Abstract Page

AJLS 2000

Friday, November 10, 2000

Session I

4:00-6:00

Writing Gender and Establishing Cultural Authority in Periods of Cultural Flux

—a Panel Organized by Indra Levy—

Gendered figures in Japanese literature have often signified not only sexual difference, but also anxieties over cultural authority -- the production of knowledge, dominant discourses, and literary lingua francae-- that manifest themselves in textual form. This is particularly true in periods of productive cultural and linguistic flux. This panel will explore some key examples of the underlying relationship between the desire to establish cultural authority and the female figures who both enable and elude such authority.
In the case of the Tosa Diary, Ki no Tsurayuki adopts a female persona in order to write "like a man," i.e. with authority. In San'yutei Encho's "Shinkei kasanegafuji," the category of the hysterical woman attempts, but ultimately fails, to assimilate the supernatural to modern scientific discourse. In Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo, the manifold anxieties of Futabatei's attempt to consolidate speech and writing give rise to a femme fatale whose speech provocatively appropriates the diction of written discourse. Once genbun-itchi had become firmly established as the standard literary language, the enigmatic figure of the Osaka woman, and particularly her "exotic" speech, emerged in the writing of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro as a critical impetus for reconfiguring the discourse on the Japanese language. In all of these examples, the female figure renders legible the attempt to establish authority by artists who, for various reasons, had problematic relationships to the dominant authorities of their day.

Writing Like a Man in the Tosa Diary

Gus Heldt
Bard College

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa
Diary (ca. 935) represents one of the most over-read "acts of writing" in
modern Japanese literary history. In conjunction with the development of
a classical canon and the association of a feminine oral tradition with a
pure "Japanese language" from the Edo period onwards, the Tosa Diary has
often been seen as the mother of all vernacular prose literature in
Japan. However, even the most cursory examination of other writings from
Tsurayuki's period reveals this view - and their underlying assumptions
about gender and language in the Heian period - to be essentially
fallacious.
This paper will present a new hypothesis as to why Tsurayuki wrote
the Tosa Diary, one that takes seriously the writer's claim that "I will
attempt a diary such as men are said to keep." My approach will include
the following issues: the political and ritual nature of diary writing in
the mid-tenth century as an attempt to create a "body of knowledges"
propagated through male aristocratic lineages; the attempt in the Tosa
Diary to represent poetics as a similar "body of knowledges" with textual
and corporeal dimensions; and the gendered politics of "property" as it
was practiced at the Heian court. Put briefly, I will argue that the
attempt to write "like" a man but not "as" one in the Tosa Diary comments
on Tsurayuki's social position as a lower-ranking male courtier whose
ability to claim a "body of knowledges" vis-a-vis waka poetry was
severely limited in practice.

The Specter of Hysteria in San'yutei Encho's Shinkei kasanegafuchi

Daniel O'Neill
Yale University

     The critical desire to assimilate Encho to the tradition of genbun
itchi realism misses a key aspect of his work: his longstanding interest
in the supernatural and the form it assumes in modern life.   A long
prose narrative which comments on the status of the supernatural in 19th
century Japan, Encho's Shinkei kasanegafuchi was published in a time when
modernization in Japan was popularly identified with a scientific
rationalism that denied the supernatural while reordering how the world
would be known.
     In his attempts to represent the supernatural in a modern world that
finds it increasingly unfashionable, Encho draws upon disparate
discourses - the visual, scientific and the early psychological.   The
conflation of discourses, in turn, creates an anxiety that is first felt
at the level of gender, in the problematic figure of the hysterical
woman.   Encho's text, thus, functions as a commentary on how the writing
about ghosts has produced problematic, if not essentializing notions of
gender.   Through a reading of Encho's ghost story in conjunction with
an examination of popular writings on hysteria during Meiji, I will
demonstrate how this anxiety of gender troubles the tradition of genbun
itchi realism which which Encho has been associated in literary history.

The Anxiety of Translation: interlingual seduction and betrayal in
Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo

Indra Levy
Rutgers University

As progenitor of the modern vernacular style that would eventually
become the dominant language of Japanese fiction, Futabatei Shimei stands
at the beginning of modern Japanese literary history. His dual literary
career as translator and novelist illuminates many of the critical
dilemmas that both engendered and complicated modern literary production
in Japan, which essentially began as an interlingual endeavor. This
paper will examine the underlying relationships between Futabatei's
practice of translation, his concept of literature, and the story of
seduction and betrayal developed in his first original composition,
Ukigumo.
Aside from his significant contribution to the development of a
modern literary style, Futabatei also created the prototype for an
archetypal femme fatale who appears in numerous works of Japanese fiction
by self-consciously modern male writers, a character type I call the
"Westernesque woman." The persistence of this gender type in the works
of later writers who were particularly concerned with the status of
literary language suggests a fundamental relationship between gender
representation and the anxieties of translation in modern Japanese
fiction. This paper will attempt to carve out the basic outlines of that
relationship by reading the story of disappointed love in Ukigumo as a
metanarrative on the failed betrothal of speech and writing inspired by
the vernacular model of Western writing.

Discourse of Desire and Cultural Topography:
The Figure of Woman in Tanizaki's Reflections on Japanese Language

Tomi Suzuki
Columbia University

     In the mid-1920s, when the modern genbun-itchi style seemed to have
been naturalized and permeated national writing practices, some literary
writers started to question this standardized written language, largely
under the impact of European literary modernism and a rapidly expanded
mass industrial society. Tanizaki Jun'ichiro participated in this
problematization of genbun-itchi written language at a time when he moved
from his native city of Tokyo to Kansai in the aftermath of the Great
Kanto Earthquake.
     At the core of Tanizaki's reflections on the Japanese
language--explored both through his discursive reflections and
novelistic practices--lies the enigmatic figure of the Osaka woman, whose
"exotic" speech provided the Tokyo-born Tanizaki with a new site of
cultural exoticism. The uncanny, ambivalent figure and voice of the Osaka
woman became the site of producing multiple bipolar oppositions that
provided Tanizaki with a discursive space for talking
about the unique identity of the Japanese language: Kansai/Kanto,
Osaka/Tokyo, Osaka woman/Osaka man, dialect/standardized language,
speech/writing, woman/man, and Japan/West. The ambivalent figure of the
Osaka woman produced not only a chain of geographical and spatial
oppositions but called for imagining the cultural significance of
different, opposing historical periods--modern /Tokugawa, Tokugawa/Heian,
Genroku/Bunka-Bunsei, modernity/tradition--particularly in terms of
historical differences with regard to cultural notions of love
(ren'ai/shikijo).
     This paper examines the process of producing this spatial, temporal,
and gendered cultural topography that induced Tanizaki to talk about the
"recovery" of the unique identity of Japanese language. The paper
attempts to situate Tanizaki's linguistic project in the larger context
of contemporary discourse on love and cultural tradition.

Saturday, November 11, 2000

Session II

8:30-10:30

Writing Otherness: Strategies of Literary Appropriation and Nativization

Archetypes Unbound: Domestication of the Chinese "Five Imperial Consorts"

Atsuko Sakaki
University of Toronto

This paper traces the process in which five of the Chinese female archetypes--Wang Zhaojun, Yang Guifei, Shangyang ren, Li Furen, and Lingyuan qie--immortalized by Bai Juyi were imported to Japan and transformed in order to conform to the convention of Japanese literary practice. Bai's satirical poems (fengyu) were received by Japanese readers of waka and wabun not as political critique but as lyrics. Ahistoricizing and depoliticizing forces are conspicuously at work when the focus of a poem rests on a woman. Rather than faithfully inheriting Bai's warnings against negative ramifications of the imperial concubinage, privileging of Daoism, and the increasing influences from the non-Han ethnic groups in and around China, the Japanese readership placed stress on the poetically verified, universalized and crystalized emotions (longings for the homeland, lover, family, prosperity, and youth) incited by tragedies and misfortunes befalling the aforementioned women. By examining adaptations of the five concubines, ranging from sequences of poems in high-Heian to medieval anthologies such as Shinsen rôeishû, Fûboku
wakashô, and Kan koji wakashû to stories in collections such as
Konjaku monogatari shû and Kara monogatari, to noh plays including "Shôkun," "Yô Kihi," and "Hanagatami," I will show that specific lines of Bai's poems were highlighted while others confused with attributes of other women, to the effect that each woman's historical circumstances and her story's dogmatic overtones were neutralized so as to construct the universal image of the ill-fated woman.

Kambun as Performative Power in Makura no sôshi and Murasaki Shikibu nikki

Naomi Fukumori
The Ohio State University

Interest in feminist and gender studies has re-invigorated the study of mid-Heian women’s texts in the last two decades, with attention directed to the phenomenon of an early tradition of women’s writing within a national literary canon and to the various theoretical implications of a "women’s literature." Foremost in theoretical investigations has been the problematic of writing in the vernacular language and kana, as opposed to the Chinese literary language and mana. The Heian polarization of these writing practices in gendered terms, that is, kana as onnade/women’s script and mana as otoko-de/men’s script, has spawned studies of the construction of gender identities within premodern Japanese culture. Each writing system indeed seems to have been employed primarily by those of the gender of its nomenclature; however, in actuality, women and men practiced the reading and writing of both systems. What then did the onna-de and otoko-de scripts and their corresponding languages Japanese and Chinese signify in their usage?
Sei Shônagon’s Makura no sôshi (The pillow book) and Murasaki Shikibu’s Murasaki Shikibu nikki (The memoir of Murasaki Shikibu), two 11^th century texts by women, offer provocative case studies of the cultural significance of women’s usage of mana and their knowledge of Chinese writings (kambun). In her memoir, Murasaki Shikibu consistently presents her female knowledge of Chinese writings as socially improper, and in her famous critique of ladies-in-waiting, she takes Sei Shônagon to task for her "sprinkling of mana in her writings." Ironically, what is highlighted through Murasaki’s modest apologies is her outstanding knowledge of Chinese writings, abnormal as she may present it to be. Sei Shônagon, on the other hand, is forthright in recording a number of exchanges with male courtiers which showcase her knowledge of the Chinese classics. Although the two writers seem to present two diverging portrayals of Heian women’s relationship to Chinese writings, close investigation reveals that both writers underscore their connections with specific men in their society through their references to their mastery of kambun/mana. In my paper, I will argue that kambun and mana script are employed as symbolic performances in both Makura no sôshi and Murasaki Shikibu nikki, serving to illustrate the women’s ties to prominent male figures.

In a "Borrowed Tongue": The Representation of Japan in the English Language by Nitobe, Okakura and Uchimura

Matthew Mizenko
Ursinus College

The period from 1895 to 1905 saw the initial publication of three influential and significant books by Japanese men born around 1860: Nitobe Inazo, Okakura Kakuzo, and Uchimura Kanzo. What made the books particularly noteworthy was that they were written in English--a "borrowed tongue," as Nitobe put it in the introduction to "Bushido, the Soul of Japan" (1900). Nitobe's goal was to make himself "intelligible" as he sought to bring "Japan . . . closer to the understanding of foreign readers." Nitobe was surprisingly sensitive to the politics of representation; while referring appreciatively to Hearn, Chamberlain, and others who had written so sympathetically on Japan, he nevertheless considered them to be, "at best," Japan's "solicitors and attorneys," and he argued that it was now time for him, as the "defendant," to speak for himself. Although my paper will focus on Nitobe, I will also suggest that similar motives may be discerned behind Okakura's "The Book of Tea" and Uchimura's "How I Became a Christian."
Now that texts such as "Bushido" have been largely dismissed for any descriptive value, I believe that it is time to consider them as discursive acts, and to situate them within the history of modern Japan's relationship with the West. With its concern for the politics of representation, colonial studies may provide some useful tools for such an analysis, with the understanding that even though Japan during that period may seem to have been under the influence of Euro-American cultural imperialism, it was at the same time developing its own colonialist program in East Asia. This leaves the texts in the somewhat ambiguous position of representing a nascent (marginal) Empire writing to (and against) a more established imperial Center.

‘Dreams Come True’: Fukuda Tsuneari and the Shakespearean Sub-Text

Daniel Gallimore
Linacre College, Oxford

Sub-text is essential to the transmission of Shakespeare’s plays both between and within cultures. For the translator it matters not only in ensuring that the original texts are understood but also that they make a difference to the target culture. Resistance to sub-text is associated with different traditions of organising and receiving texts, for example the tendency for Japanese kabuki to be organised along a fragmented series of dramatic moments rather than towards a single cathartic one. Effective translations, therefore, have usually accompanied agendas of cultural reform.
Fukuda Tsuneari (1912-94) was a playwright, director, and professor of English literature with a clear agenda for the cultural reform of 1950s, war-depressed Japan. My paper will discuss a number of ways in which sub-texts are articulated in his translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (first published in 1957 and first staged in 1957). Finally, in expounding his own interpretation of the play it can be seen how Fukuda’s translation also serves to comment on its immediate cultural context.

Session III

10:45-12:15

The Lyrical Word: Language and Identity in Poetry and Poetics

The Wakan rôei shû: Singing in Harmony or Cannibalization?

Sonja Arntzen
University of Toronto

The Wakan rôei shû (Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing, Chaves and Rimer, 1997) certainly marks a key moment in the process of assimilating Chinese poetry into the Japanese literary identity. It was the first anthology to treat both Japanese and Chinese poets of kanshi as equals, as well as placing waka and kanshi on an equal footing. The Wakan rôei shû can thus be said to have furthered the project begun by the Kokinshû to have Japanese poetry accepted as the equal of Chinese poetry, a project very important for pride in the national poetic tradition. Moreover, if the Kokinshû can be credited with laying the foundation for the canon of Japanese poetry, the Wakan rôei shû established a unified canon for Chinese and Japanese poetry that exerted influence even into the modern era. For an example of this, one can point to Kawabata Yasunari's alluding to a Po Chü-i couplet from the Wakan rôei shû as the epitome of Japanese sensibility in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize.
This paper will address the following question: does the Wakan rôei shû represent an act of appropriation or even cannibalization of Chinese poetry, or does it rather demonstrate the interdependence and essential complementarity of the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions? Slides from manuscripts of the Wakan rôei shû attributed to Fujiwara Yukinari will be used to illustrate how the calligraphic style of the anthology's most famous renderer mirrors the literary function of the work itself.

Gender, Geography, and Writing in Mabuchi's Nativist Poetics:
From Masurao-buri to Taoyame-buri

Lawrence E. Marceau
University of Delaware

The early-modern scholar and poet Kamo no Mabuchi conducted research into the Japanese classics, notably the Man'yoshu, composed poetry in the Man'yo-cho metre, and lectured in classical philology and poetics at his successful academy, the Kemmon, in Edo. Mabuchi's academy is unusual for its age in that 20 percent of his recorded disciples were women. Mabuchi actively solicited women into his academy, and many of his female disciples went on to play a role in the history of early modern waka composition, including the talented Yuya Shizuko, Udono Yonoko, and Toki Tsukubako.
Mabuchi's poetics influenced these women, with its strong emphasis on gender distinctions relating both to ancient poetry as well as to geography. This presentation explores the relationships Mabuchi makes between ancient Yamato (site of the Nara capital) as a center for "masurao-buri," or "valiant masculine style," and Yamashiro (site of the Heian capital) as a center for an alternative "taoyame-buri," or "'soft-handed' feminine style." In an early form of the "climate and culture (fudo)" thesis later promoted by Watsuji Tetsuro and others, Mabuchi argues that the geography of Yamato by its very nature promoted masculinity, even among its women, while Yamashiro generated femininity among its inhabitants. This presentation delves into the complex interrelationships between gender, geography, and periodization as they appear both in Mabuchi's theories and in his school's poetry. The "act of writing," in the case of early modern Kemmon poetic composition, becomes a highly gendered attempt to recreate the "spirit of the ancients" in urban Edo.

Anzai Fuyue’s Empire of Signs: Japanese Poetry in Manchuria

William O. Gardner
Middlebury College

As suggested in the Call for Papers, issues of “language choice” relating to “the creation of historical worlds and national identities” have for much of Japanese history been emplotted in the matrix of Japanese spoken language and its phonetic representations versus the “linguistically unrelated script” of Chinese. I propose to give a paper on the poet Anzai Fuyue (1898-1965), whose work revisits this linguistic matrix in the new historical context of transnational Modernism and Japanese Imperialist hegemony in East Asia.
From his home in the Japanese-administered port city of Dalian, Manchuria, Anzai propagated an influential new style of Modernist poetry. He co-founded and edited the journal A (Dalian 1924-1928), and was a founding member of Shi to Shiron (Tokyo, 1928-1931), the journal credited with laying the groundwork for Japanese postwar poetry. Anzai’s concise, witty, and sometimes brutal poetry is especially noted for its incorporation of unusual Chinese lexical elements. His exoticism was both spatial and temporal: maps and Chinese toponyms are important sources of his language and imagery, as are classical Chinese historical and literary texts.
Although his case is particularly striking, Anzai was only one of many writers testing the boundaries of the Japanese national and linguistic integrity during this period of Imperialist expansion. In my paper, I will explore the intersection of Modernism, Orientalism, and Imperialism in Anzai’s career, and address the ethical and theoretical challenges which the works of Japanese interwar Modernists pose to our conceptions of language and identity today.

Session IV

3:00-4:30

Crosscurrents: Language Styles and Codes in the Nineteenth Century

Making the Scene with Shikitei Sanba

Joshua Young
Cornell University

The works of the nineteenth-century writer Shikitei Sanba have, since the beginning of the scholarly study of literature in Japan, been known for their representations of actual speech, especially of speech of the urban commoners of the time. Futabatei Shimei, in his essay Yo ga genbunitchi no yurai, speaks of Sanba’s writing as one model in his search for a suitable style of conversational prose. In the late Twentieth century, literary scholars continued to approach Sanba as the great recording artist of the late Tokugawa period, the mixer who sampled techniques of his gesakusha predecessors but moved the scene being recorded from the exclusive environs of the pleasure quarters to the streets of Edo.
What these understandings of Sanba’s work have skipped over in their utilitarian conception of writing is the great preoccupation with performance in both Sanba’s writings and the cultural texts of the early Nineteenth century. Not only do Sanba’s texts often take theatrical settings as their subject matter, but they often also frame the written text as transcriptions of performances, transcriptions in this case ambiguously oriented toward both demonstrations of past events and the elicitation of future practices. Reading for the demonstration and elicitation of performance in Sanba’s humor books (kokkeibon), this presentation will attempt to show how these texts are part of a cultural concern with the idea of performativity: the awareness of a constructed nature of practices that disrupts the assumption of a natural ground of identities.

Rhetoric as Metalanguage and the Metalanguage of Rhetoric: How Language Defines and Is Defined in the Scholarship of Rhetoric of the Meiji and Taisho Periods

Massimiliano Tomasi
Western Washington University

     The Meiji period saw the rise of a controversy over the character of the new written language. The literary world was divided into two factions, one supporting the vernacularization of the written language and one who insisted on the supremacy of classical language. Scholars and writers debated the necessity of reconciling the notions of elegance and simplicity in writing to create a refined literary language that could be intelligible even to the less educated.
      Western rhetoric, first introduced to Japan after the Restoration, was an important component of this debate. Like the novels published during that period, treatises of rhetoric took a position on the issue. But while novels endorsed either classical or colloquial styles primarily on a connotative, implicit level, works of rhetoric did so on a denotative level, by means of a metalanguage that explicitly discussed the prerequisites of language in written communication.
      Already in these terms rhetoric played an important function, speaking in favor of certain styles over others and providing notions of refinement, clarity and appropriateness of expression. However, its contribution went even further: as texts, treatises of rhetoric had their own written style, and this gave birth to (meta)metalanguage that also connoted a preference for a specific literary language.
      This paper proposed to analyze Meiji and Taishô works of rhetoric and their metalanguage to investigate the relationship between their mode of discourse and their object and ultimately to discuss rhetoric’s multiple contributions to the controversy over the new written language.

Session V

4:45-6:30

The Mediated Word: Publishers and Periodicals in Twentieth-Century Literary Production

Translation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Writing in(to) Japanese

Sarah Cox
Brigham Young University

In the Meiji era, Japan turned its attention to the assimilation and appropriation of literature from the West through translation of works from Europe, Russia, and the Americas. This assimilation so profoundly influenced the literary climate that critics could compare Higushi Ichiyô’s writing to that of Turgenev, and Hinatsu Kôsuke could claim that the history of Meiji literature was the history of translation. Eventually, translation became no just an activity but a topic of discourse, a discourse simultaneously situating the Japanese bundan and its activities within the global literary scene and challenging the authority of the “originality” of Western works.
This paper will examine the discourse on translation carried out in Bunshô sekai. Drawing on Benjamin’s notions of originality and authority, it will show how members of the literary establishment in Meiji Japan read the significance of inscription of foreign writings into native language, an inscription which required stretching the limits of Japanese to accommodate the foreign. As literary works were removed from their contexts—both time and place—and made to speak in Japanese, Bunshô sekai critics focused on the act of translation rather than on questions of accuracy and fidelity to the original text. They read multiple translations of a single work as well as jûyaku (Japanese translations from already-translated materials) as part of the life cycle of an original work of art. The conception of the work of literary art as infinitely translatable, and therefore infinitely reproduceable, substituted a plurality of voices and a democratic view of art for the monolithic authority of the foreign “original.”

"Novels You Can Watch/Movies You Can Read": Visual Narrative in 1930s Women¹s Magazines

Sarah Frederick
Boston University

The influence of cinematic culture on Japanese writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s has been the subject of recent analysis (such as the montage-like scenes in Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai). Women¹s magazines in early Showa incorporated visual forms into written narrative in a more literal way. Women's magazines produced their own stories using photographs in the style of film stills using the same format as their introductions both Hollywood and Japanese films. Full page photographs of urban scenes or domestic life were accompanied by a small amount of textual dialogue and narration. Publishers gave these visual stories different names such as "photographic novels" (shasshin shôsetsu) Shufu no tomo) and "Novels you can watch/ Movies you can read"(Mieru shôsetsu/Yomeru eiga) in Fujin Kôron. These narratives, which were made possible by the influence of cinematic culture, cheaper methods of magazine photograph printing, and the enormous profit potential in advertising in women's magazines, took illustration of serialized novels and the increased visuality of print culture to their logical extremes. By introducing some of these extreme examples, this paper will consider the broader question of the effects of visual technology on modern Japanese written fictional forms.

Publishing Houses and Court Houses: Ishihara Shintaro's Debut as a Novelist

Ann Sherif
Oberlin College

From 1945 through 1960s, prose fiction writers in Japan started adopting new strategies for evoking the body, gender, and sexuality in their works. Much of this change has been attributed to politic and social changes occasioned by Japan's defeat and the Allied Occupation, as well as the debates within literary communities about the future of post-defeat art and literature. In my paper, I will examine the roles that the publishing world, literary prizes, and the legal system (in particular, Lady Chatterly's Lover censorship trials that commenced in 1952) had in steering the course of literary production. Specifically, I will look at then-innovative fictional texts of Ishihara Shintaro (b. 1932, now xenophobic mayor of Tokyo), and the ways that vestiges of Occupation censorship policies, literary censorship trials, and publishing and advertising practices influenced the production and reception of Ishihara's famous Season of Violence (Taiyoo no kisetsu, 1955).

Sunday, November 12, 2000

Session VI

8:30-10:30

Writing Exercises: New Positions in Postwar and Contemporary Literary Discourse

Both Ways Now: Dazai Osamu and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Writing the Female in Postwar Japan

Linda Chance
University of Pennsylvania

A truism of the classical era split between kanbun and kana writing is that male authors used imported "masculine" Chinese for official documents and also had access to "feminine" native feeling. Nonetheless, some men "became" women through adoption of a female persona. This paper considers two modern authors who write as both men and women in the texts Shayo (The Setting Sun, 1947) and Kagi (The Key, 1956).
As Japanese women had better access to "the master's tools" of writing, literary ventriloquism has differed from the West. Ovid speaking as Sappho or Richardson's Pamela step into a larger space devoid of women's own voices. Japanese male ventriloquists are arguably less likely to displace the woman's voice to assert domination. What happens in the Japanese case? As Miyake argues, a transformative merger of male and female voice characterizes the foundational performance that is Kagero nikki. Lyons suggests that in Dazai's late works he "had it both ways" through his male experience and female narrators. In Shayo, both the narrator Kazuko and her brother Naoji participate in Dazai's personality. Kagi enacts a play of genders as Tanizaki writes both the husband and the wife, Ikuko, who in turn write each other through "secret" diaries.
Neither author stops with a male-female hybrid voice, however. Kazuko and Ikuko not only observe but may hasten the death of the exhausted males Uehara and the husband. Dazai and Tanizaki expose the postwar male--remnant of the prewar nation's failed masculinist desires--in his weakness, allowing female characters to overpower him.
While taking care not to reinstantiate images of Dazai and Tanizaki that Wolfe explodes, this paper will explore the acts of writing that produce this apparent triumph of the feminine.

Wresting National Language from the State: Inoue Hisashi’s Attempt to Overcome the Modern
Christopher Robins
State University of New York at New Paltz
In his fiction, plays and critical essays, Inoue Hisashi has long grappled with the problem of the modern nation state and national language as coterminous. He seems to view the conflicting tensions inherent in the development of national language, that is, the opposition between nostalgia for the past and desire for the new (modern), as parallel to the Janus-faced nature of the emerging nation state.
In this paper I will briefly discuss how Inoue Hisashi positions himself in opposition to the homogenization of Japanese language (specifically, hyôjungo). I will discuss Inoue’s often ironic attacks on “standard Japanese” as part of a larger polemic against the ideological excesses of the Meiji State and the negative impact on regional and pre-modern Japanese cultural forms. Using three of Inoue’s texts that deal with the topic of national language: Kirikirijin (1981), Kokugo gannen (1986), and Tokyo seben rôzu (1999), I will show how Inoue’s writings consistently attack the idea of state control over language. Inoue assails the instruments of state ideology by giving voice to the marginalized members of Japanese society; the social, economic and cultural outcastes who implicitly preserve the diversity of the pre-modern period. While Inoue presents countless examples of cultural and linguistic heterogeneity that challenge the monolithic vision of modern Japanese national identity, I will also point out that his success in altering the discourse on national language runs counter to his original goals once he becomes an arbiter of linguistic orthodoxy himself. As a proponent of the conservation of certain pre-modern linguistic forms, I will discuss the way that in some respects, Inoue ironically strengthens the case for fixing Japanese linguistic forms and thus, asserts the need for a more historically authentic version of “standard Japanese.”

The Gender of Solitude: Changing Sexual Identities in Recent Japanese Fiction

Giorgio Amitrano
Naples University of Oriental Studies

The provocative novel Kagirinaku tômei ni chikai burû (1976) by Murakami Ryû, with the bisexual encounters of the male hero, may be considered one of the first examples of an unprecedented challenge to traditional boundaries of sex definition in Japanese literature.
Some years later, writers such as Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana, have expressed in their best-selling works an even stronger need for a redefinition of masculine and feminine roles. Their works are less obviously provocative than Murakami Ryû’s but are more subtly subversive in their suggesting unconventional sex roles as normality. In their novels a new balance between the sexes is created through questioning male and female stereotypes, and to a certain extent the reading public has seemed to identify with this. The invention of a transsexual father in Kitchin and the lesbian theme, recurrent both in Yoshimoto and Murakami, have been accepted by their readers without scandalized reactions, as if they faithfully reflected the state of Japanese society.
But do they really reflect reality, as the success of gay author Fujino Chiya, recent Akutagawa winner, would seem to suggest? Or do they just anticipate a change in Japanese sensibility that has not yet taken place in actual society? And why is the search for a redefinition of sexual roles so often connected with a feeling of loneliness and displacement? Do these writers see changing sexual identities as a cause of social isolation, or rather as a means to establish a new kind of communication between sexes? These are some of the themes I shall be investigating in my paper.

Writing the Limits of Sexual Identities: Tomioka Taeko’s "Straw Dogs"
and Nakagami Kenji’s "The Immortal"

Eiji Sekine
Purdue University
Some contemporary authors write so as to examine the validity of the
novel’s very thematic foundations. The two stories, Tomioka’s "Suuku"
(Straw Dogs) and Nakagami’s "Fushi" (The Immortal), critically
reexamines the limits of sexual identities.
Tomioka’s middle-aged female protagonist continues one-night-stand
ventures with young men and conclusively reconfirms her hope of living
life as an "animal," with no "relationships and words." The "animal"
here indicates that she wants to decenter any thematics of sexuality,
covered with values of commitment (relationships) and/or meaningfulness
(words). The mere pursuit for sexual acts is discovered at ground zero,
where a woman and a man can face each other equally and straightly.
Nakagami’s protagonist expresses an ambivalent interest in sexual
symbolism. The story unfolds a wandering hijiri’s encounter with a young
mysterious woman in a mountain. The man approaches her in the hope of
corresponding with something divine in her; he soon realizes that
neither spiritual salvation nor a life together with the woman are
attainable. With nowhere to belong to, this hijiri just keeps walking
through an always-renewing present.
Tomioka and Nakagami write about the limits of sexuality by highlighting
the literal and performative power of sexuality as something digressive
from sexual symbolism. The protagonist’s modes of being are both
described by their namelessness and endlessness of their desires. On the
basis of this commonality, the two writers display contrast: Tomioka’s
protagonist aggressively disengages herself from sexual symbolism, while
Nakagami’s hero becomes deconstructively free from within his engaged
search of the very symbolism. Their difference corresponds to the
asymmetric gender role differences assigned to them in the formation of
the discourse on sexuality.

Session VII

11:00-12:30

Writing at the Crossroads: Migrations and Mergings in Modern Japanese Literature

Colonial Ethnography and the Writing of the Exotic:
Nishikawa Mitsuru in the Tropics

Faye Yuan Kleeman
University of Colorado at Boulder

     Studies of Nishikawa Mitsuru usually split into several camps. One is the nationalistic, nativist point of view of the colonialized subject, which denounces and dismisses categorically all literary productions of the colonial writers. This is perhaps best represented by writer/critics such as Chen Yingzhen in his article “Nishikawa Mitsuru and Taiwanese Literature” (1984). The other camp also takes a nativist position, albeit a positive one which credits Nishikawa’s dedication to the recording and valorization of Taiwanese culture. Zhang Lianze (1979, 1983) may be the best representative of this camp. Others, mostly Japanese researchers, treat this topic with careful ambiguity, focusing on interpretive concepts such as “exotic” and “romantic” in deciphering Nishikawa’s writings.
     With the passing of Nishikawa in 1999, it is high time to re-evaluate Nishikawa’s literary endeavor. Going beyond the two schools of interpretation representing colonial and post-colonial points of view, I would like, in this paper, to explore the possibility of a reading that is not bound by these two binary positions. Nishikawa’s oeuvre and the body of criticism in has inspired must, of course, be placed in the historical context of the twentieth-century (de)colonization process, but attention must also be paid to the course of modernization in East Asia as a whole and the postwar/cold war politics of that region.
     I will first examine the nature of critical standards applied to Nishikawa’s writings and ponder the issues of Orientalism, authenticity, and nostalgic ethnography. Nishikawa’s literary texts will be examined as a process that implicates the ambivalence of the colonial enterprise. How Nishikawa writes about the exotic other(s) also sheds light on the construction of Japanese Orientalist discourse. It is my belief that the historical significance of Nishikawa’s work cannot be fully understood without a reflection on the conflicting and contradictory nature of the “compassionate Orientalist.”

                Ethnic Identities and Various Approaches towards
Japanese Language: Analysis of Ri Kaisei, Kin Kakuei, and Tachihara Masaaki

Yoshiko Matsuura

Purdue University
        Resident Korean writers take various attitudes towards ethnicity which influence
both their writing styles and the Japanese language. In my project, I treat three Resident
Korean writers, Ri Kaisei, Kin Kakuei, and Tachihara Masaaki, and analyze their
approaches towards the Japanese language.
        Ri Kaisei, a second-generation Korean immigrant writer, pursues his ethnicity and
puts Korean words in Kinuta wo utsu onna (The Woman Who Fulled Clothes,
1971) sporadically. On the other hand, Kin Kakuei, a precursor of the third
generation, speaks only Japanese and endures drifting between two ethnic poles, one
Japanese and the other Korean. Kin, connecting his mental anguish as a stutterer and the agony of being a Korean, succeeds in creating the stuttering effect in Kogoerukuchi (The
Benumbed Mouth, 1966) in several ways. He uses lots of chemical terms written in
katakana (Wender, 2000) and repeats the word "kyoufu (terror)." He also uses "boku (I)"
extraordinarily frequently as if he were seeking himself in the text.
        Tachihara, born of Korean parents, fabricates a birth as the son of a Korean noble
man and a Japanese woman. He shows flexibility towards ethnicity and keeps a distance
from characters by using a third-person narrator and an objective writing style in
Tsurugigasaki (Cliff’s Edge, 1964). Tachihara’s writing is characterized
by the repetitive use of the plain past form of verbs, which ends many sentences in "ta."
He seems to ignore the monotonous sound.
        Thus, Resident Korean writers, through facing ethnic identity issues,
take unique approaches toward the Japanese language and embrace the potential for
transforming it.

    Women in Two Cultures: Nomadic Writers of Japan
Reiko Tachibana
The Pennsylvania State University

     The presence of transnational writers has rapidly increased in the Japanese literary world in the 1990s, such as Mizumura Minae (returning from the U.S. to Japan after a 20-year absence), Tawada Yoko (living in Germany since 1982), and Yang Ji Lee (born of Korean parents and raised in Japan). They are what another multicultural writer, Levy Hideo, describes, “radical” in their own rights. Tawada is the first and only author from Japan who writes in German and Japanese. Her choice of the two languages not only breaks the illusion of homogeneity—one nation, one race, and one language—that has been a predominant ideology in both Japanese and German societies, but also demonstrates the potential for a writer to select language(s) of his/her choice without concern for borders. Mizumura too consciously chooses Japanese over English—the supposedly universal language for world literature at the millennium. Unlike Mizumura and Tawada, Lee has no “luxury” of choosing a language for her narrative. She speaks little of her mother tongue, Korean, but necessarily uses Japanese. Her fiction in Japanese represents voices of the “invisible” members of this “homogeneous” society.
For these transnational authors, writing is what Walter Benjamin called an act of translation. Their bi-cultural vision allows them to function as critics of their own writings. Characterized by heterogeneity, they challenge and make readers redefine the (political) concepts of a homogeneous nation, national culture, and identity that still operate in many public contexts.