Reading Modern Japanese Fiction in Translation by Beholdmyswarthyface
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Study Guide: Ishikawa Jun “Moon Gems” (Meigetsushu, 1946)
Lit 365: Morrison
“There are moments when the radical gesture is to do nothing”–Slavoj
Žižek, March 14, 2007 interview with Soft
Targets.
Terms/Cultural
Particularities
1. Hachiman 八幡: “One of the most
popular Shinto deities of Japan; the patron deity of the Minamoto clan and of
warriors in general; often referred to as the god of war. Hachiman is commonly
regarded as the deification of Ojin, the 15th emperor of Japan. He is seldom
worshipped alone, however, and Hachiman shrines are most frequently dedicated
to three deities, the emperor Ojin, his mother the empress Jingo, and the
goddess Hime-gami” (Schadé).
2. Hachimangū 八幡宮。A Shintō shrine
dedicated to the gods of war; in this story, probably the Tomioka Hachiman
located in the blue-collar Fukagawa district of Tokyo. One of more than sixty
Hachiman shrines in Tokyo, the Tomioka Hachiman Shrine 富岡八幡神宮 was
built around 1625, and is dedicated to the war god, Hachiman. Many of Japan’s
major cities— especially cities that have served at the headquarters of the bakufu military government— have shrines
to Hachiman.
3. Firebombing of
Tokyo 東京大空襲: A total of sixty-seven Japanese cities were firebombed by
US forces during WWII. The firebombing of Tokyo began in early 1945 and
continued up through the final days of the war. The worst damage was suffered
on Mach 10, 1945, when approximately 100,000 civilians were killed and over 1,000,000
homes destroyed. Other than the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
March 10 Tokyo air raids proved to be the deadliest single attack on the
Japanese mainland by US forces. The bombing referred to in this story is the infamous
March 10 bombing.
4. Kyōka 狂歌: “Mad poems. Waka with a
humorous or witty cast of language or thought,” and goes on to note that “word
plays involving several meanings were especially popular” (PCJL, 287).
The genre, it points out, was intended to “appeal to a popular audience” (287).
Among the major collections of kyōka,
which is said to begin with the Gyōgetsubō’s Sake Hyakushu in the early
14th century, is the joint work of Ōta Nampo and Akera Kankō, titled
Manzai Kyōkashū and compiled in
1783 (361). The PCJL also notes in the same entry:
“Kyōka – ‘mad waka’ – were
composed from fairly early times, as early as the Kamakura period. But at that
period waka was so highly esteemed
that ‘mad waka’ was a contradiction
in terms, an oxymoron. That fact explains why kyōka really developed in Muromachi, and chiefly in Edo, times.
Given the cultivation necessary to effect difference, and the desire to write
poems that made the difference, it will be clear that the practice was chiefly
that of the warrior aristocracy and of learned townspeople” (360).
5. Ōta Nanpo 大田南畝 (1749-1823), aka Shokusanjin 蜀山人: a late Edo writer of kyōka and kyōshi poetry,
who also wrote kokkeibon, hanashibon, kibyōshi and other kinds of prose. He is best remembered though for
his seminal works of poetry, most notably Shokusan hyakushu 蜀山百首 (1818), Manzaishū 万歳集 (A Thousand Centuries of Kyōka,
1783), and Neboke sensei bunshū 寝惚先生文集
(Professor Sleepy Head’s Poems, 1767) (PCJL, 216). According to Tyler, he
was “the grand master of the kyōka
coteries,” and was both a “samurai bureaucrat and a literary light” (188). He
was to twentieth-century
writers Ishikawa and Kafū the supreme model of Edo culture and elegance,
admired for his “anti-establishment stance and iconoclastic humor, his
cultivated air of aloofness, his uncompromising adroitness at playing the game
of public versus private personae (omote/ura), his disdain for personal
revelation, and his ability to generate fictions or fabrications that have an
artistic integrity independent of the author’s life” (189).
In a time when the I-novel dominated literary salons, “Ishikawa surely found
Nanpo’s ‘shadowless’ transparency to be enviably cool” (189).
6. Epiphany: “A
Moment of sudden insight. With an upper case ‘e’, Epiphany is a Christian
festival that celebrates the appearance of Christ in this world to the Magi,
and is celebrated on January 6. In a literary context, it retains a sense of
higher, sometimes mystical awareness of how the world actually is (a form of
subjective truth). There are many authors, such as George Herbert and William
Wordsworth, whose poems seem to contain epiphanic moments. But the term is specifically
associated with James Joyce, who used the term himself, and whose characters
(particularly those in Dubliners) undergo moments of epiphany. Joyce thought it
was the writer’s task to record these flashes of truth when they appear”
(Auger, 100).
7. Transcendent Impulse:
My term for the impulse (toward transcendence or some sort of mystical
experience) that is discernible in many of Ishikawa’s narrators. Needless to
say, this impulse is always thwarted by the conditions of reality.
8. Emperor Mu of the Zhou Dynasty
(周穆王; circa
985-907 BC) and the Eight Stallions: “The Eight horses of Emperor Mu was a popular decoration
on porcelain from the Transitional into the Yongzheng period (1723-35). The
story originates from a historical romance, the Mu tianzhi zhuan (An Account of Emperor Mu), which
describes the journeys of the fifth emperor of the Zhou dynasty (1023-983 BC)
during which he met Xi Wang Mu,
the Queen Mother of the West, at Yaozhi (the Jade Pond).
During these travels the
emperor’s chariot was pulled by eight horses named after the color of their
hair. Another account, the fourth-century book the Shiyiji (Researches into Lost Records) has it
that the horses’ names reflected their unusual talents; Number 1 gallops
without touching the ground; Number 2 runs faster than birds; Number 3 goes
especially fast at night; Number 4 goes as fast as the shadow of the sun;
Number 5 is especially well-groomed with a splendid mane; Number 6 runs so fast
that one can see a row of ten images of him; Number 7 rides on a cloud; Number
8 has wings.
The Eight Horses of Wang Mu
became a popular subject among later poets and artists and a symbol for the vehicle
or journeys of any emperor” (Gotheborg).
9. The Toribeno
Cemetary 鳥辺野: the customary site for
cremation and burial in Kyoto, in the western slopes of Higashiyama. It appears in Genji
monogatari and is referred to in the Hōjōki.
10. Bunjin 文人: Literati; Japanese
term equivalent to the Chinese wenren,
designating those who devoted themselves to studying literature and the arts”
(Frédéric, 91).
11. Superfluous Man
(or lishny chelovek in Russian): “a
character type whose frequent recurrence in 19th-century Russian literature is
sufficiently striking to make him a national archetype. He is usually an
aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill
but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective
action” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Though Watashi gives us no clues regarding
his family’s social status, he certainly fits the rest of this description.
Study Questions
Answer all of
the following.
1. Describe the narrative
structure. Where is the narrator situated temporally in relation to the
events he is describing?
2. Give a concise summary
of the story.
3. Discuss the symbolic significance of the bicycle. Discuss Watashi’s interaction with it.
4. Describe the
character referred to as “Boots.”
What ideas/institutions does he embody? How is he a marked contrast to Watashi?
5. Describe the persona
of the narrator. Is he a comic or
tragic figure?
6. Discuss the epiphany-like scene on page 48.
Consider it in relation to the following scene in which Watashi has his first
successful ride.
7. Discuss the
significance of the title. What do
the moon, moonbeams, etc. represent to the narrator? Identify and discuss other
associated images in the work.
8. Describe the young girl and her relationship with Watashi.
Why does she say “we won” (52) after the bombing raid?
9. Can this story be
read as an allegory? Explain.
10. Explain the
significance of poetry/kyōka in the story. Why is Watashi able to compose comic verse again by
the end of the story?
11. Discuss the
character Gūka. What is Gūka to
Watashi?
12. Discuss the ending. Why is Watashi now ready to give
away the bike?
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Study Guide: Ishikawa Jun “Mars’ Song” (Marusu no uta; 1938)
Lit 365: Morrison
Relevant Terms
1. Metafiction:
a mimesis of product rather than of product; fiction that self-consciously addresses
the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion.
“Fiction about fiction; or more especially a kind of fiction that openly
comments on its own fictional status. In a weak sense, many modern novels about
novelists having problems writing their novels may be called metafictional in
so far as they discuss the nature of fiction; but the term is normally used for
works that involve a significant degree of self-consciousness about themselves
as fictions, in ways that go beyond occasional apologetic addresses to the
reader. The most celebrated case is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), which makes a continuous joke of its
own digressive form. A notable modern example is John Fowles’s The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which Fowles interrupts the narrative to explain
his procedures, and offers the reader alternative endings. Perhaps the finest
of modern metafictions is Italo Calvino’s Se
una notte d’inverno un viaggatore (If
on a winter’s night a traveler, 1979), which begins ‘You are about to begin
reading Italo Calvino’s new novel.” (Baldick, ODLT, 203)
2. Self-conscious
narrator: A narrator that draws the reader’s attention to the process and
mechanics of narration.
3. Death Drive (pulsion de mort) (psychoanalysis):
Although intimations of the concept of the death drive (Todestrieb) can be
found early on in Freud’s work, it was only in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920g) that the concept was fully articulated. In this work Freud established
a fundamental opposition between life drives (eros), conceived of as a tendency
towards cohesion and unity, and the death drives, which operate in the opposite
direction, undoing connections and destroying things. However, the life drives
and the death drives are never found in a pure state, but always mixed/fused
together in differing proportions. Indeed, Freud argued that were it not for
this fusion with erotism, the death drive would elude our perception, since in
itself it is silent (Freud, 1930a: SE, XXI, 120).
The concept of the
death drive was one of the most controversial concepts introduced by Freud, and
many of his disciples rejected it (regarding it as mere poetry or as an unjustifiable
incursion into metaphysics), but Freud continued to reaffirm the concept for the
rest of his life. Of the non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory, only
Kleinian psychoanalysis takes the concept seriously.
Lacan follows Freud in
reaffirming the concept of the death drive as central to psychoanalysis: ‘to
ignore the death instinct in his [Freud’s] doctrine is to misunderstand that
doctrine entirely’ (E, 301).
In Lacan’s first
remarks on the death drive, in 1938, he describes it as a nostalgia for a lost
harmony, a desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother’s breast,
the loss of which is marked on the psyche in the weaning complex (Lacan,
1938:35). In 1946 he links the death drive to the suicidal tendency of
narcissism (Ec, 186). By linking the death drive with the preoedipal phase and
with narcissism, these early remarks would place the death drive in what Lacan
later comes to call the imaginary order. However, when Lacan begins to develop
his concept of the three orders of imaginary, symbolic and real, in the 1950s,
he does not situate the death drive in the imaginary but in the symbolic. In
the seminar of 1954–5, for example, he argues that the death drive is simply
the fundamental tendency of the symbolic order to produce REPETITION; ‘The death
instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order’ (S2, 326). This shift also
marks a difference with Freud, for whom the death drive was closely bound up
with biology, representing the fundamental tendency of every living thing to
return to an inorganic state. By situating the death drive firmly in the
symbolic, Lacan articulates it with culturerather than nature; he states that
the death drive ‘is not a question of biology’ (E, 102), and must be
distinguished from the biological instinct to return to the inanimate (S7, 211–12).
Another difference
between Lacan’s concept of the death drive and Freud’s emerges in 1964. Freud
opposed the death drive to the sexual drives, but now Lacan argues that the
death drive is not a separate drive, but is in fact an aspect of every DRIVE. ‘The
distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it
manifests two aspects of the drive’ (S11, 257). Hence Lacan writes that ‘every
drive is virtually a death drive’ (Ec, 848), because (i) every drive pursues
its own extinction, (ii) every drive involves the subject in repetition, and
(iii) every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the
realm of excess JOUISSANCE where enjoyment is experienced as suffering.
4. Fascism: “Political
philosophy [from Latin fasces, the bundle of ax and rods carried before Roman
consuls as a symbol of authority]. A political doctrine, in opposition to
liberalism and socialism, which was originally proposed in early
twentieth-century Italy by Mussolini and the neo-Hegelian philosopher Giovanni
Gentile. The doctrine was deeply influenced by the Hegelian theory of the state
and combined extreme nationalism with extreme communitarianism. Fascism rejects
individualism by claiming that a nation is an organic entity rather than an aggregate
of individuals with basic rights. It propounds irrationality and particularity
in contrast to rationality and universality. It supports the role of the
government as the upholder of moral integrity and the nation’s collective
purpose. It advocates an authoritarian state in which the government controls
all aspects of social life. In practice, Mussolini’s fascist government denied
freedom of speech to individuals and appealed to violence. The term ‘fascism’
was later used to characterize Hitler’s National Socialism (Nazi) and other
European regimes influenced by Hitler and Mussolini. Through Hitler, fascism
became associated with genocidal anti-Semitism, but other fascist regimes were
militaristic. Since the Second World War, the terms has been taken as a symbol
of evil, which is applied to any oppressive and totalitarian political regime
or action. Some political theorists seek to understand how fascist regimes
arose in the context of modernity” (Bunnin, BDWP, 251).
Particularities of
Culture
5. Hachiman 八幡: “One of the most
popular Shinto deities of Japan; the patron deity of the Minamoto clan and of
warriors in general; often referred to as the god of war. Hachiman is commonly
regarded as the deification of Ojin, the 15th emperor of Japan. He is seldom
worshipped alone, however, and Hachiman shrines are most frequently dedicated
to three deities, the emperor Ojin, his mother the empress Jingo, and the
goddess Hime-gami” (Schadé).
6. Roei no uta 露営の歌 (Field Encampment
Song): Japanese gunka (military song)
from 1937. “Marusu no uta” seems to be based on this actual song.
7. Kamata: eki in Ōta-ku, Tokyo; where Fuyuko lives.
8. Sōjiji temple in Tsurumi: temple in Yokohama.
9. Utsunomiya
宇都宮: military outpost in Tochigi-ken
10. Izu nagaoka:
11. Mishima-eki: in Shizuoka-ken, on Izu peninsula.
12. Shizuura- Shizuoka-ken, on Izu peninsula.
13. Mito:
14. … [add to the list as you read]
11. Mishima-eki: in Shizuoka-ken, on Izu peninsula.
12. Shizuura- Shizuoka-ken, on Izu peninsula.
13. Mito:
14. … [add to the list as you read]
Historical Timeline
1935: Rapid rise of
militarists begins.
1936: Ni-ni-roku jiken 二二 六事件 (“February 26
Incident”): A major coup attempt against the Japanese government by the
Imperial Way Faction 皇道派 in which groups of
assassins killed or attempted to kill the upper leadership of the government
and seize control of key buildings. Fourteen hundred junior military officers
took up arms in Tokyo, occupying the Diet, army ministry, and police
headquarters. Three cabinet members were killed, including finance minister
Takahashi Korekiyo. The rebellion was eventually put down under orders from the
emperor.
1937: Rokōkyō jiken 盧溝橋事件 (Marco Polo Bridge Incident): Conflict
between Chinese and Japanese troops near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing,
which developed into the warfare between the two countries that was the prelude
to the Pacific side of World War II. (Britannica
Encyclopedia)
1937: Shina jihen 支那事 変 (“China Incident”): incident that led to
large-scale hostilities between Japan and China.
1937: Nanking Massacre 南京大虐殺: a mass murder and war
rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of
the city of Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China.
1938: Establishment of the
National Spiritual Mobilization Movement 国民精神総動員運動の設立: Organization
established as part of the controls on civilian organizations under the
National Mobilization Law by Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe.
1938: National General
Mobilization Law 国家総動員法: Legislation passed by the Diet of Japan by Prime Minister
Fumimaro Konoe to put the national economy of the Empire of Japan on war-time
footing after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The National
Mobilization Law had fifty clauses, which provided for government controls over
civilian organizations (including labor unions), nationalization of strategic
industries, price controls and rationing, and nationalized the news media. The
laws gave the government the authority to use unlimited budgets to subsidize
war production, and to compensate manufacturers for losses caused by war-time
mobilization.
*Note on publication:
“‘Mars’ Song’ appeared in Bungakkai
but was banned within a week of the magazine’s distribution. Unsold copies were
seized, and the magazine was ordered to cease publication temporarily.
Eventually, Ishikawa and his editor, Kawakami Tetsutarō (1902-1991), were
hauled into Tokyo District Court, where they were fined thirty and fifty yen, respectively—a
considerable sum at the time and one that neither could hope to pay. Only through
the intervention of Kikuchi Kan (1888-1949), then doyen of Japanese letters and
editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary journal Bungei shunjū, were the fines paid and the two men released”
(Tyler, LOG, 178)
Study Questions
Answer all of
the following.
1. Describe the narrator. What is his relation to the world
he inhabits? What does he find lacking in the world at present?
2. Describe the narrative structure of the work. What “metafictional”
elements are employed? Is the narrator a “self-conscious narrator”?
3. Reality and fiction are initially presented by the narrator as irreconcilable opposites, yet it soon
becomes apparent that they are somehow inseparable. Discuss the relationship
between reality and fiction, art and life that is evoked in the work.
4. Discuss the
character of Obiko 帯子. What female type (or
combination of types) does she represent?
5. Discuss the
character Fuyuko 冬子 (her tastes,
inclinations, personality, etc.). What are the circumstances surrounding her suicide?
Can her life and death—and particularly her hobby of feigning various handicaps—be
read as an allegory for something? Also discuss the scene at her funeral wake.
6. Discuss the
character Sanji.
7. Describe the mood
of the times. What images/symbols/elements of militarism/fascism can you identify in the work?
8. Discuss the motif of
refusal/resistance that runs through
the work. Explain the context, target, significance, and impact of each act of
refusal or resistance.
9. Describe the scene
at the aquarium. Are the various
species of fish metaphors for something? Explain.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965), “The Tattooer” (Shisei刺青, 1910)
Lit 231:
Morrison
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō谷崎潤一郎 (1886-1965): Edokko; born to wealthy chōnin father (owner of publishing
company) in Nihonbashi; a botchan in
early years, but family fortunes soon declined; had to drop out of 帝大
in 1911; literary career begins in 1909; married in 1915, but soon bores of
her; encourages her to have affair with Satō Haruo (Odawara jiken); obsession
with West, aestheticism; moves to cosmopolitan Yokohama in 1922: lives bohemian
lifestyle; dabbles in film industry, script writing, 純映画劇運動 (pure film movement); reputation really takes off after 1923
Kantō daishinsai quake (old Tokyo
disappears, never to return; his attention moves from West to Kansai); between
1924 and 1934, writes Chijin no ai, In’ei raisan, Manji, Tade kū mushi, Yoshino kuzu, Ashikari, Shunkinshō; this
period corresponds to the general trend of Nihon
kaiki (yet maintains modernist inclinations); during war: Genji monogatari gendaiyaku and Sasame yuki (portrait of four daughters
of a wealthy family slowing slipping in stature); awarded bunka kunshō (order of culture) in 1949; continues to pursue his
favorite themes in later novels: longing for mother/ideal woman; male
masochism; sexuality/perversion; fantasy in old age; his eternal ideal female
archetypes: Western-ish femme fatale throughout early period, then the traditional
ningyō-like woman, then the lost
mother, then the noblewoman behind screen . . .
Terms/Particularities
of Culture
1.
Horimono/irezumi: traditional Japanese tattooing;
can be traced back to Jōmon period for religious purposes, then as punishment
in Kofun period (300-600AD); began to develop as art form during mid-Edo period,
influenced by popularity of Japanese translation of Suikoden (Water Margin;
14th century; one of four great classical novels of Chinese
literature), which features heroes who have their deeds inscribed into their
bodies; flourished among merchant class, wealthy merchants; horimono artists included many ukiyo-e
artists; outlawed at beginning of Meiji, thus outlaw associations of tattoos; legalized
again in 1948.
2.
“Cruel Empress Chou of Shang Dynasty” (1600-1047 BC): reference to the sadistic
and depraved King Zhou 商紂王 and Daji 妲己,
who reigned from 1075-1046 BC and brought Shang dynasty to ruin. The empress is
an archetype in Chinese history of selfish, sadistic consort who controls emperor
through her charms, and leads the country to ruin.
3. Aestheticism, or “the Aesthetic Movement” (definition provided by Professor Yiu): A European
phenomenon during the latter nineteenth century that had its chief
philosophical headquarters in France.
Its roots lie in the German theory, proposed by Kant (1790), that the
pure aesthetic experience consists of a “disinterested” contemplation of an
aesthetic object without reference to its reality, or to the “external” ends of
its utility or morality. Rallying cries
included “poem per se”—a “poem written solely for the poem’s sake,” (Edgar Allan
Poe) and “art for art’s sake.” This
movement also stresses the “autonomy” and “all-importance” of art (M.H. Abrams,
A Glossary of Literary Terms).
Tanizaki’s
story paved the way for other literary works that celebrated art for art’s sake
and the artist’s unwavering devotion to his craft. [This story] and Akutagawa’s “Hell Screen” (Jigokuhen 地獄変, 1918) are often grouped
together as works of the Aesthetic School (tanbi-ha
耽美派) and are seen not only as harbingers of modernism in
prose but also as the beginnings of opposition to the literary school of
Naturalism (shizen-shugi 自然主義) and the narrative style of the I-novel, which
emphasized flat, unvarnished, and sincere depiction in contrast to the new,
spectacle-driven narrative style of the modernists (William Tyler, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan
1913-1938, University of Hawaii Press, 2008, p. 25.).
More on aestheticism: sensibility/philosophy
of life and of art; English literary and artistic movement culminating in 1890s
(Oscar Wilde/Walter Pater most extravagant proponent); a stage in development
of Romanticism; related to symbolism; reaction to Naturalism; generally anti-commercial,
anti-didactic, anti-democratic, anti-bourgeois, anti-“religion of progress”
tone, anti-bunmeikaika; tends to emphasize
hedonism, occult, and prefer spiritual, transcendental over material.
Aestheticism has its roots in Kant’s postulate from Critique of Judgment (1790) of the “disinterestedness” (no personal
interest) of aesthetical judgment, and the irrelevance of concepts to the
intuitions of the imagination (i.e. emphasizes intuition/sense/imagination over
rational intellect). Music is the ideal
art form, as it is most immaterial, removed from quotidian; “to become like
music is aspiration of all arts” says Schopenhauer, then Walter Pater)It holds
that the pursuit of beauty the main task in life; l’art pour l’art (love of art
for its own sake). Aestheticist writers usually regard themselves as an alienated
minority, scornful of masses (Seikichi is no exception).
4.
Aesthetic Movement in Japan (tanbiha
耽美派): Poe, Baudelaire influences; fin-de-siècle;
diabolism (akumashugi); Tanizaki, Akutagawa,
Satō Haruo, Kajii Motojirō, Nagai Kafū, Edogawa Rampo; centered around Keiō
(Mitabungaku) vs. Waseda bungaku (Naturalists); urban, cosmopolitan,
sophisticated.
5. The Edo
Period (1603-1868), particularly the decades of Bunka and Bunsei (1804-1829):Tanizaki
presents this as a time when wit and pleasure were highly esteemed—as were
women who were depicted on stage, for example, in heroic roles in plays like The Female Sadakurō (Onna Sadakurō), The Female Jiraiya, and The Woman Thunder. It was an age of liberalism, affluence, and
urbanity worthy of being reclaimed not in xenophobic retreat to the past but
through rediscovery of a modernity latent and detectable within pre-Meiji
history. Like many novelists writing in
the years following Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905,
Tanizaki was disenchanted with the economic and human costs that accrued to an
imperial power intent on building an international empire. In looking to the past for a different model
of the future, he presents the townsman culture of the Edo period as an
artistic and societal alternative to the policies of the Meiji
establishment. Needless to say, in
presenting his view of Edo as far nobler, he erases any vestige of the
feudalistic authoritarianism historically associated with the samurai class,
Neo-Confucianism, and the Tokugawa shogunate (Tyler 2008, p.25).
Bunka/Bunsei (1804-1829):
the last great era before crisis decades of Tokugawa era; Edo period’s second flourishing
of urban cultural scene, the first being Genroku (1688-1704) (a view contested
by recent Tenmei-focused literary historians); painters Shiba Kōkan, Sharaku;
writers Takizawa Bakin, Shikitei Sanba, Jippensha Ikku; arts of this period
characterized by down to earth, vernacular style; popular appeal; common
everyday themes; lavish habits of Tokugawa shogun Ienari spread to public (post
Matsudaira Sadanobu).
6. Fetish/ Fetishism: A fetish is something,
such as a material object or an often nonsexual part of the body that arouses
or gratifies sexual desire. A fetishism
is the displacement of sexual arousal or gratification to a fetish. (1) broad
definition in psychoanalysis: any activity that deviates from heterosexual intercourse;
(2) a non-sexual part of body or thing that is highly charged with libido/sex
drive (foot, pillow, ear, etc.). According to Freud a fetish is a substitute
for mother’s penis that boy/girl once believed in (i.e. she lost it, got to
find it, before I lose it too). Fetishism is usually found in men, often
accompanied by aversion to real female genitals. In Shisei, Seikichi finds replacement for mother’s penis in girl’s
foot.
7. Archetype: Applied to narrative designs, character types, or
images which are said to be identifiable in a wide variety of works of
literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even ritualized modes of social
behavior. (Abrams, pp.11-12). A central term
in Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, introduced in his 1919 work. Based on
idea that there are “primordial and universal images that make up the contents
of the collective consciousness.”
8. Ero-guro-nansensu (Erotic-grotesque-nonsense): A spontaneous
artistic and narrative style, strategy and movement that came in vogue in the
1910s-1930s as a new form of expression in defiance of the introspective nature
and unadorned language of the Naturalist movement. Playful, evocative, at times vulgar and
absurd, it aims at entertaining and shocking the reader and the viewer in an
age of nouveau art and literary forms. Literary and artistic movement in 1920s
and 1930s Japan; “prewar, bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to
explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous” (Reichart); focus
on eroticism, sexual corruption, decadence; Taisho popular culture (roots in ukiyoe, shunga). Challenged state
ideology, bourgeois conservative values; Edogawa Rampo; traces today in manga,
anime, etc.
9.
Femme Fatale (lit, “deadly woman”): Mysterious, charming, seductive,
often dangerous even deadly female archetype. Examples from history/literature:
Eve, Lilith, Delilah, Cleopatra, other “dark ladies” from antiquity; film noir
females.
10.
Mimetic theory of art: Views/evaluates art in relation to real world; the
value of art is determined by the extent to which it accurately mirrors
reality.
11.
Masochism/sadism: Tanizaki’s great theme; Krafft-Ebing first to provide
detailed account of masochism in Psychopathia
Sexualis (1886). Word itself comes from Sacher-Masoch’s book Venus in Furs. Krafft-Ebing’s classic
study of sexual perversion was introduced to Japan in 1914, translated as 『変態性慾心理』 and immediately banned. The modern use of the word hentai began around this time. (An
earlier translation had appeared in 1894, under the title Shikijōkyōhen.) What does masochist want?→satisfaction
through unpleasantness/pain). Freud’s gives three types of masochist:
erotogenic (sexual pleasure linked with pain), feminine masochism (acting the
subservient “bitch”), and moral masochism (desire to experience guilt). Seikichi
seems to be erotogenic (he wants her to stomp on his face). Tanizaki’s great insight
into human relations: romantic relations are always negotiated in terms of
power.
Study Questions (Provided by Professor A. Yiu)
Answer all of the following.
1. Identify the age (time period) and place (setting) of
the narrative. How does Tanizaki comment on the Meiji period through evoking a
different time period?
2. What is the atmosphere of that specific age and place?
How is that atmosphere evoked or
depicted?
3. Discuss elements of decadence, eroticism, exoticism,
fetishism, and sensuality in the text.
In what sense does this work precipitate and embody elements of ero-guro-nansense movement?
4. Discuss the image of the woman as a literary
archetype. How is that archetype constructed in the text? How does it serve as
a generic archetype as well as a Tanizaki archetype?
5. “Just as the ancient Egyptians had embellished their
magnificent land with pyramids
and sphinxes, he was about to embellish the pure skin
of this girl” (p. 167). What is the nature of this comparison? Discuss the
relationship between art (man-made/tattooing) and nature (not man-made/the
woman’s skin) in the text.
6. In insisting on inscribing (tattooing) on nature (the
woman’s skin) to create art, how does Tanizaki challenge the mimetic theory
(art imitates nature) of art?
7. What happens to the tattooer when his work is
complete? Discuss the relationship between
the artist and the work of art. In what
sense is this work representative of the tanbi-ha
(Aesthetic School)?
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