropping of a heavy security wall to trap her “active sadistic” libido inside her body: [T]he hitherto active-sadistic libido attached to the clitoris rebounds from the barricade of the subject’s inner recognition of her lack of the penis and, on the one hand, regressively cathects points in the pregenital development which it had already abandoned, while, on the other hand, and most frequently of all, it is deflected in a regressive direction towards masochism. In place of the active urge of the phallic tendencies, there arises the masochistic phantasy: ‘I want to be castrated,’ and this forms the erotogenic masochistic basis of the feminine libido. (413)

We could hardly ask for a more graphic account of how femininity comes to be synonymous with the “flat red wound” of H oshimaru’s fantasy. Because the barricade of self-recognition stands at point-blank range, it makes sense that the sadism “rebounding” from it would make a bloody mess. Strangely, Deutsch maintains both that the girl is already castrated and that she wants to be castrated again. Economically, however, it works: she has to want this if she is to process her endless feedback loop of recycling self-hurt. We can easily imagine the same loop creating the “brutally hacked-up head” (mecha kucha ni hakai sareta kubi) that inspires H oshimaru too to say, repeatedly, “I want to be castrated” (216). With this wish, The Secret History admits that its drag performance is powerless to change the logic it criticizes. Certainly the consequences of the missing protuberance are ridiculous, but they are also universal; they are recited by a Japanese author who encountered them only in his own modern urban milieu, never in Freud or in Deutsch. If Tanizaki’s “woman heads” prove Irigaray’s point about sexual indifference, it is because far from offering an alternative to a male libido conceived as death-driven aggression, they show so vividly how “woman” becomes merely a symbol of giving oneself up to aggression with utter abandon and unspeakable

The Problem with Parody   

violence. This is a serious ethical issue. It speaks not just to the ethics of projection, of refused and therefore still unknown future feminine identity. It speaks also to the ethics of an all-too-well-known present, when a “repetitive, explosive, non-evolutive” libido so confuses itself with science as to make the history of modern physics and modern warfare into a history, as Irigaray says, of “disintegration, fission, explosion, and catastrophe” (“A Chance” 31). In the rest of his novel Tanizaki uses fission, explosion, and catastrophe as leitmotifs that define “noselessness.” Initially, again, the effect is humorous. Punning on the phrase hana chiru sato (“village of falling flowers or noses”) from The Tale of Genji, he structures much of the remaining narrative around a plot by H oshimaru (in adulthood Terukatsu) and his lover, Kiky o, to rob Kiky o’s husband, Norishige, of his nose. To pay attention to the success of this plot, however, is to corroborate that The Secret History is a historical novel only in the sense that it is a history of our violent present and, barring an end to sexual indifference, our violent future as well. For what the plot reveals is that Tanizaki’s definition of “woman head” in book 2 is a fake definition, flaunted in its historical inaccuracy to prove that modern minds have no way not to accept women’s “castration” as real and inevitable. The Nihon kokugo daijiten (Uabridged dictionary of the Japanese national language) defines onna kubi as “the vernacular term for what was brought in, in instances where taking the entire head of an enemy killed on the battlefield was not feasible, and only a nose or ear was cut off. In order to prove that one had taken the head of a man, the usual procedure was to sever some whiskers from the upper lip together with [the nose or ear], and the term refers to dubious things which did not fit this description” (Vol. 4, 174). Despite the use of kubi (head), onna kubi refers not to heads but to ears and noses, which are cut from the victim in such a way that they bear no proof of having been taken from a man and thus could in fact be women’s body parts.12 In The comes Secret History, the girl who explains the terminology to H oshimaru close to acknowledging this when she explains that the term “comes from the impossibility, if only a nose is brought in, of distinguishing whether it is a man’s or a woman’s” (218). Despite her remark, however, the text casts onna kubi not as nose but as kubi, emphasizing not the appendage but the head, and appearing to omit any complicating references to whiskers or ears. - snipers set out to turn Norishige But it turns out that when Kiky o’s into an onna kubi and miss their mark, it is none other than his upper lip, first, and his ear, second, that their arrows take instead. After the first maiming, Terukatsu, who has not yet joined the plot, is riveted to find out whether Kiky o- will be “satisfied to have turned her husband into a

   The Problem with Parody harelip, or repeat her attacks until obliterating his nose” (254). According to the historical definition, she is already in possession of a “woman head.” Nevertheless, she presses on, the historical definition completely meaningless to her. After the second maiming, of the ear, the narrator puts the question of satisfaction to readers directly: perhaps it is already worse to lose an ear than a “nose”? He “leaves it to general opinion” (255), but again we know that the quest for a truly castrated femininity will have to continue. Could there be a tighter turn of the screw of the modern definition of onna than this succession of not-onna-enough maimings, followed by taunting invitations for readers to acknowledge their own investment in exactly the object of critique? Also, when Norishige is finally rendered noseless, he becomes the very picture of “feminine” masochism. Depressed and withdrawn, he is incapable of any interaction beyond sex, and his words are “indistinguishable from the cries of an animal” (293). The brutality and relentlessness of our collective commitment to the “femininity” of this masochism is matched only by the brutality and relentlessness of the masochism itself.

The Problem with Parody: A Critique of Haver It seems highly appropriate, then, that The Secret History should join the lineup of politically urgent texts read by William Haver in The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS. The enormous appeal of Haver’s book is its call to reject intellectual complacency and “think, for once in our lives, toward a question worth asking”(xvii). Challenging us to “abandon the narcoleptic comforts of our epistemophiliac business as usual” (11), Haver would seem a strong ally in a feminist project of thinking beyond the relentlessness and brutality of both feminine and moral masochism. Especially given that “the body of this death” in the time of AIDS is, for him, the “dead meat” from which we allow ourselves too much dissociation, for which we are too quick to seek redemption, we might expect that his reading of The Secret History would be sensitive to its unflinching look at onna defined precisely as living-deadness (17). But the disappointment of Haver’s chapter on Tanizaki is that even while he provides one of the most politically and theoretically invested readings of Japanese literature in English, he ends up celebrating castration as an ungendered abstraction, “an intolerable obstacle to the achievement of identity” (176). In turn, this Lacanian claim contributes to a larger deconstructive argument about how The Secret History makes good on “the possibilities of the parodic as a fundamentally perverse, queer practice” (xvi). I have been arguing that castration functions here as anything but an obstacle to identity. I want, however, to end this chapter with a reading

The Problem with Parody   

of Haver for two reasons. First, he helps us continue to appreciate that the text is itself interested in how much perversion and parody can accomplish. Second, in proposing the opposite answer to mine, and to what I think is the answer of The Secret History, he underscores what is at stake for feminism when we gave parody too much credit. Let us start with Haver at his most persuasive, when he is discussing the kanbun preface. We know from Anthony Chambers that as late as 1960 Tanizaki was still toying with the idea of a sequel in which Terukatsu would actually be castrated. Chambers also explains that although Tanizaki promised Shinseinen readers in 1933 that a sequel was immanent, he decided in 1935 not to finish The Secret History but instead to republish it with a new beginning (Secret 19–23). Haver argues that this new beginning registers the text’s opposition to “tumescent plenitude” more effectively than any ending ever could. The narrator who pieces together the truth of the past with his secret archive would appear to perform the classic historian’s role of restoring what has been lost. Yet the authority of his voice is undermined by his plea, at the end of the new preface, for readers not to dismiss the novel as “absurd nonsense, written as a prank” (183). Haver points out that by defending his own truthfulness, the narrator underscores “the radical undecidability of any protest of veracity” (173). Also, by using kanbun, in which Haver explains “it is necessary [for Japanese] to rearrange the [Chinese] word order according to a kind of road map, which often seems to indicate nothing but detours,” the narrator makes his voice a “displacement of and supplement to” a written text whose meaning is already obscure (174). Finally, because the preface is signed with a pen name that means, literally, “surrogate phallus” (set- 13 its “series of deceptive stagings and framings” allows The Secret suy o), History to begin by defining “phallus of history” as “the dissemination that precedes origin” (176). Clearly the text is invested in all the strategies that Haver identifies, and clearly the preface does a brilliant job of retroactively asserting their primacy. What may well be the novel’s most famous line also reads like an ode to the supplementarity that Haver is celebrating. Musing on the infinite nature of the unconscious after H oshimaru’s first night in the attic, the narrator intones, “In the innermost recesses of his heart was a deep, deep well of a different construction, beyond the reach of his selfdiscipline, and the cover of this well had suddenly been lifted” (214). Still, how deep is this well, ultimately? How much can the gaggle of pruriently invested fake “sources” marshaled by the narrator to disseminate H oshimaru’s story really pervert the tale of a boy for whom everything begins with the discovery that “she has no nose!”? Haver’s answer is that the story can be infinitely perverted, or rather that it always already is. Elsewhere in

   The Problem with Parody The Body of This Death he maintains that “the refusal of meaning and intelligibility” is commensurate with a “refusal of community as constituted in the reproduction of the Same,” and that this refusal creates an “endless proliferation, in destitution, of difference itself ” (19). I want to return to his word destitution, because it links Haver’s argument to my discussion of entropy. For now, however, let us move to a key moment in Haver’s text, a moment when “difference itself ” gets a notably premature endorsement. Discussing Norishige’s castration, Haver claims that the removal of her husband’s nose allows Kiky o- to love him for the first time, because discharging her responsibility to her father’s ghost has “freed [her] from the Law of the Father” (169). Really? If one thing is clear about Kiky o- it is that she is never discharged of her responsibility to the paternal penis or phallus. She devotes her entire life to getting her father’s “nose,” in a literalization of Freud’s description of “normal femininity” as an endless Oedipus complex in which the girl looks first to her father and then to a husband modeled after him to fulfill her singular wish for a “penis-child.” What makes Kiky o’s story at once tragic and hilarious is the way in which, as a literalization, it dispenses with the “penis-child” displacement and has her simply pursue “nose” from start to finish. She even assigns her wet nurse and wet nurse’s relatives to helping, not with children, but with “nose.” True, the nose is a fundamentally displaced penis or phallus. Who can forget the scene in which Terukatsu presents Kiky o- with a pickled “memento” of her father while the narrator muses that “really any floppy fragment would have worked” (80)? The point, though, is that the abiding power of this fragment is fully commensurate with its arbitrariness. It is impossible to challenge, precisely because it is impossible to apprehend. To wit: even though Terukatsu acts like a Lacanian and claims that the nose is always already missing, Kiky o- has no choice but to bring her palms together and sink to her knees before it. Also, in keeping with Freud’s theory of aggression, - husband nor her father can successfully wage war without neither Kiky o’s this “fragment.” So if The Secret History is a parody of castration, it is also a testament to the intractability of phallic power. Moreover, if we are precise about when exactly Kiky o- comes to “love” her husband, we see that it is not after he loses his nose but after he loses his castle, and with it Kiky o’s only son. At this point the literalization of her penis-envy story is reduced by a factor of one and she is defined more traditionally by her desire for another boy “child” rather than by her desire for a nose. Holed up with - no the infantilized Norishige, her “complete marital love” (kanzen na f ufu ai) (340) is a perfect illustration of Freud’s line that “even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him” (“Femininity” 133–134).

The Problem with Parody   

To be fair to Haver, his claim that Kiky o- loves Norishige is something of a throwaway line. He is much more interested in what Norishige’s castration means for his voice—which gives way to “the absence of presence that is writing”—than in what it means for his marriage (168). But what are we to make of Haver’s inattention to Tanizaki’s citation of the stubborn equation between onna, castration, and penis-envy? How is it possible for Haver to ignore this in favor of “castration [as] the impossibility of presence, identity, and unity” (171)? Discussing a similar inattention in Derrida, Margaret Whitford points out that it is both a symptom of sexual indifference and a gesture that unwittingly perpetuates it. For women, she says, “[identity’s] dissemination is not an exhilarating or perilously heroic adventure, but an alienating and familiar condition” (83). Along the same lines, Irigaray criticizes Deleuze for celebrating “becoming woman” as a privileged mode of fragmentation and of becoming “minoritarian.” This understanding may “constitute a discovery for men,” she says, but it “has long been familiar to women”(This Sex 141). The same criticisms would seem to apply to Haver, because he too fails to notice that “the absence of presence” is hardly radical when it comes to the question of female identity. On the contrary, it is so overdetermined as to make any claims for an endless proliferation of difference ring deeply false. What distinguishes Haver from Whitford’s Derrida and Irigaray’s Deleuze, however, is that he is far from “exhilarated.” This too turns out to be highly relevant for a discussion of how far parody can take us. In a departure from Eve Sedgwick’s definition of “camp recognition” in Epistemology of the Closet, Haver proposes that parody in The Secret History produces not a community of those who “get the joke,” not an occasion for shared understanding, but rather shared awareness that there should never be anything but partial, vulnerable, and even anonymous understanding between those who stand before the “aporetic thematics” of the terms that The Body of This Death explores: historicity, sociality, and AIDS. In an early invocation of what has since been called the “anti-social thesis in queer theory,” Haver maintains that what we have to learn from something like AIDS is precisely the limits of what can be learned, or known, about anything.14 Such a setting of limits might seem compatible with Irigaray’s call to respect what can not be known about the other. However, the primary relationship that Haver considers is not between an “I” and a “you” but rather between an “I” and an “impossible object of apperception” that claims the “I” for an “inescapable belonging to death” and an “inescapable destitution” (xi). As he spells out the implications of this relationship, we find ourselves back in the language of thermodynamics. Haver writes:

   The Problem with Parody [M]ust the erotic in its immemorial perversity, historicity in its radical destitution, the Real in its resistance to representability, the AIDS-object in its ultimately unobjectifiable multiplicity, all bespeak what would be first and last an existential entropy, an ultimate degeneration, the radical failure of any possibility for community? In a word: yes. And this anarchic entropy is unavoidable. (20, emphasis in original)

Would it be unfair to say that Haver is only repeating what Freud and the physicists have been saying all along? He derives his argument differently, and theorizes a different relation between the subject and the closed system he calls “community.” I can’t help wondering, however, whether the unavoidable entropy of which Haver speaks isn’t also unavoidably familiar because he is interested in respecting the limits of what we can know rather than in actually knowing something different. For Irigaray, that “something different” is always the femininity that was sacrificed at the founding of our monosexual economy. To know it for the first time would be to make the difference between the sexes the motor of a dialectic of becoming, and so “to renounce death as sovereign master in order finally to concern oneself with the growth of life, natural and spiritual, individual and collective” (I Love 60). This is of course exactly the utopia that Haver refuses to posit. It not something that The Secret History posits either. What Tanizaki’s text does posit, however, is no less important for feminism. Acknowledging the desire to use undecidability and supplementarity as tools to undo the impasse of sexual indifference, the early chapters of The Secret History supply the terms—onna and nose—that later chapters keep trying to supplement, just as the 1931–1932 text is supplemented with the 1935 preface, and the 1935 preface would have been supplemented with the sequel that Tanizaki was still thinking of writing twenty-five years later. If he never wrote it, and if the new preface is as politically ineffective as it is verbally dexterous, is it not because the psychoanalytic definitions of primary and secondary masochism cited by the early chapters are too incontrovertible, too “scientific,” to yield? If the supplement is what proves the original to be incomplete, and incompletable, here the failure of the supplement is what proves the original to be depressingly, unfailingly accurate.

  r 

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name: The Language of Abjection in Arrowroot, Nakagami, and Irigaray

3

We need to be careful in one other respect: not again to kill the mother who was immolated at the birth of our culture. Our task is to give life back to that mother, to the mother who lives within us and among us. [ . . . ] We also need to find, to rediscover, invent the words, the sentences that speak the most ancient and most current relationship we know—the relationship to the mother’s body, to our body—sentences that translate the bond between our body, her body, the body of our daughter. We need to discover a language that is not a substitute for the experience of corps-á-corps as the paternal language seeks to be, but which accompanies that bodily experience, clothing it in words that do not erase the body but speak the body. —Luce Irigaray

in the most moving scene from Tanizaki’s Yoshinokuzu (Arrowroot), a daughter who has been sold into prostitution receives forbidden correspondence from her mother.1 It is on paper from the mother’s papermaking village and it holds in its fibers tiny flecks of the mother’s own chapped skin. “This too is paper made by your Mama,” the letter exhorts, “never, never let it leave contact with your body” (36). Pressing it to her chest, the daughter is in the tender embrace of a loving membrane that carries the blood of the woman who bore her. The letter is an exquisite example of what Irigaray calls, in the epigraph to this chapter, language that does not substitute for our relationship to the mother’s body

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name but rather “accompanies that bodily experience, clothing it in words that do not erase the body but speak the body” (Sexes 18). At first Tanizaki seems an unlikely source of language celebrating the mother-daughter relationship. Throughout his career he returned to the problem of intimacy between mothers and sons in a famous series of novels focusing on haha-koi (mother-love) and bosei shib o- (longing for the maternal). Beginning with Haha o kouru ki (Record of a longing for mother), the series includes Yoshinokuzu, Ashikari (The Reed cutter), - o- Shigemoto no haha (The mother of Captain Shigemoto) and Yume Sh osh  no ukihashi (Bridge of dreams). These stories all present classic Oedipal fantasies of maternal regression. At the same time, their very classicism suggests a certain self-reflexivity, and underscores the consciousness of Tanizaki’s departure from the norm with the mother-daughter relationship in Arrowroot. Whereas the letter from the mother in the papermaking village reestablishes her maternal line, linking her to her lost daughter, Tanizaki’s fantasies of maternal regression typically erase the maternal line, melting mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers into the same “eternal woman” whom the boy protagonist is encouraged, often by his father, both to worship and to fear. Indeed, as Noguchi Takehiko has pointed out, it is odd that Tanizaki’s haha-koi works should be criticized as “sickly-sweet,” because they never stop haunting their longing with an undercurrent of terror (Tanizaki 260). Protagonists make frightening night journeys in search of lost mothers who merge not only with other women but also with watery landscapes, wild animals, and rotting corpses. These elements are completely absent from Arrowroot’s mother-daughter correspondence, in which even the potentially squeamish union of bleeding hands and handmade paper yields not aversion but profound and simple love. This chapter argues that the same love is amplified in the exquisite scenes of Arrowroot’s narrator visiting the home of the mother who wrote the letter. Exploring a relational ethics of skins, membranes, petals, leaves, and finally mucous, Tanizaki writes an encounter with the maternal origin in sentences that reject terror and fusion in favor of mediation and mutual recognition. It is an extraordinary accomplishment for it amounts to his having discovered in 1931 what Irigaray was saying still needed to be discovered in 1980: “sentences that speak the most ancient and most current relationship we know” (Sexes 18). Psychoanalytically speaking, such sentences are supposed to be impossible. Lacan’s axiomatic reading of Freud’s fort-da game states in no uncertain terms that a child acquires language only by giving up his relationship with the mother’s body. Feminists took note when in 1970 Julia Kristeva proposed a loophole, theorizing a “semiotic” dimension in language that

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

maintains the subject’s primary relationship with “archaic, instinctual, maternal territory” (Desire 136). Yet Kristeva drew a number of detractors. In the United States the most influential was Judith Butler, who took issue in Gender Trouble with the semiotic’s “prediscursive corporeal” origins (88). If the source of the semiotic is outside culture and language, Butler asked, can it effect anything more than local displacements and temporary subversions? Issuing the charge of “biological teleology” (89) that would become increasingly devastating as more feminists embraced her work, Butler accused Kristeva of “reify[ing] motherhood” (80). At the same time, she also undermined Kristeva’s account of the female body prior to its emergence into culture by arguing along Foucauldian lines that such a body is the product of the very discourse it is supposed to predate. Calling for “a more effective strategy of subversion” (81), Butler proposed that we speak our relationship to the maternal body by means of contestatory performances of motherhood and other femininities within the symbolic, to which there is ultimately no outside. What we appreciate when we recall the Butler-Kristeva debates in the process of reading Tanizaki on haha-koi is how deeply satisfying it is to dismiss Kristeva so summarily, but also how premature. It is satisfying because Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic is closely linked to her theory of abjection. Associated with the sensation that the borders of one’s “clean and proper body” are uncomfortably tenuous, abjection denotes a breakdown in the object relations by which the subject of psychoanalysis constitutes itself. Rather than sub-ject (me) and ob-ject (you, it, him, or her), there is only an ab-ject indeterminacy, “a threat that draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Powers 2). According to Kristeva, we remain vulnerable to this threat to the same degree that we remain open to the semiotic, because both are vestiges of our preoedipal relationship with our originary “object”: our mother. Her body is the “natural mansion” in which we once lived, and in relation to which, even after separated, we feel “the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (13). Contrary to Butler’s claim that Kristeva “reifies” motherhood, this means that the maternal in Kristeva is attractive only to the extent that it is also threatening and suffocating. It would be wonderful if we could dismiss this model of maternity simply by disqualifying its claims to prediscursivity. The problem is that its constructedness does not make its power as our imagined origin any less real.2 In Arrowroot, Tanizaki acknowledges the power of the threatening mother in the ill-named “mother-love” of the narrator’s friend, Tsumura. He then moves beyond it in the stunningly original journey to the maternal home undertaken by his narrator. With these two contrasting figures, the novel anticipates not the familiar feminist debate between Butler and

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name Kristeva but a more urgent, less well-known debate between Kristeva and Irigaray. Is the semiotic, illustrated in some fascinating language Tsumura remembers from his childhood, a revolutionary linguistic category, as Kristeva argues? Or is it a symptom of the dereliction of the mother by a symbolic that never acknowledges her sacrifice, as Irigaray maintains? According to Irigaray, a mother-love truly worthy of the name requires us to think outside Kristeva’s psychoanalytic paradigm. Together with Tanizaki’s narrator, Irigaray shows that this new haha-koi is foundational to any ethics not founded in the sacrifice of the other. In recent Japanese criticism, however, it is actually Tsumura’s mode of mother-love that has been embraced as progressive and radical. In the final third of this chapter, I analyze some tantalizingly oblique remarks made by Nakagami Kenji in the 1970s to the effect that Tsumura’s mother may be have followed up on a burakumin.3 Watanabe Naomi and Komori Y oichi - gitai no y uwaku these remarks in their respective books: Tanizaki Jun’ichir o: (Tanizaki Jun’ichir o: The seduction of mimesis) and “Yuragi” no nihon bungaku (The ‘slippage’ of Japanese literature). For both critics, Nakagami’s comments serve to open Arrowroot for a deconstruction of the binary between Japan’s imperial genealogy—the subject of an aborted historical novel by the narrator—and its abject buraku inverse. I read Nakagami’s oblique remarks differently, however, claiming them for a feminist reading by proposing that Nakagami is at his most politically progressive when his focus remains, like Tanizaki’s, most maternal.

Tsumura’s Fort-Da Game: Death of the Mother One of the clues that Arrowroot does not endorse Tsumura’s mother-love is the way it isolates his voice. The narrator moves aside to let Tsumura speak in the first person only in the fourth chapter, and only for the duration of his account of the michi no onna (not-yet-known woman) with whom he associates both his beloved mother and his future wife. Analyzing this section, we realize that what Tsumura most wants from his trip to Yoshino is a chance to reenact the lyrics to a set of songs he memorized when he was a very young child, just after his mother died. Reciting the originals to his friend on a rock in the bed of the Yoshino River, he is drawn into a trance from which he emerges much later, after night has fallen. It is fitting that the physicality of his mother’s home should fade during this period of recitation, because the first thing we notice about Tsumura’s songs is that they make of “mother-love” a kind of substitution game in which words take the place of the mother’s physical body. One song, from a game he remembers being played at his family’s prosperous pawn shop in the merchant district of Osaka, is remarkably explicit.

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

Sitting in a circle, a group of shop apprentices and maids would sing and pass a small object, such as a bean, from hand to hand. The one who was “it” would sit in the middle and, when the song ended, guess whose hand the bean was in. The lyrics are fascinating in the way they use an extra katakana u to draw out their u and o sounds. Tanizaki separates the lyrics into the following lines, which I have numbered for convenience: 1. 麦摘ウんで  Picking barley 2. 蓬摘ウんで  picking absinthe 3. お手にお豆がこウこのつ  there are nine beans [here] in our hands 4. 九ウつの、豆の数より  but more than nine, the number of beans 5. 親の所在が恋いしゅうて  it’s the parents’ whereabouts you yearn to know 6. 恋いしイくば  if you’re yearning 7. 訪ね来てみよ  try coming to visit 8. 信田のもウりのうウらみ葛の葉  Shinoda Forest’s loathsome arrowroot leaves (29–30)

Tsumura explains that the game is popular in Osaka because of its proximity to Shinoda Forest. Famous from Bunraku and Kabuki retellings of the Kuzunoha or “arrowroot leaf ” folktale, Shinoda Forest is the place to which the fox-mother retreats at the end of the story. She has married a man to thank him for saving her from hunters, and given birth to a son. When the son is still young, however, her secret is discovered, and she must flee to her original home. On the shoji she leaves the poem that the bean-game lyrics cite in lines six and seven: “If you are yearning, try coming to visit, in Izumi.”4 According to Tsumura, people outside Osaka don’t play this bean game, or if they do, they don’t play it as elaborately or with the same investment. If we are familiar, however, with how Freud’s fort-da game is played, the rules of Tsumura’s game are uncannily familiar. Freud introduces fort-da in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he recounts the story of a boy of one and a half, his grandson Ernst, who is remarkable for never crying when his mother leaves him. Freud surmises that the boy has overcome his distress by means of a singing exercise he invented. Ernst has a habit of taking hold of a small toy and throwing it away from him while “giving vent to a loud, long-drawn-out o-o-o-o, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction” (14). His mother and grandfather imagine that “o-o-o-o” corresponds to the German word fort, meaning “gone” or “far,” and they remark that “the only use he makes with any of his toys is to play ‘gone’ with them.” One day Freud observes his grandson throwing a wooden spool with a piece of string tied around it. Tossing it “over the edge of his curtained cot,” he repeatedly pulls it out

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name again and “hails its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [there]” (15). Freud’s interpretation of this game of disappearance and return is that Ernst has figured out how to master his mother’s absence by staging it himself, repeatedly. Although it is painful—Freud introduces the game as part of a discussion of why people compulsively repeat traumatic memories and events—it nevertheless represents “a great cultural achievement” (15). In Freud’s view it is inevitable that the boy will give up his mother’s physical intimacy. At least with fort-da he receives compensation in the form of a game that provides the illusion of mastery. In the Osaka bean game, compensation is again clearly at stake, even if mastery remains elusive. Tsumura says the game was touching when played in his family’s shop by adolescent apprentices whose parents were far away in the countryside. However, it was clearly even more meaningful to him in that his mother’s death when he was four had provided a powerful incentive to stage her return. That he can still cite the lyrics from memory decades later suggests the depth of his investment in this fantasy of “da!” Indeed, sitting in the riverbed in Yoshino, he is about to reel in a wifely version of his own mother, as if she had simply been waiting at the end of a string all this time. A second game he recalls, involving a string, a bride, and the lyrics, “Let’s catch her! The fox of Shinoda Forest!” makes this clear (28). At the same time, Tanizaki’s fort-da is more complicated than Freud’s, as if to criticize Tsumura’s logic even in the process of explaining it. In Ernst’s game, the drawn-out “o-o-o-o” corresponds to a hand motion he repeats “untiringly,” thus compensating for the absence of his wooden spool-mother by piling up endless acts of throwing and endless vowel sounds. In the bean game, the drawn-out “oo” of the extra katakana u also combines repetitive hand motions (passing the bean) with images of plenty, and with additional repeated vowels. The u of “picking”— tsu-u-n-de—doubles up in the first two lines, as does the sound of what is picked: mugi (barley) and yomogi (absinthe). In the third line, the pun on kokonotsu also suggests immediacy and amassing. There are nine fruits of one’s labor (kokonotsu), right here (koko) in one’s hand. Yet the idea of plenty is compromised not only when there turns out to be only one bean, despite promises of nine, but also when the players themselves admit that they could not care less about the bean, because what they really yearn to know is the whereabouts of the parent! What we have is a highly melancholic exercise in which the only way to master distress over the mother’s absence is to repeat that absence untiringly in an act of “compensation” that substitutes representation for the real thing. Tanizaki’s version of fort-da is remarkably self-reflexive on this score, even to the point of casting the repeated u in the role of marker for the

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

mother who is missing. For if the mother is the bean that passes from hand to hand, she also seems to be the u that jumps from line to line in the form of a vowel (in Japanese, vowel is literally “mother sound,” bo-in) that sometimes changes its position even within a single word. In line three, for instance, it appears as the second syllable of ko-u-ko-no-tsu. In line four it becomes the fourth syllable: ko-ko-no-u-tsu. Is this a game of hide and seek? The movement of the u mimics the movement of the fleeing fox, disappearing quite literally into the middle of the forest, the mo-‘u’-ri, in the closing line: 8. 信田のもウりのうウらみ葛の葉  Shinoda Fo-o-rest’s lo-o-oathsome arrowroot leaves

The line uses a classical pun that combines resentment (urami) with “seeing the back of ” (ura o miru). As the fox-mother slips between the arrowroot leaves and exposes their undersides, she actually becomes this vowel, this u, sinking into their interior: u-‘u’-rami kuzu no ha. No wonder the leaves are loathsome! They are the very language into which she has vanished! Of course, even while singing the song’s lyrics Tsumura himself does not seem to think the leaves are loathsome. His desire moves not vertically, back through language, but rather laterally, intertextually, from foxes in the arrowroot play, through other Bunraku allusions, and finally to foxes in another play by Takeda Izumo, Yoshitsune senbon zakura (Yoshitsune and the thousand cherry trees). Strangely, he is not in the least put off by the image in that play of a fox-son responding eagerly when his lover beats a drum stretched with the hides of his dead parents. In his simple acceptance that the mother is always already dead, and in his willingness nevertheless to pursue her through a dense web of language, Tsumura’s approach to fort-da might be said to be classically Lacanian. For it was Lacan who, in the 1950s, reinterpreted Ernst’s game as a matter not of compensation and mastery but of language and desire. It was also Lacan who, in the process, showed how the acquisition of language is one of the most important issues in feminist theory. In Lacan’s reading, it is important that Ernst, who is one and a half years old, is at a stage when he “make[s] use of a number of sounds which express a meaning intelligible to those around him,” but can only “say a few comprehensible words” (Freud, Beyond 14). He is on the verge of acquiring language with which to communicate abstractly, without his body, but he is still making meaning with gestures that make sense only to those in close physical proximity. The most important person in this category is his mother, from whose body he issued and with whom, on account of activities like bathing, caring, and breast-feeding, he continues to maintain a special symbiosis. Freud had already theorized that the subject

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name comes into existence when he renounces this relationship with his mother in an act of primary repression that creates both the unconscious and the superego. This is another reason that he calls Ernst’s instinctual renunciation a “great cultural achievement.” Lacan goes further, however, insisting that the great cultural achievement corresponds much more specifically to Ernst’s ability to use the words fort and da. He writes: These are the games . . . which Freud, in a flash of genius, revealed to us so that we might recognize in them that the moment in which desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language. We can now grasp in this the fact that in this moment the subject is not simply mastering his privation by assuming it, but that here he is raising his desire to a second power. For his action destroys the object that it causes to appear and disappear in the anticipating provocation of its absence and its presence. . . . The child begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of the environment, by reproducing more or less approximately in his Fort! and in his Da! the vocables that he receives from it. (Ecrits 103)

Lacan means roughly the same thing by “desire becoming human” and “desire raised to a second power.” If we call “first-order desire” what Ernst feels for his mother before he starts having to endure her absence, then “desire raised to a second power” is what he feels after having to accept that his original love object will always be missing. He gives her up in exchange for the privilege of “engag[ing] in the concrete discourse of [his] environment.” In this sense, “desire raised to a second power” is simply another name for “human desire” as defined by psychoanalysis. Only humans desire what is re-presented as opposed to what is presented. Only humans, in other words, live lives of desire based in lack and founded in loss. Lacan uses unsparingly violent language to describe what this means for the lost object, the mother herself. He concludes, “Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire” (Ecrits 104). The magnitude of the problem this presents for feminists is obvious. The mother is dead—murdered by “the symbol”—and Lacan hails the result as the becoming-human of desire. For Irigaray, this is the zero-hour of sexual indifference. The mother’s sexual specificity is erased by this second “birth,” this birth-into-language that will forever after insist that it is primary, that it marks the beginning of all meaning and all culture, because any recourse to its outside, now renamed “the real,” would mean psychosis. It is an appropriation of the maternal origin by a “humanity” that then refuses to speak of the maternal in any language besides that of anxiety, phobia, and disgust. “[T]he exclusivity of [the father’s] law refuses all representation to that first body, that first home, that first love,” Irigaray writes. “These are sacrificed and provide matter for an empire of

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

language that so privileges the male sex as to confuse it with the human race” (Sexes 14).

Tsumura’s “Cry of the Fox”: Kristevan Mother-Love Given this sad state of affairs, it is not surprising that feminists rallied behind Julia Kristeva when she introduced her theory of the semiotic in the 1970s. Trained in linguistics, Kristeva challenged her discipline’s reluctance to consider the relationship between language and referent, a reluctance we also see reflected in Lacan’s founding assumption that signifying systems come into being only when the link between word and thing is severed. In works such as Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) and Polylogue (1977, translated in Desire in Language), Kristeva proposes that the order of meaning emerges from material continuity not only once in the history of a given sign system but rather repeatedly, in the language of every speaking subject. Although most speakers keep this moment of rupture repressed, certain kinds of speakers, notably poets and artists, put its disruptive power to work: “[V]iolence surg[es] up,” she says, “through the phonetic, syntactic and logical orders to reach the symbolic order” (Revolution 83). Kristeva traces the origin of this “violence” to a psychical space called the “chora,” the home of a signifying disposition she calls “semiotic.” Modeled on communication between mother and infant, semiotic articulation is indeterminate and clumsy, like the sounds and rhythms of the oral and anal muscles with which the child first expresses itself. We have seen how Lacan maintains that the subject comes into being only by breaking with this mode of articulation. Kristeva’s innovation was to insist that the break is never clean, and that the continued rupture into language of “the workings of the drives . . . and . . . the archaisms of the semiotic body” is proof that the semiotic is inherent in the symbolic, the support for all signification (Desire 136). Explaining what this means for the mother, Kristeva writes: Language as symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother. [In contrast,] the unsettled and questionable subject of poetic language (for whom the word is never uniquely sign) maintains itself at the cost of reactivating this repressed, maternal element. If it is true that the prohibition of incest constitutes, at the same time, language as communicative code and women as exchange objects in order for a society to be established, poetic language would be for its questionable subject-in-process the equivalent of incest: it is within the economy of signification itself that the questionable subject-in-process appropriates to itself this archaic, instinctual, and maternal territory. . . .  (Desire 136)

For feminists, the problem of finding a language for the mother’s sexual

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name specificity is not solved by this scenario, because “archaic maternal instinctual territory” refers to a place prior to the emergence of the subject proper. In other words, it refers to the memory of a time when “I” and “she” are not yet separate. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, Kristeva’s “chora” is attractive because it seems to acknowledge “the hitherto unexpressed debt that a patriarchal symbolic order [ . . . ] owes to femininity, and particularly to maternity” (Three 102). The “thing” is not simply murdered by the symbol, as in Lacan. Instead, Kristeva says, “[o]ur discourse—all discourse—moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it” (Revolution 26). A similar dialectic of refusal and dependence plays itself out in “Cry of the Fox” (Konkai), a song that Tsumura memorized as a child when his grandmother and sisters were having their music lessons. Singing this song in the riverbed too, he takes on the role of Kristeva’s “subject of poetic language” in that he appropriates the maternal to himself by means of an incestuous text. The song belongs to the jiuta tradition of shamisen singing that developed in the Kyoto-Osaka region during the Tokugawa period. Because its lyrics are extremely obscure, my translation uses asterisks to mark places where I have supplemented the lyrics with commentaries rather than try to reproduce in English their nonsense syllables and gaps in syntax.5 Tsumura says that this obscurity is typical of all jiuta; their grammar is often so “garbled” (mecha kucha) and their “incoherent places” (tsujitsuma no awanai tokoro) so numerous that one wonders whether the meaning has been made deliberately incomprehensible (27). Given that the entire genre is thus more or less “rhythmic, unfettered [and] irreducible to intelligible translation,” Kristeva might classify all jiuta as semiotic (Revolution 29). In its storyline, however, surely no other song could evoke so well what it means to straddle the border between the law-abiding order of language and a wild, animal anterior. The song takes us back and forth over this border several times as the son is tempted to return “home” to the fox-mother’s forest: いたわしや母上は、 花の姿に引き替えて しほるる露の床の内 智慧の鏡も掻き曇る、 法師にまみえ給いつつ 母も招けばうしろみ返りて さらばと云わぬ ばかりにて、

Oh, how sad! Mother, who was pretty as a flower is suddenly* changed lying withered* in her bed of tears the mirror of her mind* clouded over, we have her seen by a healing priest when I call her* she is fleeing, looking backward without saying goodbye her silence audible,*

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name    泣くより外の 事ぞなき, 野越え山越え 里打ち過ぎて 来るは誰故ぞ さま故 誰故来るは 来るは誰故ぞ様故 君は帰るか 恨めしやなうやれ 我が住む森に帰らん 我が思う思う心のうらは 白菊岩隠れ蔦がくれ、 篠の細道掻き分け行けば、 虫のこえごえ面白や 降りそむる、 やれ降りそむる、 けさだにも けさだにも 所は跡もなかりけり 西は田の畦あぶないさ、 谷峰しどろに 越え行け、 あの山越えてこの山越えて、 こがれこがるるうき思ひ　

and there is nothing to do but cry, crossing fields and crossing mountains, in and out of villages For whom do you come? For you! For whom do you come, for whom? For you! Are you going home? So unbearable! I shall take my leave.* Let’s go home to the forest where I live No one knows* the inside of my longing heart. White chrysanthemum, hidden in crags and ivy, scratching down a narrow bamboo path, pleasant insect voices cry and the rain* begins to fall now* the rain* begins to fall, even this morning even this morning no trace remains in my home* place. On the western paddy ridge, people* and danger, peaks and valleys drenched with rain,* as I run and run, crossing this mountain, crossing that, loving, longing, oh so sad. (27)

About a third of the way through the speaker shifts from the son, who is in a realm of health and reason, to the mother, who is in a realm of increasing obscurity and desperation. She tries to dash back over the line in the middle section. The first time it happens so suddenly that the son is bewildered: “For whom do you come? For you!” The second time her entreaty is clearer: “Let’s go home to the forest where I live!” Ultimately, it goes unheeded. As the song ends, the fox-mother retreats into narrowing lanes, deepening moisture, and increasingly frenetic, misunderstood longing. The point, however, is that she is never completely lost. It is not that the laws of psychoanalysis are breached. At a certain moment in his growing up, the child still has to give up the mother to a state of nature. To follow her would mean madness for him, or death. Yet because fear of

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name nearby humans prevents her from stopping in her old home, she must keep running. As a result, her retreat here feels endless, a leave-taking never fully accomplished. As she continues to dash and scratch through a parallel register, her sadness is ready to irrupt again each time Tsumura assumes first partly his voice, then partly hers to sing “Cry of the Fox.” For Kristeva, another major marker of semiotic motility would no doubt be the song’s status as a hymn of abjection. If the semiotic is a space that ruptures into language, abjection is the feeling that accompanies that rupture. It is the sensation that the borders of the subject’s being are fluid and unreliable, that the subject’s very foundation is a threatening void. Kristeva calls it the feeling of “death infecting life,” of “something rejected from which one does not part” (Powers 4). “It beckons us, and ends up engulfing us,” she says. Of course no one is engulfed more emphatically than “the questionable subject of poetic language,” which Kristeva says is “retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn” (18). In “Cry of the Fox,” the fox-mother embodies this peril when, with “the mirror of her mind clouded over” and “the inside of [her] longing heart” unfathomable, she tempts her son into this chaos, this schizophrenic mixture of contentment (“pleasant insect voices”) and deep, deep gloom. Tsumura says that the Edo dramatists who wrote Bunraku plays were cleverly exploiting the psychology of their audiences when they blurred the distinction between lover and mother. He seems to refer to anxiety over incest prohibitions. Because the mother in question is a fox, however, the audience’s “exploited psychology” clearly also involves anxiety over prohibitions of interspecies sex. As Kristeva writes, although the abject confronts us, on the one hand, “with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside of her,” it also confronts us, on the other hand, “with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal” (12–13). Nakagami contends that this “fragile state” represents something of a permanent home for the underclass in the Kii Peninsula, a home he calls ne no kuni (“country of roots”). “Only in this country of roots,” he writes, “is there intercourse and mutual rapport between humans and other species” (Kish u- 321).6 I develop Nakagami’s account of Tsumura’s motherlove later in the chapter, but it is worth noting here that his account persuades both Komori Y oichi and Watanabe Naomi that Tsumura’s journey to his mother’s home is a journey into abjection and defilement. Komori proposes that “Tsumura’s trip becomes an occasion for him to begin resisting the discrimination (sabetsu) that has been made to circulate like a stain in his blood, and for him to make it clear to his friend that this is what he is doing” (Yuragi 207). Watanabe writes that in yearning for this foxmother, Tsumura would have felt that “the more defiled the ‘mother,’ the

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

more powerful her seduction” (196). What is interesting is that both critics are keenly interested in abjection, on the assumption that nothing gives a better account of how the limits of signification can be reached. Is this really true? Kristeva’s theory appears to keep the once-murdered mother in the linguistic equation, and “Cry of the Fox” appears to give the motherbanished-from-culture a voice to express her sorrow in parting. In both cases, however, maternity and abjection remain synonymous. Have we really reached the limits of signification? Or merely enforced them?

The Narrator’s Encounter with Paper and Persimmons: Irigarayan Mother-Love Although Irigaray never makes her quarrel with Kristeva explicit, she clearly rejects her theory. According to Irigaray, the fear and loathing we associate with abjection do not come from the memory of insufficient differentiation from the maternal body. Rather, they come from our failure to acknowledge our indebtedness to that body. “How are any other feelings possible,” she asks, “when we are asked to move back toward something that has always been negated, denied, sacrificed for the construction of an exclusively male symbolic world?” (Sexes 17). For Irigaray, abjection is thus the effect of psychoanalysis’ dereliction of the mother and not its antidote. Terror arises because the abject mother is an unacknowledged substitute for an origin that remains completely unknown and for which we have no language. Invoking Kristeva’s “power of horror” as a lie, a convenient burial ground, Irigaray writes: And where are we to find the imaginary and symbolic of life in the womb and the first corps-a-corps with the mother? In what darkness, what madness do they lie abandoned? And what relation to the placenta, that first home that surrounds us and whose aura accompanies our every step, like a primary safety zone, how is that presented to us in our culture? No image has been formed[. . . . ] In this way, the opening of the mother, the opening to the mother, appear as threats of contagion, contamination, falling into sickness, madness, death. (Sexes 15)

What is this “primary safety zone” with which Irigaray would have us replace our nightmares of contamination and madness? By invoking the placenta, she suggests that a different relationship to the mother has been with us all along, legible in the morphology of a maternal body that, appreciated independent of “certain theoreticians of psychoanalysis” (Ethics 105), could facilitate a relationship not of fusion and madness but of exquisite openness. When she exhorts us, as in the epigraph to this chapter, to “find, to rediscover, invent the words [ . . . ] that speak the most ancient

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name and most current relationship we know,” she emphasizes the dual nature of her mother-love project: to invent what has never existed even while rediscovering something latent. In a passage that displays what Margaret Whitford calls her “metaphorical anatomy” (60), Irigaray writes: If women are to establish or make possible a love among us, or a love for the feminine among us, women need to double and play what we are twice over, lovingly. Whether it be —love for the nourishing envelope, both inner and outer, for its skins and its mucous membranes; —love of the body: both of that body we give and of that body we give each other back in return; —[ . . . ] a path into infinity that is always open, in-finite. (Ethics 105)

Irigarayans have spilled a great deal of ink defending her from charges of essentialism in passages like this. Ewa Ziarek, for instance, explains that Irigaray should not be taken to be imposing a female identity because her “emphasis on proximity, threshold, porosity, and embodiment [ . . . ] is structured around exposure to the other rather than the assumption of the ‘armor’ of alienating identity” (73). Ziarek’s point will prove highly pertinent to our conversation. However, one of the luxuries of reading Irigaray with Arrowroot is that the text provides its own justification for embracing her utopian descriptions. In a number of remarkable parallels to this passage, the narrator explains how it feels to return to the place of the mother in terms precisely of nourishing skins, open membranes, and loving mucous. In the first chapter, Tanizaki sets up the expectation of an explicit parallel between Tsumura’s and the narrator’s journeys “upriver.” Tsumura will rediscover his lost maternal home on the Yoshino, and the narrator will penetrate even further, following the river to its origin in order to find a “cave” with a sacred “jewel.” Like a parody of the risky maternal journey undertaken by modernist writers such as Celine and Joyce in Kristeva’s account, the narrator’s path is supposed to grow narrower and more treacherous as he gets closer to his destination. Similarly, the landscape, unknown to all but a few brave writers who went before, is supposed to grow more and more threatening. Of course this is the trip that in the final chapter ends in failure, its semiotic obsession long since supplanted in chapters that, with the exception of the one ceded to Tsumura, trade the language of penetration for unforgettable odes to the delicate openness of local paper and the sublimely slippery mucous of local persimmons. That these passages are the most powerful in Arrowroot has been noted by other readers.7 What I want to emphasize is that the text offers them as an explicit alternative to abjection. If the bean game shows Tanizaki’s awareness of how language “murders” the mother, and if Tsumura’s fox

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

fantasies show Tanizaki’s awareness that abjection is the default method of recouping her, then the narrator’s passage to Yoshino shows Tanizaki’s determination to write a different relation to maternal origin. Because his prose in these passages is some of the most beautiful in modern Japanese literature, we know that for him a “revolution in poetic language” does not require rupture, violence, or madness in the mode of “Cry of the Fox.” In fact, his riffs on Yoshino paper might even be read as a rewriting of that song, appropriating many of its motifs for a mother-love finally worthy of the name. first paper passage In “Cry of the Fox” the fox-mother passes through village after village on her journey home. In Arrowroot, Tsumura and the narrator mimic this passage as they move on foot through the villages of Matsuda, Kamiichi, Natsumi, and Miyataki. It is in the second of these villages, toward the end of chapter 2, that the narrator has his first “maternal” encounter. He writes: In contrast to the age of the houses, the paper in the shoji of every house was new. It looked freshly changed, without any signs of wear, and even the tiniest hole had been painstakingly patched in the shape of flower petals. In the clear autumn air [the double-thickness of the paper patches] was dazzlingly, icily white. That there was not a speck of dust was due to tidiness, of course, but not using glass probably also makes people here more fastidious than city people. . . . [T]he crisp whiteness of the shoji made the latticework below the eaves and the sooty ledges look crisp and well kept, like a woman who is meticulous about her appearance even though she is poor. Gazing at the brightness of the sun shining on the paper, I felt even more deeply that this was autumn, through and through. Although the sky was radiantly clear, the rays of reflected light were not so bright as to assault the eye; they sank instead into the body, and were beautiful. As the sun traced its arc toward the river, the shoji of the houses on the left bank reflected it all the way across to the buildings on the right. (12)

In “Cry of the Fox” the mother is pitiable because her passage back to nature means her “longing heart” is inscrutable, the white chrysanthemum that stands for it hidden among rocks and ivy. Because she retreats into rain, with the gloom and the wet falling simultaneously, her path is swallowed up by the darkness of the forest. In contrast, Tanizaki’s Kamiichi passage transforms her disappearing chrysanthemum into “dazzlingly, icily white” flower-petal patches that have nothing to do with the depth of the forest vortex and everything to do with luminous surfaces. The image of thin layers of paper in double thickness only emphasizes their sheerness, which is at once strong and versatile. These layers can bounce sunlight clear across the Yoshino River, or they can morph into human skin

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name by way of the metaphor of “a woman meticulous about her appearance” and receive that same sunshine with even, beautiful softness. Although the flight of the fox-mother is one of penetration, here the passage of light goes both ways, now sinking and now bouncing, sometimes inside and sometimes out. second pape r passage The narrator’s next maternal encounter takes place in the village of Miyataki, at the beginning of chapter 3. Unlike Tsumura, who narrates his mother-love in a great rush of memorization at a single appointed time, the narrator’s remarks are spaced evenly, in unexpected pockets that unfold with his discovery. Although this passage is not technically about paper, it is still very much about surfaces and skins, petals and membranes: Autumn was in full swing as we made our way deeper into the mountains. Every time we entered an oak grove our feet rustled, kasa-kasa, across carpets of fallen leaves. There weren’t many maples, but the foliage of mountain lacquer, sumac, and ivy was at its peak, dotting the dark green of cypress hillsides with - o] - literally every color from deepest red to faintest yellow. The word “foliage” [k oy  means “red leaves,” but to behold it was to appreciate the myriad of variations within crimson, yellow, and brown. [ . . . ] They say the faces of people in Shiohara are all dyed red in autumn. It is beautiful when leaves turn all one color, but this is charming too. And although we use such phrases as “bescattered petals” and “thousand purples, ten thousand reds” to describe the riot of color in spring wildflowers, surely the richness of autumn’s variation on the theme of yellow is a worthy match for that of spring. Leaves fell through the rays of light pouring into the valley from between the mountains, fluttering like flakes of gold until they landed on the surface of the river. (15–16)

Here the “clouded over” mirror of the fox-mother’s mind is rewritten as the Yoshino River shimmering with flakes of gold. Again we trade depth for surface, and again we trade the fast, heavy fall of forest wetness for the almost suspended, tentative radiance of sun on skin. This time skin comes in the form of leaves, as red maple foliage transfers its pigment to the faces of the people in Shiohara. The veil-of-color motif is repeated in the carpet of leaves that the narrator and his friend swish through; the light kasa-kasa of their footfalls is a relief after the desperate scratching of the fox-mother trying to make her way through a thicket of dwarf bamboo. Whereas the ivy (tsuta) of “Cry of the Fox” encroached on and hid the mother’s flower form, the ivy in Miyataki waftily dots the landscape here and there, leaving room for plenty of flowers and in fact not incapable, by way of the “riot of color in spring wildflowers,” of morphing into flowers itself.8 In “Cry of the Fox,” returning to the place of the mother is all about being swallowed up and sucked back in. In Arrowroot it is about

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

spatial relationships of delicacy and symbiosis; the traveler and his environment are equal partners in a dance of open glidings and shiftings. third paper passage It is not until the narrator’s third riff on surfaces and membranes that Yoshino paper actually becomes maternal skin, in the letter with the tiny flecks of chapped finger that this chapter began by invoking. Technically, the story of the letter belongs to Tsumura’s maternal memories. It is part of what he tells his friend on the rocks in the riverbed. It is therefore significant that Tanizaki gives the narration back to the narrator just beforehand, so that we associate it with his sensibility and not Tsumura’s. Chapter 5 begins, “Well, then, why don’t I take up Tsumura’s story from this point, continuing it indirectly?” (33). The letter reveals Tsumura’s grandmother’s identification with local fox deities, but because Tsumura is not speaking, he is never given the chance to claim that identification for abjection. Instead, the narrator emphasizes the letter’s status as communication between a mother and her lost daughter, turning it into what we might call a competing “Cry of the Fox,” an alternative register for addressing the child from the fox-mother’s place of origin. This is his retelling of his friend’s story: Tsumura brought the scroll reverently to his chest, placing against his own naked skin the part that said, “This too is paper made by Mama and [your Aunt] Orito. Never, never let it leave contact with your skin.” If the letter had been sent shortly after his mother had been sold to Osaka, then it dated at least to the tenth year of the Meiji Era, but this paper that must have been thirty or forty years old, though it had turned a faintly toasted golden-brown, was very strong and of much finer texture than what we use today. Holding it up to the light, Tsumura could see lines of sturdy, thin fibers running through it. He remembered the lines, “When Mama and Orito were making this paper, it was like shredding our fingertips into the pulp, from all the chapping and frostbite. Oh, it hurt so much!” It occurred to him that within this single sheet, thin like elderly human skin, was the blood of the woman who had given birth to his own mother. Probably his mother too had brought the letter reverently to her chest when it arrived at the teahouse in Shinmachi, pressing it against her skin just as he had done. (38–39)

Reconnecting with Tsumura’s fox-mother would mean fusion with the abyss of nature. Reconnecting with the woman who wrote this letter means not fusion, or even envelopment, but the caress of a mediating membrane that allows mother and daughter to embrace across a kind of heavenly fluttering as the thin, strong fibers of the paper move in tandem with the rise and fall of the daughter’s chest. It is the opposite of the plaintive invitation into abjection we get in the original “Cry of the Fox.” This mother says, in effect, “I am at home, but I do not beckon you, because

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name we are already together. You do not need to chase after me. This is not a game of rushing headlong.” Elsewhere in the letter she confirms this togetherness: “[E]ven after my life has ended, I will still be by your side supporting you” (36). Exhorting the daughter never to let it leave contact with her skin, the letter invites her to a place like Irigaray’s “path into infinity that is always open.” Indeed, the letter itself feels infinite, a scroll of more than three meters that the daughter could stretch from head to foot and back again. Always half-open, it is a maternal envelope in perfect illustration of Irigaray’s point that acknowledging our debt to the maternal body (“It hurt so much!”) is precisely what exorcises any specter of suffocation. The letter is also remarkable for the way it reopens the mother-daughter genealogy. The narrator explains, “[I]n those days, it was expected that an indentured servant in the red-light district, whether she be an entertainer, a prostitute, or a tea-house girl, would sever all family ties once her article of bondage had been signed. After that [ . . . ] the family had no right to maintain a relationship with their daughter, no matter what the circumstance” (42). So, in its own context, as forbidden correspondence, the letter is already radical. It becomes even moreso, however, when we contrast it to Tsumura’s mother-love, which is incapable of respecting the same mother-daughter genealogy. Tsumura arrives back in the mother’s village and falls in love with the first woman he sees making paper. In so doing, he conflates his grandmother’s generation with what turns out to be her great-grandaughter’s, shrinking four generations of women into one. The same thing happens when he decides to marry that woman, his mother’s grandniece Owasa, on the grounds that “with a little polishing she might be just like my mother” (48): three generations melt into one. It happens to the women on his father’s side as well. His paternal grandmother tells him he would have memorized “Cry of the Fox” after his mother died, when his older sister, younger sister, and she herself were having their koto lessons. In Tsumura’s memory, however, it was only ever his mother who sang this anthem of abjection. The voices of completely unrelated women, his mother and her mother-in-law, are merged in his mind, together with two sisters. Irigaray writes a great deal about mother-daughter genealogies. For her they are a crucial prerequisite to an ethics of sexual difference, and therefore to love. What does she mean by this? Tsumura’s desire for a woman who is at once mother, wife, fox-diety, and prostitute (“that his mother had come of age in the pleasure district only increased his nostalgia” [34]) illustrates the kind of sexual indifference that Irigaray sometimes calls “love of same.” These disparate women are all the same woman for Tsumura; his desire is the same desire for mother/lover/savior/whore that

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

Freud identifies in “Contributions to the Psychology of Love” as quintessentially Oedipal.9 In other words, to be loved by a man like Tsumura, a man whose desire is normative in the psychoanalytic scheme of things, a woman has to be “the same.” Irigaray points out that this makes both love and genealogies between women impossible: “If we are to be desired and loved by men, we must abandon our mothers, substitute for them, eliminate them in order to be same. All of which destroys the possibility of a love between mother and daughter. The two become at once accomplices and rivals in order to move into the single possible position in the desire of man” (Ethics 102). We have seen how this “single possible position” is no position at all. To the degree that it is overdetermined as abject, it is only ever an appropriation of femininity, a covering over and a closing off. Moreover, because there is no femininity, there can be no sexual difference, and thus no heterosexual love. The problem is not just that motherlove is an oxymoron in this context. The problem is that conflating all the women into this pseudo woman means that the very people who could best teach us how to love the other as other have gone missing: the mother and the daughter. According to Irigaray, the fact that a daughter is born to someone of the same sex makes it imperative for her to negotiate fort-da differently from the boy. The boy becomes a subject by turning the mother into an object. As we have seen, his failure to keep the transaction swift and clean results in an ab-ject. The girl, however, cannot reduce her mother to the status of either object or abject without reducing herself at the same time. This accounts for what Irigaray calls the “all or nothing” aspect of the girl’s attempt “to find a subjective identity in relation to her mother” (Sexes 196). Too often, the result is “nothing”: “The fort-da, which Freud describes as marking the child’s entry into the world of language and culture, does not work for the girl child, unless she identifies herself as a little boy. Then she loses herself in a male other, and makes her children, and subsequently her husband, into quasi-objects” (Sexes 195). But what is Irigaray’s other scenario? Her “all” scenario? She locates it characteristically both in a utopian future and in a latent now, when the little girl would be able to come out of an “exclusive relation with the same as herself ” having “discover[ed] the relation with a different other, while remaining herself ” (Between 130). She would emerge from her infant relation with her mother, in other words, having learned how to recognize someone of the same sex as nevertheless different, and separate. It is this ability to recognize subjective difference from within a horizon of would-be sameness that Irigaray posits as the sine qua non of ethical relations. A loving relation to a truly different other is possible only if one knows how to be oneself, remain oneself, without having to abject or object an other.

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name In Tsumura’s version of fort-da, like his father’s before him, the mother is turned into a kind of natural resource that can be reeled back in from Yoshino whenever a man needs the raw material to make a wife. Of course the reeling is not all fun and games. The string, the puller, and the pulled must all pass through an abject liminality of animism and, as we shall see, illiteracy. In contrast, the narrator’s encounter with Yoshino produces an entirely different version of liminality. In his appreciation for surfaces and skins, petals and membranes, Arrowroot’s narrator might be said to be reacting to Tsumura’s rendition of fort-da the same way Irigaray reacts to Freud’s. Why, Irigaray asks, does Freud take note of the curtained cot into which Ernst throws the wooden spool, only to leave it out of his analysis? How do we know that the spool represents the mother and not Ernst? Couldn’t the mother be the bed and not the spool? Irigaray imagines that rather than looking ahead to his accession into language, as Lacan decides, Ernst is more likely looking backward. The fort-da game allows him to be a fetus again, “playing at going in and coming out of her with a cord, a placental-veil, a womb-bed” (Sexes 31). In Irigaray’s imagination, all we need to do to change the rules of Ernst’s foundational game is reconceive our relation to this veil, this placenta. Is this not exactly what Arrowroot’s narrator is doing? Uninterested in the women whom Tsumura and his father make a game of batting back and forth like wooden spools between Yoshino and Osaka, the narrator focuses, like Irigaray, on a “haven of skin, of membranes, of water [ . . . ] an amnion and a placenta, a whole world with its layers, its circuits, its vessels, its nourishing pathways [ . . . ]” (Sexes 33). placentas and pe r simmons Irigaray often mentions the placenta. Is it not strange, she asks, that we accept the psychoanalytic definition of mother as a place of regression and fusion when the actual biology of gestation tells another story? As an organ designed to mediate between mother and child—to keep the mother’s body from rejecting the foreign body that is the fetus—the placenta has an amazing ability to facilitate simultaneous proximity and distance, symbiosis and independence. Although it is produced from the cellular and genetic material of the embryo, it secretes maternal hormones during the interruption of ovulation that is pregnancy. Like the membranes of Yoshino, in other words, it serves first this side and then the other, morphing alternately into an extension of both without allowing the two to merge. The way the placenta manages the mother’s immune reactions is also remarkable. Rather than simply block her body from rejecting the half-paternal antigens in the fetus, the placenta activates immunodepressors only after assessing the exact degree of foreign antigens,

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

and only locally, in the uterus, so that the mother’s defenses against infection elsewhere are not compromised. In an interview with Irigaray, biologist Helene Rouche points out that this is far more sophisticated than what happens, for instance, in the case of organ transplants, when there is an extreme and immediate immune rejection, or in the case of cancerous tumors, when the body fails to marshal any immune reaction at all. Rouche explains, “There has to be a recognition of the other, of the nonself, by the mother, and therefore an initial reaction from her, in order for placental factors to be produced. The difference between the ‘self ’ and other is, so to speak, continuously negotiated” ( je, tu 41). It is on account of this continuous negotiation that Irigaray calls the relationship enabled by the placenta “almost ethical” (41). Rouche notes how curious it is that psychoanalysis disavows it: [In psychoanalysis] it’s this fusion, implicitly presented as an extension of the organic fusion during pregnancy, which, it would seem, simply has to be broken in order for the child to be constituted as a subject. The rupture of this fusion by a third term—whether it’s called the father, law, Name of the Father, or something else—should facilitate entry into the symbolic and access to language. [ . . . ] But surely all that’s needed is to reiterate and mark, on another level, a differentiation that already exists during pregnancy thanks to the placenta. . . .  (42)

What would it be like if our subjectivity were founded not on rupture but on a more subtle kind of differentiation that allowed us to maintain our relation to our mothers? The example of the placenta is interesting because it suggests that such a possibility exists, as Rouche points out, already. In the United States, “biologism” has long since become the ultimate insult among feminists, its fate sealed in no small part by Judith Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble that “the language of biology participates in other kinds of languages and reproduces that cultural sedimentation in objects it purports to discover and neutrally describe” (109). Butler’s critique of false neutrality is certainly valid. At the same time, the example of the placenta reminds us how much we stand to lose if we reject the language of biology out of hand. It is not that that language is inherently any more or less faithful to its maternal referent. However, its perceived status as such does have the advantage of suggesting that a different relation to the mother belongs not to a distant utopian future but to an undeniable, anatomical now. Tanizaki invokes the same sense of immediacy in chapter 3 with his description of a Yoshino delicacy called jukushi that is so sensual as to provide the most memorable passage in the novel: The empty ashtray seemed not for cigarettes but for holding under one’s mouth while eating the runny, overripe persimmons. With trepidation I tried placing a

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name piece of this about-to-burst fruit on my palm, just as I was told. It was large and cone-shaped with a pointy tip, and had ripened to a bright, half-translucent red. Like a bag made of rubber, it was swollen and jiggly, but with the sun passing through it became a beautiful orb of coral jade. Persimmons sold in the city never turn such a splendid color, and cave in on themselves long before achieving this kind of softness. According to our host, you can make jukushi only from Min opersimmons with thick skins. They are picked while still hard, and stored in a box or basket away from the elements. Left untouched for ten days, the insides melt naturally to a jelly sweet as nectar. The insides of other persimmons run - To eat them like water and never achieve the marvelous gooiness of the Min o. you can pull off the top and scoop out the insides with a spoon, as with a softsoft boiled egg, but they are more delicious eaten by hand from a bowl, the skin peeled back with dripping fingers. (21–22)

Watanabe Naomi writes that these jukushi are the very essence of abjection, calling them “sweetly beautiful rot” (kanbi na fushoku) and glossing the whole phrase with the ateji abuje (“abject”). According to Watanabe, Tanizaki went so far as to build abjection into the title of his novel. To read it forward is to read Yo-SHI-no KU-ZU. To read it backward is to find these decomposing Z[ J]U-KU-SHI making themselves integral from the start (199). But couldn’t the same argument be made for placental jukushi? That they have been integral from the start? Whether or not the persimmons strike us as abject depends on how much we learn from the narrator’s alternative encounter with Yoshino. Watanabe does not see it. For him, the narrator and Tsumura are essentially the same character (189). Yet clearly the narrator’s job is to stage a meeting with the mother in which abjection cannot threaten because the threshold is always mediated: safe, open, and mutual. As the persimmons become another example of this threshold, coating the narrator’s intestinal tract with a coolness that “flow[s] from his gums to his entrails” (22), it is as if the biology of the place itself is teaching him how to relate to it differently. The point is that that difference was there already, waiting. The irony of its availability is illustrated nicely in the status of jukushi as a local delicacy. On the one hand, they are so fragile and rare as to be inconceivable in society at large. One never finds them in the city. On the other hand, they are completely natural, even inevitable, given the right circumstances and the right sensibility. What should we call this sensibility? To what is the narrator attuned such that his trip toward the mother makes him so happily intimate with this swollen, dripping gooiness? According to Irigaray, the answer is mucous. “Serving love, respiration, and song,” she writes, mucous is a joyful expansiveness that “any thinking of or about the female has to think through” (Ethics 110). In many ways, mucous fulfills a function similar to

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

that of the placenta. Both are aspects of female corporeality that suggest a feminist ethics already at work in the biology of everyday life. Yet whereas our collective imagination tends to ignore the miracle of the placenta, the problem with mucous is not that we overlook it but that we misunderstand it. We tend to think of mucous as the condition of possibility for the duration of a masculine time measured in forts and in das, in thrustings forward and pullings back. It is the lubricant, in other words, for making women into “eternal mediators” between “the incarnation of the body” and “the world of man”(109). Thinking about mucous this way mistakes it for something easily quantified and located when in fact it is neither. Impermanent yet undeniable, elastic yet immeasurable, mucous, Irigaray says, “has been taken out of the order of numbers” so that it is “never merely something available, never merely material for some hand or some tool to use to construct some piece of work”(109). In this it offers sharp contrast to the way spools and beans mediate between the body and “the world of men.” Mucous cannot be held in a hand. It cannot be attached to the end of a string. It does not go and come back. When one finds it again, it is never the same. It is, to be sure, a mediator and, as with the placenta, its ethics derive from its role as such. With its special touch and properties does it not, Irigaray asks, stand in the way of a transcendence of language alien to the flesh? Relating to the other through mucous would mean reversing our exploitation of nature and coming back into contact with the “vitality of the soil and the fertility of the great cosmic rhythms” (100). This is exactly what our narrator does when he relates to the maternal home by “filling his mouth full of Yoshino autumn”(22).

Nakagami’s Almost Irigarayan Reading It is also autumn when Nakagami Kenji goes to Yoshino, a place he says does not exist for him apart from Arrowroot by “Tanizaki the Great” (Kish u- 247). That this text and this author should be held in   (Otanizaki) such high esteem by the most famous writer from Japan’s buraku underclass is remarkable in itself. Even more remarkable is that Nakagami should ex- ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari (“Kishu: - country press his esteem in Kish u: of trees and deeply rooted narratives”), a collection of twenty-five essays he wrote in 1977 and 1978 as ethnographic “reportage” from his home on the Kii Peninsula. The peninsula has been famous throughout Japan’s long history as the abject inverse of imperial power. As Nakagami conducts interviews there, gathering oral tales and offering his insider’s rumination on what he calls “the structure of sabetsu,” we do not expect to find praise for an elite mainstream writer with few local ties save the three trips he made to Yoshino in preparation for writing Arrowroot.10 Yet Nakagami

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name structures his entire chapter on Yoshino around a series of nuanced references to Tanizaki’s text. He also imports an interview from elsewhere in his travels so that he can write, in his Yoshino chapter, about mother-love. What about Tanizaki’s treatment of haha-koi makes it a truer account of Yoshino than any that Nakagami imagines he himself could offer? The answer comes into clearer focus if we consider it in the context of two other places where Nakagami discusses Arrowroot in the late 1970s. tsumura’s mothe r : the ‘buraku’ connection Nakagami first mentions the novel in a conversation with fellow writ- o- (1920– ) and Noma Hiroshi (1915–1991) published in ers Yasuoka Sh otar  1977 and titled Shimin ni hisomu sabetsu shinri (“Discriminatory Psychology Latent in the Citizens of Civil Society”). The conversation took place as part of a series sponsored by the leftist weekly Asahi Journal after the Tokyo High Court rejected the appeal of a buraku resident who had been framed for murder fourteen years earlier. In a series of events known as the Sayama Incident, twenty-four-year-old Ishikawa Kazuo had been arrested in 1963 and forced to confess in writing to the rape and murder of a high school girl in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture. He was also forced to hand-copy a threat letter written by the perpetrator. Despite the flimsiness of the evidence—Ishikawa was functionally illiterate at the time of his arrest—police, prosecutors, judges, and members of the press upheld both pieces through a series of appeals, and Ishikawa was not released from prison until 1994.11 As Anne McKnight explains, the Sayama Incident had a profound impact on Nakagami’s conception of sabetsu. A productive discourse exercised through writing, sabetsu is for Nakagami not what obscures truth but rather what generates it, in keeping with the social rule that, in Ishikawa’s case, a man born and raised in an outcast enclave would be predisposed to criminality. With reference to Nakagami’s studies of Lévi-Strauss in the 1970s, McKnight notes the inevitability of his agreement with the structuralist account of writing and law as “techniques of oppression,” given that the innocence of Ishikawa’s oral pleas had no effect and his attempts to respond to the law discursively only led to the death penalty (159). At the time of his conversation with Noma and Yasuoka, both close to sixty, Nakagami is thirty-one years old. He has only recently become famous with Misaki (The Cape, 1975) and Karekinada (Coast of withered trees, 1977), two novels about life in the roji, or buraku alleyways, of the southern Kii Peninsula. Despite his junior stature, Nakagami uses the conversation to fire off a barrage of polemical statements. Most of them are at odds which with those of the Buraku Liberation League (buraku kaih o- d omei), was leading the protest movement against the Sayama Incident and to

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

which Noma, at least, is highly sympathetic.12 The bluster of their rhetoric notwithstanding, Nakagami’s statements are appealing for their insight into the complexity and intractability of sabetsu. He asserts that it is a selfpreservation mechanism integral to human psychology, and is therefore ineradicable (183, 198); that the Japanese emperor system and the Japanese outcast class are like two sides of the same coin, and mutually essential to the symbolic governance of the nation (187); that buraku enclaves should be recognized for their unique culture rather than eradicated in civic improvement campaigns (196); that buraku illiteracy is not a problem per se but the source of a richly independent culture of orality (212); and that novelists must themselves practice sabetsu if they are to write truthfully and powerfully (178). It is in conjunction with this last assertion that Nakagami mentions Tanizaki, whose role in modern Japanese literature he likens to that of the American South’s William Faulkner—a white writer whose complex account of race surpasses those of “minority writers” such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin.13 This is where the talk turns to Tsumura’s mother’s home: Tanizaki had no relation to the buraku but he understood the structure of sabetsu extremely well. [ . . . ] In Arrowroot, for instance, the novel about traveling to see But I wonder if we the mother, the story is based on Kuzunoha from sekky o-bushi. aren’t supposed to understand the village in the Kuzunoha story as a buraku village. (203)

The remark goes unsubstantiated, and unchallenged by Noma and Yasuoka, who may be worn down by Nakagami’s alternately outrageous and elusive comments.14 Yet it is echoed two years later in an essay called “Monogatari no keifu” (“Genealogy of Monogatari”) in which Nakagami develops his ideas about the relationship between power and discourse. As shorthand for power he uses a pair of phrases that reflect his affinity for structuralism: “law and system” (h o- to seido). As shorthand for discourse, he retrofits the literary term for traditional Japanese prose narrative: monogatari.15 Again Arrowroot is upheld as evidence of Tanizaki’s insight into sabetsu, and again Tsumura’s mother’s home is mentioned not as an actual buraku enclave but as a place somehow cognizant of and related to such enclaves:16 Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- is modern literature’s single true discriminator (sabetsushugisha). Why activists clamoring for liberation don’t rip his novels to shreds is a mystery to me. That’s how thoroughly Tanizaki embraces discrimination toward the defiled and the misshapen (sen naru mono ikei naru mono). Just seeing them is highly unpleasant for him. If we consider that the settings of Arrowroot and The Reed Cutter both rub up against hisabetsu-buraku, it is self-evident: Tanizaki is using sabetsu to illuminate (kagayakasu) law and system. (139)

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name It is impossible not to conclude that Nakagami disdains Tanizaki, and on one level he does. He calls Tanizaki the “swine of monogatari” (monogatari no buta) (136), but he adds that, as a writer, he too is swine, because sabetsu is an unavoidable effect of monogatari. What does he mean by this? In many ways, sabetsu in Nakagami is like abjection in Irigaray. It is the fear and loathing that are generated when an entire category of people is derelicted for the construction of a system of signification that never acknowledges their sacrifice. Nakagami appreciates Tanizaki because, unlike the bad-faith humanists whose writing he says is synonymous with modern literature in Japan,17 Tanizaki eschews the discourses of equality and liberation for an explicit acknowledgment of where sabetsu comes from and how it works. Pushing the parallel a bit further, we might say that “law” and “system” in Nakagami are like “phallic law” or “Law of the Father” in Irigaray. They are the system of sameness that makes it impossible for a subject to relate to its other except by ob-jecting and abjecting that other. If the parallel holds, then Nakagami’s obscure remark about Tanizaki “using sabetsu to illuminate law and system” in Arrowroot might refer to the harsh glare to which he exposes Tsumura’s mother-love. Rather than depict it as the sweet and lovely (kanbi) phenomenon that most critics perceive, Tanizaki exposes what was sacrificed for its construction: the genealogy of the family in Yoshino that was forced to sell its daughter into prostitution. For our purposes, what is most revealing about Nakagami’s remarks in “Genealogy of Monogatari” is that he uses Arrowroot both to support his assertions about Tanizaki and to posit an exception. With characteristic obliqueness he writes: I consider Arrowroot to be Tanizaki’s greatest masterpiece. This is because he’s almost overripe here, the writer of law and system having, in Arrowroot, gone so far as to import sabetsu into his novel and narrowly avoided smashing law and system to pieces from the inside. [ . . . ] [ . . . Here] Tanizaki was not satisfied with his so-called usual law and system, and he changed his writing in an attempt to depict Yoshino itself, the land where so many monogatari intersect (Yoshino to iu ikutsu mo no monogatari no sakus o- suru tochi sono mono o egako- to fude o kaeta). It is possible to say that with this work Tanizaki resisted monogatari, or in other words resisted law and system, for the first time. (139–140)

The idea that one could use sabetsu to “smash law and system from the inside” sounds suspiciously Kristevan, and in the end Nakagami does partially succumb to the allure of the semiotic. I have written elsewhere of this tendency in Kish u- at large.18 Nevertheless, as we turn to that text for clues as to why Nakagami thinks Arrowroot “resists law and system,” I want to focus on what I think amounts to a competing claim: that Tanizaki

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

“changed his writing in an attempt to depict Yoshino itself.” If by “itself ” he simply means “the land where competing monogatari intersect,” then we are still in the realm of sabetsu, and abjection. If, however, by “itself ” Nakagami is talking about the narrator’s unexpected encounter with the physicality of the maternal home, then we will have found a powerful ally for our reading. the structure of sabetsu is not binary The most obvious place Tanizaki might be said to have “imported sabetsu” into his novel is in the scene where Tsumura and the narrator pay Examining heirlooms that are supposed a visit to a family named Otani.   to have belonged to Minamoto Yoshitsune and his lover, Shizuka, they notice that the documents meant to prove the heirlooms’ authenticity are patriarch handles them with venfull of mistakes. Nevertheless, the Otani   eration and, with a “straight face” (magao), casually dates one item to an era that predates its written label by five centuries. For him, the soiled documents evoke “feelings of longing and reverence toward ‘the past’ (inishie), toward ‘the master’ (shukun), and toward ‘ancestors’ (sosen)” (20– 21). Nakagami probably senses sabetsu in Tanizaki’s treatment of this illithas dirt under his fingernails and goo eracy. It is not so much that Otani   in the corners of his eyes. It is that his obeisance to the phony heirlooms evokes the feeling of disgust that Nakagami says is our default reaction to those who cannot read (“Shimin” 212). family is the most vividly portrayed In the novel as a whole, the Otani   of a larger group of people in Yoshino who trace their lineage to ochiudo, famous figures who fell from grace in Kyoto and fled to the mountains of the Kii Peninsula. In fact, what remains of the narrator’s aborted historical novel could be described as an impressive list of all these sujime no mono, these “people of the lineage,” who define themselves by means of their ancestors’ intermarriage with refugees who arrived after losing im- Nakagami comments on perial power struggles in the capital. In Kish u, Tanizaki’s treatment of these people by reproducing it in his own narrative. He says that on his way to Yoshino he too “heard countless monogatari, the majority legends of fallen Heike and stories of Southern Court nobility” (249). Nakagami finds it troubling that, “with straight faces” (magao, the same word Tanizaki uses) people should claim such stories as their own family histories: Here, people do not live, only monogatari live, sucking peoples’ blood and using their voices to transmit generation after generation of stories. People do not really believe in these stories of wandering nobles and at this point they have no way of confirming them, but even while tacitly acknowledging as much with their faces they still say, “They say the Heike are our ancestors.” For them Heike [in

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name katakana] is not Heike [in kanji] but a synonym for the monogatari that proves their origins and history. (249)

Nakagami obscures the clarity of this point in the conclusion to his book of reportage when he writes that “tragedies of imperial succession . . . flow - (324). Komori Y oichi in the blood of the defeated people of Kishu” quotes this line in his own account of how Nakagami reads Arrowroot, citing it as evidence that Nakagami is using monogatari to blur the binary distinction between ochiudo and local people. In both Tanizaki and Nakagami, Komori says, monogatari “should be read for the relationship between the defeated and the victorious,” for “aspects of [both] the discriminators and the discriminated against” (Yuragi 203). I think we miss the point, however, when we focus on binaries, and on using monogatari as a tool for deconstructing them. In both Tanizaki’s and Nakagami’s accounts, Kii people are forced to give their voices over to a genealogy of ochiudo in order to say anything at all about their origins. What appears to be a monogatari of difference, of winners and losers in Japan’s long history of imperial power struggles, is actually a monogatari of indifference that draws life and legitimacy from a class of people whose identity it erases in the process. It is similar to Lacan’s account of fort-da. To be “born into monogatari” is to lose all contact with one’s actual material origin. Despite claims of intermarriage, it is not that the blood of imperial tragedy flows in the veins of Kii people. On the contrary, as Nakagami says here, the blood of Kii people is sucked out of their bodies, its vitality stolen for stories of a tragedy that has nothing to do with them. Nakagami is disgusted with the use of this monogatari to “prove origins and history” when it amounts so clearly to an appropriation of origins and an erasure of history. In his discussion with Noma and Yasuoka he insists on the richness of the oral tradition in buraku culture. Clearly he holds out hope for an alternative language that would not erase Kii origins but speak them. The phonetic katakana version of Heike will never work in this capacity. It will always be defined in dichotomy with its more authoritative kanji homophone, and that very dichotomy will continue to generate the fear and   loathing of sabetsu by virtue of having derelicted a people, such as Otani, who nevertheless haunt the present. What language should they use? a language for the de re licte d In Arrowroot, Tanizaki could be said to attempt an answer in the form patriarch who of the persimmons, because it is none other than the Otani   serves them. When he does, all talk of heirlooms and documents is displaced with solid proof of the family’s claim to local knowledge and authenticity. The narrator is duly impressed:

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name    I felt as though the spirits (reiki) and the sunshine of these mountains were congealed here in the palm of my hand. I have heard that people of old would wrap a handful of Miyako soil in paper and bring it back from the capital as a keepsake, but if someone were to ask me about the colors of autumn in Yoshino I would take great care in bringing one of these persimmons back to show. (22)

By congealing the spirits, the true ancestors of this place, and by reminding the narrator that the capital too is a physical place made of both dirt and competing discourses, the persimmons redeem the dignity of the Otani   by introducing a third term, an “oral tradition” outside the binary of winners and losers, literate and illiterate. - Nakagami introduces a similarly momentous example of a In Kish u, language for the derelicted by means of a young man whose story he imports into his Yoshino chapter in honor of Arrowroot. When he first arrives and hears so many stories of wandering nobles, he decides that these rapacious monogatari are like the goldenrod that grows everywhere on the Kii Peninsula. With poison in its roots to kill competing vegetation, the goldenrod dispenses with its “other” before any perception of difference. Depressed, Nakagami consoles himself with the memory of a young man he met elsewhere in his travels, a man who maintains a relationship to monogatari that is completely different from his own and, we realize, completely different from that of Ishikawa Kazuo, the burakumin framed for murder during the Sayama trials. This other young man is not trapped by discourse, not criminalized by it. Instead, in being baffled by it—he has failed his written driver’s test seven times—he is freed of its constraints and open to a completely different encounter with Kii origins: What is tripping him up are words, and what we can guess will continue to trip him up are also words, but words are a product of social convention. In him there is no such thing as convention. Or if there is, it is very weak. He is in a horizon of reality, of matter. Riding in the car with me he sees the profusion of grasses, trees, and rocks that is landscape and experiences an oversensitive reaction to what lies at its heart, a succession of the real. When he looks at the blue blue water he says osoroshii (terrifying). And indeed it is. I feel it too. It is a flood of matter; it is anarchy. (250)

We learn that this young man had left the peninsula once and traveled the world on a container ship until his mother, a former prostitute, called him home. Nakagami says that the reason he remembers this man’s story while he is in Yoshino is because it “has the same structure as Arrowroot, which is a monogatari about mother-love” (252). Declaring that these two tales of mother-love have opened a “giant fissure” in his thinking about goldenrod, he writes: “In other words, it is the coexistence of those who are on board with social convention, using words as convention dictates, and

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name those who have dropped out (datsuraku shita) of social convention. This is how Tanizaki the Great’s Arrowroot is supposed to be read” (252–253). To whom is Nakagami referring? Who in Arrowroot has “dropped out of social convention”? family, obviously, with their alternative, mucousy There is the Otani   language. There is also Tsumura’s mother, who speaks through the strong thin fibers of handmade paper. Still, to Nakagami, the most important dropout in Arrowroot has got to be the narrator himself, who drops the imperative to write a historical novel in order to stage his own “oversensitive reaction” to what lies at the heart of the Yoshino landscape. The discovery of mucous and mediating membranes keeps his experience from being “terrifying,” as it is for Nakagami’s youth, and for Nakagami himself. We will come back to their problematic “anarchy.” Let us focus first on the way two tales of mother-love seem to have dissuaded Nakagami from his claim that novelists must practice sabetsu if they are to write truthfully and powerfully. Arrowroot begins with Tsumura persuading the narrator that “the land being what it is” (tsuchi ga tsuchi da kara) he could easily get enough mate- for two or three historical novels if he were to visit Yoshino rial (zairy o) in person. (8) Yet the novel explicitly limits the collection of materials in Yoshino to Tsumura, on his successful expedition to find a wife. When the narrator sets out on his own expedition, he emerges only with corroboration of Nakagami’s point that “here, people do not live, only monogatari live.” Focused on his footing as he scrambles up the wall of a steep canyon where the imperial jewel is supposed to have been hidden, the narrator is oblivious to his physical surroundings. His local guide points out - These are names confirmed for two rocks called Berobedo and Gozen m osu. them by a no doubt equally oblivious scholar or bureaucrat who had made the same trip four or five years earlier and, in asking after the whereabouts of landmarks mentioned in histories he had read back in Tokyo, perpetuated a hegemonic cycle of naming.19 The local guide, who confesses to the narrator that he “does not know the origin of the weird names,” (52) is nevertheless compelled to attach them to the local landscape every time someone arrives from Tokyo and hires him for a tour. What is the mysterious imperial force that drives him to affirm that “in the valley where the Southern Court’s sequestered emperor had lived, there must necessar- and Berobedo ( o- no sunde irashitta tani ni wa, ily be rocks called Gozen m osu kanarazu gozenm osu to iu iwa to, berobedo to iu iwa ga aru) (52)? Nakagami would say it is a perfect illustration of the blood being sucked from a local Kii voice for an outsider’s monogatari. In Tanizaki’s novel, it is exactly this vampiric process that the narrator rejects when he declines to write his historical novel. When he explains that he abandoned it because he had

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

been “defeated by the material” (zairy o- make ni kakezu ni shimatta) (54), this “defeat” should be read as a form of respect. Unlike Tsumura, who is only too eager to appropriate Owasa for the monogatari called “Cry of the Fox,”20 the narrator defers to local “materials” in order to open a much more tentative, more mutual monogatari. It is hard to imagine that Tanizaki’s Berobedo scene was not the inspiration for an incredible passage in Nakagami’s Yoshino chapter where he too ponders what it means to name a rock. When he speaks of the youth in a “horizon of matter,” he suggests an unmediated encounter with the real. Elsewhere in the chapter, however, he is also clearly asking how to give a linguistic home to those who have only ever been used as the raw material to construct the linguistic homes of others: There is no essence of things; the essence of things is words—so I have said, but that rock (iwa), that greenery—they cannot be words. To prove that they are things, to prove that the rock is not a word, there is the heat it offers to the touch after soaking in the sun. It is not what it is because it has been named. It is what it is even when it is not named. To this thing which exists even nameless I dare to give the name iwa. Resourceless people—and the denizens of hisabetsu buraku are the ultimate example of such people/things (mono/mono)—existed in society for a long time as nameless people/things (mono/mono). As a result, they came to be named, and to have projected onto them all the distortions of the social structures that were developed in their absence. This much is undeniable. For denizens of this hidden country (komoriku), to say that the essence of things is words is to reclaim the words that have been plundered from them. (253–254)

Nakagami confirms that the abject identity of burakumin originates not with them but with mainstream society, as its own “distortions.” In order to speak of what exists outside this binary, the task is not to repeat the received poststructuralist wisdom that “the essence of things is words” and conclude that what has no words has no essence. Rather, the task is to insist that projection is itself a form of plundering, and to “reclaim the words that have been plundered.” Like Irigaray in the epigraph to this chapter, Nakagami wants to find “a language that is not a substitute for the experience of corps-á-corps[ . . . ], but which accompanies that bodily experience” (Sexes 18). When he puts his hands on the warm rock and “dares” to give it a name, he takes his cue from Arrowroot’s narrator, who uses his own touch to speak the kasa-kasa of Yoshino’s fallen leaves, the soft radiance of its shoji, and the gooiness of its persimmons. In fact, it may have been the persimmons that persuaded Nakagami of Tanizaki’s “overripeness” (ranjuku) in Arrowroot. It seems clear at least that when he praises Tanizaki for depicting “Yoshino itself,” he is praising him for writing truthfully and powerfully by having learned sabetsu’s lessons and moved beyond them.

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name nakagami’s mothe r-love Still, what exactly is the connection between moving beyond sabetsu and moving toward mother-love? That Nakagami fails to theorize the connection sufficiently is clear in the disturbing ending of his chapter on Yoshino. Unlike other chapters in Kish u- where Nakagami relates conversations with several Kii people, the Yoshino chapter discusses only two. The second person is a foil for the first, a young man who is nothing if not “on board with social convention.” He says that being conscious of discrimination (hisabetsu ishiki) is a form of weakness, and that he would be a fool to speak of his true identity when no one knows about it. Frustrated, Nakagami tries to get him to talk about his mother, forcing him to let him ride shotgun in his small-appliance delivery truck because “like the Great Tanizaki, I want to find out about people’s feelings of haha-koi” (255). For Nakagami, “feelings of haha-koi” are the quickest route out of the false binary between weak and strong, the surest way to expose the error of the idea that because the essence of sabetsu is words, keeping silent about sabetsu will make it go away. The young man resists, however, and Nakagami is so upset that he finds himself abandoning his itinerary to flee down the coast in search of what turns out to be the “blue blue water” that the first young man spoke about. It is there in the ocean at Karekinada: “the too-blue ocean bathed in the strong sun of autumn” (256). Yet no sooner does Nakagami see it than he notices a clump of goldenrod growing by the roadside and is shocked: I felt as though my body had suddenly burst into flames. Or rather, the motherlove that lives in my body too was heating the same spot on my back that had felt strangely cold the night before [when I had passed the brothel]. It was not for my mother as she is now, in and out of bed with high blood pressure and heart disease. Rather, it was for my mother as she was when I was young and prone to asthma, her body cold from having just come home and woken me in the middle of the night in the cold futon. As I drew closer she always smelled of makeup. Sliding nearer to get warm my throat would ache so much I could barely breathe. The goldenrod in Karekinada made me remember that feeling of suffocation. . . .  I thought how the poisoned roots of the goldenrod had completely done me in. (256)

What are we to make of this astonishing reabjection of the mother? On the one hand, it is satisfying that Nakagami identifies the suffocating mother as yet another goldenrod-like monogatari. Clearly it has killed off the loving mother with its poisoned roots! But why is Nakagami unable

Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name   

to “drop out” of the monogatari of abjection, to experience for himself the “blue blue water” of his native place, without finding himself poisoned all over again? And why is he poisoned by the same mother-love that once seemed to be his savior? On the most obvious level it is corroboration of the intransigence of the psychoanalytic paradigm. Nakagami used to say that he never read Kristeva, that he had tried but found her too difficult.21 But we could hardly ask for a more vivid illustration of what she calls the “constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” than the risk posed here by Nakagami’s own “natural mansion,” his mother (Powers 13). Why can’t he help sliding closer to her? Why is he compelled, in a line that foreshadows this passage, to “bring the pollen-allergy flowers [of the goldenrod] to his nose” (247)? The name of the monogatari that has done him in may as well be called psychoanalysis, with its incessant conflation of mother, prostitute, lover, and savior, and its mandate, as Irigaray writes, that any opening to her will appear as “threats of contagion, contamination, falling into sickness, madness, death” (Sexes 15). Yet on a more subtle level this sudden appearance of the suffocating mother can also be explained in terms of Nakagami’s failure to be mindful of one of his own tenets about sabetsu. When he rides in the appliance truck with the second young man and prompts him to speak of hahakoi, he is using “mother-love” to mean “love for buraku people” in general. Whether the young man actually speaks of his mother is irrelevant as long as he stops parroting racist discourse. We see the same tendency amplified in Komori’s and Watanabe’s studies, in which the mother is interesting only to the degree that she is a burakumin and not at all because she is a mother. Does this not amount to using mothers exactly the way Nakagami says we should not use Kii people, as the raw material for a monogatari that has nothing to do with them? And is the result of this dereliction not exactly what we would expect—the feelings of fear and loathing that Irigaray calls abjection and Nakagami calls sabetsu? If Nakagami abandons his itinerary and flees down the coast after riding in the appliance truck, he may be propelled less by frustration over his conversation with the driver than by the ghost of the mother who was abjected while they talked. Of course, it had been happening all along. Nakagami says that the structure of the first young man’s story is the same as the structure of Arrowroot because both tell stories of being called home by the mother. But if it is truly the mother who does this calling, why do we hear only about a “profusion of materiality”? Why “anarchy”? Both Nakagami and his young informant would be free of this terror if they traced their origins not to “blue blue water” in the abstract but to the “haven of skin,

   Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name of membranes, of water” from which they actually issued (Irigaray, Sexes 33). It is devastating that a writer who cares so deeply about acknowledging indebtedness should forget this primary example. Perhaps Nakagami sensed this on some level. Perhaps this is why he deferred to “Tanizaki the Great.”

  r 

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime: Portrait of Shunkin, Feminist Film Theory, and Tanizaki’s Cinema Essays

4

i n 192 0 ta n i z a k i Jun’ichir o- took a break from his early literary career to accept a position as “artistic consultant” at the Taish o- Katsuei film company in Yokohama. The company had been founded earlier that year under the artistic direction of Thomas Kurihara, a Hollywood returnee who had spent six years in America studying production and acting in small roles.1 Kurihara quickly became the driving force at Taish o- Katsuei, single-handedly training a corps of eager cinematographers and actors with what Tanizaki would later describe as superhuman energy. In the following eighteen months Kurihara and Tanizaki turned out four silent films. Although all the screenplays are attributed to Tanizaki, he later admitted that Kurihara had written most of their first production. And although director’s credits go formally to Kurihara in each case, the third film was directed partially by Tanizaki.2 By early 1922, other film studios founded at the same time as Taish o- Katsuei were flourishing. In contrast, Tanizaki’s company was nearly defunct, ruined by financial mismanagement and Kurihara’s advancing tuberculosis.3 Yet in a sense the brevity of Tanizaki’s film career is a perfect expression of its incandescence. For a short but fervent period, he loved everything about motion pictures and was convinced that they were fast becoming Japan’s most important cultural form. Thirteen years later he had changed his mind. “I have long since started not caring about cinema,” he wrote in 1935, “and the day when I will care nothing at all can’t be far away” (“Eiga e” 319).4 Turning his back on a medium he had praised in the 1920s for its American cheerfulness, he devoted himself to the traditional Japanese forms, allusions, and settings of An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Feminist Film Theory: Osaka Circa 1866,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.3 (Fall 2002): 24–63.

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime his “return to the classics.” For many critics it was yet more proof that he was shifting from cosmopolitanism to cultural nationalism in the years before the war. In this chapter I consider the source of Tanizaki’s cinematic disappointment from a different angle, arguing that one of the best-known novels from his “return to the classics” can be read as an extended commentary on film—one might even say as an incisive piece of film theory. Shunkinsh o- (Portrait of Shunkin) is set in Osaka on the cusp of the Edo and modern periods. Formally, as Mizumura Minae points out, it makes masterful use of “imported,” “found” narratives written in a style predating the genbun itchi language reforms of the late nineteenth century (121). Thematically as well, the plot pivots on the minutiae of a musical world centered on blind masters of shamisen and koto, traditional stringed instruments important to the culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet despite its premodern investments, the story is at heart the same story that feminist film theorists from Laura Mulvey to Joan Copjec have been telling for quite some time: the story of castration, disavowal, and fetishism; of the lure, the look, and the gaze. When read as a 1933 contribution to debates that did not take shape elsewhere until much later, Portrait of Shunkin is remarkable not only for the precision with which it presents many of the central concerns of feminist film theory, but also for the originality with which it handles them. This chapter proposes that the filmic disappointment documented in Portrait of Shunkin is organized around Tanizaki’s resistance to the inaugural roles of loss and lack in the generation of visual meaning. As we saw in Chapter 3, Lacan describes how signification is born from “the murder of the thing” by the symbol that forever after substitutes representation for the real thing. In this chapter as well we see Tanizaki asking how to imagine a more loving relationship to the woman who corresponds to that object of would-be foundational violence, his heroine, Shunkin. He finds, however, that when the signification in question is visual rather than verbal, what discourages our modern minds from seeking a nonsacrificial relation to signification’s outside is not the terror of maternal abjection but the terror of a licentious, all-seeing male sadism. In feminist film theory, this sadism has been the focus of lively debates about what it means to occupy the position of the gaze, and about whether human eyes are even capable of apprehending a visual field from which absolutely nothing is missing. Only recently, however, have feminists begun to think beyond the psychoanalytic paradigm to consider whether desire and meaning can emerge as forces of creativity rather than as futile compulsions to make good on lack. This chapter argues that Tanizaki was already deeply invested in such considerations in the 1930s, and that Portrait of Shunkin can be read as an idiosyncratic contribution to Japanese philosophy’s effort to

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

“overcome” modernity in the years before the war. During the period between working on films and “returning to the classics,” Tanizaki seems to have concluded that narrative cinema is doomed to be an endless renarrativization of the subject’s sad reliance on lack for the only kind of desire it ever knows. His radical move in 1933 was to bypass “sexuality in the field of vision” altogether, using Portrait of Shunkin to imagine a symbolic universe derived entirely from sound and touch.5

Movie Magic:Tanizaki’s Film Infatuation Tanizaki wrote several essays about motion pictures in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Some of these explain basic cinematic terms for the burgeoning ranks of Japanese movie fans. For instance, “Film Techniques” draws on the author’s studio expertise to give Japanese translations and synopses of key English terms such as closeup, longshot, dissolve, iris, and cutting. Other essays detail the artistic advantages of film for people working in the industry. A good example is “Katsud o- shashin no genzai to sh orai” (“The Present and future of motion pictures”), in which Tanizaki urges filmmakers to jettison theater conventions and capitalize on their medium’s extraordinary capacity for detailed cinematographic composition, breathless closeups, and dramatic natural settings.6 Where criticism of specific works is concerned, the essays devote equal time to Western and Japanese films. The latter are treated as part of a younger tradition that, although still developing, nevertheless speaks the same language as the older tradition and participates in the same conversations. Thomas Lamarre has noted that when Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari came to Japan in 1920, Tanizaki’s comments were virtually identical to those the film generated in Europe and America (172). Informing all the essays is a conviction that film offers new ways of looking and new things to see, in a truly cosmopolitan sign system that is legible everywhere motion pictures are made and watched. Exactly how this sign system operates is less clear. The dream is Tanizaki’s dominant metaphor; for him cinema is a literal dream machine for making stories even more vivid and illogical than those of the unconscious. Accordingly, nonsense plots are his favorite, their absurdity giving immediate rise to cinema’s signature aura of mystery and fantasy (“Eiga zakkan” 100). A passage from “Eiga zakkan” (Miscellaneous observations on cinema) captures the author’s mixture of eagerness and mystification, describing the bright March day he went to Yokohama to meet representatives from Taish o- Katsuei for the first time. There, in the second-floor room of a cramped office building, Thomas Kurihara set up a makeshift theater and screened two of his recent productions. They were

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime short documentaries, one about cherry blossoms and the other about the Japanese silk industry: Needless to say, these were extremely ordinary pictures, but I was gradually lulled into a strange reverie by the shadows projected with such clarity and vitality, sparkling like gemstones against the dark wall of a room that had been filled with bright sunshine only moments before. As I stared at the silkworm’s body wriggling silently in the three-foot patch of light that cut across the darkness, I was completely unaware of any world but the tiny one before me. Yokohama’s shopping district, Sakuragi-ch o- station, the distant home in Odawara to which I would return, the very existence of my family: all of them seemed like fabrications. I didn’t catch my breath until the film ended and, emerging from the building [ . . . ] I met fresh air. My surroundings looked entirely unfamiliar, and I distrusted my own eyes. (102)

Tanizaki is astonished that a silent black-and-white film only three-feet square could have such a profound effect on his sense of place and time. He is thrilled by the opportunity to doubt his eyes—to watch as the true and obvious lose their status as such. Equally thrilling is the luxury of that opportunity’s instant access. The cramped, dusty office building is replaced by visions of sparkly gemstones in a matter of seconds. That no anxiety creeps into his account seems related to Kurihara’s documentary form and its botanical and industrial subjects. When the topic shifts to narrative film and human subjects, the tone of glee is tempered with disquiet. Some strange remarks from “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures” are a good example. Tanizaki holds that a human face, no matter how ugly, will always give way to transcendental beauty if pondered long enough as a cinematic closeup (16–17). No reason is given, but the phenomenon seems related to another curious claim. The author looks forward to a day when the quality of Japanese films will have improved enough for them to find a global market. Should this happen, he says, they would fascinate Westerners not only with their Eastern sensibility but also with their Japanese bodies: “[I]t is extremely difficult for Japanese artists to gain the respect of the West in fields such as music, literature, and theater, but Japanese film actors face no such hurdles. [ . . . ] Those who seek fame should become motion picture actors”(20). The exhortation makes little sense in context. Presumably, the universality of film language is what overcomes the usual hurdles to Western respect; the languages of Japanese music, literature, and drama are all mired in much older, culturally inscrutable syntaxes. The fact remains, however, that in the late nineteen-teens and early nineteen-twenties, Tanizaki was well known for his unflattering descriptions of Japanese bodies. His male protagonists sport “ugly pigmy bodies” in comparison to those of their Western friends (Dokutan 244); they feel deep shame for being “stunted,

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

snaggle-toothed, and dark as savages” (Chijin 102). What is it about the symbolic economy of film that manages to turn disprized bodies into objects of global admiration? Although Tanizaki’s remarks do not offer an answer, the racialized question itself hints at conflict, and shame. As Lamarre points out, there is no shortage of disparaging remarks about cinema in Tanizaki’s writing from the early 1930s. But probably the - (Thoughts about most emphatic remark is from 1935. In “Eiga e no kans o” film) Tanizaki recalls his stint at Taish o Katsuei as if it were the distant past and his commitment were now completely unfathomable. Japanese film had failed to develop to his expectations, but the problem was larger; he had stopped going to foreign movies as well. The bodies and faces that previously had held such allure were now powerless to attract him: “Though I keep hearing about Irie Takako and Katherine Hepburn,” he said, “I have never seen them on screen and find it difficult to find the energy even to make it to the theater” (319). His remarks were occasioned by the news that the well-known shomin-geki (drama of the urban middle and working class) director Shimazu Yasujir o- planned to make a film of Tanizaki’s story Portrait of Shunkin. The short novel had been published two years earlier to wide critical acclaim, and it was in keeping with the Sh ochiku film studio’s new policy of making art films that this work of “pure literature” was being adapted for the screen. With apologies to Shimazu, Tanizaki said he had not read the script that was sent to him and had no intention of seeing the finished product. He complained that the state of the industry would make it impossible to assemble a sufficiently talented crew and that he could think of no actors to do justice to the leading roles of lovers Shunkin and Sasuke. He did not mention that the male protagonist’s blindness might be the source of his misgivings, but he did say that if he were to try his hand at a film version, he would juxtapose the world of the blind man, Sasuke, with the real world. “Even if one were to do this, it might not work,” he remarked, “but it would be extremely interesting if it did” (321). Doubtless, finding a way to film the phenomenon of sightlessness would be enormously interesting precisely because it seems impossible. How would the world of a blind man look on screen? More to the point, why was it only by positing this particular puzzle that Tanizaki could muster interest in the medium that had fascinated him a decade earlier? An answer begins to take shape if we consider some striking parallels between Portrait of Shunkin and feminist film theory.

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime

Common Concerns: Feminist Film Theory, Sasuke as “Non-Duped” Portrait of Shunkin is organized around three extreme acts of bodily injury. The first two befall Shunkin, the female protagonist. The beautiful daughter of a prosperous Osaka druggist, she is hurt as a child when her sister’s nursemaid infects the mucous membranes of her eyes with a strain of gonorrhea that leaves her blind. As an adult she is hurt again when an intruder pours a kettle of boiling water over her sleeping face and scars her horribly. The intruder is never named, but the narrator posits a number of candidates and motives, many of the latter related to Shunkin’s muchremarked arrogance and vanity. The text’s third injury befalls Sasuke, an apprentice to Shunkin’s father. As a teenager Sasuke becomes Shunkin’s guide, escorting the blind girl back and forth from her music lessons. As his devotion to her grows, he becomes her music pupil, her lover, and eventually her life partner. Sasuke and Shunkin earn their livelihood teaching shamisen and koto. It is while Shunkin’s career is in ascent, her playing recognized as the best in Osaka, that she is burned; and it is in response to her attack that Sasuke is injured, blinding himself with a needle so as never to look upon her ruined beauty. His eyes cloud over in traumatic cataracts, and he lives the rest of his life the picture of perfect bliss. In turn, the exact nature of his satisfaction becomes the object of much conjecture. Let us start with Laura Mulvey’s famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” According to Mulvey, the ultimate meaning of woman in film is “the visually ascertainable absence of the penis.” For this reason, a man’s pleasure in looking at her is always undercut by dread at the prospect of his own castration. The man has two avenues for escape from this anxiety. First, he can “reenact the original trauma” in such a way as to assure himself that castration belongs to the woman and the woman alone. Mulvey offers several Hollywood examples in which the male protagonist concerns himself with the “devaluation [or] punishment [ . . . ] of the guilty” woman (21). He says, in effect, “She deserved her fate! It has nothing to do with me!” The second avenue of escape from castration anxiety, Mulvey says, is to disavow the woman’s lack by turning her into a fetish and making her a source of satisfaction rather than fear. In this case the man assures himself, “She’s not mutilated! She’s actually quite beautiful!” In Portrait of Shunkin, Shunkin’s blindness, with its insidiously genital (gonorrheal) origins, makes her a compelling figure of castration from the start. Her subsequent disfigurement by burns compounds this status in what we intuit to be a “reenactment of the original trauma.” The litany of identities for the intruder and motives for the crime offer ample

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

justification for Shunkin’s fate—there is no shortage of angles from which to ascertain her guilt. While it is the figure of the narrator who provides these angles, embodying Mulvey’s first strategy, Sasuke would seem to offer a textbook example of the second. His refusal to recognize Shunkin’s castration, first when she is blind—he loves her anyway—and again when she is scarred—he insists that she is beautiful—appear to make him a classic fetishist, with Shunkin his fetish object. Despite its close adherence to film codes as Mulvey defines them, Portrait of Shunkin presents one marked departure. Because blindness in this text is understood from the beginning to be a form of castration, Sasuke can hardly be said to be avoiding castration when he blinds himself. His act challenges the fetishism of classic cinema’s male viewer and makes it impossible for men to identify with him. In turn, this failure of identification represents a break with another cinematic convention that is much analyzed by feminist film theory. Best known from Kaja Silverman’s work, the phenomenon of suture is a third means of neutralizing castration anxiety. Here, however, that anxiety has to do not with having the phallus but with being able to see and know in the way phallic subjects should—namely, in “pure acts of perception” (Metz 253). The problem with the motion picture camera is that every time it moves from shot to shot the viewer is reminded of the limitations of what he sees. Why does the frame include this but not that? What is the camera hiding? Suture alleviates this anxiety by prompting the male viewer to feel that his look coincides with that of the screen protagonist. Subsequently, shot-countershot sequences, which show first the protagonist and then what he sees, create the illusion that his look coincides with that of the camera. Once the viewer-protagonist has identified with the powerful gaze of the camera, he can forget that it is functionally impossible, in any field of vision, for nothing to be concealed. The process of suture succeeds at the moment the viewing subject is coerced, out of anxiety, into agreeing not only, in Silverman’s words, “ ‘Yes, that’s me,’ ‘That’s what I see’ ” (“Suture” 222), but also, “That’s all there is.” In contrast, Sasuke frustrates the suturing impulse, first in the sense that castration anxiety is hardly assuaged by the prospect of identifying with his self-mutilated position, and second in the sense that readers even of a written text find it impossible to accept the visual field of a blind man as “all there is.” As evidence, we have the curious fact that shortly after Portrait of Shunkin was published Tanizaki received complaints from readers that he had not offered sufficient knowledge of Sasuke’s “psychology.” Although the author replied publicly that nothing was missing from the story— that it was “all right there”—the figure of Sasuke was clearly insufficient (“Shunkinsh o- k ogo” 86). In the decades since, the field of Japanese

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime literature studies has addressed the problem by concluding in a host of academic publications that Sasuke’s secret is sadistic enjoyment. Known as the “Sasuke-as-culprit theories” (Sasuke hannin setsu), these now widely accepted readings look beyond the text’s presumed reticence to discern the truth about its male protagonist. Might Sasuke himself have been the one to maim his lover, in an act of “male egotism” (Nosaka 90)? Might his self-blinding have been a strategy to claim Shunkin’s beauty for himself, the image of her perfection etched forever into his ruined retina, and his alone? The Sasuke-as-culprit readings are disturbing on several levels. First, they tend to base their conclusions on extratextual calculations— whether an intruder would have had time to boil a kettle of water without being detected, for instance—and in this sense they seem simply unliterary. The real problem, however, is the effect of this impulse to see beyond the text. By attempting to know the truth about Sasuke, how does as conservative a discipline as Japan’s national literature studies produce a figure of such unthinkably obscene sadism? This gesture of positing an unthinkable figure as the ultimate cause of a given narrative has been the focus of a more recent strain of feminist film theory based on Lacan’s model of human vision. Rather than theorize cinema’s ability to shore up the male ego by offering a reprieve from lack, this strain, best known from Joan Copjec’s work, argues that the visual field is fundamentally incapable of inspiring feelings of certainty or plenitude. Copjec takes issue with feminist film theory’s tendency to identify such feelings as the effect of Lacanian “misrecognition.” In Lacan, the viewer can never say, as in suture theory, “I know I cannot see everything, but nevertheless I feel as though I can.” Such self-satisfaction is always ruined by an accusatory voice that accompanies misrecognition to intone, “You may think you recognize your own point of view in the God’s-eye gaze of the camera, but you are wrong on both counts! Humans do not see like cameras, and cameras do not gaze like God!” Copjec points out that, according to Lacan, what I see within my field of vision—inside this angle that opens out from my eye, or my camera, in straight lines according to the laws of optics—is limited not by the power of my personal or prosthetic eyesight but rather by my uniquely human conviction that there is always something beyond. I would like to see this “more,” but I cannot, so I imagine instead what the world must look like from its perspective. More specifically, I imagine what I myself must look like when the beyond looks back at me. However, because I remain fixed in place as I glance now here and now there, the position of the gaze spreads out in every direction on the far side of the entire sphere of possible destinations for my look. The gaze, the God’s-eye view, is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This means that I can never coincide with the gaze. It

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

also means that the gaze is too dispersed, too “nowhere,” to look back at me. Yet it is the gaze nevertheless that, in delimiting what I can see and reminding me of that limitation in its accusatory voice-from-nowhere, makes it possible for me to know anything at all about myself and my world. Copjec writes, “The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see” (35). This is the concern that the Sasuke-as-culprit theorists share with Copjec. They do not focus on their relationship to the “representation”— the screen, the image, or with Portrait of Shunkin, the text—as they would if they were Mulvey or Silverman. Instead, they focus on their relationship to what is beyond the text: the “true” Sasuke they are prevented from seeing by the text itself. He is the unthinkable figure who “causes” the narrative. Interestingly, in this model he is also necessarily consumed with sadistic enjoyment. In Lacan, because the gaze is an impossible object of prohibited desire, the unthinkable figure who commands it is by definition licentious and immoral. In language remarkably evocative of Portrait of Shunkin, Copjec explains, “When you encounter the gaze of the other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment” (36). Encountering what they perceive to be Sasuke’s “gaze”—the gaze of a man with otherworldly vision who commands the secret of sexual bliss—the culprit-theorists encounter exactly what they should. Yet their example departs from Copjec’s theory in one important way. They are convinced that they, as literary critics free to invent the “truth” of sadism floating behind Sasuke’s cloudy cataracts, are the only ones who truly understand the text. They are acting, in other words, as if they are “non-duped”—and in Lacan the non-duped are not only wrong but dangerous. Using Slavoj Zizek’s essay “How the Non-Duped Err,” Rey Chow has extended this argument to the field of intellectual politics. Copjec maintains that the gaze is unoccupiable and that feminists need not worry about the male look coinciding with it. In contrast, Chow argues that although the gaze may in fact be “extimate,” worrying about the impulse to want to see from its position is crucial not only for feminists but also for theorists of power in general. Chow writes, “Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’ which is a not-too-innocent desire to seize control” (53). Chow identifies this “not-too-innocent” desire as the driving force behind idealist political criticism, first-world feminism included, when it attempts to restore the dignity of the oppressed by

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime seeing beyond racist and sexist discourses to discern the “real” woman, the “authentic” native, and so on. She argues that the seizure of the allseeing gaze that is necessary for such restorative discernment is not only possible but commonplace, in the sense that replacing “false” (derogatory) images with “true” (celebratory or autobiographical) images is by now a familiar methodology across a range of disciplines. Her critique comes as something of a shock when levied against liberal academics, but it makes perfect sense when considered in relation to the Sasuke-as-culprit theorists. Do they not force us into intimacy with licentiousness—with sadism, even—in two related forms? Positioning themselves as all-seeing critics who can restore Sasuke’s truth to him, they decide that he is not the defiled, masochistic blind man of their initial readings but rather the picture of “male egotism,” determined to take what he wants. What he wants is of course the traditional kind of sadism, reaping pleasure from rapacious sexual license over Shunkin. In turn, by wanting this particular Sasuke so badly that they go so far as to invent him, the theorists inflict their own “non-duped” licentiousness upon us, forcibly commanding a point of view that should never be theirs to command. The point I want to develop with regard to the culprit theorists and these more recent debates in feminist film theory is that here as well Tanizaki’s text offers a departure so radical as to reject the scopic regime altogether. Portrait of Shunkin seeks a way to do away with these sadisms, and the visual formulae that make them inevitable.

“Restorative” Narrative? Race and Silverman’s Theory of Suture Certain clues from Tanizaki’s film essays suggest that the seeds of his doubt about these formulae had been sown much earlier. Let us take a moment before turning to Portrait of Shunkin to lay to rest an unresolved mystery from “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures.” If we pursue the logic of Tanizaki’s point about universal admiration for Japanese bodies to its natural conclusion, we find that he already had vague misgivings about codes such as suture and fetish in the late 1910s. What is more, his misgivings suggest the limits of some early feminist strategies for addressing the same problems. What exactly is the anxiety of which Kaja Silverman speaks when she calls suture its antidote? The answer is always fundamentally “castration anxiety,” and it is important to note at the outset that film theory’s default viewer is therefore always male. Having “nothing” to be castrated, women have no reason to feel anxiety, so they lack the motivation to assuage it that defines film theory’s default viewer.7 Silverman’s work on

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

suture is addressed to the field of semiotic film theory and to what she calls its “sublimation” of such sexual questions into questions of representation (Acoustic 13). Christian Metz’s famous “imaginary signifier” is a case in point. For Metz, the cinema distinguishes itself from other art forms by way of what he calls the “imaginariness” of its signifier—the way its images and sounds are at once more present and more absent than those of stage drama, for instance, or painting. Cinema provides “unaccustomed perceptual wealth” even though its sights and sounds are more ephemeral than those of the plastic arts that went before (250). This is why cinema is said to function as a “lure”—a visual trap known for “giving more and taking as much, i.e., more [than other forms of representation]” (250). De-sublimating Metz’s imaginary signifier, Silverman describes its effect in terms of theft. Viewers experience perceptual “wealth” in recompense not for an equal (“as much”) debt but for one that, once resexualized, is clearly greater. She writes: [C]inematic signification depends entirely upon the moment of unpleasure in which the viewing subject perceives that it is lacking something, i.e., that there is an absent field. Only then, with the disruption of imaginary plenitude, does the shot become a signifier. . . .  A complex signifying chain is introduced in place of the lack which can never be made good, suturing over the wound of castration with narrative. However, it is only by inflicting the wound to begin with that the viewing subject can be made to want the restorative meaning of narrative. (“Suture” 221)

The passage does a good job of explaining how film language operates through coercion, with the viewer “made to want” what it delivers. Less is still more than nothing, or rather, more than the worse-than-nothing that is castration. Silverman underscores her point in an analysis of Hitchcock’s Psycho, which forces its viewers to identify with the psychopath Norman. Abandoning them halfway to an unbearable sense of ignorance—”Why is Marion dead? What is being kept from me?”—the film kills off its initial protagonist and makes identification with Norman the only way to continue following the film. Even if it means acceding to a narrative of murderous psychosis, acceding to Norman’s point of view by agreeing “Yes, that’s me; that’s what I see” is better than having no narrative at all. In this context, Tanizaki’s strange remarks about film faces and film bodies begin to make sense. Note his simultaneous feelings of encroachment and attraction: The thing we call a human face, no matter how ugly, will, when pondered long enough, reveal a certain mysterious, otherworldly, eternal beauty. It is a feeling that affects me especially deeply when I gaze at a face captured in a motionAll the normally overlooked aspects of the human face picture closeup [ outsushi].

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime and body hold a seductive power quite difficult to explain. One feels as if they were closing in on him, and it is not simply because they are so much bigger than - 16–17) in real life. (“Katsud o”

Human faces and bodies “closing in on” viewers is a wonderfully literal evocation of the “suturing over” of the gap that separates them prior to identification. That it happens without the viewer’s consent accounts for the unpleasant sense of infringement that comes from being forced to merge with an ugly surrogate. In turn, the fact that suture banishes all points of view save that of the protagonist—and hence the camera—accounts for the “mysterious, venerable, eternal beauty” with which it rewards its participants. Once they are convinced that they, via the surrogate, command the authoritative gaze of the camera, they experience the fiction of mastery and all its transcendental trappings. Now, what would happen if the bodies and faces in question were Japanese? In “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures,” Tanizaki seems to be saying that they would be every bit as mysteriously, venerably, and eternally beautiful as long as the quality of the film were high enough. When he specifies that the Japanese movie industry will need to have earned a worldwide market before Japanese actors can be admired abroad, he is effectively saying that it will need to have mastered the universal film language that can begin, in Silverman’s words, only with a “moment of unpleasure in which the viewer perceives that he is lacking something.” What is universal about film language, in other words, is this “unpleasure,” this gap, and the urgency with which it demands to be addressed. Culturally specific narrative—that is, Japanese film—comes only afterward. Given this sequence, it is not surprising that white audiences watching Japanese actors would gladly suture themselves even to snaggletoothed, savagely dark, pigmy bodies. If Tanizaki’s remarks are informed by such an awareness, then his advice to fame seekers to become film actors is deeply cynical.8 Suture is certainly no way to acquire lasting acceptance; it is no real solution to racism. Perhaps more important, Tanizaki’s example itself reveals a starkly different set of conclusions about suture than those drawn by Silverman. Her critique targets the interpellating effects of a process that defines viewers’ points of view so precisely as to deny any discursive position but its own. “[T]he repudiation of alternative discourses,” she says, “is one of the chief aims of the system of suture” (222). Although it is true in Tanizaki’s example that Western viewers have no alternative but to assume Japanese faces, “no matter how ugly,” the act itself is still “alternative” in the sense that it accomplishes novel identifications. By this logic, film codes such as suture would seem to lend themselves quite readily to political manipulation. The catch is that they do so without addressing suture’s trademark

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

compulsion to anxiety. The narrative may be different, but the coercive means of imposing it are the same. For Tanizaki, it is at this primary structural level that the problem lies. As long as the subject’s inauguration into film language requires castration, the ontological inevitability of suffering will remain, and no amount of fame for Japanese actors will solve the problem. Throughout her writings, Silverman’s response to suture’s shortcomings has been to remain within the psychoanalytic paradigm and advocate for more equitable acknowledgment of castration across the sexes. In place of suture and the illusion of a coherent and controlling identity, she celebrates films that encourage viewers to acknowledge that both film and subjectivity are structured around absence. In so doing, she argues, such films replace the illusion of the all-powerful “gaze” with a desirous and desired “look” that admits that no subject, male or female, is equal to the phallic function. In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, for instance, she praises Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul for filming the black body of the Arab Ali so as to elicit looks rather than gazes: “Rather than locating castration definitively elsewhere, [the look directed at Ali] becomes itself the locus of insufficiency” (155). A similar attention to the role that racialized bodies can play in a more ethical cinema informs Silverman’s Threshold of the Visible World, a study of films and other visual works that allow us to idealize “bodies we would otherwise repudiate” (2). According to Silverman, such works teach us how to give the “gift of love” through “heteropathic identification,” a kind of suture that maintains idealization without appropriative identification (77). Yet here again Tanizaki’s much more cynical example would seem to ask, how loving can visual love be when it stems from horror and revulsion? Another passage, from Tanizaki’s “Film Techniques,” addresses what appear to be the same issues: unattractive screen images that draw too close for comfort then give way to transcendent beauty. In contrast to the “ugly face” example, where the beauty in question is male, here it is female: Taish o- Katsuei, where I gained my experience, uses the word sessha (photograph[large image], and of-contact; photo that touches its object) rather than  outsushi this would seem to be more faithful to the original (closeup). [ . . . ] In general, closeups seem to be more prevalent in American pictures than in European pictures. In the case of films made according to the “star system,” in which the actor him- or herself is more important than the story, the closeup of the actor’s face is often so extreme as to impart overwhelmed disorientation. Of course, if the star is an extremely beautiful actress, one never tires of being made to look at her, and in fact it is not uncommon to forget the story’s narrative entirely and be swept off, bewitched. Alla Nazimova’s pictures are a perfect example. Ms. Nazimova

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime is by no means a beauty, but in her face there is the flicker of something more than beauty—something sublime. Many of her films are held in high esteem despite their insipid plots because they exert the fascination, the glimmer to seduce people into a dream world where they can savor how she looks. (113)

This passage recalls Mulvey’s woman-as-fetish theory, in which woman’s visual presence in film “works against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (19). In contrast to suture, Mulvey’s “fetish” puts an end to narrative rather than providing its beginning; it draws the viewer into “overwhelmed disorientation” rather than promising relief. Spatially speaking, suturing is based on the anxiety that the gap of castration must be closed, while fetishization is based on the anxiety that that same gap—necessary for narrative— can never be opened. To quote Mulvey, fetishization “fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him” (26). The photograph on the screen is “touching” the viewer in a union not of subject and comforting surrogate subject, but rather of subject and threatening object. Technically speaking, what Mulvey describes is actually a situation of not enough fetishization, because the fetish is an object that helps the male subject evade psychosis whereas the overproximate object she invokes invites it. That is, the object’s threat of suffocating fusion amounts, psychoanalytically speaking, to overindulgence in the fetish, to the point where it no longer serves as a substitute for the maternal phallus but convinces the viewer that it is the “real thing.” As Metz observes, “[T]o fill in this distance would threaten to overwhelm the subject, to lead him to consume the object [ . . . ] mobilizing the senses of contact and putting an end to the scopic arrangement” (261). Of course it is the same with all languages: one must never freeze the signifying chain by filling the one absence that initially spurred it into motion. Yet with respect to the inauguration into film language, the Japanese phrase “touching picture” (sessha) is especially evocative. In addition to its colorful description of the danger it poses, it also underscores what was already becoming Tanizaki’s aversion to that danger. If, in the alternate modernity he imagines, desire will be a force of creativity rather than a compulsion to make good on lack, then “touching” will need to be part of the story, not what shuts it down. Mulvey’s solution to the “fetishization” of woman in film is to expose it for what it is. “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it,” she says; “that is [my] intention” (16). In turn, acknowledging the masculinist workings of visual “pleasure” is supposed to open a space for new film languages—languages that Mulvey herself attempts to speak in directing films such as Riddles of the Sphinx. For Tanizaki, the prospect of different film codes holds little promise. In 1921 he is still giving himself over to the

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

seduction of screen sirens such as Alla Nazimova, even though we sense his impatience with a symbolic economy that can valorize the insipid and seduce through mediocracy. By 1935 he has not only withdrawn his interest from film language but has also made a point of keeping himself removed from its effects. Although he keeps hearing about Irie Takako and Katherine Hepburn, he has resolved never to see them on screen.

Uncanny Parallels: Fetishism in Tanizaki and Freud This is where Tanizaki’s contributions to feminist film theory seem inflected by the sensibility of 1930s Japan. Discovering the overdetermination of film codes does not convince him that one can struggle against them only from within. Instead, he is impatient, suspecting from the start that they will be all but impossible to change. In Portrait of Shunkin, the twist that Tanizaki adds to his astonishingly Freudian depiction of fetishism makes this clear. Freud identifies the fetishist as the little boy who, like all boys, greets the “unwelcome fact of women’s castration” with horror and disgust (“Fetishism” 156). Until his traumatic discovery, the little boy has had no knowledge that penises could be missing. However, if his mother’s, in which he has always believed, now proves absent, then the possibility of losing his own suddenly emerges. This is the terrifying prospect on which his father capitalizes in order to bring about the resolution of his Oedipal complex. The father orders him either to give up his mother or lose his penis. Usually the boy obeys, relinquishing the mother and her now discredited plenitude in order to keep the organ he loves so much. The fetishist, in contrast, does not obey. He “refuses to take cognizance” of the mother’s castration, renegotiating the Oedipal ultimatum by means of a tricky psychic compromise. With part of his ego he acknowledges the mother’s lack, thus averting psychosis by repressing his desire for her. Freud reminds us, “In a psychosis the [ . . . ] current that [ . . . ] fitted in with reality would have in fact been absent” (156). With another part of his ego, however, the fetishist maintains his belief in the mother’s wholeness. Disavowal is his “defense against the claims of external reality” (153), his “triumph over the threat of castration and protection against it” (154). Freud writes: In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached. . . .  Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but the penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. (154)

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime It is of course this “appointed substitute” that becomes the fetish. It is the last thing the boy sees while it is still possible to believe that he is in no danger of being castrated, and it becomes adored in that capacity. In Freud’s scenario, the toddler’s gaze travels up over such things as the mother’s feet, shoes, underwear, and pubic hair en route to the traumatic sight. This accounts for why classic fetish objects tend to be things like feet, shoes, underwear, and fur rather than substitutes that actually resemble a penis. Later in life, people will have no inkling of the true significance of the fetishist’s loved object, hence his access to it will not be limited. The fetishist is therefore a happy pervert, disinclined to seek a psychoanalytic cure for his (half-) conviction that he has unimpeded access to the maternal phallus, and his own as well. Keeping this description in mind, let us consider the language that depicts Sasuke’s line of vision upon discovering Shunkin’s injury. A Japanese version of Freud’s fetishism essay had not appeared in the standard translations of Freud in 1933, but if it had it might easily have borrowed from Tanizaki.9 Immediately following Shunkin’s attack, Sasuke rushes to her bedside from the antechamber where he sleeps. The text reads: Sasuke, Sasuke! I’ve been made hideous! You must not look at my face! Shunkin spoke again in pained whispers, continuing to writhe in agony, frantically trying to hide her face with her hands. At this Sasuke replied, please don’t worry. I have not seen your face; I am keeping my eyes closed, just like this. . . .  (545–546)

The narrator glosses, “So it seems that Sasuke did see Shunkin’s blistered face at the moment he rushed to her bedside that night, but finding it unbearable to look at directly, instantly averted his gaze” (546). Because the spectacle is traumatic, Sasuke sees but claims not to have seen, looks but declares never to have looked. We could hardly ask for a better example of disavowal than his defensive declaration, “I have not seen your face; I am keeping my eyes closed, just like this.” Nor could we ask for a clearer account of his sense of “triumph over the threat of castration.” After he has blinded himself and made his disavowal permanent, he exclaims to Shunkin: To me the change in your appearance is invisible; what I see is only the familiar image of your lovely face that remains etched in my mind’s eye after all these thirty years. . . . I don’t know who could have been so cruel to us and caused us so much grief, but if he meant to attack me by disfiguring you, I refuse to take any notice. Now that I too am blind, it is as if nothing happened to you. . . . It’s wonderful to think how I thwarted that coward’s evil scheme and triumphed over him. (549)

Where Tanizaki’s version of fetishism parts company with Freud’s is in its treatment of what the fetish represents.

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

Both writers conceive of the origins of the fetish in the same way. Sasuke’s memory “stops” the moment before he lays eyes on Shunkin’s wound, so what he sees afterward is her face exactly as he had always known it. The parallel with Freud is unmistakable: When the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia. As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt half-way, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish. (155)

Were Sasuke himself in analysis, his adored substitute for the maternal phallus would no doubt be identified as Shunkin’s visage. The promise of male satisfaction that was her beauty has been reduced to a bloody woundedness, alerting him to the possibility that he too has something to lose. Of course she is not his mother. She is, however, a narcissist, at least by reputation, and in Freud’s formula the narcissistic woman has made her whole body into a phallus.10 Now that phallus is nothing to look at. Freezing his memory the moment before discovering her injury seems to furnish Sasuke with an indelible guarantee that neither Shunkin nor, more important, he, need ever fear castration. Yet several factors disqualify such a reading. First is the fact that long before the calamity Sasuke was already the only one who conceived of Shunkin as whole. Although her parents and the community referred to the poor blind girl’s “deficiency” (kanojo no fugu), Sasuke insisted he never saw a single “lack” ( fusoku na mono) in Shunkin’s appearance (504, 505). For him and him alone her face was the very picture of “fullness and perfection” (enman gusoku) (504). Given that Sasuke’s love for Shunkin takes his belief in her wholeness as its point of departure, and given that by the time of her maiming this belief must have been indistinguishable from his very being, it seems unlikely that he would need to blind himself in order to maintain it. Should we be tempted to argue that these contrarian beliefs of Sasuke’s merely prove that he was a fetishist from the start, let us note that self-blinding hardly makes sense as a refusal to take cognizance of Shunkin’s burns. To Sasuke, the second attack is merely a reinscription of the first, an amplification of her original blindness. After Shunkin suffers the second castration, he groups it matter-of-factly with the first, calling them both expressions of jealousy for her beauty and her artistic talent (500). He simply is not revolted by either “woundedness,” just as he is not disgusted by what fetishism holds them to represent. Freud speaks of an aversion “which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals” (154). Yet Sasuke clearly loves Shunkin’s genitals as much as he loves the rest of her. Among the unforgettable descriptions of the blind lovers’ intimacy is Sasuke helping

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime Shunkin in the toilet, her hands wrapped elegantly in a towel while he tends to her hygiene. In the end, Sasuke emphasizes the similarity between Tanizaki’s definition of fetishism and Freud’s, not by embracing its terms but by rejecting them so explicitly. The only classic element he retains is disavowal, in a spirit similar to what Gilles Deleuze seems to have in mind when he calls disavowal “the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor even in destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is” (“Coldness” 31–32). By blinding himself, Sasuke is contesting the validity of the assailant’s need to reinflict castration on a woman who, together with her lover, refuses to acknowledge it. He is contesting, that is, but he is not fetishizing. For him, there is no “adored substitute for the maternal phallus” because there is never any recognition of “the fact of women’s castration.” He cherishes the “familiar image of [Shunkin’s] lovely face” through all her successive maimings, disavowing them without ever experiencing the classic fetishist’s “last moment it was possible to believe.” For Sasuke, “seeing” Shunkin’s lovely face is always a first moment, not a last. It is an opening to a different symbolic based on an ever-stronger conviction that neither he nor Shunkin will ever have anything to lose.

Photographically Induced Violence: The “Sasuke as Culprit”Theorists This is not to say that there are no classic fetishists in Tanizaki’s text. The narrator fits the description perfectly, and in such a way as to amplify Portrait of Shunkin’s critique. Suggesting that fetishism seldom exists independent of sadism, his fetishistic reading of Sasuke is in many ways a diegetic prototype of the extradiegetic “Sasuke-as-culprit” readings that came later. The narrator identifies himself as a 1930s writer and presents his story as reportage—a piecing together of information gleaned from interviews, artifacts, and a biography of Shunkin commissioned by Sasuke. One of the artifacts is a photograph of the blind woman that he analyzes briefly, then stops to qualify: Given my description, the face that comes to mind probably strikes readers as insufficient and vague, yet I doubt they would be able to discern things more clearly were they able to see the photograph for themselves. Compared to what my readers call to mind from the above account, the photograph is probably even hazier. To think of it, the year that Shunkin’s image was captured she was thirtyseven, when [Sasuke], too, went blind. So his last earthly vision of Shunkin may well have resembled the photo. Yet surely the memory he kept of her visage in his later years was not as indistinct. . . . (499)

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

The photograph acts for the narrator much the way the motion picture acts for cinema’s model viewer: as a lure that draws the eye toward what appears to offer special access to visual truth. We read that prior to 1866, the year Shunkin was thirty-seven, photographic technology had yet to find its way into the lives of the Osaka merchant class. After 1866, the year Shunkin was burned, she would not have allowed her image to be recorded. Accordingly, this is the only photograph of Shunkin ever taken, and as such it seems to promise singular insight into her character. Furthermore, because the picture dates to the moment of photography’s introduction to Japan, it also seems to offer material knowledge of an important turning point in the history of visual representation in Japan. Yet no sooner does the narrator posit the photograph’s promise than he comes up short. The photograph is old and dappled with spots, so the person it purports to reveal remains elusive, ironically, because of imperfections in the very technology that is supposed to deliver her for observation. The narrator is forced to make do with a vague substitute for visual truth, the verbal description of which he declares to be so woefully inadequate. Yet what should spring to his mind at this point but someone in the world of the photograph itself whose vision is not compromised—who can, in fact, see everything the picture is hiding. Sasuke, with his eternal portrait of Shunkin based not on representation but on something “surely much less indistinct,” is suddenly quite a comforting figure for the narrator.11 Is he not an obvious choice as surrogate, a perfect point of view for suture? Like the motion picture, this still photo speaks a lack that generates its own compensation. We begin to understand how suture is itself a fetishistic operation, substituting its restorative narrative, the story of Sasuke’s allknowing gaze, for an unbearably absent signified: the face whose unsightliness will soon be even further literalized by mutilation. Important to remember, however, is that the fetishism the narrator adopts as a defense produces an overdetermined Sasuke at odds with the rest of Tanizaki’s text. Once he is blind, Sasuke’s knowledge of Shunkin is tactile, aural, and most importantly, tentative. In the fetishistic frame of reference, meanwhile, the photograph effectively demands that Sasuke’s blindness make him more seeing and more sure, his optical knowledge not diminished but perfected to a superhuman and, not incidentally, cruel extreme. In this sense, the narrator’s photographically induced need to believe in a man who takes sole visual possession of the true Shunkin acts as a harbinger of a similar need felt by the Sasuke-as-culprit theorists. Might the text even be said to be trying, with this inoculation of fetishism, to make itself immune to further attempts to transform Sasuke’s blind perspective into omniscience? The proposal would make sense if we agreed with Mulvey that exposing a perversion’s logic ruins the pleasure of its effects.

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime What the culprit theories teach us, however, is that this is not the case. The narrator’s fetishism develops into a full-scale epidemic once these theorists come into contact with it, with the effect again being that sadism proliferates in the form of a “nonfiction” Sasuke whom the text itself never offers. The narrator proposes a number of possible enemies and motives behind the blind shamisen teacher’s attack. There were people who were jealous of her talent, people who resented her pride, and people who had suffered her severe teaching methods—methods that were customary for male teachers at the time. There were people whom she had spurned in love, and people who resented Sasuke’s devotion and wanted to harm him through her. The abundance of motives forces the question of why a woman’s excellence—her talent, desirability, and pride—should elicit such brutal retribution. The debate that rages around Portrait of Shunkin to this day, however, is over the meaning not of Shunkin’s but of Sasuke’s injury. The shift testifies to the accuracy of Freud’s theory that in fetishism the real issue is always the man’s castration, not the woman’s. Beginning with the argument that the ever-vigilant Sasuke could not have remained asleep while an intruder broke in, boiled water in the kitchen, and carried it past him to Shunkin’s room, critics have proposed that his self-blinding is part of an interconnected set of objectives. He wanted, the theories variously argue, to punish Shunkin for her willfulness, to render her beauty invisible to all but his own mind’s eye, to break her spirit and achieve the “equality” of lovers, and to facilitate it all by eliciting Shunkin’s gratitude with feigned self-sacrifice. The dubious honor of presenting the first culprit theory goes to novelist and Tanizaki - Taeko, who wrote in 1976 that she “could imagine” Sasuke scholar K ono - 151). In 1978, as the intruder who scalds Shunkin with boiling water (K otei Nosaka Akiyuki developed K ono’s idea, presenting Sasuke as the picture of “male egotism,” who wounds in order to possess and control (90). With increasingly lengthy ruminations on Sasuke’s guilt by Kasahara Nobuo, - and Moriyasu Masafumi, Portrait of Shunkin scholarship in Tada Michitar o, the late 1970s and early 1980s grew so accustomed to the culprit theories that when the academy’s foremost Tanizaki expert, Chiba Shunji, gave a synopsis in 1982, he presented them with such force that his became the definitive account.12 After a spate of equally troubling “Shunkin-injuringherself theories” (Shunkin jigaisetsu) in the late 1980s, the debate returned to Sasuke’s guilt in handsome, full-length volumes with such titles as The Riddle of Tanizaki’s Shunkinsh o- and Shunkinsh o- Studies.13 Let us take a closer look at the two Sasukes, the one invented by Portrait of Shunkin’s narrator, the other by the culprit theorists. The narrator is induced by the photograph to posit an all-seeing Sasuke and to fetishize his narrative. He is prompted to do this by the photograph itself, which

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

makes him feel that when he looks at Shunkin, something is being hidden from him—something “more” that he is compelled to want to see. The culprit theorists, meanwhile, are induced by Portrait of Shunkin to posit a sadistic, violent, castrating Sasuke and to fetishize his narrative. They are prompted to do this, however, despite the fact that Portrait of Shunkin is the story of a man who chooses to live in a world in which nothing is hidden and from which the compulsion to “want to see” has been banished. For Sasuke, Shunkin’s second castration acts the way Irigaray wishes all castrations would: “as inducement(s) to perform castration on an age-old oculocentrism” (Speculum 47). His self-blinding serves as a disavowal of the scopic regime in which viewers are required, in flashes of instantaneous recognition, to see “nothing” when what is presented is not castration but difference. Portrait of Shunkin’s displacement of mutilation from the genitals to the face is a powerful indictment of how “the fact of women’s castration” obliterates any chance of feminine identity or difference. However, the text also moves beyond this critique to suggest a system of representation that does not require castration. As we shall see, Shunkin speaks a language that has nothing to do with Oedipus. Hers is a musical language, a language she composes in symbiosis with a creative life-chain that includes grains, vegetables, fish, birds, bird droppings, and even the wriggling insects of Tanizaki’s early filmic delight. Unlike narrative film and still photography, Shunkin’s language leaves nothing to be desired because it is not founded on anything’s absence. Might it be for this reason that her language is so vehemently denied by the Sasuke-as-culprit theorists? Shunkin’s music threatens the phallic economy of the codes by which they live—codes that require a precious object to be missing from their field of representation. In turn, the absence of castration induces them to invent Sasuke-as-castrator to reenact the foundational violence without which they would find themselves unable to speak. Their invention recalls Zizek’s account of how, in the world as psychoanalysis understands it, a secret sadistic license is always underwriting official public codes of morality. Zizek writes: Where does this splitting of the law into the written public Law and its underside, the “unwritten,” obscene secret code, come from? From the incomplete, “notall” character of the public Law. . . .  Sadism thus relies on the splitting of the field of the Law into [ . . . ] a symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains social peace—and its obscene, superegotistical inverse. (Metastases 54–55)

It would be one thing if the culprit theorists were positing Sasuke’s sadism so nonchalantly because they understand sadistic enjoyment to be “extimate,” that is, belonging to a different order from their own. Here, however, they are not merely suturing Sasuke’s narrative to close the gap

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime of the “not-all.” Rather, they are inventing and controlling the “not-all,” which means, ultimately, that they coincide with it. As a result, their sadism cannot help but be intimate, both to them and to those of us in the Japanese literature community into whose symbolic order it falls, however fleetingly. How does all this make Portrait of Shunkin a piece of feminist film criticism, circa 1866? The culprit theorists’ continued amplification of the narrator’s 1933 will to scopic power makes us wonder whether something might have been done to preempt it. Yet by dating the photograph of Shunkin even further back in time, Tanizaki suggests that his narrator’s way of seeing is already a foregone conclusion in 1866, a year that straddles, as the narrator says, “the first years of Meiji and the last years of - (498)—in other words, the last years of the premodern Edo period Kei o” and the first years of the modern Meiji period. It is the year in which photography entered the lives of urban Japanese, and it is the year in which Shunkin stopped being seen and Sasuke stopped looking. Might modernity have turned out differently in Japan if everyone had done as Sasuke did? Certainly, yes. But by making photography and modernity coincide, Tanizaki suggests that modernity is fated to be an age in which representation is founded in the repression of a never entirely extimate violence— a representation epitomized for him by the scopic regime. What was true of a single photograph in 1866 would be only that much more true of motion pictures in 1933, the year Tanizaki created Shunkin. Her story concedes that as long as there is lack there will be fetishists to fantasize ways to evade it, and sadists with the will to step in and control it. Even more important, Shunkin’s story acknowledges that although violence may come from the incomplete, not-all character of discourse in general, it is always women to whom that not-all, finally and brutally, is made to refer.

Why Do the Blind Keep Castrating the Blind? Shamisen’s Primal Fathers Another way to make this point is to consider a newspaper article cited by Portrait of Shunkin’s narrator. He is describing the strict way in which Shunkin treated her pupil Sasuke when both were in their teens and the shop boy had just begun to learn shamisen. To contextualize, he reminds us that harsh teaching methods are part of coming of age in the world of the Japanese performing arts. As evidence, he recounts the vicious cruelty cited in an apparently real newspaper article titled “Ningy o- j oruri no chimamire shugy o” (“Puppet Theater’s Bloodstained Training”) from “the Sunday page of this year’s February 12th Osaka Asahi Shinbun”

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

(514–515). According to the article, musician Koshiji Day u- III had on his forehead a moon-shaped scar received from his teacher, Toyozawa Danshichi, who would fling a sharp plectrum along with his insults. In addition, musician Osumi   Day u- was made to play a single passage from dusk until dawn, swarmed by mosquitoes, while his teacher, the legendary Toyozawa Danbei, listened from inside a net. Worst of all, puppeteer Yoshida Tamajir o- had a scar on the back of his head from his teacher, the - who assaulted him with a stage-prop sword. One great Yoshida Tamaz o, of the puppet’s legs had splintered off and been soaked with Tamajir o’s blood, and thereafter the student worshiped the puppet on the grounds that “were it not for the chastisement of this puppet, I might have remained an ordinary artist all my life” (515). The famous men in the newspaper article all have their sight. Yet the narrator is careful to mention that the same sorts of stories abound in the worlds of koto, shamisen, and ikutary u- singing, whose most accomplished artists are usually blind. Shunkin’s own blind teacher was such a fearful presence that his male students would inch away from him bit by bit, often falling headlong down the back stairway. - conviction that true talent emerges What should we make of Tamajir o’s only from mistreatment? If artistic “legends” such as his teacher can be compared to national literature scholars, then what we have is another version of the sadism story. This time the symbolic order in question is Japanese performing arts, and the “something missing” is the (barely) repressed sadistic kernel of violence that ushers it into existence. The artists’ scars are traces of this originary encounter, without which there could be no true art. In one of the most upsetting lines in Portrait of Shunkin, the narrator extends this logic to Shunkin by insisting that the beauty of the music she made in her later years stemmed entirely from the ferocity of her attack: With the accident as a turning point Shunkin’s art improved exponentially. No matter how blessed with musical talent one may be, achieving artistic genius without tasting the bitterness of life is difficult. Until then she had been coddled and indulged, extreme in her reliance on others. She knew neither cruelty nor humiliation, and there had been no one to put her in her place [literally, to break her nose]. But then fate presented her with the harshest of ordeals, forcing her to hang in the balance between life and death until her impudence was smashed. (553–554)

In the narrator’s account, Shunkin’s ordeal becomes just another necessary castration. Of course her three encounters with life-altering “wounds”— femaleness, blindness, and now disfigurement—far outnumber the famous musicians’ single, career-founding injuries. Yet repetitive violence is not

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime entirely missing from the male tradition either. Because each famous pupil becomes a master in turn, the art world is actually sustained by perpetual cycles of violence and scarring. The genealogical nature of these cycles offers an opportunity to look more carefully at how Tanizaki’s understanding of foundational injury differs from Joan Copjec’s. Copjec’s objection to feminist film theory focuses on what she calls its tendency to “trap the subject in representation” rather than heeding Lacan’s insight that representation is only ever a trompe l’oeil constructed by something beyond and outside it (34). Film theory calls itself Lacanian, but it forgets about the “not-all” character of representation when it argues, for instance, like Silverman, that narrative film has the power to repudiate all discourses but its own. According to Copjec, film’s real object of repudiation is the “secret” cruelty or castration without which it would never have been founded. “Every phenomenal field occludes its cause,” she says, describing the field itself as a “first-order principle” produced by a “second-order principle with which it is never co-present” (11, 13). As an example, Copjec introduces Freud’s Totem and Taboo, and this is where her thinking contrasts with Tanizaki’s most clearly. Totem and Taboo speculates on how primitive men first managed to suppress their innate aggression in order to relate peaceably as equals. Copjec’s point is that Freud is interested less in peaceable equality in the symbolic order than in the second-order principle in the real that enables it: Freud insists on going beyond these relations to posit the existence of some preposterous being, a primal father who once possessed all the power the brothers now equally share and whose murder is supposed to have issued in the present regime. No wonder so many have taken this to be one of Freud’s most crackpot ideas, the wild fantasy of an incompetent ethnologist! But to call it crackpot is to miss the point that if this father of the primal horde is indeed preposterous, then he is objectively so. That is to say, he is unbelievable within the regime in which his existence must be unthinkable if relations of equality are to take hold. (12)

The first thing to notice is that Tanizaki is likewise fascinated with paternal figures who in the beginning wield unthinkably absolute power. In their unbridled violence his shamisen masters bear more than a passing resemblance to Freud’s lawless, licentious father. Although the masters are never murdered per se, they do lurk deep in the shadows of the performing arts world, their fury preposterous in the context of its venerable traditions. Where Tanizaki differs from Copjec is in his understanding of the mutual exclusivity of the first- and second-order principles.14 How can second-order sadism remain entirely in the real if it is integral to the handing down of tradition, that is, if it happens not just once in the society’s prehistory but in fact again and again, with each new generation? In

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

Portrait of Shunkin, “unthinkable” violence is so hard to banish that it pops up even in nonfiction newspaper accounts. There is no single originary primal father, sacrificed in the beginning and repressed forever after. In this context it is instructive to remember Kaja Silverman’s call to acknowledge castration more evenly across the sexes. If ever there were a community tailored for such an acknowledgment, the blind world of elite Japanese musicians would seem to be it! Sightlessness serves as an irrefutable reminder of the wound that purchased each member’s entry into the community. Such an obvious lack would seem to be impossible to disavow, and equally impossible to project onto women. Yet as the narrator explains, the society of elite blind musicians identifies itself by means of - “a magnificent ‘position’ handed down to a special office called kengy o, blind males by the imperial household” (542). We know from the dicthat until the beginning of the modern period the imperial tionary K ojien and that they household did designate special offices for the blind (m okan), - k ot  - o, - zat o, - and were divided into four levels of decreasing prestige: kengy o, shubun. True to the narrator’s word, the office of kengy o was open only to men, and this fact is the basis for one of his most credible explanations for Shunkin’s attack: the assailants were kengy o- who were threatened by a woman’s superior talent. “When the rumor arose that such people could not match Shunkin’s artistry,” he suggests, “people may well have begun to think of some underhanded way to bury her skill once and for all” (542–543). The “magnificent positions” handed down from on high allow these kengy o- to disavow their lack despite its apparent indisputability. They will not tolerate being forced to acknowledge it by a woman who is doubly castrated. Although the kengy o- community would thus seem to support Copjec’s point that the second-order principle of castration must remain extimate, the fact remains that their first-order will to keep it repressed makes them enact it anew, on Shunkin.

Shunkin’s Not-Extimate Bird Bliss One such kengy o- figures prominently in an episode remarkable again for a parallel in Freud. The legendary shamisen player Toyozawa Danbei, whose real-life dates (1827–1898) overlap with Shunkin’s fictional ones (1829–1887), appears twice in the text. We meet him first in the newspaper article. We meet him the second time when the narrator invokes him as a witness to Shunkin’s own musical skill, about which he is said to have expressed nothing but regret: “How sad! If only she had been born a boy she could have played the wide-necked shamisen; she could have been a master!” (536). The narrator speculates that Danbei must have thought Shunkin’s talent was wasted on a woman “because the deepest mysteries

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime of the wide-necked futozao, the noblest of all the three-stringed instruments, can only be penetrated by men” (536). The joke is that both the narrator and Danbei are punning on “shaft” (sao), the “wide neck” of the “noblest of all instruments.” The reason that Danbei cannot appreciate Shunkin’s music, in other words, is that its maker does not now and never has wielded a “wide-necked instrument.” In psychoanalysis we have seen how the speaking subject who accedes to language must first have something to lose—something for which language then acts as compensation. For Danbei, Shunkin’s musical language is inaudible because she lacks the phallic qualifications to speak it. This is why the narrator’s remark that Shunkin achieved genius only after her “nose” was broken is so ironic. Had it not already been broken, twice? Was it not always already broken? This is not to say that the female voice’s imperceptibility prevents it from providing male subjects with an endless source of compensatory narrative. The female voice is imagined to be a transcendental object the apprehension of which would offer the ultimate pleasure and pain of jouissance. The encounter with this lack is exactly what Freud was suturing with narrative every time he spoke of “the riddle of the nature of femininity” that no woman had the language to help solve (“Femininity” 113). In Lacanian parlance, the same riddle became the female ecstasy that men have forever begged “on their hands and knees” for women to reveal, without ever being able to “get anything out of them” (On Feminine Sexuality 74). In Portrait of Shunkin, Shunkin’s own elusive discourse as perceived by Danbei and characters like him is just this sort, with the scenes involving her highly trained songbirds offering a vivid example. Listening to the music of her larks (hibari) and thrushes (uguisu), Shunkin achieves a pleasure attributed by all but Sasuke to female ecstasy. Some of her favorite birds sing most beautifully when allowed to soar high in the sky in a maneuver called “cutting the clouds.” Her habit is to release them once a day, her blind eyes upturned as she listens fervently in joy. In turn, the neighborhood boys’ habit is to rush out and enjoy not the wondrous sound of the larks but the sight of the “knockout lady music teacher” (bep- transformed by bliss. The narrator notes with resignapin no onna shish o) tion that the world will always have its “base-minded lechers” (532). To be accurate, however, these lechers are only following the advice of Lacan himself, who told his students that if they want to see a woman “getting off,” they should go to Rome to see Bernini’s statue of St. Theresa (On Feminine 76). In both cases the woman’s pleasure is “nothing” she can talk about, a preposterous second-order principle occluded from the first. Yet unlike the “nothing” that is supposedly her genitals, her absent pleasure is thrilling to look at because the “nothing” in question is language, which

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime   

men need never fear losing as long as the privilege of language remains theirs. Still, if the psychoanalytic law of ec-static female bliss is what Portrait of Shunkin contests, why does the text place such emphasis on the otherworldliness of Shunkin’s birds? They hold the key to both her pleasure and her musical compositions, her language. Yet they all have names from Buddhism and Chinese mythology, as if to evoke a sublime and impossible - after the drum of heaven in elsewhere. Her favorite thrush is called Tenk o, the Lotus Sutra, famous for producing a wondrous sound (myo’on) without ever being struck. When Tenk o I dies, Shunkin replaces it with Tenk oII, whose voice Sasuke likens to the imaginary creature with the head of a bird and the body of a human—the kary o- binga, who sings sutras so beautifully that listeners never tire of its song. Other birds have names like “Friend for a Thousand Ages” and “Phoenix,” and all offer stunning examples, Shunkin says, of the music her pupils should emulate. To do so would make them kirinji (child prodigies), with their ideal status linked to the mythical Chinese giraffe kirin. Perhaps the key to understanding these metaphors lies in the fact that Sasuke himself becomes a kirinji, a prodigy of both music and lovemaking, the minute he goes blind. Confessing afterward to his housemaid, he says he never truly understood the softness of Shunkin’s hands and feet, or the suppleness of her skin, until after he lost his sight. “[But m]ore than anything,” he concludes, “it was the mysteriously wondrous sound (my o’on) of Teacher’s shamisen that I was able to savor for the first time” (553). What seemed like a sublime and impossible elsewhere becomes available to Sasuke because blindness is the point of entry to a phenomenal field from which nothing is occluded. Here the transcendent song of the birds is not a mystery, and Shunkin’s pleasure is not extimate. On the contrary, they make sense for the very first time. In other words, the birds have mythological names to show that sacred pleasures depend for their very pleasurability on not being exiled to another register. To enjoy them, one need only embrace the blindness that cures the compulsion always to see behind, see beyond, and see more.

A Happiness Unknown to the Sighted This explains why Shunkin’s death at the end of the text is occasioned when one of her “cloud-cutting” larks fails to return to its cage. The scene in which the lark soars up to infinity and makes Shunkin so sad that she falls ill has been singled out by several critics as the only flaw in an otherwise flawless classic. Is it not a bit too formulaic? Too melodramatic?

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime Kawabata Yasunari complained: “The training of a famous songbird requires a mysterious coincidence of both human and animal genius. Such birds are seldom produced; it is no easy feat to train them, and it would seem that someone who gives herself up to it as much as Shunkin is beyond the range of Tanizaki’s power to depict” (120–121). Kawabata attributes the scene’s failure to the inherent evasiveness of its subject matter. By now, however, it should be clear that what is truly formulaic is Kawabata’s own tendency to insist on the inexpressibility of the pleasures to which women “give themselves up.” If the scene fails to make sense, or makes only the most tired, formulaic sort of sense, it is because readers take the lark’s disappearance to be yet another manifestation of its extimacy. According to this line of thought, Shunkin grows despondent because she cannot join the lark as it rises up in this overdetermined metaphor for transcendence; or inversely, she dies because the bird and she existed only as a “mysterious coincidence of both human and animal,” and she has no choice but to follow it into infinity. Yet given what we have learned, it seems much more likely that Shunkin dies because she finds it unbearable to live in a world from which objects of desire are necessarily excluded. For all their “cutting of the clouds,” her larks have never been out of earshot, never inaccessible. Now, for the first time, she is faced with a world in which what she loves has actually become a sublime second-order entity occluded from the first. This is a world we know all too well from psychoanalysis, and critics are perfectly justified to call it a cliché. The point to remember, however, is that Shunkin does not die in accordance with the rules of this world, with her own transcendental status dictating her reaction. On the contrary, Shunkin dies because the bird goes missing in a way that so closely invokes what she and Sasuke have built their world around rejecting: the inaugural absence of the sublime object that founds desire and meaning as modernity defines them. Her unique symbiosis with the birds at all other moments in the text illustrates the altogether different mode of meaning and desire that Portrait of Shunkin is written to explore. Although Shunkin composes music for koto and shamisen using the birds’ trills and warbles as her model, it is never a matter of art representing an absent nature. The birds, which traditionally are trained by other birds, are in Shunkin’s household trained by her, or rather, they are inspired by her. The music she plays prompts them to trill out joyfully, voices “straining to compete with the tone and artistry of [her] koto strings” (555). In this text, every musical voice is understood to derive its meaning from a surplus of reality-effect rather than a shortage. There is, in other words, no moment of “unpleasure” in which the subject perceives it is lacking something. Consider Shunkin’s remarks on what it is like to listen to Tenk o:

The Sadism of the Scopic Regime    - no matter where When we hear the warbling of a famous trained bird like Tenk o, we are we remember the elegance of the mountain ravine in all its hushed tranquility. The tinkle of a rushing stream, the mass of cherry blossom clouds above the bird’s tail—we see and hear all of it. Blossoms and mist alike are furnished deep in the shadow of that voice, and we forget that we are in the city with all its dusty cares. (531)

For Shunkin, representation is not a matter of compensation. There is no nature that is not fully present in the music, and there is no music that is exiled from nature by virtue of human intervention. Whether it issues from a bird or a stringed instrument, this language contains everything, and it is the miraculous ability to make meaning despite the absence of absence that makes it wondrous. Moreover, just as in the psychoanalytic field “absence” never fails to refer back to women’s castration, the absence of “absence” in Portrait of Shunkin never fails to refer back to Sasuke’s unique disavowal. As Deleuze explains: [T]he expression of fetishistic disavowal, “No, the mother does not lack a phallus,” is not one particular form of disavowal among others, but formulates the very principle from which the other manifestations of disavowal derive. . . .  Nor is disavowal in general just a form of imagination; it is nothing less than the foundation of imagination, which suspends reality and establishes the ideal in the suspended world. (127–128)

Portrait of Shunkin’s suspended, ideal world is the work of no ordinary imag- that critics have always ination; it is not simply the “other world” (iky o) called it. It is the work of nothing less than the foundation of imagination, a world founded in Sasuke’s refusal to take cognizance of lack. If he and Shunkin experience this world, in his words, as “a happiness unknown to the sighted,” it is because it is also the product of one of Deleuze’s “other manifestations of disavowal”: a blind manifestation founded in Sasuke’s indelible phrase, “[No,] I have not seen your wounded face; I am keeping my eyes closed, just like this” (553, italics added). For with the shutting of eyes comes the closing of the distance between subject and object, a distance that must now give way to touching for meaning and desire to exist. As we have seen, there is the sense of “touching” that informs the earthly godliness of a music that can come only from nearness: Shunkin, the birds, and Sasuke too are like music machines working always off the proximate energy of the others. Of course there is also the more explicitly erotic sense of “touching,” the daily ministrations of cleaning, rubbing, wiping, wetting, drying, warming, massaging, and loving played out over Shunkin and Sasuke’s entire bodies. “Just how much blind lovers delight in their sense of touch,” the narrator says, “is something our imaginations can simply not allow” (551).

   The Sadism of the Scopic Regime His remark offers an opportunity to solve one last riddle. If Portrait of Shunkin celebrates the closing of the gap that makes desire a product of futile longing, why does there remain such a noticeable gap between Shunkin and Sasuke’s paradise and the narrator’s understanding? In other words, why allow such an Oedipal subject to tell so much of the story? Formally, the text is an amalgam of three distinct voices, like music from the three strings of a shamisen. The narrator gives his opinions and interpretations. He also quotes from the Sasuke-commissioned “Biography of Mozuya Shunkin.” Finally, he relays information from his conversations with Shigizawa Teru, the loyal housemaid who began serving the blind couple at age twelve. Interestingly, Shunkin’s family name, Mozuya, contains the character mozu, meaning “shrike,” a kind of sparrow. Similarly, Teru’s family name contains the character shigi, meaning “snipe,” a kind of plover. In other words, two of the three sources that come together to make Portrait of Shunkin are named after birds. The narrator is thus in the minority; he is the only one declining to speak in the text’s preferred avian mode. Perhaps that is precisely why he is necessary. Because modernity is an age in which representation has been fated to operate only as compensation for lack, readers have no immediate access to the more ethical, erotic, and productive meanings that Portrait of Shunkin imagines by means of its bird voices. Hence, the narrator’s voice is itself offered as an object of disavowal, spurring the “radical contestation” without which the story would never begin.

Conclusion: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Performativity but Were Afraid to Ask Tanizaki

how ca n w e lov e e ac h ot h e r ethically and not simply produce endless perversions of the objecting and abjecting gestures that go by the name love in narratives of the modern subject? This is the feminist question that Tanizaki’s texts from the 1930s never stop asking. If the preceding chapters have left room for doubt, I wonder if I might use these concluding remarks to give one final snapshot of the argument, and in so doing offer one last sketch of how the project situates itself with regard to Japanese studies in general and feminist studies of Japanese literature and culture in particular. Let me begin with three questions from a critical reader. Relevant individually, the questions are perhaps even more helpful taken as a set. My reader asks: 1. Can one really argue that evidence of the psychoanalytic in Tanizaki is evidence of the universality of the psychoanalytic paradigm? 2. Shouldn’t this project be more historical, working harder to place Tanizaki in his time and explain where he “got” psychoanalysis? 3. Why argue so pointedly with Judith Butler? Is she still so influential? Although the third question seems unrelated to the first two, it occurs to me that the first two are framed in a way that is itself evidence, if not of Butler’s predominance, then certainly of the predominance of the argument with psychoanalysis that she has developed. For few have been as

   Conclusion forceful as Butler in rejecting the psychoanalytic account of something I have argued is everywhere in Tanizaki’s work from the 1930s: the foundational dereliction of the maternal feminine. Moreover, few have been as unequivocal about our responsibility to social and historical analysis, especially when we are dealing with identity categories such as woman and queer that have been created through exclusion. These dual intellectual commitments—to the necessity of historical contextualization and to the critique of psychoanalytic “universality”—have been termed “historicist” by critics such as Joan Copjec, and associated with the legacy of Foucault.1 With Butler as one of their most formidable proponents, it seems safe to say that these commitments are so well accepted in the United States as to have achieved the status of common sense across a range of humanistic disciplines. Japan studies, with which I associate my critical reader, is no exception. So let me begin with the third question and use it to frame my responses to the other two. I would like to do so by discussing Ashikari (The Reed cutter), which Tanizaki wrote in 1932.2 In the early stages of this project, I loved both the novel and Butler’s theories because they seemed to be a perfect match. For the novel’s heroine Tanizaki chose the name - written with the honorific prefix o and the kanji for play. As his text Oy u, reminds us, play has a long association in Japanese with objectified women who entertain men with music and sex. Through rich historical and literary allusions, The Reed Cutter makes it clear that what has been foreclosed from their “playful” identities is any possibility that they could be the subjects of their own desire and their own play. Yet this possibility is precisely what the heroine Oy u- sets out to realize. She performs her prescribed identity with such self-reflexive flair and such startling results that she seems a perfect illustration of two of Butler’s key points. First, she suggests that reiteration is never merely a replica of the same. Second, she suggests that it is in fact only ever by reappropriating the injurious terms of one’s identity that there is any chance of resignification. Butler derives these points from her historicist account of language and identity. She argues that the terms that are meant to establish coherent identities become meaningful over time through both exclusion, of what they cannot abide, and reiteration, of what they require but can never fully consolidate. For this reason, their “constitutive outside” has an opportunity to reassert itself with every necessary repetition of the norm. Butler gives the name performativity both to the cultural injunction to repeat one’s identity and to the practice of exploiting its inherent incompleteness. She writes: “Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation

Conclusion   

that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure” (Bodies 241). When I was first reading The Reed Cutter, performativity was being embraced by some of the most committed and influential feminists in Japan studies. Focusing on the impure practice of reenactment, they were writing about theatrical figures whose roles—as women on the shingeki stage, for instance, or as Takarazuka actresses—expose gender as a risky practice that is nevertheless open to splittings, selfparody, and destabilization.3 In recent English-language scholarship, feminists have continued to focus on Japan’s “bad girls” and “poison women,” affirming that we should acknowledge and exploit injurious names rather than try to transcend them.4 It seems safe to say that in the years since I started writing about Tanizaki, the field has only intensified its commitment to Butler’s keyword, gender. Among feminists in Japan studies there is general consensus that one of our most important tasks is to show how gender is always already a performative force within categories such as history and national literature that have confused it with the biological determinism of sex and ignored its power to contest and disrupt.5 The story of how my reading of The Reed Cutter evolved is the story of how I fell out of consensus. What the novel ultimately reveals is that although Tanizaki was himself already a consummate practitioner of performativity in 1932, he both perfected and abandoned it in the space of a single novel fully half a century prior to its heyday in North America. This raises a number of pressing questions. How did he know to doubt performativity’s reliability? How does his novel underscore the tragedy of its failure? And what is a feminist to do, having come to appreciate that failure anew?

The Reed Cutter Structured Like a No- Play One of the most seductive essays in Bodies That Matter is the final one, “Critically Queer.” Writing in the early 1990s, Butler begins by discussing the recent reappropriation of the term queer for a progressive politics of pride and activism. Even if we do not know what performativity is, we already have evidence that it works! She gives this account of the normative use of queer: “When the term has been used as a paralyzing slur, as the mundane interpellation of pathologized sexuality, it has produced the user of the term as the emblem and vehicle of normalization [and] the occasion of its utterance as the discursive regulation of the boundaries of sexual legitimacy” (223). In addition, to account for how queer was reappropriated, Butler poses a series of rhetorical questions: “How is it that a term that signaled degradation has been turned . . . to signify a new and affirmative set

   Conclusion of meanings? Is this a simple reversal of valuations such that ‘queer’ means either a past degradation or a present or future affirmation? [Or] is this a reversal that retains and reiterates the abjected history of the term?” (223). Reading these lines in the midst of reading The Reed Cutter, I was struck by how satisfying it would be to argue that Tanizaki’s text is using play not as an affirmative identity but rather as a paralyzing slur. In the first third of the story the term is used exclusively by men to establish the boundaries, if not of their sexual legitimacy, then certainly of their political and economic legitimacy. Like queer, in other words, play is used to measure and enforce the speaker’s own power at the expense of those it purports to describe. In turn, by presenting readers with this abjected history of the term, The Reed Cutter makes it clear exactly what Oy u- is retaining and reiterating when she reclaims it for herself. Granted, calling play a slur represents a major departure from the way the first third of the text is usually read. Borrowing its structure from a - or spirit play, The Reed Cutter sends its opening narrator on a mugen n o, ritualized journey through a landscape saturated with literary and historical associations before introducing the ghostly figure who will tell the remainder of the story.6 Here, the opening narrator is a 1930s writer who sets out from his home in suburban Osaka to spend an afternoon at the ancient site of retired emperor Gotoba’s detached palace at Minase. The ghostly figure is a man he meets later that evening, a nephew of Oy uwho will soon begin to channel her voice. In the moonlit scenes leading up to that moment, the two men have what seems to be an exquisite time drinking sake on a sandbar in the Yodo River and reciting classical texts - “play from memory. The poetry that rises to their lips centers on y ujo, women” from bygone centuries who poled boats along this very sandbar, singing songs and enticing customers. The opening narrator laments their absence from the modern river and recalls a text that links their lovemaking to Buddhist salvation. He sighs, “[W]here have all those waterbuoyed women (mizu no ue no onna) gone?” (454). His longing is typically read as the highest form of compliment a man can pay a woman. If this is straightforward adoration, however, how do we account for the text’s starkly different associations with play in the pages immediately prior, when the opening narrator is still alone in Minase? - or Oy u- take the stage, the kanji for play (y u) - and its Before either y ujo Japanese reading (asobi) appear five times in eight opening pages devoted to the initial narrator’s thoughts of retired emperor Gotoba, his detached palace at Minase, and the splendid play that was pursued there. Three of the five citations are from Masukagami, a fourteenth-century history that tells the story of Gotoba using Minase: first to “become the talk of society by enjoying pleasurable pursuits (asobi) to his heart’s content,” second

Conclusion   

to “assemble courtiers for poetry and pleasurable pursuits (onasobi),” and finally to “pursue every possible pleasurable pursuit (yorozu no asobiwaza), just as the spirit moved him” (Ashikari 443, 444). Strolling through Minase, our narrator remembers these lines as if they were all from one contiguous passage in Masukagami. Checking the original, however, we find that Tanizaki has pasted together two separate sections to create the cluster.7 That the main focus is Gotoba’s association with play becomes even clearer with The Reed Cutter’s fourth citation of the term, in which the narrator remarks that he is “deeply moved by every tree and stone” when he thinks that this is the spot where the retired emperor held his “seasonal y uen” (banquets; literally, play-feasts) (446). However, Masukagami’s protestations of unlimited, carefree play grow suspect if we know, as our narrator certainly does, that the text was written during an age of severely diminished court influence, as a kind of elegy to aristocratic ideals.8 Gotoba ascended the throne in 1183, the same year that Japan’s first warrior regime established its Shogunate in Kamakura. He proceeded to assemble salons that pursued the splendor of aristocratic aesthetics with legendary vigor, asserting his superior legitimacy culturally because he could not assert it politically. Historically speaking, in other words, his elegant play is always already a marker of his eclipse by the Shogunate. Worse, both the eclipse and the irony of using play to resist it only intensified when Gotoba did attempt to take political action. The Reed Cutter’s fifth citation of the term in question underscores this point: In later years when his plot to overthrow the Bakufu had ruined him and he spent nineteen sad years on Oki Island among the sound of the waves and the echo of the wind, longing for the glory of past days, what must have returned to him most frequently were visions of the hills and rivers of this area, and all the differ- which he enjoyed at the palace. (450) ent kinds of honorable play (gyoy u)

We see that for Gotoba, play has nothing to do with women. At this point in Tanizaki’s text it is not a paralyzing slur. Nevertheless, because it measures an impossible ideal, and Gotoba’s anxiety over that impossibility, it is for him a highly narcissistic and melancholy yardstick. Like the phallus in psychoanalysis, it is, to borrow Butler’s phrase, “a having to have that is never had” (205). The term takes on its misogynist tenor only in the pages immediately subsequent, where we realize that the panoply of historical and literary figures with whom our opening narrator communes on his way to and from Minase all seek “play women” for the same reason Gotoba seeks “play.” They too are exiles and fallers from political grace, and they too seek solace in an impossible absolute. Now they call it “feminine,” but it is clearly still an index of their own lost power. From the fifteenth-century

   Conclusion n o- play Kog o- there is retired emperor Takakura, who sends a surrogate to hear his favorite courtesan’s heavenly koto playing after she has been driven from the capital by his rival, Taira Kiyomori. From Hakurakuten’s - (Song of the lute, ninth century) there is an exiled offipoem “Biwak o” cial who bids his friend from the capital a riverside good-bye, then spends the evening consoling himself with the sublime lute-playing of a singing girl. From the vernacular history Okagami (“Great Mirror,” twelfth century) there is Sugawara Michizane, who passes into exile at the hands of Fujiwara Tokihira. Michizane is comforted not by a musical consort but by a landscape that is itself feminized, as the swaying branches above a lover’s house seem to bid him compassionate farewell. In each case, The Reed Cutter cites only snatches of its source texts.9 Readers are expected, as with a n o- play, to be literate enough to recognize them on their own. Meanwhile, the process of discerning their significance forces us to recognize patterns in the relations of power that have wrought the meaning of courtesan and singing girl in Japanese discursive history. In this way, Tanizaki uses the classical conventions of n o- drama to illustrate a principle that Butler calls “the power of the speech act.” This power, Butler says, “is to be found neither in the subject nor in his will, but in the citational legacy by which a contemporary ‘act’ emerges in the context of a chain of binding conventions” (225). We could hardly ask for a more exhaustive account of “citational legacies” than the dense weave of textual allusions that constitute the ritualized opening of a n o- play. Butler of course does not imply that the citational legacy of the English term queer stretches back several centuries to Beowulf, for instance, or to The Canterbury Tales. For her, the history of the relevant “binding conventions” is much shorter. Is Tanizaki really suggesting that his modern narrator’s understanding of play is determined by an entire millennium of classical texts? In this context, Terry Kawashima’s historical study of - is enlightening because it shows us how The Reed Cutter’s extraory ujo dinary fluency with the classics is still organized by a modern sensibility. - o miru no j o- (tenth Kawashima identifies several texts—among them Y ujo century), Y ujoki (eleventh century), and Senj ush o (thirteenth century)— that have been studied exhaustively in the twentieth century by scholars writing the history of prostitution in Japan.10 Interestingly, these same three sources are recited by Tanizaki’s opening narrator to conjure the es- Yet nowhere in the scholarship on y ujo - that Kawashima dissence of y ujo. cusses is there any mention of the characteristic that Tanizaki uses to bind his own profile together: maternity. It is this characteristic that makes his text’s opening citations of play distinctly modern. I think it is also this characteristic that makes them slurs.

Conclusion   

Play as Paralyzing Slur The opening narrator explains that the reason he sets out for Minase in particular is that he has always loved a famous poem by Gotoba about the Minase River in springtime, misty at the foot of hills: miwataseba yamamoto kasumu minasegawa - wa aki to yube nani omoikemu

When I gaze across the base of the mountains is hazy along the Minase River Why did I ever think the time for dusk is fall? (443)11

Declaring that Minase is “not the sort of place to invite women and children” (445), he spends the afternoon alone there, conjuring Masukagami passages and looking for the spot where Gotoba would have composed the poem. Yet whereas Gotoba speaks only of gazing across the river (miwata[su]), the opening narrator is sure that Gotoba must have gazed upriver (kawakami no h o- o goran ni na[ru]), and at the very same sight that now floats before his eyes “like something nostalgic, warm, and melancholy” (444). He elaborates: I am invited into sweet fantasies not by the majestic or the striking but by just these sorts of ordinary hills and ordinary rivers, which make me want to stand here endlessly. A landscape like this doesn’t surprise the eyes or steal the soul. Instead it tries to meet and enfold the traveler, bringing a smile of nostalgia to his lips. A quick glance reveals nothing, but standing for a long time one is moved by a gentle love, as if swept up in the warm embrace of a merciful mother. More than anything, I come to want to be sucked up into that faint mist hovering upriver, as if beckoning me from afar into its melancholy evening darkness. (448–449)

The passage is remarkable for its use of the passive. Our traveler is “invited” by the Minase’s maternal landscape, “made to want” it, “moved by” it, and finally “sucked up into” it. Despite his protestations of mercy and gentleness, there is no mistaking the abject poetics of self-loss, with their familiar evocation of being enclosed and overwhelmed by a mother who merges with nature. As the narrator shifts from Gotoba’s longing for play to his own longing for “play women,” The Reed Cutter intensifies this poetics by having him move “upriver” not on the Minase but on the much wider and longer Yodo nearby. Our ghostly second narrator greets him on a sandbar there with a pun. “How truly special,” he says, “the moon seen from between the reeds / her legs (ashi no aida kara), with the great Yodo River flowing by on either side of us” (457). At this point both men are crouched deep in the marshy reediness of the sandbar, and the image of a woman’s legs is

   Conclusion provided not only by the pun on ashi but also by the Yodo’s topography. Pointing out obvious Oedipal overtones, Noguchi Takehiko explains: The spot at which the narrator-author is lingering, where the Katsura River joins the Yodo, may well speak of a sort of geographical eroticism, of the sort that calls forth a woman’s body made of water, her legs spread open indulgently as she reclines. If so, the narrator’s crouching here on a sandbar amid a thicket of dew-dampened reeds would suggest a symbolic return to that most lush and most forbidden part of the female body. (Tanizaki 199)

With this description Noguchi responds directly to the opening narrator’s plaintive question, “Where have all those water-buoyed women gone?” The answer is, “Precisely nowhere!” They are stuck here permanently in this landscape, this overdetermined destination of every male traveler on the journey that Noguchi rightly identifies as “infantile regression” (y oji taik o) (200). The only point of contention is whether we, with Noguchi, should call such a place “the most lush part of the female body.” How can the most attractive part also be the most swampy, the most engulfing, and the most melancholy? These adjectives describe not any actual maternal body but the body constructed for her by a modern subjectivity that insists, as we saw in Chapter 3, that the specificity of her materiality be given up from the start. As long as the mother is what must be derelicted in order for the subject to accede to language and culture, she will always be represented in language and culture spectrally, as what beckons from their misty borders in the form of the abject. Throughout This Perversion Called Love one of my main arguments has been that this originary foreclosure is what produces the perverse phenomena that Tanizaki’s texts explore. If the woman were not missing from the start, it wouldn’t be the case, as we saw in Chapter 4 with Shunkin, that no one could imagine the nature of her sexual bliss, and a sadist would have to be invented to imagine it on our behalf. If the woman weren’t missing from the start, it wouldn’t be the case, as we saw in Chapter 2 with the “woman heads” and their “feminine masochism,” that her death drive would be thought to consume her before she ever enters into the realm of the social. Most saliently, if the woman weren’t absent from the start, it wouldn’t happen, as it does in Chapter 3 with Tsumura’s “motherlove,” that the trip back to her would be imagined as treacherous and defiled by definition. By making play yet another metaphor for what we get when the maternal feminine is always already lost, The Reed Cutter proves itself to be more than familiar with what Butler calls “the mundane interpellation of a pathologized sexuality” (223). The sexuality of the femininity called play is mundane because, as Noguchi shows, it is thoroughly overfamiliar in its Oedipality. It is also pathologized, as Tanizaki shows, because it is prone, primordial, and paralyzed.

Conclusion   

Performativity’s Promise How would Butler respond to this sad state of affairs? The Reed Cutter shows us her answer with what at first glance seems to be great flair and optimism. Butler contends that one of the biggest mistakes feminists make is to indulge the fantasy that “language expresses a ‘will’ or a ‘choice’ rather than a complex and constitutive history of discourse and power” (228). Because simply choosing to identify ourselves in nonpathological language is not an option, the point is to start where we are and use the power of existing language against itself. As she writes in “Critically Queer”: It remains politically necessary to lay claim to “women,” “queer,” “gay,” and “lesbian” precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowing. (229) To recast queer agency in this chain of historicity is thus to avow a set of constraints on the past and the future that mark at once the limits of agency and its most enabling conditions. (228)

Reading Butler in the 1990s, I sensed something incredibly honest and powerful about this approach. It seems ideally suited to addressing the intransigence of exactly the sorts of identities we find for women in psychoanalysis.12 We wish we could simply discard them. We even dismiss them, like my critical reader, as ahistorical or doctrinaire. They persist, however, as Tanizaki shows us, and what both he and Butler initially seem to agree on is not only the necessity but also the promise of embracing them. We know from her name that The Reed Cutter’s Oy u- is laying active claim to the discursive history of play as appreciated by a 1930s sensibility. She is a modern link in the chain that connects centuries of objects— ”playthings” for would-be powerful men—with the twentieth-century abject—a beckoning primordial mother. Lest there be any doubt, Tanizaki begins the second two-thirds of the text by having Oy u- perform “Yuya,” a koto composition with lyrics based on Zeami’s n o- play. Oy u- is a widow and the mother of a young son. Her in-laws want her not to remarry but to stay in the family and support their “precious heir” (daiji na yosegare) (469). To quell her boredom they encourage her to buy lavish uchikake and take part in expensive koto recitals.13 It is at the recital where she plays “Yuya” that a man named Seribashi, the father of the ghostly narrator, falls in love with her. The scene does a brilliant job of using “Yuya” to introduce Oy uin an explicit performance of both her object and her abject roles. For the in-laws, she functions as an object. They are said to be oldfashioned in their insistence that she uphold chastity (misao) toward their dead son. Still, has maternity ever really stopped being synonymous with

   Conclusion subsumption into paternal genealogy? That Oy u- is immobile, unable to make good on her own desire, goes hand in hand with her object-role as an index and perpetuator of the family’s prestige. So it is interesting that this is the role that is performed with explicit tragedy in Zeami’s n o- play. The title character, Yuya, is the daughter of a provincial innkeeper who comes to the capital as the mistress of Taira no Munemori at the height of Taira power. She receives a poignant letter from her dying mother, but Munemori refuses to grant her leave to visit home. He insists that she accompany him to a cherry-blossom party and relents only when she composes a poem that emphasizes both her desire to be with him and her filial concern for her mother.14 Although it must masquerade as a love poem to work, Yuya’s composition underscores the total lack of love between the despot and the woman. The more artful her performance is, the more it ingratiates her with the man of whose power she is only ever an extension. Initially this would seem to be the role that Seribashi too wants Oy uto play. He prides himself on being a member of Osaka’s merchant class, and he yearns for a wife who would wear an uchikake in homage to that subculture. Yet the text reminds us how quickly object tends to tip into abject. Seribashi falls in love with Oy u- while watching her perform “Yuya” in an uchikake, but afterward he muses that her true merit is in the mysterious indistinctness of her features. Contemplating it, he feels like “a hazy shadow is falling across his own eyes, as if the area around [Oy u’s] body were trailed with mist (kasumi ga tanabiite iru y o)” (466). It is the same phrase our opening narrator uses to characterize the Minase River, describing the appeal of spring as a time when “pink mist trails at the foot of the mountains (kurenai kasumi ga tanabi[ku])” (449). Once again we see a collapse of the distance separating male subject from female object, and once again the result is a simultaneously alluring and threatening site for male self-loss. Like the opening narrator, seduced into mid-river - Seribashi too wants to be “sucked up into the faint mist” of tales of Oy u, a woman who is impossibly sublime precisely because, having first been converted into an object for measuring male power, she has only ever been missing from the start. That such a status could become the “enabling condition” of resignification seems highly dubious. Yet Oy u- wastes no time explaining how it might be done. I’ll show you “chaste!” she says. I’ll show you “hazy!” She engineers a sham marriage between Seribashi and her younger sis- the couple ter, Oshizu. In recognition of Seribashi’s feelings for Oy u, will not have sex. In recognition of Oy u’s promise to her in-laws, neither will she. Yet these constraints do not stop her from mortgaging her son to galavant around Western Japan with the newlyweds. At country inns

Conclusion   

- a maid (Oshizu), and the threesome pretend to be a rich matron (Oy u), a steward (Seribashi), using honorifics and elaborate rituals to act and re- elevation. It all culminates in a startling bedroom scene, with enact Oy u’s Oy u’s virtuoso performance of exactly the misty oblivion Seribashi craves. “Don’t breathe!” she orders him (483). “Don’t complain when I hold your lips closed. Don’t laugh when I tickle! Don’t flinch when I pinch! Don’t sleep! Don’t stay awake!” Seribashi thinks they are erotic commands and wonderfully intimate. To us, however, they feel cold, because The Reed Cutter has already shown so well that the citational legacy of play will always equate such “eros” with a man’s self-negation, such “intimacy” with - resignification means his suffocation. “Don’t breathe,” indeed! For Oy u, showing how utterly unloving such play really is. Pointedly, it is her act of making this painfully clear that the text calls “one of Oy u-san’s fun ways to play [Oy u-san ni wa tanoshii asobi no hitotsu]” (485). It is the first time the word has referred to something she does rather than something she is. - performance has succeeded in With this line it would seem that Oy u’s transforming her from an object of play into a subject of play. It could not have been possible had she not first been feminized into discourse by a text whose male characters all summon her with familiar misogynist interpellations. In this respect Oy u- is analogous to the queer subject about whom Butler writes: Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is “queered” into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention it also reverses. (232)

In Tanizaki studies, much has been made of The Reed Cutter’s own term - theatricality: shibaigi (484). Yet critics tend merely to corrobofor Oy u’s - flair for performance is something with rate Seribashi’s fantasy that Oy u’s which she was born and that she practices unconsciously.15 In contrast, I - shibaigi functions in the spirit of Butler’s “theatriwould argue that Oy u’s cal citation.” Taking up play as the discursive basis for her opposition, she performs the compulsory with such pointed exaggeration that its pathology becomes impossible to overlook. She also accomplishes a “reversal” by replacing Seribashi’s love of “mist” and “haze” with startling clarity. No one is chaste in the second two-thirds of the novel, but no one is erotic either. Above all, no one is loving.

   Conclusion

Performativity’s Limits Except, perhaps, Oy u- and Oshizu? Performativity is supposed to resignify not just through hyperbolic exposure of a term’s injuriousness, but also by what Butler calls “working the weakness in the norm” (237) to “queer, twist, and redeploy” it (228). The sisters come close to pulling off just this in a recitation of maternity that has always been for me the most intriguing scene in the novel. Not incidentally, it was also this scene that precipitated my break with performativity. Leaving her small son with a nursemaid to travel with Oshizu and Seribashi, Oy u- continues to lactate and asks her sister to suckle her. Ostensibly it is to lessen the pressure on her swollen breasts. However, we read that long after the nursemaid has weaned the child, Oshizu is still pulling a milky thread of pleasure through her sister’s body. What are we to make of this? In a famous line from “Femininity,” Freud writes that “a mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships” (133). Freud says it is because the son finally satisfies the mother’s penis-envy, “bringing the longed-for penis with him” (128). In contrast, Oy u- is a mother who couldn’t care less about the son. She leaves him at home and uses his milk for erotic exchanges with her sister. In the spirit of Gender Trouble, the sisters’ suckling seems to expose “the natural” status of lactation as something phantasmatic, completely open to cultural interpretation. Do the sisters not, as in a line from Butler’s text, “destabiliz[e] substantive identity, and depriv[e] the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ” (146)? The more we embrace their relationship as a challenge to heteronormativity, the more likely we are to hail the novel’s ending as a bril- son dies of pneumonia while liant encapsulation of that challenge. Oy u’s she is out “playing.” Ha ha! we nod appreciatively. The Reed Cutter has queered things so thoroughly that what began with a son’s fantasy of maternal regression now ends with a son’s death from maternal neglect! Still, is this a valid reading? If we take too much perverse pleasure in the son’s death, we overlook the fact that Tanizaki structures his entire - theater of homonovel to show that without him as collateral Oy u’s erotic resignification quickly goes bankrupt. As soon as he dies she is cast out of her in-laws’ family and married off to a rich sake merchant. The new husband installs her in his country house but never visits because, as a “playboy” (naka naka asobu otoko) (490) he is busy pursuing other women. It is a brutal reinscription of female play as immobile and

Conclusion   

- performaobjectified, and it reminds us, with its symmetry, that Oy u’s tivity was never not underwritten by her in-laws’ “old-fashioned” values. Despite her theatrics, The Reed Cutter ends in the same place it began. Like the phallus in psychoanalysis, play is still something that men want to “have” and women have to “be.” Independent of this term there is no identity, no language for women.

The Problem with History Why would Tanizaki write a novel that begins by championing performativity and ends by discrediting it? He is drawn to its power to expose the perversity of the existing terms for femininity, but he is ultimately unconvinced that retaining and reiterating them produces more than a replication of the same. What The Reed Cutter helps us see is that Tanizaki’s lack of conviction stems from his disagreement with Butler over two specific points: the status of the derelicted maternal feminine and the usefulness of history for addressing the problem. For Butler, the woman-outside-discourse is a prime candidate for subversion through performativity precisely because psychoanalysis says such a subversion is impossible. In an essay from Bodies That Matter called “Arguing with the Real,” Butler takes Slavoj Zizek to task for accepting Lacan’s glib paraphrasal of this impossibility, la Femme n’existe pas (“the woman does not exist”) (203). Of course Butler’s outrage is very much in keeping with the spirit of this book. We cannot afford simply to accept this point! But if The Reed Cutter crystallizes a fundamental incompatibility between Butler’s approach and Tanizaki’s, it is because the Japanese author thinks differently, both about how seriously we need to take the problem of the missing woman and about what it means for heterosexuality. Butler maintains that the woman-outside-discourse is Zizek’s “specific appropriation of the Lacanian doctrine of the real” (196). In other words, it is a matter of theoretical orthodoxy, itself in need of redeployment to bring it in line with the kind of “nonnormative” psychoanalysis she says she likes better (189). However, if the problem of the woman-outside-discourse is merely a matter of postwar European doctrine, why do we find it in so many of Tanizaki’s Japanese novels from the 1930s? Why is it so intractable for him? What is more, how can the missing woman’s name be re-deployed in language if it never had language in the first place? Butler also maintains that the founding prohibition of the maternal described by psychoanalysis is a “heterosexualizing injunction” that mandates the existence of masculinity on one side of the symbolic divide and femininity on the other (189). Yet if femininity is outside the domain of intelligibility, how can Butler speak meaningfully of hetero-sexuality? She accuses the

   Conclusion kind of psychoanalysis she doesn’t like of “attribut[ing] to that ‘outside’ [the] specific social and sexual position” called femininity (189). Yet the dilemma that psychoanalysis describes is precisely that that “outside” has no specificity, socially or sexually. It does not exist. It has been derelicted! The purpose of The Reed Cutter’s successive celebration and disqualification of performativity is to insist on this point in particular. Play, after all, is an extremely effective tool for illustrating a monosexual economy in which both men and women within the symbolic are defined by means of a single masculine term. To have play or to be play— these are the sole options. The Reed Cutter uses them to ask a simple but profound question. Even given the most spirited, the most hyperbolic possible examples of performativity, how much “femininity” can we really generate if the rules of the game dictate that we begin and end with the same phallic term? In Gender Trouble, Butler speaks of “parodic practices in which the original, the authentic and the real are themselves constituted as effects.” The result of such practices, she says, is the loss of gender norms, and “the loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations” (146). In The Reed Cutter, if we take the “norm” of lactation as an example, it is true that having performed it well beyond its usual limits, the text does present us with a highly original sororal “configuration.” In the 1990s I hailed this as exactly the proliferation of gender that Butler celebrates. Yet if we are honest about how The Reed Cutter presents the suckling scenes, we have to admit that their main purpose is to titillate Seribashi as he watches. The wife and her sister serve ultimately to invite him back into the infantile regression that men in this novel have been seeking in play from the start. If it is true that gender is proliferating, it is also true that all we get are endless variations of the same master term. Meanwhile, the woman not defined as play is nowhere to be found. In her critique of Zizek, Butler insists, strangely, that this nowhere, this absence, is essentialist. “[The] conflation of women with that foreclosed existence,” she says, “is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism” (218). She continues: “[T]o supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of symbolic intelligibility is to preempt the specific social and historical analysis that is required . . . ” (206–207). The contradiction is obvious. How can we analyze the history of something that does not exist? That has been foreclosed from the start? That has no intelligibility? Butler herself no doubt sees this. But in her critical worldview there can simply be no such thing as “outside history,” or “outside discourse,” and she resists psychoanalysis to the exact degree that it says otherwise. Returning now to my critical reader, I am left wondering, is Butler’s resistance so different from the resistance my reader offers when prompting me to do a better job of placing Tanizaki in his historical context?

Conclusion   

Certainly the idea that we should trace ideas from text to text and author to author—in this case, to explain where Tanizaki “got” psychoanalysis— is widely respected in Japan studies. However, if Tanizaki had simply inherited psychoanalysis from his peers in ero-guro-nansensu, for instance, or from reading an exotic foreign author called Freud, then it would be for him just one discourse among many, and as easily displaced by history as both Butler and my critical reader would like. Instead, what we see so often in Tanizaki’s purportedly classical “historical” texts is a distinctly modern obsession with the perversions we get when the woman is missing. The full force of his brilliant narratives are brought to bear on the intransigence of exactly this problem, which only psychoanalysis really explains. For this reason we might say that Tanizaki’s narratives are themselves a critique of psychoanalysis’ universality, at least where his own personal universe is concerned. Of course my critical reader is right to point out that evidence of the psychoanalytic in Tanizaki is not evidence of the universality of the psychoanalytic paradigm. I will be more than satisfied to have shown merely that evidence of the psychoanalytic in Tanizaki is overwhelming. Still, where “universality” is concerned, perhaps it is worth recalling Naoki Sakai’s point that the two main groups of historians to have invoked that term vis-à-vis modern Japan both used it interchangeably with “progress.” For prewar and wartime advocates of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s role as the center of universalism in Asia was supposed to involve moving all Asian nations in the direction of the ethical. They saw “history [ . . . as] the history of moral development” (169). For postwar modernization theorists, Japan’s transition from particularity to universality was supposed to coincide with a “process of increasing rationalization, of reason realizing itself ” (157). When we talk about Tanizaki’s relation to psychoanalysis, the key difference is that he is talking about its “universality” as something thoroughly unreasonable and immoral! Psychoanalysis describes an economy in which femininity serves, as Irigaray says, “forever and for free, unknown, forgotten” (Ethics 98). In Japan studies, other scholars have begun exploring psychoanalysis’ intellectual travels in Japan during the first half of the twentieth century.16 My aim has been less to read Tanizaki laterally, against his contemporaries, than to read him vertically, as it were, and to appreciate the depth of his desire both to understand psychoanalysis and to think beyond it. I have tried to show that for him, as for me, the stakes are high. If what this book calls “nonperverted love” is to be possible, we must first acknowledge the degree to which the missing woman is not simply theoretical doctrine but something much more descriptive of the world in which we continue to live. Both Tanizaki and I want to love the woman. Yet how can we love her if she is not here?

Notes

Introduction 1.  Saegusa is referring to a famous line from Tanizaki’s 1929 novel Tade kuu mushi (Some prefer nettles) that says of the protagonist, “[he] did not know whether ‘woman’ was a god (kami) or a plaything (gangu), but he did know that from his position the reason he and his wife were never in accord was that she was neither” (97). 2. The chapter on Tanizaki from Danry u- bungakuron (Theory of men’s literature) has since been partially translated by Maryellen Mori in a valuable collection edited by Rebecca Copeland, Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. The page numbers here refer to Mori’s translation. biography that Tanizaki read some of Freud’s 3. We know from Nomura Sh ogo’s early works in English translation with Sugita Naoki of the Medical Faculty at Tokyo Imperial University between 1905 and 1908 (170). However, this was before Freud published his major essays on fetishism, masochism, the death drive, femininity, and the other configurations for which I argue Tanizaki is offering his own definitions. Meanwhile, translations of Freud into Japanese began to appear only simultaneously with the works I analyze here, and there is no evidence that Tanizaki - o- published the ten-volume Furoito seishin bunsekigaku zenshu read them. Shuny od  (Complete works of the study of Freudian psychoanalysis) between 1929 and 1933. Ars published the fifteen–volume Furoito seishin bunseki taikei (Collected works of Freudian psychoanalysis) between 1930 and 1934. 4.  In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari define modernity as a time when the political economy has come to be managed by capitalism, and the libidinal economy by the restricted, guilty Oedipal family.They argue that the two came into existence together, with Oedipus born of the capitalist system as an interiorization of limits made necessary by the market’s tendency to decode and deterritorialize desire. For the capitalist psyche, Deleuze and Guattari explain, “Everything is reduced to the father-mother-child triangle, which reverberates the answer ‘daddy-mommy’ every time it is stimulated by the images of capital. [ . . . ] It is our intimate colonial formation that corresponds to the form of social sovereignty” (265). 5.  One of the strongest objections might come from participants in Japan’s own subjectivity debates, which heated up in the postwar era to consider whether lack

   Notes of a Japanese consciousness regarding war responsibility was proof of Japan’s failure to establish a modern ego. The definitive account in English is Koschmann. In Chapters 1 and 2 I argue that Tanizaki depicts a Japanese consciousness that is more widely than capable of experiencing guilt. In the field of literature, Karatani K ojin’s admired account of the emergence of the “modern self ” (kindai jiga) as a function of the genbun itchi language reforms in the 1890s combines Freudian concepts such as introjection with a historically nuanced account of Japanese “interiority.” See Origins 34–40. 6.  In the first of three essays called “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” Freud relates the contradictory desires of male patients who want their women to be both chaste and promiscuous and, satisfied by neither, are compelled to seek an endless series of affairs with women whom they fantasize as alternately sacred and profane, goddess and prostitute. Freud explains that such desires are neither contradictory nor pathological, for the simple reason that a man models all his love objects on his mother. Because this original object is unique and irreplaceable, she appears in his fantasies as sacred. At the same time, because she betrayed him by sleeping with his father, he also thinks of her as a prostitute. Only by debasing her, Freud says, can the man bring his affectionate currents for his exalted mother in line with his passionate currents for the whore he wants to steal from his father. Finally, a man spends his life chasing an endless series of this same love object because the prohibition of actual incest with his mother means that every surrogate will fail to provide the satisfaction he desires. See “A Special Type of Choice” 168. 7.  For instance, she indicts the “intense overt heterosexuality” of Irigaray’s book An Ethics of Sexual Difference, “which is all about mom and motherhood and not at all about postfamily arrangements or alternative family arrangements” (qtd. in Cheah and Grosz 28). 8.  Analyzing the work of influential cultural critics such as Doi Takeo, Et o- Jun, Kawai Hayao, Ueno Chizuko, and Asada Akira in the context of postwar economic history, Yoda’s metacritique shows that it was the need alternately to describe, justify, and disavow the characteristics of corporate-centered social organization in a kigy o- shakai (enterprise society), rather than any inherently maternal qualities, that made maternal society discourses so popular. Methodologically,Yoda “examines the notion of maternal society not in ahistorical, cultural, and personal /psychological terms, [ . . . ] but in relation to the organization of gender identity and gender division of labor under the postwar capitalist regime in Japan” (“Rise and Fall” 867). In other words, hers is a historicist approach by which maternity emerges as a gender construct determined by economic and social history. Although Yoda’s reading is compelling, I would argue that these histories alone cannot account for the persistence of a specifically abject maternity.Whether pundits embrace or condemn Japan’s unique “maternal society,” the way they define maternity itself is disturbingly homogeneous across the modern period, and the historicist approach leaves this problem largely unaddressed.

Notes   

Chapter 1 1.  On the Japan Romantic School, see Doak. On the bungei fukk o,- see Seiji Lippit, Topographies, 204–205. 2.  Although all translations are mine except where noted, to avoid confusion I use the title of the English translation if one exists. For “In’ei raisan,” see “In Praise of Shadows” in Harper and Seidensticker 1–42. For “Ren’ai oyobi shikij o,” see “Love and Sexual Desire” in Lamarre 319–355. For F udo, see Bownas, A Climate: A Philosophical Study. For “Koky o- o ushinatta bungaku,” see “Literature of the Lost Home” in Anderer 46–54. 3.  Akira Lippit’s intriguing reading of In Praise of Shadows develops the atomic associations of this Einstein passage without mentioning it explicitly. Inspired by Derrida’s Archive Fever, Lippit attributes the challenging logic of Tanizaki’s culturalist suffering to an unabsorbed and unassimilated “oriental” unconscious—an “imaginary, phantasmatic, racialized archive” (13). I like Lippit’s association of this logic with what is unconscious and even “outlaw” (11), but we differ on whether it is part of an attempt to “express a national and nationalist sensibility” (108). Interestingly, Lippit reads Tanizaki’s cultural particularlism—especially the shadowy Japanese body that “writes on others, infect[ing] them with darkness” (107)—as a prescient 1930s alternative to the 1940s atomic writing that would obliterate bodies with light. 4.  Ironically, as Naoki Sakai points out, Watsuji identifies the climatological method itself as part of a Western intellectual tradition, locating himself in a genealogy that begins with Hippocrates and includes Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Sakai notes that the English translation, by cutting the chapter in which Watsuji elaborates this genealogy, reinforces the cultural nationalism not only of Watsuji but also of readers in the academic field of Asian studies who are eager to classify his work as uniquely Japanese (151). - ningengakuteki k osatsu 119. 5.  This is Bownas’ translation, modified using F udo: Except where noted, translations in this chapter are by Bownas. 6.  I follow Koichi Iwabuchi’s distinction between the involuntary, unpredictable state of “hybridity” and the putatively voluntary act of savvy, self-supplementing “hybridism” that has long been claimed as a unique feature of Japan’s national character. For a fuller account see Iwabuchi 53–56. 7. This is Anderer’s translation. Except where noted, translations of Kobayashi in this chapter are by Anderer. 8.  Hirata’s reading of Kobayashi offers an interesting counterpoint to Karatani’s given that Hirata emphasizes Kobayashi’s fearlessness, and Karatani, his cowardice. The discrepancy stems in part from divergent accounts of the object of Kobayashi’s critical encounter, with Hirata focusing on the Lacanian real, and Karatani focusing on an other that is more politically and historically defined. 9.  “Multiple designs” refers to the title of Kobayashi’s famous 1929 essay “Sa- translated by Anderer in Literature of the Lost Home 19–34. Karamazama naru ish o,” tani cites Natsume S oseki, Mori Ogai,   and even Yanagida Kunio as intellectuals deeply affected by international “intercourse,” but he maintains that the lack of intercourse remains a major problem for Japanese thought. He ends his essay by implicating himself: “Fundamentally, nothing had changed at all. ‘Intercourse’ is missing.

   Notes The dislike I feel for Kobayashi Hideo resembles the dislike I continue to feel for myself ” (128). 10.  Anderer’s translation modified using Kobayashi, “Koky o- o ushinatta bungaku” 286. 11.  For an account of these events from the perspective of popular history, see Irokawa. - The Art of Sub12.  Lamarre cites Gregory Golley’s article “Tanizaki Junichir o: version and the Subversion of Art,” which itself cites Ken Ito’s book Visions of Desire as a point of departure on the question of Tanizaki’s irony (368n6). Komori Y oichi’s remarks on “In’ei raisan” could also be said to fit the “subversion” pattern.

Chapter 2 1.  Although translations are mine, to avoid confusion I use Chambers’ translation of the title. See The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi in Two Novels. 2.  A sympathetic portrait of this period in Tanizaki’s life can be found in the For more on the “‘Odawara Jiken’ to Taish o- Katsuei” chapter of Nomura Sh ogo. Odawara Incident see Ken Ito 133–135 and Lamarre 136–137. 3.  I discuss the preface to this essay collection in my article “Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese Culturalism” 442–443. 4.  Rubin draws from anthropological models to identify gift-giving as something that “confers upon its participants a special relationship of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid.” She relates how, since Lévi-Strauss, marriage has been viewed as the most basic form of gift-giving, so kinship systems necessarily divide gifts from givers according to sex (172). Accordingly, “it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (174). 5.  Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz emphasize this point from I Love to You in a lively debate with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell, who counter that Irigaray’s premise in I Love to You is heterosexist. See 27–30. - no 6.  This is a phrase from the title of her 1976 study Tanizaki bungaku to k otei yokub o (“Tanizaki’s literature and affirmative desire”), which won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature the year it was published. Both Ken K. Ito and Thomas Lamarre find arguments about masochism in Tanizaki unconvincing. See Ito 280n10 and K ono’s Lamarre 317n9. 7.  For instance, Peter Gay observes that with three sons at risk in World War I, then a string of war neurosis patients and the gathering threat of Nazism in the interwar years, Freud was more than motivated to produce a “skeptical psychoanalytic appraisal of human nature” (xix). See “A Brief Life.” 8.  This list is abstracted from the discussion Freud offers in The Ego and the Id that begins, “The dangerous death instincts are dealt with in the individual in various ways . . . ” (54). The parenthetical labels are from Freud’s discussion in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” - o- hiwa as a popular 9. This is what Noguchi Takehiko does in his essay on Bush uk  novel (ts uzoku sh osetsu). Noguchi proposes that Tanizaki’s use of kanbun (annotated Chinese) in the preface and his classification of what will follow as a haishi sh osetsu (‘unofficial’ history novel) is meant to evoke the Edo genre of moralistic fiction

Notes    epitomized by the writings of Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848). Noguchi argues that while Bakin justifies “empty fabrications” as vessels if their contents “praise good and chastise evil,” Tanizaki gleefully turns the genre on its ear by filling the same “vessel” with the details of a warrior’s sex life. According to Noguchi, it is exactly the incompatibility of moralistic form and sexually sensationalist content that Tanizaki is after; this is the irreverent effect that his experiments with genre are meant to accomplish. See “Takara to shite” 207–208. - o- hiwa, It o- Sei 10.  In his afterword to the 1953 Shinch o- bunko edition of Bush uk  characterizes Shinseinen as “a mystery-story magazine that also attracted intellectual readers by offering highbrow diversion in the form of astute satirical pieces and car- description is accurate for the period from the magazine’s inceptoons” (177). It o’s - 2). During this time it specialized in transtion in 1920 (Taish o- 9) to 1927 (Sh owa lations of European detective novels and in an increasingly lively Japanese version of the same genre, spearheaded by Shinseinen’s representative contributor, Edogawa - In 1927, however, a change in editorial policy charted a new “modernist” Ranp o. course, steering the magazine toward a more youthful audience and championing such popular movements as ero-guro-nansensu (Nakajima 199-200). It was at the - o- hiwa appeared. As a result, the text was height of this trend that Tanizaki’s Bush uk  largely dismissed as a taish u sh osetsu (“popular novel”) until the mid-1950s. For a history of the text’s critical reception, see Chiba, “Sakuhinron jiten.” For a history of the ways Japanese modernism has been variously interpreted as both high- and low-brow, especially in relation to studies of Shinseinen, see Omori. 11.  In a famous line from “Femininity” Freud writes, “It would not be surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had its own special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of libido would pursue the aims of a masculine sexual life and another sort those of a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true.There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual functions” (131). 12. The dictionary entry cites two texts as sources for the definition: Kasshi yawa, a one-hundred-volume zuihitsu on Sengoku practices written by Matsu’ura Seizan (1760–1841); and Buky o- zensho, a military compendium written by Yamaga Sok o(1622–1685). Anthony Chambers appears to have referenced the same dictionary for his essay on The Secret History in The Secret Window. Chambers does not comment on the discrepancy between Tanizaki’s definition and the historical definition, but he does write in a footnote, “The term onnakubi (woman head) originally referred to a nose or ear taken on the battlefield and presented as evidence when there had been no time to take an enemy’s head. In such a case, a warrior was supposed to take part of the upper lip and mustache with the nose, to prove that it had come from the head of a warrior and not from a woman or a priest. Onnakubi was one of four categories of dubious heads” (130n19). As for Tanizaki’s own use of source texts, commentaries tell us that he gleaned material for the head-grooming scenes from an early eighteenth-century military tale called Oan monogatari, which exists as a later transcription of oral histories related by a woman who had experienced the siege on Ogaki Castle in Min o- during the battle of Sekigahara in 1603. We know that Tanizaki was familiar with Oan monogatari because he mentions it in his 1933 essay “Naoki-kun no rekishi sh osetsu ni tsuite” (On the historical novels of Naoki Sanj ugo) (477). Interestingly, however,

   Notes to read Oan monogatari is to find that nowhere does it mention “woman heads,” noseless or otherwise. This suggests that the authors of the modern commentaries are blind to the fact that the most salient aspect of Tanizaki’s head-grooming scenes is missing from the text that is supposed to have served as their model. The importation of castration is invisible, completely naturalized. For an English translation of Oan Monogatari see Selden and Nelson. For commentaries that mention the Tanizaki-Oan connection, see Okabayashi (375) and Keene (555). 13. The character setsu means “vicarious, surrogate” and the character y o- means “male, sun, positive” (it is the yang in the Chinese yin-yang and the y o- in the Japanese - At the most obvious level, Setsuy o- is a geographic reference, referring to the in-y o). “sunny” or “southern” side of the mountains in the old kuni Settsu (modern Osakawhere Tanizaki was living in 1935. He published his essay collection Setsuy oK obe), zuihitsu the same year. who Haver’s more playful reading, however, is supported by Komori Y oichi, pointed out in a summer 1995 tutorial with me that the pen name Setsuy o- Gyofu (“Setsuy o- fisherman”) is probably a spoof on Mori Ogai   (1862–1922), who used Gyoshi (“ Ogai fisherman”) during his early career but gave it up     the pen name Ogai when he turned to what traditional scholarship still hails as exhaustively accurate and objective historical biographies (shiden sh osetsu). The shift in Ogai’s   career took - and continued to the end of his place in 1916 with the publication of Shibue Ch usai life. Here Tanizaki uses a resonant pen name in the inverse way, to mark not the end of fiction writing but the beginning of the writing of historical biography as fiction. The Secret History was his own oeuvre’s first such “biography.” 14.  For an overview of the “Anti-Social Thesis” see Caserio. Haver’s argument bears a strong resemblance to the one developed by Edelman in No Future.

Chapter 3 1.  Although all translations are mine, to avoid confusion I use Chambers’ translation of the title. See Arrowroot in Two Novels. 2.  Despite Kristeva’s often misleading language, psychoanalysis readily admits that the abject mother is the product of the symbolic, retroactively projected. Charles Shepherdson outlines this tenet in his rigorous defense of Kristeva. See Vital Signs 62. 3.  For a history of Japan’s outcast class and an extensive bibliography, see Cornyetz, Dangerous Women 240–241. I follow Edward Fowler in using buraku (“village” or “enclave”) and burakumin (“person from the village or enclave”) rather than hisabetsu buraku and hisabetsu burakumin. Although the prefatory term hisabetsu (“object of discrimination”) is formally preferred in academic and activist discourse, Fowler points out that abbreviating is also accepted practice, as long as the issue of naming is itself acknowledged to be of paramount political importance (2n3). 4.  “Koishikuba / tazune kite mi yo / izumi naru.” This is the poem written on ouchi kagami. Tsumura the shoji by the fox-mother in Takeda Izumo’s Ashiya d oman  recites it when recalling the scene where the fox-mother in the Kuzu-no-ha play takes leave of her son (28). For a detailed account of the text’s evolution in Bunraku see Goff. and Kabuki history, including its complicated relationship to sekky o-bushi,

Notes    who, for instance, extrapolates, 5. The commentary I used is by Yamato H omei, “I shall take my leave” (tachisar o, sa) from the extremely vague set of syllables n oyare in line 11. According to Yamato, the story echoed in “Cry of the Fox” has more play Shinoda mori onna urakata (1703) than with affinity with Ki no Kaion’s j oruri ouchi kagami (1734). This theory accounts for the heal Takeda Izumo’s Ashiya d oman ing priest, who does not appear in Takeda’s play. Although the original lyrics date to the early eighteenth century, an arrangement for koto and shamisen was updated in 1920 by the famous koto composer and performer Miyagi Michio, whose stillplaintive version is on disc six of his Collected Compositions. See Miyagi. 6. This is how reading Arrowroot by way of Nakagami undoes the default association of foxes with the god Inari, and thus with purification rather than abjection. Likening the Kuzunoha folktale to other irui-kon (different-species marriage) tales set and “Jasei no in,” Kish u- notes the inevitabilon the Kii Peninsula such as “D ojoji” ity of such stories of squeamishness over the human-animal border being associated with Kii buraku culture. For a fuller discussion, see Long, “Nakagami and the Denial of Lineage” 23–25. 7.  For instance, Jacqueline Pigeot remarks on the way Arrowroot uses “lifeless documents” as foils for the “sudden, immediate and delicious contact with life” that happens in these scenes (112, 114). 8.  I have retained “riot of color in spring wildflowers” from Chambers’ translation. 9.  I discuss Freud’s argument in the Introduction. 10. Tanizaki discusses these trips in his 1935 essay “Watashi no binb o- monogatari” (“My tale of poverty”), in which he also mentions visiting Shinoda to scour paper stores for old prostututes’ letters and redemption certificates. According to Chambers, there is some controversy as to whether Tanizaki actually went to Yoshino when he said he did, but he does seem to have gone several times (“A Study” 485n6). 11.  For a detailed account of the case, including ongoing efforts to have it retried, see IMADR. 12.  Eve Zimmerman explains that Nakagami himself quit the Buraku Liberation League in 1977, the same year in which his conversation with Noma and Yasuoka was published in Asahi Journal. She also gives a fuller account of Nakagami’s Asahi Journal debate with Noma over the viability of a “humanist” response to discrimination. See 40–43. The Buraku mondai, jinken jiten (Encyclopedia of buraku issues and human rights) explains that Noma was head of the buraku-relations Department of Reconciliation Affairs at Osaka City Hall after graduating from Kyoto University in the late 1930s. - throughHe maintained an interest in buraku liberation thought (buraku kaih o- shis o) out his life, treating it in many of his novels. He also wrote a massive three-volume critique of the Sayama trial. See Ozue. For an account of buraku themes in Noma’s literature, see Fowler 6, 38–39.Yasuoka does not merit an entry in the encyclopedia, but it is interesting to note in relation to the Asahi Journal discussion of oral culture that he includes a retelling of a Nakagami’s mother’s Kinji nya-nya tale in his collection of literary travelogue, Hareta sora (Clear skies). For Nakagami’s version, see Kish u-

   Notes 50–55. For the story’s status in Nakagami lore as originating with his mother, see the Kinji nya nya entry in Takazawa. 13.  Nakagami’s esteem for the value of “outsider” contributions contrasts with the suspicion voiced around the same period by Hijikata Tetsu, editor-in-chief of the Buraku Liberation League’s Kaih o- shinbun (Liberation newspaper). In an article sympathetic to Hijikata, Edward Fowler quotes a 1980 speech: “I’ve always thought we needed someone from the buraku to come forward and depict a character [like Ushimatsu from Hakai]. We needed literary works coming from the buraku itself. [ . . . ] [T]hat’s what got me started as a writer” (2). 14.  On the most obvious level, Nakagami implies that Arrowroot “understands” sabetsu because it is based on the Kuzunoha story, which, in addition to the Bunraku verversion by Takeda Izumo mentioned by Tsumura, has an earlier sekky o-bushi is a popular form of chanting originally persion called Shinoda zuma. Sekky o-bushi formed by outcast entertainers in the late medieval and early Edo periods. In Kish u, Nakagami calls it “a literature invented by defiled people (senmin)” (319), and in his recited conversation with Noma and Yasuoka he remarks that it was sekky o-bushi by his mother’s and grandmother’s generations that inspired him too to become a storyteller (212). Providing a more concrete justification for Nakagami’s remark about Shinoda version of as a buraku village, Watanabe Naomi points out that in the sekky o-bushi the Kuzunoha story, the son to whom the fox-mother gives birth is Abe no Seimei, - (yin-yang diviners) in Japan. Watanabe traces the founder of a long line of in’y oshi - Shinoda Forest, sekky o-bushi, the complicated historical connection between in’y oshi, and sabetsu to argue that Tanizaki abandoned an early version of his novel, set in Shinoda, in favor of the current version, set in Yoshino, in order to import the discriminatory associations of the former setting into the latter (192–193). For a history as a genre associated with outcasts, see Ishii. For a written version of of sekky o-bushi Shinoda zuma see Araki and Yamamoto. the sekky o-bushi 15.  Anne McKnight’s detailed analysis of this retrofitting process explains both how Nakagami rewrites monogatari to refer to a system rather than a genre and how - Yomota Inuhiko, and Watanabe Naomi have failed to apprecicritics Karatani K ojin, ate Nakagami’s insistence on monogatari’s extraliterary, ethnographic dimension. See “Imperial Syntax.” 16.  Watanabe takes Nakagami more literally on this than I do, proposing that Kuzunoha’s connection to buraku issues can be traced to the thirteenth-century n oplay of the same name, mentioned briefly by Arrowroot’s narrator. In the play, Emperor Temmu (r. 672–686) has fled from the capital during the Jinshin Rebellion because of a dispute with his nephew over imperial succession. When the nephew’s troops chase the emperor to Kuzu, he is sheltered by a local man. Watanabe explains that the term Kuzu person (kuzubito) has been used since ancient times to refer to the area’s aboriginal people, so dictionaries of local family names and place names associate it with cave dwellers and Ainu who maintained cultural isolation well into Japan’s Middle Ages. Citing Yanagida Kunio’s work on yamabito (mountain people), Watanabe underscores the crucial part they have played in imperial pageantry even into the modern period. Like the kuzubito in the n o- play, these yamabito serve to protect and perpetuate the imperial line even though their names are synonymous

Notes    with what is unassimilated and defiled (192). For a translation of the n o- play Kuzu, see Yasuda. 1906 Hakai 17.  Nakagami says it was from about the time of Shimazaki T oson’s that “egalitarian thought” (by odo shik o) came to dominate modern Japanese literature (kindai bungaku), even its most political, proletarian schools. He offers a withering ends Hakai, with his protagonist Ushimatsu confessing critique of the way T oson his buraku identity as if simply invoking the Meiji mantra that “nobility, commoners, and the defiled classes (kizoku mo heimin mo senmin mo) are all equally human” would make it true (“Genealogy” 139). We can see how Nakagami would think that all Ushimatsu accomplishes by confessing is to insert himself into “the structure of sabetsu” that much more emphatically, like Ishikawa Kazuo during the Sayama Incident. 18.  See Long, “Nakagami and the Denial of Lineage” 6–21. 19.  In Komori’s reading, it is important to read this scholar or bureaucrat in connection with the date that Tanizaki chose for his narrator’s trip to Yoshino— - (3), which evokes a famous 1911 de”the end of Meiji or the beginning of Taish o” bate called Nanbokuch o- seijun rons o- (Debate over whether the southern or northern court is legitimate). The debate was sparked by right-wing textbook editors who, wary of slandering the myth of direct imperial succession, decided to recognize the Northern Court. It was to this branch that the Meiji emperor traced his lineage, even though the Meiji government had upheld the practice until then of recognizing the Southern Court’s legitimacy because it provided an important precedent for the Meiji Restoration. (Godaigo was the last emperor before Meiji to defy the Shogunate and rule Japan directly.) Obviously, choosing either court would mire the logic of the “unbroken” Japanese Imperial line in contradiction, and this is exactly - Arguing that the date of what happened as a result of the Nanbokuch o- seijun rons o. the journey of Arrowroot’s narrator’s evokes this debate, Komori draws the opposite conclusion from mine: “[W]e must recognize the very act of Arrowroot’s narrator’s writing of a historical novel as an extremely political act” (206). For an account of the textbook controversy, see Varley 180–184. 20.  The success of his appropriation is emphasized by the closing lines of the novel, in which, as Watanabe points out, “Cry of the Fox” is sung out in the clatter of Owasa’s geta by way of the fox-evocative onomatopoeia ko-n, ko-n (194). - August 2004. Mark Morris also 21.  Personal conversation with Takazawa Sh uji, notes Nakagami’s affinity for Kristeva in “Gossip and History.” See 50n6.

Chapter 4 1.  The name Thomas is said to have been assigned to Kurihara, born Kurihara - by Thomas H. Ince, who directed two of the roughly fourteen films in Kisabur o, which Kurihara starred between 1914 and 1918. In his small roles he played Mexicans, Arabs, Japanese, Italians, and a number of nameless “orientals.” See Nihon eiga kantoku zensh u- 156. no koto.” The films 2. Tanizaki remembers Kurihara in “Kurihara T omasu-kun they made together are Amateur Club (Amachua kurabu, 1920), a slapstick physical comedy; The Sands of Katsushika (Katsushika sunago, 1920), an adaptation of Izumi

   Notes eponymous 1901 novel; On the Night of the Doll Festival (Hinamatsuri no yoru, Ky oka’s 1921), an eerie children’s fantasy starring Tanizaki’s six-year-old daughter; and Lust of the White Serpent (Jasei no in, 1921), a film adaptation of Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari (1776). For the specifics of the roles that Tanizaki and Kurihara played for each film, see Chiba Nobuo, Eiga to Tanizaki 62–64, 88–90, 130–134, 148–150. In her important study of Tanizaki’s film career in the context of Japan’s Pure Film Movement, Joanne Bernardi notes that Tanizaki also played an active role in the production of Amateur Club (233). no koto.” Ber3. These are the reasons Tanizaki gives in “Kurihara T omasu-kun nardi offers several additional reasons for Taikatsu’s decline (229–232). 4. Tanizaki’s “Thoughts About Film,” from which this quote is taken, is not translated in Shadows on the Screen, Thomas Lamarre’s valuable new study of the relation between Tanizaki’s film career and his “Oriental aesthetics,” but three other essays I discuss are: “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures” (65–74), “Miscellaneous Observations on Cinema” (120–130), and “A Viewing of Dr. Caligari” (167–171). Lamarre also translates and analyzes the screenplays for the Tanizaki-Kurihara collaborations Night of the Doll Festival (145–166) and Lust of the White Serpent (179–236). For a translation of the screenplay for Amateur Club, see Bernardi 263–299. For a translation by Howard Hibbett of Tanizaki’s Shunkinsh o,- see Seven Japanese Tales 3–84. 5. This phrase is from the title of Jacqueline Rose’s book Sexuality in the Field of Vision, a classic in the field of feminist work on Lacanian film and visual theory. 6.  Such exhortations would become characteristic of those who worked for Thomas Kurihara, Henry Kotani, and other Hollywood returnees, who criticized the Japanese silent film industry’s tendency to rely on stage techniques and live benshi voice-overs and interpretations. For an overview, see Anderson and Richie 35–46. For a detailed history of how the desire to go beyond theater paradigms became Japan’s Pure Film Movement, see Bernardi. Lamarre mentions that Aaron Gerow’s dissertation takes issue with Bernardi’s teleological characterization of the Pure Film Movement as an effort by “progressive individuals to rescue the cinema from a set of film practices that ignore its essence” (79). However, he also notes that Tanizaki’s essay “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures” is straightforwardly teleological in urging the Japanese film industry to succeed in the world market by meeting international standards (81). 7.  As Mary Ann Doane notes of her field, “[F]eminist film criticism has consistently demonstrated that, in the classical Hollywood cinema, the woman is deprived of a gaze, deprived of subjectivity and repeatedly transformed into the object of male scopophiliac desire” (2). This is why I refer to the classic film viewer throughout this chapter as “he.” 8.  Lamarre reads “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures” differently. He agrees that there is a confluence in Tanizaki’s mind between the “collapse of perceptual distance [and] the collapse of geographical distance,” but he concludes that Tanizaki feels ambivalence about whether this is “a boon or a disaster” (114). - o’s - ten-volume Furoito seishin bunsekigaku zenshu (Complete 9.  Neither Shuny od  works of the study of Freudian psychoanalysis, 1929–1933) nor Arusu’s fifteenvolume Furoito seishin bunseki taikei (Collected works of Freudian psychoanalysis, 1930–1934) included the “Fetishism” essay.

Notes    10.  Freud theorizes that narcissism is in fact the “normal” of three paths taken by girls after acknowledging their castration, the other two being frigidity and the masculinity complex. See “Femininity.” 11.  Eric Cazdyn offers a parallel but opposite reading of the photograph in his discussion of Portrait of Shunkin and the problem of film adaptation. Analyzing Tanizaki’s remarks upon translating Genji monogatari from classical to modern Japanese, Cazdyn argues that Tanizaki’s concept of translation is like Walter Benjamin’s in that it privileges neither the original nor the translation but rather the elusive “something larger” to which both texts refer (96). In Cazdyn’s reading of Portrait of Shunkin, the narrator is also invested in this “something larger”; his disappointment with the photograph is to be read as Tanizaki’s own “jab at the insufficient nature of the image compared with the richer form of the prose narrative” (104). My point is that because “insufficiency” and “something more” go together in the psychoanalytic scheme of things, Tanizaki is critical of the visual to the same extent that he, unlike his narrator, is critical of the violence that inheres in the equation for both literary and filmic representation. In other words, while Cazdyn’s analysis posits fidelity to an “original” (Japan) as the most dangerous impulse in the 1930s, my reading posits fidelity to the ideal “something more” as the most dangerous impulse, then as now. 12.  Most participants in the debates consider Chiba Shunji’s synopsis to be the definitive Sasuke-as-culprit theory. See also the studies mentioned here by Kasahara Nobuo, Moriyasu Masafumi, and Tada Michitar o. 13.  See Mishima Y uichi and Kubota Osamu. 14.  This analysis runs parallel to the one in Chapter 1 where I argue that “In Praise of Shadows” exposes the “second-order” eruption of murderous racism in the American South. I make this argument using Zizek’s formulation that the “necessary consequence of a’s overproximity to reality [ . . . ] is a ‘de-realization’ of reality itself: reality is no longer structured by symbolic functions [ . . . ] and it is here that violence comes on to the stage” (Metastases 76). Although Zizek thus makes more explicit than Copjec that violence and psychosis are what result when “first-” and “second-order” principles are not mutually exclusive, the possibility of these limit cases is implicit in Copjec’s argument as well. In this respect, she and Tanizaki are not entirely opposed.

Conclusion 1.  See Copjec’s critique of Gender Trouble in “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” the last chapter of Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. 2. Tanizaki’s title is difficult to translate because it comes from a pun in the text’s waka (thirty-one syllable poem) epigraph, where the opening phrase “I have been cutting reeds without you” (kimi nakute / ashikari keri) can also mean “things have been quite bad without you.” Although translations are mine, to avoid confusion I use Chambers’ translation of the title. See The Reed Cutter in The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto’s Mother. 3.  In Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan, Ayako Kano offers a compelling feminist analysis of two “New Theater” actresses to discuss “the fundamental imbrication of gender and performance” (35). In Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture

   Notes in Modern Japan, Jennifer Robertson studies a famous all-female theater revue as “an ideal site for an exploration of the contested discourse of sexuality [ . . . ] in modern Japan” (45). 4.  In Bad Girls of Japan, Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley collect feminist essays that explore both how “negative labeling and defining fortifies a patriarchal system” and how “women have reclaimed Bad Girl names and statuses for themselves” (3). Although it notes a general tendency for transgression to fail, Christine Marran’s Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture also explores narratives that have “counterhegemonic and nonhegemonic functions because they signal disruptive and irreconcilable differences” (xxv). 5.  In the introduction to their influential anthology Gendering Modern Japanese History, Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno document the important role that gender has played as historians have moved away from the institutional focus of modernization theories and toward social and cultural histories that focus on “exploitation, resistance, and conflict” (6). For Molony and Uno, as for many of their contributors, the most important thing we do when we talk about both gender and sex is expose their social constructedness, highlighting the conservative ideologies they have been made to serve in the name of the “natural,” and opening new questions by recognizing gender as a historical contingency. The same conviction informs Tomiko Yoda’s pathbreaking study Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity. Although Molony and Uno (as well as Kano, Robertson, and Marran) cite Butler as a source of their methodology,Yoda takes explicit issue with Butler in her epilogue, arguing that Butler’s theory is insufficiently historical: “[the c]itational dynamics of the signifying chain as described by Butler [ . . . ] are strictly speaking atemporal and ahistoric despite the appearance of incessant movement” (219). Its trenchant and very welcome critique notwithstanding, Yoda’s epilogue may still be taken as evidence both of Butler’s importance in our field, and of the depth of the field’s investment in historicism as the most powerful possible feminist approach. 6.  For more on The Reed Cutter as mugen n o,- see Chambers, The Secret Window 47–50, and Mikame. 7.  In a copy of the text published in Nihon koten zensho (Complete books of Japanese classical literature), six pages separate the passage containing the first two quotes from the passage containing the third. Neither the hiragana nor the kanji for play appears in the interim. See Oka, Masukagami 73–79. Tanizaki’s narrator casually refers to all three passages as “this passage from the ‘Odoronoshita’ section of the Masukagami” (7). 8.  Introducing her partial translation of the Masukagami, Helen McCullough writes, “[The text’s] chief concern is with the court, which it attempts to portray as maintaining its vitality and relevance in an age of political eclipse. Extensive attention is devoted to Go-Toba and Go-Daigo, the two sovereigns who asserted the legitimacy of imperial rule by challenging the shogunate, and to descriptions of the court’s role as the center of civilization.” See Classical Japanese Prose 447. 9.  For these snatches in their original context, see Sanari 1095–1110 for Kog o, - and Oka 104 for Okagami.   Matsueda 134–146 for Biwak o, For English translations - Watson 249–252 for “Song of the Lute,” and Mcsee Shimazaki 89–132 for Kog o,

Notes    Cullough 97 for The Great Mirror. Later in the text I speak of the Chinese poem by Hakurakuten (Po Chü-i) as part of Japanese discursive history because of its tremendous popularity in Japan and its long history of having been read there heavily annotated in Japanese. - no ki has played in modern schol10.  Kawashima notes the central role that Y ujo - wo arship (31) and explains how that text borrows heavily from the earlier Y ujo - o,miru (34). The Reed Cutter quotes from both texts and calls them by name. Senj ush  which Kawashima also discusses, is not named explicitly in The Reed Cutter, although Tanizaki’s narrator quotes directly from a section titled “Eguchi no y ujo no koto” when he speaks of “what Saigy o says” about y ujo (455). See Kojima and Asami, 141–142. 11. That “the time for dusk is fall” is a poetic association famous from the openIn The Reed Cutter, the ing lines of the eleventh-century Pillow Book of Sei Sh onagon. narrator travels to Minase in autumn but fantasizes about spring for its association with the mist (kasumi) of Gotoba’s poem, which soon takes on sexual overtones. 12.  Of course the exception is the one “identity” in psychoanalysis to which Butler voices such strong opposition—the identity of the derelicted, missing woman. When I first read The Reed Cutter, however, I ignored this problem. defines uchikake as a long ceremonial outer robe traditionally worn by 13.  K ojien performers of court music and dance (bugaku), that became popular with upper-class women during the early modern (kinsei) period. In modern times it is worn for wedding ceremonies. 14. The poem that Yuya composes is ika ne sen / miyako no haru mo / oshikeredo / nareshi azuma no / hana chiruran: “What am I to do? Springtime in the capital is precious to me, but treasured Eastern blossoms may scatter while I stay” (Koyama, Sat o, and Sat o, 389). “Treasured Eastern blossoms” denotes Yuya’s mother in the province and the preciousness of “springtime in the capital” denotes her feelof T otomi, ings for Munemori. For an English translation of the play see Nihon Gakujutsu 35–51. Shink okai well-known discussion of shibaigi, which takes 15.  See, for instance, Hata K ohei’s at face value Seribashi’s claim that Oy u- was born with it and Oshizu was not (Kami to gangu 296–297). Ken Ito offers a more performative account of shibaigi in analyzing Tanizaki’s correspondence with his third wife, Matsuko, and her own memoirs. See Visions 157–162. 16.  One interesting recent example is Miri Nakamura’s work on Yumeno which traces the detective writer’s interest in the uncanny in tandem with Ky usaku, - u- Imperial University in the the development of psychoanalytic studies at Ky ush  1920s. See “Horror and Machines.” For two studies that read Freud’s early reception - u- in the context of Japan’s modern reception of psychoanalysis in general, in Ky ush  see Hall, Unwilling Subjects, and Taketomo, “Cultural Adaptation to Psychoanalysis in Japan.” For an essay that considers the relation between the history of the formal reception of psychoanalysis in Japan and the practice of reading Japanese texts psychoanalytically, see Cornyetz and Vincent, “Japan as Screen Memory.”

Works Cited

Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. - eds. “Shinoda zuma.” Sekky o-bushi. - oAraki Shigeru and Yamamoto Kichiz o, T oy  bunko 243. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1973. 275–303. Bernardi, Joanne. Writing in Light:The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Caserio, Robert L. “The Anti-Social Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 819–821. Cazdyn, Eric. The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. Chambers, Anthony H. The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1994. ———. “A Study of Tanizaki’s Yoshino kuzu.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41:2 (December 1981): 483–505. Cheah, Pheng, and Elizabeth Grosz. “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell.” Diacritics 28.1 (1998): 19–30. Chiba Nobuo. Eiga to Tanizaki [Cinema and Tanizaki]. Tokyo: Heibunsha, 1990. - Kansh o- nihon gendai bungaku 8 [Appreciating Chiba Shunji. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o. modern Japanese literature 8]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1982. Chiba Shunji et al. “Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- sakuhinron jiten” [Encyclopedia of readings - Kokubungaku: kaishaku to ky ozai - no kenky u- [National litof Tanizaki Jun’ichir o]. erature: research on interpretation and sources] 38.4 (December 1993): 108–130. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Copeland, Rebecca, ed. Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2006.

Works Cited    Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. ———. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1995. Cornyetz, Nina. Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Cornyetz, Nina, and J. Keith Vincent. “Japan as Screen Memory: Psychoanalysis and History.” Perversion in Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture. Ed. Nina Cornyetz and James Keith Vincent. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. “Coldness and Cruelty.” Masochism. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone, 1991. 9–138. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Deutsch, Helene. “The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women.” Essential Papers on Masochism. Ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly. New York: New York UP, 1995. 411–422. Doak, Kevin Michael. Dreams of Difference:The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Ehara Yumiko. “A Feminist View of Maruyama Masao’s Modernity.” Trans. Ayako Kano. Contemporary Japanese Thought. Ed. Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 58–69. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality,Volume I. New York:Vintage, 1990. Fowler, Edward. “The Buraku in Modern Japanese Literature: Texts and Contexts.” Journal of Japanese Studies 26.1 (Winter 2000): 1–39. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 18. London: Hogarth, 1961. 1–66. 24 vols. 1953–1974. ———. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 21. 59–145. ———. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” 1924. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 19. 157–170. ———. “The Ego and the Id.” 1924. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 19. 1–66. ———. “Female Sexuality.” 1931. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 21. 221–243. ———. “Femininity.” 1933. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 22. 112–135.

  Works Cited ———. “Fetishism.” 1927. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 21. 149–154. ———. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” 1918. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 17. 3–122. ———. “Group Psychology and an Analysis of the Ego.” 1921. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 18. 65–143. ———. “Mourning and Melancholia.” 1917. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 14. 239–258. ———. “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” 1925. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 19. 243–260. ———. “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I).” 1910. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 11. 163–175. ———. Totem and Taboo. 1912–1913. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 13. 1–162. ———. “Why War?” 1932. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Vol. 22. 197–215. Fujii, James A. Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Gay, Peter. “Freud: A Brief Life.” Introduction. New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis. By Freud. Ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989. ix–xxii. Goff, Janet. “Conjuring Kuzunoha from the World of Abe no Seimei.” A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance. Ed. Samuel L. Leiter. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2002. 269–283. - The Art of Subversion and the Subversion of Golley, Gregory. “Tanizaki Junichir o: Art.” Journal of Japanese Studies 21.2 (Summer 1995): 365–404. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space,Time, and Perversion. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. Sexual Subversions:Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Hall, Jonathan Mark. “Unwilling Subjects: Psychoanalysis and Japanese Modernity.” Diss. U of California Santa Cruz, 2003. Harootunian, Harry. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. ———. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000. Harootunian, H. D., and Tetsuo Najita. “Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century.” The Cambridge History of Japan. Ed. Peter Duus.Vol. 6. New York: Cambridge UP, 1988. 711–774. 6 vols. 1988. - shonen no Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- [Between a Hata, K ohei. Kami to gangu to no aida: Sh owa - period]. Tokyo: Rokk ogod and a toy: the Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- of the early Sh owa shuppan, 1977. ———. Haver, William. The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Hirata, Hosea. Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Asia Center / Harvard UP, 2005.

Works Cited    International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR). The Sayama Case. 19 November 2007 . Irigaray, Luce. Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. Trans. Stephen Pluhacek. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. ———. “A Chance to Live.” Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution. Trans. Karin Montin. New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. ———. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996. ———. je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. “The Limits of the Transference.” Trans. David Mace and Margaret Whitford. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford and Malden, MA: Oxford, 1991. ———. Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. ———. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. ———. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. ———. To Speak Is Never Neutral. Trans. Gail Schwab. New York: Routledge, 2002. Irokawa Daikichi. The Age of Hirohito. Trans. Mikiso Hane and John K. Urda. New York: Free Press, 1995. Monumenta Nipponica 44.3 (Autumn 1989): 283–307. Ishii, Nobuko. “Sekky o-bushi.” Ito, Ken K. Visions of Desire:Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. - o- hiwa [The secret history of the Lord of It o- Sei. “Kaisetsu” [Afterword]. Bush uk  Musashi]. By Tanizaki. Tokyo: Shinch o- bunko, 1953. 177–179. - Tokyo: ———. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- no bungaku [The literature of Tanizaki Jun’ichir o]. 1970. Chû o- k oron, Iwabuchi, Koichi. “Trans/nationalism: Discourses on Japan in the Global Cultural Flow.” Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 51–84. Kano, Ayako. Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan. New York: Palgrave, 2001. ———. “Toward a Critique of Transhistorical Femininity.” Gendering Modern Japanese History. Ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Asia Center / Harvard UP, 2005. 520–554. - u- ni tsuite” [On intercourse]. Kobayashi Hideo o koete [OverKaratani K ojin. “K ots  and Nakagami Kenji. Tokyo: coming Kobayashi Hideo]. Ed. Karatani K ojin Kawade shob o, 1979. 109–128. ———. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.Trans. Brett de Bary et. al. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1993. - and Nakagami Kenji. “Kobayashi Hideo o koete” [Overcoming KoKaratani K ojin - and Nakagami Kenji. bayashi Hideo]. Kobayashi Hideo o koete. Ed. Karatani K ojin Tokyo: Kawade shob o, 1979. 7–108. - shukumei no erosu [Tanizaki Jun’ichir o: - eros of Kasahara Nobuo. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o: fate]. Tokyo: T ojusha, 1980.

  Works Cited - [Mr.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o’s no Shunkinsho” Kawabata Yasunari. “Tanizaki Jun’ichir o-shi Portrait of Shunkin]. Kawabata Yasunari zensh u [Collected works of Kawabata Yasu1982. 119–23. 35 vols. 1980–84. nari].Vol. 31. Tokyo: Shinch osha, Kawashima, Terry. Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. - o- hiwa [The secret history of the Lord Keene, Donald. “Kaisetsu” [Afterword]. Bush uk  of Musashi]. By Tanizaki. Nihon no bungaku [The literature of Japan]. Ed. Tanizaki - Kawabata Yasunari, It o- Sei, et. al.Vol. 25. Tokyo: Ch u  - o- k oronsha, 1967. Jun’ichir o, 542–560. 80 vols. 1966–69. Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home.” Literature of the Lost Home. Trans. Paul Anderer. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. 46–54. ———. “Koky o- o ushinatta bungaku” [Literature of the lost home]. 1933. Nihon bungaku zensh u- [Collected works of Japanese literature]. Vol. 42. Kobayashi Hideo - Tokyo: Chikuma shob o, - 1978. 286–292. sh u. - o- [Selected stories].Tokyo: Of usha, Kojima Takayuki and Asami Kazuhiko, eds. Senj ush  1985. “Yuragi” no nihon bungaku [The slippage of Japanese literature]. ToKomori Y oichi. - o- shuppan kyokai, 1998. kyo: Nihon h os  - o- suru disuk uru” [In Komori Y oichi and Hasumi Shigehiko. “Tanizaki raisan—t os  no praise of Tanizaki—embattled discourses]. Kokubungaku: kaishaku to ky ozai kenky u- [National literature: research on interpretation and sources] 38.4 (December 1993): 6–29. - Taeko. “Tanizaki bungaku no yogenryoku” [The power of prediction in TaK ono nizaki’s literature]. Ika ni shite Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- o yomu ka [How should we read - Ed. K ono - Taeko. Tokyo: Ch u  - o- k oron, 1999. 173–193. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o?]. ———. Tanizaki bungaku to k otei no yokub o [Tanizaki’s literature and affirmative de- 1976. sire]. Tokyo: Bungei Shunj u, Koschmann, J.Victor. Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. - eds. Y okyoku Koyama Hiroshi, Sat o- Kikuo and Sat o- Ken’ichir o, sh u- [Collection of n o plays]. Nihon koten bungaku zensh u [Complete collection of classical Japanese 1973. 51 vols. literature].Vol. 33. Tokyo: Sh ogakukan, Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. 1977. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. 1980. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. ———. Revolution in Poetic Language. 1974. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 1995. Kubota Osamu. Shunkinsh o- no kenky u- [Shunkinsh o- studies]. Tokyo: S obunsha, Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. ———. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love, and Knowledge. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. Lamarre, Thomas. Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2005.

Works Cited    Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Long, Margherita. “Nakagami and the Denial of Lineage: On Maternity, Abjection, and the Japanese Outcast Class.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.2 (Summer 2006): 1–32. ———. “Tanizaki and the Enjoyment of Japanese Culturalism.” positions east asia cultures critique 10.2 (Fall 2002): 431–469. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. Marran, Christine. Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. meishi sen [Selection of famous Chinese poems]. Vol. Matsueda Shigeo, ed. Ch ugoku 3. Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1994. 3 vols. McCullough, Helen. Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990. ———. Okagami, The Great Mirror: Fujiwara Michinaga and His Times. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. McKnight, Anne. “Imperial Syntax: Nakagami Kenji’s ‘Monogatari’ and Modern Literature as Ethnography.” Discourse 28.1 (Winter 2006): 142–165. Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier [Excerpts].” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 244–278. k osei” [The n o-like Mikame Tatsuji. “Tanizaki no Ashikari ni okeru n ogakuteki structure of Tanizaki’s The Reed Cutter]. Kokugo kokubun kaishaku [Interpretation of national literature and language] (July 1973): 40–49. Miller, Laura, and Jan Bardsley, eds. Bad Girls of Japan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Mishima Y uichi. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- Shunkinsh o- no nazo [The riddle of Tanizaki - Shunkinsh o]. - Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 1994. Jun’ichir o’s Miyagi Michio. Miyagi Michio sakuhin daizenshu [The collected compositions of Miyagi Michio]. Tokyo:Victor, 1993. 13 discs. Mizumura Minae. “Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- no ‘tenk oki’: Shunkinsh o- o megutte” [Ta- period of ‘political conversion:’ regarding Shunkinsh o]. - Nihon nizaki Jun’ichir o’s Kindai Bungaku 68 (May 2003): 118–125. Molony, Barbara, and Kathleen Uno. Introduction. Gendering Modern Japanese History. Ed. Molony and Uno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center / Harvard UP, 2005. 1–35. - a literaMoriyasu Masafumi. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o,- asobi no bungaku [Tanizaki Jun’ichir o, ture of play]. Tokyo: Kokusho kank okai, 1983. Morris, Mark. “Gossip and History: Nakagami, Faulkner, García Márquez,” Japan Forum 8:1 (1996): 35–50. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14–26. - ki no kuni ne no kuni monogatari [Kish u: - country of trees and Nakagami Kenji. Kish u: deeply rooted narratives]. 1979. Tokyo: Asahi bunko, 1999.

  Works Cited - no muk o- e ———. “Monogatari no keifu” [Genealogy of monogatari]. 1979. F ukei [Toward landscape’s beyond]. Tokyo: T ojusha, 1983. 93–188. - o. - “Shimin ni hisomu sabetsu Nakagami Kenji, Noma Hiroshi, and Yasuoka Sh otar  shinri” [Discriminatory psychology latent in the citizens of civil society]. 1977. Sabetsu sono kongen o tou [Interrogating the origins of discrimination]. Ed. Na- o. - Vol. 1. Tokyo: Asahi Sensho kagami Kenji, Noma Hiroshi, and Yasuoka Sh otar  250, 1984. 174–212. - “Shinseinen.” Vol. 6. Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten [Unabridged Nakajima Kawatar o. encyclopedia of modern Japanese literature]. Ed. Odagiri Susumu and Nihon 1978. 199–200. 6 vols. 1977–1978. Kindai Bungakukan. Tokyo: K odansha, Nakamura, Miri. “Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan: The Mechanical Uncanny Dogura magura.” Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Sciin Yumeno Ky usaku’s ence Fiction from Origins to Anime. Ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 3–26. Natsume Sôseki. Kokoro. Trans. Edwin McLellan. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1978. ed. Japanese Noh Drama. Vol. 2. Tokyo: Nihon GakuNihon Gakujutsu Shink okai, 1960. 3 vols. jutsu Shink okai, Nihon Eiga Kantoku Zensh u- [Dictionary of Japanese film directors]. Tokyo: Kinema 1976. Junp o- S okan, Nihon kokugo daijiten [Unabridged dictionary of the Japanese national language]. Ed. 1973. 20 Vols. 1972–1976. Nihon Daijiten Kank okai. Tokyo: Sh ogakukan, shoNoguchi Takehiko. “Takara to shite no busshin: Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- no ‘ts uzoku setsu’ ” [Fetish as treasure: Tanizaki Jun’ichir o’s “popular novel”]. Kaien (August 1984): 202–217. - Tokyo: Chû o- k oron———. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- ron [Theory of Tanizaki Jun’ichir o]. sha, 1973. - Denki Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- [Biography of Tanizaki Jun’ichir o]. - Tokyo: Nomura Sh ogo. Rokk o Shuppan, 1972. - Kokubungaku kaishaku to ky ozai - no kenky u- [Studies Nosaka Akiyuki. “Shunkinsh o.” in the interpretation and educational materials of national literature] 23 (August 1978): 90–91. Oka Kazuo, ed. Masukagami [Clear mirror]. Nihon koten zensho [Complete books of Japanese classical literature].Vol. 54. Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1956. 97 vols.   [Great mirror]. Nihon koten zensho [Complete books of Japanese ———. Okagami classical literature].Vol. 61. Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1960. 97 vols. Okabayashi Shimizu, ed. Oan monogatari [Story of Oan]. Kenmonki [Eyewitness ac- [Compendium of historical counts]. Vol. 8. Nihon shomin seikatsu shiry o- sh usei records of Japanese common people’s lives]. Ed. Miyamoto Tsuneichi, Haragu- 1969. 371–377. 31 vols. chi Torao, Higa Shuncho, et. al. Tokyo: San’ichi shob o, 1968–1984. Omori, Kyoko. “Detecting Japanese Vernacular Modernism: Shinseinen Magazine Genre.” Diss. Ohio State U, 2003. and the Development of the Tantei Sh osetsu Ozue Keiji. “Noma Hiroshi.” Buraku mondai, jinken jiten [Encyclopedia of buraku is- jinken kenky uj  - o- [Buraku liberation sues and human rights]. Ed. Buraku kaih o, and human rights research institute]. Osaka: Kaih o- shuppansha, 2001. Pigeot, Jacqueline. “The Function of Source References in Arrowroot.” A Tanizaki

Works Cited    Feast: the International Symposium in Venice. Ed. Adriana Boscaro and Anthony Hood Chambers. Ann Arbor: Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 1998. 107–115. Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley and Los Angleles: U of California P, 1998. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. New York:Verso, 1986. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. no kansei [The trap of love novels]. Tokyo: Seidosha, Saegusa Kazuko. Ren’ai sh osetsu 1991. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. - ed. Kog o.- Y okyoku taikan [Great anthology of n o- plays].Vol. 2. Tokyo: Sanari Kentar o, Meiji Shoin, 1930. 7 vols. Sat o- Haruo. Beautiful Town: Stories and Essays by Sat o- Haruo. Trans. Francis B. Tenny. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1996. [Rural melancholy]. Nihon bungaku zensh u- [Collected ———. Den’en no y uutsu - Tokyo: Chikuma shob o, works of Japanese literature]. Vol. 27. Sat o- Haruo sh u. 1978. 5–72. ———. The Sick Rose: A Pastoral Elegy. Trans. Francis B. Tenny. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1993. ———. Utsukushiki machi; Supein inu no ie [Beautiful town; House of the Spanish dog]. Ed. Ikeuchi Osamu. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten 1992. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990. Selden, Kyoko, and Christopher Nelson, trans. “The Tale of Oan.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 16 (December 2004): 1–5. Shaw, George Bernard. “The Speech of George Bernard Shaw on the Occasion of the Performance of ‘No’ on March 8, 1933.” Kaiz o- 14.4 (1933): 314–315. Shepherdson, Charles. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000. Shimazaki, Chifumi. Troubled Souls from Japanese Noh Plays of the Fourth Group: Parallel Translations with Running Commentary. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell U, 1998. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. ———. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. “Suture [Excerpts].” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 213–235. ———. Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1995. - Kansai:Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- ni sotte [With Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- in WestTada Michitar o. - 1981. ern Japan]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shob o, Takazawa Sh uji. Nakagami Kenji jiten [Nakagami Kenji encyclopedia]. Tokyo: 2002. K obunsha, Takeda Izumo. Ashiya doman ouchi kagami [A courtly mirror of Ashiya Doman]. Tokyo: Kokuritsu Gekij o, 1990.

  Works Cited Taketomo, Yasuhiko. “Cultural Adaptation to Psychoanalysis in Japan, 1912–1952.” Social Research 57.4 (Winter 1990): 951–991. Tanaka, Stefan. Japan’s Orient. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. - Ashikari [The Reed cutter]. 1932. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u- [ColTanizaki Jun’ichir o. - Vol. 13. Tokyo: Chû o- k oron, 1967. 443–491. lected works of Tanizaki Jun’ichir o]. 28 vols. 1966–1968. - o- hiwa [The secret history of the Lord of Musashi]. 1931–1932. Ta———. Bush uk  - Vol. 13. 179–341. nizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. - o- hiwa, dai ikkai” [The first installment of The Secret History of the ———. “Bush uk  Lord of Musashi]. Shinseinen [New Youth] (October 1931): 22–35. - Vol. 10. ———. Chijin no ai [A fool’s love]. 1924–1925.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. 3–302. - Vol. 3. 231–273. ———. Dokutan [German spy]. 1915.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. ———. “Eiga e no kans o—Shunkinsh o eigaka ni sai shite” [Thoughts about film, on the occasion of Portrait of Shunkin’s being made into a movie]. 1935.Tanizaki - Vol. 22. 317–321. Jun’ichir o- zensh u. - Vol. ———. “Eiga no tekunikku” [Film techniques]. 1921. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. 22. 113–120. ———. “Eiga zakkan” [Various feelings about film]. 1921.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. Vol. 22. 98–102. - Vol. 20. 411–54. ———. “Geidan” [Speaking of art]. 1933.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. ———. Haha o kouru ki [Record of a longing for mother]. 1919. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- Vol. 6. 191–219. zensh u. ———. In Praise of Shadows. Trans. Edward Seidensticker and Thomas Harper. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977. - Vol. ———. “In’ei raisan” [In praise of shadows]. 1933–34.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. 20. 515–557. - zuihitsu [Following the brush essays from the leaning-pine hermit———. Ish oan 1932. age]. Osaka: S ogensha, ———. Kami to hito no aida [Between humans and gods]. 1924. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- Vol. 9. 201–408. zensh u. [The Present and future of motion ———. “Katsud o- shashin no genzai to sh orai” - Vol. 20. 13–21. pictures]. 1917.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. no koto” [On Thomas Kurihara]. 1926.Tanizaki ———. “Kurihara T omasu-kun Jun’ichir o zensh u.Vol. 22. 192–195. ———. “Love and Sexual Desire.” Trans. Thomas Lamarre. Shadows on the Screen. Ann Arbor: Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2005. 319–355. ni tsuite” [On the historical novels of ———. “Naoki-kun no rekishi sh osetsu - Vol. 20. 471–513. Naoki Sanj ugo]. 1933.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. ———. The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto’s Mother. Trans. Anthony H. Chambers. New York: Knopf, 1993. - [Love and sexual desire]. 1931.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o———. “Ren’ai oyobi shikij o” zensh u.Vol. 20. 239–278. ———. “Sat o- Haruo ni ataete kako hansei o kataru sho” [An account of the first - Vol. 20. 305–345. half of my life, for Sat o- Haruo]. 1931.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u.

Works Cited    ———. Seven Japanese Tales. Trans. Howard Hibbett. New York: Putnam, 1981. - o- Shigemoto no haha [The mother of Captain Shigemoto]. 1950. Ta———. Sh osh  - Vol. 16. 155–282. nizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. - Vol. 13. ———. Shunkinsh o [Portrait of Shunkin]. 1933.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. 495–555. [An Afterword to Portrait of Shunkin]. 1934.Tanizaki ———. “Shunkinsh o- k ogo” Jun’ichir o zensh u.Vol. 21. 103–106. ———. Tade kuu mushi [Some prefer nettles]. 1928–1929.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. Vol. 12. 1–185. ———. Two Novels:The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot. Trans. Anthony H. Chambers. San Francisco: North Point, 1991. - Vol. 13. ———. Yoshinokuzu. [Yoshino arrowroot]. 1931.Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. 3–54. - Vol. ———. Yume no ukihashi [“Bridge of dreams”]. 1959. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o- zensh u. 18. 147–211. “Thermodynamics.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. 2007. Encyclopedia Brittanica Online. Aug. 30, 2007. Ueno Chizuko, Ogura Chikako, and Tomioka Taeko. Danry u- bungakuron [Theory of - 1992. men’s literature]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shob o, Ukai Satoshi. “The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions.” Trans. Thomas LaMarre. positions east asia cultures critique 13.1 (Spring 2005): 235–252. Varley, Paul. Imperial Restoration in Medieval Japan. New York: Columbia UP, 1971. - gitai no y uwaku. - the seduc[Tanizaki Jun’ichir o: Watanabe Naomi. Tanizaki Jun’ichir o: tion of mimesis]. Tokyo: Shinch osha, 1992. Watson, Burton, trans. and ed. The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. - A Climate: A Philosophical Study. Trans. Geoffrey Bownas. Tokyo: Watsuji Tetsur o. Ministry of Education, 1961. - ningengakuteki k osatsu [Climate: an anthropological study].Tokyo: Iwa———. F udo: nami shoten, 1961. Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1991. lyrYamato H omei. S okyoku kashi kaisetsu: jiuta, s okyoku [Interpretation of s okyoku ics: jiuta and koto music]. October 22, 2007 Yasuda, Kenneth. Masterworks of the N o- Theater. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1989. - o. - Hareta sora, kumotta kao: watashi no bungaku sanp o- [Clear skies, Yasuoka, Sh otar  - 2003. cloudy faces: my literary strolls]. Tokyo: Genki Shob o, Yoda, Tomiko. Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Constructions of Japanese Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. ———. “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99.4 (Fall 2000): 865–902. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “Toward a Radical Female Imaginary:Temporality and Embodiment in Irigaray’s Ethics.” Diacritics 28.1 (1998): 60–75.

  Works Cited Zimmerman, Eve. Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Asia Center / Harvard UP: 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. “How the Non-Duped Err.” Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. 69–87. ———. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. ———. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso, 1994.

Index

Abjection, 9; Arrowroot and, 82–83, 90; burakumin and, 91, 99; Japan’s “maternal society” and, 150n8; Kristeva’s theory of, 71, 80–81; Irigaray on, 81, 94; The Reed Cutter and, 142; signification and, 81 “An Account of the First Half of My Life, for Sat o- Haruo” (Tanizaki), 6, 41–48, 58 Aggression, 6–7; civilization and, 6–7, 16, 40, 51–53, 126; death drive and, 51–52; femininity and, 42, 60, 62–63; Freud’s hydraulic model of, 40, 42, 50–54; internalization of, 40, 42, 52–55. See also Violence; War AIDS, 64, 67–68 Amateur Club (film), 43, 157n2, 158n4 Arrowroot (Tanizaki), 9–10, 140; and abjection, 78–81, 90; “Cry of the Fox” (jiuta) in, 9, 77–81, 83–86, 99, 155n5, 157n21 fort-da game in, 72–76; haha-koi (mother-love) in, 70, 72–74, 100–102; jukushi in, 89–91; and maternity, 69–91; Nakagami’s reading of 9, 72, 91–102; paper as theme in, 69, 83–88; semiotic language in, 78–81; skin/membrane as theme in, 69–70, 82–85, 88 Art, Japanese vs. Western, 30–32, 35–37 Asahi Journal, 92 Asia: Watsuji’s climatology and, 23–28; Japan in relation to, 27–29, 147 Ashikari (Tanizaki). See The Reed Cutter.

Bersani, Leo, 3, 20, 47, 54 Between Humans and Gods (Tanizaki), 49–50 Bin Laden, Osama, 8 - (Song of the lute), 138, 160n9 “Biwako” Bridge of Dreams (Tanizaki), 70 Bukyo- zensho (Yamaga), 153n12 Bungakkai (journal), 22, 30 Bungei fukko- (cultural revival), 14 Bungei Shunju- (journal), 30 Buraku Liberation League, 92, 155n12, 156n13 Burakumin, 154n3, 155n12, 156n13; Nakagami on Arrowroot and, 9, 72, 91–93, 156n16; - Country of Trees and Nakagami’s Kishu: Deeply Rooted Narrative and, 99–101. Bush, George W., 8 - o- hiwa (Tanizaki). See The Secret Bushuk History of the Lord of Musashi. Butler, Judith, 9, 137, 152n5, 160n5; “Arguing with the Real,” 145–46; on biologism, 89; Bodies That Matter, 1, 135, 145; “Critically Queer,” 135–36, 138, 141–43; Gender Trouble, 1, 71, 89, 144, 146; and Irigaray, 9–10, 150nn7; and Kristeva, 71; on language, 141; on performativity, 134–35, 144; and psychoanalysis, 133–34, 145–46; on the term queer, 135–36, 143; on sexual difference, 11–12; Tanizaki’s The Reed Cutter and, 134–35, 138, 140–46; Undoing Gender, 11–12

Baldwin, James, 93 Balzac, Honore de, 36 Bardsley, Jan, Bad Girls of Japan, 160n4 Bernardi, Joanne, 158n4, 158n6; Writing in Light, 11

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Weine), 105 Castration: feminist film theory and, 108–9, 112–16; fetishism and, 108–9, 117–20; Irigaray on, 123; Portrait of Shunkin and, 118–20, 125; The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and, 57–68.

   Index Cazdyn, Eric, 159nn11; The Flash of Capital, 11 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 82 Chambers, Anthony, 65, 153nn12, 155nn8, 155nn10 Cheah, Pheng, 152n5 Chiba Shunji, 122, 159n12 Chijin no ai (Tanizaki). See A Fool’s Love China, Japan’s colonial relation to, 27–29 Chow, Rey, 111–12 Christianity, Watsuji’s account of, 24–25 - (journal), 13, 43, 47 Chu-o- koron Cinema: and the racialized body, 106–7, 112– 16; feminist film theory and, 10–11, 104, 108–16, 124, 126, 158n7; and fetishism, 108–9, 116; language of the, 106, 113–16; Metz’s imaginary signifier and, 113; Portrait of Shunkin and, 104, 107–12; Tanizaki and, 10–11, 103–7, 117, 157n2 Civilization: Freud’s account of the death drive and, 6–7, 40, 51–53; internalization of aggression and, 6–7, 40, 51–53; origins of, 16, 126 Climate, Watsuji’s theory of, 23–28, 29, 151n4 Conscience, 6–7, 55. See also Superego Copeland, Rebecca, 149n2 Copjec, Joan, 3, 11, 104, 110–11, 126, 134, 159n14 Cornell, Drucilla, 152n5 Cornyetz, Nina, 154n2 Culturalism, Japanese: defined, 13–14; as fetishism, 14, 18–19; Kobayashi and, 30–37; pain of, 5, 14, 34–37; Tanizaki’s account of, 5, 14–15, 17–18, 37–39; Watsuji and, 22–26 Darwin, Charles, 16, 51 Death drive, Freud’s account of, 6–7, 51–53 De Lauretis, Teresa, 2–3; The Practice of Love, 1 Deleuze, Gilles, 3; Anti-Oedipus 149n4; theory of “becoming woman” 67; theory of disavowal, 11, 120, 131 Desert climate, Watsuji’s theory of, 24–25 Desire: film and, 104–5, 115; language and, 75–76 Deutsch, Helene, 62 Disavowal, 30; Deleuze’s theory of, 11, 120, 131–32; Freud’s theory of, 117–118; in Portrait of Shunkin 118–119. Doane, Mary Ann, 158n7

- 153n10 Edogawa Ranpo, Ehara Yumiko, 3–4 Einstein, Albert, 22, 40, 42 Engels, Friedrich, 34 Enjoyment: Zizek’s theory of nationalist, 15–16, 18 Entropy: Haver’s The Body of this Death and, 68; second law of thermodynamics and, 53 Ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), 57–58, 147 Eros, Freud’s account of, 50–51, 54. Essentialism: of Japanese cultural identity, 5; debated in feminist theory, 8, 59, 82, 146 “Eternal woman,” 5, 150n6 Ethics: absence of female libido and, 62–63; female morphology and, 91; Irigaray’s theory of, 42–43, 47–48, 86–88; maternal dereliction and, 72; sexual difference as starting point for, 42–43 Europe: Watsuji’s climatology and, 23–25 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 115 Faulkner, William, 93 Female subjectivity, 2, 6, 42, 87, 134. See also Women Femininity: and aggression, 42, 60, 62–63; Irigaray on, 59, 67–68; masochism and, 7, 42, 62, 64; modern subjectivity and, 2; in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 41; violence and, 8. See also Female subjectivity; Women Feminist theory: and biologism, 89; and film, 10–11, 104, 108–17, 124, 126, 158n7; French, 11–12; Japanese, 1–4; and language, 75–78; and perversion, 1; postmodern, 3–4; Tanizaki’s work and, 1–2, 7–11, 42–43, 68, 145–47. See also Butler; Copjec; Ehara; Grosz; Irigaray; Kristeva; Silverman; Ueno Fetishism: castration and, 108–9, 117–20; culturalist, 14, 18–19; and disavowal, 131; film theory’s male viewer and, 108–9, 116; Freud’s theory of, 117–20, 122; in Portrait of Shunkin, 117–24; suture and, 121 Fifteen Years’ War, 3, 42 Film. See Cinema “Film Techniques” (Tanizaki), 105, 115–16 Flaubert, Gustave, 36

Index    A Fool’s Love (Tanizaki), 48–50 Fort-da game, Freud’s, 70, 73–77, 87–88, 96 Foucault, Michel, 42, 57–58, 71, 134 Fowler, Edward, 154n2, 156n13 Freud, Sigmund: on aggression, 40, 42, 50– 54; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 50–52, 73–74; Civilization and Its Discontents, 6, 40, 51–52, 55; “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” 87, 150n6; on death drive, 6–7, 50–52; “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 53–55; The Ego and the Id, 16, 20; “Femininity,” 61–62, 128, 144, 153n11; on fetishism, 117–20; on fort-da game, 70, 73–76, 87–88; Japanese translations of, 118, 158n9; libido, model of, 7, 42, 59, 153n11; on masochism, primary (or “feminine”), 7, 42, 54, 60–61, 62, 64; on masochism, secondary (or “moral”), 5, 7, 20–22, 37–38, 54, 58, 60; on melancholia, 44–46; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 44–45; on origin of social groups, 16; on penis envy, 60–61; “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” 60–62; on the superego, 16–18, 20, 54–55, 61–62; Tanizaki’s reading of, 147, 149n3; Totem and Taboo, 16–17, 59, 126; “Why War?” 40, 52; Wolf Man case history, 37 Fujii, James, 7–8 Furukawa Tomiko, 43 Fuss, Diana, Identification Papers, 1 Gaze. See Vision Gay, Peter, 152n7 “Geidan” (Tanizaki). See “Speaking of Art” Gender: Japan studies and, 43, 135, 160n5; modern subjectivity and, 2. See also Femininity; Masculinity; Monosexual economy; Sexual indifference Gerow, Aaron, 158n11 Golley, Gregory, 152n12 Gotoba, 136–139, 160n8, 161n11 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 147 Grosz, Elizabeth, 52, 78, 152n5 Guattari, Felix, 3; Anti-Oedipus, 149n4 Haha-koi (mother-love), 10, 70–72; in - Country of Arrowroot, 77–92; in Kishu: Trees and Deeply Rooted Narrative, 100– 102. See also Mothers and maternity

- (Song of Hakurakuten (Bai Juyi), “Biwak o” the lute), 138, 160n9 Hamaguchi Osachi, 33–34 Harootunian, Harry, 3, 13, 38; “Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century,” 22–23 Hasumi Shigehiko, 48–50 Hata Kohei, 161n15 Haver, William, 7, 64–68, 154n13; The Body of This Death, 64 Hepburn, Katherine, 107, 117 Hijikata Tetsu, 156n13 Hirata, Hosea, 31, 151n8 Hisabetsu burakumin. See Burakumin Hitchcock, Alfred, Psycho, 113 Homosociality: aggression and, 48–50; suffering and, 38; Tanizaki on, 6–8; Tanizaki-Sato- relations and, 43–50 Identity: Butler on, 134–35; women’s lack of, 58–59, 67, 76–77, 86–87, 123, 134, 145–47. See also Monosexual economy; Sexual indifference Ince, Thomas H., 157n1 Incest, in Freud’s writing, 77–78, 80 “In’ei raisan” (Tanizaki). See “In Praise of Shadows” “In Praise of Shadows” (Tanizaki), 5, 14, 17–22, 23, 38, 45, 159n14; and aesthetics, 19; image of layers in, 18; male suffering in, 38; and race, 20–22; and the tactile, 19–20; and the unclean, 18–19 Instincts, Freud’s theory of, 50–51 - 33–34 Inukai Tsuyoshi (Inukai Bokudo), Irie Takako, 107, 117 Irigaray, Luce, 8, 67; on abjection, 9, 81–82, 94, 101; “A Chance to Live,” 42, 52–53; and ethics, 42, 47, 87; An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 42; on femininity, 59, 67–68, 147; on fort-da in Freud, 87–88, I Love to You, 42, 152n5; and Kristeva, 72, 81; on libido and laws of thermodynamics, 7, 52; on love, 47–48, 86–87; on mothers and maternity, 9–10, 69, 70, 72, 76–77, 81–91, 99, 101; and mucous, 90–91; on oculocentrism, 123; and the placenta, 81, 88–89, 91; on psychoanalysis, 81; on science and war, 63; on sexual indifference, 2, 4, 20, 76, 78, 92, 102; “Women on the Market,” 47

   Index Ishikawa Chiyoko (Chiyo), 41–48, 58 Ishikawa Kazuo, 92, 97, 157n17 Ishikawa Seiko, 43 - zuihitsu (Tanizaki), 44 Ishoan Islam, Watsuji’s account of, 24 Ito, Ken K., 152n12, 161n15 Ito- Sei, afterword to The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 153n10; reading of “In Praise of Shadows,” 19–20 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 151n6 - 157n2 Izumi Kyoka, Japan: bosei shakai (maternal society) of, 10, 150n8; and modernization, 13, 17–18, 22, 30, 38, 104–5, 147; colonial relation to Asia of, 27–29, 147; Tanizakis’ account of sexuality in, 26–29; subjectivity debates in, 149n5; universality debates in, 3–4, 147; Watsuji’s theory of climate for, 23–26 Japan Romantic School, 14, 30 Japan studies, 135, 160n5 Jiuta singing, 78–79 Joyce, James, 82 Junshi (following one’s lord in death), 7, 58 Kaizo- (journal), 13, 30, 34–35 Kano, Ayako, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan, 159n3 Karatani Kojin, 150n5, 156n15; “Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo,” 30, 32, 151n8, 151n9 Kasahara Nobuo, 122 Kasshi yawa (Matsu’ura) 153n12 Kawabata Yasunari, 130 Kawashima, Terry, 138, 161n10 - 127–28 Kengyo, Kii Peninsula, Nakagami’s account of, 91–92, 95–96, 101 Kita Ikki, 22 - Taeko: “Sasuke-as-culprit Theories” Kono and, 122; on Tanizaki’s “desire to affirm,” 49–50, 152n6 Kobayashi Hideo, 14–15, 30, 151n8; “Literature of the Lost Home,” 5–6, 14, 30–36; “Multiple Designs,” 151n9 Kogo- (no- play), 138, 160n9 Komori Yoichi, 9, 19, 48–49, 152n12, 154n13; “Yuragi” no nihon bungaku, 72, 80–81, 96, 101, 157n19 Korea: Japan’s colonial relation to, 28

Kotani, Henry, 158n6. Kristeva, Julia: Desire in Language, 77; Nakagami’s reading of, 101; Revolution in Poetic Language, 77; theory of abjection, 9, 80–81, 100; theory of the semiotic, 9, 70, 77–80, 82, 94; Butler’s critique of, 71 - o, - 14 Kuki Sh uz Kurihara, Thomas, 103, 105, 107, 157n1, 157n2, 158n3, 158n6 Kuzunoha, 73–74, 93, 154n4, 155n6, 156n14, 156n16 Kyokutei Bakin, 153n9 Kyoto School, 22 Lacan, Jacques, 3; and desire, 76; and female ecstasy, 128; and fort-da game, 70, 75–76, 96; and the subject’s accession to language, 77–78, 88, 104; on representation, 126; and vision, 110–11, 126; on woman’s non-existence, 145 Lacquerware, 19–20 Lamarre, Thomas, 37–38, 105, 107, 152n12, 158n8; Shadows on the Screen, 11, 158n4 Language: acquisition of, 9, 76; buraku culture and, 96–99; feminist theory and, 75–78; of film, 106, 113–16; history of power relations in, 141; as masculine privilege, 128–29; mothers and, 9, 69–71, 75–80; origins of culture in, 76; violence and, 77; women and, 145 League of Nations, 40 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 92 Libido: Freud’s model of, 7, 42, 59, 153n11; laws of thermodynamics and, 7, 42, 52–53; war and, 7–8 Lippit, Akira, 151n3 Love: Freud’s psychology of male, 150n6; Irigaray on, 47–48, 86–87; mothers and, 82; and perversion, 2, 133; Tanizaki and, 2, 5, 147. See also Heterosexual love, Haha-koi “Love and Sexual Desire” (Tanizaki), 5–6, 14, 22–30; and climate, 23–28; humidity as theme in, 25, 27–30; Japan’s character and, 27–29; male suffering in, 38 Lust of the White Serpent (film), 158n4. Male subjectivity, 2, 47, 87 Manchurian Incident (1931), 33 Marcuse, Herbert, 53

Index    Marran, Christine, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture, 160n4 Marx, Karl, 34 Masculinity: language and, 128–29; masochism and, 7; modern subjectivity and, 2; monosexual economy and, 2, 68, 145–46; in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 42; suffering and, 38. See also Homosociality; Male subjectivity Masochism, 1; homosociality and, 50; Freud’s theory of primary (or “feminine”), 7, 42, 54, 60–61, 62, 64; Freud’s theory of secondary (or “moral”), 5, 7, 20–22, 37–38, 54, 58, 60; in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 40–41, 56–57, 64 Masukagami, 136–37, 160n7 Maternity. See Mothers and maternity May 15 Incident (1932), 34 McKnight, Anne, 92, 156n15 Meadow Climate, Watsuji’s theory of, 24 Melancholia, Frueud’s theory of, 43–48 Metz, Christian, 113, 116 Middle East, Watsuji’s climatology and, 23–25 Miki Kiyoshi, 14, 22 Miller, Laura, Bad Girls of Japan, 160n4 Miyagi Michio, 155n5 Mizumura Minae, 104 “Miscellaneous Observations on Cinema” (Tanizaki), 105–6, 158n4 Modernity: capitalism and Oedipal family relations in, 149n4; Japanese response to, 13, 17–18, 22, 30, 38, 104–5, 147. See also Westernization Molony, Barbara, Gendering Modern Japanese History, 160n5 Mongolia, Japan’s colonial relation to, 28 Monogatari, Nakagami on, 93–101 Monosexual economy: Irigaray’s theory of, 2, 68, 145–46. See also Sexual indifference Monsoon climate, Watsuji’s theory of, 23, 25 Moral masochism, 5, 7, 20–22. See also masochism Mori, Maryellen, 149n2 Mori Ogai, 151n9, 154n13 Moriyasu Masafumi, 122 Mother-daughter relationships, Irigaray’s theory of, 86–87 Mother-love. See Haha-koi

The Mother of Captain Shigemoto (Tanizaki), 70 Mothers and maternity: Arrowroot and, 9, 69–91; 81–82; dereliction of, 9–10, 72, 81, 134, 140; fort-da game and, 73–76; haha-koi (mother-love), 70–72, 92, 100– 101; Irigaray and, 9–10, 69, 72, 76–77, 81–91, 101; Japan’s bosei shakai (maternal society), 10, 150n8; language and, 9, 69–71, 75–80; and love, 82; in Nakagami’s reading of Arrowroot, 9, 72, 92–95, 101; as objects, 71, 76, 87; originary relationship to, 10, 71, 77–78, 81–82, 89; The Reed Cutter and, 139–40. See also Motherdaughter relationships; Mother-son relationships Mucous, Irigaray’s theory of, 90–91 Mulvey, Laura, 11, 104, 108–9, 116, 121; Riddles of the Sphinx, 116; “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 108 Najita, Tetsuo: “Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century,” 22–23 Nakagami Kenji, 1; on abjection, 92–102; on Arrowroot, 9, 72, 92–102; “Discriminatory Psychology Latent in the Citizens of Civil Society,” 92–93; “Genealogy of Monogatari,” 50, 93–95; Karekinada (Coast of withered trees), 92; - Country of Trees and Deeply Rooted Kishu: Narratives, 80, 91, 94, 95–102; Misaki (The Cape), 92; “Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo,” 30 Nakamura, Miri, 161n16 Nanbokucho- seijun ronso- (Debate over whether the southern or northern court is legitimate), 157n19 Narcissism, Freud’s theory of, 119, 159n10 Nationalism, 15–16, 18. See also Culturalism Natsume Soseki, 48, 151n9 Nazimova, Alla, 115–17 Night of the Doll Festival (film), 158n4 - 14 Nishida Kitaro, Noguchi Takehiko, 70, 140, 152n9 Noma Hiroshi, 92–93, 96, 155n12 - 149n3, 152n2. Nomura Shogo, Nosaka Akiyuki, 122 Oan monogatari, 153n12 Odawara Incident, 43, 152n2.

   Index Oedipus complex, 3, 61, 66, 87, 117, 140, 149n4 Ogura Chikako, Danryu- bungakuron (Theory - of men’s literature), 2 Okagami, 138, 160n9 “On the Historical Novels of Naoki Sanj ugo” (Tanizaki), 153n12 Origuchi Shinobu, 14 Overcoming Modernity Symposium (1942), 30 Parody: as textual strategy in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 7, 41, 61–62, 64–67 Penis envy, 60–62, 144. See also Castration Performativity, Butler’s theory of, 134–35, 143–46 Persimmons, 89–90 Perversion: feminist scholarship on, 1; love and, 2, 133; modern subjectivity and, 6. See also Fetishism; Masochism; Sadism Photography: in Portrait of Shunkin, 120–124 Pigeot, Jacqueline, 155n7 Placenta: Irigaray on, 81, 88–91 Portrait of Shunkin (film), 107 Portrait of Shunkin (Tanizaki), 11, 140; bird theme in 127–132, castration in, 118–27; and cinema, 104, 107–12; and feminist film theory, 124; fetishism in, 117–24; music and musicians in, 124–31; sadism in, 110, 112, 123–27; Sasuke-as-culprit theories about, 110–12, 120–24; touch in, 116, 131; vision and blindness in, 107–9, 111, 118–32 “The Present and Future of Motion Pictures” (Tanizaki), 105, 106, 112–114, 158n4 Psychoanalysis: Butler on, 133–34, 145–46; feminism and, 3; in Tanizaki’s work, 2–4, 147; universality of, 134, 147; and vision, 11. See also Freud; Lacan Queer: performative reappropriation of, 135–36, 143 Race: in “Love and Sexual Desire,” 27; in “In Praise of Shadows,” 20–21; in Tanizaki’s cinema essays, 112–17 Record of a Longing for Mother (Tanizaki), 70 The Reed Cutter (Tanizaki), 70, 93, 134–46;

performativity and, 134–35, 141–46; play (asobi) as theme in, 134, 136–46; structured like a no- play, 136–138; title of, 159n2 “Ren’ai oyobi shikijo” (Tanizaki). See “Love and Sexual Desire” Robertson, Jennifer, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan, 159n3 Roman-ha writers, 22 Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 158n5. Rouche, Helene, 89 Rubin, Gayle, 152n4; “The Traffic in Women,” 47 Sabetsu, 92–96, 100–101, 156n14 Sadism, 11; Freud’s theory of, 53–54; in Portrait of Shunkin, 110, 111–12, 123–27; vision and, 104; Zizek on, 123. Saegusa Kazuko, Ren’ai shosetsu no kansei (The trap of love novels), 1–2, 149n1 Sakai, Naoki, 147, 151n4 Sasuke-as-culprit Theories, 110–12, 120–24 Sato- Haruo, 41–50 “Sato- Haruo ni ataete kako hansei o kataru sho” (Tanizaki). See “An Account of the First Half of My Life, for Sato- Haruo” (Tanizaki) Sayama Incident, 92, 97, 157n17 The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (Tanizaki), 6–7, 40–43, 55–68, 140; castration in, 57–68; femininity in, 41; kanbun preface to, 56–57, 65, 68; masculinity in, 42; masochism in, 56–57, 64; nose imagery in, 57–68; preface of, 56–57, 65, 68; reception of, 153n10 Sedgwick, Eve, 67 Sekkyo-bushi, 93, 156n14 Semiotic, Kristeva’s theory of, 9, 70–72, 77–80, 94 Seppuku, 51, 56 September 11, 2001 attacks, 8 Sexual indifference, Irigaray’s theory of, 2, 4, 59, 62, 67–68, 76, 86. See also Monosexual economy Shadows, theme of, 18, 21, 45–46 Shaw, George Bernard, 34–37 Shepherdson, Charles, 154n2 Shimazaki Toson, 157n117

Index    - 107 Shimazu Yasujiro, Shinseinen (magazine), 57, 65, 153n10 Shiso- (journal), 23 Shochiku film company, 107 Shunkinsho- (Tanizaki). See Portrait of Shunkin Silverman, Kaja, 2–3, 11, 17, 109, 126–27; Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 1, 115; theory of suture, 112–15; Threshold of the Visible World, 115 Soseki, Natsume, Kokoro, 7–8 “Speaking of Art” (Tanizaki), 5–6, 14, 30–38; and Japanese art, 30–32; male suffering in, 38; and 1930s politics, 33–34; and Shaw, 34–36; and Western art, 30–32, 36–37 Strindberg, August, 36–37 Subjectivity: and abjection, 80; Japanese debates on, 149n5; Freud’s account of the origins of, 76, 89; superego and ambivalence in, 17; vision and, 109–11, 115. See also Female subjectivity; Male subjectivity Suffering: culturalism and, 14, 34–37; Freud’s hydraulic account of, 40–42, 53; male, 38; superego as source of, 18; Tanizaki’s culturalist account of, 5, 16–19, 28–29 Suicide. See Junshi Superego: aggression and, 54–55; contradictory injunctions of, 5, 17–18, 20, 54–55; Freud’s account of the origin of, 16–18, 20, 54–55; melancholia and, 45–46; in Tanizaki’s culturalist writings, 5, 16–19, 21, 28–30, 35, 37–38; women’s lack of, 61–62; Zizek’s account of nationalist enjoyment and, 15–16, 18 Suture: and fetishism, 121; and film theory’s male viewer, 109; Silverman on, 112–113, 115; Tanizaki on 114 - 122 Tada Michitaro, Taisho Katsuei film company, 11, 31, 103, 105, 107, 115 - 157n21 Takazawa Sh uji, Takeda Izumo: Ashiya doman ouchi kagami, 154n4, 155n5; Yoshitsune senbon zakura, 75 Tanabe Hajime, 14 Tanaka, Stefan, 29 - and cinema, 10–11, 103– Tanizaki Jun’ichiro: 7, 117, 157n2; Japanese feminists on, 1–2; and love, 2, 5, 147; and psychoanalysis, 2–4, 147; reading of Freud, 149n3; relationship with Sato- Haruo, 6, 41, 43–

48; and “return to the classics,” 13, 32–34, 103–4. See also individual works by name Tetsuo Najita, “Japanese Revolt Against the West,” 22 Thermodynamics, first and second laws of, 7, 42, 52–53, 56, 59, 67–68 “Thoughts About Film” (Tanizaki), 107, 158n4 Tokugawa Ieyasu, 26–27 Tomioka Taeko, Danryu- bungakuron (Theory of men’s literature), 2 Toyozawa Danbei, 125, 127–28 Ueno Chizuko, 4; Danryu- bungakuron (Theory of men’s literature), 2, 49, 149n2 Ukai Satoshi, 8 Universality, of psychoanalytic paradigm, 3–4, 133, 147, 149n5 Uno, Kathleen, Gendering Modern Japanese History, 160n5 Vietnam, Japan’s colonial relation to, 28 Violence: femininity and, 8; language and, 77. See also Aggression; Sadism; War Vision, 10–11; castration and, 127; feminist film theory and, 104, 108–15; Lacan’s model of, 11, 110–11, 126; in Portrait of Shunkin, 108–12; sadism and, 104; and subjectivity, 109–11, 115; truth and, 121 - 33–34 Wakatsuki Reijiro, War: Freud’s correspondence with Einstein on, 40, 52; libido and, 7–8. See also Aggression;Violence - gitai Watanabe Naomi, 9; Tanizaki Jun’ichiro: no yuwaku, 72, 80–81, 90, 101, 156n14, 156n15, 156n16 “Watashi no binbo- monogatari” (Tanizaki), 155n10 - 14–15, 23, 32; Fudo Watsuji Tetsuro, (Climate), 5–6, 14, 23–26, 29, 151n4 Weine, Robert, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 105 Westernization: art and, 30–32, 35–37; suffering and guilt as outcome of, 5, 16–19, 28–29; and the superego, 5, 16–19, 21, 28–30, 35, 38; and violence, 34. See also Modernity Whitford, Margaret, 59, 67, 82 Wife-passing incident, 6, 41–50 Wolf Man, 37

   Index Women: as abject, 142; identity impossible for, 58–59, 67, 76–77, 86–87, 123, 134, 140, 145–47; language and, 145; libido of, 59, 153n11; masochism and, 57, 60–62, 64; as objects, 20, 38, 58–59, 134, 141–42; and Oedipus complex, 61, 66; and penis envy, 60–62; in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, 57–62; superego lacking in, 61–62. See also Female subjectivity; Femininity; Sexual indifference Wright, Richard, 93 Yamato, Homei, 155n5 Yanagida Kunio, 14, 23, 151n9, 156n15 - o, - 92–93, 96, 155n12 Yasuoka Shotar Yoda, Tomiko, 10, 150n8; Gender and National

Literature: Heian Texts and the Construction of Japanese Modernity, 160n5 - 134, 138 Yujo, Yoshinokuzu (Tanizaki). See Arrowroot. Yuya (no- play), 141–42, 161n14 Ziarek, Ewa, 82 Zimmerman, Eve, 155n12 Žižek, Slavoj, 123, 159n14; Butler’s critique of, 145–46; “How the Non-Duped Err,” 111; theory of nationalist enjoyment, 15–16, 18, 21 Zola, Emile, 36–37 Zuihitsu (following the brush essay), Tanizaki’s use of, 5, 13, 15, 41, 44