Organizer: Brett de Bary, Cornell University
Chair: Kathryn W. Sparling, Carleton College
Has the discipline of literature, conjoined with the intrinsically national as kokubungaku departments were established in Japanese universities in the late nineteenth century, become anachronistic by the end of the twentieth? As enrollments in literature courses have declined, and in response to Ministry of Education reform initiatives launched in 1991, Japanese universities have undertaken the most significant restructuring of human sciences curricula since the Occupation. With the development of cybernetics and electronic media, Japan-like other advanced industrial societies-has become increasingly oriented to the oral and the visual, while predictions that written culture will be superseded of are commonplace. Finally, within the context of a globalized economy, transnationalist, feminist, minority, and post-colonial intellectual movements have contested the privileging of modern literature's masculine subject and its assumed coherence as national tradition. Papers on this two-part panel, dedicated to Professor Asai Kiyoshi on the occasion of his retirement from Ochanomizu Women's University, will exemplify a range of contemporary approaches problematizing the notion of the "literary.'' Part One will focus on the problem of gender and the modern literary subject; Part Two will explore formal and political aspects of recent boundary-crossing genres such as post-modernism, manga, and writing about AIDS.
Women and Demons in Setsuwa
Michelle Li, Princeton University
This paper will examine the relationship between women and demons (oni) in the Konjaku monogatari shu and other setsuwa collections, focusing on tales about female demons as well as male demons who interact with girls and women. I will discuss how oni support and challenge prevailing social and political attitudes in Heian Japan, especially those toward women and their roles, as well as how they fail to do so. Drawing from observations made by Baba Akiko in Oni no kenkyu, I will also consider the significance of the subtle and overt links made between women and oni in classical texts other than setsuwa to those made in the tales.
In "Mushi mezuru himegimi" (one of ten stories in Tsutsumi Chunagon monogatari), the protagonist defies social conventions and refuses to succumb to the pressure of contemporary fashion. However defiant, she nonetheless remarks, "Demons and women are better not seen." Baba uses this comment to explore how and why women are juxtaposed with these creatures. My paper will add new dimensions to this type of analysis, first by providing a close reading of particular tales. In my view, we can better understand oni by exploring the ways they function as grotesque representations, particularly in, but not limited to, a Bakhtinian sense. I will look at how they debase authority by directing the attention of listeners and readers to the body and bodily life, for example. Since most oni, male and female, challenge aspects of the existing world order, it is necessary to ask how oni are gendered: are there differences in how female and male oni are situated in the tales and the kinds of things and people each oppose?
Kono Taeko's "Soomu" (Mutual Dreams) and the Question of Gendered
Narrative
Kathryn W. Sparling, Carleton College
"Soomu" is a short novel by Kono Taeko, first published in 1972. The title means "mutual dream(s)," a term that Kono seems to have invented. The novel consists of many layers of embedded narratives, each (except for the first) created by paired female/male narrators, who tell or perform stories for each other. The gender identity of the outside narrator or speaker of the text is unspecified. The first pair of narrators is Kare and Kanojo, otherwise unidentified, who sleep together and have mutually identical dreams. They take turns telling each other installments of a continuous story that is directly or indirectly inspired by their mutual dreams. The main characters in that story are a Man and a Woman, who create more narrator-characters, and so on. Along the way both male and female narrators offer definitions of the "essential" difference between men and women. Each member of each pair also takes turns acting as reader or critic for the other's story.
I read this novel as an invitation to consider whether narrative itself can be gendered. The central question seems to be whether the stories told or performed by women are "essentially" or characteristically different from stories told or performed by men. Even with identical inspiration and in identical context (the premises of "Soomu"), do women and men purposely or despite themselves make stories that differ in words, rhetoric, form, politics, consequences? I will focus on the only remarkable consistent difference between "male" and "female" narrators in the novel, namely their social or political behavior.
He Stole Her Sky: Takamura Kotaro and Chieko sho
Phyllis Birnbaum, Translator and Writer
Intent on becoming a Western-style painter, Takamura Chieko studied painting at a women's college in Tokyo. Along the way, she became closely associated with the staff of Seito and drew the first cover of that early feminist magazine. Chieko seemed on the brink of a promising career when she met and later married Takamura Kotaro, a sculptor and poet. She had reason to rejoice at this marriage, since Kotaro, recently returned from Europe, presented himself as the most modern of husbands. Declaring himself free from all feudal attitudes, he expected her to continue her painting career. But somewhere between her marriage and her suicide attempt in 1932, Chieko lost her confidence and her sanity. Worse still, Kotaro chronicled her decline in poems that later became known as Chieko sho, a collection that is much loved by Japanese. As Kotaro gained more renown, Chieko declined further. She died in 1938, at the age of fifty-two, in a Tokyo mental institution.
Until now, most have viewed Chieko's insanity as the result of an unfortunate, inherited defect, but recent writings by Japanese women have started to take a new look at her life, particularly her marriage to Kotaro. Dark questions are being asked about his role in her mental disintegration. Is Chieko sho truly the record of one husband's great love for a wife who is blighted by emotional problems? Or does this poetry collection show how Kotaro, a supremely egotistical husband, crushed Chieko's spirit? These are not safe times for men who have earned their greatest fame on their wife's misfortunes, and Kotaro now faces harsh reassessment.
Reflections: Enchi Fumiko and the Sequel to Onna Zaka
Eileen Mikals-Adachi, University of Notre Dame
Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986) has created a world in which, to borrow the author's own words, "every woman has a slope she has to climb." Onna Zaka, a novel awarded the Noma Prize for Literature and one of the few works by Enchi available in English (trans. as The Waiting Years) brings this world to the western reader with a fictionalized, yet vivid, description of the struggles Enchi's own grandmother had to face. What is little known and/or discussed is the fact that the writer herself had "a slope to climb" before creating this masterpiece of Japanese literature.
This paper will focus on Hanseiki (Half a Century), a short story that stands as the epilogue to Onna Zaka and one that offers invaluable information on how and why Enchi came to write this award-winning novel. By examining the writer's identification with the protagonist, it will show reflections on her background and her own life helped Enchi to discover the thread that ties Japanese women together throughout the ages-the desire to define and then express the self. And, after reviewing how Enchi weaves this "thread" of self-expression into a tapestry of Japanese women, the discussion will conclude with an affirmation of the strength and charm of her literature-the universality of its nature.
Inversion and Repetition: Representations of Women in Sakaguchi Ango's Fiction
Robert Steen, Oglethorpe University
A critical assessment of Sakaguchi Ango's (1906-1955) literary achievement cannot ignore the question of gender. This paper will address Sakaguchi's representations of women through readings of "Hakuchi" (The Idiot, 1946) and two other stories from the same period, "Sakura no mori no mankai no shita" (Under the Cherry Tree Forest in Full Bloom, l947) and "Ao oni no fundoshi o arau onna" (The Woman Who Washes the Blue Demon's Underclothes, 1947).
In his critical essays, Sakaguchi repeatedly asserts that the goal of literature is to explore the "essential nature of the human being" (ningen no honshitsu). The question I wish to ask is this: what does the fact that the title character of "The Idiot" is a speechless woman say about Sakaguchi's portrayal of human nature?
Sakaguchi's practice of inverting hierarchies of cultural forces is a well known aspect of his writing; many of his most famous works enact such reversals. Thus, farce supplants tragedy, popular culture unseats elite culture, and the black marketeer upstages the forty-seven loyal retainers. The gender hierarchy, however, remains uninverted. Toward suggesting a provisional analysis of this aspect of Sakaguchi's work, I draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of the literary field, as well as on Toril Moi's feminist appropriation of Bourdieu's work.