Session 32: Spectacular Excess: Gender and Melodrama in Modern Japanese Literary and Visual Culture

Organizer: Deborah M. Shamoon, University of California, Berkeley

Chair: Eve Zimmerman, Wellesley College

Discussant: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University

Keywords: Japan, literature, gender, melodrama, performance.

Building on last year’s panel on 19th-century Japanese melodrama, we continue the study of melodrama in 20th and 21st century Japan, focusing on the confluences between the performance of melodrama and gender in a variety of media, including popular, visual and theatrical. We argue that melodramatic elements are the means by which these texts call attention to the construction of gender, and also to the possibility of the deconstruction of gender roles. We take an historical approach, selecting examples of melodrama, and fleshing out their social, political and aesthetic contexts, their language and modes of address, their particular narrative lines, and their compulsive, repetitive appeal.

Sarah Frederick addresses how style in the work of Yoshiya Nobuko linguistically performs "girlness." Deborah Shamoon examines the way in which the manga Rose of Versailles uses melodramatic conventions of shôjo manga to address serious issues of gender and politics in the 1970s. Eve Zimmerman of Wellesley College explores the Western classic Wuthering Heights as a form of translated imported melodrama that stimulated female literary production in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Brian Bergstrom explores the relationship between masculinity and virtue in the genre of shônen manga, which draws on the melodramatic mode to express the ways this relationship is reformulated in response to recent anxieties about violent crimes perpetrated by young boys. Continuing the conversation begun by last year’s panel, our discussant, Charles Inouye, will add his expertise in 19th-century stage spectacles to questions of visuality and spectacle in contemporary Japan.

Linguistic Performance of Girl Culture in the Fiction of Yoshiya Nobuko

Sarah Anne Frederick, Boston University

Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973) was one of modern Japan’s most commercially successful and prolific writers, specializing in serialized romance novels and adolescent girls’ fiction. Throughout her life her photographs and personal essays appeared regularly in magazines, creating a public persona that included her lifelong relationship with a same-sex partner, Monma Chiyo. Whether depicting same-sex romance between girls or heterosexual domestic melodrama, her novels usually avoid the marriage plot. In order to depict girls and women who are marginal to the family system, Yoshiya often evokes an exotic atmosphere through objects (such as roses and pianos) and architectural styles (such as attics and verandas); these create a sense of difference or fantasy space in which lesbian relationships can exist outside the view of parental control or state education. Similarly, Yoshiya’s melodramatic writing style, marked by onomatopoeia, use of English words in romanized script, exclamation points and other unusual diacritical marks, forms what seems to be a different linguistic space, which is aesthetically inviting to her female readers. Both the writing style and use of imagery suggest her interaction and competition with modern entertainment technology found in her modernist contemporaries, while also marking her as part of "girl" culture. This paper considers the aesthetic and political effects of Yoshiya’s use of spaces and language to explore same-sex erotic and emotional relationships in popular fiction.

The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shôjo Manga

Deborah Shamoon, University of California, Berkeley

Ikeda Riyoko’s manga epic The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no bara, 1972) began as a frothy romance for girls, but by the end had become a serious examination of gender roles and political issues. This transformation encapsulates the larger changes in shôjo manga in the 1970s, when authors used melodramatic conventions received from earlier shôjo magazines and novels, to create stories that explored the psychological interiority and sexual agency of girls. The Rose of Versailles has also migrated to other media, including the Takarazuka Revue, TV anime and film, and is now the locus classicus for many of the gender-crossing and fighting girl stories that have followed in manga and anime. I will use a formal consideration of the shôjo manga aesthetic to explain the enduring popularity of this story.

Ikeda’s revisionist history of the French Revolution told from the perspective of the nobility and sympathetic to Marie Antoinette was successful because she shifted the focus away from Antoinette to the fictional character of Oscar de Jarjayes, a woman raised as a man and the captain of the Queen’s Royal Guard. Oscar provided girls with a thrilling image of a woman endowed with masculine strength and agency, but without sacrificing her feminine beauty and empathy, and who can fall in love without losing her identity to her partner.

This paper will examine the way in which Ikeda successfully combined the narrative and aesthetic elements of previous shôjo manga and shôjo shosetsu generic conventions with new depth and seriousness.

Melodrama in Translation: The Staging of Wuthering Heights in Japan

Eve Zimmerman, Wellesley College

Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights first appeared in Japanese translation in 1932. Since that time seventeen translators have taken up the task of transforming Brontë’s gothic tale into Japanese; stage, film and television adaptations also abound. Certain translations (both print and media) turn Wuthering Heights into melodrama, a spectacular tale of innocent but doomed young love. Nineteenth-century Japanese melodrama has received serious attention in recent years, but we need to carry our study further into the 20th century, analyzing the dialogue between East and West. We must also foreground the question of gender, particularly how melodrama affects the young female (or male) audiences who consume it.

My paper first examines the work of early translators such as Miyake Ikusaburô who subtly romanticized and softened the contours of Brontë’s original. I consider the question of whether translation itself is inherently melodramatic—an enterprise that heightens emotional affect, moral causality, and spectatorship in the interest of crossing linguistic and national borders. Second, my paper explores the link between gender, melodrama and language in postwar women’s writing: Kôno Taeko, Tsushima Yûko, and Mizumura Minae, for example, clearly document their engagement with Wuthering Heights, revealing how they put Brontë’s vision to work. In order to deepen our understanding of the "melodramatic mode" in modern Japan, particularly its relevance to gender studies, we need to open our inquiry to the language of translation, a nuanced grammar that projects a view from the outside in.

Weeping and Wounding: Melodrama and the "Moral Occult" of Boyishness in Shônen Manga

Brian Bergstrom, University of Chicago

Peter Brooks has written that the melodramatic mode produces a type of "moral occult" through rhetorical practices of overstatement and excessive emotional expressionism, one that "substitutes for the rite of sacrifice an urging toward combat in life, an active, lucid confrontation of evil" (Brooks, 1976). This paper explores the implications of Brooks’ insights into melodrama as they apply to popular cultural texts written about and for young boys in contemporary Japan. In particular, I wish to examine the moral dimensions of boyishness as portrayed in shônen (boy) manga. Shônen (as opposed to, for example, shôjo, or "girl") manga takes as its primary subject matter boyishness and its relation to proper citizenship, repeating motifs like competition, combat, and camaraderie in an effort to define and celebrate a certain kind of boyish virtue that, while modulated through maturation, still ideally informs the actions of men as adult members of society. However, since the early 1990s, and especially following the 1997 "Shônen A" incident in Kobe, the Japanese public sphere has been suffused with a growing suspicion of boys. Increasingly seen as potential perpetrators of brutal, senseless violence, shônen have become privileged signifiers for the perceived "emptiness" lying at the heart of contemporary Japan. This paper will examine shônen manga written within this period of boyishness-in-crisis, focusing on melodrama as a mode through which the "evil" lying at the heart of this crisis is elucidated and confronted even as boyishness itself is recuperated as a virtue necessary for its vanquishing.