Reading Desire in a New Generation of Japanese Women Writers 9781000964660, 9781032437323, 9781032437330, 9781003368632

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Reading Desire in a New Generation of Japanese Women Writers

This book explores desire through the work of a new generation of Japanese women writers, in response to the increased attention these writers have received following the release of their work in the English language. The contributions explore a wide range of theoretical approaches and psychoanalytic interpretations to “reading” a new generation of Japanese women writers’ relationships to identity, sex/gender, and desire. Through dealing with female spaces, maternal roles, gendered bodies, or resistant speech acts, the book uncovers the overarching theme of desire – desire for language, touch, and recognition. Focusing on authors who have previously been underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the book highlights the diverse nature and the important synergies of writing by women in the last few decades. Addressing experimental and nonconforming authors whose works challenge gender and culture expectation as well as Orientalist myths, this will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese culture, and Asian studies. Nina Cornyetz is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Instruction, USA, and is the author of The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (Routledge, 2007). Rebecca Copeland is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and is the author of the novel The Kimono Tattoo (2021).

Reading Desire in a New Generation of Japanese Women Writers A Special Collection of Essays

Edited by Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland

Designed cover image: Vyychan First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-43732-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43733-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36863-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction

vii 1

NINA CORNYETZ AND REBECCA COPELAND

1

The Step to Trample the Unexplored: Family, School Girlishness, and Lesbian Panic in Matsuura Rieko’s Saiai no kodomo (The Most Beloved Child, 2017)

11

ANNA SPECCHIO

2

Body and/as Food: Rediscovering Female Subjectivity through the Mother–Daughter Dyad in Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru (2006)

29

MINA QIAO

3

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko: An Analysis of “Unhomely” Sounds in the Mother Tongue

50

KENIA AVENDAÑO HARA

4

Writing and Being Written: Approaches to Reading the Narrative of Kanai Mieko’s “Mado” (“Window,” 1979)

67

ZIFAN YANG

5

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces: Body, Precarity, and Language in Kawakami Mieko’s Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs, 2019) HITOMI YOSHIO

86

vi Contents 6

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital: Oyamada Hiroko’s Kōjō (The Factory, 2013)

106

PETER TILLACK

Index

129

Contributors

Rebecca Copeland, professor of modern Japanese literature at Washington ­University in St. Louis, is the author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (2000), editor of Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (2006), and coeditor with Melek Ortabasi of The Modern Murasaki: Selected Works by Women Writers of Meiji Japan 1885–1912 (2006), among other works. She has also translated the works of Uno Chiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, and Kirino Natsuo and has recently completed the novel The Kimono Tattoo (2021). Nina Cornyetz, professor of interdisciplinary studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Instruction, is the author of The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (Routledge, 2007) and Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers (1999) and the coeditor with Keith Vincent of Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture (Routledge, 2009). Her translation of Izumi Kyōka’s “The Tale of the Enchanted Sword” (The Asia-Pacific Journal) was awarded the 2017 Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize. She recently published the article “Sadism and the Vicissitudes of the Drive in Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism,” Discourse, Winter 2021. Kenia Avendaño Hara, Japanese literature specialist and language instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, completed her PhD in 2021 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Japanese literature with a concentration in contemporary literature, popular culture, and critical race theory. As a global citizen raised in DC with roots in Cuba and Spain and her heart in Japan, race, identity, and hybridity have been a constant point of interest. Both her dissertation and passion projects put Japanese identity and racial homogeneity into question while encouraging a more nuanced examination of how “Japaneseness” is constructed through popular literature and media. Mina Qiao, Japanese literature specialist and instructor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, earned her PhD at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her recent publications include Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature (2022) and The Coronavirus Pandemic in Japanese Literature and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2023).

viii Contributors Anna Specchio, tenure-track assistant professor (RtdB) of Japanese language and literature at the University of Turin, researches contemporary Japanese women’s literature. She has translated into Italian works of Iwaki Kei, Sakuraba Kazuki, Hayashi Mariko, Matsuura Rieko, Kashimada Maki, Yagi Emi, and Li Kotomi. She has authored papers on Ogawa Yōko, Hayashi Mariko, Wataya Risa, Murata Sayaka, and Matsuura Rieko. She is the coeditor with Matteo Cestari, Gianluca Coci, and Daniela Moro of the volume Orizzonti Giapponesi: ricerche, idee, prospettive (2018); and with Paola Scrolavezza and Gino Scatasta of the volume NipPop: 10 anni di cultura pop giapponese in Italia (2023). Peter Tillack, associate professor in the Japan Studies Program at Montana State University, earned his PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Oregon in 2006. He has written on “introspective generation” writers Gotō Meisei and Kuroi Senji and has published Engaging Banality: Stories of the Salaried Life by Kuroi Senji (2017), an annotated collection of several of Kuroi Senji’s early works. His current research interest focuses on the capitalist unconscious and its representation in contemporary Japanese literature. ZiFan Yang, a master’s student at Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, received her BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research interests include rhetoric of negation, deaestheticization of tragedy and parody writing, writing in the mentality of gendered others, and the genealogy of empathy in modern East Asian literature. Recently, she has presented a paper titled “From Either/Or to As Well As: the Rise and Fall of Self-Allegorization in No-No Boy” at the Rising Asia Foundation Annual Asian Literature in Motion Conference. Hitomi Yoshio, associate professor of Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at Waseda University, specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese literature with a focus on women’s writing. Her recent publications are included in the edited volumes Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (2022), The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature (2022), and Sekai bungaku to shite no shinsaigo bungaku (Post-Disaster Literature as World Literature, 2021). She is the translator of Imamura Natsuko’s This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? (2023), Kawakami Mieko’s Dreams of Love, Etc. (forthcoming), and works by Higuchi Ichiyō and Osaki Midori.

Introduction Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland

In recent years, Japanese women writers have skyrocketed to the attention of English-language readers. Many have found their way onto shortlists of some of the most prestigious literary awards. Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven was one of six shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. Ogawa Yōko was similarly acknowledged in 2020. Although neither ultimately captured the award, their nominations indicate the interest international readers now have in works by Japanese women writers. This interest has been slowly but consistently growing since the late 1980s, encouraged by the corresponding proliferation of translations of those women writers. We, the editors of this volume, felt that a collection of critical essays to address the issues pertinent to this set of writings was, in fact, overdue. In the following introduction, we offer a brief historical context to the emergence of Japanese-language women’s writing as a subject of study in the North American Academy, an overview of our organizational framework, and a presentation of the chapters gathered here. Uncovering Modern Japanese Women Writers in North America Following World War II, major trade presses in Europe and North America, such as Knopf, actively solicited English-language translations of notable writers. A near cottage industry arose around the marketing of Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and most particularly Mishima Yukio. As interests in Japanese writers increased, so did the translations and the breadth of writers presented. Two decades would pass, however, before modern Japanese women writers found their way into the Englishlanguage market. In the early 1980s, something unprecedented happened in the field of English-language scholarship in Japan: three anthologies of modern Japanese women’s fiction in translation appeared almost simultaneously, representing the efforts of 5 women translators and presenting translations of 28 works of Japanese women writers. Phyllis Birnbaum published Rabbits, Crabs, Etc. Stories by Japanese Women with the University of Hawai’i Press in 1982. That same year, Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hansen published their edited anthology This Kind of Woman. Ten Stories by Japanese Women Writers, 1960–1977 with Stanford University Press, and M.E. Sharpe released the twelve-story collection, Stories by Contemporary Women Writers, translated and edited by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden. DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-1

2  Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland In a span of a year, these translations of works by modern Japanese women writers gave birth to studies of Japanese women’s writing. This is not to suggest that modern women’s writing had not been translated before this period. Edward Seidensticker, for example, undertook translations of works by Okamoto Kanoko and Hirabayashi Taiko but usually published them in niche journals like the now defunct Japan Quarterly. Women were “represented” in the omnibus anthologies of modern Japanese literature edited by Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, and others. But “representation” meant one or two stories amid a full table of contents by men. With such treatment, women writers did not rise beyond the “kō itten” (tokenism) so prevalent in years past. Therefore, anthologies that focused on women, privileged women, and were crafted by women were extraordinary and exciting. In one fell swoop, these translators pushed against the gender-defined boundaries of Japanese Studies in the English-speaking world. They made it possible for literature teachers to offer more than a smattering of works by women writers in their courses, and they inspired fledgling scholars to focus on women writers. As scholar Sharalyn Orbaugh would recount when she first learned of the anthologies in 1982: “I was just beginning to discover Japanese women writers after a steady diet of Akutagawas and Shigas and Tanizakis and Mishimas. I looked forward to the chance to familiarize myself quickly with the work of the best women writers.”1 These anthologies of short stories were accompanied by more and more translations of novels, and before long, the North American academy saw an increase in doctoral dissertations that focused exclusively on individual Japanese women writers, largely with a biographical or social historical focus. A number of university presses, such as the University of Hawai’i and Yale, published revised versions of these dissertations, ensuring that the stories they told of female literary lives were more widely available. Among these are Rebecca Copeland, The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo (Hawai’i, 1992); Alan Tansman, The Writings of Kōda Aya, A Japanese Literary Daughter (Yale, 1993); Joan Ericson, Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature (Hawai’i, 1997); and Ann Sherif, Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Kōda Aya (Hawai’i, 1999). Simultaneously, scholars began to publish articles and present papers on modern Japanese women writers in academic journals and conferences, with international profiles, which did much to legitimize Japanese Women’s Studies in the United States. The US-Japan Women’s Journal, for example, was established in 1988 to promote scholarly exchange on social, cultural, political, and economic issues pertaining to gender and Japan, initiated largely under the direction of Japanese feminist pioneer Mizuta Noriko. Women’s Studies conferences on Japanese literature began to take the stage a few years later. The first, held at Rutgers University in 1993, drew together scholars who had labored for years and often in isolation, on the topic of Japanese women’s writing. This conference was followed by an anthology of critical and analytical essays, The Woman’s Hand (published by Stanford University Press), which made enormous strides in grounding the study of Japanese women’s writing in North American Academies, while also laying the foundation for the creation of a woman’s literature canon. While the conference and the volume offered

Introduction  3 the imprimatur of academic legitimacy, on the one hand, it also conferred on the conference attendees and others working on women’s writing the more emotional sense of “legitimacy,” justification, or belonging. The Rutgers conference was followed in 2001 by “Across Time and Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts” held at the University of Alberta, which was so popular and so inclusive, the organizers elected to run simultaneous panels and include two keynote speakers.2 By 2013, the Emory University conference, “Revisiting Japanese Feminisms,” gave ample evidence of the richness of scholarship now available on Japanese women’s writing and activism. The conference included second- and even third-generation scholars of Japanese women’s writing who convened over a “reconsideration” of Japanese feminism. The resulting publication explored the dynamic intersection of gender, political action, and ethnicity in Japan. More recently, scholars from both North America and Japan collaborated in 2019 on “The Woman in the Story: Female Protagonism in Japanese Narratives,” a conference at UCLA that explored the way “women” as a trans-historical category has been represented over time in Japan.3 By the second decade of the 21st century, we have seen an increase in monographs and translations meant to assist English-language readers in understanding the richness and depth of modern women’s literature in Japan. Many of these move us beyond comfortable assumptions about what Japanese literature is or who Japanese women are. So tired have we become of casual assumptions regarding the blandly passive, delicate nature of Japanese fiction, particularly by women, that many of our recent translations and monographs may provide a distorted view of Japanese writing as always deviant, dangerous, and twisted – or as John Treat has described it, “Japanese quirky.”4 Any glance at social media pages devoted to Japanese literature of late would lead one to assume that almost all contemporary Japanese literature of note is written by women. Translations of the works of Ogawa Yōko, Kawakami Mieko, and others, as noted above, consistently win awards and threaten to dethrone international darling, Murakami Haruki. Focus on these women writers is such that a casual observer might wonder if Japanese men still write. Translator Allison Markin Powell, however, cautions more circumspection. She researched the period 2012–2017 and found that: the winners of literary prizes since 2012 in Japan are more-or-less evenly divided by gender (7-6 in favor of women for the Akutagawa Prize, 7-6 for men in the Naoki Prize) and more bestselling novels in Japan in 2016 were written by women (26-24 according to Da Vinci magazine) and it was pretty balanced in the years prior. Even so, and despite the celebrated successes of Japanese women’s novels, translators still spend more time translating works by men than by women.5 Certainly, Japan is not unique in this inequity. Chad Post, who maintains the 3 percent6 website and keeps astoundingly detailed statistics on the number of works in translation worldwide, has noted that there is “quite a gap between books in

4  Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland translation originally written by men, and those written by women.”7 Breaking the disparity down by country, he shows that for the period 2008–2019, 25.62 percent of translations from the Japanese language were of works by women writers. Of the 16 countries surveyed, Japan was 13th. Works from Canada (mostly Quebec) were 45.9 percent, and China was the lowest at 22.5 percent. Since 2012 women translators around the world but primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States have banded together in reaction to these statistics to create the highly visible and active Women in Translation online forum, which promotes Women in Translation Month every August.8 The year 2017 saw the inauguration of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation “with the aim of addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature and increasing the number of international women’s voices accessible to a British and Irish readership.”9 When more than one woman steps into an arena where they are unexpected or where they are not commonly seen, bystanders jump to the conclusion that they are “taking over.” Years ago, writer and future Buddhist priest Setouchi Harumi (Jakuchō) noticed that shortly after World War II, the Japanese press was agog over the fact that she, Sono Ayako, and a few other women had begun publishing fiction to some success. The media labeled the phenomenon, “the era of the female genius.” Male critic Okuno Takeo quipped that the literary arena was rapidly becoming a woman’s “territory” and soon a special prize just for men would be necessary. “Because writing men far outnumber women,” Setouchi observed, “the activity of two or three women writers always seems strikingly conspicuous.”10 And yet, the male ego survived. Men continued to write, and women at the time still struggled under the label of “joryū sakka” or woman writer. Is 2023 that different? More and more women-identified writers are reaping the benefits of the easing of gender roles in the social fabric and a leveling of educational opportunity. But, are they not still dealing with the residual challenges of latent sexism and misguided assumptions about their gender, age, and nationality? What marks their writing? What traces of earlier social/cultural norms still linger? Or for that matter, what earlier traces have been excised, erased, or repurposed? The essays in this volume explore the way contemporary Japanese women writers have responded to demands of familial bonds, language, body politics, and national identity in an increasingly expanding global marketplace. Creative Writing and the Psychoanalytic Framework of Desire We chose the essays gathered in this issue because they offer a wide range of theoretically complex ways of reading a new generation of Japanese women writers’ relations to identity, sex/gender, and desire. The writers analyzed by our contributors happen to be cisgendered women, but they are also Japanese women – writing in Japanese and for the most part residing in Japan, where the politics of sex and gender, class and ethnicity, and more are economically and socioculturally specific. Suffice to say that the chapters herein must attend to a degree of what has been called intersectionality in the spirit of what the term was coined to designate by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. That is, they interrogate the way the

Introduction  5 interrelated social categories of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other individual or group identities give rise to overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage.11 Our contributors take up the complex identities of the woman writer with careful attention to the sociohistorical and economic specificities of the sex and gender politics that attend them. What motivates someone to write a story? Within a psychoanalytic framework, creative writing – one might say all writing – is one means of binding or defusing a sublimated libidinal desire. In this context, writing constitutes the (unattainable) attempt to fulfill desire. That is, writing is constitutively related to desire. Drive is simply that: it wants to discharge. While drive cares little of how the discharge occurs, other parts of the psyche care deeply.12 Accordingly, one person may take up creative writing, another painting, and yet another complex mathematics. Thoughts themselves, according to Sigmund Freud, are examples of (perhaps low-level) fusions of the ego, or the libidinal function of binding and uniting, or sublimations of libidinal energy.13 As societies grow in inherited knowledge of the arts and sciences, and as individuals grow in epistemic educations, these thought processes develop more complexity and become more circuitous, moving us further and further from their origins as drive. As Freud put it, in the primitive organism, to come into existence is to quickly expire, but as the organism grows more complex, the path of life develops “ever more complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of death.”14 What motivates the reader to read? Roland Barthes theorizes that it is a search for meaning, in which there is both a passion for the ending and for which there must also be a middle of reasonable length – mirroring perfectly the intertwining of the libidinal and death drives postulated by Freud in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle.15 Peter Brooks points out that in “literary texts there is slim but real evidence of a compulsion to repeat which can override the pleasure principle, and which seems ‘more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it overrides.’”16 This compulsion(?) is felt most keenly in the repetitions – with a difference – of literature with uncanny affects.17 To this, we would add: to want to read is inseparable from the subject’s paranoia that representation appears to hide something beyond itself, that there is something behind the signifiers that constitute signification. In the literary field, it is the suspicion that the text itself veils something more than itself.18 Further, to paraphrase that infamous remark by Freud, we ask, what do these women writers want? And how do they channel what they want into imaginary or recollected or envisioned linguistic formulations? We want to recognize and mark the desire of women that lies at the basis of female creativity of all sorts. However, we caution that what drive wants is individually determined by both conscious and unconscious forces; both of these, although more obviously the conscious forces, are inhibited by a network of social and political discourses, including those on power – attributes that Freud acknowledged but also largely ignored. Of course, who and how we desire is political. In his Civilization and its Discontents, Freud postulates the presence of a societal superego that polices the forms our conscious sexual desires take and delimits the socially acceptable expressions

6  Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland of those desires. It is even more repressive than the individual superego because it prioritizes harmony within the group over individual happiness. The chapters in this volume probe the question of desire, its repression, and political suppression in both sexual and nonsexual contexts. In framing our selection of chapters around the notion of desire, we bear in mind Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, which looks at the issue of desire from a purely political perspective. She begins by taking up the tacit (and sometimes explicit) expectation held by some that they have a “right” to sex, as invigorated by the complaints of those identifying as involuntary celibates, or “incels.”19 Arguing, of course, against such an expectation, Srinivasan explores the etiology and effects of such axioms in her bold and refreshingly honest study. She borrows Freud’s discussion of transference to describe the relations of a (female) college or university student to her (male) professor, chiding those who would support sexual relations between the two as an abuse of the contracted relation, which would demand he teaches and not seduce her.20 She ventures into the troubled realm of the profound ambivalence surrounding feminists’ diverse positionings toward pornography, sexual orientation, and trans and lesbian structures of desire. She asks: The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obliged to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.21 What does it mean that one desires, in a particular way, a particular sort of person? Why does one person prefer certain sexual acts and another person prefer others? Forcefully pointing out that no preferences are “pure” (or in Kantian terms, noumenal) and are directly the result of a circulating set of racial, ethnic, gendered, and other discourses that predate any individual’s insertion into those discourses, she brings our attention to the constructed truths of how and what we desire. In Lacanian terms, this is the Symbolic world into which we are born and to which we subject ourselves in order to be subjects at all.22 And, to let our desire be subject to this Other – here, to obey the injunction not just to enjoy! but to enjoy! in a particular fashion, is to be, in essence, a pervert, or one who does not respond to their own desire but is merely an instrument of the law of the Other.23 As Slavoj Žižek elaborates: the pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as an instrument of the big Other’s will.24 It is not only sexual desires that are curbed by sociopolitical and economic interests but also our murderous impulses as modulated by the superego alongside the societal superego.25 Death instincts are mute in general, and life proceeds through

Introduction  7 the firing of the libidinal instincts in sublimated forms; when unsublimated, the purest form of libidinal id alloys with the death drive in the post-orgasmic stasis of (temporary) sexual satisfactions.26 This brings us back to Brook’s contention that we read in order to finish the text. New Writers New Readings: A Theoretics of Desire Female spaces, maternal roles, gendered bodies, and resistance, the chapters collected here enact the embrace of desire, desire for language, for touch, and for recognition. Many, although not all, of the chapters collected here employ some form of psychoanalytic interpretation. Anna Specchio’s contribution, “The Step to Tremble the Unexplored: Family, High School Girlishness, and Lesbian Panic in Matsuura Rieko’s Sai ai no kodomo (The Most Beloved Child, 2017),” discusses Matsuura’s theorization of “gentle castration” as a subversion of what she understood to be Freud’s notion of sex as a union of differing genitals. This understanding is evidence of Matsuura’s engagement with the phallicism of psychoanalysis and her struggles to find alternative ways of imagining the social world. Mina Qiao’s “Body and/as Food: Rediscovering Female Subjectivity through the Mother–Daughter Dyad in Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru (2006)” takes up the contention by Luce Irigaray that the relation between food, feeding, and eating engaged in by mothers and their daughters is fraught with ambivalence – the concept of ambivalence is crucial to a psychoanalytic framework. Like Melanie Klein, Irigaray highlights the possible shifting function of food as pharmakon: from nutrition and pleasure to poison and suffering. Qiao’s discussion is also attentive to how relations between mothers and daughters are here in the shadow of an omnipresent patriarchal father figure, even if he is physically absent. Kenia Avendaño Hara has recourse to the concept of the uncanny or unhomely (unheimlich) to describe Tawada Yōko’s prose style in Japanese (although she also writes in German), which phonetically reverberates with a strangeness to the reader. Hara argues that Tawada challenges readers to listen to how she nuances the familiar to make it unfamiliar, or precisely, uncanny. These “unhomely” linguistic and aural/oral spaces span gender, racial, and ethnic identities in a global context. The uncanny was for Freud a staple of fiction, and bore relation to the return of the repressed, in the form of the double, the ghost, and other figures common to horror literatures. Hara’s focus on the linguistic and phonetic patterns of Tawada’s prose also links it to ZiFan Yang’s chapter “Approaches to Reading the Narrative of Kanai Mieko’s “Mado” (Window, 1979).” Yang’s study highlights the presence of a set of metadiscourses in the text under analysis: on writing, on photography, and on time. She argues that Kanai presents readers with a “reverse” story in which the elements created in the fiction subversively affect those doing the writing and put the narrator and narration into mutually negating relation to one another. In “Envisioning Community Through Women’s Space: Body, Precarity, and Language in Kawakami Mieko’s Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs, 2019),” Hitomi Yoshio explores three “spaces” of feminist community in Kawakami

8  Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland Mieko’s writings: the physical space of the public bathhouse, the linguistic space of Osaka dialect, and the literary space of intertextuality. Her study engages directly with a feminist perspective she locates within those spaces and charts how the intersectionality of class, sexuality, and race nuance these very spaces. Peter Tillack’s “Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital: Oyamada Hiroko’s Kōjō (The Factory, 2013)” also foregrounds the notion of a particular “site” – in this case, the imagined world of Oyamada Hiroko’s The Factory. He brings psychoanalysis back into the analytic framework and extends his interpretation into the area of a critique of capitalism through his reliance on Žižek’s theorization of a parallel gap between capitalist subjectivity and its own void. We are especially delighted that our collection brings together a diverse group of scholars from across the spectrum of the academic arena, from different regions of the world, and from different training backgrounds. Although the writers these scholars discuss have achieved some name recognition in English-language publications, most are more familiar to readers via translation, and with few exceptions (such as Tawada Yōko), they have received scant attention in any venue but that of popular journalism. By presenting these studies in a collection like this, we are drawing attention to the diverse nature of writing by women in the last few decades, and we also highlight important synergies among them. These are writers who are experimental and nonconforming. They are writing against the expectations of both gender and culture and exploding Orientalist myths as they do so. By reading them together this way, we offer new perspectives in ways that would not be achieved by single unrelated articles. These studies and analyses will provide a path forward to new ways to read and receive contemporary Japanese fiction. Notes 1 Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction by Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Kyoko Iriye Selden,” Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 2 (1992): 281. 2 The event brought together generations of scholars, from the pioneers of the field to graduate students presenting on new dissertations. 3 Like the Alberta conference, this one also had a rich representation of scholars across generations, which unlike the earlier conference, led to contentious discussions both in the panels and behind the scenes. Whereas senior scholars appeared eager to celebrate milestones and the luxury of sharing scholarship in a safe, receptive space, newer scholars expressed frustration with the lack of greater attention to LGBTQ voices, lack of focus on the intersectionality of discrimination, or the lack of diversity among the invited speakers. 4 Among the deviant we can include the translations of works by Kirino Natsuo (b. 1951) that intentionally work against the image of Japanese women as gentle and submissive; or the 2005 translation of Kanehara Hitomi’s shocking 2003 Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings), which inspired a number of analytical essays on Japan’s violent “subcultures.” Notably not translated are the works of Kirino’s contemporary, the massively popular and prolific Hayashi Mariko (b. 1954). Perhaps her focus on the awkwardly single woman craving sex and going on shopping sprees is too lighthearted. Conversely, award-winning writer Mitsuyo Kakuta (b. 1967), though represented by translations, has not yet become the subject of academic scrutiny.

Introduction  9

10  Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland Works Cited Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1974. Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” Yale French Studies, no. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977): 280–300. Carbin, Maria and Sara Edenheim. “The Intersectional Turn in Feminist Theory: A Dream of a Common Language?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 23, no. 3 (2013): 233–48. Copjec, Joan. “The Orthopsychic Subject.” In Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. 15–38. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 8, no. 1 (1989): 139–67. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C.J.M. Hubback. London: The Hogarth Press LTD, 1948. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1961. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and The Id. Translated by Joan Riviere. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1960. Freud, Sigmund. “The Sexual Aberrations.” In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Edited and Translated by James Strachey, 1–38. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1962. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In Collected Papers. Translated by Alix Strachey, Volume 4, 365–407. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1959. Lacan, Jacques. “Kant with Sade.” In Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, 645–70. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis: Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 11. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” In Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, 197–268. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002. Maloney, Iain. “Ensuring Women Are Not Lost in Translation.” The Japan Times, November 25, 2017. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/11/25/books/ensuring-women-notlost-translation/#.Xl1FQ0BFzIX. Orbaugh, Sharalyn. “Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction by Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Kyoko Iriye Selden.” Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 2 (1992): 281–3. Post, Chad. “Women in Translation by Country,” Three Percent, 2019. http://www.rochester. edu/College/translation/threepercent/2019/08/19/women-in-translation-by-country/. Setouchi Harumi. “Requirements for Becoming a Woman Writer.” Translated by Rebecca Copeland. In Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Edited by Rebecca Copeland, 61–5. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021. Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation. Women in Translation. https://womenintranslation.tumblr.com/. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Fundamental Pervert: Lacan, Dostoyevsky, Bouyeri.” Lacanian Ink 27 (Spring 2006): 114–29.

1

The Step to Trample the Unexplored Family, School Girlishness, and Lesbian Panic in Matsuura Rieko’s Saiai no kodomo (The Most Beloved Child, 2017) Anna Specchio

Matsuura Rieko (b. 1958) defies the Japanese publishing industry’s tendency to mercilessly forget “unproductive writers.”1 After her brilliant debut in 1978 with “Sōgi no hi” (“The Day of the Funeral”), which she wrote while still in college, earning her the 47th Bungakukai Prize for Emerging Writers, she produced other short stories but struggled “to recreate her initial success.”2 She subsequently gained international fame thanks to the translation of her two novels Nachuraru ūman (Natural Woman, 1987) and Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai (The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, 1993; Eng. tr. 2010; hereafter Big Toe P) into European languages. To date, she has only published four novels, four collections of essays and debates, and the contemporary Japanese retranslation of Higuchi Ichiyō’s masterpiece Takekurabe (Comparing Heights, 1895). As moderate as her fiction output is, Matsuura in no way lacks content fecundity, and in all her works until Saiai no kodomo (The Most Beloved Child, 2017), she “deals intimately with sexual minorities, as well as the world of lesbianism and sadomasochism, and explores the possibility of heterosexual and familial relationships that transcend the conventions of humanism.”3 Critic Shimizu Yoshinori defines Matsuura as “a writer of the future” who “will forever remain a breath of fresh air in the readers’ memories,” and he identifies the complexity of the themes she addresses as the reason for both the readers’ expectation of her works and their difficulty in being accepted by the general public; according to Shimizu, there are few who are able to understand Matsuura’s literary value in its entirety.4 The motifs that recur in her novels have been examined through a myriad of approaches, from Freudian penis envy and castration anxiety to the Body without Organs (BwO) of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari via the lessons of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Ronald Dworkin, and Judith Butler. For instance, Fusako Innami underlines that unity in Matsuura’s novels “is not limited to ‘sexual’ unification but is a haptic interaction” and that the term “haptic,” for Deleuze and Guattari, “never dichotomizes sensual experiences.”5 She further explains that: although it makes sense to read Matsuura next to Deleuze and Guattari through the concepts of haptic, deterritorialization, and BwO since they share the intensions toward bareness of the body, the difference seems to lie in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-2

12  Anna Specchio fact that while Deleuze and Guattari aim toward new horizons, resisting the regression in psychoanalysis and departing from the past, Matsuura rather cherishes the reminiscence from the past.6 Matsuura’s subjects are often unchained from a binary sexual economy and challenge the concept of sexuality as unique and irreducible. Yet, her portraits of women having homosexual intercourses have caused Japanese and international critics to categorize her fiction as lesbian or homosexual literature.7 However, Matsuura has categorically rejected the label of “lesbian and homosexual writer.”8 Matsuura’s career soared in the early 1990s thanks to Big Toe P. Initially serialized in the journal Bungei from 1991 to 1993, the work won the Women’s Literature Prize (Joryū bungakushō) in 1994 when it was published as a single volume in the fall of the latter year. Matsuura’s accomplishments coincided with a rise in feminist reading of novels and queer studies in Japan, and a new focus was put on women and/or queer subjects in literature.9 And since Mano Kazumi, the protagonist of Big Toe P, sees the big toe of her right foot turning into a penis, which leads her to a lesbian adventure, feminist psychologist Ogura Chikako reviewed the novel as the story of a “pseudo-castrated man,” insisting on the lesbian matrix of the novel. Consequently, Matsuura responded in an interview declaring her intention to kill the reviewer (“koroshite yarimasu”) and affirming that “Ogura’s feminism isn’t able to both read and write. It’s clear that I had no intention of pursuing homosexuality within this novel, however her blindness only recognizes that aspect!”10 Furthermore, Matsuura emphasized that Big Toe P, as well as Nachuraru ūman, “isn’t homosexual literature, but is rather intended to cancel that label” and declared her antifeminist and antiacademic position.11 As Joanne Quimby underlines, in the same interview, Matsuura used “the oftmistaken citation from [Andrea] Dworkin that ‘all penetration is rape’ to criticize feminist ideology for being ‘too philosophical’ and ‘too removed from reality.’” She went on to denounce “the feminist conflation of the penis with the phallus,” invoking wide-ranging feminist and psychoanalytic discourses on “the phallus,” from the distinction, or correspondence, between the penis and the phallus to Lacanian theories of “being” versus “having” the phallus – and numerous feminist analyses and critiques of both.12 She also criticized feminist scholars’ vision of what they called “heterosexual male-centrism” (iseiai dansei chūshin shugi) and which Matsuura defines as “genital unionism” (seiki ketsugō shugi). In other words, she stated that her intention was to question and provoke the binary sexual economy, phallocentrism, and genital unionism, that is, sex as intended as the mere union of genitals from different biological sexes.13 Furthermore, she locates the prominent manifestation of genital unionism: in the men of the baby-boom generation (or ‘phallic mass generation,’ as she calls it) who especially love myths about love and sex…[Matsuura] has always contested it in both literary and critical works, and her fight against ‘feminists’ in criticism is a part of it.14

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  13 In Matsuura’s unconventional Weltanschauung, writing texts means to provoke genital unionism and the privileged status of the phallus without ever linking or reconnecting to mainstream currents, more precisely, without linking the concepts to Japanese or Western feminist scholars or academics.15 To do so, she uses a concept through which she expresses her stance against the centrality of genital sexuality, which has given rise not only to Freudian theories of castration and penis envy but also to a literature (hetero- or homosexual) concerned above all with depicting love between people only through genital sexuality. She calls that concept “gentle castration” (yasashii kyosei). Since genitals have been designated as the organs that symbolize gender and, as a result, are “tainted” by the cultural meaning ascribed to them, Matsuura’s vision focuses on dismantling the idea of love as limited to genital eros through the act of “stripping the genitals” or “removing the genitals” (seiki o nugu). Since castrating a genital organ in a nonmetaphorical way would merely result in a reversal of power dynamics and would not involve the delineation of new cartographies, in the essay collection Yasashii kyosei no tame ni (For a Gentle Castration, 1997), Matsuura introduces (or reproposes, given that some essays, including “Seiki kara no kaihō o” [“On the Liberation of the Genitals”], were written in previous years) the concept of “gentle castration,” which invites the denuding of the cultural meaning attributed to genitals:16 We undress our genitals: annoying genitals, which entice us to put on too many clothes, and our rough genitals, which resolve our genitals into a combination of male and female forms. In short, the “genitals” that must be stripped and discarded, are always aware of the genitals of the opposite sex, even if they are not in the middle of the sex act. The body gathers the imaginary genitals of the opposite sex, genitals that can be said to be a fiction. Even if we deal with the “imaginary” genitals, there is no reason for them to feel pain. The castration is a gentle one. Even in our castrated bodies, the genitals remain, but as mere organs. When they are at peace, they are not an obstruction. They have no particular value, they don’t speak for anything, they aren’t symbol, and they suggest nothing. Perhaps they don’t even show sexual difference. You and I stop using genital as an “expression.” You and I enjoy a pleasure that doesn’t depend on genitals. We call it “sex-gang-child”: sex that belongs to us.17 The economy of gentle castration is not in the service of constructing sex as an activity defined by the union of the genitals. Through this concept, Matsuura intends to propose a new kind of sexuality that is free from established cultural meanings and, by virtue of this reason, is more akin to childhood sexuality, innocent, without contaminations (the “sex-gang-child” she mentions in the essay). In Matsuura’s approach, gently castrating is to rid genitals of their symbolic value on a cultural level. However, I argue that it is possible to extend this concept also to

14  Anna Specchio all the preconceptions within Japanese society that limit and impoverish individual experiences by contaminating them with preexisting meanings. In fact, Matsuura’s 2017 work, Saiai no kodomo, best shows readers her vision of the concept of “gentle castration.” Through the depowered gaze of female highschool students, Matsuura offers new perspectives for redrawing the conceptual maps currently in use related to family and blood bonds, the ideal constructed around Japanese female high-school students (joshi kōkōsei), and lesbian identities. All these relationships, where the “touch” predominates, can be called “skinships” or “non-genital sensuality.”18 Redefining the Concept of “Family” One of the first to notice how the concept of “family” is substantially revised in the pages of Saiai no kodomo was Murata Sayaka (b. 1979), the contemporary writer who has offered the most compelling interpretation of Matsuura’s texts.19 In the afterword to the Japanese paperback edition of the novel, an essay first published in Bungakukai in June 2017 (four months after Saiai no kodomo appeared in the same magazine), she writes: There exist words that are contaminated from the very moment we learn them. Are those covered by the preconceptions of adults as they teach them to us while we children still live in a world where they don’t exist. They explain to us, “Here, this is called X.” For me, “woman” was one of those words, as well as “sex” and “family.”20 Murata further explains that it takes a lifetime to rinse, dissect, and recompose the meanings of these words. Her perspective of “family” as a contaminated term is due to the common belief that the family is created by indissoluble blood ties and necessarily carnal relationships – what sociologist Ochiai Emiko identifies as the “modern family.”21 In Japan, the modern family counts the nuclear family among its peculiarities, placing emphasis on the mother–daughter/son relationship, and within which “women are defined by the presumption of their heterosexuality.”22 Saiai no kodomo is set in a very close past (probably between 2007 and 2011, counting backward from the end of the story until the protagonists’ third year of middle school) and tells the story of the friendship between three female high-school students: Maibara Hinatsu, Imazato Mashio, and Kusui Utsuho.23 Their story is narrated through the voices of a very original narrating “us,” made up of the classmates of the fourth section of the second year of the Tamamo Institute in Kanagawa Prefecture. The narrating “us” declares themselves to be “eyewitnesses” to the relationship, or pseudo-family, composed of Hinatsu, Mashio, and Utsuho, who they call, respectively, the “father,” the “mother,” and the “prince.” The story is divided into five chapters, where the narrating “us” tells the reader about the “romance” of Hinatsu, Mashio, and Utsuho since they first meet at the first year of high school. However, Hinatsu is forced to leave school, as Utsuho’s real mother finds her kissing her beloved daughter and accuses her of being a lesbian and a pervert.

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  15 Within Saiai no kodomo, there is a diegetic disorder: the third-person narration of real events, that is, the voice of the narrating “us,” is mixed with the monologues of the three main protagonists imagined by the narrators, who guess what is going on in their minds. In this regard, Saiai no kodomo inherits the narrative structure of her earlier Ura vājon (The Reverse Version, 2000), which is composed of 18 chapters with stand-alone stories linked by the presence of two intradiegetic female voices. In Ura vājon, Matsuura describes what Nagaike Kazumi summarizes as “a powerful female imaginative discourse in relation to fantasies of male homosexuality” – even though it should be noted that the fantasies of the narrating voices also address female homosexuality.24 As Iida Yūko shows us, Ura vājon can be interpreted as a parody of the “right version,” not only because of the “backward” representation of thoughts based on gender and relationships but also because of the reversal of the structure of the modern novel, with the presence of a metanarrative serving as a common thread between the stories (which turns out to be short stories written by one of the two narrating voices).25 It is within this metanarrative that the voice under the name of Masako states she wants to write about a pseudo-family comprising three high-school girls: The use of a pseudo-family makes it easier to read, as it softens the creepy feel of these events that would be too suffocating and horrible if they happened in a family bound under one roof. I haven’t thought about the structure concretely, but there would be three high school girls who are very close to each other. At first, the three girls wouldn’t be aware of it, but since their classmates would say they are “the father, the mother, and the prince,” they would begin to figure themselves as such.26 Hinatsu, Mashio, and Utsuho’s classmates claim not to remember who gave them the roles of “father,” “mother,” and “prince” and even during the initial debate about Hinatsu’s identity as Mashio’s “husband” rather than her “wife” and Utsuho’s identity as the “prince” rather than the “princess”; although they are both girls, they don’t seem to have any problem with this representation. They just state that Hinatsu and Utsuho’s gender can be changed as needed since gender is not the main issue in the relationship between the three friends. What really matters, in their view, is not the gender performance, here represented in a more fluid way, but rather the family role performance. Within the narration, Hinatsu, Mashio, and Utsuho’s pseudo-family stands in contrast to the real families. Mashio’s biological family consists of her, her parents, and her younger brother (on whom her mother seems to lavish more attention and expectations); Hinatsu’s consists of her, her parents, an older brother, and an older sister (with the latter seeming to be affected by a particular form of dependency on her mother); Utsuho’s consists of her and Mrs. Itsuko, the only adult outside the Tamamo Institute whose real name is given. As Tsumura Kikuko points out in an interview with Matsuura, the real families of the three protagonists include both adults who play the roles assigned them by society and adults who do not seem to fulfill the parental role completely. An example of the first are Hinatsu’s parents, as Hinatsu states that her

16  Anna Specchio father never misses giving her mother a present on her birthday or when he returns from business trips, while the latter case is better represented by Mrs. Itsuko.27 However, Mrs. Itsuko is a working single mother whose absence from home, even at night, is caused by the need to cover nursing shifts. At the same time, Utsuho recounts that when she was a child, her mother used to tie her with an obi (the sash used to tie a kimono) so that she would not stray too far while her mother slept. While Mrs. Itsuko’s obsession with keeping her daughter tied to herself can be tracked back to the widespread belief in Japanese society that children should grow up attached to their mothers at least until the age of three, Mrs. Itsuko drags her mania for control over Utsuho into the present moment, alternating between phases of attention and apparent disinterest.28 In addition, her obsession with her daughter manifests itself as she beats or castigates Utsuho. Mrs. Itsuko’s cantankerous nature might be interpreted as a challenge Matsuura employs toward the ideal of “Japanese maternalism,” which ascribes the responsibility of generating, raising, and educating children only to the mother, and is the basis of amae, the dependence of children on their mother, or a parody of this concept.29 Innami further describes Mrs. Itsuko and Utsuho (and Hinatsu’s sister and her mother) as a familial relationship “with elements of boshi yuchaku (like boshi mikkachu; an adherence between mother and infant).”30 Regardless of the peculiarities within their real families, Hinatsu, Mashio, and Utsuho seem to find much comfort in their pseudo-family, and, although they first considered it no more than a game, they gradually come to recognize it as a family, just as in Masako’s fantasy in Ura vājon. This vision is confirmed by a statement that follows what the narrators imagine Mashio to be thinking: “The family she had created with Hinatsu and Utsuho made her feel more comfortable than the real family where she was forced to come back every day after school” (94). The pseudo-family, where each member finds comfort in the other, becomes the new family and replaces the traditional family system, which loses its function. Blood relations are replaced by new intimacies and contacts, as shown in the scenes in which Hinatsu cuddles Mashio and Utsuho, or Hinatsu and Mashio “play” with Utsuho. Closeness is no longer between mother and daughter, but between parents and daughter, and parents themselves, and it culminates, in this specific case, in a greater attachment between the “father” (Hinatsu) and the “prince” (Utsuho). Accordingly, Innami summarizes that “Writing about skinship in the age of postfamilial relationships, Matsuura shows that the relationship is renewable to the extent that it replaces the familial intimacy that skinship cultivates beyond the mother.”31 The concept of the interchangeable parent–child relation, as well as the deconstruction of the myth of blood relation as absolute and the traditional family as value, is part of Matsuura’s concept to gently castrate fixed, unspoken norms: “I have always been thinking that even the parent-child one might be a replaceable relationship. It would be terrible if they feel secure just by having a blood bound or having given birth, as if one possesses the other.”32 In the end, through the pseudo-family, Matsuura Rieko strips the term “family” of its usual meaning and the social conventions associated with it. Thanks to the

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  17 narrating “us” who protect the pseudo-family, she creates a small “community” in which the classmates fulfill the function of an extended family. In other words, Matsuura Rieko creates a “community” whose concept and function are not dissimilar from that at the base of the LGBTQ+ community. As a matter of fact, it is possible to consider the fourth section of the second year of the Tamamo Institute as a “community.” The various actions taken by the girls – each with a different and precise role, as shown in the “list of characters” written at the end of the first chapter – aim to dismantle any essentialism and categorization or gently castrate the preconceptions.33 And, as I shall propose in the next section, the readers intuit this sense of community from the very first lines of the novel. There Is No Such Thing as Joshi kōkōsei rashisa (School Girlishness) Saiai no kodomo starts with the draft copy of the sakubun (essay or composition) that Mashio left to her classmates before being called into the teacher’s office; this device serves to dull “the difference between the original and the copy, that sets the fiction of the novel into motion.”34 The strategy also works to emphasize the difference between the actual events and those imagined by the narrating “us” – Hasumi Shigehiko notes that the reader has no way to verify the correspondence between what is written in the draft and what Mashio delivered to the professors.35 Likewise, it is impossible to ascertain whether the facts reported by the narrating “us” correspond to the truth and to what extent, as the classmates repeatedly admit to having exaggerated certain aspects of the story. Returning to the sakubun of the opening, this has a particular track: the students of the fourth section of the second year are asked to write what it means to be a female high-school student (the original title of the theme is Joshi kōkōsei rashisa to wa nani ka). The myth of female high-school students (joshi kōkōsei) in Japan was born and developed in the 1990s when, thanks to the changes teenage girls made to their school uniforms, their use of gadgets hanging from cellphones and bags, and their habit of spending afternoons at the karaoke or other trendy places and other factors, they became protagonists of the subculture scene.36 What fuels the narratives about high-school girls are the increasingly prominent depictions of female students in their uniforms on popular culture products, on the one hand, and the relationship some of them engage in with middle-aged men to profit off them, on the other hand. During the early 1990s, these narratives exploded around the phenomenon of burusera (from the union of burumā, gym shorts, and sērā fuku, the sailor uniform used by high-school girls). In this phenomenon, female students sold their used or unused school uniforms and underwear. Then, toward the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s, that phenomenon was replaced by the so-called enjo kōsai or “subsidized relationships,” which involved middle-aged men willing to offer financial support to high-school girls in exchange for companionship – relationships that often culminated in sexual performances.37 As Mashio herself critically points out in her sakubun, the Japanese media have focused on the myth of high-school female students and their “bad” sexual behavior, yet they have never paid as much attention to their male counterparts. The same

18  Anna Specchio is true of the professors at the Tamamo Institute since the topic was given only to all female students’ classes, not to male students’ classes. The main actors behind and in those media are the same middle-aged men (old men, in the eyes of a highschool girl) who belong to the “phallic mass generation” that Matsuura criticizes and provokes through her works. Saiai no kodomo is set during the years when the phenomenon of enjo kōsai and the myths surrounding high-school female students were still widespread in Japan. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that within the novel we find a variety of female characters who, each in their own way, try to demystify the essentialist concept of joshi kōkōsei rashisa. In addition, the female classmates are not only uninterested in relationships with boomers that can bring them economic benefits, but they also do not pay any attention to the male students at their institute, who are their age (that they solely take as “passersby or intruders,” as explained in endnote 39). Indeed, some classmates of the fourth section of the second year point out that ironically, although they have observed several penises in photos, they have never seen one in person – apart from Efumi, who is sexually harassed on the train but does not perceive the incident as harassment, instead remaining calm and experiencing the curiosity of observing a penis in the flesh for the first time (78).38 Thanks to the setting in a united and varied class, the “kingdom” governed by Hinatsu, Mashio, and Utsuho, that is, the “community” of the fourth section of the second year, Matsuura manages to protect her protagonists from the world contaminated by the man of the “phallic mass generation” and to provoke them by stripping the myths they created of any importance:39 It is impossible to answer the question “What does it mean to be a high school female student?” The question itself is meaningless. Mashio and the others assume that such essentialisms are not even worth considering. … I wanted to write a critique of the obscene and disgusting way the world tortures high school female students, and the fact that I did not bother to explain what it means to be a high school female student is both the premise and the reconfirmation of it.40 The classmates not only refuse to answer what it means to be a high-school student but also complain that not all of them are as close as the male students think they are (Isogai Noriyuki is convinced that their class pivots around Maibara Hinatsu) and that they do not even know how to define themselves. This point becomes clear when they speak of having met a male student walking alone during the school trip in Hokkaido and start thinking about what could have happened to them if they were not in the same class (Would they feel alone? Would they be able to make friends?); they conclude that they were lucky to belong to the same section, but that this did not mean some of them did not protest when they chose the “us” to tell their (and their beloved pseudo-family’s) story. Even if they paint a rosy picture of themselves, and although they are for certain high-school female students – that is, what the Japanese society takes as a fixed category – they define themselves as “a group

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  19 of not yet well-defined creatures, trapped in a microscopic world and suspended in a viscous culture fluid” (62). In this respect, Mashio’s sakubun and its polemic tone mirror the thoughts of the entire section: Maybe it’s just my impression, but the gaze of the old men who passionately comment on the sexual misconduct of the high school students gives off an inexplicable sense of enjoyment, as if in place of a genuine concern for the girls they feel a mixture of amusement and irritation from having to deal with these little animals that elude their sympathies. (8–9) The female students’ refusal to accept the compulsory roles assigned to them by the society is better illustrated when they feel uncomfortable with their institute’s decision to suspend Hinatsu from school after Mrs. Istuko finds Hinatsu and Utsuho kissing. Dangerous Girls and Lesbian Panic As already mentioned, the three girls’ friendship, which takes the form of a pseudofamily, changes through the narrative, and the readers witness a greater intimacy between Hinatsu and Utsuho, namely, the “father” and the “prince.” The change occurs after the class trip, following an unprecedented episode that shocks the eyewitnesses: Hinatsu and Mashio spank Utsuho to punish her for her distraction since she crossed the street without paying attention and risked being hit by a car. The “corporal punishment” awakens in Utsuho a desire for physical relationships and sensations, as if her body, and especially her skin, responded to a specific stimulus. Through these kinds of relationships, Matsuura “creates a particular space of sensualness, which centers around the multiple memories of contact with others, and which demonstrates the highly sensual but sexually unbound, nonpassive self, not by resisting but by having a dialogue with others” rather than on genital unionism.41 Even though both Hinatsu and Mashio spank Utsuho, the incident causes her to become closer to Hinatsu, her “father” within the pseudo-family. Since Matsuura’s intent is to reverse the traditional mother–daughter adherence and dependence, and considering her will to make renewable every familial relationship, it can be argued that Utsuho projects her attachment to and desire for attention from Mrs. Istuko to Hinatsu, whose corporal punishment reminded her of Mrs. Itsuko’s, shifting her object of sympathy from the mother to the pseudo-father. As a matter of fact, the reader is informed that Mrs. Itsuko is used to punishing Utsuho by hitting her. The desire for bodily contact awakens in Utsuho’s body, prompting “the most beloved girl” to ask Hinatsu to kiss her when, after the school festival, they go back to Utsuho’s together. Hinatsu, who repeatedly declares she does not like kissing, eventually decides to comply with Usuho’s request despite her initial reluctance. However, the two are surprised by Mrs. Itsuko as she returns home. At the sight of the kiss between her real daughter and her pseudo-father, Mrs. Itsuko’s

20  Anna Specchio preexisting jealousy toward Hinatsu explodes. The narrating “us” interprets Mrs. Itsuko’s feelings toward Hinatsu as a conflict between the biological mother and the adoptive one. Although Mrs. Itsuko’s rivalry could be analyzed from a psychoanalytical point of view, or within the critical frame of the “mother–daughter relationship,” what matters here is that it leads Mrs. Itsuko to a reaction that cannot be described in any other way than “panic.” 42 It is on this very aspect that I intend to put more emphasis since it is connected to the long-debated theme of lesbian representations in Matsuura’s works. In fact, the day after surprising her daughter and Hinatsu kissing, Mrs. Itsuko starts to supervise Utsuho like a soldier, and with the same aggressive charge, she walks to the professor’s office to ask for Hinatsu’s expulsion, declaring she does not intend to leave her daughter in the same institute where a “pervert” (henshitsu mono) studies (195). Mrs. Itsuko’s exaggerated reaction, which leads to Hinatsu’s suspension from school and her subsequent voluntary expulsion, leads back to the discourse of “lesbian panic” formulated by Patricia Juliana Smith, who speaks about it in relation to English fiction and, in particular, to some novels that become worldrenowned masterpieces. However, her theory can be applied also to works created in other countries by non-English-speaking authors and is well suited to the specific case of Matsuura – especially if we consider the label of “lesbian writer” attributed by feminist critics to her work. In terms of narrative, lesbian panic can be defined as: The disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character – or, conceivably, an author – is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire. Typically, a female character, fearing discovery of her covert or unarticulated lesbian desires – whether by the object of her desires, by other characters, or even by herself – and motivated by any of the factors previously described, lashes out directly or indirectly at another woman, resulting in emotional or physical harm to herself or others…. In any instance, the character is led by work to the disadvantage or harm of herself or others.43 Regardless of the reasons that lead to the manifestation of Mrs. Istuko’s panic (her possible repressed lesbianism, which could justify her status as a single mother, or the fear that the daughter, who grew up without a male figure of reference, could identify her ideal partner only with people of the same sex), what is certain is that Utsuho’s mother’s impulsive act results in a disadvantageous situation for herself since it compromises her relationship with her beloved daughter. In fact, after Hinatsu decides to retire from the Tamamo Institute and to take the final exam studying on her own (they are at the beginning of their third year in this moment of the narration), Utsuho distances herself from her real mother and is reluctant to forgive her. Hinatsu’s case is different. Mrs. Itsuko’s accusation leads to her suspension from school but, at the same time, generates an interesting debate on lesbianism and sexuality, between characters who believe that Hinatsu and Utsuho’s kiss is

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  21 irrelevant, including their classmates, and others who emphasize its gravity, such as Hinatsu’s elder sister, who leads Hinatsu to reflect on what happened: “My sister, just like Mrs. Itsuko and most of the teachers, has decided that I am lesbian. A far different perception than mine,” Hinatsu vented. “Maybe I’ll realize I am lesbian one day, but I have to accumulate several experiences before declaring it for sure. Come on, I can’t say I’m lesbian for something that could happen to anyone! But, no, for them the world divides between lesbians and non-lesbians, two clear categories, end of the story.” “Too easy!” nodded Mashio. “Were you able to explain it?” “No.” Hinatsu shook her head. “I gave up on it. To get angry and deny that what I’ve done identifies me as lesbian would be rude to people who identify as such. I’ve chosen to let people think what they like, I’m still me, no matter what label they stick on me”. (198–9) Hinatsu neither confirms nor denies her sexuality. She states that she cannot answer categorically based on a single episode, underlining the necessity of repeated performances to establish a sexual orientation. Connected to the discourse of lesbian panic, Hinatsu’s words seem to endorse a second type of narrative representation of the same. Smith argues that the locus of lesbian panic is not always to be found in the psyche of a protagonist and that a curious form of authorial lesbian panic exists, one that occurs when the woman writer creates a “dangerous” (and, thus, “interesting”) female character to destroy her “so that the narrative ideologies of institutional heterosexuality may be fulfilled.”44 Could it that be that Matsuura has internalized the stigma against female homosexuality to the point she is unaware of what she does not accept? The voluntary expulsion from the school toward which Hinatsu is driven might, in fact, appear to be a device created to destroy Hinatsu to please the politics of mainstream heterosexual fiction and allude to Matsuura’s alleged lesbianism – which Japanese and international critics have already questioned.45 However, if this strategy panders to the criticism of the majority, it is equally true that it is embedded in Matsuura’s broader project of castrating preconceptions via provocative and ambiguous representations that destabilize mainstream currents. As a matter of fact, Hinatsu’s answer exceeds the conventional understanding of lesbian identity. In an interview mentioned by Atogami and released in 2001 for Anise, a magazine whose target audience is lesbian and bisexual people with which the author has collaborated several times, Matsuura gives a rather interesting answer about her alleged lesbianism:46 If I were asked in public “Are you lesbian?” and I answered “Yes!” the majority would comment on it with a “Oh, dear!” and end up incorporating me into the majority society as a minority…. If one has the will to remove the oppressive situation against homosexuality, then even heterosexuals do not have to categorically deny when asked if they are lesbians or gays.47

22  Anna Specchio Conclusion It is noticeable that Matsuura’s choice of not reassuring the majority by providing clear-cut answers corresponds to her economy of redrawing existing cartographies, and the provocative and “dangerous” character of Hinatsu seems to be created precisely with the intention of disturbing mainstream feminist and academic thought. Matsuura’s castration is as gentle as it is radical. It represents a form of resistance against any label that places her production in a minority within the minority – not even a queer one, Gōhara Kai argues, as Matsuura’s literature must remain without categories.48 Hinatsu winks at the expectations of traditional heterosexual fiction, and at the same time, she sets herself as the designated heroine to subvert them. The reader understands it from the very first pages of the novel when the narrating “us” argues about the possibility of Hinatsu and Mashio having a carnal relationship, and Kiwako eventually voices the doubt (“Do Hinatsu and Mashio have a sexual relationship?” [Hinatsu to Mashio tte nikutai kankei aru no?]). Hinatsu replies that their question does not deserve an answer, as it is irrelevant (mottainai kara oshienai, 17). Hasumi notes that this scene moves Hinatsu into the invisible focus of the narrative, and in fact, Hinatsu’s figure becomes central to perpetrating Matsuura’s cause.49 The means by which the protagonist castrates all preconceptions is her dance step, whose name none of the narrating “us” remembers until Hinatsu disappears from the scene after taking off for London. The first time Hinatsu shows her step happens when a male student from another section intrudes in the classroom where Hinatsu and her classmates are and gives her a piece of paper. On the paper, there is a printed erotic image of a prosperous woman, which causes Hinatsu to tremble as if she were dancing. The narrating “us” starts thinking about the name of the dance step, but, again, Hinatsu will not tell them what it is. When the narrating “us” finally remembers it, the reader finds out it is the “Step to trample the unexplored.” The voluntary expulsion from schools, that is, Hinatsu’s decision to distance herself from the institution that singles her out as lesbian, thus becomes the pretext for Hinatsu to practice her “Step to trample the unexplored.” Metaphorically, the steps she takes, the decision to travel to London, represent a journey to a destination far from the preconceptions that pervade Japanese society. Ultimately, with Saiai no kodomo, Matsuura offers her readers a reflection on the meaning of words and their connection to reality. She suggests the need for more people who, like her and Hinatsu, do not allow themselves to be constrained by labels, preconceptions, and conformity in general; for people that have the courage to trample (disdain) already beaten paths, and trample (explore) new ones; and for people who ask themselves what they need to do to change things, without providing categorial answers, leaving all chances open. As the work ends, the narrating “us” tries to imagine what Mashio is thinking as she looks through the window after Hinatsu takes off for London: How much intelligence does it take to live without causing a stir? How much beauty does it take to be appreciated by people? How much education does

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  23 it take to develop healthy sexual instincts? How much goodness of temper does it take for the me of today to learn to love people I doesn’t love at all? (212–13) Here, Matsuura applies the same strategy used in the opening: just as the reader is not able to understand whether her draft sakubun actually contains the text that the classmates are reading, so too is the reader unable to understand whether Mashio is actually thinking the monologue at the end as it is imagined by the narrating “us.” Certainly, Mashio’s monologue is the best example Matsuura could give us of a girl renegotiating her identity and questioning how much effort she needs to draw new possibilities. Notes 1 Shimizu Yoshinori, “Eien ni mirai no sakka,” in Gendai josei sakka tokuhon Vol. 5 – Matsuura Rieko, ed. Shimizu Yoshinori (Tokyo: Kanae shobō, 2006), 8. In the Japanese context, writers are expected, but not obliged, to publish at least two new novels per year, one serialized in literary journals (such as Shinchō, Bungakukai or Yasei jidai, just to mention a few), and one in hardcover (tankobon). In most cases, the publishing houses differ, and the serialized novel is later published in hardcover. Then, when a novel in hardcover becomes a bestseller, it is latterly printed in paperback (bunkobon). Moreover, writers are asked to take part in discussions with other colleagues (taidan), interviews, and/or writing short essays. Those to whom Shimizu refers when he writes “unproductive writers,” thus, are those authors who do not follow the hard schedule promoted by the Japanese publishing industry, Matsuura being one of them. 2 David Holloway, “‘Fat Phobia’ in Matsuura Rieko’s Himatai kyōfushōi,” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (2018): 44. 3 Shimizu, “Eien ni mirai no sakka,” 9. At the time of this chapter, Saiai no kodomo was Matsuura’s last long work of fiction, but on February 22, 2022, her newest novel Hikari bunshū (An Anthology on Hikari) has been released by Kōdansha. All the English translations from Saiai no kodomo here are mine. 4 Shimizu, “Eien ni mirai no sakka,” 8. 5 Fusako Innami, “The Departing Body: Creation of the Neutral In-between Sensual Bodies,” Asian and African Studies 15, no. 3 (2011): 123. 6 Innami, “Departing Body,” 124. 7 Komiya Chiho, “Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai ron: Sono tayōna sekushuaritei o yomitoku,” Nihon bungaku 112 (March 2016): 91–104; Egusa Michiko, “Oyayubi P no shūgyōjidai – Watashi jishin no yōkyū o ikitai,” Gendai josei sakka tokuhon Vol. 5 – Matsuura Rieko, ed. Shimizu Yoshinori (Tokyo: Kanae shobō, 2006), 76–81; Kazumi Nagaike, “Japanese Women Writers Watch a Boy Being Beaten by His Father: Male Homosexual Fantasies, Female Sexuality and Desire” (PhD diss., The University of British Columbia, 2004); Ichimura Takako, “Judisu Batorā to Matsuura Rieko. Shisen no kōsa,” Artes Liberales – Iwate daigaku jinbun shakai kagakubu kiyō 66 (2000): 23–37; Katrin Amann, Yugamu karada. Gendai josei sakka no henshin tan (Tokyo: Senshū Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2000). 8 Matsuura Rieko, “Matsuura Rieko intabyū. Penisu sanbu saku no tusgi no sakuhin dewa farusu no tegowasa o omoishiru koto ni naru kamoshirenai,” interview by Talking Heads, Tōgingu hezzu – Matsuura Rieko to P sensuna ai no bigaku. Yuragu seisa no monogatari 8 (November 1995): 12–38. 9 The Women’s Literature Prize was awarded to women writers from 1962 to 2000, promoted by the publishing house Chūō kōronsha.

24  Anna Specchio

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  25 22 Sharon Chalmers claims that, within the Japanese context, “the general portrayal of a Japanese woman’s life-course is presented as: a young woman who will graduate from high school, attend a junior college or university, enter the paid workforce until marriage or childbirth, rear her children, and over the last twenty years increasingly re-enter the paid workforce as a part-time employee with the potential obligation of taking care of one’s parents-in-law or sometimes also one’s own parents as they become elderly. In all of these phases there is a central assumption and general acceptance that women’s activities, whether in relation to education, the paid and unpaid workforce, marital status, reproduction, childcare or parental duty, are both self-evident and natural extensions of their potential roles as wife and mother.” Sharon Chalmers, Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan (London and New York, NY: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 80–92. 23 The characters of the surname Maibara are the same of the verb mau, “to dance,” “to swirl,” or “to fly,” and of the substantive hara, “field”; Hinatsu is written with the characters of “sun” and “summer.” Thus, Maibara Hinatsu’s name might be interpreted as revealing of her destiny: a girl able to perform a dance and fly away in the fields, whose existence will shine like the summer sun. The meaning and pronunciation of the name Imazato Mashio can be interpreted as hinting to the creation of a better country, thanks to the opposition of the terms ima, “now,” and mashi, “better.” Moreover, the term shio, commonly used with the meaning of “tide,” also carries the meaning of “opportunity” or “chance.” Thus, Imazato Mashio’s name blinks at the possibility that she, with her “tidelike” behavior, represents a key individual to help other characters overcoming their problems. Lastly, the characters forming Kusui Utsuho’s surname are kusuri, “drug” or “medicine,” and i, “well” or “pool,” alluding to a sort of “healing source.” While her name can be read as “unriped grain spike” (ho means spikes, while utsu can have the meaning of sky, or empty), to symbolize her being still “a (beloved) child.” 24 Nagaike, “Japanese Women Writers Watch a Boy being Beaten,” 144. 25 Iida Yūko, Kanojotachi no bungaku. Katarinikusa to yomareru koto (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2016); Iida Yūko, “Kotoba kankei o tsuzukeru. Matsuura Rieko Ura vājon, Kokoro to Hōrōki to,” Gendai shizō. Tokushū: Judisu Batorā 24, no. 14 (2000): 200–11. 26 Rieko Matsuura, Saiai no kodomo (Tokyo: Bungei bunshun, 2017), 193–4. My translation. Hereafter, page numbers will follow quotations in parentheses within the text. 27 Matsuura Rieko and Tsumura Kikuko, “Mainā na kyōdōtai no romansu,” Bungakukai. Tokushū 2 – Matsuura Rieko. Sakka wa ayauki ni asobu no. 2 (February 2017): 149. 28 Ochiai, “Modern Family and Japanese Culture,” 7–15. 29 Ochiai, “Modern Family and Japanese Culture.” 30 Innami, Touching the Unreachable, 170. 31 Innami, Touching the Unreachable. 32 Matsuura and Tsumura, “Mainā na kyōdōtai no romansu,” 156. 33 At the end of the first chapter, Matsuura lists all the characters’ names and roles as if the readers are going to read the script of a theater piece, emphasizing the fictional element of the novel. The list has been written on the whiteboard of the classroom by one of the narrating “us,” and while each female high school student is presented as “eyewitness,” some of them also having a second role, male students from the same institute are just listed as “passersby or intruders.” This is of relevance, as it underlines that the small community is all female, where, again, what matters is not the gender performance but the (renewable) role within the family/community. At the same time, by presenting this kind of community, Matsuura emphasizes the fluidity of these young girls who are struggling to negotiate their identities versus a male-dominated external world. 34 Hasumi Shigehiko, “Toritome no nai namamekashisa ni tsuite. Matsuura Rieko Saiai no kodomo,” Bungakukai. Tokushū 2 – Matsuura Rieko. Sakka wa ayauki ni asobu no. 2 (February 2017): 165. 35 Hasumi, “Toritome no nai namamekashisa ni tsuite.”

26  Anna Specchio 36 Matt Alt, Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World (London: Constable, 2020), 163–93. 37 The term enjo kōsai has often translated been “compensated dating.” Now, the keyword for these relationships is “JK Business,” JK being the acronym of joshi kōkōsei. With this term, several kinds of relationships are described, each of them bringing a benefit to high school female students. Mutsumi Ogaki, “Theoretical Explanations of Joshi Kousei Business (‘JK Business’) in Japan,” Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence 3, no. 1 (2018), Article 11: 2–3. https://doi.org/10.23860/ dignity.2018.03.01.11. 38 Hasumi, “Toritome no nai namamekashisa ni tsuite,” 168. When Efumi and other classmates reunite at Miori’s home, she says that a man on the train showed her his penis through the opened fastener of his trousers. However, Efumi explains that she did not panic: “On the contrary, I told myself that if I had feigned embarrassment, that old exhibitionist would have been happy, so I just stared at him blankly, as expected. Oh, I just did it to tell you what happened!” Matsuura, Saiai no kodomo, 78. 39 Not all the adults in the novel are represented as antagonists, even though some of them belong to the baby-boom generation. Miori’s parents, as well as Professor Karatsu, who were born in the same year as Matsuura, are depicted as open-minded characters. In this regard, Tsumura Kikuko notes that, in their specific case, the generation gap with the high school girls is described only through musical tastes. Matsuura and Tsumura, “Mainā na kyōdōtai no romansu,” 157. 40 The person speaking here is Matsuura. The quote is from the taidan, or published conversation, in Matsuura and Tsumura, “Mainā na kyōdōtai no romansu,” 161. 41 Innami, “Departing Body,” 122. 42 As Tomoko Aoyama points out, the mother–daughter relationship has long been neglected within Japanese literature, emerging only in later years. She individuates 2008 as the marking point at which the topic became prominent in Japan and lists a series of critical works dealing with it. Tomoko Aoyama, “Narratives of the MotherDaughter Reconciliation: New Possibilities in Ageing Japan,” in Mother at the Margins: Stories of Challenge, Resistance and Love, eds. Jenny Jones, Marie Porter and Lisa Raith (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 246. Aoyama states that much of the discussion on the mother–daughter relationships deals with conflicts and problems, and the relationship between Mrs. Itsuko and Utsuho is not an exception. In Saiai no kodomo, set just in the years when this topic arose, Mrs. Itsuko and Utsuho’s conflicts are shown according to Matsuura Rieko’s tastes: as a lover of the puroresu (the predominant style of Japanese professional wrestling), Matsuura compares mother and daughter’s conflicts to a fight in the chapter called “Mother-Daughter Pro Wrestling.” Matsuura further develops the fight through a comparison with the most known sport of sumo, making the narrating “us” declare that “there was a clear asymmetry of power between the two, roughly the same as between a makunouchi [top-rated] sumo wrestler and a fundoshi [loincloth], and it was obvious that the one to roll out of the circle would be Utsuho.” Matsuura, Saiai no kodomo, 135. Yet, Mrs. Itsuko and Utsuho’s relationship might be seen as an example of what Marianne Hirsh defines as “Feminist Family Romance,” as opposed to the Freudian “Family Romance” based on the father-son relationship. Marianne Hirsh, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1989), 15. 43 Patricia Juliana Smith, “And I Wondered if She Might Kiss Me: Lesbian Panic as a ­Narrative Strategy in British Women’s Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1995): 569. 44 Smith, “And I Wondered if She Might Kiss Me,” 575. 45 Atogami, “Matsuura san wa rezubian nan desu ka?” 138–43. 46 Anise was a magazine that ran from 2006 to 2013 (with a break between 1997 and 2001). Its contents varied from essays and interviews to manga and short stories. Even

The Step to Trample the Unexplored  27 though being aware of the importance of consulting original sources, it has been impossible to access the pages of the magazine as it is out print and not available even in used ­copies. The issue on which the interview was published is the following: Anise – Rezubian & baisekushuaru no tame no zasshi [Anise – A Magazine for Lesbians and Bisexuals], (Summer) Tera shuppan, 2001. 47 Matsuura Rieko’s words in Atogami, “Matsuura san wa rezubian nan desu ka?” 143. 48 Gōhara, “Hiseikiteki senshuariti o yobimodosu tame ni,” 102–104. 49 Hasumi, “Toritome no nai namamekashisa ni tsuite,” 167.

Works Cited Alt, Matt. Pure Invention. How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. London: ­Constable, 2020. Amann, Katrin. Yugamu karada: Gendai josei sakka no henshin tan. Tokyo: Senshū Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2000. Aoyama, Tomoko. “Narratives of the Mother-Daughter Reconciliation: New Possibilities in Ageing Japan.” In Mother at the Margins: Stories of Challenge, Resistance and Love. Edited by Lisa Raith, Jenny Jones, and Marie Porter, 245–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Atogami Shirō. “Matsuura san wa rezubian nan desu ka?” In Gendai josei sakka tokuhon Vol. 5 – Matsuura Rieko. Edited by Shimizu Yoshinori, 138–43. Tokyo: Kanae shobō, 2006. Chalmers, Sharon. Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan. London and New York, NY: ­Routledge-Curzon, 2002. Egusa Michiko. “Oyayubi P no shūgyōjidai – Watashi jishin no yōkyū o ikitai.” In Gendai josei sakka tokuhon – Matsuura Rieko. Edited by Shimizu Yoshinori, 76–81. Tokyo: ­Kanae shobō, 2006.
Enami Amiko. “21 seiki no josei sakka tachi.” Special Issue Waseda Bungaku – Josei gō 1026 (2017): 404–14. Gōhara Kai. “Hiseikiteki senshuariti wo yobimodosu tame ni.” Gendai shisō. Special Issue Feminizumu no genzai 48, no. 4 (2020): 102–13. Hasumi Shigehiko. “Toritome no nai namamekashisa ni tsuite. Matsuura Rieko Saiai no kodomo.” Bungakukai. Special Issue 2 – Matsuura Rieko: Sakka wa ayauki ni asobu, no. 2 (February 2017): 164–73. Holloway, David. “‘Fat Phobia’ in Matsuura Rieko’s Himatai kyōfushōi.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (2018): 43–58. Ichimura Takako. “Judisu Batorā to Matsuura Rieko: Shisen no kōsa.” Artes Liberales – Iwate daigaku jinbun shakai kagakubu kiyō 66 (2000): 23–37. Iida Yūko. Kanojotachi no bungaku. Katarinikusa to yomareru koto. Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku Shuppankai, 2016. Iida Yūko. “Kotoba kankei o tsuzukeru. Matsuura Rieko Ura vājon, Kokoro to Hōrōki to.” Gendai shisō. Special issue: Judisu Batorā 24, no. 14 (2000): 200–11. Innami, Fusako. “The Departing Body: Creation of the Neutral In-between Sensual Bodies.” Asian and African Studies 15, no. 3 (2011): 111–30. Innami, Fusako. Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Komiya Chiho. “Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai ron: Sono tayōna sekushuaritei o yomitoku.” Nihon bungaku 112, no. 3 (March 2016): 91–104. Matsuura Rieko. “Bungaku to sekushuaritī.” Waseda bungaku 214 (March 1994): 38–57. Matsuura Rieko. “For a Gentle Castration.” Translated by Amanda Seaman. In Woman Critiqued. Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Edited by Rebecca L. Copeland, 194–205. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.

28  Anna Specchio Matsuura Rieko. “Matsuura Rieko intabyū. Penisu sanbu saku no tusgi no sakuhin dewa farusu no tegowasa o omoishiru koto ni naru kamoshirenai.” Interview by Talking Heads. Tōgingu hezzu – Matsuura Rieko to P sensuna ai no bigaku. Yuragu seisa no monogatari 8 (November 1995): 12–38. Matsuura Rieko. Saiai no kodomo. Tokyo: Bungei bunshun, 2017. Matsuura Rieko. Ura vājon. Tokyo: Bungei bunshun, 2007. Matsuura Rieko and Tsumura Kikuko. “Mainā na kyōdōtai no romansu.” Bungakukai. Special Issue 2 – Matsuura Rieko: Sakka wa ayauki ni asobu, no. 2 (February 2017): 146–62. Matsuura Rieko and Watanabe Naomi. “Intabyū – Oyayubi P no shinjitsu.” Bungei (Spring 1994): 132–45. Murata Sayaka. “Kaisetsu – ‘Watashitachi’ ga susumu sekai.” In Saiai no kodomo. Edited by Matsuura Rieko, 232–9. Tokyo: Bunshun bunko, 2020. Nagaike, Kazumi. “Japanese Women Writers Watch a Boy Being Eaten by His Father: Male Homosexual Fantasies, Female Sexuality and Desire.” PhD diss. University of British Columbia, 2004. Ochiai, Emiko. “The Modern Family and Japanese Culture: Exploring the Japanese MotherChild Relationship.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society – Women and the Family 3, no. 1 (1989): 7–15. Ogaki, Mutsumi. “Theoretical Explanations of Joshi Kousei Business (‘JK Business’) in Japan.” Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence 3, no. 1 (2018): ­Article 11. Quimby, Joanne. “Performative Citation and Allusion in Matsuura Rieko’s Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai: Interrogating Matsuura’s Inheritances.” Evidence, Transmission, and Inheritance in Japanese Literature and Media – Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 20 (January 2019): 87–95. Shimizu Yoshinori. “Eien ni mirai no sakka.” Gendai josei sakka tokuhon Special issue: Matsuura Rieko 5 (2006): 8–13. Smith, Patricia Juliana. “And I Wondered if She Might Kiss Me: Lesbian Panic as a Narrative Strategy in British Women’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1995): 567–607.

2

Body and/as Food Rediscovering Female Subjectivity through the Mother–Daughter Dyad in Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru (2006) Mina Qiao

Award-winning writer Kawakami Hiromi (b. 1958) is celebrated for creating fantastical spaces and revitalizing traditional Japanese folklore.1 Critics have largely focused on her magical realist approach to literature, namely, how she “juxtapose[s] meaningfully the realities of modern life in Japan.”2 Beata Kubiak Ho-Chi, for example, suggests that her transgression of “cultural, linguistic and geographical barriers … constitutes one of the principal features of post-modern Japanese literature.”3 Her use of Japanese folklore and myths has earned her comparison with Tawada Yōko, while her employment of elements of absence and void is said to resemble Ogawa Yōko (b. 1962), and her healing ambience reminds readers of Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964).4 All of these features can be seen in her 2006 novel Manazuru (Eng. tr. 2010). It is no doubt that Kawakami joins the most renowned contemporary Japanese authors with her acute perceptions of modern maladies and confounding interpersonal relationships. Of course, we can read Kawakami beyond comparisons to her peers. This chapter analyzes the mother–daughter relationship that informs Manazuru. More specifically, I proffer a reading of Manazuru via Luce Irigaray as a psychoanalytic account of female self-discovery in a physical dimension. I also examine the role of food as a metaphor in reconstructing a nonphallocentric relationship (skinship) between women. Much of the fiction written about mothers and daughters in the 1960s made use of the quintessential shōjo trope as the means by which young girls struggle to distance themselves from systems of (re)production, hence the maternal.5 As John Treat writes: “The shōjo are, if you will, ‘off the production line,’ lacking any real referent in the ‘economy’ of postmodern Japan.”6 The early works of Yoshimoto and Ogawa in the 1980s and 1990s have been said to reflect the shōjo’s resistance to her own sociosexual development and a maternal social role.7 The female protagonists are often daughters that resist domesticity or seek alternative forms of hegemonic domesticity. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase makes a similar observation of the abjection of mother in shōjo horror manga, stating, “for adolescent girls, mothers are constant reminders of their future social roles as wives and mothers. Although they desire maternal love, they attempt to break the spell of motherhood, seeking alternative futures.”8 Adalgisa Giorgio’s statement in Writing Mothers and DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-3

30  Mina Qiao Daughters that “the mother-daughter dyad is still the dominant structuring principle of female identity in Western cultures” extends to hold value for the Japanese case.9 The spectrum of literary representations of mother–daughter plots in contemporary Japanese fiction runs from teenage girls’ ambivalent attitudes toward their mothers (e.g., Chichi to ran [Breasts and Eggs, 2008; Eng. tr. 2020] by Kawakami Mieko and Gyokō no Nikuko-chan [Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, 2011] by Nishi Kanako) to the toxic and exploitative relationships between adult daughters and their mothers (e.g., Hōtōki [A Record of Debauchery, 2011] by Murayama Yuka, Meido meguri [Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012] by Kashimada Maki, and Yuikawa Kei’s Nakanai tori wa sora ni oboreru [Birds that Don’t Sing are Drowned in the Sky, 2015]). All the above works attend to intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes: that is, how the daughters ruminate on the gender roles modeled by their mothers in formulating a female identity and, more often than not, how they strive to take a different path than their mothers in formulating their own identities. In all of these works, the subject of reflection and/or resistance is the daughter. In contrast, Kawakami’s Manazuru describes the ambivalence of the mother–daughter dyad from a mother’s perspective. A Poetics of Prose Even for a Kawakami work, Manazuru is highly idiosyncratic in both style and storyline. The work is narrated from the first-person perspective of the 45-yearold protagonist Kei: a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a professional writer. The novel reveals fragments of her domestic life with her teenage daughter Momo and her mother in Tokyo, her occasional dates with a married man Seiji, and her pursuit of mysteries surrounding the disappearance of her husband Rei to Manazuru (a town in Kanagawa Prefecture 90 minutes from Tokyo by train). Kei reveals through her memory that Rei was having an affair before he went missing 12 years prior. Though some sections of the text depict Kei as depressed and even suffering a nervous breakdown, with time, she has come to accept Rei’s absence (even possible death). The novel ends with Kei watching Momo play with her cousins from Rei’s side of the family in a sunlit park. In spite of its integration of mystery and ghost elements, the story of Manazuru is not especially dramatic, and the narration is emotional but calm. Readers never learn whether Rei is alive or dead nor is Kei’s role in his disappearance or the identity of a mystery woman made clear. As in poetry, much is left to the reader’s own interpretation.10 The language of Manazuru is closer to prose poetry than a conventional novel because of its rhythm and symmetry across consistently truncated sentences and bewildering imagery. In particular, its lyricism and psychological exploration of motherhood echo the poetic works of Itō Hiromi. Jeffery Angles suggests that Itō’s works are a reexamination of female experiences of motherhood.11 “By rejecting clichés about motherhood, women’s sexuality, and the relationships between women and their families,” Angles writes, “Itō looks anew at the complicated psychological

Body and/as Food  31 processes at work in the relationships between women and the people around them.”12 The poetic features of Manazuru are evident from its opening lines: I was walking, with something following. Because it was in the distance still, whether it was a female, or it was a male, I couldn’t tell. Whichever. Without a care I kept on walking.13 Another example of such repetition, symmetry, and abstraction is Kei’s description of her relationship with her daughter. “Since when has Momo stopped being close? Distant, but rather close, although close, [she] has become rather distant.”14 This passage also highlights another characteristic of the text: the prose often blends pairs of contrasting adjectives such as close (chikai)/distant (tōi) repeatedly in order to represent the ambivalence in Kei’s interpersonal relationships and her disturbed psyche. The reader may feel as disoriented and alienated by Kawakami’s unique composition style as by the enigmatic plotline. If the author intended to recreate Kei’s sense of staggering through fog and facing rejection, it was a successful attempt. In a review of Kawakami’s body of work, Kudō Yūko suggests that it is the author’s trademark to employ the three forms of the Japanese writing system for distinct purposes: hiragana (Japanese phonetic syllabary) for softening expressions, kanji (Chinese characters) for concrete forms and traditional elements, and katakana (a second phonetic syllabary) for foreign phrases and characters’ names.15 Kudō argues that compared to kanji and katakana, hiragana leaves a visual impression of being “spatial” and “gentle” because of the shape of its characters.16 When phrases or words commonly written in kanji appear in hiragana, which we see in Manazuru, the text gains both a lightness and a surprising, alienating effect, extracting the language itself from everyday context.17 For instance, when Kei is breastfeeding her newborn, she thinks of Momo not as adorable (itōshii), but repulsive (utomashii, 16). Here, the two phrases are written in hiragana instead of kanji. The expression, thus, becomes softened and more ambiguous, fitting the new mother’s conflicted attitude toward her baby. In this almost experimental work, Kawakami unifies the visible text and the intangible sensations and sentiments it tries to deliver. Jill Mowbray-Tsutsumi points out that Kawakami strikes a kana/kanji balance in Manazuru in order to “create a text with a tangible surface for production of meaning,” a textual strategy also employed by Kawakami Mieko and Kanehara Hitomi.18 Mowbray-Tsutsumi links the “‘body’ of the text” to the theme of “female body experience,” arguing that “the words themselves, both semantically and visually act as the gateway to the physicality (or if you prefer, the bodyfulness) of the text as a whole.”19 According to her analysis, the narrator’s bodily experience centers on three keywords—rinkaku (outline), minagiru (overflow), and nijimu (blur)—all dealing with her discovery of desire and individuality through physical intimacy.20 Written in hiragana without a kanji core, these words transfer the narrator’s scattered, out-of-focus mind and body because of her husband’s disappearance and her daughter’s alienation from her.21 Refuting Saitō Tamaki’s criticism

32  Mina Qiao of Kawakami’s exclusion of “the real flesh and blood body,” Mowbray-Tsutsumi argues that: the experience of the woman’s body is far more diverse [than the realistic bodily representation] and for Kei, it is in the experience of marriage, of family, of pregnancy, birth and separation (though not limited to these), that her sense of body is structured.22 In order to better theorize Kawakami’s idiosyncratic use of language and the Japanese writing system itself, I would like to introduce here the notion of “dereliction,” a term Irigaray uses to describe the state of daughters (hence all women) in phallocentric culture suffering from a violent severance from their maternal origins.23 Women are cut off from the cultural system of language and representation and are therefore denied self-representation and subjectivity. Rectifying the mother–daughter relationship and the fragmented maternal genealogy, thus, holds the key to overturning the patriarchal order.24 In Manazuru, the female protagonist’s abandonment by her husband, which caused her to lose both her identity and her writing abilities, speaks to this symbolic dereliction. The disappearance of the husband, whose presence previously dictated the phallogocentric center of her being, is a metaphor for women’s cultural plight. The daughter’s teenage rebellion also mirrors the Oedipal imperative during female development that drives women to abandon their mothers in exchange for approval from men.25 Manazuru is essentially a woman’s journey to establish her subjectivity through body and language. Because the narrator is a professional writer, her narration (i.e., the text) is an Irigarayan writing exercise that restructures her language to achieve a feminine representation. In the “dark continent” (Irigaray’s term) of female sexuality under linguistic and cultural hegemony, she has to cultivate her female subjectivity through rediscovering her sexuality and the mother–daughter bond. Food, Skinship, and Narration Tomoko Aoyama, in Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, amply examines the politics of food and the role it often plays in modern texts: “Food nourishes and poisons; it soothes and tortures, divides as well as unites individuals and groups of people.”26 She quotes Terry Eagleton in stating the multivalent meanings food bears in literature that “[food] looks like an object but is actually a relationship.”27 Although not a gastronomic fiction, Manazuru is threaded with scenes of food: its consumption, preparation, and refusal. Food, thus, functions as a signifier of relationship dynamics and emotional distance in the mother–daughter dyads of Manazuru. Food plays a central role in both Kei’s everyday life and her travels in the fantasy realm. The story depicts various food scenes, including Kei eating alone, the family dining together (both at home and outside), and memories of Kei breastfeeding Momo. The first time her mother and Momo appear in the narrative is when Kei calls to inform her mother that she is going to stay at Manazuru for the night, to which her mother asks, “What should I put in Momo’s lunch tomorrow?” (5).

Body and/as Food  33 Whenever food appears, Kawakami spares no detail in listing the dishes: for example, the narrator and her daughter have “[d]ried mackerel, miso soup with daikon, and slices of deep-fried tofu,” “boiled spinach drizzled with soy sauce, boiled tofu” for breakfast at the hotel in the second chapter (38). By design, the recurrence and specifics of food draw the reader’s attention to how the characters’ interaction surrounding food parallels their interpersonal relationships. In her “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other” Irigaray notes a singular physiopsychological exchange between the mother and the daughter.28 To her child, the mother is the feeder as well as the food; when the child is of her own sex, nurturing runs the risk of “poisoning,” for that it reflects a mirror image of both being “trapped in a single function—mothering.”29 The ambiguity of the mother–daughter dyad echoes with the remedy/poison bifurcation of pharmakon (drug) suggested by Jacques Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy.”30 Maternal love is something both beneficial and dangerous, both notorious and poisonous. Food in Manazuru serves as a metaphor that connects the physical with the psychological and delicately maps out both closeness and detachment between the mother and the daughter. Furthermore, food is especially symbolically loaded in gendered representations due to the association of womanhood and motherhood with food preparation. Carole Counihan reminds us of the association between gender, sexuality, and food: In all cultures, women’s primary responsibilities involve food provisioning and the bearing and rearing of children…. Women are food to the fetus and infant, and the breasts can be sources of both sexual pleasure and food. Although women’s feeding activities are undertaken with widely ranging amounts of autonomy, prestige, and control, they are nonetheless universally linked to womanhood.31 Across cultures, representations of food in literature are associated with “our conceptions of female sexuality, desire and development.”32 Studying Western girls’ coming-of-age literature such as The Little Princess (1905) and Anne of Green Gables (1908; both of which, incidentally, are classified as shōjo fiction in the Japanese market), Holly Blackford sees food as “an intergenerational matter between mother and daughter” that lies at the center of the daughterly socialization to a feminine gender role “packaging the self and female body for the pleasure of others.”33 In the literary works by Irish women writers Edna O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, and Mary Leland, daughters refuse to eat to resist their mothers and, hence, patriarchal gender norms that they and their food represent.34 The motif of poisoning through feeding as part of a shōjo rejection of patriarchal gender role, and even a defilement of the symbolic maternal, can be found in Ogawa’s fiction (e.g., “Daivingu pūru” [“The Diving Pool,” 1989; Eng. tr. 2008] and “Ninshin Karenda” [“Pregnancy Calendar,” 1990; Eng. tr. 2008]). In Manazuru, food is also a powerful indicator of the adolescent daughter’s psychosexual development and Kei’s exploration of her own body, sexuality, and motherhood. However, Kawakami reconfigures food as positive imagery rather than a painful socialization strategy by eliminating male characters in the household. The nature

34  Mina Qiao of the household being all female eschews the “gender imbalance in relation to food” where women serve to men’s appetite35 and allows the women characters to explore their relationships to food and to one another. Cooking and eating in Manazuru is a physical enactment of women’s emancipation instead of repression and consumption. Food offers confirmation of the narrator’s corporeality, even becoming a semiotic center to support her reconstruction of an embodied female identity outside the context of a heterosexual partnership. As food is central to the discussion, co-eating serves as a bodily practice that affirms kinship ties and, thus, a form of skinship. The concept of skinship is of great significance in the bodily discourse due to the centrality of Kei’s craving for physical intimacy in the text. Drawing from both Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh and Ichikawa Hiroshi’s notion of mi (Japanese for “body”), cultural anthropologist Diana Adis Tahhan offers an understanding of skinship as blurring boundaries between the subject and the object. Merleau-Ponty perceives that flesh “occurs through an ‘overlapping encroachment’” and enables “a sensuous, embodied connection.”36 “This connection relies on a reversible and reciprocal relation where there is a blurring of the boundaries between people” as it is impossible to determine the subject/object in hands shaking or gazes meeting. In an emic context, Ichikawa proposes that “mi exists through an all-encompassing space which connects people via the heart, mind, body, objects and so on.”37 Mi implicates the object—in other words, “that which is attached to mi or is connected in some way, can be viewed as part of the relationship.”38 Taking breastfeeding as an example of skinship, the nursed child, who is the object, becomes an extension of the maternal body, the subject of nursing.39 The boundaries between the mother and the child become unclear through the intimacy of breastfeeding.40 Tahhan further suggests that skinship, though primarily understood in its haptic aspect, is not limited to direct physical contact. Even in the state of babysitting or co-sleeping, “it is difficult to feel where the mother’s body ends and the child’s begins,” thus “mutual mingling” emerges in a “fleshy space.”41 Lastly, Tahhan argues that skinship is what endows the physical with meaning. “A hand, a breast, a mouth, on its own is purely physical; it is the intrinsic connection that gives the hand, breast and mouth meaning. What is touched, in skinship, is the whole.”42 This power of embodied meaning-making through skinship is employed in Manazuru to reconfigure the female body as a meaningful whole in its own agency, against its underrepresentation in phallocentric culture. Sharing food can be seen as a form of skinship, even though it does not involve physical touch. In many literary works, the act of co-eating is equivalent to physical intimacy because of the exchange of saliva, the shared experiences of sensory stimuli and perception, and the synchronous act of welcoming a foreign object into the physical body, whereby the boundaries between self and other are blurred. In women’s writings in the 1960s and 1970s, sharing food often represents covert or sublimated desire, which vehicles fantasies and imaginations pertaining transgressive intimacy (e.g., pedophilia or incest). For instance, the female protagonist who secretly fetishizes little boys asks to have a bite of a boy’s watermelon in Kōno Taeko’s “Yōji gari” (“Toddler Hunting,” 1961;

Body and/as Food  35 Eng. tr. 1996), and a young girl gorges herself on rabbit meat with her father in a sexually charged scene in “Usagi” (“Rabbits,” 1972; Eng. tr. 1984) by Kanai Mieko. Manazuru does not venture into concerns with incest or quasi-incest; Kei’s desire to touch her daughter is curbed by Momo’s estrangement and frustrated in a similar way. Food, thus, becomes the one last linkage between her body and her daughter’s, echoing their initial connection by the umbilical cord. This resonates with Fusako Innami’s observation of “the unreachable” in modern Japanese literature’s representations of skinship: “the repressed or diverted desire for touch leads to detailed observations of the loved object, as if the narrator’s language and the characters’ gaze do indeed almost succeed in touching the other.”43 By the same token, co-eating becomes a detour to physical encounter and joins the two parties in a primitive oral pleasure in an ultimate state of togetherness. In addition, in this context, the skinship is not in conflict with the meaningful differentiation between mother and daughter Irigaray advocates. As Irigaray suggests, skinship allows a framework for mother and daughter to move together toward their emancipation, as is achieved at the end of Kawakami’s novel. In the following sections, I will trace the narrator’s exploration of selfsubjectivity in the text, focusing on the trope of body and/as food. Reapproaching the Physical in the Absence of Man To reiterate, the story begins with Kei deeply disturbed by her husband’s disappearance, even 12 years after he is gone. Kei’s drive to find her husband sets the story in motion on the mission of unraveling the mystery. Rei, whose absence is central to the narrative, is also central to Kei’s very being. He represents the phallic ideal; without it, Kei as the lacking sex cannot function, as she does not possess the signifier of desire in a Lacanian sense.44 Irigaray suggests that the woman who wants to articulate her desire then has to reject “an essential part of her femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade. … It is for that which she is not—that is, the phallus—that she asks to be desired and simultaneously to be loved.” 45 In other words, the woman is trapped in eternal passivity in the phallocentric economy of desire and love. Since his disappearance, even her anger “assumes no form” (20). Kei says, “I seldom lust for things with a form. Seldom, that is, anymore. Sometimes it leads to joy, sometimes to a gut-wrenching loneliness, and sometimes it goes nowhere, only hovers, disconnected, lost. I call it lust, wherever it leads” (10). Losing Rei is like losing the anchor of her being; in her own words, “after Rei’s disappearance, I had no place. I didn’t know where to channel what I felt. When the path ahead is still unformed, we lose all sense of our location” (22). Kei’s mindset takes form in a shadowy presence. This existence is invisible to all except the narrator, an unidentified woman who seems to lead the narrator to pursue the truth about her husband.46 The narrative hints in places that the shadow is an avatar of the narrator as their image and voice overlap, possibly the shadow is a manifestation of Kei’s depression. The woman’s lack of a concrete form is symbolic of the same self-cognition and subjectivity Kei is missing. Her difficulty in forming an identity is symbolized by a body-blurring that plagues Kei throughout the story.

36  Mina Qiao Kei’s writer’s block, a line of work that requires a high sensitivity regarding expression through language, underlines the female struggle to self-represent. Elizabeth Gross suggests that women are subjected to the violent effacement of their existence in universal construction; as Irigaray writes, “the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence.” 47 Rei, as the husband, embodies the structural violence against the narrator. First, Rei seems to have obstructed Kei’s speech. Kei can never easily call Rei by his first name for reasons unknown or communicate verbally with him in bed. When being intimate with her lover Seiji, Kei recalls how she is wordless with Rei. “With Seiji, I use words. With Rei, I never could” (43). Similarly, she also comments on how Rei draws her in but with Seiji her shape is contained (121, 71). Kei’s pursuit of Rei alongside the woman is also a silent one. Her speech is inaudible when she speaks to the woman as the conversation takes place within herself: “Must I follow you, I asked, testing my voice, but it didn’t emerge as sound. I realized that when I talked with the woman, it wasn’t my real voice; it happened within my body” (98). Her female subjectivity and voice are both muted and negated until Kei’s thoughts of her daughter lead her to abandon her pursuit of Rei. Kei experiences the dilemma articulated by Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman: “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the masculine,” while the feminine is reduced to the specular function (affirmation of his subjectivity) and the maternal function.48 Under such a construction, Kei is a mirror to reflect her husband’s subjectivity. The cultural system’s deprivation and silencing of women are exposed by Irigaray: For where he projects a something to absorb, to take, to see, to possess … as well as a patch of ground to stand upon, a mirror to catch his reflection, he is already faced by another specularization. Whose twisted character is her inability to say what she represents.49 Kei falls into a predicament of self-identification, obsessed with her failure as a wife without a husband and a mother without a child (as Momo is pulling away). Kei holds on fast to Momo, whom she sees as a remnant of Rei. The child in this context is a substitute for the symbolic phallus to make up for the mother’s deficiency. Replacing the missing father figure, the child becomes the object of the mother’s desire. Kei sees Momo, the outcome of copulation between her and the symbolic phallus, as something that completes her existence. In Kei’s internal monologue, she expresses her love for Momo many times, so much so that the mystery woman comments, “You’re too wrapped up in your daughter” (88). Kei is desperate to gain subjectivity by proxy of others through complying to the phallological order because what would a female body be on its own? Under the logic of the predominant culture, then, she naturally loses all meaning in her being at the moment Rei exits their marriage. Her body, her sexuality, and her identity are nullified by the privation of the masculine subject.

Body and/as Food  37 Since Kei experiences all interpersonal relationships through her body— sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and, as Mowbray-Tsutsumi suggests, abortion—Kei’s feminine selfhood is defined by embodied experiences.50 In a scene that contrasts her breastfeeding Momo with accepting her husband with the surface of her body, Kei’s existence is rendered powerfully corporeal but also reveals her risk of being subsumed by such relationships: No, loveable was not the word. For a second the heat of her lips repulsed me. I learned then that disgust and tenderness do not stand in opposition. I had never felt such a disgust for the male body. I had thought the male body, my husband’s body, was unquestionably necessary. The feeling that welled within me when I held Momo’s body was not need, but tenderness. … I felt no desire for the man, my husband. Momo was warmth enough. As long as I suckled her, my body had no desire for my husband. I had no tenderness for him. And yet, in the absence of any tenderness, in my mind I craved him. At night when my husband came to me, I received him willingly with the surface of my body. I had the idea that mind and body were distinct, but the truth is that it is all body. The mind is of the body. (13–14) This depicts a nuanced female psyche in a conflict where the role of motherhood does not seem to agree with female sexuality. Being both a wife and a mother, Kei finds the maternal body, which now serves as food to the infant, and inhibits her sexual desire for the husband. She is repulsed by her daughter’s body but feels tenderness; at the same time, she feels a physical need for the male body that she has no affective desire for. With her being the food for the child and the sex object for the husband, she is doubly objectified in a dual sense, foreshadowing her later loss of self. Put another way, Kei’s identity constructed on the objectification of her physical body loses its footing when the subject is gone. The ontological mirror refuses to work for her female body in its own right. Kei’s frustration at her mirror image in the following scene indicates a scarcity of subjectivity and underrepresentation of her bodily experiences. “I see Momo’s face through my own. … I hate mirrors, I used to think, all the time. The things that are reflected there, that aren’t there. You try to touch your own body, and can’t reach it” (104). Their shared corporeal femininity is repressed. The phallocentric culture precludes Kei from the physical touch of her body image, in the mirror and by extension in her own daughter, a metaphor for acquiring autonomy over her body and representing her experience. Kei’s sentiment suggests that mirroring of the mother in the daughter and vice versa only entails emptiness under the phallocentric institution. When the subject no longer desires or needs her body, the objectified loses her raison d’être and herself in her worst nightmare of being abandoned. Kei echoes this fear of abandonment: that “no one answers. No one is there. Everyone retreats from me, goes away” (165). Perhaps, this is why chasing after Rei’s phantom becomes Kei’s sole purpose and also why searching for Rei is also self-searching. As the woman comments on one of Kei’s trips to Manazuru, “You don’t come to Manazuru for Rei, it’s for yourself” (189).

38  Mina Qiao Manazuru represents a liminal space that offers the possibility of deviation from these gendered norms. It is a place that enshrines a primitive power that undertakes the rediscovery of the female body. As the shadowy woman says, “When you come to Manazuru, give yourself to Manazuru” (171). During her pilgrimage, Kei chants the name of Manazuru in several plots: “Manazuru. I mouthed the name to feel it in me” (10). “Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. I whisper the syllables. I hadn’t noticed. Or had I forgotten? Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. Once again, I say the word” (55–6). The creation of language and meaning here is highly corporeal. Kei’s articulation of Manazuru as if in a vocal practice suggests a linkage between the verbal, the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual. Through speaking, her body is reproducing the language and regaining her voice, in turn, to debunk the phallocentric ruling of her sex as deficient and to redefine her subjectivity. In the text, the ethereal space of Manazuru serves as an Irigarayan space for exploration of a female language for female self-representation. Gross suggests that Irigaray does not aim for the transgression of dichotomous gender conceptions but to go beyond the masculine/ feminine binaries to “a conceptual perspective and discursive space” to articulate women’s unacknowledged and distinctive narratives.51 Such a space could only exist “as marginalized, a ‘private space’ outside the scope of publicly validated interactions” where the power of male representations is removed.52 Manazuru functions as such a liminal space where Kei rediscovers her lived body in an Irigarayan sense. Kei’s body at the center of Manazuru’s narratives, which goes through sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, breast feeding, and abortion, is such a lived body Gross describes. It is a female body: as it is lived, the body which is marked, inscribed, made meaningful both in social and familial and idiosyncratic terms, the body psychically, socially and discursively established: the body as socially and individually significant. This body is considered to be built on biological raw materials out of which are produced meanings, sensations, desires, pleasures, by its interaction with systems of social meaning and practices.53 Through narrating or writing (let us not forget that she is a professional writer), Kei eventually transfers the bodily experiences into a reconstruction of her identity and subjectivity. Writing is a metaphorical form of cooking. The transformation of raw experience to cultural meanings through social practices is also a process of metaphorical cooking. As Blackford writes, “women across cultures are often responsible for transforming ‘the raw’ into ‘the cooked,’ categories of nature and culture that Claude Lévi-Strauss felt indicative of the very structure of civilization.”54 Rei’s disappearance is an incentive for her journey, but more importantly, it is a precondition of autonomous agency over her body. His absence highlighted in the space of Manazuru allows Kei to find a self-representation of femininity independent of masculine domination and of a predefined mother–daughter relationship made toxic by phallocentric structure. By the end of the narrative, we learn that it was Rei who lured Momo to go with him and turned her against Kei, but Momo eventually refuses to go with him

Body and/as Food  39 because she finds him a strange and frightening figure (125). The father figure functions as an obstacle in the mother–daughter relationship. Esperanza RamirezChristensen points out that the father represents the law that governs the patriarchal family structure and the primary impediment in mother–daughter bonding.55 According to her, The Father is the figure of the agency that institutes the founding prohibition against the instinctual gratifications of the mother-child dyad and compels their sublimation into the symbolic realm of language or, more broadly, the order of the sign in all fields of human endeavor.56 Therefore, for any attempt to rectify the mother–daughter relationship and to gain the right to represent their own bodies in their own language, bypassing the patriarch is critical. Tracing a Maternal Genealogy Kei is primarily a mother in the story, but she is also a daughter to her own mother. After Rei vanishes without a word, she and Momo move back to her mother’s home. This setting accentuates three different stages of a woman’s life—youth, maturity, and senior years—interlocked in two pairs of mother–daughter dyads. The allfemale household emphasizes on empowerment from female bonding and maternal genealogy and rules out any potential patriarchal exploitation. Kei describes their “three bodies” as “spheres joined in motion,” “not concentric spheres, each sphere cradles its own center, not flat but full” (21). They are independent individuals but support one another at the same time. Kei’s mother performs the maternal role and has become a new pillar of the domestic space through providing them with food since Rei’s disappearance. She is always grocery shopping or preparing food for Kei and Momo throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Momo is learning to cook as a young woman. Without any male character’s interference, Momo’s cooking is less concerned with female selfdiscipline than other literary representations of young girls preparing food (see Blackford), but it is more focused on female growth and development guided by a motherly figure (the grandmother). The acts of cooking, feeding, and eating together denote closeness and interdependence among the trio. The habitual coeating sustained by Kei’s mother creates a space of female bonding and intangible skinship, as is evident in the scene where the three of them prepare packed lunches for a trip to the botanical garden: Rolled omelets and Spanish mackerel. Beef and konnyaku noodles boiled in a strong broth. Snow peas. Carrot salad. Rice balls. Momo cooked the snow peas. Don’t leave them on too long! Mother cautioned. I know, I know, you boil the water and take them right out. We chattered as we cooked, enjoying ourselves. (79)

40  Mina Qiao Eating with family keeps Kei’s disrupted thoughts at bay. The inversion of eating, vomiting, is also a form of regaining mental balance with the maternal companionship. In a scene in which Kei accompanies her mother to the department store, she suddenly feels sick to her stomach and hurries to the restroom to vomit in the presence of the woman’s shadow. A pain in the pit of her stomach acts out many times throughout the story, denoting her chaotic psychological status. The capability of eating in Manazuru is less about physical health and more about mental balance. After vomiting, she soon feels better: I had never thrown up before, either. Though I didn’t know if she was to blame. Mother was standing, waiting, when I returned. “What should we do about lunch, Kei?” “One of the restaurants upstairs?” “I feel like having chirashi-zushi.” The woman wavered. The air around her bent into darkness for a second, then brightened again, like the flickering of a candle flame. I didn’t feel sick again after that. The unpleasantness had already left me, through my mouth. We ascended to the restaurant floor, the woman trailing. Mother ordered eel; I had the chirashi-zushi. The restaurants in department stores have such high ceilings. Voices resound. We ate everything, leaving nothing. When we left the store, just like that, the woman was gone. (27) In this scene, the woman is a threat that compels Kei to eject “the unpleasantness” from within herself (27). In her vomiting, we detect abjection in, in Julia Kristeva’s words, “the most elementary and most archaic form.”57 Kei’s reaction is necessary in securing the boundaries between the other and the self, and in this context, the abjected is none other than the self. As Kristeva writes: “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.58 As bodily practices, eating and vomiting are both processes in reconstructing the self through managing the body. The woman’s deleterious effect on Kei is Kei’s own self-abjection as a female object. Rei’s absence does not liberate her from the phallic economy; on the contrary, it emphasizes her lack of the symbolic phallus. Rei is not here, but his existence and influence are ubiquitous nonetheless. This is a battle between Kei and the self sulking over her failed marriage (her failure in possessing the symbolic phallus). Moreover, Kei’s bonding with her mother detains the woman’s negative impact on her. Through constantly and consistently asking what to cook and what to eat in the narrative, her mother manages Kei’s appetite and, hence, keeps both her health and mentality in check. Motherhood reconfirms the essence of a female identity in Kei, and the mother–daughter dyad offers a

Body and/as Food  41 powerful connection that drives away the sense of loss and lack due to the missing symbolic phallus. In a scene where Kei relives Rei’s disappearance, she panics and keeps calling his name in the dark but then calms at a perception of her body through hunger: “I’m hungry. I feel my body, and I am relieved” (92). Kei then goes into a Chinese restaurant for wonton soup. Appetite, as discussed above, signifies a restoration of mental balance. Moreover, it allows Kei to approach her physicality from within and confirm her embodied subjectivity— “I” am hungry. In contrast, as the emblematic of Kei’s obsession over Rei, the woman is incapable of eating and expresses her envy of Kei in the following conversation. “What did you have?” the woman asked. “Wonton soup.” “I envy you”.

(93)

Moreover, appetite is linked with Kei’s fighting will to live, and the “wonton soup” frequently referred to in the text alludes to libido that has previously withdrawn due to Rei’s disappearance. The woman’s inability to consume food represents a loss of interest and an inhibition of all activity during Kei’s mourning period in a Freudian sense, and her inexperience of wonton soup confirms her role as a personification of Thanatos in Kei.59 Moreover, under the compulsion to repeat that is beyond the pleasure principle, Kei repeats the “unwanted experiences and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity” through the woman.60 In the novel, she tempts the narrator to cross over to the fantasy realm where Rei now resides, resembling a death drive during major depressive episodes. In another scene, where she finally accepts the fact that Rei will never return, Kei proposes to the woman that they eat together, again referring to wonton soup as a resilient act in united womanhood: Useless or not, once he’s gone, you can’t help it, left behind. The wind whips around the woman. Wonton soup, jiajiang noodles, whatever you feel like, we can eat them together. Don’t talk anymore about being sick of it all, let’s just live our lives, effortlessly, without a thought. I call to the woman, once again, in my heart. She shakes her head in disbelief. Are you for real, or a flake? I don’t get you. For real, flaky—like they can be separated. We’re alive, you know! I shout at her. (118) Kei’s offer to share food with the woman is a sign she is trying to move on from Rei’s betrayal, to keep living because of her love for her mother and Momo, and to recenter her being to the physical self, to reclaim her subjectivity. The tension between the narrator and her adolescent daughter is also represented through food. The following two dining scenes outline ambivalence in

42  Mina Qiao their relationship and Kei’s emotional vulnerability. When Kei takes Momo to Manazuru, the woman haunts her at the dinner table. The woman snatches food from their dinner table, a symbolic act of coming in between Kei and her daughter: She stayed for dinner, too. Snatching food, eating. Momo’s food, mine. She appeared to be fond of shrimp, kept plucking them from a plate of seafood in tomato sauce. She stole the same pieces repeatedly, as long as they stayed on the plate. The food itself remained even after she had taken and eaten it, so she could steal it again and again. … Eventually I realized that I was angry. The woman fled. I will not allow anything to come between Momo and me. This, I realized, was the thought I had been thinking. (35–6) When the woman intrudes into their relationship and jeopardizes it by stealing food, the metaphor of bonding between mother and daughter is interrupted. On the one hand, this scene foreshadows the menace of Kei’s depression and obsession. In later points of the narrative, the woman lures Kei away from her family using Rei as bait, reflecting the damage done to the mother–daughter relationship by Kei’s rumination on Rei. On the other hand, Kei’s depression also manifests in separation anxiety. In this scene, she recalls how “close” they were when Momo was a baby that demanded her undivided and ceaseless attention (36). She was exhausted but fulfilled. During this trip, Kei senses that Momo is no longer a child who depends on her. Momo asks more questions about her father and has a romantic interest in a boy, exhibiting all the signs of maturing. At breakfast the next morning, Kei has no appetite, barely touching her meal, and lets Momo have her food. Momo says, “Growing children, you know, we’ve got appetites” (39). When Kei finds her “so adorable” and reaches out to stroke her cheek at the table, “all at once she paled. She shook her head violently, rejecting the hand I [Kei] touched her with. She wanted to be distant. From me” (39). This motif of Momo’s refusal of Kei’s touch and Kei’s frustration about not being able to touch her is recurrent in the text. Rejecting skinship is Momo’s symbolic detachment from the mother. In Manazuru, the teenage daughter Momo attempts a divorce from the maternal body in rebellion. Her growing appetite suggests that she, who used to feed at Kei’s breast, now has found other ways to nutrition. As Momo’s rebellion escalates, she stays out late and refuses to tell Kei who she was with. Somehow Kei cannot shake off the idea that Momo was with Rei (she confirms her hunch in the eighth chapter). Momo is unwilling to speak to or even look at Kei during the peak of her rebellion. Momo still talks to her grandmother but shuts down every mode of communication with Kei. Bypassing Kei, Momo says to her grandmother: “I won’t need a lunchbox tomorrow, Grandma. I’ve got cooking class” (140). The daughter’s rejection of the maternal finds its apotheosis in her rejection of homemade food. Phallocentric culture obstructs the daughter’s affection for the mother. Mothers and daughters share the same bodily experiences and are driven apart in their social sexualization, nonetheless. Irigaray points out that as a daughter grows up, she will

Body and/as Food  43 learn that “the mother, upon whom the primary identification is based, turns out to be castrated and therefore devalued.”61 The young woman’s identification with the mother is discouraged and repressed in a phallocentric cultural system, and she is, therefore, trapped in “a state of childish dependence upon a phallic super-ego.”62 From an emic viewpoint, the abjection of the mother’s body can be dated back to “the primal mother Izanami’s rotting corpse” and continues in the omission of the maternal in premodern literature.63 The cultural invisibility of the mother’s body (and the predominance of the shōjo ideal) still prevails in contemporary Japanese literature and media.64 In a patriarchal society, the mother–daughter relationship is “extremely problematic” due to the daughter’s difficulty in respecting the mother who is subordinate to the patriarchal authority.65 The young women’s subsequent resistance and rebellion are often represented through food, which is associated with order.66 “Because of the centrality and significance of food for women and their lack of other means … women use its refusal as the central vehicle in their search for identity, relationship, autonomy.”67 By learning to cook, Momo declares her independence through her ability to acquire food. By rejecting the food offered to her, she attempts to separate from the symbolic maternal (m)other to establish the self and develop an individual identity as preached in the phallocentric culture. Rose Lucas argues that the mother is otherized, and the mother–daughter relationship is “the most repressed, and the most denigrated” in phallocentric narratives, perhaps because the masculine subject is intimidated by the “biological, emotional and social power” of the maternal corporeality and a potent sustainability in the mother–daughter communal femininity.68 Otherization of the maternal in the status quo propels the circle of hurt. In the same scene, Kei realizes that “[Mother], too, has been hurt, by me” (141). The psychosexual development of female individuals repeats in a circle. Being both a mother and a daughter endows Kei with more clarity in seeing the mother–daughter relationship as under repression. The last chapter depicts a harmonious family life of the three women after Kei’s final meeting with Rei in the fantasy realm. Fully accepting Rei’s absence and her own selfhood at last, Kei overcomes the phallocentric logic that rendered her physically lacking and culturally absent. The text remarks on Momo’s upcoming 17th birthday and how she nurses her grandmother back to health while Kei is away from home, underlining the different stages of female development again. With her mother and daughter, Kei’s female self is no longer at a loss for meaning in isolation but seen, touched, acknowledged, and sustained in a full circle of life. In completing and returning to the maternal genealogy, Kei finds her strength and salvation. The last chapter is full of portrayals of illumination that contrast with the gloomy and dim scenes in the previous chapters, a sign that finally, Kei sees everything, including herself, with clarity. Light now shines over the “dark continent” in the mother–daughter bonding, which Irigaray believes could guide women out of dereliction and to their emancipation. In praise of the divine mother–daughter bonding, Kei narrates, “the light illuminates all three of us, from our faces to our shoulders. When we bend, the light rings our foreheads, like crowns. Three women of different age, sharing the same blood, wearing the same crown” (209). Food,

44  Mina Qiao again, appears in this concluding chapter to show female bonding in a scene where Kei’s mother teaches Momo to make almond pudding: The soft, white almond pudding is hardening, now, in its dish. Things made with agar firm up even if you don’t refrigerate them, Mother tells Momo. Let’s put it in, though, it tastes better cold, Momo says. These hands, handling food, deeply wrinkled, smooth, skin beginning to loosen, touching each other, moving apart, overlapping. Nothing comes, anymore, to follow. The space around my body is wide open, slightly cool. (21) In the process of making food, loving hands touch, move apart, and overlap, as the shifting mother–daughter relationship eventually arrives at a state of blurring the borders between the self and the other, a skinship. The grandmother and granddaughter also form a quasi-mother–daughter relationship, denoting an empowering bond that leads Kei to exorcise her own demons and step into the light. The answer to Kei’s plight, and perhaps that of all women under phallocentric cultural domination, lies in food as a sign of a reconstruction of their physical experiences and a sustainable female power that is passed on as an intergenerational legacy from mother to daughter. Conclusion Manazuru joins an emerging body of Japanese literature that examines food, embodiment, and womanhood through an unconventional discursive approach to gender. Kawakami takes on the theme of mother–daughter dyad, exploring the construction of female physicality and the quest of subjectivity around it with food as a metaphor. As Aoyama suggests, the discussion of food covers “not merely interpersonal relations but also the relation between nature and culture, the physical and the spiritual as well as between the individual and society and between production and reception.”69 Food in Manazuru begins within the natural, physical realm in its preparation and consumption, but it transcends into the spiritual. Cooking in this text is not a mindless labor of female socialization but an evocation of female subjectivity. When Kawakami’s female characters exhibit an affinity to food and cooking together, they cultivate their own feminine subjectivity outside the context of patriarchy without denying their maternal and nurturing qualities. With the transformative power of cooking as “a form of mediation between nature and society, life and death,”70 the narrator completes her otherworldly journey of searching for not her missing husband, but rather herself. She is writing the female body, as well as “cooking” its cultural representation, into a new significance. Notes 1 She has won many prestigious literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize for “Hebi o fumu” (“Tread on a Snake,” 1996; Eng. tr. 2017).

Body and/as Food  45

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46  Mina Qiao

Body and/as Food  47

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48  Mina Qiao Eagleton, Terry. “Edible Écriture.” In Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety. Edited by Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace, 203–208. Manchester and New York, NY: Mandolin, 1998. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XIV. Edited by James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth, 1964. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology (Second Edition). Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Giorgio, Adalgisa. “Introduction: Mothers and Daughters in Western Europe: Mapping the Territory.” In Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women. Edited by Adalgisa Giorgio, 1–9. New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002. Gross, Elizabeth. “Philosophy, Subjectivity, and the Body: Irigaray and Kristeva.” In Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory. Edited by Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross, 125–43. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase. “‘Shōjo’ Spirits in Horror Manga.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 38 (2010): 59–80. Hiroshi Ichikawa. Mi no kōzō: Shintairon wo koete. Tokyo: Kodansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1993. Innami, Fusako. Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Irigaray, Luce. “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other.” Translated by Hélène Vivienne Wenzel. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 ([1979] 1981): 60–7. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. London: The Athlone Press, 1993. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. “Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order.” In The Irigaray Reader. Edited by Margaret Whitford, 47–52. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Kano, Ayako. “Review of Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan, by Amanda C. Seaman.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 44, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 385–9. ­ Kashimada Maki. Meido meguri. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 2012. Kawakami Hiromi. Manazuru. Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2006. Kawakami Hiromi. Manazuru. Translated by Michael Emmerich. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010. Kawakami Mieko. Chichi to Ran. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2008. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York, NY: Colombia University Press, 1982. Kubiak Ho-Chi, Beata. “When Your Neighbor Is a Bear, Your Fiancé–a Dog, and Your Lover–a Tuna. About Human-Nonhuman Encounters in the Works of Kawakami Hiromi, Shōno Yoriko and Tawada Yōko. A Critical Posthuman Perspective.” Analecta Nipponica, no. 8 (2018): 83–96. Kudō Yuuko. “Kawakami Hiromi, Yashi Yashi ron.” Iwate daigaku daigakuin jinbun shakai kagaku kenkyū-ka kenkyū kiyō, 22: 19–36. Morioka: Iwate Daigaku June, 2013. Lucas, Rose. “Telling Maternity: Mothers and Daughters in Recent Women’s Fiction.” Australian Feminist Studies 13, no. 27 (1998): 35–46.

Body and/as Food  49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mowbray-Tsutsumi, Jill. “Kawakami Hiromi’s Manazuru — Surfaces of Meaning and the Keywords of Female Bodily Experience.” Conference Proceedings of the 18th Biennial Conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia (2013): 1–12. Murayama Yuka. Hōtōki. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2011. Nishi Kanako. Kyokō no Nikuko-chan. Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2011. Ogawa, Yuko. “Healing Literature by Contemporary Japanese Female Authors: Yoshimoto Banana, Ogawa Yōko, and Kawakami Hiromi.” PhD diss., Purdue University, 2018. Qiao, Mina. “Shōjo, Mother, and the Uncanny Space in Ogawa Yōko’s Writings.” In Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature. Edited by Mina Qiao, 31–49. New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2022. Qiao, Mina, and Matthew Strecher. “Minding the Gap in Kawakami Hiromi.” In Into the Fantastical Spaces in Contemporary Japanese Literature. Edited by Mina Qiao, 166–89. New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2022. Ramirez-Christensen, Esperanza. “Introduction.” In The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father. Edited by Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, 1–24. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Saitō Tamaki. Bungaku no chōkō. Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2004. Seaman, Amanda. Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. Tahhan, Diana Adis. “Blurring the Boundaries between Bodies: Skinship and Bodily Intimacy in Japan.” Japanese Studies 30, no. 2 (2010): 215–30. Treat, John Whittier. “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shōjo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject.” Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 353–87. Yuikawa Kei. Nakanai tori wa sora ni oboreru. Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2015.

3

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko An Analysis of “Unhomely” Sounds in the Mother Tongue Kenia Avendaño Hara

There is a particular sense of discomfort permeating the works of author Tawada Yōko (b. 1960). While on the surface her writing appears to be in Japanese or German or both, in many ways, it resists language as a form rooted in essentialist national rhetoric. This chapter contends that it is specifically Tawada’s auditory manipulations of language that produce instances of unheimlich, which is defined here as both “uncanny” and “unhomely” in order to stress how language is used in unexpected ways to push against normative expectations of their place of origin, or “home.” Furthermore, these transcribed yet sonically transmitted manipulations function as one of the key messages and tools of displacement in Tawada’s work. Rather than existing strictly within the confines of a single national linguistic or literary space, these works perform within a transitional, translational site in between languages, cultures, and listening where distortion and transformation take place. I especially wish to draw attention to Tawada’s works in Japanese or those that mention her relationship with “home,” where the resulting interplay between unstable spaces and phonemically fragmented language allows the author to negotiate alternate relationships to her prescribed homeland and “mother tongue.” Simultaneously, I wish to explore how these works challenge readers to listen – in both a literal and metaphorical sense – for the unusual within the familiar as a condition of possibility for new understandings of human identities that exist between traditionally fixed gendered, linguistic, and racial spaces. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from Tawada’s short story “Chōkanzu” (“Bird’s-Eye View”) in her collection Amerika: Hidō no tairiku (America: The Unjust Continent, 2006), which chronicles a series of peculiar journeys across the United States. Here, the protagonist “you” (anata) is walking the streets of Chicago and comes upon an unusual advertisement: A poster was pasted on a glass storefront. It depicted a slab of meat slathered in venomously red fluid and crammed between two pieces of brown, freckled steam bun-like (manjūgata) bread with thinly sliced pickles, protruding like taunting tongues. It looked more like a bizarre doll (etai no shirenai ningyō) than a type of food, but you decided to give it a try. Jutting out your chin, you zip-zipped (zui zui) into the store, lips first. Once at the counter, you filled your mouth with plenty of saliva and placed an order for the word, “Cheeseburger.”1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-4

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  51 There is a subtle strangeness to this passage that is difficult to isolate. How and why is it filled with such visceral disgust, perplexity, and surprise all in the span of a few sentences? The most obvious answer lies in the misalignment between the initial exotifying description of the object and the ultimate disclosure of it as something globally familiar to Tawada’s audience. At first, the reader is prematurely persuaded to conclude that “a slab of meat slathered in venomously red fluid” could be anything but edible. Its “steam bun-like bread” forces upon the protagonist, who is eerily “you,” the reader, a persona of an Asian tourist who is presumably more familiar with the concept of a steam bun (manjū) than (“Western”) bread. Then, the description of the pickles “protrud[ing] like taunting tongues” not only personifies the object described but also provides it agency – the ability to stick out its tongue, taunt “you,” and potentially even speak. Listening, or paying close attention, to the colorful and rhythmic qualities of this description fills the reader’s head with questions to what this unappealing object may be. Is it food? Is it foreign? Is it possibly even alive? As a result, it comes as a surprise when the strange object is revealed to be a commonplace cheeseburger since its uncanny description in this passage is clever enough to throw the most careful reader off guard. Even the articulation of the word “cheeseburger” on the protagonist’s lips is exoticized in fully spaced katakana text (chīzubāgā), and the effort to produce its sounds demands an entire mouth of saliva. This technique that invites the reader to perceive oddity in the familiar is no stranger to Tawada’s works. German literature scholar Petra Fachinger points out that mainstream publishers, readers, and critics in both Germany and Japan often seek a voyeuristic view into the allegedly “exotic” lives of marginalized writers, as exotification goes hand in hand with attempts to reinforce homogenization.2 Perhaps aware of this trend, Tawada utilizes her status as a perpetual “foreigner” within the “foreign” spaces of her narratives to appear to feed literary markets. However, she simultaneously disrupts the superficial expectations intrinsic to her identity as a Japanese woman with sudden twists that ensnare her readers in the philosophical conundrum of their lack of fundamental knowledge of basic definitions or reasoning behind customs that have often been taken for granted. By setting her story in common reality (Chicago), while descriptively renaming a familiar object (a cheeseburger), Tawada creates a lack of recognition for her readers that challenges linguistic assumptions intricately tied to sociocultural biases of how the world appears to be. In so doing, she suggests that a simple twist of perspective can reveal strangeness within the familiar, or the unnerving proximity of “foreign” to “home.” In the same vein of strangeness within the familiar, it is salient to point out that the onomatopoeia in the passage above, “zui” (translated here as “zip-zipped”), used to describe the protagonist’s movement into the restaurant is not a typically recognized word. It is, however, found in the traditional children’s song “Zui Zukkorobashi,” which is commonly believed to be based on the teapot carrying procession held in Uji during the Edo period.3 If the word in this passage does, indeed, derive from this song, the invocations of the pseudo-word “zui zui” can be understood as twofold. First, it mockingly invokes the image of self-important officials

52  Kenia Avendaño Hara crossing the land only to be carrying an ordinary pot of tea. The protagonist’s quick movement into the store is, then, in a similar fashion, ironically portrayed full of duty to fulfill the inane task of ordering a cheeseburger. Although the folk song is now sung under less controversial circumstances, it – and perhaps vicariously, the onomatopoeic phrase – still serves, in part, as a jab at authoritative figures that take themselves too seriously. Second, while meaningless in definition, “zui zui” within the children’s song is often believed by scholars and native speakers alike to function as a means to confer rhythm to the song.4 In this sense, the onomatopoeia could be understood as serving a similar role in Tawada’s passage by creating a musicality that suspends communicative function to push the narrative forward through rhythm and sound. In a way following the folk song’s example, Tawada’s rearrangement of sounds in the cheeseburger passage to create untraditional meanings seems to represent a social statement that teases at conventional paradigms and attempts humorous linguistic reinventions. Furthermore, Tawada’s particular experimentation in this passage with structures of Japanese – her “mother tongue” – especially as a woman and potential mother, can be seen as sending mischievously disruptive tremors through the very foundation of the national ideologies which she is expected to sustain, while holding in contention the very organicity of her “exterior skin,” albeit in playful ways.5 I argue, therefore, that Tawada’s act of playing with words and breaking language into sounds represents a framework in which the departure from restrictions of national rules and gender roles poignantly re-emphasizes the necessity for observance, or close listening, in order to glean a more holistic understanding of identities that exist not defined by but between nations, languages, and cultures. By grasping the very building blocks of language – the sonic components that bring words and meaning together – and experimenting with assorted combinations and connotations, Tawada works to contest the social, national, and often gendered functions of language that are set to define the cores of contemporary societies. Hence, analyzing the ways in which she experiments with sound in Japanese with an ear to her multilinguistic experiences has the potential to expand on existing studies, uncover new meanings in the “dissonant” spaces of her work, and reveal alternate ways to consider global iterations of identity. For it seems to be at the level of the sounds of her words and the rhythms of her sentences that Tawada’s linguistic experimentation in her “mother tongue” directly addresses her relationship with Japanese national rhetoric and her gendered position in order to more freely define herself and her writing as something that exists in between preexisting labels. Listening to these sounds and rhythms from a reader’s perspective, then, serves as a method of engagement framed more by the ear than solely by the eye. That which is perceived on the ear is sensed yet remains conceptually obscure; it exists yet can often only be grasped through the felt and the imagined. Therefore, it has the ability to upset conventional systems that rely on the visible, the stable, and the known and serves as an intriguing tool to explore Tawada’s invisible interstitial landscapes meticulously conveyed through the mysterious atmosphere of the unheimlich – the “uncannily unhomely” – within the home itself.

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  53 The “Unhomely” Mother Tongue My use of the term unheimlich to mean “unhomely” here harkens back to Ernst Jentsch’s original description of the term in his 1906 essay “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny”). He describes the unheimlich experience as intellectual uncertainty in relation to one’s orientation in a particular environment and, therefore, the opposite of heimlich, or familiar, native, unambiguous, and belonging to the home. As exemplified in “Chōkanzu,” Tawada’s works often seem to fold this definition back onto itself to describe the possibility of uncomfortable displacement within the home or a similarly familiar environment. Through hyperbolic examples bedecked in plays of words, Tawada places the presumed comfort and unambiguity of the familiar directly into question. In her short story “Porträt einer Zunge” (“Portrait of a Tongue,” 2002; Eng. tr. 2013), Tawada even uses the German term unheimlich explicitly. Toward the end, she writes: The word haben [“to have”] comforts us with a capitalist, enlightened gesture, as though you can have feelings in the same way you can have a house (heim) and furniture. Hegen [“to harbor”], on the other hand, implies an uncanny (unheimlich) relationship between people and their feelings.6 Rather than focusing on the content of this passage, I suggest a postmonolingual mode of reading, or “a mode of reading that is attentive to multilingual practices,” to listen to the story being told through the sounds of Tawada’s words.7 Since her polyglot proficiencies grant her the ability to notice connections between languages and words that are not usually drawn, keeping an ear out for these connections at the level of the phoneme and the sound of words can provide insight into different ways to understand her work. Read in this way, the seemingly rambling “Portrait of a Tongue” can be understood as an abstract semantic portrait, or a linguistic experiment, pushed forward not by plot but by a word association game in which each concept builds off the one before it. In the passage above, the reoccurring “h” sound in the key terms haben, heim, hegen, and unheimlich seems to reflect a phenomenon of uncannily coincidental repetition or “repetition-compulsion,” an aspect Sigmund Freud appends to Jentsch’s definition in his own essay on the unheimlich, written in 1919. An important part of the unheimlich atmosphere that Jentsch neglects to mention, Freud argues, is the sense of helplessness forced upon us by an event that seems “fateful or unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of ‘chance’ only.”8 In such an event, Freud suggests that the affected person – or the reader in the case of Tawada’s works – is “tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence.”9 Especially when led by the author’s multilingually inspired process of piecing similar sounds together, it becomes impossible to ignore that the word unheimlich in Tawada’s passage above is preceded by the word heim. Given this order, unheimlich seems to “spawn” from the sounds of heim, incongruously suggesting, as is a common theme in her works, the potential for uncanny emotions to stem from the home.

54  Kenia Avendaño Hara If this type of word game seems juvenile, it may well be. However, it is precisely this familiar juvenility in which we have all played with words when first learning a language either as infants or as language learners that may at least, in part, spark the sensation of unheimlich. For as Freud suggests, “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”10 Rather than the uncanny existing within a childhood fear per se, it is, in fact, the return of a familiar infantile belief that serves as a catalyst for the sense of the uncanny. Notably, following Jentsch, Freud’s central example of this is rooted in an instance from literature, specifically E.T.A. Hoffman’s story “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman,” 1816). Here, Freud focuses on the protagonist Nathaniel’s traumatic fascination with the Sandman, a mythical being that Nathaniel is told from a young age gorges out and feasts on children’s eyes. It is first and foremost the familiar childhood story of the Sandman resuscitated by the lawyer Coppelius whom Nathaniel meets as an adult, Freud contends, that sparks the sense of uncanny.11 In Tawada’s works like “Chōkanzu” and “Portrait of a Tongue,” this same phenomenon could be seen as manifesting itself in the resurgence of the childish perspective that is based in fantasy and newness of words within what is believed to be an adult character. But perhaps, we can understand this forcible resurgence of a childish perspective as the author’s way to confront readers with conundrums as to why, as adults, we no longer perceive reality in this fluidly fantastical manner and often accept reality in fixed and stable terms. While focused on the same Hoffman story of “The Sandman,” it proves salient to mention that Jentsch’s description of the uncanny is specifically concerned with the protagonist Nathaniel’s enrapture with the automata, Olympia. Notably, Nathaniel is unable to recognize Olympia as anything other human until he sees her glass eyes on the ground. Based on this example, Jentsch holds that artificial representations of the human form can produce uncanny sensations and notes that it is human inclination, “in a kind of naïve analogy with his own animatedness, to assume that things in the natural world are also animate, or perhaps more correctly, are animate in the same way.”12 While seemingly taking a different direction than Freud, Jentsch’s use of the term “naïve” here seems to similarly signify a role of returning infantile beliefs in the production of unheimlich. In addition, his focus on the uncanniness of automata – a figure that is human-like, but not quite human – connects directly to Tawada’s own work that questions of fixed realities, categories, and dichotomies. One quintessential work in which Tawada probes the boundaries of the “fixed” occurs in her short prose piece “Von der Muttersprach zur Sprachmutter” (“From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” 1996; Eng. tr. 2006). Here, much like Hoffman, Tawada focuses at least on the surface on the ambiguities between humankind and automata. While this story is in German rather than Japanese, I wish to highlight it here because it records experiences of initial reactions to German language that lead to deeper observations on larger social topics. For example, Tawada’s narrator recalls that a pencil in German becomes masculine when a woman complains about it since words are gendered. “In Japanese,” the narrator explains, “words have no gender.…Grammatically speaking, a man is not even

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  55 masculine in Japanese.”13 The fact that Japanese is not a gendered language is a detail that goes unnoticed without exposure to a language that is. His observation is not only intrinsic to Tawada’s diverse linguistic and cultural experiences but is further woven into a tongue-in-cheek social critique. The narrator then proceeds to describe a linguistically feminine-marked object in her office as a large, broad body tattooed with letters. This object is her typewriter (die Schreibmaschine), which in an anthropomorphized way seems to offer Tawada German language. She explains: [The typewriter’s] offer did nothing to alter the fact that German was not my mother tongue (Muttersprach), but now I had a mother inside the German language. I called this female machine, which gave me the gift of its language, Linguistic Mother (Sprachmutter).14 This explicit reversal of the German word for “mother tongue” into “linguistic mother” demonstrates a recognition of the strangeness of a social order that positions a female body as the source of language and thereby implies an organic relationship between language and its national population. Utilizing this new term to then address an inanimate, mechanical object candidly shatters the underlying natural, motherly presuppositions engendered by the literal connotations of the term.15 In this way, the description of the typewriter sparks sentiments of the unheimlich in Jentsch’s terms. Furthermore, the typewriter rendered as a sentient being with the agency to bestow the narrator with language is reminiscent of the common childhood belief of inanimate dolls coming to life. The familiarity with this belief connected to the way in which the concept of life stemming from automata tests reality initiates the unheimlich experience in Freud’s terms as well. Significantly, Tawada’s sense of uncanny does not begin with the object, per se, but at the level of words used to redefine the object. In “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” this begins with the identification of the word typewriter as a “female” word, followed by the deliberate linguistic reversal of the term muttersprache (lit. “mother language”) into sprachemutter (lit. “language mother”) to create an uncannily motherly figure out of a mechanical typewriter. Here, there is a machine that, specifically through the narrator’s play on words, becomes a second “mother” and, therefore, comes to occupy an unfixed status between living and nonliving, simultaneously inert and sentient. This machine then “offers” the narrator – the adopted child – a language that becomes a type of “mother tongue” if this term is understood as a language bestowed upon a child by its mother. Not only is unheimlich, or “unhomeliness,” established via the typewriter’s tenuous balance between states of being (biological and machine) but also via linguistically bestowed and seemingly conflicting qualities of the familiar “mother” and the foreign “body” within the narrator’s apartment home. German and comparative literature scholar Yasemin Yildiz understands “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother” in terms of a step beyond the mother tongue as a singular, organic language entrenched in physicality and emotion. She contends that this insightful reimagining of the origin of a “mother tongue” in an inanimate, infertile object with a reversed name is Tawada’s way of rewriting traditional

56  Kenia Avendaño Hara linguistic, gender, and kinship bonds into a state of detachment. This reimagination, she suggests, insinuates the potential of a multilingual paradigm where it is possible to overcome the bindings of the mother tongue and write in nonnative languages or multiple languages at the same time.16 This argument importantly legitimizes the author’s position in what Yildiz calls “postmonolingual” literature, which constantly reinvents and questions the meaning of language and identity while also insisting that the imagined authority of the term “mother tongue” disavows the possibility of multilingual writing in general. I would also add that placing the typewriter in a position of motherhood challenges the concept perpetuated by nationalistic rhetoric, such as Nihonjinron, that (1) language is transmitted by a biological mother and (2) a mother must be organically connected to her children, namely by blood. This strain of thought posits that the Japanese population is descendent from a single imperial line, or “family state,” connected by the same biology and culture. In other words, “blood” symbolism is collapsed with concepts of sexuality, reproduction, and race to ultimately argue for the cultural and racial uniqueness of a singular lineage of people defined as “Japanese.” As a result, Japanese women, deemed in charge of producing and nurturing familial bloodlines, serve as the crux of this nationalistic thinking. The “Unhomely” of Female, Foreign, and Intersectional Tawada’s position as a Japanese woman who lives in Germany and began writing in the early 1990s is an aspect of her identity that can be misconstrued when she is discussed. This misalignment occurs most obviously when she is compared with Meiji author Mori Ōgai, under the superficial pretense that both are Japanese authors who reflect on their personal experiences in Germany through their literature.17 In her book of essays, Ekusofonii: Bōgo no soto e deru tabi (Exophony: A Journey of Leaving the Mother Tongue, 2003), she explicitly addresses the similarities drawn between herself and Ōgai, by listing three core differences: (1) she learned German as a language, rather than as a part of learning political and/or medical sciences; (2) she learned German by choice rather than being required by the government; and (3) she is a woman, rather than an elite man groomed for national work. She continues sympathetically toward the past and gratefully toward the present: [Meiji writers] simply swallowed what they were given and resolved to make a future of it. I cannot help but sense tragic heroism in this, and I salute their enthusiasm. At the same time, I am grateful to have been born in an age in which “the West” can be viewed relatively and even women can study German.18 Studying German as a choice may seem relatively insignificant, and the fact that Tawada is a woman may not always be explicitly considered for the sake of equality in the literary field in which she has made a name for herself. However, anthropologist Karen Kelsky argues, based on fieldwork on Japanese female narratives

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  57 between lifestyles in Japan and abroad, that “‘Personal choice’ [for women] is one of the hallmarks of modernity, which has valorized it over the roles and expectations associated with national ‘tradition.’”19 Furthermore, personal choice also reveals “the emergence of a discourse of value and morals that…stands to impose the ruptures of a disenchanted modernity in the intimate gendered spaces of the Japanese home and company.”20 In other words, it is not only the act of studying a foreign language but also the decision in and of itself as a Japanese woman that demonstrates a break with the seemingly natural bonds that tie Tawada to the Japanese “home” and the societal roles, traditional paradigms, and national language that it carries. Therefore, I find Tawada’s choice as a woman to study German and her experiences in Germany as a woman fundamentally indispensable to the process of forming her identity and particular style of literature. In order to understand Tawada’s stance in a holistic manner, it is important to recognize that statements made in Tawada’s formative years in Japan reveal that at least some aspects of societal politics and “race-thinking” in Japan have been conceptualized around sexuality and biological traits.21 Within this logic, the Japanese people are imagined to naturally exist as a distinct, homogeneous, single-bloodline “family” living in the Japanese nation that, by association, becomes imagined as the “home.” Scholars, such as Anne Allison and Jennifer Robertson, indicate that it then becomes the burden of Japanese women, understood as embodying both actual and metaphorical “mothers,” to uphold nostalgic patriarchal imaginings of the traditional “family” and “home.”22 Yet, ironically, they are shut out from the very labor force for which they are held responsible in order to procreate and nurture. When women’s predominant role in the economic productivity of their country becomes mothering, their value then becomes grounded in the currency of their reproductive bodies. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Sharon Kinsella claims that the very sexuality and reproductive activity of young Japanese women’s bodies are positioned at “the center of the national racial defense” in order to maintain the cultural and racial purity of the bloodline (kettō) of the Japanese nation.23 Especially when the nation is represented by a narrative of a family tied deeply by bonds of blood, this paradigm goes beyond the status of a metaphor and becomes a felt reality of population imagined as extending from a single origin and identity promulgated by political propaganda and media. Within the familial narrative in which the nation is the “home,” the female is perpetually the “mother” held responsible for raising a homogenous population via language. Uncoincidentally, this language is imagined organically as part of the mother’s body – the “mother tongue.” Much like the term “race,” “mother tongue” similarly evokes the constructed concept of a singular inherent origin and identity connected to biological bonds that, in this case, center around female gender roles. However, this tireless deployment of Japanese women as symbols of Japanese tradition throughout Japan’s modernization process to maintain the sanctity of the family, especially in the absence of militant or overworked men, has its consequences. Notably, Kelsky notes that the 1980s and 1990s – the period during which Tawada first studied abroad in Germany and began writing – saw many profound and far-reaching transformations in Japanese gender relations. It was during this time that Japan’s birthrate first began

58  Kenia Avendaño Hara to decline, reaching a record low of 1.57 births per woman in 1989, and young Japanese women, supported by the high yen and overvalued economy, increasingly began traveling abroad.24 Kelsky argues that: by turning away from (what they label) ‘traditional lifestyles,’ resisting the expectations of (what they label) ‘traditional’ Japanese men, refraining from having children, and traveling, studying, and working abroad, more and more Japanese women are exploiting their position on the margins of corporate and family systems to engage in a form of ‘defection’ from expected life courses.25 Tawada was likely one of many Japanese women to take a “foreign turn” as a way to resist marginalizing gendered and ultimately national expectations forced upon her by society. It is arguably also this perpetual marginality and “foreign” status as a woman in the late 20th century that fosters within Tawada a particular framework of knowledge based on a sense of dissonance with the norm and lack of belonging to a singular national or physical space. However, instead of ultimately categorizing either Japan or abroad as ideal, she places herself somewhere in between, embracing this “unhomely” position as a way to exist physically and psychologically within multiple languages and cultures at once. In this sense, she seems to be the epitome of what African American lawyer and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “intersectionality.” This term extends from Crenshaw’s experience in the American legal system in which discrimination functions on a single-axis framework of racial or gender marginalization, rarely an interaction of both. She argues that: Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet, often they experience double-discrimination—the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women— not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women.26 In other words, Crenshaw claims that the interactions of various aspects of identity – here, specifically race and sex – create a unique brand of marginality that is not simply a sum of its parts but an experience that exists explicitly at the intersection. Although this theory began in legal courts, it has gained widespread attention in feminist circles to justify many transcultural women’s experiences of layered oppression and/or marginality. It suggests that existing between traditionally prescribed national, racial, and gendered spaces holds what has long been considered “natural” and “normal” in contention. It is precisely this mixture of simultaneous identities resulting in intersectionality that contributes to Tawada’s unique perspective in her lived and narrative worlds. In Tawada’s texts, a sonic tension dwells between the Japanese mother tongue, representing an “organic” relationship to female roles within the family-nation,

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  59 and foreign language, an untethered outlet for new types of expression. Therefore, playing between languages, or experimenting with the sonic limits of the “mother tongue,” becomes a form of identity politics in which struggles under unjust structures of social order reveal the “strange” uselessness of spaces out of reach. To put these politics into language, or reformulated sounds of language, indicates a desire to communicate a need for social repair. Although language and sound cannot always be conflated, in Tawada Yōko’s work, they are incessantly intertwined. In her essay compilation, Ekusofonii, Tawada specifically mentions that her process of creating sentences involves a conscious search for rhythms that she finds audibly pleasing. Therefore, it is impossible to disregard the indispensability of audible elements to her work. At the same time, or perhaps as a result, she is often told that while her sentences are easy to listen to, there is something about them that is not quite “normal.”27 Media scholar Brandon LaBelle calls sound nondualistic in the sense that it is at once “an itinerant movement,” and “a meeting point” that immediately brings multiplicities together, while it also incorporates a dynamic of interference, noise, and transgression.28 In other words, sound is capable of simultaneously encouraging empathy and divergence, or empathy from divergence. Similarly, this “abnormal” quality of Tawada’s works, however, may be understood as an important part of her message. In departing from the norm, Tawada seems to challenge readers to listen beyond the plot and search for meaning within the “strange” combinations of sounds in what is traditionally conceived as “silent” text. “Unhomely” Sounds in “Silent” Texts: Experiments in Onomatopoeia In her essay “Die kunst des nicht-synchronisiert-seins” (“The Art of Being Nonsynchronous,” Eng. tr. 2009), Tawada ponders over whether onomatopoeic expression can function as a method to naturally add sound to text. The main conundrum that she encounters with this is that, as literary critic Craig La Driére defines, onomatopoeia is “a coincidence of two meanings or strands of meaning… [a mere] suggestion of sound with its conventional reference.”29 In other words, onomatopoeia is a representative of sound but not sound itself. To supplement Tawada’s solution, it may be pertinent to consider comparative literature scholar Cara Lynne Cardinale’s theoretical device of “look-listening,” which functions to alter understandings of language and perception and destabilize the dichotomic ways that voice is observed.30 Considering this perspective allows for a space where sound is not simply limited to vibrations through the air but can be perceived in ways, such as through written text, and thereby simultaneously connect to multiple senses to provide a visceral, transsensory experience. Therefore, even a written text has the potential to produce perceivable and transsensory sound. Unusual combinations of these sounds may then work to displace the known as the center of the text’s geography and force the reader to inhabit an “unhomely” time and space. It is only through a close listening of these “uncanny” sounds of a multiplicity of perceptions that the reader becomes aware of the passage’s full meaning.

60  Kenia Avendaño Hara As someone who lives within and between various languages, Tawada’s challenge then becomes that. Precisely, because onomatopoeia only represents sound, it is also culturally encoded. “When I write shitoshito in Japanese,” she explains, “only Japanese speakers can hear the sound of gentle rain.” 31 It is, she finds, perhaps impossible to represent sound itself in a text without having it be intrinsically connected to a certain culture, producer, or metaphorical significance. Tawada’s solution, therefore, is not to find a solution, but rather “to enter the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes,” for this dark crevice, she argues, is “a treasure trove of possibilities for what language can be.” 32 In short, for Tawada, sound in literature appears to represent an exploration of the possibilities of language that test the boundaries of dominant norms, the familiar, and the already known. She seems to express that language, as a chaotic structure, and sound, as the deconstructed pieces of that structure, are not always the same thing but are intricately connected. In “The Art of Being Nonsynchronous,” she writes: Language can produce an image from a sound or juxtapose several images. It can clumsily imitate various sounds and invent new words precisely because of its clumsiness. Language can link a sound to a color or think up an adjective to go along with it while at the same time questioning its legitimacy. Language can compare what we hear with other things. Then the images invoked only by way of comparison begin to assert their independence.33 This argument directly confronts national linguistic movements, like genbun itchi, that attempt to unify language as a stable structure under unifying government policies. By questioning the traditional stability, singularity, and hierarchy of language, Tawada provides a perspective, perhaps unique to her experiences as a Japanese woman immersed in several languages and cultures that expand the dominant “normative” worldview. Like Brandon LaBelle, who positions listening to the pluralities of sound as a method to perceive and create new formations of social becoming, Tawada situates language as an unstable structure with the potential to become new and unexpected things.34 Thereby, listening to this type of language becomes a political framework to shift the singular truths and dichotomic concepts that currently make up society into concepts that encompass multiple possibilities and identities. Rather than stray from onomatopoeia entirely, however, there appear to be several ways in which Tawada manipulates onomatopoetic expressions to, at least in part, detach themselves from the stringent borders of cultural and linguistic rules. One example occurs in the first passage of this chapter with the pseudo-word “zui zui” to simultaneously portray an absurd scene, imbed rhythm, and challenge readers to search for meaning within the unusual and incomprehensible. Another example of similarly interesting onomatopoeia occurs in the beginning of another of Tawada’s Amerika short stories, “Mutō unten” (“Driving Without Lights”), where the protagonist “you” finds themself laying on the bed of a dark hotel room. This darkness is absolutely crucial to the environment of the narrative’s introduction, because it obscures the protagonist’s, and vicariously the reader’s, vision.

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  61 As a result, sound and listening are pushed to the forefront as the only way to map the narrative space while simultaneously revealing the uncertain anxiety that exists within invisibility. In fact, the narrator begins by describing the protagonist’s sensitivity to the sounds of a hotel: You heard the sound of someone cutting their nails in the distance. It echoed carefully and at intervals – clip, clip (pachin pachin). The intervals grew longer when the person most likely moved from finger to finger, toe to toe. Even after all ten fingers and toes were finished, the sound continued. How many digits did this person have? The clipping gradually grew rounder and mellower (marukunatte), turning into a tap, tap (kotsu kotsu). Someone was knocking at the door.35 What is noteworthy about this passage is that the onomatopoetic words (pachin pachin and kotsu kotsu) are simultaneously read as sounds and shapes on the page. In fact, their shape, in part, supplements the perception of their sound. The sound pachin pachin (clip, clip) is heard at a high pitch, representing the metallic sound of clippers. The chin portion of this word’s characters, in particular, forms a somewhat visually hard combination that ends with an “n” – from which initiating a new word is an impossibility. The narration then remarks that the sound gradually grows “mellower,” or literally “rounder (marukunatte),” as it transforms into the kotsu kotsu (tap, tap) of someone knocking at the door. This kotsu kotsu signals to the Japanese literate reader that the sound has become deeper and, perhaps, raspier. The material reverberating the sound is, therefore, something grainer than the metal of the clippers, such as wood. If we then observe the shape of the characters for kotsu kotsu, it is clear that it is not just the sound, but the shape of the Japanese word that has grown “rounder.” In essence, the sound of nail clipping transforms – both physically on the page and audibly within the sonic imagination – into the sound of knocking at the door. This fluidity of the sounds, rhythms, and shapes of words that start off as one thing and easily become something else marks a central concern in the entire story that suggests an indiscernibility between exterior sounds and the ways in which they are internally perceived. One onomatopoeic word (pachin pachin) that linguistically has nothing to do with the other (kotsu kotsu) nevertheless gives birth to the latter through its newfound ability to change physical shape. A similar “unhomely” phenomenon was also seen with the repeating “h” words in “Portrait of a Tongue,” where each “h” sound produces the next. In essence, the act of listening to the sounds of words has the potential to discover, or perhaps rediscover, new meanings that are not related to usual structures of language prescribed by hegemonic organizations but open a space of alternate understanding of sound, words, and audibility in literature. While the textual medium may appear to be an inhibition to the use of sound, Tawada uses it to her advantage by expressing the sound of onomatopoeia in the passage above with at least two levels of perception: visible and auditory. They are not entirely separate dichotomies but rather intertwine in a way that blurs the very boundary that is believed to exist between them. In effect, the sonicity of

62  Kenia Avendaño Hara the word, as well as its shape on the page, mimics the sensations that emerge when listening to sound. Simultaneously, sound is made audio-visible to the reader while remaining solely audible – and therefore invisible – to the helpless protagonist in the darkness of the hotel room. This lack of control becomes especially clear in another passage where the music from another room makes the protagonist begin moving to the beat: You involuntarily bobbed (gokkuri gokkuri) your chin up and down. It made a clunk (kotsun) whenever it dropped as far as it could go and sounded like bone thumping against wood. What in the world was your chin hitting? Since your chin did not hurt, you started to wonder whether it was even your own. You tried to stroke it but failed to find your own hand to stroke it with.36 Here, the lack of certain vision and newfound reliance on the ambiguity of sound makes the protagonist virtually invisible and unable to find their own body. As was a goal in the Fluxus movement, the subject, through transsensory, transmedia, and transnational movements, becomes positioned in an unmappable state that “is everywhere and therefore nowhere to be found.”37 The invisibility of the subject allows it to become a product of the imagination, configured not by vision but by the possibilities formed by the types of sounds and rhythms of the dark room. In other words, the sound enables a type of engagement with the text that alters the reader’s perspective on what is real, compelling a reconsideration of the singularity of the already known. The darkness provides a device that obscures the visible – the known – and incites close listening and “look-listening” as a way to expose alternate possibilities of the known that have not been previously considered. In the darkness, the protagonist is even forced to rethink the borders of their own body – the vessel of their identity – as their physical existence becomes entwined with intangible sounds. On one hand, this “unhomely” experience can incite a fear of uncertainty concerning where the body and self have gone and whether they even still exist. On the other hand, the escape from the body and “home” can instill an exciting sense of freedom that enables the protagonist to escape the burden of labels that the body carries and recreate themselves from their own imagination. Transposing the allegedly visible body with the invisibility of sound gives the anxiety-producing illusion of distances becoming simultaneity and constantly changing their position and shape. This may seem contradictory, since, as Walter Ong indicates in “The Shifting Sensorium,” “writing transposes language to a spatial medium…shift[ing] the balance of the sense away from the aural to the visual.”38 However, Tawada’s passage in effect flips this balance in a way that does not completely turn to the aural. Rather, it mixes and, therefore, complicates the “sensorium” by experimenting directly with the spatiality of her medium in which language has been transposed. In this framework, the words on the page are simultaneously ephemeral when perceived as atmospheric sound and concrete in its written medium. Listening then does not replace but rather extends vision as a way of engaging with the world of Tawada’s narrative in ways that contradict the usual norm. Again, the reader is faced with the “unhomeliness” of the author’s

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  63 manipulation of words that produce this mixed sensorium and alternate method of perceiving sound. In doing so, we are provided an opportunity to read language in different ways and to rediscover significance in the exposed strangeness of words and methods of identification. In short, Tawada’s deliberate mixing and blurring of the senses in “Driving Without Lights” can be understood as a way to hold the authoritarian act of strict compartmentalization in direct contention. Compartmentalization, here, includes both that of the medium and sensorium immediately in question within the space of the text while referring metaphorically to larger social categories of racial and gender identity. By reconnecting the audible back into the literary text in ways that are impossible to ignore, Tawada appears to be acutely reminding the reader of the interconnectivity and fluidity of the senses and languages. This interconnected fluidity not only resonates in the space of the page but also more broadly within the reality of her own interstitial and intersectional experiences. Conclusion: Positioning In-between Identity Tawada’s approach to language and writing often reveals a harkening to the “unhomely” in-between. In other words, she occupies an intersectional position that aims to question existing paradigms in playful ways and create space for social reconfiguration and new perspectives on society. To identify Tawada and her texts as solely German or solely Japanese is to, in essence, only read one dimension of her reality. What readers ultimately see on the page and hear through her words is not purely German or Japanese language but rather a closely transreferential language. Here, sound is not sound in a pure sense but a transsensory experience created through an “unhomely” fusion of onomatopoeia and look-listening techniques. As Brian Massumi contends in his book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, “Sensation is never simple; it is always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling. In other words, it is self-referential…a resonation, or interference pattern.”39 Similarly, Tawada’s racial, linguistic, and gender identity also resists simplicity, resonating not off fixed borders, but in the flexible and ambiguous darkness of sonic spaces in-between cultures, languages, and listening. While this may pose an uncertain and alienating position, Tawada clearly relishes in the precious prospect for emancipation from the fixed modernist state and for individual self-fulfillment. Through her literature, her experiences of “in-betweenness” and “intersectionality” manifest themselves as a global epistemic perspective that sees and hears things through interstitial pathways, while encouraging readers to empathize. In a broader theoretical context, this interstitial stance that resists a single home or cultural identity appears to seek to redefine the way that we understand society and the mixed individuals that inhabit it through audible rather than visible means. Understood through a framework of listening to spaces of discomfort, Tawada’s “unhomely” literature compels a reconsideration of in-between identities and their ability to contest aspects long taken for granted within contemporary social structures.

64  Kenia Avendaño Hara Notes 1 Tawada Yōko, Amerika: Hidō no tairiku (Tokyo: Aoshisa, 2006), 27–8. My translation. 2 Petra Fachinger, Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 113. 3 “Zui Zui Zukkorobashi,” hosted by Naomi and Peter, JapanesePod101, October 10, 2010, accessed January 15, 2020, https://www.japanesepod101.com/lesson/japanesesongs-9-zui-zui-zukkorobashi/. 4 “Zui Zui Zukkorobashi.” 5 In her essay “Überseezungen” (“Overseas-Tongues”), Tawada likens being born into Japanese language as being thrown into a sack, thereby making Japanese her “exterior skin.” “The German language, on the other hand,” she writes, “I swallowed whole, and it has been sitting in my stomach ever since.” Tawada Yōko, Überseezungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2002, 103. 6 Tawada Yōko, Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation, trans. Chantal Wright (Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 2013), 54. 7 Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 20. 8 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” trans. Alix Strachey, in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1959), 390. 9 Freud, “Uncanny,” 391. 10 Freud, “Uncanny,” 369–70. 11 Freud then goes on to connect the uncanny to an anxiety of losing the eyes, which he predictably associates as a metaphor for castration, but I do not wish to delve into that direction for the purposes of this chapter. 12 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1995): 13. 13 Tawada Yōko, “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” trans. Rachel McNichol, Manoa 18, no. 1 (2006): 141. 14 Tawada, “From Mother Tongue,” 142. 15 Yildiz provides an in-depth analysis on this point both in her book cited here and in her essay, “Tawada’s Multilingual Moves: Toward a Transnational Imaginary,” in Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Doug Slaymaker (New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2007), 77–89. 16 Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), 13. 17 See, for example, Reiko Tachibana, “Tawada Yōko’s Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany,” in Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Doug Slaymaker (New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2007), 153–68. 18 Tawada Yōko, Ekusofonii: Bōgo no soto e deru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shōten, 2003), 17. My translation. 19 Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 225. 20 Kelsky, Women on the Verge. 21 For example, former Diet member Kunihiro Masao uncontestably claimed in the early 1970s that “what makes a Japanese person more than anything else is blood.” Kunihiro Masao, Kokusai eigo no susume (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1972), 32. 22 Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual, Political, and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 23 Sharon Kinsella, “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism Against Girls,” in Bad Girls of Japan, eds. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 152. 24 Kelsky, Women on the Verge, 1. 25 Kelsky, Women on the Verge, 2.

Intersectional Identity in the Works of Tawada Yōko  65 ­

66  Kenia Avendaño Hara Kinsella, Sharon. “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism Against Girls.” In Bad Girls of Japan. Edited by Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, 143–58. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ­ Kraenzle, Christina. “Mobility, Space, and Subjectivity: Yoko Tawada and German-language Transnational Literature.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Kunihiro Masao. Kokusai eigo no susume. Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1972. LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010. LaBelle, Brandon. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018. La Driére, Craig. “Structure, Sound, and Meaning.” In Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays, 1956. Edited by Northrop Frye, 85–108. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1967. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Ong, Walter. “The Shifting Sensorium.” In The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Edited by David Howes, 25–30. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Reiko Tachibana. “Tawada Yōko’s Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany.” In Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Edited by Doug Slaymaker, 153–68. New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2007. Tawada Yōko. Amerika: hidō no tairiku. Tokyo: Aoshisa, 2006. Tawada Yōko. Ekusofonii: bōgo no soto e deru. Tokyo: Iwanami Shōten, 2003. Tawada Yōko. “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother.” Translated by Rachel McNichol. Manoa 18, no. 1 (2006): 139–43. Tawada Yōko. Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation. Translated by Chantal Wright. Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 2013. Tawada Yōko. “The Art of Being Nonsynchronous.” Translated by Susan Bernofsky. In The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound. Edited by Craig Douglas Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, 184–95. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012. Yildiz, Yasemin. “Tawada’s Multilingual Moves: Toward a Transnational Imaginary.” In Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Edited by Doug Slaymaker, 77–89. New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2007. “Zui Zui Zukkorobashi.” Hosted by Naomi and Peter. JapanesePod101. October 10, 2010. https://www.japanesepod101.com/lesson/japanese-songs-9-zui-zui-zukkorobashi/.

4

Writing and Being Written Approaches to Reading the Narrative of Kanai Mieko’s “Mado” (“Window,” 1979) ZiFan Yang

Writing in the Mentality of a Genderless Other What does it feel like to be a woman writer in Japan? A look at the table of contents of “Joryū” hōdan: Shōwa o ikita josei sakkatachi (Conversations with “Women” Writers: Showa-born Female Authors), an interview collection edited by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, may help trace the changes and continuities of Japanese women writers’ self-identification. Under the section “Meiji umare no senkusha” (“Meijiborn Pioneers”), extended chapter titles such as “Enchi Fumiko: ‘Watakushi no bungakunetsu towa chichi wa kankei arimasen, subete wa sobo no eikyō desu’” (“Enchi Fumiko: ‘My passion for literature has nothing to do with my father; it is entirely due to my grandmother’s influence’”) evoke a sense of literary solidarity among women. In the section entitled “Senchūha no sengo” (“Wartime Writers in the Postwar”), chapter titles such as “Saegusa Kazuko: ‘Watakushi wa dansei no shiten dake de sensō o toraetakunai no desu’” (“Saegusa Kazuko: ‘I do not want to perceive the war only through a male perspective’”) illustrate not only selfaffirmation but also lament at the incompetence of men writers. Curiously, in the section “Sengoha no yūutsu” (“The Melancholy of Postwar Writers”), rather than affirming their identity as female writers, the interviewees seek to blur the boundary between men and women writers. Among these, the chapter “Kanai Mieko: ‘Josei saka da to iu ishiki nashi de yondemoraitai’” (“Kanai Mieko: ‘I would like to not be read as a woman writer’”) strikingly extends from ambivalence to a direct rejection of being recognized as a “woman writer.” How should we approach such a stark transformation in attitude? Why would Hijiya-Kirschnereit categorize Kanai’s rejection as a part of the “postwar writer’s melancholy?” A close reading of the interview itself may partially answer these questions: by declaring that she would rather have the readers read her works without being aware that she is a “woman writer,” Kanai is not necessarily rejecting her gender identity, nor is she implying that “women writers” are inferior to “men writers.” Instead, she problematizes the very categorization of “women writer,” a categorization that is discriminatory due to the lack of antithesis: while comments such as “only women can write this kind of book” are quite common, comments such “only men can write this kind of book” are rarely heard.1 This emphasis on “women writers” and the absent discourse on “men writers” designates the former as a subgenre DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-5

68  ZiFan Yang and the latter as open to multiple tropes of representation: ranging from “modern writers” to “Japanese writers.” Obviously, ethnicity-orientated categorization can be equally problematic. Nonetheless, considering the theory of intersectionality, Japanese women writers are asked to represent “women” before they can even be considered to represent Japan. The sense of “postwar melancholy” probably has neither much to do with Kanai herself nor much to do with the topics she and Hijiya-Kirschnereitt discuss. Rather, it lies in the interviewer’s consternation: Kanai never answers her questions directly. As mentioned before, Kanai first problematizes the notion of “women writers” when asked about the experience of being a woman writer. When asked about the I-novel genre, she talks about European novels and the confession of sins in Christianity. When queried about the “introverted generation” (naikō no sedai, a term invented to point to certain Japanese writers in the 1970s), she discusses social issues in developed countries and the writings of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka. At the end of the day, nothing specifically informative or representative of Japanese writers or women writers can be extracted from this interview. No wonder Hijiya-Kirschnereit comments that “I felt like I was talking to a European writer.”2 Nonetheless, just like her attitude toward the categorization of women writers, Kanai rejects being regarded a “Western-style writer” and simply replies “that is a misunderstanding.”3 Perhaps due to this short response, HijiyaKirschnereit describes Kanai in the afterword as the “most European-like” writer.4 The lingering question may then be: if Kanai’s disinclination toward the trope of women writers and her frequent references to European writers does not affirm but rather criticizes sexist and Orientalist self-internalization, where can we locate such criticism most concretely? The answer may as well be a return to Kanai’s fictional writings and her narrative strategies. In other words, I propose to reverse the relationship between nonfiction and fictional texts by treating the interview transcript as unelaborated problematics and Kanai’s fictional writings as sites of literary criticism and a corpus of subversive readership. At first sight, one could not help but associate the recurring figures of a gender-neutral narrator in “Usagi” (“Rabbits,” 1976; Eng. tr. 1982) and male artist protagonist in Tama-ya (Oh Tama! 1987; Eng. tr. 2019) with Kanai’s wish to be regarded as a genderless author. Meanwhile, just as the interview title should not be taken at face value, nor should Kanai’s narrative strategies be reduced to a fantasy of becoming a male writer. Instead of portraying established artists and writers, Kanai’s male characters and narrators are often portrayed as mundane and marginal, who spend more time wandering around than doing actual work, and whose artistic aspirations remain unfulfilled throughout the stories. One might argue that these struggles and aspirations can be shared by both men and women, established and unestablished artists. That is, indeed, an accurate observation. Differences, however, lie not in struggles and aspirations themselves but rather in their specific modes and outcomes. An investigation into Kanai’s “Mado” (“Windows”; Eng. tr. 2009), a 1979 short story, may illuminate how Kanai’s pursuit of a gender-neutral writer identity is accomplished not through imitating but rather through subverting the image of art and artists portrayed in

Writing and Being Written  69 European literature. Ultimately, can we really describe Kanai as a writer who “sees Japan from the perspective of outsiders?”5 The very title of her short story “Windows” suggests that she is concerned with neither the self nor the other, but rather the medium that allows our conception of these ideas in the first place. Through the Windows Can authors reject the gaze of their readers? Notwithstanding expressing her hope of being approached as a genderless writer, Kanai also acknowledges that “it would not be possible.”6 At the same time, can characters reject the gaze of their authors? The question itself may sound absurd, as no stories could be written without creating characters. Nonetheless, written in the transduction of two narrative voices – one from a genderless narrator, one from a nameless protagonist – Kanai is able to kill two birds with one stone, the gazing readers and the gazing authors, by illuminating the impossibility of representation. Plot-wise, nothing really happens in “Windows”: the story begins with a description of a photographer’s everyday life, jumps to a writer’s struggle with writing, focuses on the photographer’s childhood memories, and then ends with the photographer’s continued endeavor to represent “the eternity of the instant.”7 Despite the lack of plot development, the story comprises multiple narratives; it is also full of philosophical wonderment. Narratologically, the story may be divided into four parts: it begins as a mediated narration told by a heterodiegetic narrator kare (he/him); it then turns into a metanarrative in which the character challenges the narrator’s ability to represent him fully. In the following phase, it becomes a retrospective first-person narrative told by a homodiegetic narrator; at the end of the story, it returns to the beginning – a narrative mediated by the heterogenetic narrator who probes the thoughts of kare. Meanwhile, shifts in narrative structure are accompanied by a proliferation of negotiations around the issue of “eternity of the instant” (shunkan no eiensei): in part one, it is negotiated in relation to photography and the body; in part two, it is negotiated in relation to plants and fiction writing; in part three, it is negotiated in relation to memory and relics; in part four, it is negotiated in relation to photography and film. Considering its multitude in narrative structures and motifs, the story’s significance may be observed in the following ways. First, the nameless photographer’s dull, repetitive, everyday life and his “simple desire for women” implies a parody of Charles Baudelaire’s portrayal of the artist M.G. and the women in “The Life of a Modern Painter” (11). Second, the metafictional element destabilizes the distinction between authors and their characters, heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators; such destabilization, thus, invites a reconsideration of the issues of authorship and readership. Finally, the narrator’s interest in the “eternity of the instant” and pursuit of a “cut off from the continuous progression of time” suggest creative subversions of Baudelaire’s notion of “eternity of the ephemerality” (for Baudelaire, “modernity, is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s distaste of ruins (for Goethe, historical sites such as ruins

70  ZiFan Yang are mere “ghosts,” whereas “growth of trees” and “age of people” reveal signs of “real historical time”; 11, 14).8 Following the narrator’s attempt at compressing and merging multiplicity into a singularity, this chapter also fuses the above observations and argues that the subverted implications of “women,” “author,” “art,” and “time” are precisely accomplished through the employment of metanarrative, embedded narrative, and “time-category narrative discourses” – through the enfolding of the writing “I” into the being-written “him.”9 Women: From Muses to Bodies In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire portrays women in an oscillating voice of ridicule and praise, contempt and appreciation. However, such an oscillation does not point to contradictoriness or obscureness but rather a differentiation between fantasy and reality. Praise and appreciation are attributed to the artists’ perception of women, whereas satire and contempt are attributed to women themselves. To quote from Baudelaire: The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend; that awe-inspiring being, incommunicable like God (with this difference that the infinite does not reveal itself because it would blind and crush the finite, whereas the being we are speaking about is incommunicable only, perhaps, because having nothing to communicate).10 From this, we may gain a better grasp of this division: women seem to be the source of happiness and inspiration for these artists, yet women themselves are ignorant and incommunicable. In this way, beauty lies neither in men nor in women but in the men’s contemplation of women’s incomprehensiveness, the simultaneity of their dazzling apparel, and their empty heads. Women do not inspire the artist through their intelligence but rather their lack of intellect and even evilness. Indeed, Jeffery Meyers observes that: From Homer in classical Greece to Milton in the English Renaissance, epic poets have invoked the sacred muses for inspiration. In a perverse rejection of this noble tradition, Baudelaire and Nietzsche did not seek inspiration from the goddesses, embodiments and sponsors of art, but pursued destructive women who tormented and humiliated them. …They made the writers suffer, suffering inspired their art and their art portrayed the malicious muses who made them suffer.11 Such discourse on women’s entangled ignorance and charm continues to affect contemporary society, and Japan is not an outlier. In the essay “Chiteki josei” (“Intellectual Women,” 1977), Kanai acutely observes that the phrase intellectual women (chiteki josei) is often employed with malice and ridicule.12 Similar to the

Writing and Being Written  71 category of “women writers,” behind the category of “intellectual women” lies the consensus that most women are “incomprehensible, animalistic, and incapable of conducting logical reasoning.”13 Meanwhile, the seemingly positive word “charm” equally has less to do with the women themselves but more to do with men’s need to conceal and justify their “desire for sexual intercourse.”14 Taking Baudelaire’s condescending portrayal and Kanai’s rejection of categorization into consideration, the opening of “Windows” may, thus, be read as a form of parodic stylization. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, parodic stylization is a: type of internally dialogized interillumination of languages, the intentions of the representing discourse are at odds with the intentions of the represented discourse; they fight against them, they depict a real-world of objects not by using the represented language as a productive point of view, but rather by using it as an exposé to destroy the represented language.15 To quote from “Windows”: But he was not thinking of women in terms of what is commonly referred to as the incomprehensibility of their way of thinking and their physiology. Only when he became aware that women as physical existences were living within the eternity of the instant did he think of them – or it might be more accurate to say that he pursued his desire without thinking, and that was all he did with regard to women. Apart from that, he read books and ate meals and worked to get the money necessary for his meals and books and, at all costs, for pursuing his simple desire for women. (11) Like Baudelaire’s M.G., the nameless kare is equally interested in the “eternity of instant”; however, for kare, women remain irrelevant from his pursuit of the “eternity of instant.” Instead, his desire for women rather represents intervals where he stops probing. The nameless photographer’s desire for women, then, exposes neither the incomprehensibility of the women nor his curiosity for that – thus nonexistent – incomprehensiveness; it rather exposes his own basic, biological needs. Traces of parodic stylization lie in Kanai’s sarcastic iteration of the phrase “their incomprehensibility way of thinking” (shikō no fukakai) in her mobilization of an oscillating voice that meanders between “thinking” (kangaeru) and “without thinking” (kangae nashi ni, 11). By exposing the male artist’s stream of thought as noncontinuous and broken, Kanai does not necessarily negate the intellectuals’ depiction of women as incorrect – no, women are not empty-headed – but rather reveals their own hypocrisy and inconsistency – no, these intellectuals are not interested in women’s “incomprehensibility”; they are merely interested in their bodies. The significance of “Windows” lies not only in its parodic response to Baudelaire’s discussion on art and women but also in its parodic attitude toward narrative itself. Unlike interviews and essays where the speakers are clearly identified, fiction

72  ZiFan Yang asks a further question: “but who is ridiculing here?” As mentioned previously, the opening section of “Windows” is a mediated narration by a heterodiegetic speaker. It would be impossible to categorize the point of view as “third-person omniscient” or “third-person limited” since the nameless and genderless “watashi” (I) remains uncertain whether they have transmitted kare’s thoughts accurately: such sense of uncertainty may be seen from phrases such as “or perhaps I should say” (to iu yori) and “or it might be more accurate to say” (toitta hō ga seikaku kamo shirenai no da ga, 11).16 The narrator’s constant need to adjust his/her judgment poses another question: is kare’s simple desire – just like Baudelaire’s characterization of women – equally inauthentic, as it tells more about watashi’s impression of kare and less of kare’s own thoughts? In fact, why would kare want his story to be told in another person’s voice, and why would watashi want to write it out? The answer is a double negation: “He required an objective listener to his dreams, though why I was chosen as that listener is unfathomable (kare wa jibun no musō ni tsuite kyakkan teki na kikite to iu mono o hitsuyō to shiteita wake na no da ga, naze mata sono kikite ni watashi ga erabareta no ka wa, wakaranai).”17 By double negation, I refer to the very lack of a subject pronoun in the closing phrase. I translated it as “unfathomable” since Kanai does not write “I do not understand” or “he does not understand.” Considering that it is quite common to omit subject pronouns in Japanese, in terms of context, we may also understand it as “I do not understand.” For instance, Paul McCarthy has translated the phrase “wakaranai” as “beyond me” (12). Nonetheless, as observed by Sharalyn Orbaugh in Ōe and Beyond, Kanai “is concerned with the relationship between writer, reader, and text – or, rather, she is concerned with the impossibility of distinguishing these roles according to some unique function.”18 In light of Orbaugh’s argument, the closing phrase reflects not only the intricacy of the Japanese language but also Kanai’s very manipulation of that intricateness. By omitting subjective pronouns, Kanai portrays the lack of understanding as inclusive and layered – an unfathomableness shared among kare, watashi, and even the readers. Considering that Kanai’s ultimate goal lies not in destroying the represented language but in complicating “representation” itself, her use of parodic stylization echoes not only with Bakhtin but also with Judith Butler. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity, Butler opens the book with the question of “whether feminist politics could do without a ‘subject’ in the category of women.”19 In the concluding chapter, she proposes that: Practices of parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantasmatic, and mimetic – a failed copy, as it were… And yet this failure to become “real” and to embody “the natural” is…a constitutive failure of all gender enactments for the very reason that these ontological locales are fundamentally uninhabitable.20 Indeed, by part two of “Windows” – when the narrative proliferates into a metafictional confrontation between the genderless narrator and the nameless

Writing and Being Written  73 protagonist – such a sense of failure grows more fraught as kare directly accuses watashi of an inadequate and even inaccurate portrayal. Nonetheless, as argued above by Butler, such failure – such dramatic repetition of distinction – not only exposes the inauthenticity of the failed copy but also sneers at the (supposedly) original. Building upon Butler’s argument, I would contend that while drag performance functions to destabilize the assumption of essential gender identity, the act of writing in the mentality of a gendered other challenges not only the hierarchy relationship between men and women but also the hierarchy relationship between writing and being written. Though operating in subtler and more literary forms, the second type of parody is of great necessity: the hierarchical relationship between the artist and the muse remains even with the problematization of gender identity. Yet, through the very act of fiction writing, Kanai reveals the corporeality of both the artists and the muses, the spectator and the spectacle. In fact, several scholars have already brought up the issue of corporeality. For instance, Atsuko Sakaki has illuminated the issue of corporeality in “Windows” by arguing that: the face that concerns ‘I’ here is not that of a spectacle but a part of the spectator’s body. Although his own face is fixed to the lens and thus remains invisible to him, its physical presence is painfully felt in coordination with other parts of his body.21 In addition to the malleability of the photographer’s body, the coalescence of bathroom and darkroom (“he had long since turned his bathroom into a darkroom”) and the photographer’s fascination with the public bath further illustrates the transformation from the artist/muse paradigm to equalization and solidarity of all beings as bodies: “he felt as if people’s bodies were always about to melt away in the midst of the steam and hot water. He became one of those whose bodies were about to melt away” (12). In the following sections, we will learn that the melting body does not signal the death of the art but rather the birth of a new kind of art, or more precisely, a new kind of artistic expression. Author: From Creating to Negotiating with the Characters The merging of the artist and the muse, the writers and the characters into one category – the body – also necessitates a reconfiguration of the act of writing. As mentioned previously, part two of the story is a first-person narrative revolving around the struggle of writing and the livelihood of plants. It is the section where the narrator-writer watashi expresses their anxiety toward the act of writing, especially the act of creating characters through the use of intertext: When I began to think about writing – plants got in the way of it. If you ask just how they got in the way, I cannot clearly recall at this point; but the images of death and rebirth within plants grew up inside me like a forest and turned into pain at my being here, creating a painful sense of oppression. (12)

74  ZiFan Yang And: I tore apart a cigarette pack and wrote the following on the white inner surface with a ballpoint pen: Is my gaze necessary for me to write about him? Is my existence as both narrator and at the same time recorder necessary to write that? Should I hide myself quietly behind him, and give him a name (A capital letter, or a very ordinary, realistic name?) and have him make his appearance as a character all of a sudden? (13) Before diving directly into literary analysis, I would like to first introduce a couple of intertexts outside the narrative: namely, Kanai’s essays and works of literary criticisms that have influenced Kanai’s attitude toward the issue of authorship. In her collection of essays Yoru ni natte mo asobitsuzukero (Keep on Playing even at Night, 1977), Kanai devotes three essays to the issue of readership and authorship: “Yomu koto no kairaku” (“The Joy of Reading”), “Kaiteinai toki no sakka” (“When Authors Aren’t Writing”), and “Kakanai koto no fuan, kaku koto no fukou” (“The Unease of Not Writing, the Misfortune of Writing”). Through a comparative reading of the three essays, we can recognize how the act of writing has different meanings for Kanai under different contexts. In “Yomu koto no kairaku,” writing is essentially a desire derived from the act of reading: “while I am reading, I cannot resist the urge to write my own fiction.”22 Just as the significance of reading is often approached from two angles: as adventuring and as experiencing “overlappings between fiction and reality,” the experience of writing also meanders between the desire of mimesis (since reading is also about learning from previous writers) and the hope of creating something new on one’s own.23 Ultimately, to write is to “exile” (tōbō). It is almost self-reflexive, as it is not only an escape from reality but also an escape from the very act of writing: “it is an exile from writing, from the reluctance of writing, from the impotence of writing.”24 Previously, I have discussed how the opening of “Windows” may be read as a kind of parody that problematizes not only the represented language but also representation. The issue of parody returns in “Yomu koto no kairaku” as Kanai compares the writer with the protagonist of Don Quixote: “we may say that the craziness of Don Quixote is a characteristic shared among all writers.”25 In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson identifies Don Quixote as “the first (modern, or realist) novel, with the function of demystification.”26 As the first realist novel and one of the most iconic parodies, Don Quixote profoundly ridicules the chivalric romance. However, if ridicule and demystification are achieved through the very form of fiction writing, that means that we will no longer able to divide the parodying subject (the author) and the object of parody (the character): as suggested by Kanai, what are the differences between the bookwormish, self-declared knight and “the bibliophile writer?”27 We may now draw a full circle on Kanai’s meaning of parody: it begins as a ridicule of a specific discourse (such as the saying that women are charming but empty-headed), then mutates into a reflection on the limits of ridicule, and finally returns to a recognition that writers – the parodying

Writing and Being Written  75 subjects – are at once objects of parody, for one could not write fiction without a certain degree of “ridiculousness.”28 While initially discussed in a rather cheerful manner, in the latter two essays, Kanai begins to focus more on the negative sides of writing, as now writing is no longer a derivative of reading but rather implicates the issue of authorship and the market. In “Kaiteinai toki no sakka,” Kanai wonders whether diary and letter writing could be counted as the time when authors are not writing. Kafka’s diary and letters, for Kanai, reveal a sense of “stubbornness” (koshitsu) that defines his authorship even when he is not writing fiction.29 In “Kakanai koto no fuan, kaku koto no fukou,” Kanai continues to refer to Kafka’s diary. However, though experiencing a similar sense of unease and even misfortune, for Kanai, the source of such misfortune lies in the recognition that she has “rarely thought about life seriously”; it also is doubtful whether her writing is “true writing” (hontō ni kaku to iu koto) or “fundamentally void” (jitsu wa nani mo kakarete inai).30 From her consistent mentioning of phrases such as “manuscript,” “deadline,” and “payment,” we may infer that such a sense of nihilism is triggered not from writing itself but from the bondages of the market and print capitalism.31 In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that print-capitalism enabled “people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.”32 However, the irony is that the very group of people who indirectly fostered such a sense of belonging – the writers – instead often suffer from doubt and despair. But, their doubts are not merely metaphysical: these doubts are precisely derived from print-capitalism, from their position as the inferior sellers: as argued by Karatani Kōjin, “the position of selling is structurally always weaker than the position of buying precisely because the salto mortale only exists on the side of the seller, who must pray, so to speak, to realize the value in a sale.”33 In short, when the writers can no longer decide for themselves whether their writings have meaning (imi) and value (kachi), misfortune arises.34 At the end of the essay, Kanai acknowledges that the problem is not irresolvable: “if one hates writing, one could simply stop writing.”35 However, for her, writing means “peeping into the only Real.”36 While yuiitsu no shinjitsu may be translated as the only truth or the only reality, considering Kanai’s interests in critical theory and her strategy of making negation through playful and overt affirmation, we may infer that Kanai’s wording of echoes with Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the Real.” If the Real describes “the interminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped,” then fictional writing – which seems to be the very attempt at representation but simultaneously exposes the limits and even impossibility of representation, leaving the desire for representation eternally unfulfilled – necessitates a return to the preimagery, presymbolic stage through its very manipulation of imagery and symbolism.37 From this quotation, we may infer that for Kanai, the meaning of writing is inconsistent mutation. It originated from the joy of reading and self-parody. However, the necessity of creating and selling meaning may trigger self-doubt, anxiety, and disappointment. Ultimately, writing becomes neither joyful nor painful; it is deeply ingrained in life. No matter how miserable it is, the act of writing becomes

76  ZiFan Yang the Real, and a life without writing becomes unimaginable – in Kanai’s words, the equivalent of death (hontō ni kakanaku nattara, sore wa shi da).38 After surveying Kanai’s essays, the metaphor of plants and the use of intertextuality become much more telling. The narrator of “Windows” cannot help but watch “the image of death and rebirth within plants grew up inside me as a forest” (shokubutsu no motsu shi to saisei no imēji ga mori no kibo de fura kumi) because writing shares similar features with the biological life cycle (12). One becomes a writer through reading, and even when one wants to give up writing, the urge to write will come back as long as they continue to be a reader. More importantly, even if one stops to write, their works will serve as sources of inspiration for future writers. It is not only an endless loop but also helplessly reproductive. At this point, readers of Kanai may realize that the reproductive, repressive, and even violent aspects of writing have also appeared in other short stories, such as Kanai’s most well-known story, “Rabbits,” in which the girl Sayuri’s impulse to tell her story is compared with her impulse to kill the rabbit and the rapid reproduction of the rabbits despite her frequent killings. Apart from the corporeality of writing, intertext – namely, the insertion of diaries or memo-like writings within the story – is also a feature that appears in both “Rabbits” and “Windows.” In “Rabbits,” the narrator-writer – once again, nameless and gender-neutral – begins the story by confessing in their diary that “writing (also not writing, since that is part of the whole process) means putting pen to paper and this I can no longer escape. To write would seem to be my fate.”39 Similarly, in “Windows,” the narrator expresses their unsettlement by means of scribbling on an impromptu medium: “I tore apart a cigarette pack and wrote the following” (12). With her essay “Kakanai toki no sakka” in mind, we may then interpret Kanai’s frequent insertion of memo-like texts as a salute to Kafka’s diary and letters. Considering her reference to Blanchot in “Yomu koto no kairaku,” such use of intertext may also be read as an extended reflection upon Maurice Blanchot’s discussion of Kafka’s diaries. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot observes that: Kafka, perhaps without knowing it, felt deeply that to write is to surrender to the incessant; and, out of anxiety – fear of impatience – and scrupulous attention to the work’s demand, he most often denied himself the leap which alone permits finishing, the insouciant and happy confidence by which (momentarily) a limit is placed upon the interminable.40 Blanchot’s summary perfectly captures the sense of anxiety and despair experienced by Kafka and expressed by Kanai in “Rabbits,” in which the narrator declares in the diary that to write seems to be their “fate” (unmei). However, the metafictional confrontation between the narrator and the protagonist in “Windows” breaks the space of solitude and reconfigures it as a space constituting continuous negotiations between the writing and the being written: Might he not say that he was a different sort of person? If it were possible to do so, he might very well make some sort of mild objection: “The part you

Writing and Being Written  77 didn’t write – I’m sure you realize this, of course, but what you wrote about was only one small part, and what you didn’t write of was much, much larger. And I feel that I’m living my life within the flow of the time you didn’t write about. Besides, you don’t know anything about me, and I bet you never really cared about me at all….” That’s how he might have spoken to me. “Do you intend to say that I, the character, am yourself, the author?” (13) Here, the imagined dialog between watashi and kare reminds us of Roland Barthes’s article “The Death of Author.” Barthes begins the article by citing a quote from Honoré de Balzac’s novella “Sarrasine”: “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.” He then raises the question, “who is speaking in this way?” Is it “the man Balzac,” “the author Balzac,” “universal wisdom,” or “romantic psychology?”41 For Barthes, there is no correct answer: All writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.42 Put in more simplistic terms, we would not be able to derive any correct answer from the perspective of the Author, as the text itself is only “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture … a lost, infinitely remote imitation.”43 All the above possible answers, then, come from readers’ interpretations: “the true locus of writing is reading.”44 Reading “Windows” as not only a piece of narrative but also a corpus of literary criticism, the confrontation between the writer and the character may, thus, be interpreted as an extended reflection upon Barthes’s discussion of authorship and readership: what will happen after the death of the author and the birth of the reader? How should we approach the characters when we recognize that they are not merely the author’s creation? For the narrator, kare originated as a living person, and watashi’s portrayal of kare – even if it is a portrayal based upon an actual conversation with kare – can never capture the real kare. He will continue to live outside the fiction, and it seems the time outside the fiction captures the more comprehensive picture. Ultimately, what makes such a metafictional confrontation possible in the first place? In other words, the characters – no matter whether they originated as living people, pure imagination, or a metamorphosis of the author’s self-portrayal – their objections cannot be heard unless they appear simultaneously in the identity of readers. Taking a closer look at kare’s objection toward watashi, we realize that it is precisely made possible through a potential readership: the potentiality of a character reading his or her author’s works. In this way, Kanai not only blurs the relationship between the author and the characters but also the relationship between the characters and the readers. By doing so, she is able to transform the reading

78  ZiFan Yang experience. In Barthes’s words, “once the Author is gone, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite useless.”45 Ultimately, the reversed relationship in “Windows” – whereby the author tries to decipher the thought of kare, who is both a character and a reader – suggests that reading is, after all, not a search for the author but a re-encounter with oneself. Art: From Representing to Replacing Life In Part 3, as the narrative authority is shifted from the narrator-writer to the protagonist-photographer, and as the photographer begins to recount his childhood and his experience with the camera, we gradually begin to understand what he meant by the abstract phrase “the eternity of the instant.” As mentioned in the introduction, the phrase “eternity of the instant” was first employed by Baudelaire and later elaborated by Marxist economic geographer David Harvey. In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey begins the first chapter by referring to Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: “Modernity, is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being eternal and the immutable.”46 Harvey then explains that for Baudelaire, the modernist artist is “someone who can concentrate his or her vision on ordinary subjects of city life, understand their fleeting qualities, and yet extract from the passing moment all the suggestion of eternity it contains.”47 In short, when living in an era of constant change and chaos, we may only record eternity by capturing ephemerality. To create such a “simultaneous effect,” artists have been creating new words and new forms of representation: for instance, using montage techniques to visualize the “spatialization of time.”48 For contemporary readers, the association between art and photography is often taken for granted. Yet, as Sakaki observes, photography is always defined in an ambivalent, even negative tone: photography has been defined in terms of what it is not … it is not fine art on the one hand … and not cinema/film on the other. Its reproducibility, affordability, and perceived contingency of production have resulted in it… being considered inferior to “fine” art – deemed highbrow, irreplaceable, and invaluable, created intentionally by an author of genius.49 Indeed, we may gain a better sense of such negativity – also the discourse on the artistic genius – by taking a peek at Baudelaire’s letter to the editor of the Revue Française: As the photographic industry became the refuge of all failed painters with too little talent, or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal craze not only assumed the air of blind and imbecile infatuation, but took on the aspect of revenge … I am convinced that the badly applied advances of photography, like all purely material progress for that matter, have greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius, rare enough in all conscience.50

Writing and Being Written  79 Once again, Kanai has no interest in directly negating Baudelaire by saying that photography is also an art. Like her very reductionist portrayal of the women in part 1, Kanai makes ridicule in overt agreement – by making the photographer kare declare “I have never considered such photographs’ ‘works of art’” (19). Meanwhile, despite considering his own photos as worthless, kare still conceives photos to be “the eternity of the moment”; such conception is derived from his first encounter with a photo of his mother: My mother, though she was no longer here, continued eternally to smile, bathed in a light that moved in the wind within the photograph. She seemed to have kept on smiling from that static moment, in the direction of her future son, whom she did not know. (17) Notwithstanding its worthiness, for the young kare, the photo is paradoxically alluring. It is able to present absence (“though she was no longer here”); it conveys a sense of eternity (“continued eternally to smile”), yet such expression is derivative from the instant (“the moment when she smiles”). It belongs to the past (“as yet unmarried, and had no thought of me”), but it also foresees the future (“in the direction of her future son”). At this point, the young boy’s experience with photos echoes quite well with Harvey’s observation that “modernism could only speak to eternity by freezing time and all its fleeting quality.”51 In addition, the exposure (“bathed in light”) and disappearance of the light (“where had the light gone?”) also remind us of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture. For the last time, the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.52 For Benjamin, the aura is “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”53 The decay of aura lies not in the invention of the camera but rather in the transformation of the viewers’ attitude toward photography: from ritual value to exhibition value. To elaborate, it lies in “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things’ closer’ spatially and humanly.”54 The young kare’s understanding of “aura” simultaneously echoes with and departs from Benjamin’s account. Like Benjamin, for the young kare, the aura comes from the expression of his mother’s countenance – a fleeting but frozen smile. However, the disappearance of aura lies neither in the rise of mass culture nor mechanical reproduction. Just as writing is painfully self-reflexive and ruminating, the very presence of aura in the photo lies in recognition of the simultaneous

80  ZiFan Yang absence of aura in real life. In this way, by asking, “where has that light gone,” kare is not referring to the light of the photo (since his mother continued to be “bathed in a light that moved in the wind within the photograph”) but rather something more concrete yet also more absurd: why can I only see that light in this single photograph? Was it taken away by her marriage, aging, and death? Or, is the camera responsible for committing the very crime of peeling away the light in real life? In kare’s grandmother’s words, “photographs suck out people’s souls” (18). These not yet fully elaborated probings explain why kare soon exposes the dark side of photography: “by pressing a cylindrical, dull-silver-coloured piece of metal … one could peel away a sliver from the radiance of the world of matter and time” (18). This quotation answers the previous question by suggesting that rather than refracting the aura, photographing takes it away. In this way, photography is no longer the reflection of reality but the replacement of reality. The danger of replacement is heightened in the following paragraph, as the narrator-protagonist declares: “I want to take all the instances of time that I was living and enwrap them in a thin layer of photographs” (19). While the product (the photos) may create an effect of the “eternity of the instant,” the process is another matter: both instances and eternity melt away when the act of photography takes the place of one’s life completely. By the end of this paragraph, the narrator reveals that photographing not only peels away “radiance” and “time” but also his “very existence”: “I think of my world as an onion that, however much its skin may be peeled away, never weeps … a world with no inner core” (19). In short, we may argue that while the wording may sound similar, Baudelaire wants to extract eternity from ephemerality, whereas the narrator in “Windows” ultimately wants the opposite. In the previous section, I have discussed how Kanai employs metanarrative to contextualize the issue of authorship and readership; the narrator’s subversion of the meaning of art can be posited in relation to embedded narrative. In Section 5 of Narratology, Mieke Bal discusses Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert’s works and argues that “both authors use the possibility of quoting embedded speeches … to explore the limits of their chosen contemporary poetics.”55 The photographer’s recollection in Part 3 might function as the employment of “quoting embedded speeches,” as it is enveloped within the writer’s narration. It begins after the writer’s recollection of his encounter with the photographer: “I was taken back when he spoke to me that spring afternoon. Please listen to what I have to say” (13). It ends when the writer takes back the narrative authority, almost abruptly: “thus his story continued” (20). Such an embedding, thus, leads one to wonder whether the first-person recollection in Part 3 should be read as a direct quotation of the photographer’s speech or a reconstructed narrative produced by the writer. In other words, does the pronoun watashi indicate the voice of the character kare or the writer’s mere imagination of kare – thus still the voice of the writer? By posing this question, I do not intend to answer but rather argue that the problematization of identity may be read as a complement to the photographer’s understanding of the self: an onion without an inner core. The answer to “who is speaking” here, thus, becomes irrelevant: the pronoun “who” is already removed. What is left is the elongated act of speaking: “no matter how long he talked, time didn’t flow” (20).

Writing and Being Written  81 Temporality: From Progressive Time to Disorderly Time In Speech, Genres, and Other Essays, Bakhtin argues that the most significant type of Bildungsroman is the type where “man’s emergence is accomplished in real historical time”; he also argues that such a type is presented most profoundly in the works of Goethe.56 When reading the term “historical time,” it is perhaps common to understand it as “what happened in the past” and connect it to historical sites and figures. However, for Goethe, historical sites such as ruins are mere “ghosts,” whereas “growth of trees” and “ages of people” reveal signs of real historical time. How so? Bakhtin explains that these signs indicate the correspondence between time and nature, time and human life, thus revealing time in its visible form. More importantly, by combining the human and the natural signs, we may grasp “traces of human hands and minds that change nature.”57 Perhaps, behind Goethe’s emphasis on such a connection lies a historicist thinking: that history itself must be consistently in the process of “becoming.” Signs of the past are only meaningful when contributing to it. As a result, signs that show continuous degradation rather than continual growth are discarded as “ghosts.” Apart from his first encounter with the camera, kare also recounts his first visit to a ruined army weapons depot: It was not such an old building; it probably dated from around the same time as the regimental buildings. But in those ruins, there was what one might call the hum of a special kind of time that transcended actual, chronological time. (15) As kare grows up, his fascination with the camera and the ruins will gradually merge into one, by means of taking photos of the ruins: “it was this half-ruined model of time that I first chose as a ‘subject,’ so I remember it all very clearly” (15). Taking Bakhtin’s discussion into account, the photographer’s fascination with the army depot and “cutoff from the continuous progression of time” can, thus, be read as a subversion of Goethe’s distaste of the ruins. While the ruins are reduced to “ghosts” in classical bildungsroman, in “Windows,” it is transformed into a site of entertainment for the kids: “it was obvious that children of the neighborhood slipped through to play” (15). What are the implications behind the children’s obsession with the army depot? Perhaps rather than showing their ignorance of the depot’s negative connotation, Kanai is suggesting that the children may offer a more sensitive insight into the relationship between architecture and temporality: was it that I conceived [through the windows of the army depot], in my childish mind, the emptiness of space that ought to be filled, the darkness of the universe that comes when the image of the continuous progression of time is at an end? (14) Here, the word “ought” (beki) suggests that while being extremely sensitive and imaginative, as a child, the photographer shares Goethe’s fear. However, as he grows up and encounters the camera, fear is transformed into fascination: “the boy

82  ZiFan Yang who dreamed of enclosing each and every second within eternity decided to take one photograph of the ruins at the same time every day” (20). After spending 20 years of ascetical efforts, the photographer produces 7,305 photographs and transfers them into a movie film: “in the five-minute film, the ruined walls are pulled down, down, and in the slow movement of time, they begin slowly, silently melt away” (21). Although taking a positive stance toward it, this quote does, to some degree, share with Goethe’s metaphor of the “ghost”: “that process was too slow for human eyes to see” (21). In fact, the photographer’s obsession with the camera lies precisely in the discrepancy between the camera lens and the naked eyes: “something is filtered out within the camera … something disordered, something we might even call disorder of the world, is violently emphasized on the small surface of the photo” (21). Taking the ghost metaphor and the “disorder of the world” together, we may infer that the camera produces a different kind of temporality incoherent with human beings’ experience of time in everyday life. Yet through this incoherence, it captures the changes that have been ignored by the naked eyes, such as the gradual degradation of the army depot. Thus, the camera does not merely symbolize the eye, but instead, it operates as a “third eye,” one that sees through “the ghosts.” As a story that deals with both the issue of photography and writing, the subversion of time may also be read concerning the “order” of narratives, a term coined by Gérard Genette. In “Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu,” Genette points out that early in the Homeric epic, there is a discrepancy between “the real order of events and the order of the narrative.”58 He then argues that “Proust made a much more extensive use than any of the predecessors of his freedom to reorder the temporality of events.”59 To support his point, he divides the narrative into five times: the first time … refers to a moment that cannot be dated with precision but that must take place quite late in the life of the protagonist … the second moment refers to the memory relived by the protagonist during his sleepless night … the third moment again moves far ahead…the [the fourth moment is a ] a second return to Combray … the fifth moment is a very brief return to the initial state of sleeplessness.60 Taking Genette’s analysis into consideration, we may infer that the narrative time of A la recherche du temps perdu is neither progressive nor regressive but circular. In like manners, the narrative of “Windows” is progressed through a rather “circular time”: it also begins with no specific reference to time, turns into a retrospection of the narrator-writer’s encounter with the photographer, and then tells the photographer’s childhood memory; lastly, it returns to the beginning. Just as metanarrative and embedded narrative may be read as rhetorics of authorship and art, the zigzag-like order of “Windows” may be read as the writer’s attempt at replicating the photographer’s experience of time: “no matter how long he talked, time didn’t flow. It did flow very slowly, but he remained static in the midst of it” (20). Through the lack of time specifications, the narrator-writer, thus, creates an everlasting, almost tiring experience of remembering. Just as kare is always

Writing and Being Written  83 thinking about the “eternity of the instant,” watashi is always thinking about their encounter with kare: the act of retrieving this very incidental instance becomes a part of watashi’s everyday life. Just as kare has not yet produced – or perhaps never will – a photograph that perfectly captures the “eternity of instant,” watashi has not yet finished – or perhaps has not even begun – writing the story of kare. In short, we may infer that their experience of time parallels “the order,” whereas their untiring repetition on the same matters parallels Genette’s notion of “frequency.” Conclusion The window is often taken as a symbol of perspective and reflection; so has been the case in both literature and visual art: the reader holds a book as if holding the mirror of the author; the artist paints in the hope of representing life – notwithstanding whether it is about “eternity,” or “ephemerality,” or “eternity of the ephemerality.” However, through a meta-, embedded, and disordered narrative, Kanai focuses on the very process of writing and photographing and tells a reverse story: how writers could be dependent upon their characters and readers; how artworks invoke a danger of opening up a void, rather than filling it; how it may simultaneously steal the light in real life while offering an aura; and lastly, how the camera lens (as ghost eyes) and the writer’s pen (as time machine) possess the power of creating a kind of temporality that is diverted from our cognition of “real time” yet reveals more about the reality itself: thus offering a passage into the unknown. Notes 1 Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Joryū” hōdan: Shōwa o ikita josei sakkatachi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2018), 263. My translation. 2 Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Joryū” hōdan, 283. 3 Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Joryū” hōdan. 4 Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Joryū” hōdan, 339. 5 Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Joryū” hōdan. 6 Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Joryū” hōdan, 265. 7 Kanai Mieko, “Mado,” in Tangoshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979), 35. The English version is cited from Kanai Mieko, “Windows,” in The Word Book, trans. Paul McCarthy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 11. Hereafter, page numbers from the English translation will follow quotations in parentheses within the text. 8 See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 17. In his discussion on the bildungsroman genre, Bakhtin writes about Goethe’s distaste of ruins. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 23. 9 Gérard Genette, “Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu,” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, eds. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 121. 10 Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 37. 11 Jeffery Meyers, “Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and the Malicious Muse,” American Imago 75, no. 4 (2018): 543. 12 Kanai Mieko, “Chiteki josei,” in Yoru ni natte mo asobitsuzukero (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1977), 210. My translation. 13 Kanai, “Chiteki josei,” 214. 14 Kanai, “Chiteki josei,” 213.

84  ZiFan Yang

Writing and Being Written  85

5

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces Body, Precarity, and Language in Kawakami Mieko’s Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs, 2019) Hitomi Yoshio

Feminist scholars have pointed out the importance of “space” in considering gender relations and power, particularly the tenuous relationship between the private intimacy of domestic spaces and public realms associated with prestige. Lucy Delap, in her work on the global history of feminism, argues that contestation of space has been central to feminist thought, and illustrates how feminists across the world creatively and tenaciously appropriated spaces for political or personal means. From public spaces such as polling booths and town squares, to commercial spaces such as the tea shop, to intimate private spaces of the home, women have sought opportunities for solidarity and resistance.1 Furthermore, since the 1990s, feminist geography has reexamined the relationship between gendered power relations and the social construction of space, by theorizing space as “dynamic, socially constructed configurations with fluid and porous boundaries.”2 Space and gender have become key theoretical concepts in literary and cultural studies as well, with particular attention paid to the public–private binary that complicates the notion of domesticity and empowerment.3 As these recent studies show, approaching literary analysis through the feminist theory of space allows us to reach beyond local and national contexts to make transnational and transdisciplinary affinities with broader cultural and historical concerns. Kawakami Mieko’s (b. 1976) literary works are filled with gendered spaces – in this case, women’s spaces where men are largely absent. One could argue that Kawakami’s work shines the spotlight on female characters to explore complex philosophical questions of life and human character through their own experiences and relationships, and not as secondary counterparts to a male experience or as objects of the gaze that have dominated literature. At the same time, women’s spaces in Kawakami’s work do not provide an easy, utopian vision of connection and solidarity. Rather, they are presented as spaces of interrogation and conflict. Underlying these conflicts are the precarious conditions under which many of the characters live, and the cycle of poverty that functions both to connect and disrupt intimate relationships. One could say that Kawakami’s work explores in fiction the social realities that Anne Allison explores in her anthropological studies of precarity in contemporary Japan that counter the narrative of Japan’s postwar economic prosperity.4 This chapter explores the feminist vision of community as spatially represented in Kawakami’s novel, Natsu monogatari (Breasts and Eggs, 2019; Eng. tr. 2020).5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-6

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  87 It focuses particularly on several public spaces that function as highly intimate spaces for women who have no economic stability to gain access to private spaces or property. In this examination of spaces that blur the boundary between public and private, I will introduce three gendered spaces that, I argue, articulate Kawakami’s feminist vision of community that intersect with precarity. The first is the physical space of sentō, or the public bathhouse, which is one of the most iconic spaces in Kawakami’s fiction. Here, bodies become visible in a public yet intimate space that seems radically liberated from, but also entangled with, the social gaze. The second prominent space is the commercial space of sunakku, or the snack bar, where women from precarious backgrounds support one another and create surrogate families but are nonetheless subject to exploitation and violence as they work as hostesses to entertain male customers. The third space is the linguistic space of Osaka dialect – Kawakami’s mother tongue – which becomes a rich site of memory and solidarity, and of resistance for the women who communicate in the shared language within the dominance of Tokyo’s standard language and urban space. Through a close analysis of the three gendered spaces, this chapter addresses the following questions: how are women’s spaces idealized and envisioned as a source of power and solidarity, while at the same time complicated and problematized by the intrusion of the social gaze, or the existence of nonbinary bodies or identities? How can we think critically about “community” through the study of gendered spaces from a feminist perspective, while not overlooking the intersectionality of class, sexuality, and ethnicity? How can we interpret Kawakami’s dramatic use of the Osaka dialect as a critique of national language, and a linguistic (and perhaps literary) space for community where women can find their own voices? The Economics of Space: A Room of One’s Own? One key work in considering the importance of feminist space is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). In this feminist treatise, Woolf describes how women novelists of the 19th century had to find spaces to write in common areas within the domestic home, with constant interruption and sometimes in secret from servants and visitors: If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, – “women never have an half hour … that they can call their own” – she was always interrupted. … Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. … Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper.6 Considering this predicament, Woolf famously declares that a woman should have “a room of her own and five hundred [pounds] a year” to gain intellectual freedom.7 While this treatise shines a spotlight on the economic and social dimensions of writing, offering a practical solution to women of a certain class, Woolf’s fictional work such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) evokes

88  Hitomi Yoshio the nuanced complexities of women’s experiences in gendered spaces from the domestic home to commercial streets. Woolf’s analysis of the condition of literary production for women in 19thcentury England can also be situated in the context of early 20th-century Japan. Yosano Akiko, a prolific poet and essayist who gave birth to 12 children, describes her writing process in a similar manner. In the preface to her book of essays titled Ichigū yori (From One Corner, 1911), the editor quotes Yosano’s writing about her daily life and describes her writing process in her “notebook” (zakki-chō) as follows: Zakki-chō literally means that Akiko kept several notebooks at hand at all times, “while holding a baby, carrying one on the back, cooking food in the kitchen, lying in bed with an illness, sitting at the desk late at night with sleepy eyes, wanting to cry silently due to some muddle in the brain, and feeling irritated and angry all by oneself.” With a brush, a pencil, a pen, a red ink brush, or whatever was at hand, she would write down her thoughts and memories without order, like a diary. In those notebooks, when she wasn’t looking, her daughters would make “incomprehensible doodles” and her sons would mark the pages with “drawings of trains and trams.”8 This is a remarkable description of how Yosano’s writing emerges out of domestic life full of quotidian chores and children, constantly interrupted and with no time or space to call her own. Even her notebook is not private property but inscribed by the doodles and drawings of her many children. It is incredible that, despite these conditions, Yosano could be prolific and successful enough to earn a living for her family with her pen. Yet, she was keenly aware of these material conditions that disadvantaged women and wrote powerful essays on matters such as childbirth and motherhood, and the disconnect between reality and idealized depictions of women in novels written by men.9 Like Woolf and Yosano, Kawakami is deeply concerned with the connection between gendered spaces and women’s identity and artistic creativity, and this connection becomes central to understanding her novel, Breasts and Eggs. This chapter focuses its analysis on Book One of the novel, which is a rewriting of the novella Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008) that won the prestigious Akutagawa prize in 2008.10 Kawakami revisited the novella and reworked it into a much longer novel, adding an entirely new Book Two section, which was published together as Breasts and Eggs (retitled as Natsu monogatari, or Summer Stories, in Japanese) in 2019. The plotline of Book One is simple – Natsuko, the narrator and protagonist, goes to Tokyo Station to meet her older sister Makiko and her niece Midoriko, who arrive from Osaka to stay with her for two nights. On the first day, Natsuko and Makiko go to a public bathhouse, and the three of them have dinner in a Chinese restaurant afterward. The sisters stay up late drinking, and Makiko tells stories about the bar where she works in Osaka. On the second day, Makiko goes to a counseling session for breast augmentation surgery, the main purpose of their trip. Natsuko takes Midoriko to an amusement park where they ride the Ferris wheel together, and this time, it is Natsuko who tells stories about growing up

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  89 with Makiko in a single-mother household. That night, Makiko stays out late, while Natsuko and Midoriko wait at home. The following day, Makiko and Midoriko return to Osaka. Interwoven in this simple plot are memories and conversations from the past and in the present that expand temporally and spatially. From the opening pages, the novel Breasts and Eggs dramatizes the economics of space, illustrating how we all survive by carving out spaces of our own, no matter how precarious. As Natsuko looks back at her childhood, which was marked by poverty, she remembers her elementary school backpack (randoseru), which functioned as “a room of one’s own” (jibun dake no heya), echoing Woolf’s wellknown phrase.11 The randoseru is a standard backpack that all Japanese elementary school students carry, and had contained the young Natsuko’s textbooks, notebook, drawings, stickers, harmonica, lunch bag, and pencil case filled with her favorite pencils and erasers. In her crammed household, where her lazy and abusive father maintained a menacing presence, along with cigarette smoke and the constant sound of television, Natsuko had found refuge in her own portable space filled with her favorite things. However, this space that Natsuko claimed for herself was neither stable nor permanent. When her mother wakes her up in the middle of the night to run away from rent collectors after her father disappears, Natsuko leaves her randoseru behind, not realizing until it is too late that she will never see it again. As this randoseru incident shows, feminist spaces become complicated when bringing into consideration the intersectionality of class. With an abusive and absent father figure, Natsuko grows up in a women-only environment, not by choice but through the cycle of poverty. Ever since her father disappeared when she was seven years old, Natsuko lived with her mother, older sister Makiko, and her grandmother Komi. Then, after her mother passed away when she was 13, and her grandmother when she was 15, Makiko became her surrogate mother figure. Later, Natsuko would live with Makiko and her niece Midoriko in a small apartment in Osaka. The absence of the father figure and single motherhood is perpetuated from mother to daughter – like her mother, Makiko becomes a single mother who works day and night in restaurants and bars to scrape together a living for her daughter.12 As precarious and temporary as these possessions and dwellings are, these gendered spaces highlight women’s experiences and give room for the female characters to articulate their anxieties and desires in their own ways, creating (sometimes contested) visions of community. In the following sections, three spaces will be considered: physical, commercial, and linguistic. Physical Space: Public Bathhouse (Sentō) The public bathhouse, or sentō, is one of the most iconic spaces in Kawakami’s works that have appeared again and again. It is a key scene in the 2008 novella Chichi to ran and revisited in the novel on two occasions. In an interview, Kawakami recounts her own memories of going to public bathhouses growing up: Because my family was poor, the public bathhouse became the landscape of my childhood. Women naked. Everyone soaking in the bath together, from newborn babies to old ladies about to die at any moment. All strangers. …

90  Hitomi Yoshio Growing up looking at so many naked bodies of women had a huge impact on me. I placed myself in the spectrum of bodies, imagining how I used to be and how I would become as years passed. … For me, the public bathhouse is the original landscape, the defining experience of my childhood.13 These words show that for Kawakami, the public bathhouse was not simply a place of hygienic necessity but a symbolic space that shaped her worldview on women’s bodies and identities, intersecting with her experience of poverty. From early in her career, these images from her own childhood memory enter the world of fiction to provide rich space for exploration.14 The public bathhouse that Kawakami depicts across her works is a single-sex space. According to Scott Clark, while mixed bathing was commonplace during the Edo period, the Meiji government banned mixed bathing in public bathhouses as part of Japan’s modernization process.15 Communal bathing was the most common form of bathing in Japan until home baths became available during the postwar period, when domestic baths became a symbol of recovery and affluence.16 The number of public bathhouses peaked in the mid-1960s, followed by a steady decline as individual baths were introduced first in wealthy households.17 Yet, as Kawakami’s novel shows, the sentō remains a vibrant part of everyday life for working-class families who could not always afford a functioning bath at home. These trips to the bathhouse were not only an economic necessity but also fostered pleasure and communal bonding. The narrator of Breasts and Eggs looks back fondly to her childhood in the late 1970s to early 1980s when all the female members of the family would go to the public bathhouse together. In the present moment of the novel, set in 2008, the public bathhouses have declined and transformed into a place of luxury, sometimes called “super sentō,” offering a spa-like experience featuring saunas, jacuzzis, and milk baths. The public bathhouse that Natsuko and Makiko go to on the first day of the visit is one of the newer bathhouses, which became a destination spot after it was refurbished. Upon entering the bathhouse, the front changing room is clearly described as a women’s space, a vibrant place filled with women of all ages, including children and babies. A mom patted her baby dry at a changing table set up in the corner. Little kids darted around. Talking heads were nodding comprehendingly on a brandnew flatscreen, behind a chorus of hairdryers. The manager said hello from her perch between the changing rooms. Grandmas with stooped backs shared a couple of laughs. Women with towels wrapped around their heads sat naked on rattan chairs and chatted — the room was full of women. (50) In this in-between space of the clothed and the unclothed, women sit together relaxing and talking and laughing, letting the small children run around. No matter their age, the women seem comfortable in their varying degrees of nakedness in this communal space where men are forbidden to enter. Following this in-between

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  91 space, the sisters enter the realm of the bath where naked bodies roam and soak, only partially covered with small hand towels. While there is an implicit rule not to look too closely at one another’s bodies, Makiko breaks the social code and scrutinizes the other women, so much so that it makes her sister feel uncomfortable. While the bath is a place of relaxation and comfort, it simultaneously becomes a space that confronts Makiko to compare her own emaciated, flat-chested body to other ones that align with the social standards of female beauty.18 It becomes apparent that the main reason for Makiko’s visit to Tokyo is to find a clinic that will allow her to undergo breast augmentation surgery. Through Makiko’s obsession with the perfect breasts, the novel explores the disconnect between the idealized media image and realistic body development that often causes anxiety and depression among women. Reflecting on Makiko’s fixation, Natsuko remembers her own ambivalence when her body began to develop during her adolescence. As a kid, whenever I saw the naked women in the magazines that the kids in the neighborhood got their hands on, or saw a grownup woman expose her body on TV, I guess on some level I thought that someday all those parts of me would fill out, too, and I would have a body just like them. Except that never happened. My monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body. The two things were wholly unrelated. I never became the woman I imagined. And what was I expecting? The kind of body that you see in girly magazines. A body that fit the mold of what people describe as “sexy.” A body that provokes sexual fantasy. A source of desire. I guess I could say that I expected my body would have some sort of value. I thought all women grew up to have that kind of body, but that’s not how things played out. (55) This passage highlights the conflict between reality and the media image of women’s bodies, and the development of “feminine narcissism” as theorized by Sandra Lee Bartky, where women learn to gain pleasure from the objectification of their own bodies.19 Children are exposed to idealized and/or sexualized images of women’s bodies from a young age and are taught to believe, and to desire, that it is what their own bodies will eventually become. This has been a major concern within feminist scholarship; for instance, Naomi Wolf notes some “progress” in terms of the social awareness of “media literacy,” or the impact of media images, but problematizes the recurring and increasing sexualization of young female bodies.20 Laura Miller, in her study of beauty culture in contemporary Japan, shows how the beauty industry, in fact, thrives by playing into and even creating the consumer’s anxiety of not measuring up to the ideal female body, which can then be “corrected through novel products and services.”21 Within this space of the public bathhouse, furthermore, the notion of a single-sex, women’s space gets complicated or challenged by the introduction of what, from Natsuko’s point of view, seems to be a trans body. In this case, the character’s gender

92  Hitomi Yoshio expression – the way gender is communicated – is masculine. Here is a scene where Natsuko sees a couple entering the bath: I looked up and saw a pair of women — or so I thought, but something about them was off. One of them, who looked like she was in her twenties, had a typical woman’s body, but the other one was something else. She had to be a man. The one, still wearing makeup, whose slender neck and curves and blonde hair reaching down her back were unmistakably feminine, looped her arm around the bicep of the other — who had a guy’s haircut and a thick chest that was basically fat, and a towel pressed over her crotch. (59) Natsuko registers the trans body – one that does not comply with dominant images of femininity, with its muscular arms, short hair, and lack of breasts – as a shocking intrusion into the women-only space. She also recognizes the body as a “performance” (enshutsu) of masculinity, with its body language, hair style, and behavior flaunting the social rules of gender expression that is based on a binary division of gender. Natsuko is, at first, so bothered by the masculine body and how it destabilizes the comfort of the bathhouse patrons who accept normative images of femininity that she imagines confronting them about it. Natsuko’s hostile attitude changes, however, when she realizes that it is, in fact, someone she once knew – her former elementary school classmate Chika Yamaguchi, or Yamagu as she was called. They had even been best friends. All of a sudden, Natsuko remembers going to the cake shop run by Yamagu’s mother and licking her friend’s finger dipped in cake batter. This homoerotic memory is followed by a surreal scene where tiny people-like figures pop out from Yamagu’s bulging arm muscles and run around like children all around the bath, laughing and playing. They ran over the water, skating across the tiles, whooping their way up and down the naked bodies of the bathers, like kids monkeying through a playground. Meanwhile, the real Yamagu had wrapped the hem of her shirt around the horizontal bar and was doing feet first somersaults ad infinitum. I caught a stray homunculus by the neck and tickled him. I told him that he shouldn’t be there. This bath was for women. But the rest of them cried out “THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN” and squirmed their little bodies. They sang those words over and over. They didn’t care. Before I knew it, they had made a circle around me, and one of them was pointing at the ceiling. We all looked up to find the night sky over our camp. We were back in school. … “THIS IS IMPORTANT,” one of the homunculi said to me. “THERE ARE NO MEN AND NO WOMEN AND NOTHING ELSE.” When I looked closely, all their little faces looked familiar, like I had seen them all before, but because of the lighting it was hard to say. (63–4)

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  93 In this surreal scene, Yamagu is enacting the horizontal bar (tetsubо) ̄ exercise, a typical sport in elementary school PE class. The description is neither feminine nor masculine but a repetitive upward circling movement on the horizontal bar, as if producing kinetic energy for the playful homunculi. Following the repeated phrase that challenges binary gender norms and reveals the artificiality of the category of “woman” altogether (“THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN”), the surreal image of tiny figures gives way to several fragmented memories from elementary school. One memory is from summer camp when Natsuko looked up at the dazzling starry night sky with her classmates. Another is from the day they buried the dead body of Kuro, presumably a dog that lived in the school. Within these memories, the tiny figures remind Natsuko of her former classmates whom she had forgotten. Before she can identify them, however, she is brought back to reality by Makiko calling her name. When Natsuko snaps out of her dream-like state, the tiny figures are gone from the bath, as well as the couple. The surreal scene surrounding Yamagu’s trans body seems to be a projection of Natsuko’s inhibitions and gender policing, as she listens to her sister Makiko’s detailed explanations about getting breast augmentation surgery. However, when individualized as people she knows and connected with her childhood memories, the fear and discomfort she initially felt disappears. The public bathhouse, thus, emerges as an ambivalent space of public intimacy that, on the one hand, opens up possibilities of female bonding across generations, and on the other hand, problematizes the task of accepting the body without judgment, whether it is one’s own or of others, in relation to idealized media images and fixed gender categories. Commercial Space: Snack Bar (Sunakku) The second space is the commercial space of the “snack bar” (sunakku). Sunakku is a Japanese rendering of the English word “snack” and refers to small establishments that double as restaurants and bars. A snack bar usually has a main hostess called “Mama,” who serves simple foods and alcoholic drinks over the counter. They often employ a few young women as part-time workers and have karaoke machines for entertainment. According to Taniguchi Kōichi, snack bars opened just around the time of the 1964 Olympics when there was a government crackdown on nightlife establishments. In order to bypass strict rules for bars, snack bars came into existence to go through the loophole by providing “snacks” in addition to alcohol.22 While snack bars have a small food menu, most of their revenue comes from drinking and karaoke. They are different from actual bars and hostess clubs in that they maintain a “home-like” feel, as shown in the use of the domestic term “Mama” to refer to the main hostess. While this unique establishment seems to blur the boundaries of the commercial and domestic, it nonetheless serves as a place of exploitation. Anne Allison’s study on Japanese corporate culture and gender identities sheds light on how the nightlife institutionalizes a ritualized male dominance.23 While Allison’s anthropological study focuses on high-class hostess clubs frequented by elite male white-collar workers, the gender relations and power imbalance highlighted in the study shed light on the commercial bar space in Kawakami’s novel. After their mother and

94  Hitomi Yoshio grandmother’s deaths, Makiko and Natsuko survive by stringing together part-time work in factories and at the snack bar where their mother had worked. This snack bar, where male customers buy women’s time and service with money, becomes at once a surrogate home for the orphaned sisters – and a space of exploitation and violence where women must support each other to survive. The snack bar CHANEL that comes to life in Kawakami’s novel seems to be a typical one. It is located on the third floor of a building in the crammed and grimy streets of the Shobashi district of Osaka, where drunk people and prostitutes roam from evening to early morning. The bar itself is shabby and rundown, and accommodates 15 customers at most. Just like their watered-down drinks, the CHANEL logos that decorate the bar are all counterfeit. Makiko works there five nights a week from seven o’clock until past midnight, leaving her elementary school-aged daughter Midoriko at home by herself. On the first night of their visit to Tokyo, staying up late drinking one beer after another, Makiko tells Natsuko a long story about bar CHANEL – about “Mamasan,” a short and plump woman in her mid-50s with bleached blonde hair, and the young women who work there, some of whom are from other Asian countries. The obscure lives of these young immigrant women rarely come to light in the dominant media narrative of Japan’s postwar economic boom, and Makiko’s storytelling can be interpreted to take on the significance of oral history. Suzuka, who came from Korea, was in her early 30s and had worked at bar CHANEL for five years. A new girl named Jing Li came from China apparently to attend college. One evening, on a slow night when they had no customers, the three of them shared stories about themselves and their past. Makiko and Suzuka sympathize with the young Jing Li, who came from a background of poverty and lack of education. Moved by her story, Suzuka tells Jing Li that she can rely on her like an older sister, creating a bond of solidarity. But when Suzuka finds out that Jing Li’s salary is much higher than her own, due to her youth and fresh beauty, she confronts Mama-san and quits the next day. As this episode shows, the friendships and sisterhoods that are formed in the bar are temporary and affected by economic realities, and are easily broken. This commercial space of the snack bar reveals that even though the women all come from precarious backgrounds, the social realities of their class, ethnicity, and age can influence the type and level of oppressions they receive and how they manifest. Following Suzuka and Jing Li’s story, Makiko tells Natsuko about Nozomi and An, two new girls who came to work at the bar. The tone with which Makiko tells her story is at times humorous, but the content is bleak. Although Nozomi and An claimed to be friends from the same trade school, it was obvious that they had a darker story. Their teeth were rotten with cavities, and they smelled as if they had not bathed for days. One day, they stopped coming to work, and then the police showed up. It turns out they were being pimped out by a man as prostitutes, and one of the male customers attacked Nozomi so viciously that she had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. It is only when the police come to bar CHANEL that Makiko and Mama-san find out their age – Nozomi is 14 and An is 13. Within the exploitative space of the nightlife of Shobashi, Makiko becomes a surrogate mother figure to the young girls and women who work there. Makiko

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  95 finds out from Mama-san that Nozomi’s mother is only 30 years old, with two more children with another man. Makiko visits Nozomi at the hospital and comforts her, telling her to stay strong. While this is one of the most touching, heartfelt scenes of female connection in the novel, we cannot ignore the violence inherent in the social and institutional power structures that constantly threaten their bond. Despite the fact that the male pimp and customer are the perpetrators of violence, the police come to bar CHANEL to interrogate Mama-san, who had employed the underage girls. It is the women, often victims themselves, who get punished for the irresponsible deeds and labor exploitation by the men in power. Natsuko listens to the stories that Makiko tells, and in her inebriated mind, the young girls’ experiences become blurred in her mind as her own. She remembers snippets of her own past, and the various jobs she had as a young girl, in a streamof-consciousness style: Behind my eyelids, I saw dancing patterns mix and break apart. Over and over. I moved down an empty hall, filled with the keen smell of disinfectant. I pushed open a door and found Nozomi, face up on her hospital bed. The bandages made it impossible to see her face. Fourteen. I remember when I was fourteen. The first year I wrote up a resume. I lied and said that I was in high school and got a job at a local factory. On my way to work I put on lipstick at the drugstore, using a sample tube that had been worn down to the plastic. My job involved inspecting little batteries for leaks. If you got the purple liquid on your fingers, it sank in like a tattoo, leaving a blue smear. And piled high in the sinks were stained ashtrays that no amount of washing could clean. The cigarette smoke, the booming echo of the microphones that would never leave my head. Carrying the empty beer crates out into the alley, Mom reaches out to lock the top lock, then crouches down to throw the deadbolt. Walking home alone, men standing in the shadows underneath the telephone poles or by the vending machines, catcalling and snickering. Filthy mouths, stained pant legs, jittery hands. I run all the way up the stairs. (104–105) In this passage, where various memories and impressions blend together to make patterns in her mind, Natsuko remembers her first job when she was 14 at a factory where the chemicals stained her fingers, she lied about her age and put on lipstick at a pharmacy on her way to work. She remembers helping her mother at the snack bar filled with cigarette smoke and karaoke singing, and the men lurking in the darkness, sexualizing her, trying to grope her on the street. Natsuko’s unconscious layering of her own memories with Nozomi’s experience shows that her exploitation and violence against her are not unique or one-time events, but a commonplace and universal experience of growing up as a girl in poverty. The space of the snack bar illuminates these young women’s precarious lives and experiences of violence, and, however brief and ephemeral, forms a space of solidarity that is based on empathy by putting into words and giving voice to their life stories.

96  Hitomi Yoshio Linguistic/Literary Space: Osaka Dialect The third space that will be discussed is Osaka, or to be more precise, the linguistic space of the Osaka dialect – Kawakami’s mother tongue. This dialect features prominently in Breasts and Eggs in the speeches of her female characters, at once giving a rhythmic, musical tone to the overall piece through their lively, distinct voices, and signaling their peripheral existence within the big city of Tokyo. In this sense, Kawakami’s works can be placed in the legacy of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), who perhaps immortalized the Osaka dialect as the ultimate feminine language in Sasameyuki (1942–48; Eng. Tr. The Makioka Sisters, 1957). While Tanizaki exoticizes the Kansai region to depict a pristine, feminine sphere that becomes symbolic of Japan’s traditional aesthetics that was slowly disappearing in the modern world, Kawakami’s women thoroughly inhabit contemporary Japanese society, with their lively yet often jumbled thoughts questioning the world and the gendered bodies that they inhabit. Through conversations and monologues, the Osaka dialect in Kawakami’s novel constructs a vibrant linguistic space for women with a shared sense of marginality that functions to destabilize the dominant power structures of society. Miyako Inoue, in her seminal work Vicarious Languages: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, shows how language reform was an important part of the nation’s modernization process, and how the language used by educated Tokyo middle-class males became the basis of standard language.24 Reflecting this gender dynamic, the Osaka dialect in Kawakami’s work is most often characterized as female speech – personal, colloquial, indirect, and meandering – and these characteristics become particularly salient when juxtaposed with standard Japanese, which by contrast represents a masculine world that functions on logic and rationality. In the original novella, Chichi to ran, the character who speaks standard Japanese is Midoriko’s absent father, a Tokyoite who had lived in Osaka on business for a few years and left to return to Tokyo after getting Makiko pregnant. There is a long passage in the novella where Makiko narrates the episode to her sister, and her former husband defends himself in standard Japanese. In an impersonal and academic tone, gendered masculine, the former husband calmly tells Makiko that it is ultimately no one’s fault or deed that they had had a child together; Midoriko’s birth was essentially beyond human control. Makiko describes his speech, delivered in standard Japanese, as “uso kusai,” which means insincere, disingenuous, or bogus. She fails to understand the meaning of his words, and instead of arguing back, she responds with a physical reaction – she gets a heavy nosebleed. This image of Makiko’s nosebleed – here, fruitless and unproductive – connects with the later reflections on menstruation that appears in her daughter Midoriko’s diary.25 The Osaka in Kawakami’s work, therefore, is not only a geographic location but also a linguistic space and an ideological counterpoint to Japan’s capital Tokyo in which many of her characters reside. The Osaka dialect dominates the entire narrative voice of the novella, while in the novel reworking, it is contained in the dialogue and in Midoriko’s diary entries. However, in both works, it is a language that ties the three central characters together – a language of memory – that allows

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  97 them to create their own space of intimacy within the large city of Tokyo. In the novel, Natsuko’s first-person narrative voice is written in what is understood as standard Japanese. But in the dialogue between the sisters, which can last for pages and pages, the language switches to their native Osaka dialect. Furthermore, all of the speakers of Osaka dialect are women, from “Mama-san” to the hostess girls of bar CHANEL. Kawakami’s vivacious use of Osaka dialect functions to bring the reader into the shared intimate world of the women, creating a space of empathy between the book and the reader.26 In addition to dialogue, Midoriko’s monologues recorded in her diary emerge as important sites of analysis. The diary is written in an interesting mixture of colloquial Osaka dialect and standard written Japanese, as someone who seems to be practicing the art of writing. The novel is interspersed with entries from the diary, which functions as a space of her own, just as the randoseru had done for Natsuko. For Midoriko, the diary is a space where she can freely express her anxieties and questions regarding the changes of her body, like menstruation, developing breasts, and reproductive functions. Like the randoseru, however, the diary space is neither a solid structure nor an entirely private one since it can be read by a family member at any time. In fact, Natsuko reads the diary in secret when Midoriko is asleep – and gains an insight into the complex emotions that she harbors within. This act is not presented as an intrusion (at least from Natsuko’s perspective) but as a shared intimacy that connects the two characters together. Interestingly, Midoriko’s concerns about the changes of her body are almost always expressed simultaneously as a linguistic concern, showing how the process of language acquisition is an inseparable part of socialization. From the very first entry introduced in the novel, Midoriko ponders the word “ranshi” (egg or ovum), which refers to the female reproductive cell. She goes to the library in her school to look for an answer but feels a sense of discomfort there, like someone is always looking over her shoulder. So she goes to a real library, which is presumably a large public library where she can be anonymous. Feeling alienated in school and left behind in her classmates’ conversations and gossip about their developing bodies, Midoriko tries to find her own space of comfort and the meaning of words in the communal space of a public library. Just like the public library that offers her a space to expand her knowledge (and access to a computer she does not own), Midoriko finds a free and creative space of exploration in her diary notebook. The diary offers a place not only to record her thoughts and feelings but also to experiment with language to see which kanji character or expression fits her experience most accurately. Midoriko writes: Writing is the best. You can do it anywhere, as long as you have a pen and paper. It’s free too. And you can write whatever you want. How sweet is that. I was just thinking about the different ways to say you hate something. You can call it disgusting, repellent, revolting. I looked up “disgusting” in the dictionary. The “dis” part means undo, and the “gust” part means taste. I guess that makes sense. (15)

98  Hitomi Yoshio In the original Japanese passage, Midoriko tries using two different kanji characters to write “iya” (disagreeable or revolting) and practices writing the one that seems to express the feeling of disgust the most. She chooses the oldfashioned kanji that is less commonly used in contemporary Japanese, but one that is famously used in a canonical work by Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–96).27 This example shows that Midoriko’s diary is not just a space to simply write down facts of her daily life, but a space to experiment with the nuance of language to creatively express her inner emotions. It is also a space for Kawakami to connect her contemporary characters with their literary precedents, giving depth and nuance to the reading experience. Midoriko’s diary, written in a mixture of colloquial Osaka dialect and standard written Japanese, is a semi-private space that allows her to experiment with language and indirectly connect her with Natsuko. Natsuko – an aspiring writer in Book One – indeed seems to have a unique connection with Midoriko, who shows sensitivity to language. This connection is separate from the bond they have with Makiko. While Natsuko reads Midoriko’s diary in secret, as noted above, it is not indicated that Makiko shows the same interest. Waiting for Makiko to come home on their second night in Tokyo, Natsuko and Midoriko pass the time by looking up one word after another in the portable electronic dictionary: As I read her the definition, Midoriko nodded vigorously. She took the dictionary from me and searched for something else. Glued to the screen, she looked up one thing after another–then something clicked. She looked up at me, eyes bright. It was like she was finding the words for the thoughts in her head and making sure that each of them was right. Genuinely stunned at where her train of thought had led her, she stared wide-eyed at the screen again. (131) This scene shows Midoriko soaking up the new words presented by Natsuko’s electronic dictionary, a luxury item she cannot afford herself, matching the words to her own experience to see if they fit. Our experiences and thoughts can be expressed in language, but they can also be shaped by language. This process of Midoriko’s language acquisition, facilitated by Natsuko, undeniably has an impact on the kind of young adult that Midoriko grows up to be. We find out in the second half of the novel that Midoriko is going to college on scholarship – something that neither Natsuko nor Makiko had the opportunity or resources to do. The novel also gives us a glimpse of Natsuko’s literary education. She is an aspiring writer in Book One of the novel, and Midoriko – a lover of books as Makiko explains – shows an active interest in Natsuko’s bookshelf. In fact, the grown-up Natsuko now has a “room of her own” in a small, rented apartment and supports herself with her part-time job. Ten years ago, when she had just turned 20, she arrived in Tokyo carrying a large backpack full of books – a mobile library of sorts – by her favorite authors. Ten years later, Natsuko still has not made it as a

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  99 published writer, but her rented apartment is filled with books – cheap paperbacks – that line the wall. In her reflection on the books she owns, she states: The lower shelves were where I kept the paperbacks I figured I’d never read again. The names on the spines, Herman Hesse, Raymond Radiguet, and Kyusaku Yumeno, had all faded in the sun. Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, and my Dostoyevsky, The Gambler, Notes from Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov. Chekhov, Camus, Steinbeck. The Odyssey and The Earthquake in Chile. These were the undisputed giants of literature; but from a different angle, this classic lineup was a shameful, even mortifying symbol of my willingness to truckle to the received wisdom of the canon, a stance that undeniably marked me as an amateur. (83) The authors’ names and titles that appear here are mostly canonical and male, with the exception of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Natsuko remembers her excitement and sense of urgency as she read through these works in her younger days, but in hindsight, reflects critically upon the fact that she was simply taking in the constructed canon.28 Book Two then explores Natsuko’s struggles to find her own voice as a writer. Even though Natsuko now feels ashamed of her collection of canonical books – a mini-library of her own – she remembers how she had accumulated them one by one. She would frequent used bookstores to buy the books over a long period of time when she could afford them, and many were given to her by a young male customer of the snack bar where she worked as a high school student. Seeing Natsuko always reading library books in the corner of the bar, the quiet young man brought her a bag full of old paperbacks one day. The books were worn, and the pages were marked with underlines and scribbles, but the young Natsuko was happy to possess these books as her own. Her book collection is, thus, a testament to the haphazard literary education of her youth, and to the fact that, with enough determination, one does not necessarily need ample economic resources to become an avid reader. Natsuko’s literary journey as an author, connected to her reproductive journey of giving birth without a partner, becomes the central plotline of Book Two, which takes place eight years later. While Natsuko and Midoriko are connected through the acts of reading and writing, and through the variations of library-like spaces from backpacks to bookshelves, Makiko emerges as the dominant speaker and storyteller. Her distinctive voice and humor in the Osaka dialect stand out in the novel, always seeking a listener.29 Midoriko’s diary, on the other hand, functions as a shield against her verbose mother, to whom she has not uttered a word to in half a year. Instead of speaking, Midoriko writes down her words with a pen to communicate with Makiko (and in extension, Natsuko). In this mediated and silent mode of communication, Midoriko strives to work out her own individual identity that is separate from her mother, even as her mother remains the central subject of her writing.

100  Hitomi Yoshio Midoriko’s difficult relationship with Makiko shows the complexity of the mother–daughter relationship, which is a dominant theme across Kawakami’s works. Mothers are often the first ones to introduce sociality to children, teaching them acceptable ways of behavior and social roles. This nurturing role can be oppressive and can easily become the first point of rebellion. Economic struggles, furthermore, can prevent the forming of bonds, where mothers must work long hours and spend time apart from their young children. While Makiko becomes a surrogate mother to the young women at bar CHANEL, it is ironic that her own elementary school-aged daughter is left at home all alone. Rather than depicting an idealized image of motherhood, Kawakami depicts the mother–daughter relationship to be fraught with tension, even though the desire to connect is always underlying on both sides. Midoriko’s diary, thus, becomes the site of her struggle to articulate and search for her own identity, in relation to and independent of her mother, without providing a straightforward answer. Although the Osaka dialect used in Makiko’s speech and Midoriko’s diary entries seems to connect them together, distinguished from the narrative voice in standard Japanese, the two fail to understand each other because of their very closeness. When Midoriko finally breaks her silence and speaks out in the climactic scene in Book One, it is to demand her mother to tell her “the truth.” Makiko does not understand her meaning and responds in exasperation, “You hear that, Natsuko? The truth? What’s she want me to say? Can you translate?” (138). This demand for “translation” points to Natsuko’s role as the mediator between the mother and daughter. But before she can do so, Midoriko takes a carton of eggs from the kitchen and cracks the eggs on her head, one after another. The act is at once symbolic and absurd, conjuring in the reader’s minds the millions of egg cells that she had wished to break inside her developing body.30 The two adults watch in stunned silence; then Makiko joins, and the two proceed to crack two dozen eggs on their own heads while crying profusely. It is an epiphanic moment when absurdity, symbolism, and emotionality come together and explode all at once. This absurd yet cathartic scene becomes the resolution of Book One of the novel (and where the novella ends). In the end, it is the extra-lingual action of breaking the eggs that breaks down the barrier between the mother and daughter, restoring linguistic communication and emotional connection. Conclusion This chapter has explored Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs through the representation of three gendered spaces: the physical space of the public bathhouse, the commercial space of the snack bar, and the linguistic or literary space of Osaka dialect. The focus on “space” allows us to explore local or national contexts in which these spaces emerge, and invites us to make transnational and transdisciplinary connections with shared feminist concerns. All of the spaces explored – physical, commercial, and linguistic or literary – are in-between spaces of private and public, and are marked by the intersectionality of gender and class. The economic and social precariousness of the characters’ lives complicates the notion of community

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  101 and solidarity, but each of the spaces opens up room to recognize and give voice to the experiences and struggles that the women face. The final linguistic or literary space also includes the bookshelf and library spaces, where the acts of reading and writing become critical to the female characters for their own intellectual development and agency. In this sense, we may think beyond fictional analysis to recognize Kawakami’s own role as guest editor for Waseda bungaku’s “Women’s Issue” in 2017, in which she created an actual space within the literary journal for women’s writing and aimed for a vision of transnational feminism and solidarity.31 Following the global publication of Breasts and Eggs in 2020, first in English and then in more than 20 languages by the following year, Kawakami participated in international literary events and festivals where she appeared in conversation with writers outside of Japan. The Wheeler Centre event in 2020, “Broadly Speaking: Mieko Kawakami and Fernanda Melchor,” was one such example, where the two authors from Japan and Mexico discussed the radical representations of womanhood in their fictional works through the lens of gender, class, and race.32 Conversations like these allow translated work to not only be read in an exoticized light, speaking narrowly about some aspect of foreign culture and society for a niche audience, but to be recognized as participating in global conversations and giving nuanced and localized critique of patriarchal systems that continue to dominate the world today. As this chapter’s focus on the gendered spaces in the novel shows, Kawakami’s work sheds light on the precarious lives of women that can be located in specific historical and sociocultural conditions of post-bubble Japanese society, and envisions, from a feminist perspective, an alternative reality that allows for transnational conversations and space to build an empathetic and supportive community. Acknowledgment This chapter began as a conference paper given in the panel “Reading and Empathy: Textual Analyses of Connection, Community and Critique” (Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, 2021), chaired by Victoria Young with discussant Brett de Bary. I would like to thank my fellow panelists, especially Juliana Buriticá Alzate for her insightful comments and suggestions in writing this article. Notes 1 Lucy Delap, Feminisms: A Global History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 102–104. 2 Ann M. Oberhauser, Jennifer L. Fluri Risa Whitson, and Sharlene Mollett, Feminist Spaces: Gender and Geography in a Global Context (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 7. 3 See Kerstin W. Shands, Embracing Space Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Ágnes Zsófia Kovács and László B. Sári, eds. Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017); Theda Wrede, “Introduction to Special Issue ‘Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21st Century,’” Rocky Mountain Review 69, no. 1 (2015): 10–17.

102  Hitomi Yoshio

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  103

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104  Hitomi Yoshio Works Cited Abe Auestad, Reiko. “Invoking Affect in Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran (Breast and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyō, Playful Words and Ludic Gestures.” Japan Forum 28, no. 4 (2016): 530–48. Allison, Anne. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo ­Hostess Club. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Baldwin, Frank, and Anne Allison, eds. Japan: The Precarious Future. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2015. Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Narcissism, Femininity and Alienation.” Social Theory and Practice 8, no. 2 (1982): 127–43. Beichman, Janine. Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002. “Broadly Speaking: Mieko Kawakami and Fernanda Melchor.” Discussion moderated by Roanna Gonsalves. Wheeler Centre, 2020. https://www.wheelercentre.com/events/ mieko-kawakami-and-fernanda-melchor. Buriticá Alzate, Juliana. “Embodiment and Its Violence in Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran: Menstruation, Beauty Ideals, and Mothering.” Japanese Language and Literature 54, no. 2 (2020): 515–49. Buriticá Alzate, Juliana, and Hitomi Yoshio. “Kawakami Mieko’s Breasts and Eggs: Gender and Translation.” Gender and Sexuality 16 (2021): 110–25. Buriticá Alzate, Juliana, and Hitomi Yoshio. “Reimagining the Past, Present, and the Future of Reproductive Bodies in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction: Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs and Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature. Edited by Laura Lazzari and Beth Widmaier Capo, 465–86. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Clark, Scott. Japan, a View from the Bath. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Cornyetz, Nina. “Bound by Blood: Female Pollution, Divinity, and Community in Enchi Fumiko’s Masks.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. English Supplement, no. 9 (1995): 29–58. Delap, Lucy. Feminisms: A Global History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Inoue, Miyako. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Kawakami Mieko. Breasts and Eggs. Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. New York, NY: Europa Editions, 2020. Kawakami Mieko. Chichi to ran. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2008. Kawakami Mieko. Natsu monogatari. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2019. Kawakami Mieko. “Shōjo wa oshikko no fuan o bakuha, kokoro wa aseruwa.” In Sentan de sasuwa sasareruwa sora-eewa, 21–36. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2008. Kawakami Mieko. “The Elephant’s Eye is Burning, Burning.” Translated by Hitomi Yoshio. Denver Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2015): 48–52. Kawakami Mieko. “The Little Girl Blows Up Her Pee Anxiety, My Heart Races.” Translated by Hitomi Yoshio. Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan 4 (2014): 102–106. Kawakami Mieko, ed. Waseda bungaku zōkan: Josei-gō. Tokyo: Waseda Bungakukai, 2017. Kawakami Mieko. “Zō no me o yaitemo.” In Sentan de sasuwa sasareruwa sora-eewa, 97–110. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2008. Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia, and László B. Sári, eds. Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

Envisioning Community through Women’s Spaces  105 Mackie, Vera. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Miller, Laura. Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Shands, Kerstin W. Embracing Space Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Taniguchi Kōichi. Sunakku kenkyū josetsu: Nihon no yoru no kōkyōken. Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2017. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2002. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Woolf, Virginia. Jibundake no heya. Translated by Shizuko Kawamoto. Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1988. Wrede, Theda. “Introduction to Special Issue ‘Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21st Century.’” Rocky Mountain Review 69, no. 1 (2015): 10–17. Yosano Akiko. Yosano Akiko hyōron shū. Edited by Kano Masanao and Kōchi Nobuko. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005. Yoshio, Hitomi. “An Interview with Mieko Kawakami.” Wasafiri 35, no. 2 (2020): 39–44.

6

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital Oyamada Hiroko’s Kōjō (The Factory, 2013) Peter Tillack

Our Libidinal Relationships to Capitalism Imagine (if you can) margaritas for $1200 each.1 They are being served by an undocumented immigrant in the United States without health insurance or any other form of social welfare. The margaritas have been ordered by two investment bankers who—with not only the blessings but also the assistance—of the government agencies and the global institutions that regulate and oversee their businesses and facilitate “capitalist development” in Third World countries, accumulate surplus value by systematically impoverishing the lives of people half a world away, perhaps including members of the waiter’s own family.2 The obscenity of what, to a random middle-class American bystander, might simply look like an enviably luxurious little drinking session owes to the efficiency with which late capitalism reterritorializes desire3 (at the moment, for the margaritas) and drive4 (enacted by the investment bankers in doing their jobs), thereby perpetually reterritorializing jouissance through the constant recreation of opportunities for ever-greater displays of excess and ever greater indulgence in what David Harvey terms “accumulation for accumulation’s sake.”5 Slavoj Žižek observes: The field of social practices and socially held beliefs […] is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual has to relate, which the individual itself has to experience of an order which is minimally ‘reified,’ externalized.6 If we regard the condition—globalized late capitalism—that has brought the three subjects into proximity in this time-space as a universal, we can say that each of them constitutes a particular that both partakes of and is essential to the existence of that universal as such—as a “concrete universal”—i.e., as reality, in terms of how they each find themselves within this reality through their libidinal relation to its symbolic aspects (language, rules, both written and unwritten) and its fantasmatic aspects (as conditioned through advertising, social media, and popular culture). Although the waiter and, a fortiori, his family members in the global South are as essential to this universality as the insiders who determine its nature, their DOI: 10.4324/9781003368632-7

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  107 existence as such is proof of Žižek’s contention that “globalized late capitalism’s model of prosperity cannot be universalized.”7 The subject relates to the universal by libidinally suturing itself to the universal’s particular content.8 In the case of late capitalism-as-universal how this happens is contingent on one’s position within the social as it relates to capitalism, for this determines the role and the degree to which the subject’s desire and drive bind her to this reality. Such a universality, however, is comprised of three levels. The universal is in and of itself empty, a mere notion (e.g., “capitalism”). The particular content that would fill it is comprised of the entirety of subjects who comprise all of us who can be said to be subjects of capital (and, given the global nature of late capitalism, essentially every inhabitant of our planet can be said to be such a particular). In occupying the spectrum of subject positions vis-à-vis capital, each of us as individuals partakes of the particular, yet the nature of that particular is defined by capitalism’s “insiders” who hegemonize the universal by defining it in a way that coincides with their interests and their senses of themselves as capitalist subjects.9 Inasmuch as such notions of the universal can be naturalized through the symbolic order and in fantasy, the particular becomes hegemonic, coloring the nature of the universal (made “concrete” in the process) with its hue. However, in the case of our example, there are many capitalist subjects who, for structural and other reasons, cannot recognize themselves in the universal so hegemonized. Inasmuch as these myriad particulars cannot change the nature of the predominant discourse whereby capitalism takes shape as reality, they are capitalism’s “outsiders,” a position often redolent of their poverty, their social disenfranchisement (e.g., as undocumented immigrants or as refugees), their mental health status, degree of able-bodiedness, and so on. As intrinsic to capitalism as its insiders, the particular inhabited by capitalism’s outsiders is that aspect of capitalism which capitalism-as-universal must disavow for it to continue to exist as such, for it to continue to exist to the benefit of its insiders. As Žižek observes of any such social universal—any such “One”—this category is antagonistic by its very nature: as for late-capitalism-as-universal, the claims of the universal do not coincide with the totality of its constituent particulars. To juxtapose those aspects of the particular disavowed from the universal with the universal itself is to instantiate what Žižek calls a “parallax gap”: because the universal cannot be reconciled with the totality of its constituent particulars, because it cannot be synthesized into a higher determination, we are left with an unbridgeable gap, a “minimal difference” between the One and itself. By its very nature, this gap cannot be gentrified through the symbolic order and, hence, is to be regarded as a species of the Lacanian Real. Yet, for Žižek, this is precisely where the truth of contemporary capitalism resides. During a time in which economics has been depoliticized, he argues that those who ineluctably count among the disavowed must own their abjection as such. To politicize their condition, they must proclaim that in their abjection they, too, are part of capitalism’s constituent particular. To do so is to confront the universal with its “unbearable example.”10 In so doing, one bypasses the particular by asserting oneself as a “universal singular.”11 Thereby bypassing “substantial communal identifications,” one comes

108  Peter Tillack to exist in the interstices between them. Rather than identifying, for example, with one’s alienated coworkers, one proclaims identity with all those wherever on the planet they may be who assert their identities as capitalism’s abject, for whatever reason they do so. To do so says Žižek is to identify not with any reified class identity, but with a “universal ethico-political principle … that is in principle available to everyone.”12 Such an identification is hardly limited to a given place or class stratum; it cuts diagonally through all such reifications, creating a global community comprising the denizens of capitalism-as-Real.13 Moreover, because, as Žižek notes, in today’s “post-political” world, when to respond even to calls for protests against various injustices merely amounts to participating in late-capitalist reality’s vociferous appetite for co-opting protest and reterritorializing it, perhaps, the most effective way to voice one’s abjection is through a non-Act.14 For Žižek, the archetypal example of withdrawal-as-Act can be found in Bartleby, of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). Bartleby writes out all sorts of legal documents for his employer, an elderly attorney. Although he proves himself to be adept at his job, one day he refuses his employer’s request to proofread a document by saying, “I would prefer not to.” This line becomes Bartleby’s standard refrain, even in response to his kind-hearted but flummoxed employer’s attempts to help him out of his apparent apathy. Refusing every offer of help, even of sustenance as his withdrawal deepens, Bartleby is imprisoned for vagrancy where he dies of starvation from having refused even to eat. As Žižek observes, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is not to be regarded as “I don’t want to”: it amounts to a desiring embrace of one’s abjection.15 In embracing such a non-Act, such a refusal effectively “opens up a new space outside both the hegemonic position and its negation,” thereby “reduc[ing] all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference.”16 As we can see, this is very different from an active resistance to the status-quo: “[Bartleby’s] gesture of ‘preferring not to’ suspends the subject’s libidinal investments in [that status quo].”17 Because, as capitalist subjects, we are all subjected to late capitalism’s superego injunction to Enjoy!, such a gesture, says Žižek, effectively eschews that which sustains the superego, its obscene supplement of enjoyment; as Timothy Bryar puts it, “Rather than doing nothing in the guise of doing something Bartleby embodies the disruptive object that disturbs the existing order of things.”18 Absent its libidinal support, the universal is thereby confronted with its minimal difference as void.19 Such a “signifier-turned-object,” maintains Žižek, is thereby “reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order.”20 In other words, the Bartlebean gesture creates of the capitalist subject an “object” that objects to the very order that impels one to find one’s being in capitalist reality. Were there enough such gestures among all of us who populate this globalized concrete universal, confronting such a reality with its unbearable example might just prove more than that reality can bear. Oyamada Hiroko, A Writer for Japan’s Lost Generation Born in 1983, Japanese writer Oyamada Hiroko reached young adulthood long after Japan’s economic bubble had burst, along with it the operative assumptions many Japanese of her parents’ generation could make regarding job and

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  109 financial security. In response to the collapse of global trading patterns that had held throughout the cold war, Japanese corporations restructured themselves to compete effectively in a much more dynamic economic arena. The Japanese government, too, under Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirōō, implemented neoliberal reforms as a means of dealing with Japan’s continuing economic downslide. As in other parts of the developed world, employment became increasingly unstable, devoid of benefits, and anxiety-invoking.21 Various of Oyamada’s works feature women protagonists who are keenly aware of their disadvantages as irregular employees (hiseikikoyōōin) of large corporations.22 Japanese critics have called her a writer for Japan’s “lost generation” (rosuto jenereishon); as Yazawa Misaki writes, this generation is comprised of “young people who, having weathered fierce [entrance] exam competition [and], devoid of contacts, have been tossed out into the gap society (kakusa shakai) that has formed through the accelerating progress of globalization and neoliberalism.”23 As revealed in a 2013 interview, Oyamada has had work experience that lines up with the sort of unstable employment that such late capitalist trends have exacerbated worldwide. She has worked as a regular (salaried) employee (seishain), as a dispatch worker (hakin), and as a free-lancer (fureetaa), having changed jobs three times in her first five years after graduation from university.24 In that interview, Oyamada recalled one of her jobs, doing dispatch work for a major automobile manufacturer, as follows: “It’s so big,” I thought. There were old buildings, very factory-like on the vast grounds, and the head office was in a beautiful building. There was a gigantic parking lot, as well as small buildings that looked like they were made of pillars stuck in the ground, which I couldn’t understand. There were all sorts of things there; it was really a world unto itself. [… But] because the work I did [at the factory] was exceedingly narrowly focused and only a component of a much larger part, I couldn’t explain to you what it was I did. For example, making clean copies (seisho) on the computer, sending out faxes—there’s this feeling of anxiety and fear because you haven’t a clue as to how it’s related to the world.25 Oyamada’s recollection is striking in its evocation of how outsider status in relation to the mode of production that now subsumes us all, globalized capitalism, can also be said to have affective dimensions. As she mentions, her “feeling of anxiety and fear” owes to the sense of opacity that prevailed in her relationship as a worker to the machinations of the mode of accumulation to which her labor contributed. Intrinsic though her labor was to that mode’s existence as such, the laborer herself felt she had no basis for relating to that reality as a subject. As her interviewer surmised, that experience was a source of inspiration for Oyamada’s penning her debut work of fiction, Kōjō. Published in 2013, Kōjō won that year’s Shinchō Shinjin Prize and a nomination for the Mishima Yukio Award. Translated by David Boyd as The Factory, in 2019, the work has since received widespread praise in the English-language press.26 In this chapter, I read Factory as a tale of psychic abjection vis-à-vis contemporary capitalism. In its vastness, in

110  Peter Tillack its seeming all-inclusiveness not only of facilities for manufacturing myriad sorts of (unspecified) products, but also venues catering to apparently every taste in cuisine and commodified leisure experiences—not to mention the presence of (as yet) untamed forests, fields, and a vast river that runs to the sea—the eponymous factory is metonymical of capitalism itself. Factory is narrated from the respective points of view of three new hires, each with different employment statuses and duties. Ushiyama Yoshiko is a college graduate hired as a contract employee to shred documents. Furufue is a bryologist doing research at a university who is hired away by the factory as a regular, fulltime employee tasked with single-handedly greenroofing the entire complex, and running “moss hunts” for children of employees. Ushiyama’s unnamed brother has been downsized from his job as a computer engineer at a small company, and as very sub-adequate compensation for the loss of that job is given a temporary position at the factory proofreading documents by hand. Despite these differences, the manner in which each comes to work for the factory evokes their un-reflexive senses of membership in the concrete universal that is contemporary capitalism. Yet, the fact that each becomes alienated in their own way from their respective jobs suggests that they have each ceded their desires to the big Other which, for Lacan, was the one cardinal sin of psychoanalysis.27 In their alienation, each of the three protagonists ceases to be able to identify with the commonsensical notion of capitalism as a Law to be obeyed. This is because—despite all the outlets for consumption in the factory—the nature of each character’s job prohibits them from libidinally identifying with capitalism’s obscene flipside command to Enjoy!. Accordingly, each of them becomes increasingly drawn to that which had initially existed only on the periphery of conscious awareness, the so-called factory animals. The one entity on the factory grounds apparently not part of the industrial plan, the various species of factory animals have mutated such that they can live only in that highly denatured environment. Management’s method of dealing with the factory animals is officially to ignore them. Neither exterminated nor “managed,” the creatures are merely quietly tolerated. For these reasons, I regard them as the factory’s symptom.28 In their unfathomability, the factory animals become for each character objet petit a, the object-cause of desire.29 Factory ends when each of the three narrator’s voices are stilled owing to their having metamorphosed into one or another type of factory animal. I argue that each employee thereby comes to identify with that which is in him more than himself: in getting too close to this entity, each “dies” in the sense of losing his or her subjectivity. Freed of the symbolic order with which to identify her desire and, thus, freed of subjectivity itself, each employee, thus, comes to exist as pure, ungentrified jouissance. Written in what Rosemary Jackson calls the “fantastic mode,” Factory juxtaposes mutually incompatible realities—that of the factory and its employees with that of the factory animals—with equal verisimilitude to “oxymoronic” effect.30 As I argue, Factory thereby positions its reader to regard the factory animals not as deadly objets petit a, but as what Žižek calls “parallax objects”. Confronted with the impasse between concrete universal as contemporary capitalism and its

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  111 symptom, the reader is enticed to ponder the nature of the parallax gap inherent to capitalist subjectivity and its own void. In such a way, Oyamada educes the question, What sort of world might be possible, were the animals to run the factory? The Factory and the Manufacture of Anxiety Early in The Factory, Ushiyama Yoshiko notes of the factory that the unnamed company which runs it is a household word throughout Japan, its products known and available everywhere. With its reputation for good salaries, job security, and high status, to become a regular employee of the factory is to attain an enviable career, such that parents ambitious for their children’s success often nudge them toward employment there. En-route to an interview for regular employment there, Ushiyama recalls an elementary school field trip to the factory, evoking how it has positioned itself to court desirable associations in people from a young age: A woman in a tiny stewardess hat showed us around the museum and gave us a tour of the factory floor. I went home that day with a box of souvenirs that had a photo of the factory printed on the lid. Inside was a fabric pencil case with a twocolor retractable pen and a set of mechanical pencils, as well as a box of cookies that were shaped like dictionaries, race cars, and seashells. Other kids got different shapes. Houses, towers, dinosaurs, and faces. At the time, it felt like the factory was enormous, maybe as big as Disneyland. And the souvenirs were as good as Disneyland’s, too. On the walk from the parking lot to the factory, we saw adults dressed in all kinds of clothes: suits, coveralls, lab coats. Walking among them, I caught glimpses of the factory buildings but couldn’t see anything beyond that. No matter where you are in this city—the school, the department store, anywhere—you’re always walled in by mountains. But the factory had nothing around it. Or rather, it was as if it were surrounded by something other than the mountains. Something larger, something more distant.31 As Ushiyama’s recollections reveal, regard for the factory has taken shape through the centrality of the factory to her town’s economy, coupled with its reputation and the proliferation of its products, which spread far beyond that geographical nexus. Given her memory of a childhood fieldtrip to the factory, moreover, we can say that its unnamed corporate owner has made a point of establishing positive associations in the minds of young Japanese, both as potential consumers and employees. In this sense, it is perhaps not too much to regard Ushiyama’s childhood fieldtrip to the factory as an initiation rite of sorts into the mindset that regards the factory and the values it espouses as natural. In other words, Ushiyama’s impetus to work at the factory has been conditioned by the putative desires of the big Other; the “something larger, something more distant” that seems to surround the factory might be this big Other in its now globalized dimension. Yet, when Ushiyama reenters the factory grounds for the first time since having become an adult—for a job interview—she realizes that far from seeming smaller as is usually the case when an adult revisits a childhood scene, the factory seems to have grown larger.32 Thus, are we introduced to Ushiyama’s own anxieties regarding employment. A graduate of a four-year liberal arts program who had conducted

112  Peter Tillack undergraduate research on the Japanese language, Ushiyama has applied for a permanent position at the factory, the only listed requirement for which is a fouryear degree. Having gone over her CV, however, Gotō, her interviewer, notes how, in the few years since her graduation, she has worked five corporate jobs, none for more than a year. This impels him to offer Ushiyama a position other than the permanent, regular position she had applied for. This one is for a contract employee. The fleeting thought that she has been hoodwinked is soon succeeded by a feeling akin to “relief”: she falls back to the position that her liberal arts degree is not good enough to merit a permanent position in a place like the factory and that she is not of a caliber that such a company would be interested in. She rationalizes this relief by considering that unconsciously she believes she doesn’t “deserve” to work for such a major company.33 Gotō extols the offered position in terms redolent of the concrete universal’s neoliberal celebration of “freedom”: he tells her to consider things from a positive angle in the sense that she can choose her own hours and the work isn’t difficult. Given her employment history, he adds that the position offered suits her better.34 Although Ushiyama is disappointed, she rationalizes her disappointment, telling herself that because the company is still offering her a job they must see something of value in her.35 She reasons that even if the job is manual labor, even though it’s technically a temporary position with hourly pay, she ought not to hold out for something better; that, indeed, such a job may well be the “best thing” for her.36 During her interview, she had informed Gotō that she had become fascinated by the structure of the Japanese language while in college, which had made her want to work in a field that would enable her to utilize the background she had acquired in researching sentence structures. Ushiyama Yoshiko finds that the job she winds up with does, in its own way, enable her to work with language: she is assigned to shred documents for the entire length of her shift.37 Although she says that when she first fed a document into the mouth of a shredder, “it almost felt like I was choosing my own partner, like I was an active member of society,” she confesses, “From my second day on the job, barring the occasional jam, I never had to use a single brain cell.”38 Furufue is a similarly diffident employee. We first encounter him on an orientation hike through the factory grounds for new hires. We discover that, for some time, he has been doing research at his university lab in bryology, a position that he has no desire to leave; at 30 years of age, Furufue is acutely aware that he is about a decade older than most applicants for permanent employment. Furufue’s advisor receives a call from the factory, telling him they need a “moss expert” to take a regular (permanent, salaried) position to oversee the green-roofing of the entire factory complex. The advisor harangues Furufue to take the job, telling him that moss taxonomy is a static field and that his penchant for classifying moss merely makes him “weird.” He warns Furufue that his parents can’t continue to support him indefinitely and that there is no reason to expect that a suitable job will simply open up at the university. Furthermore, the offer from the factory is a big deal that he ought not turn his nose up at. Finally, he tells Furufue to consider how accepting such an offer will make his parents feel.39

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  113 Oblivious of his desires as his advisor, Furufue’s parents are overjoyed by the news of his employment. Furufue’s mother cries tears of joy, and his father regales him with yet another platitude: “A man’s mission in life is to make his own way in the world.”40 While shopping with Furufue for suitable clothing, he berates him, telling him that he is an introvert who doesn’t deal with people effectively. He tells him that if there’s any sort of a problem, rather than discussing it with his supervisor he ought to tell his father directly. The worst thing would be for Furufue to attempt to solve any problem on his own. Above all, Furufue’s father tells him to be “grateful.” 41 Together with his father’s homilies and passive aggressive advice, Furufue’s tacit response to the forced choice imposed on him—“Grateful for what?”— eloquently evokes the extent to which his own desires have not been taken into account. Although Furufue’s friends congratulate him for having made the move from doing research at his university to becoming a scientist at the factory, although he is very much aware that there are myriads who would kill to land the job he has just been offered, he nonetheless concludes, “I never saw the appeal. […] What difference does it make if you can’t do what you want?”42 Complicating his inherent lack of interest in the job, Furufue is given nothing in the way of helpful direction for orienting himself to his work. His conversations with Gotō amount to two people speaking past each other. Gotō tells him to make a list of all the equipment he will need to head up and constitute the entire body of the “Environmental Improvement Division Office for Green-Roof Research.” Having never engaged in such work before, Furufue is at a total loss as to what to tell Gotō; in answer to his question as to why the factory doesn’t outsource the project, Furufue is merely told that the factory disapproves of outsourcing. Preposterously, he is told that if the EI Division Office for Green-Roof Research [kankyōseibika no okujōryokkasuishin’ya] succeeds, it might well “become its own subsidiary.”43 In response to his questions regarding methods, deadlines, accountability, Furufue is blithely told not to worry about time and simply to work at his own pace, as there is no one who will impose any deadlines upon his work.44 Other than training programs for new hires on etiquette and communications, there is nothing to provide Furufue with the merest clue as to how he is to go about his job. Instead, Gotō merely tells him merely to make use of what he knows about moss.45 Ushiyama Yoshiko’s unnamed brother had been the one to alert Yoshiko to the job opening at the factory. Formerly employed by a small company as a systems engineer, he has been downsized, finding it necessary to take a temporary position doing proofreading at the factory. He tries to reconcile himself to his new, lowstatus, low-paying job by telling himself he is lucky at this point to have any job at all. But, it bothers him to be doing work “that literally anyone could do, as if nothing I’d ever done in my life even mattered.” He marvels at how, whereas his life had once been centered around computers, his proofreading work is now done completely by hand. Moreover, he resents the fact that it was through his girlfriend, who works at a temp agency, that he landed the job.46 Attempting to buoy himself up with platitudes, beaten down by the notion that a man his age should be doing a different type of work, humiliated by having

114  Peter Tillack failed to live up to the sexist assumption that a man should not depend on his girlfriend to find him a job, and alienated by work that “literally anyone could do” and which does not involve his beloved computers, Ushiyama Yoshiko’s brother finds it impossible to stay focused on the task of proofreading. Ensconced between the partitions of his cubicle, nodding off over his work, he agonizes about the fact that he, therefore, falls behind, despite the apparent simplicity of his tasks, and heaps abuse on himself for having become a “slacker” (baka no namakemono).47 As these vignettes reveal, each of the three new hires has been for different reasons and in different ways impelled to contort themselves to the desires of the big Other, whether out of a sense of diffidence, a sense of shame, or out of sheer necessity. Intrinsic to these contortions is what we might call a common-sense take on reality as structured through the dictates of contemporary capitalism. As Žižek says of contemporary everyday experience, it tells us “that the ultimate goal of capital’s circulation is still the satisfaction of human needs, that capitalism is just a means to bring this satisfaction about in a more efficient way.”48 Yet, the protagonists’ attitudes are also redolent of what political sociologist Kurihara Akira calls “manipulative common sense” (sōsateki jōshiki), resulting from capitalism’s colonization of “primal common sense” (genjōshiki).49 Manipulative common sense is so characterized because it naturalizes notions such as that “one must busily work away” despite not knowing why, exactly, things have come to be this way; it is manifested in “the ‘worldview’ that owning a dwelling is a matter of individual talent and responsibility; that regardless of the inhabitants’ mentality[,] where there’s no expressway, one ought to be built.”50 Manipulative common sense is what convinces us that “it’s better to have a car than not to have one” and to choose brandname goods over cheaper goods made by lesser-known companies.51 Because such attitudes have become so thoroughly internalized throughout the developed world, implies Kurihara, it is through such a lens not only that we come to see the world in commodified terms, but that our subjectivity has been thoroughly territorialized by capitalism for the sake of carrying out its dictates. In this sense, each of the three characters is initially depicted as having been coopted by the concrete universal that is contemporary capitalism even as they don’t comfortably coincide with that identity. Japhy Wilson explains the reason for such noncoincidence, rephrasing it in psychoanalytic terms: such [i]deological fantasies of capitalist society are structured to disavow our relationship to [its] Real, as both its producers and its slaves. Both free-market conservatism and neo-liberal atheism present the Real of capital as a benign omnipotent force to which each individual must privately submit and that exists independently of social relations and exploitation.52 Yet, as their confusion, lack of direction, and sense of self-loathing suggest, each of the three protagonists has failed libidinally to suture themselves to the factory so as to completely coincide with such a reality. This is all the more striking in the face of the factory’s myriad amenities, perhaps calculated to offset such disenchantment by courting employees’ desires through commodified offerings. When,

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  115 at one point, Furufue remarks to Gotō, “The factory really has it all, doesn’t it?” Gotō reels off the various amenities, evoking endless consumer options. Beyond apartment complexes and supermarkets, there is everything from hotels to a fishing center, from restaurants offering French food to those purveying teppanyaki, from bookstores to travel agencies, not to mention mountains and the ocean itself.53 In the midst of such a cornucopia, however, when lunchtime rolls around and Ushiyama’s brother asks his coworkers where they recommend he go to eat, they flash him pitying smiles and tell him that the Documents Division is too far from any of the restaurants for him to patronize during his allotted lunch period. They advise him to forget about trying to get lunch on the vast campus and instead to cook some rice and heat that up with some frozen food.54 He manages merely to scrounge up two energy bars and a bottle of tea, less than one could find at a typical convenience store in Japan. Small ironies such as this exemplify how, even in its most mundane aspects, the factory falls short of its promise as employment heaven. For Ushiyama’s brother, frustrating absurdities become apparent every time he retrieves a document to be proofread from his inbox. At one point, he finds a pamphlet entitled Goodbye to All Your Problems and Mine: A Guide to Mental Health Care, the cover of which features “two smiling meatballs, basking under a rainbow.”55 At another time, he pulls out a document titled EO-1987-POGI OPERATION MANUAL 16TH ED. Although it features “an image of a globe, [it] clearly wasn’t a manual for globes.”56 Such titles exemplify the random nature of the documents he receives: “corporate profiles, operating manuals, booklets for children, recipes, texts on everything from science to history.”57 Under such conditions, it is little surprise that he struggles not to fall asleep on the job, and that, at one point he finds himself “staring at the ink, the words start[ing] to fall apart, failing to hold their meaning—all I could see was a meaningless arrangement of squiggles and dots, symbols and patterns, running on endlessly. Words are such unstable things.”58 Shortly thereafter, a corporate letter of apology to customers in regard to product recalls appears in the text with the same lack of context as the documents in Ushiyama’s brother’s inbox. Utterly devoid of explanation or direction, it gradually tapers from intelligibility into nonsequiturs, fading out into complete nonsense.59 Under such conditions, it’s no wonder that, rather than reinforcing his sense of integration with his workplace, they incite Ushiyama’s brother to ask hysterical questions of the big Other: Who wrote this stuff? For what audience? To what end? Why does it need to be proofread at all? If these are all factory documents, what the hell is the factory? What’s it making? I thought I knew, but once I started working here[,] I realized I had no idea. What kind of factory is this?60 Furufue, for his part, continues to feel guilty. The story suddenly zooms ahead 15 years, where we find him struggling with himself about the morality of accepting such a good salary and a cushy life without having any sense of direction in terms of how to earn that living. At one point, he calls up Gotō, intent on

116  Peter Tillack confessing his guilty feelings regarding his utter lack of progress in green roofing the complex. Gotō’s offhanded response is maddening in its indifference to Furufue’s concerns. He tells Furufue that he understands his anxiety but reassures him that Furufue is doing “plenty.” Because new products take so much time to develop, often requiring whole teams to complete, “a result-oriented approach simply doesn’t work in Japan.” Gotō tells Furufue simply to go on classifying his moss and suggests that, since the factory is so very huge, it may well take him forever to catalogue all the different varieties of moss to be found. Gotō then suggests that Furufue make a “moss map,” detailing the different varieties of moss to be found on the factory grounds and to simply not worry about the green-roofing business for now.61 All this nonsense from Gotō is in line with what Furufue has heard from Gotō ever since he began working at the factory; collectively, it elicits the fundamental response from Furufue, “Why am I here?” Gotō’s nonchalance reinforces Ushiyama’s growing unease around him. At her interview, she takes in his red face and jaundiced eyes, surmising, “this was just how overworked managers looked, devoid of life and spirit.”62 Later, she notes, “he looked a little grungy, considering his position,” and that “he always looked a little drunk.”63 Watching him roll his shoulders as he walks away, she thinks, “I bet he’s hitting the links with the higher-ups on his days off.”64 His appearance and behavior at odds with the stereotypical image of a factory manager, Gotō evokes someone who does not derive his reason for being through following the factory’s precepts. Rather, his apparent fatigue and slovenliness evoke the sense of someone exhausted by an inability to stop enjoying, perhaps someone who finds his being in another scene, the financial aspect of capitalism, as a globalized, relentless drive to subsume all under its purview. 65 At one point, Gotō sneaks up behind Ushiyama Yoshiko and perfunctorily tells her to take her mandatory vacation leave because they’re “really cracking down on that” although no one had bothered to tell her about it until now. Rushing her out the door, he says, “[I]t’s best if you use [it]. In fact, take the rest of today off. Why don’t you go home now?”66 Thus ejected from her workstation, she decides to walk across the massive bridge dividing the factory grounds. As she walks, her thoughts reveal a much-weakened propensity to desire in the place of the other, to desire at all, in fact. She ponders the relationship between herself, her work, the factory, and society, realizing that there is an apparent lack of contiguity between them, which makes her wonder for what reason, after all, she exists, for although she has been walking the earth for 20 some-odd years, she has no particular skills and “can’t do anything that a machine can do better.” As for the shredder, far from operating it, she merely helps it do its job. As for the factory, she reasons that she should be grateful for the fact that it has a place for her, grateful that it provides her with work. The next moment, however, she counters this with, “Except, well, I don’t want to work. I really don’t. Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life.”67 She recalls how she had tried to explain as much to her coworker Itsumi, but that Itsumi’s response was always along the lines that one had to keep fighting. For Ushiyama, however, “fighting” has never been the point: “I’ve worked my whole life, and it’s never been a fight, not at all. It’s always

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  117 been stranger than that, harder to grasp,” and something over which she has had no ­control.68 Ushiyama realizes during her walk that, after all, she doesn’t want to work but doesn’t know what else to do with her life. In such ways, we see that the factory in which the three protagonists work for the purpose of being able to live gives rise to fundamental questions as to the purpose of such lives. Properly hysterical in being addressed to the big other, there is no answer forthcoming. Yet, it is this very “void” that functions as a form of abyssal freedom to desire beyond the boundaries of manipulative common sense. This is made apparent through the increasing attention that each of the protagonists pays to the presence of that which she had noted only in passing, existing as blurs in the very center of the factory, the picture in which she has otherwise tried and failed to find herself. These are the “factory animals.” On the opening page, when Ushiyama Yoshiko opens the basement-level door leading to the shredder area, she notices the distinct odor of birds.69 When another employee goes to the bathroom, he notices a sign saying, “Keep windows closed: birds in area.”70 Such statements are easy to gloss over. But to slow down and consider them is to realize that these animals have an uncannily close relationship with their denatured environment. At one point halfway through her narrative, Ushiyama relates how she had mistaken a toner cartridge for one of the black birds. What at first glance had been a bird, she later realized had simply been the copier component a woman was holding as she swapped it out for another.71 Like a slip of the tongue, this hallucination suggests that the birds are somehow registering in Ushiyama’s unconscious. Indeed, it seems that the factory animals have made inroads on many employees’ psyches. After a moss hunt, an elderly man and a boy he claims to be his grandson show up at Furufue’s apartment. The man asks to be let inside so as not to be overheard and presents Furufue with a binder, claiming that his grandson has written a report based on his observations of various of the factory animals.72 In the next chapter, Ushiyama’s brother pulls out a paper folder containing a report identical to what the old man describes. Its contents make up the rest of the chapter and go into great detail describing the morphology, habits, diets, and lifecycles of “Grayback Coypu,” “Washer Lizards,” and “Factory Shags.” Like so much in Factory, the episode of the factory animal report unfolds over chapters, suddenly appearing and disappearing from the narrative just like other aspects of the story, such as each of the three employees’ narratives and their conversations, which might begin on a page early in the work only to end abruptly and reappear chapters later. In this way, however, the reader senses that concerns with factory animals—whether they take the form of rumors, discussions as to their nature, or an excursion to look at them—are moving from the status of a shadowy presence in the background to one that begins to overshadow everything else. That the factory animal report winds up in Ushiyama’s brother’s inbox for proofreading—given its putative provenance as a fourth-grader’s science report—evokes how the factory animals are somehow both intrinsic to the factory and that they exert an increasing power of fascination on the employees. In the case of the “factory shags” (kōjō u) for example, no one can identify what sort of birds they are or where they came from. According to the report,

118  Peter Tillack though they have wings, they are unable to fly more than 65 feet. The birds, their bodies black from feathers to skin, are “average in every way… the only thing remotely interesting about them was their numbers.”73 Although the anonymous author of the report claims exhaustively to have studied their habits, apparently no dead birds have ever been found. The birds merely gather in a single, ever-growing flock at the mouth of the river where it meets the sea, from whence—all facing the same direction— they stare back at the factory.74 Ushiyama’s narrative (and the story itself) ends when, on an otherwise typical morning, she heads down to the shredder station in the basement. She passes a woman on the stairs cradling a black bird, like any of the others Ushiyama had seen the day before. Although the woman has a firm grasp on the bird, it makes no effort to escape. Very much alive, it merely surveys its surroundings. Ushiyama pauses to watch this spectacle, but the woman ignores her and continues up the stairs. She passes Ushiyama, who turns around to look; over the woman’s shoulders she sees what looks like black feathers.75 Unlike her previous in-office sighting of a factory bird, this one comes across as far less illusory. Once we reach the end of her narrative several lines later, we see these sightings as having been a harbinger of Oyamada’s own fate: working at her shredder station one day, Ushiyama turn[s] back toward the morning container. I grabbed a handful of pages and fed them into the shredder. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, just feeding paper into the machine. Then, as soon as the shredder swallowed the last pages, I became a black bird. I could see people’s legs, their arms. I saw gray, and a little green. I thought I could smell the ocean.76 Factory, the Fantastic Mode, and the Reader’s Agency Like realism, the fantastic mode insists that what it represents be taken as given, no matter how impossible according to the reader’s notions of reality: the fantastic “pull[s] the reader from the apparent familiarity and security of the known and everyday world into something more strange, into a world whose improbabilities are closer to the realm normally associated with the marvelous.”77 The inherent instability of signification is, thus, foregrounded in the fantastic’s effort to evoke that which realistic representation alone disavows, the language of the unconscious, the language of desire. Both for the characters who inhabit such a world, and for the reader herself, reality as concrete universal is, thereby put under tension. As Rosemary Jackson asserts, The fantastic exists as the inside, or underside of realism, opposing the novel’s, closed, monological forms with open dialogical structures as if the novel had given rise to its own opposite, its unrecognizable reflection. […] The fantastic [thereby] gives utterance to precisely those elements which are known only through their absence within a dominant “realistic” order. […] What could be termed a “bourgeois” category of the real [sic] is under attack. It is this negative relationality which constitutes the meaning of the modern fantastic.78

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  119 The basic coordinates of realist narrative, time and space, “distort” and “collapse.” Characters no longer appear as “unified, rational selves”; the subject becomes “ex-centric, heterogeneous, spreading into every contradiction and (im) possibility.”79 In sum, characters’ senses of the world and their places in it are shaken by perception rendered “unreliable”. Meaning becomes “indeterminate, and the world becomes unknowable, a place of anxiety.”80 Although we have discussed the nature of each of the narrator-protagonists’ anxieties, Oyamada makes use of the fantastic mode to evoke similar effects in the reader. One way she does this is by cutting up the story as originally written—with a realistic, teleological temporality—and rearranging it such that it becomes impossible for the reader to orient herself comfortably in regard to the passage of time or the order of events as narrated.81 For example, when, near the end of the story, the reader is suddenly informed that Furufue has now been with the factory some 15 years, it comes as a disconcerting revelation. Any sense of a cogent reality is further eroded by Oyamada’s insistence on leaving utterances unattributed. One must frequently backtrack through the passage one has just read in light of subsequent passages to discern who is saying what.82 However, that aspect of the fantastic that lends itself most provocatively to an immanent critique of our globalized milieu has to do with the role that visuality plays in the narrative. Mladen Dolar notes the tendency to believe that there is an object out there utterly separate from the subject that views it.83 But Lacan’s notion of the gaze evokes how such a stark delineation between “viewing subject” and “viewed object” amounts to a misrecognition, as this is merely how things appear to the conscious mind. Unconsciously, our vision is structured by our desire, stemming from the “lack that constitutes castration anxiety.”84 Such desire is constitutive of what Lacan calls the Gaze which, as Dolar maintains, is “irreducible to the subjective stance, appear[ing] as a short circuit between the subject and the object out there.”85 Because the Gaze is a form of objet petit a—the object-cause of unconscious desire—we cannot see its inscription as such. Instead, it appears as a blur or a stain to our conscious eye. Although this is true for any viewing perspective we adopt, it is most saliently disavowed by the default visuality of modernity, Cartesian perspective. Art historian Martin Jay notes of this “scopic regime” that the gaze it instantiates is that of an “ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject entirely outside the world it claims to know only from afar.”86 Significantly, such a subjectivity “abetted the fundamentally bourgeois ethic of the modern world,” by creating a “dominating subject.”87 Over time, such a subject has become synonymous with the autonomous individual of capitalism, who enters into rational relations with others through the medium of the contract and the buying and selling of commodities (including labor power) and is ostensibly recognized as an equal with his others as guaranteed by the laws of liberal democratic societies. In both cases, a subject is posited whose point of view is assumed to be identical to anyone else who occupies the same point in time and space. Such a way of seeing is intrinsic to capitalist subjectivity. Yet, the anxieties of each of Factory’s three protagonists suggest that they have not managed to find

120  Peter Tillack themselves within the scene that is the factory. Symptomatic of the lack of desire (the “lack of lack,” as Lacan has it), their anxiety, their uncertainty about the factory animals that increasingly draw their attention, makes them susceptible to other objects of interest, the factory animals, which ultimately results in their transformations. True to the fantastic mode, their metamorphoses arise from the fact that, as Jackson says, the monological sense of modern subjectivity that conflates the “‘I’ with the seeing ‘eye’ proves to be an untrustworthy, indeed frequently a fatal affair.”88 What had been blurred at the edge of the protagonists’ conscious awareness eventually subsumes their attention, the factory and any partial identifications with it effectively blurring as the animals become the focus of their gazes. The effect is that induced by anamorphosis. Because anamorphosis is based on an inversion of the mathematics undergirding Cartesian perspective, art historian Daniel L. Collins calls it the “inverse of classical perspective.”89 Painted primarily according to the rules of classical perspective, Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) initially compels its viewer to assume the classical point of view, whereby one gazes perpendicular to the painting’s surface. One thereby sees two well-dressed, well-pleased looking men gazing back. Between them stands a table rife with scientific and cultural objects representing the heights of Western achievement. But an unintelligible grey blur slashes across the foreground. To make sense of it, one physically moves one’s body to enable a POV from a radically oblique angle to the canvas. The blur, thus, resolves into a skull, and the painting’s ostensible message is made clear: all is vanity. For Lacanians, however, there is a much deeper message to be gleaned from the form of the painting itself. Because the gaze is inseparable from unconscious desire, to address the “epistemological” desire for clarity by shifting one’s gaze creates an “ontological” shift in the nature of what one sees.90 Moving that gaze back and forth, thus, puts the one that is classical perspective under tension, as the two realities cannot be reconciled; their contradiction is a parallax gap. As art historian Norman Bryson notes of both realistic and anamorphic images, they amount to signs of different cultural discourses, so to shift one’s gaze conscientiously between such images is to become aware at the broadest level that “the subject who sees is no more the center of visual experience than the subject of language is at the center of speech.”91 Just as the “network of language” decenters each of us as speaking subjects, “vision is decentered by the network of signifiers that come to [us] from the social milieu.”92 In other words, anamorphosis is a means of making apparent the fact that one “see[s] on the field of the other[.].”93 Having metamorphosed into factory animals, all of this is a moot point for each of Factory’s three protagonists: for them, the factory animals are nothing more than objet a. But not so for the reader: Collins regards anamorphosis as analogous to a writerly text, per Roland Barthes’ formulation. Like classical perspective, a readerly text: renders the reader idle or redundant, ‘left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text,’ [thereby reducing him] to that apt but impotent symbol of the bourgeois world, an inert consumer to the author’s producer.’94

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  121 As a fantastic text, however, Factory instantiates a rather less comfortable reading experience. Imposing a “state of loss,” such a writerly text “unsettles the reader’s historical cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, bring[ing] to a crisis his relation with language.”95 For such reasons, in the parallax gap between Factory’s incommensurable realities, the attentive reader discerns the minimal difference between the reality structured through manipulative common sense and its own void. Although this space of discernment cannot be named (for it is pure negativity), to glimpse it is to be presented with the opportunity for adopting a reflexive attitude toward one’s own desiring identifications with the most seductive mode of production to date. Such an attitude has great political potential, according to Žižek. Overseen by “expert managerial bodies, negotiating the interests of a multiplicity of particular social strata and groups, reaching a compromise in the guise of more or less universal consensus,” our globalized reality inheres in a “readerly” acceptance of the now unquestioned economic premises undergirding such an approach. As Dierdra Reber bleakly maintains, this acquiescence has positioned us such that “we cannot think our way out of a discourse that conflates the free-market narrative with that of the human condition itself.”96 Yet, Žižek’s politics—embodied in the contention that globalization is not universalization—enables us to transcend the implications of Reber’s assessment by putting the discursivity of the one under tension with itself.97 As the reading experience afforded by Factory evokes, in such a way might a place for politics be cultivated, by contesting the lie that enslaves us through our continuing unconscious adherence to its enticements. Notes 1 Annie Lowrey, “Why the Phrase ‘Late Capitalism’ is Suddenly Everywhere,” The Atlantic, May 1, 2017, 6. Such luxury, excessive to the point of obscenity, is merely one of many examples of how late capitalism has brought about a culture of excess. Other examples include Nordstrom’s selling ripped jeans with fake mud splattered on them for $425 or, at the other end of the consumption spectrum, prisoners being charged $14 per minute for phone calls from for-profit prisons in the US. 2 Ilan Kapoor, “What ‘Drives’ Capitalist Development?”, Human Geography 8, no. 3 (2015): 71–5. As Kapoor points out, David Harvey’s term for such rapacious patterns of corporate enrichment is “accumulation through dispossession.” See also Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), esp. 178–9. 3 As Žižek maintains, “the true object-cause of desire is the Void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations” (Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 61–3). Throughout our lives, we continually and unconsciously attempt to fill the “void” between the symbolic order and the real through attachments to “partial objects,” people and things that are “partial” in the sense that they never adequately fill the void left by “castration,” by the subject’s loss of that primordial Thing, the pre-linguistic bond with the m(O)ther. Of course, advertising exploits this gap by continually creating fantasies for subjects to identify with, fantasies purveyed as attainable through the acquisition of the commodities associated with them, in subjects’ endless attempts to answer the question put to the big Other. That none of the commodities ever proves to be “the real thing” means that the subject moves through patterns of consumption from object to object in an interminable quest for satisfaction.

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85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Sheridan(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), 72–3. For Lacan, “castration” is what happens when a young child enters the symbolic order through the process of acquiring language. In so doing, she separates from the primal object, the mother, who had conferred on the baby a sense of completeness. The nascent subject gains the world as it were by doing so but is traumatized by what she now unconsciously experiences as the “loss” of that beloved object. This negativity is what Lacan terms “desire.” See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alain Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 1–7. Dolar, 128. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York, NY: The New Press, 1988), 10. Ibid., 9–10. Jackson, 49–50. Daniel L. Collins, “Anamorphosis and the Eccentric Observer: Inverted Perspective and Construction of the Gaze,” Leonardo 25, no. 1 (1992): 74. Žižek, Parallax, 17. Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York, NY: The New Press, 1988), 93. Ibid., 93–4. Ibid., 94. Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text, cited in Collins, 78. Barthes, cited in Collins, 78. Dierdra Reber, “A Tale of Two Marats: On the Abhorrence of Verticality, from LaissezFaire to Neoliberalism,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51, no. 2 (2018): 189. R. Moolenaar, “Slavoj Žižek and the Real Subject of Politics,” Studies in East European Thought 56 (2004): 289.

Works Cited Alam, Ruman. “The Factory Is a Chilling Account of the Contemporary Workplace.” The New Republic, December 2, 2019. https://newrepublic.com/article/155848/factory-chillingaccount-contemporary-workplace#blank. Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Borovoy, Amy. “Japan as Mirror: Neoliberalism’s Promise and Costs.” Ethnographies of Neoliberalism. Edited by Carol J. Greenhouse, 60–74. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Bryar, Timothy. “Preferring Žižek’s Bartleby Politics.” International Journal of Žižek ­Studies 12, no. 1 (2018). https://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/993. Bryson, Norman. “The Gaze in the Expanded Field.” In Vision and Visuality. Edited by Hal Foster, 87–108. New York. NY: The New Press, 1988. Collins, Daniel L. “Anamorphosis and the Eccentric Observer: Inverted Perspective and Construction of the Gaze.” Leonardo 25, no. 1 (1992): 73–82. Dolar, Mladen. “Anamorphosis.” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 125–40. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Isshi, Chiko. “Kōjō: Oyamada Hiroko intabyū.” August 27, 2013. https://allabout.co.jp/gm/ gc/426424/all/. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York, NY: Methuen, 1981. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality. Edited by Hal Foster, 3–23. New York, NY: The New Press, 1988.

Writing a Place for Politics in the Space of Capital  127 Kapoor, Ian. “What ‘Drives’ Capitalist Development?” Human Geography 8, no. 3 (2015): 66–78. Kurihara Akira. Kanri shakai to minshū risei: nichijōshiki no seijishakaigaku. Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1988. Lacan, Jacques. “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a.” In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. Edited and translated by Jacques-Alain Miller, 67–122. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998. Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1999. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII. Edited by Jacques Alain Miller, translated by Dennis Porter. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I.” In Ecrits: A Selection. Edited and translated by Alain Sheridan, 1–7. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1977. Lowry,Annie. “Why the Phrase ‘Late Capitalism’Is Suddenly Everywhere.” The Atlantic, May 1, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/. Mond, Ian. “Ian Mond Reviews The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada.” Locus Online, January 31, 2020. https://locusmag.com/2020/01/ian-mond-reviews-the-factory-by-hiroko-oyamada/. Moolenaar, R. “Slavoj Žižek and the Real Subject of Politics.” Studies in East European Thought 56, no. 4 (2004): 259–97. Oyamada Hiroko. Kōjō. Tokyo: Shinchōsa, 2013. Oyamada Hiroko. The Factory. David Boyd, trans. New York, NY: New Directions, 2019. Reber, Dierdra. “A Tale of Two Marats: On the Abhorrence of Verticality, from LaissezFaire to Neoliberalism.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51, no. 2 (2018): 188–209. Sehgel, Paul. “In ‘The Factory’ a Mysterious Company Manufactures Fear.” The New York Times, December 17, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/books/review-factoryhiroko-oyamada.html. Wilson, Japhy. “Anamorphosis of Capital: Black Holes, Gothic Monsters, and the Will of God.” In Psychoanalysis and the Global. Edited by Ilan Kapoor, 164–88. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Yazawa, Misaki. “Rosutojenere-shon no ‘rōdō’ to bungaku: Oyamada Hiroko wo chūshinni.” Tokushū: shakai no kibō: Kakusa to fukanyō shakai. Special Issue Kanagawa Daigaku hyōron 84 (2016): 90–7. Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York, NY: W.W Norton, 2007. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York, NY: Verso, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York, NY: Verso, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York, NY: Verso, 2012.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. “Across Time and Genre” (conference) 3 Akutagawa Prize 3, 44n1, 88 Allison, Anne 93 The Ambassadors (Holbein) 120 Amerika (America, Tawada) 50 anamorphosis 120 Anderson, Benedict 75 Anise (magazine) 21, 26n45 anxieties: about body image 91, 97; about employment 109, 111–12, 119–20; about late capitalism 109; and unheimlich 61–2; about writing 73, 75 Aoyama, Tomoko 26n41, 32, 44 The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (Oyayubi P no shūgyō jidai, Matsuura) 11 “A Room of One’s Own” (Woolf) 87–8, 102n11 “The Art of Being Nonsynchronous” (“Die kunst des nicht-synchronisiertseins,” Tawada) 59, 60 Atogami Shirō 24n16 aura 79–80, 83 Bakhtin, Mikhail 71, 81 Bal, Mieke 80 Barthes, Roland 5, 77, 120 Bartky, Sandra Lee 91 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville) 108 Baudelaire, Charles 69–70, 78–9 beauty industry, Japan 91 beauty standards, female 91 Benjamin, Walter 79 big Other 111, 114, 121n3, 123n27; see also The Factory; Žižek, Slavoj birthrate, Japan 57–8

blood relations 56, 57; see also family, Nihonjinron, mothers; parent–child relationships bonding, female 39, 40, 43, 98; see also skinships Breasts and Eggs (Chichi to ran, Kawakami): female beauty standards 91; gender expression 91–3; marginality 94; narrative 88–9, 92–3, 96–7; Osaka dialect 96–7, 100, 103n26; poverty in 89; sentō 90–1, 93; social oppression in 95; sunakku 94–5, 97; women’s spaces 7–8, 87 Bryson, Norman 120 bubble economy 108–9 burusera (sailor-suit uniforms) 17 Butler, Judith 72 capitalism see late capitalism Cardinale, Cara Lynne 59 Chalmers, Sharon 25n21 Chichi to ran see Breasts and Eggs “Chiteki josei” (“Intellectual Woman,” Kanai) 70–1 “Chōkanzu” (“Bird’s-Eye View,” Tawada) 50 co-eating 34, 35, 40, 41; see also cooking, food commodity fetishism 121n3 concrete universal 106, 108, 110, 112, 114 cooking: and female development 39, 43; as a form of writing 38; as women’s emancipation 33–4 Copeland, Rebecca 2 Cornyetz, Nina 103n25 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 4–5, 58; see also intersectionality

130 Index declining birthrate, in Japan 57–8 Delap, Lucy 86 dereliction 32 Derrida, Jacques 33 “Der sandman” (“The Sandman,” Hoffmann) 54 desire: articulating women’s 35, 38; for commodities 121n1; for freedom 62, 113; goal of 122n4; lack of 120; murderous impulses 6–7; for one’s ideal career 111, 113; for physical relationships 19; politics of 6; sexual 6, 46n44; sublimated 34–5; and writing 5, 74 diaries 76, 88, 97–8, 100; see also writing “Diving Pool” (“Daivingu pūru,” Ogawa) 33 Dolar, Mladen 119 Dollase, Hiromi Tsuchiya 29 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 74 eating see co-eating, food Ekusufonii (Exophony, Tawada) 56, 59 enjo kōsai (compensated dating) 17, 18, 26n36 essays see sakubun eternity of instant 69, 71, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83 eternity of the ephemerality 69, 78, 80, 83 Fachinger, Petra 51 The Factory (Kōjō, Oyamada): alienation 110, 114; commodities 114–15; factory animals 110–11, 117–18, 120, 125n82; fantastic mode 110–11, 118–19; frustration with one’s work 113–14, 115–16; literary prizes 109; narrative 110, 112–14; neoliberal freedom 112; passage of time 115–16, 119; unattributed dialogue 119 families: in Breasts and Eggs 98–100; as a contaminated term 14; Japanese 14; in Manazuru 39–40, 43–4; in Nihonjinron 56, 57, 58; replacement of 14, 16–17; roles 15, 57; in Saiai no kodomo 14, 15–16 fantastic mode 110–11, 118–19, 120 female beauty standards 91 female bonding 39, 40, 43–4, 98; see also skinships female high school students 17–18, 19 female language 38, 96 feminine narcissism 91

feminism: criticism of 12; and parody 72; and sexuality 6, 12; space 86 food: and interpersonal relationships 7, 33; in Manazuru 32, 33–4, 39, 43; and moving on from trauma 41; politics of 32; and psychosexual development 33; rejection of 33, 43; sharing 39; vomiting 40; as women’s emancipation 33–4, 43 Freud, Sigmund 5, 7, 13, 41, 53, 54, 64n11 “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother” (“Von der Muttersprach zur Sprachmutter,” Tawada) 54 gaze: male 70; of readers 77–8 genbun itchi (unification of Japanese language) 60; see also Japanese language gender disparity: and “bad” sexual behavior 17; in categorizing literature 67; in commercial bars 93, 95; in English translations 3–4; idealized depictions of women 57, 88; in Japanese literature anthologies 2; in the workforce 57 gender expression 68–9, 91–3 Genette, Gerard 82 “gentle castration” 7, 13, 16, 22, 24n16 German language 54–5, 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 69–70, 81 Harvey, David 78, 79, 106, 121n2 hiragana 31; see also Japanese language Hoffman, E.T.A. 54 Holbein, Hans 120 incomprehensibility, of women 70, 71 Innami, Fusako 11–12, 16, 35 Inoue, Miyako 96, 103n24 International Booker Prize 1 intersectionality 4–5, 58 intertext 74–5, 76 Irigaray, Luce 7, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 42, 43 Itō Hiromi 30–1 Jackson, Rosemary 110, 118; see also fantastic mode Jakuchō 4 Japanese language: genbun itchi 60; genderlessness of 55; Osaka dialect 96–7, 100, 103n26; pronouns 72; writing system 31 Japanese literature: assumptions about 3; English translations of 2, 3

Index  131 Japanese women’s literature: English translations of 1, 2, 101; international interest in 1, 101; scholarship on 1–2, 3 Japanese women writers: international interest in 1, 101; interviews with 12, 21, 67–8, 89–90, 109, 125n81; label of “woman writer” 4, 67, 70; literature prize winners 3, 88, 109; representation in anthologies 2; and representing all women 68; scholarship on 1–2, 3; societal perceptions of 67, 70 Jentsch, Ernst 53 Joryū bungakushō see Women’s Literature Prize joryū sakka see Japanese women writers joshi kōkōsei see female high school students joshi kōkōsei rashisa (school girlishness) 17, 18; see also female high school students Kanai Mieko: “Chiteki josei” 70–1; comparisons with European writers 68; complication of representation 72; as a gender-neutral writer 68–9; interviews 67–8; label of “woman writer” 67–8, 70; parody 71, 73, 74–5; “Rabbits” 35, 76; “Windows” 69, 71, 72–3, 76, 82–3; Yoru ni natte mo asobitsuzukero 74–5 Kawabata Yasunari 1 Kawakami Hiromi: and Japanese folklore 29; Manazuru 30–3, 35, 37, 41–3 Kawakami Mieko: Breasts and Eggs 88–9, 91–3, 96–7, 100; feminist spaces 86; literary events 101; Osaka dialect 96; sentō 89–90, 102n14 Kelsky, Karen 56–7, 58 Kinsella, Sharon 57 Kōno Taeko 34 Kudō Yūko 31 Kurihara Akira 114, 124n49 LaBelle, Brandon 59, 60 Lacanian Real 75, 107 Lacan, Jacques 6, 46n44, 75, 119, 120, 125n84 La Driére, Craig 59 language, female 38, 96 late capitalism: abjection to 108; anxieties 109; concrete universal 106–7; insiders and outsiders 107; print

market 11, 75; satisfying needs; symbolic order 107, 109, 110, 121n3; universal singular 107–8 lesbian panic 20, 21 “The Life of a Modern Painter” (Baudelaire) 69–70, 78–9 look-listening 59, 61–2 lost generation (Japan) 109 “Mado” (Kanai) see “Windows” The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki, Tanizaki) 96 male gaze 70; see also desire, muses Manazuru (Kawakami): corporeality 34, 37; disappearance of husband 30, 32, 35, 38, 40; food 32, 33; forming identity 37; hunger 41; loneliness; narration 30; parent– child relationships 36, 39, 41–2, 43; poetic features 30–1; use of hiragana 31; vomiting 40; writer’s block 36 Manazuru (place) 30, 38; see also Kawakami Hiromi, Manazuru manipulative common sense 114, 124n49 Massumi, Brian 63 Matsuura Rieko: The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P 11, 12; Bungakukai Prize 11; criticism of feminism 12; “gentle castration” 7, 13, 16, 22, 24n16; literary output 11, 23n1; motifs 11; prominence in Japanese literature 11; rejection of labels 12, 21, 22; and sexual orientation 12, 20, 21; Saiai no kodomo 14–22; “Sōgi no hi” 11; Ura vājon 15; Women’s Literature Prize 12; Yasashii kyosei no tame ni 13 Melville, Herman 108 Miller, Laura 91 Mishima Yukio 1, 2 Mizuta Noriko 2 Mori Ōgai 56 mothers: in Breasts and Eggs 99–100; and female identity 40, 57; as food 37, 42; as food providers 39, 42; linguistic 55; in Manazuru 39, 40, 42; as models of gender roles 30, 100; and Nihonjinron 56; otherization of 43; as reproductive bodies 57; in Saiai no kodomo 19; severance from 32; single motherhood 89; traditional roles of

132 Index 37; see also families, parent–child relationships mother tongue 55, 56, 57; see also Tawada Yōko Mowbray-Tsutsumi, Jill 31, 37 Murakami Haruki 3 Murata Sayaka 14, 24n19 muses 70 “Mutō unten” (Tawada) 60, 63 Naoki Prize 3 nationalism, in Japan see Nihonjinron Natsu monogatari (Kawakami) see Breasts and Eggs Nihonjinron 56, 57, 58 objet petit a 110, 119, 120, 123n29 Ogawa Yōko viii, 1, 3, 29, 33 Ong, Walter 62 onomatopoeia 52, 59, 60, 61–2; see also Japanese language, Tawada Yōko Orbaugh, Sharalyn 2, 72 Osaka 94, 96 Osaka dialect 96–7, 100 Oyamada Hiroko: critique of capitalism 8, 110; employment 109; The Factory 110–11, 113–14, 115–16, 117–19, 120; motifs 109 parallax gaps 107, 110–11; see also Žižek, Slavoj parent–child relationships: absence of father 30, 38, 89; between adolescents and their mothers 30, 41–2; in Breasts and Eggs 99–100; conflict 26n41, 41–2, 100; in contemporary Japanese literature 29–30; and food 35; interchangeability 16; in Manazuru 36, 39, 41–2, 43–4; rebellion 42, 43, 99–100, 102n14; in Saiai no kodomo 16, 19, 20; severance from mothers 32; see also mothers, pseudo-families parodic stylization 69, 71 patriarchy 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 43, 57, 93 personal choice, for women 56–7 phallocentrism see patriarchy pharmakon 33 photography: as art 78, 79; dark side 80; eternity 79–80; and temporality 78, 79, 81–2; as a “third eye” 82 “Portrait of a Tongue” (“Porträt einer Zunge,” Tawada) 50

Post, Chad 3–4 postmonolingualism 53, 56, 63; see also mother tongue, Tawada Yōko Powell, Allison Markin 3 “Pregnancy Calendar” (“Ninshin karenda,” Ogawa) 33 primal common sense 114, 124n49 pseudo-families: in Breasts and Eggs 94–5; replacing the traditional family 16–17; in Saiai no kodomo 14, 15, 16, 19 psychoanalysis 5 public bathhouses see sentō “Rabbits” (“Usagi,” Kanai) 35, 76 Rabbits, Crabs, Etc. (Birnbaum) 1 randoseru (ransel backpack) 89 readerly text 120 reading: motivation for 5; and writing 74, 75–6, 101 Real, Lacanian 75, 107 reproduction 56 “Revisiting Japanese Feminisms” (conference) 3 The Right to Sex (Srinivasan) 6 Rutgers University conference 2–3 Saiai no kodomo (Matsuura): families 14; joshi kōkōsei rashisa 17, 18; narration 14, 15, 17, 18, 22; parent–child relationships 16, 19, 20; plot 14; pseudo-families 14, 19; sakubun 17, 19; sensuality 19; traditional roles 18 Sakaki, Atsuko 73, 78 sakubun (essays) 17, 19 Sasameyuki see The Makioka Sisters Seidensticker, Edward 2 sentō: communal bonding 90–1; and female bonding 90–1; history of 90; Kawakami Mieko’s memories of 89–90; mixed bathing 90; social code 91 Setouchi Harumi see Jakuchō sexism 4, 71 sexual orientation 12, 20, 21 Shimizu Yoshinori 11, 23n1 Shinchō Shinjin Prize 109, 125n81 shōjo 29, 33, 43 skinships 16, 34, 35, 39, 44 Smith, Patricia Juliana 20 snack bars see sunakku societal superego 5–6

Index  133 “Sōgi no hi” (“The Day of the Funeral,” Matsuura) 11 specular function 36 Srinivasan, Amia 6 Stories by Contemporary Women Writers (Lippit and Selden) 1 sunakku (snack bars): atmosphere of 93; in Breasts and Eggs; comparisons with bars 93; and female bonding 94–5; history of 93; and violence 94–5 Symbolic world 6 Tahhan, Diana Adis 34 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 1, 2, 96 Tawada Yōko: Amerika 50, 60; “The Art of Being Nonsynchronous” 59, 60; “Chōkanzu” 50; Ekusufonii 56, 59; “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother” 54–5; German language 54–5, 56; Japanese language 52, 60; linguistic mother 55; and Mori Ōgai 56; multilingualism 52, 53; “Mutō unten” 60, 63; onomatopoeic expressions 52, 59, 60, 61–2; playing with language 52, 60, 61; “Portrait of a Tongue” 53; sound in the works of 52, 60, 61–2; spatiality 62; status as a foreigner 51; “Überseezungen” 64n4; and unheimlich 7, 50, 51, 53, 55, 62–3 temporality 78, 79, 80–2 This Kind of Woman (Tanaka and Hansen) 1 traditional roles: in Japanese homes 57; of Japanese women 25n21, 57; of mothers 57; reversing 16–17, 19; in Saiai no kodomo 18 Tsumura Kikuko 15 “Überseezungen” (“Overseas-Tongues,” Tawada) 64n4 unheimlich 7, 50, 53, 54, 55, 59, 62–3 unhomely see unheimlich

universal singular 107–8 Ura vājon (The Reverse Version, Matsuura) 15 US-Japan Women’s Journal 2 Wilson, Japhy 114 “Windows” (“Mado,” Kanai): corporeality 73; narrative structure 7, 69, 72–3, 82–3; parodic stylization 69, 71, 73; photography 80; plant metaphors 76; plot 69; ruins 81; temporality 81–2 “The Woman in the Story” (conference) 3 The Woman’s Hand (Schalow and Walker) 2 Women in Translation (forum) 4 Women’s Literature Prize (Joryū bungakushō) 12, 23n9 Women Studies conferences, on Japanese literature 2–3 Woolf, Virginia 87–8, 102n11 writerly text 120, 121 writing: and cooking 38; diaries 76, 88, 97–8, 100; as fulfilling desire 5; inner emotions; meaning 5; motivation for 5; as one’s fate 76; print market 11, 75; and reading 74, 75–6, 101; sakubun 17, 19; as a search for rhythm 59; writer’s block 36 Yasashii kyosei no tame ni (For a Gentle Castration, Matsuura) 13 Yildiz, Yasemin 55–6, 64n15 Yoru ni natte mo asobitsuzukero (Let’s Keep Playing Even at Night, Kanai) 74–5 Yosano Akiko 88 Yoshimoto Banana 29 Žižek, Slavoj 6, 106–8, 114, 121n3, 123n27, 123n28 “Zui zui sukkorobashi” 51 “Zur psychologie des unheimlichen” (Jentsch) 53