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Bearing the children of humankind : sex and reproduction in Japanese women writers' dystopian fiction

This thesis addresses the varying ways in which sexual desire is portrayed in a range of fictional works by Mishima Yukio. It presents a fresh examination of the central role that desire plays in Mishima's work, in the light of contemporary literary theory, particularly cultural materialism and queer theory. The works discussed include a number of Mishima's popular entertainment novels. The representations of aspects of desire, including same-sex desire, sadomasochism and heterosexual relationships outside marriage, are compared to contemporary writing on these in Japanese non-literary discourse, as well as earlier literary representations of, in particular, same-sex desire. The influence of sexology and psychoanalysis is examined, specifically in the forms in which these accounts of desire were communicated to the Japanese reading public in journalism of the period. The relation of Mishima's fiction to popular journalism in general is discussed, with reference to the kasutori magazines of the Occupation period and women's magazines of the high-growth era. Mishima's strategies for representing sexual desire for men are discussed, including his use of literary allusion and his portrayal of women as desiring subjects. Aspects of his narrative technique are identified as camp, in that they use borrowed cultural authority to express desire from a non-dominant subject position. The use of allusion in Forbidden Colours is examined to show how Mishima used allusion to elaborate paradigms for same-sex desire other than those available in contemporary discourse.

Schoolboys, toughs and adulteresses: Representations of desire in the fiction of Mishima Yukio.

Narratives of space and place in three works by Nakagami Kenji

The Double Logic of Minor Spaces

Language questions: Translation,
 modanizumu
 , and modernist studies in Japan

This paper examines the way Nakagami Kenji's texts highlight what are generally repressed elements of mainstream Japanese culture, or what he calls its ‘private parts’. Main texts cited are the collection of essays, Kishū: ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari, and the short stories, ‘Shugen’, ‘Fushi’ and ‘Kataku’. Making use of his own peripheral status in relation to Japanese society as a native of the Kumano region, the elements he uncovers include social discrimination against the buraku (outcaste) community and a high degree of misogyny expressed through sexual violence. A particular feature of Nakagami's work is that, although he appears to be working within the traditional Japanese narrative tradition, that very tradition is subverted and challenged by narrative elements related specifically to the writer's experience of having grown up in Kumano. Nakagami's narrative strength emerges from the fact that he has access to an ‘outsider's’ perspective while being fully informed of the expectation ...

Japan's private parts: Place as a metaphor in Nakagami Kenji's works

While utopia implies an ideal space, and dystopia a site of dysfunction, Michel Foucault coined the word heterotopia to depict a space containing multiple, overlapping and sometimes conflicting lay...

The pleasure of dark places: heterotopia in Mishima Yukio’s Inochi urimasu (Life for Sale)

Several important books have come out in the last few years that explore Japanese literature written between late Meiji and early Showa (roughly 1910–1930) from a modernist perspective. In particul...

Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911–1932 by Angela Yiu, ed.

In Itō Sei's (1905–69) “Yūki no machi” (Streets of ghosts, 1937), a narrator returns to his native town of Otaru, Hokkaido, where he experiences a hellish and hallucinatory encounter with people from his past. He is forced to confront shameful aspects of his youthful life that he had tried to repress. In this paper, I propose that a close examination of the story sheds useful light on the real fears, tensions and expectations surrounding colonialism that had become an integral part of Japanese culture and society during the late 1930s. Structures of colonialism, which speak of uneven power relationships between a dominant centre and a distant weaker locality, are spelt out, for example, through the railway network and racist ideology that appear in the story. I also explore the story's depiction of a colonial relationship between mainland Japanese culture centred round Tokyo and the peripheral outpost of Hokkaido. More generally, I suggest that the story illuminates a global power configuration between Japan and its colonies that was entering an increasingly aggressive and bellicose phase during the late 1930s.

Stephen Dodd

Papers

Japan's private parts: Place as a metaphor in Nakagami Kenji's works

The pleasure of dark places: heterotopia in Mishima Yukio’s Inochi urimasu (Life for Sale)

Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911–1932 by Angela Yiu, ed.

Structures of colonialism in Itō Sei's “Yūki no machi”