Organizer: Eve Zimmerman, University of Southern California
Chair Livia Monnet, University of Montreal
Discussant: Brett De Bary, Cornell University
During his short life, Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) produced a body of work that is astounding in its range: from Misaki (The Cape), the novella that won him the Akutagawa Prize in 1976, to Karekinada (Withered Tree Beach), Chi no Hate, Shijo no Toki (The Ends of the Earth, the Supreme Time), and Sennen no Yuraku (A Thousand Years of Joy), to his nonfiction prose collections, poetry and drama. Last year two books were published posthumously and more will follow, including a collected edition of his works. There has also been a dramatic rise in the critical attention paid to his work since his death.
Born and raised in a burakumin (outcast) community on the outskirts of Shingu, Wakayama, Nakagami moved to Tokyo at age 19. The outcast neighborhood of his childhood is transformed in his work into the roji, or alleyway, a symbolic locus of the burakumin from which he launched an assault on majority language and culture. This assault took many forms: a return to sources of oral storytelling (the mother, the midwife); the inversion of the symbolic categories that underlie discrimination (high/low, pure/impure); use of the grotesque as a means to lure the reader into unfamiliar territory; and an exploration of the interdependence of violence and the erotic.
Yet in spite of its subversive properties, Nakagami's work is fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, Nakagami inverts the hierarchies that have so long entrapped his people. At the same time, however, he mythologizes representatives of the marginalized or underprivileged, thus revealing an attachment to the very categories he seeks to dismantle. The apotheosis of the young outcasts in Sennen no Yuraku, for example, glosses over very real historical practices that have created a group of despised and reviled people.
The riddles of Nakagami's writing will be the focus of our panel. Although Nakagami dissects the archetypes that history has given him-the shaman, the serpent woman, the hijiri, the noble exile-he also seems mesmerized by such archetypes, as if he meant to dissolve modern consciousness behind the mask of an imagined past. Sex and violence are harnessed to stunning narrative disjunctions in the work, yet he is unable to move beyond the framework of the story itself. He writes a prose that dissolves the boundaries between subject and object, hovering between modes such as the naturalistic, the magical realist, and the fantastic. Finally, he creates a pan Asian community out of the wastes of post industrial Japan but is quick to denounce such visions as apocalyptic posturing.
As one of the most controversial and innovative contemporary Japanese writers, Nakagami Kenji's legacy is only now making itself felt. We believe that the time has come to devote an entire panel to his work because we are witnessing a fascinating historical process in which we ourselves are implicated-the canonization of a writer, with all the struggles and readjustments that such a process entails. Critical discourse is most exciting when it is in the process of becoming; now is the time to broaden the boundaries of the debate over Nakagami's work and explore the histories that lie behind the myth.
Nina Cornyetz's paper that in Nakagami's depiction of landscapes he breaks with both the medieval Japanese practice of conceptual depiction and with modern realism, thus revealing a suppressed "other side" of Japanese folklore.
Faye Kleeman's paper addresses the anomalous position of the burakumin as an internalized other not differentiated by race or nationality, linking this to Nakagami's vision of a post colonial trans Asiatic community as a locus for a new Japanese identity that includes the burakumin.
Livia Monnet's paper treats the representations of violence in three short stories by Nakagami, discussing their relationship to larger questions of the violence of representation as a "ubiquitous form of power" and the eroticism of representation as a modality to exercise power.
Eve Zimmerman's paper examines the significance of violence directed toward women in Nakagami's fiction, finding in it a "displaced abjection" through which victims of systematic discrimination imitate the actions of their victimizers.
Brett DeBary of Cornell University has agreed to act as discussant for this panel.
Nina Cornyetz, Rutgers University
It has been well documented that medieval Japanese writers subordinated realistic description of landscapes to narrative concerns. Rhetorical forms dictated the depiction of famous sites celebrated in the literary canon. Thus the critic Karatani Kojin has described the landscapes of the classical texts as "a weave of language" given signification by poetry ("One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries," SAQ 87.3 [Summer 1988]: 619). Writers sought to transcribe the conceptual, rather than a particular place. In the early modern period, conceptual space is replaced with a foregrounding of "actual" and specific topos in the ascension of realism and naturalism.
My paper argues that landscape in the contemporary works of the writer Nakagami Kenji (1946-92) is defiant of both modern realism and medieval conceptualism, and is inseparable from his legacy as a burakumin (outcaste). The literary discourse to which premodern landscape was subordinated served the interests of the literate classes. The histories of Nakagami's burakumin descendants, and thus his "origins," were under-represented in the canon. It stands to reason that Nakagami's defiance of realistic landscape does not replicate premodern landscapes. Rather, although the topos of Kumano as written by Nakagami is a weave of language, multi layered with significations, it is peopled with narratives from the "other side" of the Japanese heartland.
The proposed paper will discuss how landscape gives birth to a suppressed "other side" of Japanese folklore in four short stories by Nakagami: "Jain," 1976; "Ukijima," 1978; "Fushi," 1984; and "Tsuki to Fushi," 1984. In all four stories traces of oral narratives which emanate from the landscape deconstruct existing stories of the serpent and the woman who is bound to the serpent (intertwined archetypes in the Japanese canon). Oral folklore functions as a conduit to an unrationalized spiritualism bound with erotic and aggressive drive, symbolized in the recurrent figure of the snake. The incompatibility of the variant ancient/oral and medieval/written versions, over which Nakagami inscribes his own renditions, ruptures textual unity: premodern landscape, impregnated with significations, thus functions within the modern (written) text as a mark of difference (the oral), "excavating" the suppressed history of an "other" Japan.
Faye Yuan Kleeman, City College of New York
In his introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (1990), Seamus Deane points out that ephemeral paradigms such as colonialism are often framed in the context of Anglo Irish conflict and contends: "Ultimately, there may have been no such thing as colonialism. It is, according to many historians, one of the phantoms created by nationalism, which is itself phantasmal enough." As one of the several groups that Emiko Ohnuki Tierney calls "marginalized internal others," burakumin in Japan occupy a peculiar position in the Japanese reflexive structure (i.e. the structure of self and other). Whereas Ainu are clearly differentiated from the Japanese racially, Koreans, Chinese and other Asians are differentiated by nationality, and atomic bomb victims are set apart by their singular experience, there are no clear criteria for the definition of the burakumin. Their status is the result of the interplay of complex historical forces involving religion, economics and culture.
How does the process of othering and discrimination operate when racialism, nationalism or ethnicity cannot sufficiently explain the existence of such an internally differentiated other? Here we see that Nakagami Kenji's literature is a constant attempt to locate and to problematize the politics of "difference," and to raise the oppressed silence to an eloquent discourse on this "difference."
My paper will focus on the last volume of Nakagami's trilogy, Chinohate shijonotoki (The End of the Earth, The Supreme Time, 1983), examining the deconstruction of temporal and spatial elements of the imaginary "roji" that the author so painstakingly constructed in his previous works. As the final chapter of the saga of Akiyuki, in which the geographical landscape of "roji" takes form along with Akiyuki's maturation into manhood, Chinohate deals with the dispossession of one's physical and psychological self. Torn by his conflicting ties to his foster father, biological father, and pseudo father, tempted by the rejuvenating power of a local water cult and threatened by encroaching modernity, Akiyuki maps out a grand narrative of mythical proportions.
Nakagami's text problematizes a number of important issues. The "authenticization" of Nakagami's view of burakumin origins inevitably entails the demystification of Japan's homogeneity myth. The psychological marginalization and cultural displacement experienced by Akiyuki dispel the illusion of a unitary Japanese cultural identity. Similarly, by bringing in the grand vision of Asia, Nakagami's text resists the hegemonic discourse of "Nihonjin ron" by presenting a new framework for locating Japanese identity within a trans Asiatic vision. Finally, the sub discourse on Korea and Taiwan reveals Nakagami's post colonial response to the Asian subaltern.
Livia Monnet, University of Montreal
The work of Nakagami Kenji exhibits an obsessive preoccupation both with violence and with the theory and practice of uninhibited sexualities. This essay places Nakagami's fiction in the context of current discussions of the intersections of violence, sexuality and gender with representation. While it seems indisputable that the representation of violence and the violence of representation cannot be distinguished in writing (Armstrong and Tennenhouse), one can certainly distinguish various types of textual/rhetorical violence: the violent language in depictions of violent acts, violence done by the narrator to other characters in the text, that done by the narrator to the reader, by the reader to the texts, or by the text to the reader.
The relationship between eros/sexuality, gender and representation seems somewhat more complicated: while representation is always already genderized (de Laurentis), is it also, necessarily and inescapably, erotic? If the violence of representation has become a "ubiquitous form of power" (Armstrong and Tennenhouse), is the eroticism of representation also a modality to exercise power, domination and oppression?
In this study I focus on three short fictions by Nakagami which seem to provide a ready link with the conceptualizations of eros and violence in his theories of writing, fiction/monogatari and language: "Fushi" (The Immortal, 1980, included in Kumanoshu, 1984); "Juryoku no miyako" (Gravity's Capital, 1981, included in the collection with the same title, 1988); "Kanna kamui no tsubasa" (The Wings of Kanna kamui, first published in 1982, included in Sennen no yuraku, 1982).
Fushi-The pervasive violence in this text aims on the one hand at exposing the mechanisms of cultural violence (e.g., the exclusion, destruction and co-optation inherent in dominant religious discourses), and on the other hand at showing that sexual/gendered identities are fluctuating, permeable, located in culture as much as in the social imaginary. While "Fushi" refuses to celebrate the otherness and marginality of the hijiri as sites of authentic identity, it nevertheless posits woman as a sign of irreducible alterity. Far from seducing the reader, the text thrusts her/him into one uncomfortable position after another.
Juryoku no miyako-The unmistakable pre text of this story is Tanizaki's "Shunkinsho" (Tale of Shunkin). Far more than a mere rewriting of the Tanizakian model, "Gravity's Capital" is an interrogation of the history of (the concept of) blindness, which like leprosy and the burakumin status, functions in Nakagami's fiction both as a site of alterity, pollution and violence, and as a nest for the birth of theory. The story also explores the "abusive structuration" (Chow) of identity and subjectivity, and calls into question traditional representations of female shamanism.
Kanna kamui no tsubasa-This is the most experimental piece, and the only one among the three stories considered in this study that directly confronts the issue of discrimination of the burakumin and of ethnic minorities. My analysis will show, among other things, that the story posits an interesting vision of writing/storytelling as incestuous love between the writer, projected as woman, her narrative, and her reader/audience, a relationship symbolized by Oryu's passion for Tatsuo. This vision, however, is immediately subverted by the movement of questioning of narrative authority that traverses the story. The representation of female sexuality and subjectivity is problematic: Oryu's vision of an ideal Japanese nation state built on the ruins of the dominant culture by an alliance of burakumin, Ainu, and other minorities is a masculinist utopia which is negotiated on women's bodies but which categorically excludes their participatlon in the revolution.
References-Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). De Laurentis, Teresa. "The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender." (in Armstrong and Tennenhouse, pp. 239-258).
Eve Zimmerman, University of Southern California
Nakagami Kenji's fiction upsets and re invents the symbolic hierarchies that oppress his people, the burakumin. At the same time, it exhibits a tendency towards "displaced abjection": the victim begins to imitate the actions of the victimizer and bears down upon those who are weaker or lower in status on the social and economic scale.
Frequently, the objects of the victim's displaced rage are women. What is particularly troubling about violence against women in Nakagami's work is the extent to which Nakagami actually rejects representations of the female as mute object or embodiment of physical desire. His shamans, serpent women, mothers and midwives are intermediaries of the divine who challenge the conventions of the modern shosetsu with its notions of internal consistency and authentic selfhood. Furthermore, they speak a language which is passed down through a matriarchal line; although illiterate, they are the storytellers, historians and record keepers of their people. By making women into wellsprings of an alternate language, Nakagami attempts to widen the scope of the literary text itself. Why then does his effort to re integrate such sources result in outbursts of violence against women in rapes, beatings and ritual murder?
The abuse of women raises more general questions about the link between narrative and violence. Itself mute, hovering beyond the taming influence of language, violence paradoxically illuminates the pitfalls of narrative: how in eliding violent acts with sexual climaxes, narrative demands its own scapegoats and feeds on the continuation of systematic discrimination. Outbursts of violence in narrative implicate both writer and reader. When confronted with feasts of violence and eroticism, how do we respond? Can we avoid becoming voyeurs when this is clearly Nakagami's intention? How do we "read" violence?
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