Organizer and Chair: J. Philip Gabriel, University of Arizona
Discussant: Brett de Bary, Cornell University
Sakaguchi Ango: Back at the Old Haunts
Joel Cohn, University of Hawaii
The reputation of the fictionist and essayist Sakaguchi Ango (1906-1955) has fluctuated to a degree rare in twentieth-century Japanese literature. After a brief burst of favorable attention following his debut in 1930, his career languished until the desperate years following the collapse of the imperial order in 1945, when he produced a series of iconoclastic and paradoxical works that immediately caught the spirit and the imagination of readers, and propelled him to the front rank in the Japanese literary world. He soon became one of the earliest celebrities in the postwar mass media and, like many others, found himself unable to maintain his equilibrium in the face of the unprecedented intense pressures to which he was subjected. By the time of his death, he was widely dismissed as an inconsequential eccentric, and there was little reason to believe that his work would ever again be viewed as anything other than an irrelevant relic in a Japan devoted to the pursuit of order and prosperity. However, Ango's reputation has undergone repeated posthumous revivals, especially at critical points such as the student unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the recent rise and collapse of the bubble economy, when his outspoken defiance of all forms of authority and convention and his metaphysical bent struck responsive chords among readers and critics driven to reexamine the most basic assumptions about the nature of Japanese society and, in some cases, the nature of human existence itself.
From Shojo to "Ladies" to "Ghosts": Problems of Female
Empowerment in Manga and Animation
Susan J. Napier, University of Texas
Scholars in recent years have increasingly dealt with the construction of femaleness in Japanese popular culture. All of these studies acknowledge the problematic significance of female power. John Treat deals with the remarkable symbolic importance of the shojo, as object and embodiment of consumer society, even when depicted as seemingly vulnerable and passive. Equally intriguingly, Allison says of the violently treated females in manga, "(F)or all that they are battered, women continually return, centering the desires of men, the plots of the stories, and the focus of imagery."
As these descriptions suggest, however, academic commentators still tend to see women in popular culture as practically (if not symbolically) disempowered. This paper attempts to amend that perception by focusing on very recent depictions of women in manga and animation that show women increasingly as subjects rather than objects of their own stories. Using examples from the relatively new erotic genre of Ladies Comics, this paper examines a new trend in manga depictions of sexual relations in which women are no longer simply victims of male rage. The paper then turns to science fiction and fantasy to discuss some of the new roles of women-as-warrior, as seen in the child oriented Sailor Moon. Finally, the paper addresses the question of the renewed importance of androgyny, as seen in such landmark works as Ranma to suggest that not only women, but men as well, are searching for new forms of identity in order to achieve their "full potential."
Writing AIDS: The Immunological Stories of Shimada Masahiko
Sarah Jane Pradt, University of Minnesota
AIDS is both a global health crisis and a discursive phenomenon. Paula Teichler has
described AIDS as a "nexus where multiple meanings, stories, and discourses intersect
and overlap, reinforce, and subvert one another." In Japan, intellectual, fictional,
and biomedical discourses on AIDS intersected in the 1980s. Advances in immunology and
virology made it possible to describe HIV relatively quickly after AIDS appeared, and
immunological accounts of the individual genome as "infiltrated" and
"corrupted" by HIV were popularized in Japan by Karatani Kojin and others who
found attractive this "evidence" for the fallacy of self-same identity. In 1986
and 1987, Shimada Masahiko (b. 1961) published four stories about AIDS that play with
immunology and AIDS. These stories and a postscript by the theoretician Asada Akira,
entitled "Deconstruction Of/By AIDS," participate in an ongoing critique of the
preoccupation of jun bungaku, high literature, whose readers and writers have so
often insisted on a link between narrative fiction and an individual, saturated
subject. Shimada's stories employ AIDS as a trope to celebrate disorder and collapse, and,
as Shimada has done in previous and subsequent works, to throw into question a stable and
knowable individual, national, or sexual identity. Here and in other essays on AIDS and
gayness, Shimada's aim appears to be to unseat associations between gay men and AIDS, and
the claims to identity gay men have made (or have been forced to make) under AIDS.
Interpreting the Postmodern: The Novels of Takahashi Genichiro
J. Philip Gabriel, University of Arizona
Possibly unique among Japanese novels, the works of the novelist Takahashi Genichiro (b. 1951) lack the usual interpretive commentary (kaisetsu) by literary critics found in paperback reprints. Questions of interpretation are thus foregrounded in the work of this pre-eminent postmodern writer. Here I will explore the possibilities of interpreting postmodernist fiction, focusing on two of Takahashi's novels-his first published novel, Sayonara, gyangutachi (Farewell to the Gang, 1981), and his most critically acclaimed, the 1988 Yuga de kanshoteki na Nihon yakyu (Elegant, Sentimental Japanese Baseball). Through the organizing signifiers of, in the first novel, poetry, and in the second, baseball, Takahashi exuberantly plays with such typical postmodernist concerns as naming and identity, the future as both utopian and dystopian, the juxtaposition of parallel worlds, and of high and low culture. What pervades Takahashi's novels, though, is a concern with the reading process, signification, and the interpretation of signs. Baseball, for instance, is seen as an endless sign system; poets, we are told, seek the "perfect crime . . . the creation of works that are unintelligible.'' But what, in the postmodern novel, lies between the two, i.e., endless interpretibility and the impossibility of interpretation? In examining this question, I will also discuss Takahashi's comments (in essays) on aphasia, language and violence, and his writing process as an escape from the "coercion" of established discourses of the State and literary establishment. Finally, through reading the "creation" myths of such Japanese postmodernists as Takahashi, Shimada Masahiko, and Kobayashi Kyoji, I will examine the question of nostalgia for "grand" or meta-narratives.