Organizer and Chair: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Discussant: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Our purpose will be to rethink the meaning of "modern," "Japanese," and "literature" by using the critical reception of the Japanese novelist and playwright Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939) as a test of these three categories. We will examine conventional notions of periodicity, nationality, and literary quality by placing Kyoka's work in a broad context of cultural activity. Such a perspective will allow us to locate those aspects of critical pursuit which illuminate rather than obscure the tremendous variety of literary expression which characterized Japan around the turn of the century. In an attempt to free literary study from the limitations of inappropriate critical categories (as are commonly employed in both Japan and in North America), this international effort will use Kyoka's work to draw connections between early modern, modern, and post-modern formulations of narrativity, sensibility, and sexuality and to propose, as a result, a more appropriate critical perspective on this gifted author.
Kyoka's anachronistic devotion to early modern culture, his problematic life as a "traditionalist" during a "modern" period, and his critical reputation today make such a wide-ranging approach both possible and fruitful. Building upon the success of the 1993 Kyoka Panel (New Orleans National Conference), our expanded efforts will continue to increase the visibility of this writer and to suggest alternative formulations of Japanese literary history.
The cooperation of the AAS and the Kyoka Research Group (Kyoka Kenkyu Kai) will allow both groups to wed their critical methods and strengths and to explore the meaning of Kyoka studies on an international scale. In practical terms, the Honolulu Conference will serve as a forum for discussion and as a first deadline for the writing of papers which will be able to take advantage of this timely opportunity for collaboration.
Response to initial queries to colleagues in both North America and Japan has been enthusiastic. Professor Matsumura has ascertained that as many as seven scholars from Japan wish to participate in this conference. In addition, other members of the Kyoka Research Circle have expressed interest in coming to Honolulu to hear the papers. We are looking forward to making this occasion a significant one in the history of the author's reception.
Gendered Nostalgia and Jouissance in Izumi Kyoka
Nina Cornyetz, Rutgers University
Repeatedly the women of Izumi Kyoka's narratives have been described as embodying "the essence of femaleness." For Kyoka, femaleness was erotically bound to death and thus to the abject. I will discuss how this gendered imaginary is a discursive reiteration of a developing Meiji/Taisho maternal myth that serves as the constitutive other by which Japanese modern phallic subjectivity was crafted. Kyoka's specifically gendered project unfolded in epistemological and temporal collusion with Meiji sociocultural modernization. Kyoka's female figures thus embody a "performative" gender construct, persistently repeating a given set of norms. As Judith Butler has said, "this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production" (Bodies that Matter, 95).
In spite of her iconographical resemblance to some premodern female archetypes, Kyoka's maternalized sorceress represents a nostalgic generation of the premodern in the service of the Meiji phallic agenda. She provides (hidden/modern) depth, and yet in contradistinction marks the presence of exteriority (premodernity). Kyoka's enticing sorceress threatens phallic selfsameness with jouissance and the "uncanny" trace of the (imagined) past in the present.
Kyoka in the Age of the Novel
Tomomi Matsumura, Keio Daigaku
The modern period was dominated by the novel, an essentially Western narrative form. Kyoka's position as a "modern novelist" is problematic, therefore, since he strenuously rejected the realistic narrative practices that came to dominate the mainstream during his day. What are the qualities of the novel, and how do they differ form what we find in Kyoka's work? And in what ways did Kyoka's retrogressive style actually anticipate a post-modern regard for language, belief, and sexuality?
Class Discrimination in the Works of Izumi Kyoka: "The Blood-Tempered
Sword"
Wakako Taneda, Fuji Joshi Tanki Daigaku
The feminist critique has exerted a significant influence upon Japanese literary criticism. But in many ways the concerns of feminists are ill-founded and poorly focused. This becomes obvious when trying to understand the work of Izumi Kyoka, whose images of women are central to his literary imagination. In what ways is a feminist reading of Kyoka fated to miss the point?
Izumi Kyoka and the Birth of Modern Sexuality
Takahito Momokawa, Tufts University
Kyoka's work is noted for its eroticism and for the play of red and white-whether the red of undergarments against pale skin or blood flowing over the same-that heighten the sensuality of practically every story and play. Though the promise of sexual fulfillment is always present, the actual enjoyment of the physical act is never a reality. In this sense, sexual identity is always defined, except in the works of the author's final years, as that which cannot exist in reality, as a taboo, a lost (maternal) paradise to which one cannot return, a tension that can never be resolved. In what ways was Kyoka's expression of the "problem" of sexual desire a continuation of Edo sexuality? In what ways was its expression only possible in post-Restoration Japan?