From the Edo-period works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon and Saikaku
Iharu, to modern texts by Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Junichiro, and
Nobel-prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, the Japanese literary canon
is filled with works about the demimonde, or karyukai. After years
of being closed off to Western influences on both its literature
and social policy, Japan fully opened up to the West in the late
nineteenth century and finally abolished legalized prostitution in
1956. Until then, the idea of a space set aside for sexuality, like
Tokyo's Yoshiwara district, had been a powerful catalyst in
structuring stories about the demimonde, and in fact, narratives
about the demimonde have continued to flourish in Japan even in the
second half of the 20th century and beyond, even though the actual
physical space of the traditional karyukai has disappeared. In
breadth and accomplishment, Japan's demimonde literature rivals
that of any other national literature; yet very little work
analyzing the cultural, psychological, and textual significance of
this space has been published to date. What is more, bringing
comparative approaches to Japanese literary studies is a relatively
new phenomenon, but Western literature is essential to
understanding both the wider context in which demimonde literature
blossomed, as well as to probing what is unique about Japan's
karyukai-themed texts. The Demimonde in Japanese Literature applies
both a comparativist approach and psychoanalytic models to the
examination of the literary karyukai in a way that allows for a
penetrating and multi-dimensional reading of its meaning in works
produced during Japan's tumultuous twentieth century. This book
analyzes representations of the demimonde in Japanese literature
and other arts from the beginning of the twentieth century to the
early 1990s, through fiction, critical essays, films, photographs,
and performances by Nagai Kafu, Koda Aya, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kuki
Shuzo, Mishima Yukio, Hosoe Eikoh, Tamura Taijiro, Murakami Ryu,
Ohno Kazuo, and Matsumoto Toshio. Throughout the book, the author
views the demimonde in general and the karyukai in particular
through the changing paradigms of spatial terms and configurations
in the twentieth-century Japanese imagination. In some narratives
written during the pre-World War II period, for instance, the
karyukai is distanced from the reader by the connoisseur as a way
of containing and idealizing it in 1930s Japan, in a climate of
intense censorship and military imperialism; in others it is
chronicled as disruptive to public space, its values and fetishes
spreading into new physical spaces in the tumultuous interwar Tokyo
metropole. During the postwar era, as the book's close readings
show, the demimonde is often shown to transcend psychic space via
the taboo movement of memory, and occasionally it is internalized
in the text via a celebration of small spaces and a poetics of
dwelling. Surveying such a variety of writings and artists allows
for a thorough analysis of the representation of the space of the
demimonde not just in literary texts, but in films, photographs,
and dance/performance art as well. The study also draws on
comparative examples from Western demimonde texts, especially those
that were pivotal for Japanese writers and artists, and she uses
them to formulate a complex argument about the socio-cultural,
psychological, aesthetic, literary, and political significance of
the space of the karyukai. The book also helpfully includes
translated passages from books that were not previously translated
in their entirety into English, including Koda Aya's Nagareru. The
Demimonde in Japanese Literature is an important book for all Asian
studies, comparative literature, and women's studies collections.
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