Organizer: Sumie Jones, Indiana University
Chair: Eiji Sekine, Purdue University
Discussant: Theodore W. Goosen, York University
Last summer, Tsutsui Yatsuka, a popular author of detective and science fiction, declared that, in response to complaints about his discriminatory language, he was ending his career as a writer. The most direct cause was the official complaint from Japan's Epilepsy Association who claimed that his descriptions of attacks were too graphic and therefore demeaned patients. Tsutsui is only one among many novelists who have felt tyrannized by the politically correct whose demands for sensitivity, in their opinion, interfere with an author's freedom of expression. Political correctness is of course an issue that has received much attention in the past few years and is beyond the scope of this panel. However, what does concern this panel is exactly what kind of responsibility the author has to society. If fiction affects society to such an extent that it can be considered offensive, dangerous and even subversive, if words do in fact shape reality, how do we describe language's function within society? In this panel, we will attempt to better understand the interaction between language and society by focusing on the changes in contemporary authors' approaches to language within their fiction.
To begin our investigation of the changing function of language within fiction, we have taken as a starting point the impressive panel on Murakami Haruki presented during the AAS meeting in 1992 that focused on approaches and skills in textual and theoretical analysis as well as in translation. Much of Murakami's remarkable popularity in Japan and abroad can be attributed to his identification with "postmodernism." On the one hand, his works reflect, for the benefit of popular readers, the passively detached sense of reality presumably shared by all in the 80's and 90's. On the other hand, they provide critics with increasingly larger and more intricately cultivated grounds for talking about postmodernism. In an attempt to recapture the intensity of the Murakami panel and continue the discussion begun there, we have invited two of its panelists, Professors Jay Rubin and Charles Inouye, to take part in our panel. As our subjects we have chosen authors who, like Murakami, transcend fixed genres and speak beyond the assumptions and restrictions of modern Japanese fiction, but who are even more self-conscious about their use of language.
Modern literature in Japan has been a complex and critical product forming a bridge between Western modernity and the Japanese/Asian tradition. In the process of the modernization of literature, the very notion of language has undergone substantial modifications. After World War II, in particular, the best of Japanese authors not only drew from both Western and indigenous models to forge strong, individual styles, but they also invented ways in which anxieties over the status of the subject in an increasingly technologized and rapidly changing society could be expressed.
Contemporary writers have displayed a heightened sensitivity to language's capacity to evoke multiple meanings. The validity of "realism" is challenged by a linguistic playfulness which marks much of today's literary scene. Writers no longer treat language as a transparent medium through which they communicate their ideas. Rather than attempt to narrow the gap between word and meaning, they experiment with a wide range of unconventional styles thereby focusing on the apparently arbitrary, and secretly confrontational, relationship between expression and meaning. Puns and other jokes as well as heavy uses of colloquialisms contribute to a liberation of literature by collapsing the boundaries between high literature (junbungaku) and low literature (taishu bungaku), a distinction strictly reinforced by literary critics since the early Meiji period. Instead of discounting taishu bungaku as merely frivolous, these writers, taking their literary pleasure seriously, work with popular styles to craft intellectually challenging, aesthetic products.
I have organized the papers in such a way so as to demonstrate a movement away from the word and towards the "post verbal." Beginning with authors (Inoue Hisashi, Tsutsui Yatsuka) who employ the traditional method of word play, the pun, to demonstrate the arbitrary and flexible nature of language, we shift to female writers (Yamada Eimi, Minagawa Hiroko et al.) who turn their attention towards that which conventionally resists categorization and verbal description. We then move on to Tanaka Yasuo who explores the graphic quality of language and end with a discussion of writers (Tanaka Komimasa, Hiruma Hisao) on the cutting edge of Japanese literature, who concentrate on meaningful silences. In order to clarify the organization of the panel, I have summarized the individual presentations in the following:
We are extremely fortunate to have Professor Jay Rubin (Harvard University) as discussant. We have chosen him for two reasons: one is that, unlike the theories of the postmodern, he is a critic who firmly believes in the connection between the art of writing and meaning; the other is that he is one of the wittiest and the most suave translators of modern Japanese literature, particularly skillful in conveying linguistic playfulness in English. With his broad knowledge and appreciation of modern Japanese literature, enriched by his expertise as a skilled translator, Rubin has always shown keen interest in linguistic issues. We believe that he will encourage lively and thoughtful discussion among panelists as well as the audience.
Sumie Jones, Indiana University
Inoue Hisashi and Tsutsui Yasutaka are two of the greatest punsters and parodists among Japanese writers. Aware that words are their blessing and curse, they noisily wrestle with the possibilities and limitations of the Japanese language. Not merely the density of their wordplay but also their pronounced cultural identity leave their works nearly impossible to translate: it will take a James Joyce or Lewis Carroll, bilingually raised in Japan, to render them in equally complex and pleasurable English. It may not be of much use to determine whether they should be labeled "modernist" or anything at all, but it seems important to take note of the sense of crisis in these current authors who refuse to wipe out the paths trod by their adventurous predecessors.
Both Inoue and Tsutsui are decidedly comic authors. Inoue began his career as writer for strip show theaters and for educational TV programs for children (this combination rather telling of the author's stance), to move on to plays, novels, folktales, essays, histories, and other genres of writing. Tsutsui attracts the largest part of his audience by his science fiction, but he is also active in mystery and other forms of narrative as well as essays, plays, and other miscellaneous categories of writing. Their experiments rebel not only against the established socio political system but also against the conventions of genres and the rules of language. Rebellion, however, is a sure sign of acknowledgment of the power of the injurious party so that these authors' writings ultimately show a strong belief in a cohesive system of some sort, separating them from the "postmodern" absence of subjectivity. For this reason, their writings are sharp critiques of Japan's society, literary genres, and language while they willingly submit, albeit often in reverse directions, to the dignity of form, tradition, and other kinds of system.
They both draw their energy from their ambivalent fear of, and for, the power of language. Each has made frequent pronouncements on the topic of the nature and current status of Japanese language and engaged himself in compilations of ironic dictionaries and glossaries of all sorts as well as in compositions of manuals for writers. Their riotous wordplay seems to be based on their concern akin to that of Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) who, seeing that language was corrupted in the age of derivatives and interpretations, attempted to retrieve the original ties between words and their meanings. Like the Edo gesaku authors at the time of new kinds of learning and of bourgeois arts, Inoue and Tsutsui, at the time of multimedia communication and pictocentrism, seem to sense that signifiers float away minute by minute unless they catch them by constant use. Like Edo gesaku, which simultaneously contained carnival like celebration of newly opened possibilities of language (thanks to the mingling of dialects, the spread of new jargon, and increased literacy) and a hysterical fear that words, their powers stretched to the limit, might come to mean nothing, Inoue's and Tsutsui's writings are laden with felicitousness and fear. The two authors, however, are very different in their notions of language as well as in their political stance. Inoue is inclined toward utopianism while Tsutsui creates a distopia consisting of the death of the signifier or the signified. This paper will examine the underlining linguistics in each author's wordplay focusing on two chief novels of each: Inoue's Tegusari Shinju [Double Suicide in Manacles] (1972) and Kirikirijin [The Kirikiriese] (1981), and Tsutsui's Reichozoku Minami e [Go South, Homosapiens!] (1974) and Zanzo ni Kuchibeni o [Lipstick for the After Image] (1989). References will be made to the linguistic plays of their respective gesaku predecessors, particularly Hiraga Gennai (1928-79), Santo Kyoden (1761-1816), Shikitei Sanba (1775-1822), and Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831).
Maryellen T. Mori, Santa Clara University
Various Japanese women writers demonstrate in their fiction a fascination with phenomena normally consigned to the margins of culture and regarded as "other" or "abject." (The abject is that which an individual or group feels it must keep at a distance in order to preserve its own identity and integrity). Animals, unclean or unclassifiable things, "deviant" humans-idiots, grotesques, racial or sexual minorities-are routinely "abjected" by mainstream society. Modern Japanese women's texts have tended to either glorify or demonize people and things commonly considered taboo. In fiction that describes a woman's quest for social, psychological or sexual emancipation, the outsider is often romanticized as rebel or visionary, a model of primitive vitality or freedom from the repressions required to fully enter the symbolic order. However, in stories that foreground a female character's anguished sense of alienation, the abject may mirror the woman's feelings of deformity or disempowerment; if so, it may inspire her anxiety or revulsion, and arouse her instinct to preserve her fragile sense of selfhood by eliminating this hateful "double." This paper will focus on stories in which animals and people associated with animals are used to represent that which resists linguistic mastery or cultural assimilation.
Minagawa Hiroko's story "Arukadia no natsu" portrays a lonely, rebellious teenager who keeps a wild owl in her bedroom. As the beast transforms the room into a foul, chaotic lair, the girl derives a perverse pleasure from witnessing the ravaging of cultural artifacts and amenities. Kono Taeko's story, "Kincho," explores a sexually frigid woman's phobic aversion to domestic birds. The foolish, agitated behavior of barnyard chickens and pet parakeets-flapping and pecking and twittering gibberish-is a sickening reminder of her own inability to articulate her inchoate feelings. Yamada Eimi's novella, Kanbuasu no hitsugi, gives an account of a dissolute young Japanese woman's affair with a black wildlife painter on an idyllic tropical island. The woman's naive dream of shedding her native identity in an alien culture is slowly undermined by her anxiety over the loss of a meaningful social persona and nuanced verbal communication. She directs her growing hostility to racial cultural otherness at the birds in her friend's paintings.
Recent women's fiction incorporates fresh perspectives on otherness and abjection. The postmodern dismantling of the individual self has transformed perceptions and literary representations of otherness. The dichotomous romantic and phobic-paranoid discourses on otherness have yielded to a shifting, carnivalesque rhetoric. Female characters in postmodern women's literature refuse mastery, affirm indeterminacy and fluidity, and engage in ambiguous and excessive behavior as ways of eluding all categories of identity, including gender related ones. Tawada Yoko's novella, Inu muko iri, for instance, is a whimsical tale of a gypsy like schoolteacher who revels in squalor (to her pupils' delight and their parents' dismay) and her brief, blissful relationship with a bisexual man who is possessed by the spirit of a dog. This paper will explore continuity and change in the rhetoric of alterity and abjection in women's fiction. Discussions will be grounded in references to the above mentioned texts.
Charles S. Inoue, Tufts University
In "Pictocentrism," Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature (l992), I proposed that Japanese narrative is "picture centered" and established there a set of critical issues to help us illuminate the extent and nature of Japan's attempts to accommodate European narrative patterns. The graphic richness of the gesaku tradition was drastically affected by Japan's encounter with the "word centered" culture of modern Europe and its affinity for linear plot development, the construction of complicated human character, and a sense of metaphysical or ideological closure. Given the more statically spatial and formulaically visual nature of the Japanese tradition, however, the accommodation of the fluidly temporal, descriptive, and analytically oriented European novel has been incomplete.
I do not take this to be a failing of Japanese literature. To the contrary, the deeply-rooted graphic tendencies of the tradition have their own epistemological foundations which are worthy of study. Indeed, they are becoming increasingly relevant (and understandable) as the world's post-industrial cultures now enter a conflicted period of (localizing) ideological fragmentation and (globalizing) visual communication, both made possible by the spread of high technology in its attempt to make all experience visually present.
I locate Tanaka Yasuo's (1956- ) tremendously popular and influential shosetsu, Nantonaku kurisutaru (Somewhat crystal, 1980) somewhere near the end of Japan's modern attempt to represent a world of objective reality and the beginning of a new, more exterior (or superficial) and graphically oriented way of framing the human condition. (Not uncritically) assumed in this work is the belief in change through acquiring the power of things, in this case name brand consumer objects or the finer life styles of capitalism. In this concern for image and style there is, I believe, a slight but important difference of nuance between Tanaka's honestly materialistic characters and those branded by the critical term "kurisutaru zoku" (crystal people), a name that was, immediately following the publication of Tanaka's book, coined to denote (usually in a disparaging way) a significant generational gap.
How are we to understand this expression of blatant consumerism and indulgence in affluent play? Among other things, this text demonstrates the inter-relationship between Japan's economic security and its return to more traditional narrative methods. Faith in style and fashion, a valorization of the exterior image, and an obsession with naming (as in brand naming or the sort of consumer oriented annotation that accompanies the text) are aspects of a graphic orientation that is supported not by an intellectual commitment to capitalism, per se, but by a profound belief in what I will call the magic of mono (thing), that is, a fetishistic regard for objects and their power to make one's life better (or at least significantly different).
I would like to read Nantonaku kurisutaru, then, as a post-modern articulation of mono. As a post-modern monogatari, it departs from representational modes of expression, thus restoring to the very body of language a new, noun-centered importance. I would venture that the phenomenal popularity of this text actually has more to do with the restoration of naming in general than with its ability to identify a particular crystal generation of Japanese. In either case, this contemporary trend toward name dropping, also apparent in the work of, for instance, Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana, is characteristic of the present pictocentric reorientation.
Eiji Sekine, Purdue University
In my recently published book, "Tasha" no Shokyo (Elimination of "the other," 1993, Keiso Shobo), I critically characterized modern Japanese literary canonicity as the discourse which cancels the opportunities for one to experience a heterogeneous quality intrinsic to one's interactive party(ies). Narratives focusing on mesmerizing, speechless moments such as those of a religious conversion or sexual orgasm may be interesting materials to examine from my point of view. Conventionally, such speechless moments are understood as an epiphany like experience, in which truth reveals and allows one to unite as one with a partner and/or with the world itself. However, an ecstatic wordlessness literally expresses one's exposure to something undescribable and unknowable. Tanaka Komimasa's Amen Father (Amen chichi, 1989) and Hiruma Hisao's Yes, Yes, Yes (1989) are examples which consciously focus attention on the latter aspect of the heroes' speechless experiences.
Tanaka's story depicts the life of the narrator's late father who lived as an excentric Protestant preacher. A young, ambitious pastor, coming back from the States, loses his self centered ambition in the long course of his religious life and ends up being a rural preacher understood only by a very small number of his church members. In his later years he keeps talking about the overwhelming spiritual presence of the crucified Jesus which thoroughly shatters his ego. Jesus is experienced by this preacher as a semantic excess which does not allow him to understand the meaning of life: instead, this excess encourages him to enjoy a meaning free realm of reality in which a mere feeling of the vividly physical presence of an absolute stranger guides the hero's survival.
Hiruma's story consists of a variety of episodes, narrated by the first person narrator hero who works as a young, male prostitute. The narrator's position as a passive prostitute allows him to describe his interactions with his customers as only surface relationships, in which reality is reduced to something strange, yet purely sensual, and the hero seeks only the affirmation of pleasure. If a modern karyu shosetsu emphasizes a male hero's control over the relationship with his geisha lover, Hiruma's story parodizes this subgenre by introducing an anti hero indifferent to the desire for intellectual control.
In both cases, interactions with otherness are expressed as something that allows the heroes to flee and free themselves from the conventional mode of representation based on the notion of meaningful explanation of the world.
Would you like to return to the Japan Table of Contents? Choose another area?