Organizer and Chair: Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky

What figures in the fictional text, in the photograph, in cinema? An organizing metaphor for the participants in this panel is the camera eye; we will turn that eye to print texts with a focus on the figural. We will do this both through the interactions across history, and within particular texts. Does a text read differently when read as though on film (whether of still photography or of the cinema)? What happens when we take the visual practices of reading in one discourse—film—and apply it to another—literary texts? Does reading a visual text require a different language than reading a literary text? If so, what happens if we try to read the literary one with visual eyes, or vice versa. We will explore these questions through a variety of means. Charles Inouye will examine the term shashin and its relationship to realism, a conceptual and imaginative history of the figural mediated by the camera. Michael Raine will look at the relationship of fiction and film in the 1950s, to raise questions about the meaning of visuality in the movement from text to screen in novels by Ishihara Shintarô. Atsuko Sakaki will draw from the fiction of Kanai Mieko to explore the mediating presence of camera/pen in the artist's hand. Doug Slaymaker will focus on a text that presents itself as a film, namely the (camera) eye of the narrator of Tawada Yôko's Tabi wo suru hadaka no me.

Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University

In the age of the camera, the problematic status of the figure is suggested by the great gap that exists between the Tokugawa-period use of the term shashin as a goal of the painter "to draw a true understanding of the world" and a later, Meiji-period use of the same term to indicate a photograph, or that mechanically produced image that "produces an exact likeness" of some represented object. What role did the camera play in this shift from what we might call emotional truth to cognitive truth? And why was this shift necessary for realism to occur as a politically virulent aesthetic movement? More specifically, what was the camera’s contribution to the development of realism and to the disciplining of the grapheme that modern ideological formation required? Finally, why did this technology eventually enable the flourishing of the grapheme that then undermined the assumptions of realism and ushered in the postmodern ascendance of the figure? I hope to suggest some answers to these questions, based on my study of long-term shifts in semiotic trends.

Michael Raine, University of Chicago

Twentieth-century Japanese literature looked early and often to the 'cinematic' for inspiration. Cinema too enticed audiences with promises of authorship and visions of adaptation. In the late 1950s those two strands entwined in the figure of Ishihara Shintaro, a best-selling novelist who claimed that his novels were a form of 'cinematic writing'. At the time, few questioned the 'cinematic' bent of Ishihara's fiction, even when they questioned its status as 'writing'. But what does it mean to call writing 'cinematic'? Does the phrase indicate a subject-free rendering of reality or a dialectical juxtaposition of fragments, to give just two alternatives? Conversely, in what sense is narrative cinema of the sound period a 'visual' medium, when that optical perspective is belied by the importance of sound (dialogue, music, effects) and diegesis (character, situation, narrative)? This paper will read Ishihara's early stories alongside their film adaptations in order to understand the stakes of their intermedial translation. Some films rely on a viewer’s preexisting construction of the novel’s 'mise-en-scene' while others undermine the dispensation of gazes laid out so overtly by Ishihara. When Ishihara complained about those films' infidelities he precipitated a discourse on authorship and visual narration that rejected existing studio cinema, dominated by theme and dialogue. The paper concludes by questioning in turn the perspectival optics of that debate in favor of a non-object- or medium-specific rhetoric of 'audio-visuality' as a complex of cultural, psycho-physiological, and material potentials activated by a particular mode of 'reading'.

Atsuko Sakaki, University of Toronto

Kuwabara Kineo (b. 1913), whose photographic work was resurrected in late 1960s by renowned artists and critics such as Tômatsu Shômei, Hosoe Eikô, Araki Nobuyoshi and Taki Kôji, problematizes the complacency which photographers often assume in taking pictures of others in his essays collected in Watakushi no shashinshi (1973). Drawing upon Walter Benjamin, Kuwabara addresses the sensation he experiences as he maneuvers the camera, film, and prints, and as he eludes encounters with the people whom he photographs, revealing how corporeal the photographer’s presence is. Kanai Mieko (b. 1947), then best known for her poetry, shares this concern in "Miru mono no nikutai wa dokode chokuritsu suruka" (1970), an essay on the gaze that people within photographs return to the camera. Citing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Kanai critiques the purported absence of the seer’s body in photographs he/she takes. She complicates the dialectic of the seer and seen in short stories such as "Mado" (1976) and "Ki no hako" (1976), resonating Kuwabara’s self-conscious reflection on the photographer’s awkward position. While she is more famous for effectively using the cinematic register, photography continued to play a formative role in Kanai’s later fiction that dislocates narrative authority, such as Karui memai (1997), in which she commends Kuwabara’s ethical operation of the eye, finger and feet as he photographs passers-by on the street. In this paper, I will show that Kanai uses photography strategically in order to elaborate the interface involving parties on both sides of the registering apparatus, be it camera or pen.

Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky

Subjectivity and identity, especially as filtered through travel and language, have comprised the primary questions in Tawada Yôko's writing. Her most recent novel, Tabi wo suru hadaka no me, in contrast to previous fiction, desires to be visual; it is a novel that wants to be a film. Tawada's texts have often stretched across languages and cultures; this work reaches further, across optic borders. The narrator of this novel wants to be a film actress; she processes the world like a camera. As a result, this text presents a spectral vision, it negotiates the landscape in ways unlike either the traditional textual novel or the spectral film. Mary Ann Caws instructs us to read texts visually (and Mieke Bal points to ways that we can read images literarily). Should we read a text differently if it is presented as a film? The related questions, and these are part of a larger project, concerns the reading of texts in a visual spectral mode. It is one thing to read the city as a text (a la Barthes/Ai/ Komori); it is another to read a text visually (as Bal does of Proust). The force of this text is its desire to be visual. This novel provides a new lens for visualizing the written text, and brings different focus to questions of subjectivity. I will focus on these two "lenses" for my reading of this text.