Organizer: Hosea Hirata, Tufts University
Chair: Eve Zimmerman, Boston University
Discussant: Ken Ito, University of Michigan
We explore a group of twentieth-century Japanese writers who turn away from the brightly lit spaces of modernity—with its roots in the code of sincerity and truth—toward a mythical past, fantastic visions, and the pursuit of erotic and psychopathic forms of ecstasy. Their writings use inspired visions (often through the eyes of the blind) to lead the reader beyond the rationally construed world into an intuitive realm where more visceral senses reign. Through the construction of private visions—whether through blindness or other forms of "perverse" transformation—the writer experiments with narrative voice, creates spectacles of violence and abjection, and explores the congruities between the spiritual and the erotic.
We propose to set the visionary in its historical and literary contexts. What conditions periodically spur a turning away from the conscious exploration of self in favor of the feverish pursuit of the visionary in Japanese literature? How do practitioners of the ecstatic speak to and draw from one another as they interweave images of the unsayable and abject in their texts? Perhaps even more importantly, these private visions seem to construct a space apart in a quixotic and solipsistic attempt to shut out the noise and dust of the world outside. Here within this room of shadows, the writer gives free reign to the symbolic, to the chaotic, to the figure of the divine. It is this assertion of the sovereign literary imagination in Japanese letters that we wish to explore—this desire to create a self-contained world of ecstasy as we turn our back to the light.
Hosea Hirata, Tufts University
Yoko tells the story of a young woman suffering from a psychiatric disorder. A young man discovers her lost in a deep stony valley and tries to rescue her from her worsening madness. Within the frame of this "love story," there is a story of visibility linked to various perceptions of self. From the opening pages, we see the unstable contours of self that threaten to erase the borders of Yoko’s identity. Furthermore, we notice that the recognition of the self, that which separates "this" from "that," is dictated by our controlling fields of vision. Once this power of control escapes us, we begin to melt into the world, no longer able to contain ourselves. Afraid that her self may disperse into thin air, Yoko dares not move out of her space, continuously wriggling her body on the floor to prove that it belongs to her.
In the end, the boyfriend’s dedication does not seem to bring her to sanity. Rather, he himself seems to be dangerously drawn to Yoko’s schizophrenic world. Yet, toward the end, we hear Yoko’s ecstatic utterance, no longer lost in the depths of a valley, but at the singularity of an apex.
Furui’s text is a sea of waving visions, dense, precise, minute, and beyond our control. My task here is not to analyze Yoko’s illness from a clinical point of view but to speak to her ecstasy from the seasickness Furui effects in his text. How can this nausea of reading approach Yoko’s final ecstasy?
Maryellen T. Mori, Santa Clara University
This paper will explore the private pleasure-worlds represented in three texts by Edogawa Ranpo that share the theme of doll-love: "Hitodenashi no koi," "Oshie to tabi suru otoko," and "Mushi."
"Hitodenashi no koi" is an account of a man’s enthrallment to an eerily lifelike antique doll with which he has played since childhood. The story, related by the man’s wife, describes the woman’s shocked discovery of her aloof husband’s nocturnal trysts with the doll in a dimly-lit storage room full of family heirlooms. In "Oshie . . . ," an austere youth is captivated by a courtesan who he glimpses from afar at a park. Upon discovering that she is merely a doll in a cloth picture, he has himself magically reduced in size so that he can replace her doll-lover in the picture. In "Mushi," a pathologically shy man murders a popular actress on whom he had a crush when they were schoolmates. He brings the woman’s corpse to his cave-like home intending to dispose of it soon. But he grows more enraptured with the doll-like corpse as it continues to decompose and to yield new ecstasies.
The paper will attempt to elucidate the uncanny allure of the doll for the protagonist of each story. What fantasies and desires does he harbor that remain dormant or unfulfilled in his human interactions but are aroused and gratified through doll-love? How does transgressive eroticism intersect with aspirations toward a utopian reality in these tales?
Miryam Sas, University of California, Berkeley
Reflections of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or of the figure of Godot as a vision and a figure for the future (or futures), for what is to be waited for, can be seen in a surprisingly large number of works of the post-war small theater movement in Japan. The work of playwright and director Betsuyaku Minoru is particularly striking and influential in this context. As a figure of ecstasy or the divine, as a realm of vision awaited from the outside or constructed and inhabited in the future, Godot’s various incarnations reflect changing social visions and contexts as well as personal reflections and projections on changing times.
Characters await something that cannot be known—some unforeseen event—or else they consciously displace or despise, within the realm of parody, that which they are supposed to be waiting for. I propose in this panel to speak about several works that take up figures or echoes of Godot as a future and vision of something outside of the realm of conditioned experience. Focusing on the work of Betsuyaku, I will also take into account certain works of Kara Juro, Tsuka Kohei, and (in the 80s, in a lighter technological mode) Kokami Shoji, that transform this figure of the cathartic, transcendent, or disappointing future. Placing these visions within their contexts, I propose to elaborate this confrontation with language within the realm of performance in order to discover what these directors and playwrights made of the horror and strangeness of ecstasy’s dark and blind underside.
Eve Zimmerman, Boston University
In stories that weave together themes of blindness and eroticism, Nakagami Kenji draws upon the legacy of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro while creating a rougher more brutal vision of a ‘realm of shadows.’ The blind woman of Tanizaki’s "Shunkinsho" (A Portrait of Shunkin, 1933) appears in "Nokori no Hana," (Lingering Flowers, 1983) as an agent of seduction, bliss and early death. Unlike Tanizaki’s perfectly balanced hierarchical relationship between blind woman and servant, however, Nakagami affords his lovers no symbiotic union; rather, the protagonist spins into a ‘whirlpool of darkness’ and the blank space of a tomb behind a wall. Through a catastrophic exploration of ecstasy and death, Nakagami reveals what he calls the ‘ho/seido’ (law/system) of Japanese culture, a deterministic hierarchy that confines his people the burakumin, to the lowest levels of society.
Nakagami expresses impatience with Tanizaki’s masochistic postures, yet he too uses the world of the blind to create fiction that transcends realistic concerns of the self. As in "Shunkinso" with its many competing versions of events, "Nokori no Hana" is a patchwork narrative with two radically different perspectives—one, the sun-baked, eternal voice of the roji (alleyway) in the persona of the old women who dwell there, and the other, the voice of the lover who is seduced by the touch of a blind woman—and the gap between these voices propels the story back and forth between the poles of mythic dream and horror. Blindness becomes a metaphor for fiction itself—a means to cover, obfuscate, to banish order, reason and light. In tales of seduction and death, Nakagami reveals his debt to Tanizaki; the realm of shadows may demand obeisance of the writer but it is the origin of all stories and of pleasure itself.