This paper will delineate the ideological resonance between The Hundred-Nights Tale from the mid-to-late Heian period and the modern play Ono no Komachi (1923) by the preeminent male author Kikuchi Kan. The tale is perhaps best remembered for the unforgettable image of the legendary Heian poetess Ono no Komachi as that of a femme fatale. Captain Fukakusa, the most ardent suitor of the poetess, suddenly dies on the ninety-ninth day while in the process of fulfilling the one hundred-night visits that Komachi demanded as the proof of his love. Kikuchi retells this well-known tale, imagining farcical sexual politics played out between the alleged victim Fukakusa and the haughty, cruel beauty Komachi.

This paper focuses particularly on the ideological significance behind Kikuchi’s imaginary return to the ninety-ninth night—the moment that lies within the temporal frame of The Hundred-Nights Tale but is left as a narrative void due to Fukakusa’s untimely death. I will discuss how through this liminal moment envisioned by Kikuchi, Komachi becomes utterly transfigured as the butt of a joke cleverly played by Fukakusa. Ono no Komachi, originally entitled A Comedy for Gentlemen, thus demonstrates the narrative desire for Fukakusa’s masculine mastery over Komachi’s dangerously powerful female sexuality—that is to say, her femme fatalité. In this sense then, Kikuchi’s play can be viewed as a modern manifestation of the enduring gender ideology that governs the narrative structure and logic of The Hundred-Nights Tale and other related famous Nô plays such as Sotoba Komachi and Kayoi Komachi.

Jane C. Britting, Princeton University

One challenge in interpreting the fiction of Nakagami Kenji stems from Nakagami’s own distrust of narrative and his anti-humanism on the one hand, and his regard for Marxism on the other. In my AAS presentation, I intend to explore this contradiction as it unfolds in the representation of labor in three of Nakagami’s works: "Misaki" (The Cape), Karekinada (The Sea of Whithered Trees), and Chi no hate shijo no toki (The End of the World, The Supreme Time). The depiction of labor in the works stands as a metonmyic link to Burakumin existence; it also acts as an organizing force in the narratives, as work situations are often determined by familial alliances and both mimic and shatter those alliances. Additionally, to the extent that realism plays a part in Nakagami’s work and that narrative voice often performs a version of a character’s speech, the trade an individual character engages in determines the type and range of expression available to that character.

In my presentation, I will look specifically at the labor kumi and the shifts in familial allegiance of the character Akiyuki from one work to the next: from kumi member to kumi foreman, to deserter of the construction trade in favor of a position in a lumber enterprise. Each of these shifts in employment effects and expresses a shift in loyalty, as Akiyuki moves from one family business to another. The allowances and restrictions that his vocation places on Akiyuki’s expression—and the violence that often results from his failures of articulation—connect labor and family allegiance with literary expression and thus with the contradiction of writing from a non-humanist perspective; where words fail, literary climax occurs.

Kumiko Sato, Pennsylvania State University

The Internet culture—or the culture that expands itself in cyberspace—has greatly changed the condition of literature in this last decade of the 20th-century. More novels, especially in the genre of so-called Science Fiction & Fantasy, are now published in PDF formats on the Net. The digitalization of literature has undermined what we assume to be the conditions of literature. Especially the authority of the author is to be questioned in relation to the Net, the fluid space that corrodes borders between reality and virtual reality, author and reader, or original and copy. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault denote the end of the Author respectively in "The Death of the Author" and "What is an Author?" in the 1970s. The Net can be "the negative," in Barthes’ world, where all identities are lost and our subjectivity slips away. Ohara Mariko, a contemporary Japanese woman writer, sees possibilities in this condition of culture, like Barthes. Her writing shows that the author and text are only "staged": that is, her text escapes the determinacy of signification by performing the pastiche of pop culture, e.g., TV melodrama and Science Fiction. Especially her illustration of cyborgs represents her attempts to construct the borderless body located at the unstable interface between body and machine. While she sanctions the fluidity of the body, however, gender is the ideological paradigm—or rather, the ideological deadlock—that prevents her writing from the innocent poststructuralism. Ohara’s cyborgs end up with their own preprogrammed limits of female gender, which seems to reflect her standpoint as a "woman" writer. In the domain of gender, therefore, the Net simultaneously deconstructs and maintains the authorship of the author.

Chizuko Uema, Lewis & Clark College

As she lost her father when she was only one year old, Tsushima Yuko’s themes in her literary works have often been an absence of a father and re-definition of family. By so doing, she questions the traditional ideal of gender roles, especially for a mother who is expected to be unselfish and forever embracing other people’s pain. However, I find her recent works to be dramatically different. She examines the role of mother in very relentless ways, criticizing and blaming an "irresponsible" mother. Research on her recent life indicates that Tsushima lost her younger son from a mistake, she believes, of her own. After this incident, Tsushima has written over and over again stories that relate to a mother’s loss of a small child. Some Japanese literary critics see Tsushima’s recent works as a literature of "forgiveness," which involves the Christian ideologies, as Tsushima herself is a Catholic author. In my paper, however, I would like to show how she reconciles her views on motherhood in her recent works.

Noriko T. Reider, Miami University, Ohio