Panel 21: Japanese Literature and Art

Chair: Michael Brownstein, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Yue Wang, Washington University in St. Louis, “Eat a Life, Make a Life: Posthuman Love in Murata Sayaka’s Life Ceremony”

What might love look like in a posthuman world? To Japanese novelist Murata Sayaka (b. 1979), who often radically dismantles systems of gender and sex in her works, love means connecting with your loved ones through touch, cannibalism, and sex orgies. In her 2013 story ‚“Life Ceremony‚” (‚“Seimeishiki‚”), the pronatalist state encourages everyone to participate in a ritual called ‚“life ceremony.‚” When someone dies, their body is transformed into food and consumed by their loved ones. Later, the participants in this mourning ritual will engage in sexual intercourse with the goal of procreation. Cannibalism turns bodies into consumable posthumanist entities by disrupting the independent, autonomous, and carefully-guarded bodily borders espoused by Humanist philosophy. It also creates a form of queer love and intimacy, as protagonist Maho attempts to remember and reconnect with her former colleague, Yamamoto, by consuming his flesh for the first time. The cooking and eating of Yamamoto’s flesh becomes an act of love that enables Maho to process her grief. This paper utilizes posthuman theories to discuss the posthumanist possibilities of the body and its boundaries that are destabilized through a series of taboos, such as cannibalism and sexual orgy. It interrogates questions of humanity in a pronatalist society that preys on death and procreative sex, and asks what it means to cross the boundary between life and death, love and obsession, and connect with dismembered, consumable bodies through acts of eating and remembering.

Yuefan Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, “China in Translation: Ema Saikō and Her Chinese Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Japan”

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Japan witnessed an upsurge in the number of female kanshi (Chinese poetry) poets, primarily due to the Tokugawa shogunate’s promotion of Chinese Neo-Confucianism. This paper examines how Japanese women active in the nineteenth century utilized Sinitic writing to assert their agency as writers and gentlewomen. Ema Saikō (1787–1861), a prominent female poet-painter of this era, composed numerous autobiographical Chinese-style poems and remained unmarried throughout her life. Through contextualization and intertextual analysis of Ema Saikō’s Chinese poems, this paper elucidates how translation, reception, and cultural adaptation in poetic creation shaped Saikō’s position in her contemporary literati circle. Focusing on the imagery, allusions, and concepts in Saikō’s Chinese poems, as well as her male teacher’s edits and comments, this paper argues that Saikō’s Sinitic writing exemplifies three approaches to translating cultural expressions: complete adoption, expansion, and deviation. Remarkably, by employing these approaches, Saikō not only domesticated Chinese poetic ideas but also crafted a persona distinguished from conventional femininity. Her self-fashioning showcased her agency as a poet of unique ethnic identity and an extraordinary gentlewoman in early modern Japan.

Elsa Chanez, Washington University in St. Louis, “Through a Cat’s Eye: Disease, Filiality and Yokai in Ogino Anna’s Short Story ‘Neko Jya’”

After caring for three family members who had become sick one after the other, novelist Ogino Anna (1956-) developed colon cancer in 2014. Through books, short stories and even newspapers columns and interviews, she has discussed frankly and often with humour, her relationship with diseases and her often difficult role as a caregiver. In her 2017 collection of short stories Kashisugawa (The Cassis River), she examines her relationship with cancer and her mother through the prism of traditional Japanese stories and fantastic creatures from the Japanese bestiary, such as the bake neko, a kind of goblin cat. In Kashisugawa’s penultimate story, titled Neko jya, (It’s a cat) it is the latter who, as narrator, tells us how he befriends a woman with cancer who is caring for his ailing mother. In this presentation, I explore how Ogino’s treats illness through the eyes of a yokai, a character from Japanese folklore, transported to modern Japan. This juxtaposition enables her to take a humorous, detached look at illness and the complexity of his family relationships.

Matthew Shorten, Williams College, “Music, Memory, and Materiality: Coalescing Aural and Visual Experience in Suzuki Harunobu’s Floating Worlds”

Suzuki Harunobu (1724-1770) was a seminal 18th-century designer of ukiyo-e prints. In 1766, Harunobu’s first series of nishiki-e “brocade pictures,” entitled Eight Parlor Views, marked the inception of polychrome printing in Japan. Inaugurating this collection – itself an invocation of a Song dynasty painting genre – is the work central to this paper, “Descending Geese of the Koto Bridges.” This print bespeaks an extraordinary sleight of hand through the coalescing of the aural and visual fields, across time and place, wherein memories of an ancient, intangible, imperial visual topos are juxtaposed with the interior, natural, sonic realms of a middle-class Edo-period home.

This paper argues that the foregrounding of the koto and its imbrication with multisensory experience of the natural world, in this seminal commencement of polychrome printing, bolsters Harunobu’s erudite encoding of aural memories through a visual medium. This allegory, predicated on an involving matrix of artistic and literary lineages transcending print, reifies the prominent roles of memory, literariness, and music across the bounds of social class in Edo Japan, and reflects the varying degrees of cultural learnedness among the audiences for which this transfigured style was originated.

Although this print is suffused with multisensory experience and intricate aural landscapes, the art history and Asian studies disciplines have yet to unravel these musical and material fundaments of ukiyo-e. By exploring the topoi summoned in this print, and their attendant literary and cultural referents, this paper demonstrates Harunobu’s conscious aesthetic fusion of nature and music, transforming the materiality and memory of print.