Organizer: Christopher A. Bolton, Stanford University
Chair: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Discussant: Susan J. Napier, University of Texas
Literature of the fantastic has often been linked to gender issues, both for its utopian ability to re-imagine or escape from an oppressive social reality, and for its power to shore up the status quo with fantasies of an utterly objectified other. This panel examines four novelists and a director who have created fantastic worlds, and asks how women authors and characters have fared amid the expanded possibilities of these different fantasies.
Central to this question is the way that past, present and future come together in fantastic literature as it ranges from mythic tales to science fiction. All of the papers show how the temporal flexibility of fantasy can address changes in gender roles over time. But ultimately the papers also identify corresponding changes in the nature of fantasy itself.
Two panelists look at the tradition of otherworldly women and its transformation over time. Marilyn Bolles shows how the modern protagonist of Enchi Fumiko’s "Oni" alters herself and her place in the family with supernatural aid. Charles Inouye examines the motif of the idealized "dream woman" in the literature of Izumi Kyoka and later the films of Bando Tamasaburo. In the process, Inouye interrogates the complicated relationship between fantasy and modernity. Christopher Bolton investigates this same relationship in Abe Kobo’s Tanin no Kao, where it is only the female character who can steer a safe course between fantasy and modern science. Finally, Shigemi Nakagawa traces the way in which the fantasies of Shono Yoriko overcome modernity’s understanding of the imagination, arriving instead at an earlier more visual experience of imagination and language.
Marilyn Bolles, University of California, Berkeley
Supernatural phenomena in the fiction of Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) are often involved in the recreating of past legends for a contemporary context. Female protagonists, driven by years of repressed frustration, tap into a mystical power familiar from premodern Japanese narratives. Rather than a mere corrective force on history, however, it is one that complicates and questions gender roles and social practices, whether "traditional" or "liberated." Enchi’s 1972 story "Oni" problematizes the authority of the family when an oni’s curse on the Toki house of Kumano prevents the daughter from marrying. The daughter desires marriage and children, yet the oni resides inside of her and sabotages her relationships with the men she attempts to marry. The oni’s transgressive power, then, does not seem to act on her desires, which rules out the straightforward notion of a fantasy realized through supernatural means. Its purpose is to prevent the women of the Toki clan from "becoming someone else’s object," therefore protecting the authority of the family unit. Meanwhile, the daughter’s possible exploitation along with her personal happiness are also prevented, a contradictory situation that reflects the ambiguity of ideology and identity in the postmodern era.
This paper will examine how the supernatural oni and the mystical, genealogical authority of Kumano elucidate a contemporary social dilemma. Unlike the conscious manipulation of supernatural powers as seen in the protagonist of Enchi’s novel Masks, the daughter in "Oni" either possesses, or is possessed by, a supernatural force that she may or may not control. Kumano as land of the Japanese people’s origin has long been a powerful subject of study on lineage in folklore and legend. It is the site for both end and beginning for the Toki line: the oni’s curse prevents the daughter from marrying, and therefore the clan will not continue in the conventional manner. However, the daughter can never leave Kumano, as seen when the oni follows her abroad and acts with a deadly force to prevent her lover’s unfaithfulness. I will investigate Enchi’s use of the oni as both destructive and benevolent, with Kumano as the site of new and ancient origins, for her exploration of the changing roles of fantasy, gender and family.
Christopher Bolton, Stanford University
In the novels of Abe Kobo (1924–1993), the narrator typically finds himself suspended between a rational, scientific world and a world of fantasy, two realms he must reconcile or choose between. Standing before him on the threshold of these two worlds there is always another, a woman. But for the narrator, it is never clear whether she represents a source of stability which will draw him back from the brink of a disintegrating rationality, or whether she is a white rabbit which will lead him further into fantasy and escape.
This paper examines the disjunction between "scientific" and "fantastic" and the role of this liminal female figure in Tanin no Kao (Face of Another, 1964). The novel’s narrator becomes estranged from his wife after his face is disfigured in a lab accident, so he uses his skills as a polymer chemist to construct a mask indistinguishable from a human face. But as soon as he dons the new face, it begins to take on a life and a violent will of its own.
The narrator’s situation mirrors the fate of a modernity which has unthinkingly equated science with rationality and progress. He realizes too late that it is sometimes only a thin line which separates science from fiction. Finally it is the liminal figure of the wife who must tame the technological fiction of the mask and chart a safe course between the rational world of the laboratory and this fantasy world of changing identity.
Shigemi Nakagawa, Ritsumeikan University
Shono Yoriko’s (1956–) experimental fiction about gender and identity has earned her a reputation as one of contemporary Japan’s most revolutionary authors. But even more remarkable than Shono’s technique is her imagination.
Theories of the Japanese novel and its development have rarely come to grips with the imagination, dismissing it instead as a remnant of the premodern. Imagination’s fate in modern criticism is partly due to its reciprocal relationship with the paradigm of modernity itself: imagination is the incarnation of premodernity’s unrealized dreams, but it is also imagination and the attendant novel which have provided the energy to drive modernity forward.
In a modern understanding of imagination, the visuality of the religious or folk "reminiscence" extolled by the Japanese imagination must be transcribed into the space of writing which dominates the system of modernity. Even the most visual products of the modern imagination—photography or motion pictures—are reduced to words in contemporary criticism.
Shono’s writing challenges this tendency. From nightmares of vulnerability to matricidal imaginings, works like Resutoresu Doriimu, Nihyakkaiki, and Haha No Hattatsu use the space of dreams and fantasies to rehearse in radical fashion various crises of feminine identity. But the heroines’ fantastic reminiscences are most radical for the fact that they revive the visuality of memory and language that modernity has endeavored to suppress.
This paper will explore these three works from the multi-layered perspective of hypertext and performance, in order to investigate the complex of gender, word, and other that surrounds the discovery of a postmodern imagination.
Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Praised for his cultivation of feminine beauty, the famous onnagata Bando Tamasaburo has emerged as a successful film director with his adaptation of Izumi Kyoka’s Surgery Room (Gekashitsu) and, more recently, The Castle Keep (Tenshu monogatari). Between these two films, Tamasaburo’s own Dream Woman (Yume no onna) fits naturally. It similarly portrays the duress of being a woman, where women are too good and too beautiful to be understood except by only the most cultivated and, therefore, emasculated masculine taste. Tamasaburo’s status as an onnagata, a man who chooses not to be a man, clarifies the question which might be leveled at anyone who has ever fantasized about the ideally feminine, about women who, in the tradition of Izumi Kyoka, are both nurturing and alluring, better than men so that they can suffer for men, both madonna and whore, companions of death, love, and violence. Why does the idealization of the feminine so often result in a masculine regression? How and why is it possible to love women too much?
We might identify as fantastic or excessive that point at which the love of the feminine becomes transgressive of normative gender categories. Dream women take us out of real time and real space; and that is precisely their utility and attraction. But this term, fantasy, is a modern one, now sorely outdated by the dominance of videographic culture and its implicit critique of positivism and, by extension, modern categories of gender, whether creative or recreative. The chic antiquarianism of Tamasaburo that is allowed to flourish on the stage and screen, is contemporaneous to the rise of the even more visually plastic manga and anime. This semiotic shift toward the visual suggests the need for a reformulation of cultural categories that are larger than usually allowed by the modern, and for a rereading of modern logocentrism.