THE POLITICS OF “STORYTELLING”: SCHEMAS OF TIME AND SPACE IN JAPAN’S TRAVELING IMAGINATION OF SEMI-COLONIAL CHINA AND BEYOND, 1920s-1980s
A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
by Junliang Huang August 2015
© 2015 Junliang Huang
THE POLITICS OF “STORYTELLING”: SCHEMAS OF TIME AND SPACE IN JAPAN’S TRAVELING IMAGINATION OF SEMI-COLONIAL CHINA AND BEYOND, 1920s-1980s
Junliang Huang, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015
Centered on the works of three Japanese writers, namely Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927), Hayashi Kyōko (1930- ), and Takeda Taijun (1912-1976), and with references to many other writers such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Takeuchi Yoshimi, in this dissertation I look into those narrative accounts for a changing pattern in their structure of storytelling about semi-colonial China. My project is in many ways indebted to but also fundamentally different from studies of Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges under semi- colonialism, in the sense that it is a subtle literary analysis organized around a theoretical problematic, rather than an effort for a comprehensive history. I highlight the politics of storytelling in our texts by examining the temporality and spatiality, narrative devices, linguistic politics, and so on in the writer’s storytelling. I take the literary texts discussed in this dissertation as always socially constructed, and as “narrative accounts” that consist of elements of figuration, rather than considering them as the unmediated reproduction of the historical “truth” about the writers or about the Chinese and Japanese societies they traveled/lived in and between.
Chapter One is a careful examination of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s narrative of prewar China, entitled Travels in China. Chapter Two focuses on the politics of storytelling in Hayashi Kyōko’s autobiographical novel Michelle Lipstick (1980), read together with several other works of hers. Chapter Three is organized around discussions of three major works on China by Takeda, entitled Sima Qian (Shiba Sen, 1943), The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947), and Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976), while referring to several of his essays written between those years as secondary materials. I reach two conclusions. First, I contend that there is an obvious shift in the ways that prewar and postwar Japanese writers construct the time and space of semi- colonial China in their works. And secondly, I hold that the allegorical meaning of storytelling lies in the space it opens up for literary critics and literary historians to access the relations between the writer, the narrator, and the surrounding social space, which, in my opinion, are the reality of the past that we have been trying to find in literature.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Junliang Huang was born and grew up in Mainland China. After receiving a MA degree in Translation Theory at ECNU in Shanghai, she earned her second MA degree in Modern Japanese Literature at the Ohio State University and entered the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University in 2009. She has been a Special Research Student at the University of Tokyo and a Non-resident Visiting Scholar at Ritsumeikan University during 2012 and 2013.
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To My Family
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The completion of this work has depended heavily on the guidance, encouragement, and patience of my graduate mentor and dissertation committee chair Brett de Bary, to whom I owe my first debt of thanks. Over the course of my years at Cornell, Brett has been extremely helpful in offering suggestions and incisive criticisms on my writing, and I have benefited consistently from her tireless and constructive advice, as well as all the exceptional meetings and discussions we had. Her mentorship and friendship supported me throughout this journey that sometimes seemed to be endless, guiding me from the start of my study in Grad School to the start of my career as a teacher and scholar.
I am also grateful to the minor members of my committee—Naoki Sakai, Edward M. Gunn, and Katsuya Hirano. I owe a great intellectual debt not only to their stimulating classes but also to the discussions and exchanges we had in various occasions. Their friendship, advice, and personal support have made my years at Cornell much easier and more enjoyable.
I would like to deeply thank Iwasaki Minoru, Komori Yōichi, Ikeuchi Yasuko, Rebecca Jennison, and many people in Japan who helped, supported, and encouraged me throughout my fieldwork there. They include: Narita Ryūichi, Toba Kōji, Tsuboi Hideto, Nishi Masahiko, Tsuchiya Shinobu, Yonetani Masafumi, Shimamura Teru, Watanabe Naoki, Kasai Hirotaka, Ko Youngran, Odawara Rin, Maja Vodopivec, Lin Shaoyang, Wang Zhongchen, Ren Yongsheng, Tan Ren’an, Wang Junwen, Murakami Katsunao, Murakami Yōko, Shin Jiyong, Sakasai Akito, Kim Younglong, Aibara Takuya, Matsubara Rika, and Hashizume Taiki. My thanks also go to the Japan Foundation who offered me a Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in 2012, and to Cornell University and the Ohio State University for the years of financial support they provided me at all levels.
I have benefited greatly from the discussions, exchanges, and collaborations with my teachers, colleagues, and friends at Cornell University, the Ohio State University, East China Normal University and beyond over the years. Special thanks go to Ding Xiang Warner, Nick Admussen, Keith Taylor, Robin McNeal, Petrus Liu, Naomi Larson, Misako Terashima Chapman, Robert Sukle, Janice Kanemitsu, Pedro Erber, Gavin Walker, Joshua Young, Daniel McKee, Jeffrey DuBois, Masuda Hajimu, Deokhyo Choi, Kinjo Masaki, Wang Yuanchong, Wah Guan Lim, Clarence I-Zhuen Lee, the late William Tyler, Noda Mari, Richard Torrance, Kirk Denton, Charles Quinn, Shirley Quinn, Bao Weihong, Rebecca Karl, Bruce Rusk, Gao Ning, and Zhao Wei.
Lastly, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my family, for their love, support, encouragement, patience, and faith that accompanied me through this otherwise lonely journey. Thank you for always being there for me.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Note on Translations viii
Introduction 1
1 Travel and the Construction of Race in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels in China (Shina
Yūki) 24
2 Through the Lens of the “Other”: Hayashi Kyōko’s Storytelling of the Shanghai
Alley-Community 92
3 The World as a Spatial Continuity over Time: Takeda Taijun and the Postwar
Discourse of the Defeat of Japan 160
Epilogue 226
Bibliography 229
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NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
Throughout this dissertation, all translations from materials written in Japanese and Chinese are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
For the transliteration of Japanese language, I use the Modified Hepburn system, with the macron indicating a long vowel, i.e. metsubō. Terms in Japanese, in particular proper nouns or place names that have an established usage in English, i.e., Tokyo, are not modified with diacritics. For the transliteration of Chinese language, I use the Hanyu Pinyin system.
viii Introduction
On November 26, 2013, I visited the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon kindai bungakukan) at Komaba, Tokyo. I was hoping to see the Takeda Taijun Collection that includes many hand-written notes and manuscripts of the postwar Japanese writer Takeda Taijun
(1912-1976) that have never been published. Among the material donated to the museum by
Takeda’s bereaved family a few years ago, I understood that there was a diary kept while he was living in Shanghai from the summer of 1944 until February 1946. During this period, Takeda worked for the China-Japan Cultural Association (Chūnichi bunka kyōkai, or Zhongri wenhua xiehui) and after the end of the Pacific War as a freelance letter-writer (daishoya) in the accommodations for Japanese residents in the Hongkew (Hongkou) District of Shanghai until he was repatriated to Japan. The diary was considered by the Takeda scholar Kawanishi Masaaki to have contained the source material for the writer’s last piece Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976),1 a work that I analyze in the last chapter of this dissertation. In addition to my interest in confirming the connection between the diary and Shanghai Firefly, I was instinctively curious to know what exactly Takeda experienced in the Shanghai international settlement right before and after Japan’s defeat. However, it turned out that Kawanishi was one of the few lucky people who were able to read this diary. When I arrived at the archive, I learned that it had been withdrawn by Takeda’s family because they worried that some of the content might be
“inappropriate” to publicize.
Just as Takeda chose to write an autobiographical novel rather than publish this diary when he was alive, his family’s donation and withdrawal of the diary reveals the ongoing
1 Kawanishi Masaaki, Takeda Taijun den [The Biography of Takeda Taijun] (Kōdansha, 2005), 482.
1 dilemma faced by many Japanese who had personal experience of China during the Sino-
Japanese war, whether voluntarily or not. On the one hand, they are compelled by an internal drive to give testimony of the inhumane conduct of Japanese imperialism in its neighboring countries during World War II and to recount their individual suffering caused by it. Postwar writers such as Takeda Taijun, Ōoka Shōhei, Hotta Yoshie, and Noma Hiroshi, among many others, could not stay silent about their experience of the battlefield in the gaichi (Japan’s overseas territory). Works that were published immediately after the defeat of Japan, such as
Takeda’s The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947), Hotta’s The Stateless One (Sokoku sōshitsu, 1948-50),
Ōoka’s Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1951), and Noma’s Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū chitai, 1952) are all vivid accounts of that history, in which their critique of Japanese imperialism is profoundly rooted. Kawanishi even holds that Takeda could not have been able to continue writing had he not confessed about the killing in the battlefield.2 On the other, however, their confession is simultaneously a charge that points to themselves because they were undeniably part of it. As a result, their testimony, together with their moral judgments of the historical events, is almost always told as stories, taking the form of the novel or the autobiographical novel. In other words, such testimony tends to present itself only in storytelling, where the reader must always make extra effort to dig deeper for historical facts.
In this literature we see a kind of reticence about the past, coming from a sense of shame, in contrast to the silence or even the denial of Japan’s imperial past in the historical revisionism promoted by the “shameless” ones in postwar Japan. That is, unlike those who hold that there is no need for the majority of Japanese people to reflect on the war, or who even deny Japan’s war crimes in World War II—criticized by postcolonial scholars as being “shameless”—the abovementioned postwar writers felt responsible for recalling past events in their present day,
2 Kawanishi 2005: 227.
2 based on their sense of guilt for what they had done or witnessed during the war. Their postwar narrative accounts can be looked at as a confession of the author, something necessary for the relief of their sense of guilt. But when disclosing the past, they (and their family, too, like
Takeda’s) are also seized by a sense of shame. They feel forced to almost intuitively draw back because, as Ukai Satoshi points out, shame relies on “external sanctions for good behavior,” and it “requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience.”3 The disclosure of one’s past wrong deeds thus triggers the sense of shame immediately when it encounters an audience.
Citing Nietzsche, Ukai points out that shame proves the “structural necessity of the being of others in order for me to recognize me.”4 Even if the sense of shame has long existed inside the self, the gaze of others following such a disclosure will leave the self nowhere to escape.
Trapped between the senses of guilt and shame these writers find either a complete silence or an outspoken exposure of the past unbearable. In the current discussion, the concept of shame, like guilt, is employed as a social affect rather than a national or cultural character as seen in the kind of essentialism adopted in works such as Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword:
Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946).
The experience of shame has been identified as an “indispensable element in thinking about war.”5 Studies of the postwar discourse of the defeat of Japan have paid considerable attention to the silence of the shameless—right-wing politicians, for example; and to the ashamed victim, such as the Comfort Women (ianfu)—young females of various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances who became sexual laborers for the Japanese
3 Ukai Satoshi, “The Future of An Affect: the Historicity of Shame,” trans. Sabu Kohso, in Traces 1: Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation (ed. Naoki Sakai, Yukiko Hanawa, Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2001), 6. 4 Ukai 2001: 19. 5 Ukai 2001: 19.
3 troops before and during World War II.6 In this dissertation, I consider the condemnation of the shameless and the respect for the ashamed to be a necessary resistance against historical revisionism in postwar Japan that any responsible human being should feel obligated to, and I take the abovementioned writers’ stories of the war as an important part of this resistance. From such a positionality, I further point out that in the postwar discourse of the defeat, scant discussion has been devoted to the reticence of the “colonizer” or the “aggressor” who are both anxious and ashamed to tell their experience of the war as part of a national history. Instead, it is only the sense of guilt relieved through their work that has won a wide recognition among critics.
From the former imperial soldiers such as Ōoka and Takeda to the dependent of her Japanese father, who lived in the empire’s overseas territories as an extension of the nation and part of the network of national power, like Hayashi Kyōko, these stories of the war in the gaichi are widely recognized as critical and confessional. But at the same time, any sense of shame buried in the unspoken part of the experience is often missing in those studies.
Without employing a psychoanalytical framework, this dissertation takes the foregoing discussion of shame as an introduction to a more profound scrutiny of Japanese narratives of semi-colonial China, depicted as a socially constructed time-space. That is, I have chosen texts to examine in this project for their distinct structure of storytelling that is inseparable from the writer’s “comfort zone” to recall past events; and further, those “comfort zones” are penetrated by the senses of shame and guilt that confront the writers in different forms. But this project is not a discussion about the internal, psychological formation of the writer’s prewar subjectivity or postwar consciousness provoked by the sense of shame or guilt (or the lack thereof). Rather, I take these texts as precisely a response to the gaze of the social other. Centered on the works of
6 Chunghee Sarah Soh, “From Imperial Gifts to Sex Slaves: Theorizing Symbolic Representations of the ‘Comfort Women,’” in Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2000), 59.
4 three Japanese writers, namely Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927), Hayashi Kyōko (1930- ), and Takeda Taijun (1912-1976), that were published before and after the defeat of Japan, and with references to many other writers such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, and
Takeuchi Yoshimi, all of whom have addressed semi-colonial China based on their traveling and/or living experiences of its time and space, this study strives to look into those narrative accounts for a changing pattern in their structure of storytelling about China in the 1920s-40s. In those writers’ storytelling of the past we see an obvious departure from historical revisionism in postwar Japan,7 as well as from the kinds of political movements that Parks M. Coble observes in
Maoist and post-Maoist China, which have shaped China’s semi-colonial past into either a revolution under “the leadership of Chairman Mao,” or a nationalist remembrance of Chinese victimhood and Japanese atrocities.8 But their “remembering” is far from being ahistorical or apolitical.
Positioning the Current Study
A major differentiation I want to make from the outset is between this dissertation and studies of Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges under semi-colonialism. The cultural exchanges between the Republican Chinese and the Taishō and early Shōwa Japanese intellectuals in semi- colonial China (especially in 1920s and 30s Shanghai) have been a popular topic among scholars of modern Japanese literature and East Asian modernity. A considerable number of Chinese and
7 For a general discussion of public memory and discourse of the war in postwar and contemporary Japan, please see, for instance, Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World” (in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, ed. Sheila Miyoshi Tager, Rana Mitter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 47-77); or Naoki Sakai, Japan/Image/the United States: The Community of Sympathy and Imperial Nationalisms (Nihon/Eizō/Beikoku: kyōkan no kyōdōtai to teikokuteki kokuminshugi, Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007). 8 Parks M. Coble, China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 163. In the book, Coble points out that wartime Chinese reporters notably did not emphasize Japanese military atrocities, and that it was not until mid-1980s in the period of reform that the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) began to reappear as public memory.
5 Japanese studies have been published in recent years on this topic. Examples of this literature include Zhao Mengyun’s A Literary Afterimage of Shanghai: Flashes and Shades of Japanese
Writers (Shanghai bungaku zanzō: nihon-jin sakka no hikari to kage, 2000), a discussion of six writers who had traveled to and written about the semi-colonial Shanghai—Taoka Reiun,
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Muramatsu Shōfū, Yokomitsu Riichi, Hino Ashihei, and Takeda Taijun;
Liu Jianhui’s The Demonic City Shanghai: Japanese Intellectuals’ Experiences of “Modern”
(Mato Shanhai: Nihon chishikijin no “kindai” taiken, 2003), a historical account of the exchanges between the city of Shanghai and Japan over a hundred years; and Wang Xiangyuan’s
A History of Japanese Literature on the Theme of China (Zhongguo ticai riben wenxueshi, 2007), which provides an overview of Japanese literary works that have taken up the theme of “China,” from ancient folktales to contemporary popular novels. Muramatsu Sadataka, Kōno Toshirō, and
Yoshida Hiroo’s The Image of China in Modern Japanese Literature (Kindai nihon bungaku ni okeru chūgokuzō, 1975) is an older study that shares a writing agenda that is similar to Wang’s but is limited to Japanese literature of the modern time. A Hundred Years of Shanghai: The
Topos of Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchanges (Shanhai hyaku-nen: Nitchū bunka koryū no toposu, ed. Suzuki Sadami and Li Zheng, Bensei shuppan, 2013) is a recent one, which, similar to Liu’s project, puts together studies of multi-medial texts that represent the “topos” of the so-called
Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges in Shanghai over the last century. There are also some older
English scholarship available in this field, including Joshua A. Fogel’s “Japanese Literary
Travelers in Prewar China,”9 an introduction to the travel accounts of “prewar China”10 published by Japanese writers from late Meiji to early Shōwa, including Natsume Sōseki,
9 Joshua A. Fogel, “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Dec., 1989), 575-602. 10 Fogel’s discussion can be better situated with the term “semi-colonial China” instead of “prewar China.” As Brett de Bary pointed out to me in our conversation, since war with Japan in China was taking pace as early 1932, and does not overlap with the American dates of the “prewar” (i.e. before 1942), Fogel’s terminology indicates his Euro-centric perspective and is not historically precise.
6 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Satō Haruo, Muramatsu Shōfū, Yosano Akiko, and
Yokomitsu Riichi.
As we can see above, in addition to Takeda Taijun and Hayashi Kyōko who were prolific writers of the postwar period, a common theme of these monographs and articles is the interaction between the Taishō and early Shōwa Japanese intellectuals, including Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Muramatsu Shōfū, Kaneko Mitsuharu, Yokomitsu Riichi, Satō
Haruo, and several young Chinese literary figures, including Tian Han, Guo Moruo, Xie Liuyi, and Ouyang Yüqian, in 1920s-30s China. The discussion of those writers is usually organized from one or both of the following two perspectives: to explore the flow of modernity in cultural and intellectual exchanges between East Asian countries, or to track the changing image of
“China” in Japanese literature by following the representations of the writer’s “shina shumi,” or
“interests in China.” Although colonialism and Japanese imperialism necessarily coexist with the flow of modernity in 1920s and 30s East Asia, they are rarely articulated explicitly in the scholarship of the Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges of the first half of the twentieth century, which are primarily apolitical. Fogel’s article, for instance, considers all Japanese travels over centuries—from voyeurism to scholarly interest to concerns for military planning—as inspired by a curiosity to know how other peoples live.11 For him, the greatest influence of the marvelous body of writings left behind by those Japanese travelers in China is in “shaping Japanese attitudes and images of China.”12
Although greatly indebted to the foregoing scholarship, this dissertation is structured in many ways that are also fundamentally different from them. First, my intention for this project is not to provide as complete a list as possible of those Japanese writers who have traveled to or
11 Fogel 1989: 575. 12 Fogel 1989: 579. Emphasis added.
7 written about China or to give a comprehensive overview of the related works by them. Such a list or overview is commonly found in studies like Liu Jianhui and Wang Xiangyuan’s, which are most interested in outlining a history of Sino-Japanese interactions within the time spans they are dealing with. Such overviews may also be found in journalistic works, such as Baba Kimihiko’s recent books The Image of China for Postwar Japanese: From the Defeat of Japan to Cultural
Revolution (Sengo nihonjin no chūgoku zō: nihon haisen kara bunka taikakumei made, 2010) and The Image of China for Contemporary Japanese (Gendai nihonjin no chūgoku zō, 2014).
Those two works are collections of the numerous newspaper and journal articles and reports that were published in postwar and contemporary Japan on the “China problem” as an epitome of the shifting political and national image of China from the Cold War era to today seen in Japan’s public sphere. Compared to the cultural, literary, or political history compiled macroscopically in those works based on the Sino-Japanese interactions, this dissertation is devoted to textual analysis of a limited number of literary writings while keeping in mind their positions among the large body of texts that could also have been considered on the same subject. Taking works like
Maeda Ai’s Literature in Urban Space (Toshikūkan no naka no bungaku, 1982) and Seiji M.
Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism (2002) as models, I aim to provide a subtle literary analysis that is profoundly rooted in a close reading of texts, organized around a theoretical problematic rather than trying for a comprehensive history. Like urbanism for Maeda and modernism for Lippit, what is at stake in this study is (semi)-colonialism and imperialism.
Because of this writing agenda and unlike many scholars in the field who are committed to the search for stories alone, I also highlight the politics of storytelling in those narratives. Put another way, here lies a second difference between this dissertation and many other studies of narratives of semi-colonial China and beyond: While they tend to read past the narrative form
8 and go after the historical “facts” buried in the content, I take the form as what gives access to the content. Narrative is a manner of speaking about events, as Hayden White points out;13 and to me, the particular “manner” of each narrative—that is, the “content” of the form, to borrow
White’s book title—is as important and indispensible to our analysis as the literal messages delivered in it. For me, literature should not serve merely as a source of information for historiography, although the informativity of literature tempts us to always ask first what the story is. Similarly, the experience of reading literature should not be reduced to a process of the mere reception of and reaction to the alienated lexicological, grammatical, or phonetic signals that are usually considered to have generated the meaning of the narrative. Instead, the text is a constellation of contextualized and ideological signs, embodied not only in its lexicon and grammar, but also in the structure. Consequently, the process of experiencing literature is a dynamic and engaging process of decoding the signs in both the outer and inner spaces of the text. This dissertation is, then, an attempt to decode those signs. It examines the temporality and spatiality, narrative devices, linguistic politics, and so on in the writer’s storytelling, with the intention to provide the historiography of Sino-Japanese interactions with something more than a collection of literal messages excerpted from literary texts.
The third difference is that I take the literary texts discussed in this dissertation as always socially constructed, and as “narrative accounts” that consist of elements of figuration,14 rather than considering them as the unmediated reproduction of the historical “truth” about the writers or about the Chinese and Japanese societies they traveled/lived in and between. In other words, because of the social and ideological nature of those texts on 1920s-40s Japan and China, they will not be looked at as representations of an autonomous consciousness that belongs to an
13 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 2. 14 White 1987: 48.
9 individual’s internal, apolitical world. Instead, the text is considered a continuum of social space, which makes the writer not only the constructing force but also the constructed. Based upon such an understanding, we cannot possibly attempt to find a “faithful” restoration of the past, be it the landscape of China/Japan, or the writer’s own experiences in the 1920s-40s period. In fact,
I hold that no absolute “truth” of history can be found in these texts. Here we are talking about the representation of the past not only in a Benjaminian sense, which believes that the truth of the past has been forever lost and every attempt to bring it back ends up being a translation of it. I am also referring, with concrete examples from the texts, to an emplotment of the past, recounted in the storyteller’s usage of specific narrative and conceptual strategies, or in the body of the traveler as a racialized territory, that saves us from searching in vain for a naked “truth” of the past. As we are self-conscious readers of the literary text, then, we must adjust ourselves to a new way of reading literature; that is, instead of bluntly asking what the story is, we must understand first that it is how the story is told that decides what the story may appear to be. This dissertation looks for precisely such a connection between literature and history that does not treat the former as a source of information (at best), but rather recognizes it as a structure that proves to be meaningful for historiography in a more profound way.
Methodology and Concepts
My major effort in the current study is to provide an example of such a reading of literature. By juxtaposing three Japanese writers of different times and connecting them through their writings on the same object—semi-colonial China in the 1920s to 1940s,15 I demonstrate how storytelling can be allegoric, just as stories usually are. I reach two conclusions at the end
15 Calling semi-colonial China the “same object” for these writers does not mean that I consider semi-colonial China as a homogeneous political entity. However, despite its ambiguous national boundaries and the constant replacement of ruling powers, it is undoubtedly also a geographical concept that presents a continuity that can be grasped through those writers’ works.
10 of the course of examining the storytelling in our texts. First, I contend that there is an obvious shift in the ways that prewar and postwar Japanese writers construct the time and space of semi- colonial China in their works. Here I am referring to those writers who were willing to communicate their experiences of China under Japanese imperialism, so the “shameless” historical revisionists who refuse to confront the past events are out of the question. Our first subject is Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who, like many of the prewar writers who went to China in the
1920s and early 1930s, offers a reportage-like, introductory, and constructive account of the places he has been to in Travels in China (Shina yūki, 1925). In this travelogue, the traveler, who is also the storyteller, discovers unexpectedly that his body has become a racialized territory, in a place where no biological differences—as what has been arbitrarily attached to each “race” by physical anthropology—should have been expected. Following his bodily movements and his shifting sense of subjectivity that moves through different political zones in 1920s China, we see how Akutagawa perceives modern China, with its new racialist hierarchy that did not exist in the premodern days of the “Central Kingdom.” As such Akutagawa’s travelogue holds the power to outline and unpack the fluidity of the traveler’s subjectivity, which is encoded in the places he has been to and responds to the unstable form of “race” that he discovers in each place. In other words, in the inner space of this text, the storyteller is able to depict a fluid and dynamic relationship between the traveler and the time-space that he has once been in.
On the other hand, the two postwar writers Hayashi Kyōko and Takeda Taijun, among many others who had lived in the gaichi territories of the Japanese empire during the war, chose to recount their experiences in the form of an autobiographical novel. Both Hayashi and Takeda published memoir-like narrative accounts of China in the 1970s and 80s after the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries, in which the past events are often obscured by
11 memories, as well as by a kind of self-censorship accompanied by an unspoken sense of shame that is absent in Akutagawa’s travelogue also published a few years after his trip. After an inter- textual reading of several works of Hayashi’s, it has become clear to me that in her most well- known autobiographical novel about China, entitled Michelle Lipstick (Missheru no kuchibeni,
1980), the Shanghai international settlement in the late 1930s and early 1940s is represented by a fragmentized and marginalized time-space called the roji (alley community), a wartime “reality” deliberately constructed by the author based on her moral judgments of the past of the central
Japanese empire. These moral judgments—although not as powerful and systematic as postcolonial theory that emerged later16—cannot be traced anywhere in the story and can only be caught in the reticence of her child narrator.
Similarly, the confessor Jirō in Takeda Taijun’s novel The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947), and the first-person narrator “Mr. Takeda” in his autobiographical novel Shanghai Firefly
(Shanhai no hotaru, 1976) bypass direct confrontation with past events and can relieve their sense of guilt only in a carefully structured way of storytelling. In The Judgment, the past is sealed in the logic of the confession that does not allow the true possibility of external
“judgment,” at least not for human beings. In his works overall, Takeda turns to a conceptualization of historical events, arguing that the destruction (metsubō) of any particular political territory, including the Japanese empire, is a universal phenomenon and a regular movement within the only absolute, spatial continuity called the “world.” Takeda’s theorization of the “world” started with his interpretation of the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian’s work
Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian, 100BC), and was obviously a reflection of the war but proposed at a time before the defeat of Japan could be predicted. So it should be considered as a
16 In a short essay written by Hayashi much later, though, it is very obvious that she has picked up some conceptual tools from postcolonial theory as she criticizes Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s problematic statements about 1920’s China in Travels in China (Hayashi Kyōko, “Shanhai e no tabi de” [In my trip to Shanghai], in Yomiuri Shinbun, August 7, 1997).
12 general philosophy of history, rather than a justification of any specific historical happenings such as Japan’s war crimes. But it is also true that in both Hayashi and Takeda’s writing about semi-colonial China, as compared to Akutagawa’s dynamic travelogue, we find surprisingly little information about China per se, but are at the same time filled with an excessive consciousness of the past that takes the place of facts.
My observation of this changing pattern of storytelling in prewar and postwar Japanese writers’ narrative accounts about 1920s-40s China, however, challenges the conclusion that most critics of these texts have drawn based on their more literal reading of the emplotments.
Akutagawa’s Travels in China has been considered an ignominious work that many Akutagawa scholars avoid mentioning because of the possibility of destroying his image as the most established Taishō writer based on his outstanding short novels. The numerous discriminatory statements addressed to the “Shina people” in the first half of Travels in China, considered by postcolonial scholars to be the evidence of Akutagawa’s self-consciousness as a “colonizer” and his lack of reflection on it, have always been the targets of harsh criticism. In other words,
Travels in China reads to many critics as an insult, which for them reveals the “shamelessness” of Akutagawa as a national of the aggressor country in the 1920s. In contrast, Hayashi and
Takeda belong to a group of postwar writers who are considered to be reflective and critical of
Japan’s imperial past in their works. Among them, Hayashi’s consistent criticism of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 over the decades in her life as a hibakusha (atomic- bomb survivor) has established her as one of the most respected writers and critics of war and nuclear power. Takeda remained an enthusiastic and productive scholar and writer of China throughout his career, which literally ended when he passed away unexpectedly in 1976, leaving
13 Shanghai Firefly unfinished. Those images of Hayashi and Takeda have almost become the stereotype affixed to all literary critiques of their works.
Having no intention to reject these arguments on Akutagawa’s Travels in China or on
Hayashi and Takeda’s general contribution to the postwar discourse of the defeat of Japan that are shared by many scholars in the field, I consider the kind of study that strives to interpret or justify an “attitude” or “intention” of the writer based on statements made in their texts as belonging to a moment in literature and postcolonial criticism that has already passed. As previously elaborated, for me, the text is not a constellation of information about the writer’s closed internal world or a finished image of the landscape of the external world, as two separate things. It is instead a structure where the writer, the narrator, and the surrounding social spaces are connected through relations, as a continuum; and the emplotment of historical events in the text is both a manifestation and an outcome of such relations. For instance, Akutagawa’s discriminatory statements toward the “Shina people” sharply contrast with his appearance in
Chinese-style clothes on his return trip, which cannot be reconciled with any simple assertion on his general “attitude.” This subtle change becomes meaningful only when situated in the particular social spaces that the traveler is experiencing and when told in a manner that uncovers such a relation between them. Similarly, behind Hayashi and Takeda’s emplotments of China and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, we find a kind of reticence in their storytelling, which could not have been caught and understood without reading the text from the perspective of such relations. Hence, here arrives our second conclusion: The allegorical meaning of storytelling lies in the space it opens up for literary critics and literary historians to access those relations, which, in my opinion, are the reality of history that we have been trying to find in literature.
14 “Time-space” is one of the terms that will frequently appear in this dissertation. I use it as a synonym of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope but restrain myself from borrowing
Bakhtin’s terminology directly, merely to avoid the risk of limiting my discussion to Bakhtin’s analysis of the novel. In fact, “time-space” is what “chronotope” literally means. Bakhtin defines “chronotope” as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,”17 and stresses that this term expresses the inseparability of space and time (i.e. time as the fourth dimension of space). In his discussion of the Greek epical romance, the folkloric novel, the chivalric romance, the idyllic chronotope, the Rabelaisian satirical novel, etc., Bakhtin employs this concept as a formally constitutive category of literature, to describe how spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. He states, “It is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time.”18 The “genre” of Bakhtin’s essay mainly points to sub-genres of the novel, but his analysis of these sub-genres seems to hold that in literature generally, space becomes more concrete, alive, and meaningful because of its relationship with time, and time becomes palpable and visible when it saturates a space.
Bakhtin explains how the chronotope in the novel gains its representational importance, by pointing out that “the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel.”19 To my understanding, his idea of the chronotope imagines the novel as consisting of all the abstract elements oriented according to an axis constituted by time and space. By finding the precise location of those otherwise fuzzy atoms on this time-space axis, we identify them as
17 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 18 Bakhtin 1981: 85. 19 Bakhtin 1981: 250.
15 the no-longer-abstract “flesh and blood” that constructs the work and concretizes the structure of the novel. These “abstract elements” would include, in Bakhtin’s words, “philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analysis of cause and effect”20; but we might say that all the narrative accounts can be made concrete by invoking the image of the chronotopic axis.
I take Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, or “time-space,” not just as something that applies only to the novel but as it reveals the most crucial mechanism of the text in various literary genres. The time-space axis is always a good reference point, a foundation for analyzing the otherwise very abstract and chaotic “inner space” of the text. For instance, in Travels in
China, it is precisely the “inseparability of space and time” that concretizes and enriches our discussion on the abstract questions of fluid “subjectivity” and “racism,” and that provides us an effective tool to keep track and make sense of the traveler’s bodily movements. On the other hand, these bodily movements help in manifesting and representing the time-space relation in the chronotope. Or, to put it more visually, as Bakhtin also mentions in his discussion of the chronotope of the ancient novel, which resonates with Henri Lefebvre as elaborated in Chapter
One, the movement of the body through space is “precisely what provides the basic indices for measuring space and time… which is to say, for its chronotope.”21
This time-space inseparability is not, of course, something exclusive about literary texts.
The actual world serves as the source of representation for the chronotopes of the world represented in the text, and at the same time is the location interwoven with different time-spaces that the reader is living in. This creates an interesting “triangle” among the real world, the text, and the reader. On the one hand, as Bakhtin has neatly summarized, the text and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the text and its world
20 Bakhtin 1981: 250. 21 Bakhtin 1981: 105. Emphasis added.
16 as “part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing” of the text through the creative perception of listeners and readers.22 Bakhtin also observes that readers of the text may be located in differing time and spaces in the real world, so that when they read the text, they create and enter the same chronotopes of the text. All these chronotopes may be interwoven with, replace, or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships; but they do co-exist, and are
“dialogical.” My discussion is based on such an understanding of the various times and spaces in the historical context of the text as well as the writer’s employment of temporal and spatial relations in the inner space of the text.
Another clarification that needs to be made here very briefly is the meaning of
“reportage.” When I previously describe the prewar narrative accounts of 1920s and 30s China as “reportage-like,” I do not take reportage as purely “objective” records of facts. Instead, following Charles A. Laughlin’s argument in Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical
Experience, which also relies on Bakhtin and Lefebvre’s concepts of chronotope and social space,
I look at reportage as a “literary construction of social space.”23 This is the way all the texts in this dissertation are handled, including the travelogue and the novel. Therefore, the difference I draw between the “reportage-like” and the “memoir-like” belongs to another realm; that is, it is not a question of being “objective” or “subjective,” like Fogel indicates in his vision of the
“objective, non-personalized reportage.”24 For me, the difference instead lies in the “manner of speaking about events.” The “reportage-like” and the “memoir-like” differ mostly in the way time and space are engaged in the storytelling.
22 Bakhtin 1981: 254. 23 Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Duke University Press, 2002), 29. 24 Fogel 1989: 581.
17 A Reading Guide to the Chapters
Chapter One is a careful examination of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s narrative of prewar
China, centered on his travels in China in 1921, the writer’s first and last experience of the abroad in his entire life. The chapter opens with a discussion of travel under colonialism in East
Asia. Although travel is generally considered to be a phenomenon that has existed since pre- modern time, scholars of travel writings such as Paul Fussell strive to differentiate the “moving from one place to another” in ancient times from the self-justifying traveling of modern men and women, and claim that prior to 1750, “travel” did not exist.25 Resonating with Fussell, Ilan
Stavans and Joshua Ellison assert that travel has connoted “exile, spiritual or prophetic searching, exploration, conquest, commerce” in the past, whereas most travel today is “a form of personal enrichment.”26 In this chapter, however, I highlight the backdrop of imperialism, colonialism, and the Sino-Japanese war in the kind of travel we are discussing, and differentiate between it and vagrancy in modern men and women’s travels for leisure and self-enrichment.
For us, travel is a crucial experience that generates rich representations and symbols for the discourses of modernity and culture. Citing Nakagawa Shigemi and Kenneth J. Ruoff’s different perceptions of travel and modern nation states in literature, I argue that the fixity of the national boundary should not be taken for granted as it has been in studies of modern travel literature so far. Rather, national identity is constructed rather than natural; and travel offers an important site for us to observe the fluidity and ambiguity of such an identity.
An itinerary of Akutagawa’s 1921 trip follows the introductory discussion in Chapter
One. Since I do not take Akutagawa’s destination of what was called “China” as a homogeneous social space, the itinerary is marked by four different zones, each corresponding to an individual
25 Ilan Stavans, Joshua Ellison, Reclaiming Travel (Duke University Press, 2015), 28. 26 Stavans and Ellison 2015: 4.
18 section of Travels in China and engaged in different power struggles. In the first zone Shanghai,
I catch the signs of the narrator’s unexpected discovery of a new racialized identity, represented in linguistic and sexual differences between the “White” and the “Yellow,” with him—the
“honorary White”—in between. This racialized identity manifests the “twisted feelings” of the overseas Japanese residents, also seen in the narrator’s encounters with the White Russians, the
Chinese intellectual Zhang Binglin, and the Indian police.
In Travels in China, however, the “twisted feelings” of Japanese as citizens of a “colored empire (yushoku no teikoku)” described by the narrator only rise to the surface when the narrator is confronted with the “international crowd” (sekaitekina gunshū) in Shanghai and must negotiate multiple power structures in his everyday struggle to deal with differences of language, sexuality, and so on. When the narrator moves on to the second zone, the Southern Yangtze
River area (jiangnan) that is most frequently cited in classical Chinese poetry, the “twisted feelings” about racial identity experienced in Shanghai gradually turn into a sturdy Japanese conservatism. Absent the officially empowered British, the narrator becomes more attentive to the anti-Japanese sentiments of local Chinese people, which barely registered in his account of
Shanghai. As for the “whites” with whom he strove so anxiously to identify while in Shanghai, in Jiangnan the narrator becomes disillusioned and discovers a racial hierarchy even among them, after watching a drunken American urinate in public and curse with the British slang word,
“bloody.” In these passages, the narrator’s rediscovery of the so-called “spirit of exclusionism” in Japanese tradition indicates a new definition of his own identity as part of the new power relations that prevail in this different time-space.
The narrator’s identity continues to change as Travels in China shifts its focus from the international port city of Shanghai to the Jiangnan area, and then to the hinterlands. With this
19 shift of focus, the narrator feels surprisingly comfortable in the hinterland assuming the identity of a “yellow face,” an identity shared with the Chinese. I provide ample examples from Travels in China to show how the description of the historical experience of travel becomes a process of constructing a new kind of subjectivity. By the same token, I argue that the transformation of the social space in literary construction is also a dynamic process that is not just perceived by the subjectivity of writing, but is also produced or defined by it. Chapter One concludes that in
Travels in China, a sophisticated account of Japanese (and European) imperialism, Akutagawa’s literary construction of the social spaces of China and Japan in 1921 generates the perception and conception of a certain type of landscape with the medium of language, which is no less spatial and historical than any actual and physical spaces. Using race as a “method,” this chapter introduces an issue that, unlike Natsume Sōseki’s experience in London and Mori Ōgai’s in
Berlin, has never been related to Akutagawa, who only traveled in Asia. In fact, Japanese writers’ travels in China have been taken as free of racism by critics such as Fogel.27 This analysis also reveals how nakedly the complexity of race in 1920’s China and the traveler’s engagement with it—also represented by those problematic statements of his in the first half of Travels in China— are shown in the narrative accounts of Akutagawa and other travelers in China at the time, such as Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai (Shanhai, 1928-1931).
Following the works previously examined, in Chapters Two and Three, I move on to postwar narratives of Japan’s imperial past in its gaichi colonies. These narratives remain focused on semi-colonial China, but the international mass of people has somehow vanished at least from the “front stage.” Instead, those stories reveal direct opposition between Japan and
China, as well as the writer’s struggle with the question of Japan’s war responsibility. Chapter
Two focuses on the politics of storytelling in Hayashi Kyōko’s autobiographical novel Michelle
27 Fogel 1989: 600.
20 Lipstick (1980), read together with several other works of hers based on her travel and diasporic experiences, such as “Echoes” (“Hibiki,” 1977) and Shanghai (Shanhai, 1983). Following a brief introduction to Hayashi’s personal experience of the war when she was a child, as well as her career as a writer that started in her forties, is an articulation of my awareness of both the autobiographical and figurative parts of her works. In particular, I look at Hayashi’s stories of
Shanghai in Michelle Lipstick as something based on her personal experience but never a faithful projection. And unlike many other Hayashi scholars who take the emplotment in Michelle
Lipstick as a reproduction of Hayashi’s childhood lived in the Shanghai international settlement,
I focus on how in the 1970s the writer gave the “amorphous time” when she lived in semi- colonial China a form and what she wanted her readers to experience in such a construct and perception of the “past.”
I consider the roji in the international settlement depicted in Michelle Lipstick to be the spatial “origin” of the story as well as the storytelling. Stressing the spatial and territorial significance of this peripheral part of the Japanese empire, I argue that it is a deliberately constructed wartime “reality” rather than a natural existence and demonstrate how its time-space is configured through the double-layered structure of the reticent child narrator’s consciousness.
It is through the gaze of the child (i.e. the Other, or the periphery of the society) that Hayashi recounts the past of the roji in Michelle Lipstick. After a comparative reading with her other works also on this symbolic space, it becomes clear to us how, in this particular story, the narrative strategy of inserting a child narrator, who is put under a layer of “insulation” and is aloof from the war, helps make it a narrative that reflects Hayashi’s moral judgments of the past events and also fits the particular time when it was published.
21 Finally, relating Michelle Lipstick to Hayashi’s storytelling about the atomic bombing
(genbaku) and her travelogue entitled Shanghai, I conclude that it is precisely in her effort to construct the everyday of the peripheral (i.e. the roji) as a transnational possibility in this autobiographical novel that we find a lack of real relations between the peripheral and the central
(i.e. Japan), which might be described as similar to a state of “segregation.” Put more explicitly, because of Hayashi’s consciousness of Japan as the war criminal—also a response to the social spaces she lived in—her storytelling of Shanghai, as opposed to her genbaku stories, only recounts the past in a fragmentized space such as the roji, which obviously lacks a social relationship between the narrator and what was generally considered to be the reality of China in the 1930s and 1940s.
The same kind of question is raised in Chapter Three about Takeda Taijun’s works.
Unlike Hayashi who deliberately constructs the past as a response to the present’s search for stories, Takeda conceptualizes his wartime experiences in his prewar and (mainly) postwar works, using the trope of “destruction” (metsubō). As a former soldier who served in the
Japanese imperial army and fought in 1938 and 1939 China, and as a chief manager of the
China-Japan Cultural Association who stayed in Shanghai from 1944 till several months after the defeat, Takeda’s narrative accounts of China are also highly autobiographical, but most of them still take the form of the novel. Organized around discussions of three major works on China by
Takeda, entitled Sima Qian (Shiba Sen, 1943), The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947), and Shanghai
Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976), while referring to several of his essays written between those years as secondary materials, Chapter Three elucidates a more complicated theory of Takeda’s storytelling of wartime China. On the one hand, while theorizing about his construction of the
“world” as a transnational, continuous, total space, I am fascinated by the structural
22 meaningfulness that Takeda’s notions of destruction, continuity, life, and death have to the historiography of imperialism and colonialism. But on the other hand, after exploring the positionality of the all-knowing historian in Shiba sen and the impossibility of making a real
“judgment” of Jirō’s confession in The Judgment, this chapter also uncovers the narrator’s restraint buried in the structure of Takeda’s storytelling of the semi-colonial China of the 1930s and 1940s.
23 Chapter 1
Travel and the Construction of Race in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels in
China (Shina Yūki)
Although travel is by no means a unique phenomenon that appears only in modern times, for the discourses of modernity and culture, among many others, it is a crucial experience that generates rich representations and symbols for our study. The scholar of modern Japanese literature and Japanese modernity Nakagawa Shigemi writes, “‘Travel,’ or ‘trip,’ used to indicate an experience of ‘discovering,’ ‘awakening,’ or ‘exchanging.’ But in modern times, the emergence, development and expansion of the concept of ‘tourism’ have redefined travel as a process in which every event, space, and time becomes a ‘symbol of consumerism.’”28 Without differentiating the traveler from the tourist, Nakagawa goes further to add that “tourism,” which has become a pervasive topic in various discourses of the modern, would have been “impossible without a self-evident ‘nation state’ that one identifies with, or a ‘place’ that one believes one belongs to and will constantly go back to.” Nakagawa contends that “whatever the tourist discovers in the narrow space between ‘places’ only exists under one condition, that is, the ceaseless comparison between the culture of the destination and the ‘national culture’ the tourist believes he or she possesses.”29 In other words, in the contexts of Western modernization and capitalism, travel has often been discussed from the perspective of the seemingly fixed boundaries of the modern nation state.
28 Nakagawa Shigemi, Modanitei no sōzōryoku: bungaku to shikakusei [The Imagination of Modernity: Literature and Visuality] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2009), 34-35. 29 Nakagawa 2009: 35.
24 The idea that travel reinforces the boundary of the nation state, however, could be problematic under colonialism, when many travel destinations had not yet become “nation states,” as in the case of semi-colonial China. Akutagawa did not need a visa to go to China in 1921, for instance. When Takeuchi Yoshimi went to China for the first time in 1932, still, “no passport was necessary; one simply paid for one’s passage, embarked, and then arrived in either Shanghai or Tianjin.”30 As will be discussed in Chapter Two, until the 1940s, Shanghai remained an
“open city” to immigrants all over the world. On the other hand, it is not always the case that the colonized would already have a “national culture” ready for comparison. Even for those traveling between political nation states, signifiers such as “place” and “identity,” or “nation state” and “national culture” are not necessarily self-evident to the traveler from the outset. They are signs whose signifiers constantly change over the trip. Although travel always involves border crossing, we should not oversimplify the process by schematizing it as a binary exchange or comparison between the two poles of the so-called “Self” and “Other.” For if we do so, we will be ignoring the fact that the traveler’s subjectivity is ceaselessly deconstructed and reconstructed as a reaction to what s/he has encountered while moving towards or within the destination. In other words, it does not make much sense to presume a fixed agent called “Self” before it encounters the forces that are going to contribute in the formation of its subjectivity.
In a recent work, the historian Kenneth Ruoff has explored the close relation between tourism and the construction—not simply the reinforcement—of the boundary of empire, taking as the context of his study imperial Japan and its colonies in the 1940s. Ruoff observes from many historical records that “travel to the colonies was marketed as a means for patriotic
30 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Asia as Method,” in What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (trans. Richard F. Calichman, Columbia University Press, 2005), 150.
25 Japanese to understand better the importance of the colonial project.”31 According to him, “even after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), travel was officially endorsed as contributing to the national mission in spite of general campaigns to encourage frugality.”32 Ruoff then argues that the reason the Japanese government promoted tourism to its colonies was to make them a lasting destination for leisure travel—they were like theme parks, as he sharply points out—to highlight cultural differences and to confirm and ensure that they would continue to play that role for imperial Japan. In other words, tourism to the colonies was not to assimilate the colonial subjects, but to underscore the differences and maintain the unique national identity of Japan. A similar conclusion can be drawn from David
Leheny’s study on the Japanese government’s prewar policy of leisure and tourism, which shows that tourism, as a modern concept borrowed from America and Europe and a form of leisure, was an instrument in prewar Japan used by the government to delineate an idealized Japanese national culture by defining “the meaning of the activities of the Japanese.”33
Echoing what Ruoff and Leheny have written about travel and the making of the imperial/colonial/national identity, my analysis will not strive to distinguish between “travel” and modern “tourism” in the manner of some recent studies of modern travel writing such as Ilan
Stavans and Joshua Ellison’s Reclaiming Travel.34 Instead, I will emphasize a far more fundamental distinction between the traditional “storyteller” and the modern travel-writer. Like
31 Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: the Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 8. 32 Ruoff 2010: 9. 33 David Leheny, “‘By Other Means’: Tourism and Leisure as Politics in Pre-war Japan,” in Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Oct., 2000), 173. 34 In Reclaiming Travel, Stavans and Ellison discuss what G. K. Chesterton writes in The Temple of Silence and Other Stories (1929), “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see” (Ilan Stavans, Joshua Ellison, Reclaiming Travel, Duke University Press, 2015, 139). Moving from the metropole to the empire’s overseas territories for the purpose of evaluating the colonial project, Akutagawa might be the “tourist” in the sense that he has come with an agenda, which makes his travels more politically and ideologically schematized and less “free.” But at the same time, the historicity of modern travels would prevent anybody from seeing exactly “what he has come to see.” The traveler not only sees what he sees, but also is made by what he is seeing. In this study, like reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, etc., in Michel de Certeau’s vision, traveling, too, is a practice that has the power of production.
26 Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) in Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” my protagonists are simultaneously modern travelers whose experiences of foreign lands make them the storyteller who “has come from afar.”35 Having traveled through Russia, Leskov was “at home in distant places as well as distant times,”36 a typical status of the traveler that echoes what Robert Louis
Stevenson describes in The Silverado Squatters (1883): “There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only who is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.”37 In Benjamin’s articulation of Leskov’s storytelling and the commercial travels in his early career, the traveler and the storyteller become each other’s doppelgaenger. This is oftentimes the case in literature. The traveler is led to his vagrancy by the impulse for the prospect and potential of the unfamiliar, and his familiarity with the unfamiliar is what marks the value of his storytelling. That is, Benjamin’s storyteller always kept a distance from his story, a state of “mental relaxation;” and the way the story-teller’s body is presented in his story is never a question in “The Storyteller.” However, in my discussion of Akutagawa’s travelogue Travels in China (Shina yūki, 1925)38—a text in which he communicates his experience of China in the early 1920’s—I will regard the self as a social construction that configures and is at the same time configured by the surrounding spaces. In this sense, the representation of the traveler’s own body in the storytelling becomes an issue that can never be bypassed.
35 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 84. 36 Benjamin 1969: 85. 37 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883), 96. 38 Travels in China (Shina yūki) consists of five parts. “Shanhai yūki” [Shanghai Travelogue] (21 episodes) was serialized between August 1921 and September 1921 in Osaka mainichi shimbun. “Kōnan yūki” [Southern Yangtze River Travelogue] (29 episodes) was serialized in the same journal between January 1922 and February 1922. The rest only came out two years later due to Akutagawa’s illness, with “Chōkō yūki” [Yangtze River Travelogue] in September 1924 in the journal Josei and “Pekin nikki shō” [Beijing Journal] in June 1925 in Kaizō. A fifth part “Zatsushin hitotaba” [A Pile of Random Letters] was added to the above when they were put together by the Kaizōsha Press and published on November 3, 1925, under the title “Shina yūki.” This paper will cite the 1925 version (the first version) of Travels in China instead of the serialized essays in the journals. The “Shanghai Travelogue” and “Beijing Journal” in Travels in China were translated by Joshua A. Fogel and Kiyoko Morita under the title “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Travels in China” and published in Chinese Studies in History, Vol. 30, No. 4, Summer 1997, 10-55. The passages of Travels in China cited in this chapter are however my translation unless otherwise indicated.
27 Maeda Ai has offered an instructive analysis of the significance of the representation of the body and space in the literary text. The “inner space” (uchi kūkan) of a literary text, as elaborated in Maeda Ai’s The Utopia of the Text (Tekusuto no yūtopia, 1990), constitutes a framework (wakugumi) in which the central meaning of the work surfaces and the horizon of the character’s life is disclosed and defined.39 Invoking Edmund Husserl and Roman Ingarden, who consider the human body as bearing the “zero-point” of orientation (kūkan no reiten) for the pure ego in its world, Maeda elucidates how the reader of a literary text usually enters this inner space of the text: when the reader opens the text, his or her body, which used to be the “zero-point” of orientation in the real world, disappears, and its orientation starts to change constantly according to the “zero-point” of orientation in the textual space, that is, the orientation of a singular protagonist, or sometimes even of multiple characters. Guided by the new “zero-point,” which is itself also constantly changing, the reader, too, for the first time is able to “inhabit” (ikihajimeru) this inner space of the text. “Inhabit” is an expression used by Ingarden, but Michel de Certeau makes a similar point using a memorable image: “This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment.”40 In the relationship between the reader and the literary text that Maeda thus depicts, a “space” emerges in the midst of the reader’s effort to relate to some non-existing (hizai no) object in “the other side” (mukō) of the text. Maeda refers to this space as “the imagination- oriented space” (sōzōryoku ni yotte shikōsareta kūkan, or Vorstellungsmeinen as Maeda glosses it), as opposed to the other kind of space called “the space as representation” (hyōshō toshite no kūkan, or Vorstellungsraum), which consists of something like the primary data of a visual image that lack vividness in color, shape, or depth.41
39 Maeda Ai, Tekusuto no yūtopia [The Utopia of the Text] (Chikuma shobō, 1990), 8. 40 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1984), xxi. Emphasis added. 41 Maeda 1990: 13.
28 Following Maeda, I would like to consider how, when Akutagawa opens up the “space” of various cities in Travels in China to the reader, the space is hardly purely “imagination- oriented” in the same way that the space of his fictional works was. In Travels in China,
Akutagawa’s only piece of travel writing, we must deal with the narrator as simultaneously the traveler in the text and the storyteller outside the text. The traveler-narrator, as opposed to the narrator of fiction, constantly leaves traces of his or her bodily motion by which the inner space of the text is “measured” (in Henri Lefebvre’s term) and memories of visual and eidetic imagery are aroused. The traveler’s body is at the same time the “zero-point” of orientation inside and outside the story, where different spaces emerge between the traveler and the reader. As such, in terms of the intervention of the storyteller’s body in the story, the travelogue usually provokes, according to some critics, a more engaging and complex mode of perception than the fiction.
These questions, however, have been ignored in most of the scholarship on Travels in
China so far, which treat this travelogue in terms of a more conventional literary approach. By this I mean that in much of the existing commentary on Travels in China, Akutagawa is above all approached as the historical author, rather than as part of the continuum of social space constructed in the text. In these approaches, Akutagawa exists outside the text, considered as the constructing force rather than a construct. The text becomes, for the scholars, a source of meaningful refractions of the author’s intentions, in a way that would prove the validity of one interpretation or another. As such, these commentaries either tend to focus on the text’s expression of anti-Chinese views in order to criticize Akutagawa’s sense of superiority towards the Chinese people, or execute a very defensive reading in the hope of protecting Akutagawa’s reputation as a great writer. Consequently, the conclusions that such readings lead to can only be
29 something like a discussion of “the image of China in Akutagawa’s literature,” or “Akutagawa’s interests in China” (shina shumi).
For instance, Kōno Toshirō, in the 1970’s, wrote, in his comments on Travels in China, that the work was “a writing that expresses [Akutagawa’s] strong interests in China’s scenery, atmosphere and heritage sites, rather than enthusiasm, concerns, or strong curiosity about an unstable China or a distressed China, i.e., the China in reality.”42 Throughout his comments,
Kōno devotes most of his attention to the “scenery, atmosphere and heritage sites” described in
Travels in China, and takes the position that this travelogue offers nothing more than an avenue for readers to grasp the image of China in the 1920s. However, Kōno does not take into account that, as Karatani Kōjin has insightfully pointed out in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, since “landscape is an epistemological constellation,”43 the “scenery” of China does not exist outside of the traveler from the start, so that the way the traveler’s subjectivity itself emerges in the process of the depiction of “scenery” should not be neglected when readers seek to “grasp the image of China” created in this text.
Many discussions of Travels in China produced more recently by Chinese scholars have taken a different approach. These scholars claim Akutagawa did pay attention to the “reality” of
China in that period. But, interestingly enough, their criticism places the same emphasis on the
“scenery” of China described in the text. For example, Chen Meijun reminds us, “What
Akutagawa saw in China were merely the ‘drunk Yankees’ who had ruined the atmosphere, and the Western-style buildings built of ‘terribly vulgar bricks of red and grey colors’ that have ruined the scenery and sights in the Kōnan area.” Chen then concludes, “There is something in what Akutagawa said about chasing the ‘West’ out of China that resembles the expansionism of
42 Muramatsu Sadataka, Kōno Toshirō, and Yoshida Hiroo ed., Kindai nihon bungaku ni okeru chūgokuzō [The Image of China in Modern Japanese Literature] (Tokyo: Yuhikaku Press, 1975), 92. 43 Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. by Brett de Bary (Duke University Press, 1993), 22.
30 imperial Japan, which sees China not as the ‘Other’ but as part of the Self.”44 That is, Chen reads in this text a tendency in Akutagawa to see China as a potential colony of the Japanese empire (thus “part of the Self”). Critic Qin Gang’s work makes a contrasting point, although in a similar vein, when he holds that the China appearing in this text is considered precisely as an
“other.” Qin writes, “Travels in China can be read as a text that depicts Japan as it is reflected in the image of the Other named China.” For Qin, Akutagawa’s China is an “other as mirror,” more important for what it reveals about Japan than about China at the time. He sees
Akutagawa in this text as “not being unconsciously content with his own positionality, but confronting the self image reflected in the mirror of the Other, and attempting to bring that to the readers.”45
On the other hand, there are scholars who do not regard Akutagawa’s negative images of
China as expressing a kind of “expansionism of imperial Japan” (although they do want to see
Akutagwa as drawing a line between the “Self,” i.e., Japan, and the “Other,” i.e., China, just as
Qin has done). Zhu Zhenyuan, for instance, conveys (without making sufficient effort to analyze the historical context, unfortunately) her harsh critique of Akutagawa’s “narrow sense of national supremacy and discrimination toward China” by focusing on Akutagawa’s “ironic depictions and laughter at China’s ‘ugliness,’ that is, its poverty and backwardness,” but she does not take this as a manifestation of “expansionism.” She argues instead that “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke had just come out of the closed, secure life style that he had been used to in Tokyo and Osaka, which should be considered ‘rural’ compared to Shanghai at that time. When he arrived in the land of the big city Shanghai, just with the ‘first glance,’ he was astonished by many aspects of the local
44 Chen Meijun, “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke ni yoru ‘Shina’ no hyōshō: kikōbun o chūshin ni” [Representations of “Shina” in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: on the Travelogues], in Hiroshima daigaku daigakuin kyōikugaku kenkyūka kiyō, dainibu, No. 52 (2003), 219. 45 Qin Gang, “Shina yūki: nihon e no manazashi” [Travels in China: the Gaze towards Japan], in Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō, Vol. 72, No. 9 (2007), 180-181.
31 society played out in the everyday life full of excitement and by all kinds of people. This can be seen mainly in his deep fear of unknown things and his overreaction to squalor.”46
The above critique of Travels in China made by Chen, Qin, and Zhu can be considered as representing some typical trends in research on this piece by Chinese scholars. Turning to the research done on Travels in China in Japan, we find works of scholars like Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, a leading Japanese specialist on Akutagawa. Sekiguchi’s 1997 study emphasizes Akutagawa’s enthusiasm for Chinese classics, defending precisely what Zhu called his “ironic depictions and laughter at China’s ‘ugliness,’ i.e., its poverty and backwardness.” Sekiguchi describes the latter as Akutagawa’s frank advice for China, “advice” that emerged “precisely because of
Akutagawa’s concerns for this country and his attention to the masses.”47 At the same time, there are many other scholars who talk on the macro level about the significance of Travels in
China in Akutagawa’s literature, or the effect that the trip to China had in Akutagawa’s life as a writer, but leave no space for close examinations of the text. For instance, Uno Kōji writes, “The trip to China not only did physical damage to Akutagawa, but also gave birth to a book that hinders his aesthetic path. In other words, this is a trip that drew Akutagawa into a direction that was not typical for him, and that was not a correct path for him, which automatically led to his collapse as a writer.”48 We also find comments on what are called Akutagawa’s “interests in
China” (shina shumi) made by Japanese scholars such as Kawamoto Saburō and Inoue Yōko.
Kawamoto decides that, compared to the exotic flavor created in Akutagawa’s earlier fictional works on China, Travels in China is a “thin, boring travelogue.”49 Provoked by that statement,
46 Zhu Zhenyuan, “Shina yūki,” in Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō, Vol. 64, No. 11 (1999), 116-119. 47 Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, Tokuhain Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Chūgoku de nani wo mita no ka [The Special Correspondent Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: What Did He See in China] (Tokyo: Mainichi shimbun Press, 1997), 136. 48 Aoyagi Tatsuo, “Ri Jinketsu ni tsuite: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke ‘Shina yūki’ chū no jinbutsu” [About Li Renjie: the Characters in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels in China], in Kokubungaku gengo to bungei, No. 103 (1988), 61. 49 Kawamoto Saburō, “Shinafuku o kita shōjo” [The Girl in Chinese Dress], in Taishō gen’ei [Illusions of Taishō] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1990), 142. Emphasis in the original.
32 Inoue attempted a classification of the expressions of shina shumi found in Akutagawa’s works from 1919 to 1921 and studied how they changed in Travels in China.50
This kind of focus on Akutagawa’s shina shumi is actually common to both Japanese and
Chinese scholars. Although their writings may reach different conclusions, none of them are able to break out of the mode of the conventional “sakkaron,” which regards the literary text primarily as something that reflects and yields information about the historical author. That is, in the end this type of criticism routinely seeks to do nothing more than establish the “facts” of
Akutagawa’s personal preference for, or hatred of, China. This tendency to “restore the writer” through the text, as referenced by Komori Yōichi with the term sakka kangen shugi,51 ignores the fact that the writer whom readers consciously construct based on the text is nothing but an imaginary idea of the writer, and thus is never the same as the real writer himself. Researchers on modern literature who fail to overcome this false consciousness tend to unconditionally connect the biographical study of the writer and the imaginary image of the writer that rises from the text. From the above overview of the existing writings on Travels in China, we see in treatments of this text exactly the problem of which Komori warns.
Among the very few studies on Travels in China written in English, we can also observe a pattern. Critics tend to read this piece while having a fixed image in their minds of “the great writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke” and look at Akutagawa’s trip to China more like a “literary event,”52 as Joshua A. Fogel, for example, seems to do. These readings tend to defend
Akutagawa or to avoid whatever would hurt his image. For instance, although Fogel makes sure to introduce Travels in China to English readers in his paper “Japanese Literary Travelers in
50 Inoue Yōko, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke no chūgoku ryokō to ‘shina shumi’ no henyō: (sono ichi) chūgoku tōchaku made” [Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Trip to China and the Transformation of His Shina shumi: Part I, Up to His Arrival in China], in Fukuoka kokusai daigaku kiyō, No. 3 (2000), 85-92. 51 Komori Yōichi, Katari tosite no kōzō [Narrative As Structure] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha Press, 1988), 15. 52 Joshua A. Fogel, “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Dec., 1989), 585.
33 Prewar China,” he largely devotes his analysis to the three Chinese intellectuals that Akutagawa met in China, as well as their conversations. As for the other parts of Travels in China, including the parts in which Akutagawa makes problematic and discriminatory statements about China,
Fogel chose not to discuss them, assuming (although with a sarcastic tone) that Akutagawa must have chosen his subjects or the material to include in his account based on requests from the press and the public.53 In addition to Fogel’s work, Travels in China is mentioned in Howard S.
Hibbet’s “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and the Negative Ideal,” in which Hibbet adopts a perspective like that of Uno Kōji in claiming that the trip to China caused the collapse of Akutagawa as a writer.54
Different from, although greatly indebted to, the abovementioned scholarship, my efforts in reading Travels in China in this chapter will be to study “space as representation” in
Akutagawa’s depictions of early 1920’s China. In other words, the purpose of this discussion is not to find a space called the “real China” in 1921, or to restore its landscape in any sense.
Neither do I intend to add my analysis to any theory of the sakkaron of Akutagawa as a writer.
As a reader of a travelogue, I would differentiate myself, while learning from, Maeda Ai’s reader of the literary text by keeping track of the traces left by Akutagawa’s bodily movements in the text. By “bodily movements” I am referring mainly to Akutagawa’s language, gaze, and sexual anxiety and its release as we see their traces mediated through the text. Most importantly, I consider this travelogue as what Lefebvre scholar Charles Laughlin has called “social space,” or
“the literary construction of social space,” which depicts in literature the social process by which the spatial environments of human activity are produced.55 In my analysis, I will take, as the
53 Fogel 1989: 587. 54 Howard S. Hibbet, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and the Negative Ideal,” in Personality in Japanese History (Albert M. Craig and Donald H. Shively ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). 55 Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: the Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 29.
34 vehicle for perceiving such a social process, precisely Akutagawa’s bodily movements as they are linked in the text to the physical topography of social spaces surrounding him. I will also trace and emphasize the narrator’s shifting sense of identification with, and/or opposition to, these constructed spaces.
My reading of Travels in China will therefore not be an inquiry into Akutagawa’s views on China as such. Rather, I hope to scrutinize the text’s literary construction of the narrator’s identity as part of China’s social spaces, while examining the dynamic reciprocal relations between the two. As Lefebvre maintains, social space and the “space” of the human subject construct each other. Furthermore, I will not only consider how bodily space and textual space are related in a narrow sense, but will consider, as a crucial aspect of the social space constructed in Akutagawa’s texts, the “space” of social spaces in semi-colonial China under pressure from
Euro-American powers and Japan. This will entail discussing space with a constant reference to its temporality, and thus to its history. Time and space are not separate and must be conceived within the “texture” of the text, again to borrow Levebvre’s term, whose networks are not closed, but open on all sides.56
Another way to state my aim might be to say that in the pages that follow, I hope to demonstrate that Travels in China can be seen as a total refutation of what the famous literary critic Kobayashi Hideo wrote about Akutagawa. Kobayashi’s critique was “Akutagawa is an author who most definitely did not execute this act of seeing. For him life existed exclusively as a function of his nerves. He dissected life through the use of his nerves.”57 But Travels in China represents precisely the Akutagawa who has “seen” the modern China, as opposed to the earlier author who had only written about ancient China as a form of shina shumi. Travels in China
56 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 118. 57 James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 112.
35 also flies in the face of Pamela Jo Abee-Taulli’s assertion that “there is a quest for identity that runs through the writing of Akutagawa, a yearning to grasp an essence of being.”58 On the contrary, I will show that in the course of the trip described, Travels in China demonstrates precisely the impossibility of a fixed “essence of being.” Of course, both Kobayashi and Abee-
Taulli’s statements were made in general about Akutagawa’s fictional works. This, however, only confirms my observation that Akutagawa as a traveler/storyteller has yet to be examined carefully by any of these scholars.
There is one more thing that I should add here. Despite the frequency with which the term “experience” tends to be used in discussions of travel literature, my study is not an effort to apply concepts such as “pure experience” to convey some sort of absolute authority of the body at the moment when the event happens. I do not believe such an authority can be restored at any level other than a philosophical one, at best. It might be useful in this sense to recall that Nishida
Kitarō, in his definition of “pure experience” in An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū, 1911), wrote that it is “the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. The moment of seeing, or hearing a sound, for example, is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what the color or sound might be.”59 That is to say, if one looks at
“experience” as “pure experience,” or as what Nishida also calls “direct experience,” that experience would be the moment when one experiences one’s own consciousness, and thus, there is not yet any subject or object. The “experience” I discuss in this study, however, is quite obviously “adulterated with some sort of thought,” as a subjectivity that is manifested in the text.
For me, the “seeing” or “hearing” in Nishida’s “pure experience” is more like an ideal and
58 Pamela Jo Abee-Taulli, dissertation, “Figures of Writing/Figures of Self: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Passage from Imagination to Madness” (Princeton University, 1997), 1. 59 Dorsey 2009: 98.
36 momentary encounter with the world that should be differentiated from the kind of “experience” under consideration here. To be exact, any experience put down in a text with words can never be a so-called pure encounter with the world, for it is always already caught, expressed, and therefore mediated by the text.
That said, in this study I do not intend to fetishize a subjectivity produced in and by the text. Most importantly, rather than assume a fixed subjectivity of Akutagawa before he visited
China, which then became a different, but still static, identity after he returned, I will focus consistently on the in between. As Laughlin notes in his study of travelogue and reportage,
“while travel is a movement through space, the space moved through is rarely depicted.”60
Travels in China allows us to observe precisely how the traveler’s consciousness is formed while moving through social spaces and negotiating them and thus participating in the formation of those spaces themselves. In positioning and repositioning his body as he moves through the space of “Shina,” Akutagawa’s text traces turbulent interactions which are often interpreted with reference to bodily differences. What I will also suggest is that the narrator is depicted in this text as, for the first time, struggling to confront a hierarchy based on a notion of bodily differences with which he is unfamiliar. In recognition of the distinct historical conditions the text confronts, I propose that we call this a hierarchy of racialization, without necessarily always engaging the biological differences that have been arbitrarily attached to each “race.”
Mapping the Trip of 1921
In the year 1921, Akutagawa left for China as a special reporter for the Osaka mainichi shinbun Press, with the assignment to send back his impressions of China as a traveler. His trip
60 Laughlin 2002: 33.
37 lasted about four months, from the end of March to late July. About the backdrop of this trip,
Fogel writes, “From the later 1910s China was in the grip of intellectual ferment, the New
Culture Movement or the May 4 Movement, and the Japanese press was interested in capturing that ferment for their readers. Akutagawa’s task was to convey how younger Chinese activists under the influence of Western trends in politics, literature, and the arts were confronting age-old
Chinese cultural forms.”61 The preliminary announcement of the publication of Travels in China that the Osaka mainichi shinbun Press made on March 31, 1921, one day after Akutagawa arrived in Shanghai, strives to attract readers’ attention by promising that Akutagawa’s travel reports will make a good introduction to modern China. It reads,
“Shina, a puzzle of the world, is the most interesting country. Beside the old Shina lying like an old tree, there is the new Shina growing like young grasses. The interesting part about Shina is where its inherent culture meets and intertwines with the new world in the spheres of politics, custom, thought, and all the others. … An account of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s ‘Impressions of Shina’ (Shina inshōki) will be coming soon. As the top mind in the literary circles and a representative writer of New Literature, Akutagawa is also widely known as a lover of shina shumi. Right now he is in Shanghai with his pen and enjoying flowers around the Jiangnan area. When he finishes there, he should go up North to Beijing, following the spring. While resting his thoughts on the natural features wherever he goes, he makes friends with the local youth, striving to observe the face of the young Shina. What new things and ideas has the new reporter discovered about Shina? The answer to that question can only be found in our paper!”62
In fact, the serialization of Travels in China did not start until a month after Akutagawa’s return to Japan. Due to health issues, Akutagawa not only had to postpone his departure date by a week, but also ended up staying in the hospital for three weeks to treat his pleurisy, which resulted in a reduction of the number of the cities that he could visit. The Osaka mainichi shinbun Press’s initial promise concerning the reportage of a new China sent back by the reporter from the sites was thus changed into a travelogue based on the reporter’s travel notes,
61 Joshua A. Fogel, “Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s and China,” in Chinese Studies in History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer 1997), 7. 62 Inoue 2000: 85.
38 the serialization of which was finally completed in 1925, four years after the trip (and two years before Akutagawa’s tragic suicide). Travels in China, therefore, makes a perfect exemplification of Stavance and Ellison’s articulation of “travel writing,” in which “our movements through space are registered by our topographic memory and then encoded as storytelling.”63 That is to say, Akutagawa’s voyage encoded in Travels in China is a summation of past events delivered in a particular way at the moment of retelling; or, to use the terms that this dissertation adopts, the text is a representation of the continuum of the socially constructed self and time-space, rather than an unmediated record of whatever the traveler sees of the landscape in a passive fashion.
Needless to say, this project ended up becoming something totally different from what the Osaka mainichi shinbun Press had initially proposed, in the sense that it belied the publisher’s expectation of a superficial comparison across cultures, peoples, and historical times marked along the national boundaries as the term shina shumi indicates, and turned into a narrative about a practiced space in which such boundaries could in fact be challenged. In other words, sent out as a reporter who was supposed to do nothing but objectively “observe” the Other, Akutagawa ended up to be a traveler whose own being was deeply involved and constantly questioned in the space that he had moved through.
Unlike Fogel, who highlights the “intellectual ferment” as the backdrop of the trip and centers his analysis on Akutagawa’s interactions with the “younger Chinese activists,” I contend that cultural exchanges between intellectuals were, unfortunately, neither the main endeavor nor the major interest of Akutagawa according to Travels in China. As stated in the Introduction, exchanges and communications between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s have been a popular topic for scholars of the cultural histories of modern Japan and China (an approach from which I hope this study can be differentiated), who usually take up such events as
63 Stavans and Ellison 2015: 23.
39 Muramatsu Shōfū’s 1923 trip to Shanghai, during which he was introduced to some leading
Chinese literary figures including Tian Han, Yu Dafu, Guo Moruo, and Ouyang Yüqian;64 or
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s trip to China in 1926, which connected him to “over ninety young Chinese artists”65 led by some of the same people. Compared to those texts, Travels in China is indeed a
“thin, boring travelogue” in terms of its very limited narrative of Akutagawa’s exchanges with local intellectuals, which explains why it has seldom been addressed in those studies. In many supporting resources, we are told that Akutagawa was charged with interviewing a number of
Chinese cultural and political figures, but most of them were completely unknown to scholars of modern Chinese history and do not appear in any part of this travelogue. Even his meetings with
Hu Shi in Beijing,66 which are recounted in Hu Shi’s diary, are not mentioned. Only four local intellectuals are introduced in Travels in China: the philosopher and revolutionary Zhang Binglin
(Zhang Taiyan); the statesman and diplomat Zheng Xiaoxu; the socialist Li Renjie (Li Hanjun); and the Malaysian Chinese intellectual Gu Hongming. Among them, Zhang, Zheng, and Gu were representative rather of the older China than the “new world,” and Li was a barely known young socialist and one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).67 As a matter of fact, as Fogel also writes, in Travels in China, readers see more of how Akutagawa was “doted on by Japanese he met all along the way”68 than his interactions with the (mostly unknown) local intellectuals. Therefore, although this travelogue might be less attractive to scholars of cultural exchanges in modern East Asian history (according to Fogel, it was Takeuchi Yoshimi’s
64 For a full account of those activities, please see Muramatsu Shōfū’s Demonic City (Mato, Konishi shoten, 1924). 65 Details can be found in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s 1926 essays “Shanghai kenbunroku” [Memoirs of Shanghai] and “Shanghai kōyūki” [Notes of Associations in Shanghai] (Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū, Vol. 10, Chūō kōronsha, 1967), 551-598. 66 Iikura Shōhei. “Pekin no Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Koteki, Rojin to no kakawari” [Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in Beijing: his connections to Hu Shi and Lu Xun], in Bungaku, Vol. 49 (1981.7). 67 For more information about the life and work of Li Renjie, please see Aoyagi 1988. 68 Fogel 1997: 7.
40 “favorite piece of Japanese travel writing about China,”69 though), on the other hand, it helps break through the circle of the “intellectual ferment” and attend to the larger social and political circumstances.
1921 is one of the crucial years in modern Chinese history, when Sun Yat-sen formed his regime in Canton in May, and the CCP was founded and held its first national congress in July as part of the continuous efforts after the May 4th Movements in 1919 to fight for democratic government and national independence. As is already widely known, the May 4th Movements broke out with protests against the Chinese government’s weak response to the Treaty of
Versailles (June 28, 1919), which unreasonably passed Article 156 transferring German concessions in the Shandong Province to Japan, rather than returning sovereign authority to
China after Germany’s defeat in World War I. Although the May 4th Movements were considered to have marked a new stage in China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism, and to have served as something out of which the cultural reform of modern China grew, the domestic situation did not actually become much more promising after these movements. We should especially note that not only did power struggles between China and the colonial powers escalate in the 1920s, but competition among the colonial powers also became more acute. This includes the rivalry between Japan and the U.S., the two new powers that gradually replaced the dominant European states in China after World War I. At the same time, there were also multiple local military cliques and political schools struggling within the boundaries of what was called “China.”
69 Fogel 1997: 8. Fogel cites Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Aoki Masaru ‘Kōnan shun’” [Aoki Masaru’s “Jiangnan Spring”], in Nihon to Chūgoku no aida [Between Japan and China] (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1973), 211-212. However, I could not find any evidence in Takeuchi’s original text that supports Fogel’s assertion. In his essay, Takeuchi highly praises Aoki Masaru’s “Jiangnan Spring” (a travelogue on the Jiangnan area) for changing his biased impression of all previous writings on China, as an example of which he gives the name of Travels in China. Takeuchi also stresses Aoki’s capability of writing excellent essays without complaining about or attacking others. In my interpretation, that is an allusive critique of those discriminatory statements in writings such as Travels in China.
41 We should keep in mind and return frequently to the fact that Akutagawa took his trip to
China in 1921 in these complicated conditions that exceed the structure of the binary Sino-
Japanese relationship. Although he went before the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the
Shōwa recession in 1926, which served as the backdrop for Japan’s later expansionist policies of sending domestic laborers to its overseas colonies and concessions such as Manchuria and
Shanghai, Akutagawa’s trip took place at such a sensitive time, when the Japanese empire, as a new power in post-WWI China, was eager to get hold of the latest information about China. The trip was planned along the Yangtze River, which had been the main area of Japanese trade in
China since the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), as a result of the Treaty of Shimonoseki
(April 17, 1895). The Yangtze River flows from the glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in
Qinghai Province in western China, eastward across southwest, central and eastern China before emptying into the East China Sea at Shanghai. Akutagawa’s trip started from Shanghai, however, and followed a route that he calls “sailing upstream” (sokō), first to the Kōnan (or “Jiangnan” in
Chinese) area next to Shanghai, then westward to central China along the River, and finally northward to Beijing, before he returned to Japan by train via the Korean Peninsula. The following is an itinerary of Akutagawa’s trip that I produced based on Zhang Lei’s and Sagi
Tadao’s studies.70
ZONE ONE 3.19.1921 Boarded the train in Tokyo, heading to the Moji Harbor.71 3.20-3.27 Stayed in Osaka due to a sudden illness. 3.28 Boarded the Chikugomaru Boat in Moji, heading to Shanghai. 3.30 Arrived at Shanghai. 4.1-4.23 Hospitalized in Shanghai because of an unexpected infection of pleurisy. 4.24-5.2 Sightseeing in Shanghai.
70 Zhang Lei, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke to chūgoku: juyō to henyō no kiseki [Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and China: the Trajectory of Adoption and Transformation] (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 2007), 243-246. Sagi Tadao, Nenpyō sakka tokuhon: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke [A Chronological Reader of Writers: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1992). 71 Moji used to be a famous harbor city in the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods, located where the Kitakyushu City in Fukuoka Province is today.
42 ZONE TWO 5.2-5.4 Went to Hangzhou from Shanghai via Jiaxing by train. Returned to Shanghai on 5.5. 5.8-5.10 Went to Suzhou from Shanghai. Fell sick in Suzhou. 5.11-5.12 Went to Yangzhou via Zhenjiang by boat. 5.12-5.14 Went to Nanking by train. Fell ill in Nanking with an upset stomach and had to return to Shanghai. 5.15-5.16 Went to the hospital in Shanghai.
ZONE THREE 5.19-5.20 Left Shanghai for Wuhu on 5.16 by the Hoyomaru Boat. Spent two days in Wuhu for sightseeing. 5.22-5.24 Went to Jiujiang by the Nanyomaru Boat. Fell ill again. 5.26-5.30 Went to Hankou by the Taianmaru Boat. 5.31-6.1 Went to Changsha. 6.1-6.6 Went back to Hankou and spent about a week there. 6.7-6.11 Went to Luoyang by train.
ZONE FOUR 6.14-7.10 Arrived at Beijing. 7.10-7.12 Went to Tianjin. 7.13-7.20 Returned to Japan via Shenyang, Pusan, Osaka and Tokyo.
43
Fig. 1.1 The Route Map of Akutagawa’s Trip in China (by Sagi Tadao)
I divided this itinerary into four parts, each corresponding to an individual section of Travels in
China: “Shanghai Travelogue” (Shanghai yūki), “Southern Yangtze River Travelogue” (Kōnan yūki), “Yangtze River Travelogue” (Chōkō yūki), and “Beijing Journal” (Pekin nikki shō). The last section of Travels in China, entitled “A Pile of Random Letters” (Zatsushin hitotaba), is devoted to a summary of the second half of the trip, touching very briefly upon the places that are already introduced in the “Yangtze River Travelogue” and the “Beijing Journal.”72 Since I will be frequently referring back to this itinerary in later discussions, for our convenience, I have
72 For more information about the book’s publication, please refer to Footnote 35.
44 marked them as Zones One, Two, Three, and Four. Zone One refers exclusively to the time
Akutagawa spent in Shanghai, the “demonic city” (mato) that represents a new China under international influences. Zone Two is the Kōnan area (or “Jiangnan” in Chinese, meaning “the
Southern Yangtze River”), an area that enjoyed its status of being an economically developed and politically progressive part of 1920s’ China thanks to its intimacy to Shanghai, but had also been an icon of the dynastic China and its civilization. Zone Three refers to his travels in the
Chōkō area (or “Changjiang” in Chinese, meaning “the Yangtze River”), which was a more rural area at that time, whereas later, in 1926, its central city, Hankou (part of Wuhan), became the base of the Kuo Ming Tang. Zone Four is centered on Beijing but also includes a few northern cities near by.
The emphasis that I insist on putting on the spatial differences among those places and zones connects to the point, as we will clearly see later, that such differences actually correspond to Akutagawa’s changing notion of a racialized identity in Travels in China. Stavans and Ellison have argued in a different context, “Maps are instruments of power. They tell the stories preferred by the powerful, and they can shape reality.”73 Similarly, here the route of
Akutagawa’s trip holds the power—though different from the state or imperial power indicated in Stavans and Ellison’s argument—to unpack the fluidity of the traveler’s subjectivity, which is encoded in the map—the “citation” of the places74 that mark out stories and actions of the journey. In Travels in China, Akutagawa recounts his experience with different cities and areas, which is simultaneously a process of the formation of his social self; and the racialized identities he discovers in such a process then provoke larger questions for him on stereotypical concepts such as nation and culture. The spatial difference among those cities and areas is not merely
73 Stavans and Ellison 2015: 40. 74 Michel de Certeau’s term, although not used to elaborate on the map. See Certeau 1984: 120.
45 embodied in different local food, climate, people, etc., but also always points to the power hierarchy that defines and characterizes each space. The power hierarchy discussed here exceeds the limitations of a confrontation between the “modern” and the “backward” under colonialism.
In fact, if modernity were indeed the criterion for Akutagawa’s reaction to those cities, he would, for instance, have been much happier with the luxury offered to him in the French Concession in
Shanghai, than with the less favorable traveling conditions in the hinterland. But the fluidity of
Akutagawa’s subjectivity, manifested in his changing response to the question of race which we are talking about here cannot be attributed to a simple reaction to the degree of modernization of each space. By “fluidity” of the subjectivity, I am referring to the uncertain borderlines of subjectivity in the semi-colonial space in China at the external borders of the Japanese empire.
In other words, the formation of Akutagawa’s subjectivity that we are looking at is not a simple dialectical process centered on an unconditional confrontation between the modern and the pre- modern (or between the glorious but dying Chinese empire and the uprising modern Japanese empire), but rather an overdetermined one, in the sense that it is the reflection of “its conditions of existence within the complex whole.”75
Furthermore, although I have divided Akutagawa’s route into four zones of observation, I will, of course, not take each of them as an isolated, homogeneous space. As Henri Lefebvre points out in The Production of Space, “We are confronted not by one social space but by many—indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we refer to generically as ‘social space.’ No space disappears in the course of growth and development. …
Social spaces interpenetrate one another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another.”76
Similarly, in Akutagawa’s text, what the traveler has encountered at an earlier stage of the trip
75 Louis Althusser, For Marx (trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2005), 253. 76 Lefebvre 1991: 86.
46 never disappears, but interpenetrates succeeding space. In this sense, the traveler never enters one social space and completely leaves the other. Akutagawa’s trip is a course of dynamic development that superimposes, one upon another, all kinds of experiences of social spaces, including experiences in Japan.
Zone One: Shanghai, the “Yellow Face,” and Language
We shall now move on to a close examination of the text to see how its construction of social spaces in China corresponds to its shifting sense of race and identity. Unlike Mori Ōgai, who traveled to Berlin and experienced for the first time being somebody with a “yellow face,” or Natsume Sōseki, who encountered the same issue of having a different skin color in London,
Akutagawa’s narrator (i.e. the traveler Akutagawa) in Travels in China discovered the “yellow face” in China, a setting where there should not have been any so-called biological racial difference between him and the people he encountered. I would like to point to this as a central tension in Travels in China. On the one hand, insofar as the text makes certain observations based on a hierarchy of skin color, the narrator’s casual use of a term like “yellow skin” seems to indicate a kind of unreflective acceptance of categories developed in the scientific racism of late
19th century Europe that proposed essentialized conceptions of race on the basis of genealogical charts and anthropomorphic measurements. On the other hand, there are in fact no “racial” differences to be perceived among East Asian peoples according to that very same physical anthropology. What I will analyze throughout the text is the way Akutagawa’s invocations of the “yellow face” are repeatedly based on differences other than the supposedly self-evident physical characteristics of “race.” In this first section of my analysis, I take up Akutagaw’s
47 writings about the “zone” of Shanghai, emphasizing how linguistic and sexual difference come to stand in for “race” in establishing social hierarchies.
The narrator in Travels in China frequently refers to himself as a “dumb traveler”77 in
China. Due to his very limited ability to communicate in the Chinese language, his statements about “Shina” are addressed exclusively to his travelling companions and translators (all
Japanese that have been living in China for a while), or to those Chinese who speak Japanese, as well, of course, to his Japanese readers. His knowledge of the Chinese language is limited to the
“No” and “Alas” kind, and interestingly enough, the text does not record the narrator’s own voice in a single conversation with local Chinese people, even through translation. Although he most likely participated in the actual conversations with the locals, as a narrative about a foreign country, Travels in China records a language practice surprisingly devoid of reference to the
Chinese language. As a result, it decodes for its readers the foreign world that the traveler
Akutagawa has encountered, but without engaging them in that same world for the actual duration of his travel. In that sense, Travels in China is precisely the kind of anthropological work that Johannes Fabian criticizes in Time and the Other, for the coevalness between the anthropologist and the native has been completely denied in the text. To use Fabian’s words, it is a “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”78 That is to say that time is spatialized and space is temporalized to give specific meaning to specific people in the text; meanwhile, the narrator/traveler is in the same space but at a different time—he is there only when he writes about that space retrospectively. When we think again about the role of translation in this case, then, we will realize that translation on the one hand makes it possible,
77 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Shina yūki [Travels in China] (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1925), 175. 78 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (Columbia University Press, 1983), 31.
48 within certain limits, to communicate with other human beings—with the Chinese in this case.
But on the other hand, it creates a distance that secures a “gray zone” for the narrator, where his
Japanese voice is probably encoded into Chinese at the scene but never gets re-encoded back to
Japanese in the text, and is therefore lost to the reader.
Moreover, what I have noted in the text is that when linguistic difference comes into play, it involves English rather than Chinese. For example, the text includes the following depiction by the narrator of his experience in a restaurant. We learn that on his first night in China, the traveler Akutagawa went out for dinner with a Mr. Jones, who worked as a reporter at the United
Press International (Kokusai tsūshinsha) in Shanghai. The dinner took place at a restaurant called “Shepherd,” located in the international settlement.
Generally speaking, both the walls and tables were quite nicely arranged. The servers were all Shina people, while I did not see a single yellow face among the patrons dining there. The food was surely 30 percent better than the meals I had had on the mail ship. I was speaking English to Mr. Jones—more or less the “yes and no” kind of English—and started to feel good (yukaina kokoromochi) while doing so. Mr. Jones was telling stories about what had happened since we saw each other last time, while gently spreading curry on his Chinese rice. Among those stories there was an episode like this. There was one night when Mr. Jones—yet to keep calling him “Mr. Jones” makes it sound as if he is not actually a friend of mine. He is a British fellow who lived in Japan altogether for five years. During those five years, I was always quite close to him, except for one time that we had a fight. We used to go to the kabuki theaters together and watch the performance standing in the gallery. We used to swim at the beach in Kamakura. Some evenings we stayed up late at a teahouse in Ueno and drank to great excess. At that time he unexpectedly jumped into a pond there wearing Kume Masao’s only good hakama. So to respectfully call him a “mister,” seems, more than anything else, like an offense to him. I should also add that I became close to him not because my English was good, but because his Japanese was perfect. —Anyway, one evening when Jones went drinking in a cafe, a Japanese waitress was sitting absentmindedly in a chair by herself. He is a fellow who everyday had a habit of saying that Shina was just his pastime, but Japan was his passion. It was at the time shortly after he had moved to Shanhai from Japan, so he must have missed Japan more than ever. At any rate, he spoke to this waitress right away in Japanese: “When did you come to Shanghai?” “I just arrived yesterday.” “Don’t you miss Japan?” When asked this, she responded, “Of course
49 I want to go home,” in a tearful voice. While speaking to me in English, Jones imitated her phrase “Of course I want to go home” in Japanese several times, and snickered. “When I’ve been asked the same question, I used to become awfully sentimental,” he said, the last two words in English.79
Fig. 1.2 Thomas Jones with Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kume Masao in Tokyo (by Sagi Tadao)
Although race and racism rarely become an explicit theme in studies of Akutagawa’s works, given his close friendship with Thomas Jones—a Caucasian male (Fig. 1.2)—in Japan, it would be hard to say that his consciousness of skin color was aroused for the first time in the international settlement in Shanghai. But what is new here is that the “yellow face” the narrator has discovered at Restaurant Shepherd belongs to the “Shina people” serving the tables, not to
79 Akutagawa 1925: 10-12. Emphasis added.
50 himself as one of the patrons. In his observation of the scene in the restaurant, people are categorized into two groups: one is the lower class of the “yellow face,” the other is the higher class with a lighter skin color. But the narrator immediately realizes the awkwardness of his own position; that is, he belongs to the patrons, but at the same time has the same skin color as the servers.
Two modes of establishing hierarchies of difference seem to be involved in Akutagawa’s observation about “yellow faces” here. We might say that one reflects an ethnicized notion of race as elaborated by Raymond Williams, while the other pertains to something like Etienne
Balibar’s “class racism.” According to Williams’s study in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the term “race” came into English in the 16th century. Williams summarizes its early uses as follows: “(i) offspring in the sense of a line of descent—‘race and stock of
Abraham’ (1570); (ii) a kind or species of plants (1596) or animals (1605); (iii) general classification, as in ‘the human race’ (1580); (iv) a group of human beings in extension and projection from sense (i) but with effects from sense (ii)—‘the last Prince of Wales of the British race’ (1600).”80 From this summary, it seems that the meaning of race, which used to be a signifier of “stock” and “species” of animals and plants, that is, a concept in classificatory biology, was extended in the late 16th and early 17th century to refer to a group of human beings.
Williams does not provide further details for this extension, but points out that it was after 1787, when the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach invoked this term in physical anthropology, that race became more widely discussed as a term to trace biological differences marked by “scientific facts” such as skin colors and the measurement of skulls among broad human groups. To use another scholar’s, Robert Bernasconi’s, words, “It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that European scholars attempted to organize the mass of information
80 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, 1983), 248.
51 now available to them and the sort the different peoples into a few groupings,” although in as early as the year of 1684 an anonymous essay, now usually attributed to Francois Bernier, already acknowledged four or five different types of human beings and employed the term race for that purpose.81
Despite the controversy over the exact dates and first inventors of the earliest usage of race in its contemporary meaning, it is usually agreed that modern race was created at the end of the 17th century and widely explored in the 18th century by a few philosophers and scholars in
Europe who became interested in this concept when reading travelogues and missionary records about foreign people and lands. These philosophers include Blumenbach and Immanuel Kant.
From the very complicated and vague history of this term, we understand that race, as Ruth
Benedict also summarizes in Race and Racism (1942), has been widely accepted as “a subject which can be investigated by genealogical charts, by anthropomorphic measurements, by studies of the same zoological group under different conditions, and by reviews of world history”82 up to a very recent time, such as Benedict’s. Discussing it within the framework of physical anthropology, Benedict believes that race is a “scientific field of inquiry,” and its special problem is that of “genetic relationship of human groups.” In Akutagawa’s sensitivity to the
“yellow face” in the restaurant, we see precisely the internalization of the idea that race can be marked by biological differences embodied in “scientific” facts, such as skin colors, and is hereditable among a particular people or ethnicity.
Although the ethnicized notion of race is probably the most pervasive foundation of racism in its modern discourse, Etienne Balibar argues in “‘Class Racism’” that the modern notion of race “did not initially have a national (or ethnic) origin, but a class signification or
81 Robert Bernasconi ed., Race (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 72. 82 Ruth Benedict, Race and Racism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, 1959), 96.
52 rather a caste signification.”83 Hence for Balibar, as he asserts in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, racism is “a genuine mode of thought, that is to say, a mode of connecting not only words with objects, but more profoundly words with images, in order to create concepts.”84 Invoking the aristocratic representation of the nobility as a superior “race” and the slave owners’ representation of slaves as an inferior “race,” Balibar concludes that “from the very outset, racist representations of history stand in relation to the class struggle,” and that it is only retrospectively that the notion of race was “ethnicized.”85
Furthermore, according to Balibar, first emerging from the “race of the laborers” in aristocratic racism, the modern form of racism, in the logic of capitalist accumulation, always tends to produce “the equivalent of a caste closure at least for one part of the working class.”86 In
Akutagawa’s narrator’s perception of class difference between the servers and patrons in the restaurant—a categorization based on that very capitalist logic—we see that precisely this “class racism” also comes into play, and the narrator’s rationale is transformed through the relation of reciprocal determination between the “class racism” and the “ethnic racism” into a co-existence and combination of the two.
The narrator’s reaction to the surrounding circumstances, however, also shows that the racialized representation that he establishes of those subjects in the restaurant is not one in which he can comfortably place himself. That is, what we see Akutagawa do is unlike the way “the
British in India and the French in Africa would all see themselves as members of a modern nobility”87 in a typical colonial context. This is precisely why the self-defensive linguistic
83 Etienne Balibar, “‘Class Racism’,” in Race, Nation, Class Ambiguous Identities (Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. Trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso, 1991), 207. 84 Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (Trans. James Swenson, New York: Routledge, 1994), 200. Emphasis in the original. 85 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 207-208. 86 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 212. 87 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 208.
53 performance of the narrator should attract our attention: in order to “feel good,” he starts to speak
English to his British friend “Mr. Jones.” In so doing, he is striving to demonstrate through his linguistic flexibility a crucial differentiation between his seemingly “yellow face” and the
Chinese servers’ that cannot be sufficiently and overtly demonstrated merely by the purchasing power that the narrator exercises as a patron of the restaurant. But at the same time, the
“yellowness” and “whiteness” defined by this differentiation is, due to more profound political conflicts and competition between Japan and the European nations in Asia after World War I, another unstable category.
In fact, the narrator’s behavior in this scene is a striking illustration of what Balibar notes as the role of language in creating “fictive ethnicity.” In another essay, entitled “The Nation
Form: History and Ideology,” Balibar discusses the important role that language and race play in producing a people—a fictive ethnic community in his opinion.88 In most of the theories and histories of peoples, we are told that a people is a homogeneous community in which everyone belongs to a continuous race that has spoken the same language since the beginning of history.
Put another way, as Balibar points out, in modern discourses on national identity, linguistic identity is seen as overlapping to a high degree with racial identity. But linguistic identity and racial identity are also different in terms of their openness. “The linguistic community is open,” according to Balibar, “whereas the race community appears in principle closed,”89 due to its obsession with purity, and hence its tendency to keep outside the community those who are not considered authentically national. We might conjecture that it is precisely the supposed
“closedness” of the race-based community that makes Akutagawa’s narrator anxious in the scene above, for he is fully aware that, had he kept silent, differences between him and the servers,
88 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 86-106. 89 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 103.
54 which might well be invisible to the racial eye but were crucial to him, would have ended up being disavowed, based on the notion of a closed race community of the “yellow face.” His anxiety was relieved, as he admitted, only when he started to talk to his British friend in English.
Interestingly, the British friend, Mr. Jones, spoke English to the narrator, Akutagawa, too, despite the fact that his Japanese was much better than Akutagawa’s English. Mr. Jones worked at the United Press International in Shanghai as a reporter, and he must have known very well that in colonial Shanghai, occupied by Britain and other Western powers, speaking English would explicitly indicate the higher social class and racial status of the speaker. In fact, for those
European residents in Shanghai at the time, speaking a language other than English would mean a compromise to the local society, and therefore a downgraded social class.90 Thus, a bizarre scene in the restaurant is brought to us, the readers. The two close friends, Akutagawa and Mr.
Jones, agreeably switch from Japanese, which used to be their favored language for communication in Japan, to English, which is undoubtedly the more powerful and better- recognized language in Shanghai. Moreover, as we are told in the above quotation, the English that Akutagawa manages to speak is not much more than the “yes and no kind.” But by playing such an extremely passive role in conversations with a White man, Akutagawa is able to move his racial status up from “Yellow” to “(honorary) White,” however unstable and imaginary that new status must be.
The linguistic “performance” that the two friends acted out in front of the servers and other patrons in the restaurant thus discloses the performer’s consciousness of his own racial and political identities, which were formed in accordance with the power struggles between Britain,
Japan, and China in the 1920s. Recalling the absence of the narrator’s voice in a Chinese
90 Xiong Yuezhi, Ma Xueqiang, and Yan Kejia ed., Shanghai de waiguo ren [Foreigners in Shanghai] (Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2003), 66.
55 language setting that I mentioned earlier, I will submit that the willingness or refusal to speak, or to record a voice in a text, in certain language, is never random. In fact, so long as language is considered one of the inherent characteristics and the indicators of political status that a people possess, it can always be racialized. As Frantz Fanon points out in Black Skin, White Masks, “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”91 Fanon also states elsewhere that “there is a retaining-wall relation between language and group. To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”92 Just as Fanon is interested in the black man confronted by the French language in Paris, I am interested in the traveler
Akutagawa (the “yellow man” with a question mark) confronted by the English and Chinese languages in Shanghai. Mr. Jones is interesting, too, in the sense that he is extremely proficient in Japanese, yet he speaks pidgin English to a Japanese. Do we observe the same anger that
Fanon’s black man would express if treated as a “pidgin-nigger-talker”? No. Fanon identifies the reasons for the black man’s anger as his reaction to “the absence of wish, the lack of interest, the indifference, the automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, and deficilizing him.”93 However, in Akutagawa’s narrator, we instead see a kind of relief in his
“Yes” and “No” to Mr. Jones’ pidgin, because “the white man’s language gave me honorary citizenship.”94
Unsurprisingly, Akutagawa’s imagination of the “White” race as a unified category is immediately challenged by the “international crowd” that he encounters in 1920s Shanghai, and questioned especially in his observation of the White Russians. Akutagawa stayed in Shanghai
91 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Press, 1986), 18. 92 Fanon 1986: 38. 93 Fanon 1986: 32. 94 Fanon 1986: 38.
56 for over a month, three weeks out of which were spent in a Japanese private hospital to have his pleurisy treated. Inside and outside the hospital, he was in touch only with Japanese friends, colleagues, and fans other than Mr. Jones. He was brought by them to local restaurants to spend a night there with the Chinese geishas, to local theaters to watch traditional Chinese plays, and to local intellectuals’ houses for interviews with them. He also went to cafes, public parks, and
Western-style churches and cemeteries, and visited Japanese institutes and factories. For
Akutagawa, Shanghai was a city of sin, because of the disease that stalked the filthy slums of
Pudong and Zhabei, because of the corruption, kidnapping, extortion, killing, opium trade, prostitution, and also because of the White Russians.95 Although, thanks to the protection of foreign laws, students, writers, and journalists in the international settlement and the French concession managed to have a productive and relatively free life compared to the far more isolated and suppressed cities and towns in other parts of China, Shanghai’s complexity, to a high degree, certainly came from the foreign presence. Akutagawa’s narrator encountered, for instance, a massive group of White Russian refugees in Shanghai. He considers them to be the same as the “Shina beggars,” despite the fact that, as he admits, they also belong to “the
Westerner” (seiyōjin).96 The White Russian refugees fled Russia after the 1917 Russian
Revolution, many of them entering China and Korea by crossing the China-Russia border in
North China. The city of Harbin, for instance, one of the major cities in North China, became the center of White Russian refugees in Asia, and for a time harbored as many as
200,000~250,000 people.97 Some of them continued to flee toward the South until they arrived at Shanghai, where, unfortunately, life did not turn out to be any easier for them due to the
95 Akutagawa 1925: 55-56. 96 Akutagawa 1925: 55-56. 97 Wang Junyan, Bai’e zhongguo dataowang jishi [A record of the White Russian refugees in China] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2001), 7.
57 linguistic obstacles they generally had to face. Most of them were forced into the hardest jobs or became beggars and prostitutes. Four years later, in the famous May 30th Movement in 1925 and onwards, these White Russian refugees started to serve as bodyguards for the European powers in the concessions to suppress Chinese workers, and finally moved to the side of the “White.”
There were other nationalities included in the system of the international settlement, working for the European powers just like the White Russians. Their situation very much resembles what Takashi Fujitani describes in his book Race for Empire, when the Koreans
“volunteered” to work at various tasks under the Japanese military in Shanghai one or two decades later.98 In 1921, what the traveler Akutagawa witnessed in Shanghai is the Indian police, who were hired by multiple powers, including Britain, to help maintain the order of the concessions. This is an extension of the situation in Hong Kong after the 1840s, and hence the relationship between the Indian and the British in the international settlement in particular was still a “master and slave” kind.99 The narrator figured out the power pyramid in Shanghai as soon as he set foot on the land of China. At the Shanghai port, the rickshaw pullers immediately surrounded him and pulled his coat sleeves. Akutagawa writes, “I pulled back behind the tall Mr.
Jones without giving it a thought, and almost ran away,” because the rickshaw pullers in China
“were filth incarnate” (fuketsu sore jishin), and their “sleazy appearance” (ayashigena ninsō) was said to scare many “Japanese women who have just disembarked.”100 After seeking for protection from the “tall” Mr. Jones, the narrator describes riding in the carriage with Jones and passing through the international settlement, where he saw an Indian policeman working hard to keep the chaotic street clear for their vehicle. He observes, “The asphalt road was packed with
98 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (University of California Press, 2011), 42. 99 For more details, please refer to Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot ed., New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953 (Manchester University Press, 2000), 70. 100 Akutagawa 1925: 7. Emphasis added.
58 Westerners and Shina people, all looking terribly busy. An international crowd (sekaitekina gunshū) yielded to carriages when an Indian policeman with a red turban signaled to them.
Traffic control in big cities in Japan, such as Tokyo or Osaka, wouldn’t even come close to the good job done here. I was a little intimidated by the ferocity of the rickshaw pullers and carriages, but was slowly cheered up (yukaina kokoromochi) seeing such an orderly scene.”101
That is, despite all the unpleasantness caused by the rickshaw pullers, the fearful horse, and the crowded street, the narrator’s mood was “cheered up” by the sight of Indian policeman clearing the road for them, a “good job” that big cities in Japan, such as Tokyo and Osaka, could not match.
In the depiction of a meeting with the formidable Chinese intellectual Zhang Bingling
(Zhang Taiyan, 1869-1936) we continue to see how Akutagawa’s narrator, while showing a strong sense of anxiety about the closed race community based on skin color, strives to establish another still very racialized identity through personal intimacy, common linguistic proficiency, and so on. On the one hand, the so-called “biological” similarities of the “yellow face” of the
Chinese and the Japanese seem to have been firmly rejected by the narrator at the Restaurant
Shepherd. Yet, surprisingly, this reference appears again in his meeting with the famous Chinese intellectual. The whole meeting is described in a sarcastic tone and full of complaints: the cold and bizarre study of Zhang, the old-fashioned decor of the house, and his unhealthy looks. “To be completely honest with you,” Akutagawa writes, “his face was not exactly what you’d call impressive. His skin color was almost yellow (kiiro). His mustache and goatee were pathetically thin. His protruding forehead made me wonder if it was just a lump.”102 Apparently, like his
“thin mustache and goatee” and his “protruding forehead,” the yellowness of Zhang’s skin color
101 Akutagawa 1925: 8. 102 Akutagawa 1925: 41-42. This quotation and the following ones about Zhang Binglin are cited from Fogel and Morita (1997): 24-25. Emphasis added.
59 is just another physical defect that has betrayed the narrator’s expectations for such a famous thinker, scholar, and political figure. The narrator admitted that he was impressed by Zhang’s
“red, thin eyes behind elegant frameless glasses” that were “always coolly smiling,” and by his
“unique thesis” regarding political and social issues; but he also made it very clear that he was not interested: “As for myself, well, I was just freezing.” By denying the commonality between him and Zhang as such, the yellowness of the narrator’s own face is, again, easily made invisible.
Moreover, the inferiority of the “yellow face” of Zhang indicated here bears irreplaceable political and historical significance, as Zhang was an advocator for the Han, not for an Asian, ethnicity, who played a crucial role in modern Chinese history by constructing and popularizing the racialized identity of the Chinese people. According to Kai-wing Chow, “Zhang Binglin began his career as a political propagandist as a member of the reformist group under the leadership of Kang Youwei,” and “before 1899, Zhang’s characterisation of China’s struggle against European powers was primarily based on the idea of war between the ‘white’ and
‘yellow’ ‘races.’”103 It appears, however, that Zhang’s positionality switched after 1899 to a more specific one, that is, his goal was no longer a Chinese resistance against European imperialism, but to overthrow the Qing government. Accordingly, the focus of his advocacy of a collective racial identity shifted from the dichotomy between the “white” and “yellow” to the one between the “Han” and the “Manchu” ethnicity. It is not entirely clear to us to what degree
Akutagawa was familiar with Zhang’s theory of race, but judging from the conversations they had (translated for the narrator by a Mr. Nishimoto Shōzō, the editor of the weekly magazine
Shanhai, we may say that at least Zhang’s speech about the political deprivation of the contemporary China and the fundamentality of “knowing the needs of the times” appears to
103 Kai-wing Chow, “Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han ‘Race’ in Modern China,” in The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, ed. by Frank Dikotter (Hong Kong University Press, 1997), 36.
60 reflect a struggle irrelevant to the narrator. For Akutagawa, or in his imagination, Japan already knew the “needs of the times” and was politically and militarily rising with remarkable speed in the post-WWI world, just like their British friend.
On the other hand, as I have said, this unstable and imaginary new status of being the
“honorary White” is a still very racialized identity that Akutagawa strives to establish in Travels in China. The narrator’s refusal to be categorized as a “yellow face” is therefore not in the least a revolt against racism or racialized identities. What he rejects is but the closed boundaries of a certain race that strictly follow the idea of pure bloodline or other biological characteristics, which he believes can be broken by proving an intimate relationship with a “higher” race, using linguistic or economic power. Without entering too much into a psychoanalytical discussion of the process of the narrator’s ego-formation here, I want to borrow Julia Kristeva’s conception of the “abjection” of self as a rhetorical device to describe a status in which the narrator is neither subject nor object. According to Kristeva, the “abject,” i.e. the disgusting and repulsive, is
“something rejected from which one does not part,”104 a pre-object stage. Different from objects that are sustained by desire, the abject is sustained by exclusion. It is the embodiment of the self’s desire to purify itself, a process in which the self becomes a subject; for as Kristeva believes, “There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.”105 As such, even before the “yellow face” becomes for him fully signifiable, Akutagawa’s narrator drives it out; and while rejecting and denigrating the “abject,” he establishes bodily and social boundaries to constitute his own territory, a defensive position outside it as the “non-abject,” a primary form of the “non-object.” At this stage of the story, however, this “non-object” does not
104 Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 105 Kristeva 1982: 5. Emphasis in the original.
61 directly slip into the subjectivization of the self, accompanied by a narcissistic pleasure that might be more typical of a colonizer’s position. Rather, threatened by a fear of being himself excluded, or of becoming the abject/object, too, to borrow Kristeva’s words again, “the phobic has no other object than the abject.”106 As introduced at the beginning of this chapter,
Akutagawa’s experiences in Travels in China are considered by many scholars as a process during which the Other has been discovered, and the Self can hence be defined. But I will contend that that is an oversimplification of the process of self-formation, as well as the social mechanism of boundary making. As seen in the narrator’s responses to the social spaces he has traveled through in Shanghai (note that this is not necessarily the case in the rest of the travelogue, as we will discuss later)—a city that Seiji M. Lippit considers to also be “spaces of abjection and exclusion,”107 after discovering the racial “Other,” it is precisely the same uncanny notion of race in the particular colonial circumstances that traps him in a position of the non- object, threatened by the fear for the abject, rather than immediately making him the subject.
Unlike the “abject position” that Nayoung Aimee Kwon assigns to bilingual colonized Korean writers who are in transit between two literary fields in the metropole and the colony,108
Akutagawa’s narrator is stuck between the undesirable abject and the desirable subject. He is driven by an impulse to mimic the “white man’s language” as well as his position in the carriage, by means of which he believes he can become homologous to the latter in order to become himself. However, as has been pointed out, this new subjectivity of his is fragile, tentative, and imaginary.
106 Kristeva 1982: 6. 107 Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 90. 108 Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 83.
62 The historical conditions that surrounded the very tentative modes of identity construction we see in Akutagawa’s Travels in China have been taken up by Takashi Fujitani, who traces how the racialized history of Japan was an effect of Euro-American discourses on racial difference that actually created the category of Asians, or the “yellow face.” As Fujitani puts it, “The racialized history of Japan in relation to its neighbors (including Korea) was in large part an effect of Euro-American discourses on racial difference that clustered the diversity of the peoples in the place named Asia into the category of Asians, discourses of racial affinity such as
‘the common ancestry of Japanese and Koreans’ were mobilized alongside humanistic universalism to disavow differences within the nation and among allies.”109 Japan, as the only empire with a skin color, the latecomer in modernization and colonization, and one of the rising foreign powers in 1920s’ China, was itself an example of breaking down the power hierarchy associated with the conventional notion of biological racism.
Against this background, Japan’s policies of overseas expansion, and its foreign relations in the 1920’s, profoundly affected the self-identification of its citizens abroad. The Japanese living in the Shanghai international settlement, for instance, had to be protected, but at the same time also controlled and monitored, by British power and capital, even though the British had actually been losing their dominant position in China since World War I and were becoming the new target of the Chinese anti-imperialist movements. Thus, the sense of being superior or inferior, advanced or backward, the colonizer or the victim of colonialism was common to these
Japanese residents in the concession. In his study of the Japanese in Shanghai, Takatsuna
Hirofumi describes these as the “twisted feelings” of Japanese as citizens of a “colored empire
109 Fujitani 2011: 26.
63 (yūshoku no teikoku).”110 The historian Shimazu Naoko also points out in her study that Japan was “the only non-White great power” seeking racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference in
1919.111 In short, Japan’s twisted position in the political hierarchy has everything to do with the modern notion of race; but at the same time, it cannot be fully expressed by a simplified confrontation between the “Yellow” and the “White,” especially in the colonial setting of
Shanghai.
Under this historical backdrop, the self-formation of Akutagawa’s narrator in Shanghai, as an ongoing process of social construction, turns out to be very complex as well. Akutagawa, in the text, looks at the “Shina people” as potential colonial subjects, but at the same time he also feels competitive toward them. The emphasis he puts on the “yellowness” of the “Shina people” is a good example, while his disgust at the architectural style and color in Shanghai that repeatedly tries to duplicate those of modern Europe, reveals a sense of competition with China as another modernizing Asian society. When confronting the colonial subjects of the Western powers, such as the Indians, the narrator is never hesitant to switch to another mood of being, the
“honorary White,” by showing his intimacy with the White. Yet on another occasion, still in
Shanghai, the narrator expresses sympathy for the kind of unease experienced by a Japanese compatriot who described feeling “patriotic indignation” when seeing three or four overly excited Japanese women clinging to a Westerner’s arms on the North Szechuan Road.112
110 Takatsuna Hirofumi, “Kokusai toshi” Shanhai no naka no nihonjin [The Japanese in the “International City” Shanghai] (Tokyo: Kenbun shuppan, 2009), 20. 111 Shimazu Naoko, Japan, Race and Equality: Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998), 92. 112 Akutagawa 1925: 76.
64 Zone Two: Hangzhou, Romantishizumu, and the “Bloody” Ijin
When Akutagawa records his travels in the culturally sophisticated South Yangtze River
Delta in the second installment of his travelogue, we find a quite different interpretation of the narrator’s difference as a Japanese. In fact, in Travels in China, what the narrator describes as these “twisted feelings” of Japanese as citizens of a “colored empire” rise to the surface only when the narrator is confronted with the “international crowd” in Shanghai, and must negotiate multiple power structures in his everyday struggle to deal with differences of language, sexuality, and so on. Shanghai’s complexity is, after all, very unique in 1920s’ China, in both good and bad senses. However, when the narrator moves to Zone Two in the South Yangtze River area, the area represented by cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Yangzhou that is most frequently cited in classical Chinese poetry, we find that the “twisted feelings” he experienced about racialized identity in Shanghai gradually turn into, first, a romanticism (romantishizumu) for the old towns, and then a sturdy Japanese conservatism. The contrast between the narrator’s reactions in Zones One and Two is perhaps most vividly depicted in the contrasting way a scene of urination in public is described in these two sections, a contrast which is related to his changing perception of the political tensions between the foreign powers and China as he travels through Zone Two.
Once outside Shanghai, the narrator finds the political and military tension between Japan and China is pronounced, going beyond the type of rivalries among the different European imperial powers and China characteristic of Shanghai. For instance, the narrator notes the
Chinese students’ anti-Japanese slogans and graffiti that he saw in Hangzhou, one of the new central points of the whirlpool of struggles among domestic military cliques including the
Chiang Kai-Shek regime in Nanking (another historical city in the Jiangnan area). Hangzhou
65 became a progressive city after the Revolution of 1911 (xinhai geming), with a well developed private educational system and several revolutionary newspapers, that actively promoted cultural reforms such as the haircut movement. Moreover, in the May 4th Movements and anti-Japanese movements, student organizations in Hangzhou were among the most active.113 In other words, the political atmosphere in Hangzhou was very different from what is sketched of Shanghai in
Travels in China. In Hangzhou, absent the officially empowered British,114 the narrator becomes more attentive to the anti-Japanese sentiments of the local people, which barely registered in his account of Shanghai. The description of those anti-Japanese sentiments in the Jiangnan area is however not followed by any harsh criticism from Akutagawa. The first site where the narrator encountered patriotic students is the famous West Lake in Hangzhou, where a couple of middle school students were singing out loud some anti-Japanese songs, passing by the narrator and his companions. Akutagawa makes no comment on this. While floating in a boat on the West Lake and wandering about in the park, the narrator saw “female Chinese students” everywhere, the presence of whom would pull him out of his daydream of the ancient Hangzhou, an illusion created by the Chinese poetry and folklore he had read in the past. But there is still no comment on this. In Suzhou, then, when climbing the Tianping Mountain, the narrator found some graffiti engraved on the walls of a kiosk, including some violent words addressed to the Japanese.
Akutagawa simply jokes about how cheap the costs are, as he has heard during his trip, to instigate anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese.
This is particularly interesting if we think about the way Akutagawa defends the narrator in Shanghai over his new tendency of getting too much into politics: “If you think I’m lying, just go and see China for yourself. Surely, in less than a month a strange thing will happen and
113 Feng Zhou ed., Minguo shiqi Hangzhou [Hangzhou in the Republican Era] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 1997). 114 Although Britain continued to be the main target of Chinese anti-imperialism movements up to the mid-20s, it makes no presence in Akutagawa’s journals of Jiangnan.
66 you’ll start feeling the need to talk politics;”115 and how excited he gets when talking about political issues concerning China later in the Changjiang area. But only in Jiangnan does the narrator appear to be completely overwhelmed by the sentiment of romanticism
(romantishizumu). Even the dirty beggars in Suzhou were “romantic” in his eye, just like the blind old beggar he met in Shanghai, because for the narrator, there is always the possibility that those beggars were in fact the incarnation of some disguised immortal beings that often appear in
Chinese folklore. It is quite obvious that in the Jiangnan area, the symbolic significance of those old towns in the literary tradition catalyzes the narrator’s romanticized imagination of the old
“Shina,” which has been suppressed up to that point by his aversion to the modern but vulgar
“international crowd” in Shanghai. Romantishizumu is the exact term Akutagawa used, over and again in the travelogue, to name this sentiment of the narrator, through which the present was imaginatively connected to the past. Not surprisingly, without any reference to the history of
Romanticism and literature in Japan, Akutagawa’s use of this term in the text is rather loose.116
In his “Romantishizumu,” for instance, we can easily identify an anti-Realism, or a longing for the classical, the sublime, the supernatural, the miserable, and the inspirational. Between the lines, the narrator seems to be jumping freely between the past and the present, linking whatever he sees in Jiangnan with what he has read about those towns in the Chinese classics. There, his mind is always directed to the China of the past, i.e., the world of classical Chinese literature with which he is most familiar. In Yangzhou, a historic town that plays a particularly important role in classical poetry, the narrator even declares that Jiangnan has brought him the greatest
115 Akutagawa 1925: 51. 116 For a detailed and rigorous analysis of the concept and history of Japanese romantishizumu, please see Sasabuchi Tomoichi’s Romanshugi bungaku no tanjō [The Birth of Literature of Romanticism] (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1981).
67 “happiness” since Shanghai.117 That is to say, interestingly enough, he found “happiness” in
China without the presence of the White man.
However, the narrator’s (un)conscious attempts to escape the racialized “Shina” and to take refuge in a romanticized China are doomed to fail. On the night he arrived in Hangzhou, the narrator ran into an elegant-looking elderly Chinese man, who was dressed in a traditional
Chinese suit, in the hotel and was enjoying his presence. Unfortunately, however, something else disturbed his pleasant night.
But eventually, life is so cruel to my romanticism. Right at that time, suddenly the door was opened and that bald American guy came down the stairs, on his unsteady and drunken feet. Once his friend yelled something at him, he shouted back “bloody” something with a weird gesture. Foreigners in Shanghai always use this terrible “bloody” instead of “very.” This alone would already make me feel uncomfortable. Not just that—he walked so unsteadily that for a moment I thought he would fall next to us. But he then went to the entrance, turned his back to us, and stood there pissing as if nobody were around. Oh romanticism. Goodbye forever. I retreated to the unpopular salon with the indifferent Mr. Murata, with the exclusionist spirit ten times stronger than Mito Rōshi burning in my heart.118
The shock that the narrator experienced by witnessing this scene is first of all accompanied by a feeling of disgust or disdain caused by an inappropriate behavior in public that violates the “common sense” established through the pervasive modern notion of hygiene.
According to Komori Yōichi, in Japan there had also been a time when civilians would urinate in public standing anywhere and when they couldn’t care less about being naked in front of other people. In the eye of those foreigners who came to work in Japan at the beginning of the Meiji era, that was an emblem of extreme barbarism and a symbol of lack of civilization.
Consequently, in the fifth year of the Meiji (1872), the newly founded government promulgated
117 Akutagawa 1925: 189-190. Translated in Fogel and Morita 1997: 28. 118 Akutagawa 1925: 107-108.
68 a law to regulate minor offenses such as public urination and public exposure of one’s body,119 the primal form of which was a policy executed in the port city Yokohama. It was, according to
William Wetherall, “an attempt to discourage a number of behaviors… that the government regarded as contrary to public hygiene, safety, order, and decency.”120 Ruth Rogaski also notes the Meiji state’s intervention to impose health where “people’s habits fell short of a hygienic ideal,” and asserts, after going over the birth of the Japanese term eisei (hygiene) and its export to the neighboring countries and areas, that the modern notion of hygiene “became an organizing principle in governance, a site of contestation over the relationship between the people and the state, and ultimately an indicator of the power of Japan vis-à-vis the rest of Asia.”121 By the
1920s, the “hygienic ideal” that the Meiji law aimed at promoting had become common sense for most Taishō Japanese civilians.
Many critics of Travels in China take up Akutagawa’s reaction to the issue of public urination in China as an indicator of his power in the text—a power that represents precisely the hierarchy in East Asian modernity generated around the dispersion of the notion of hygiene, but most of them base their arguments on another widely quoted episode involving a Chinese man that the narrator encounters in Shanghai. On the day after he was discharged from the hospital, he went to the Yuyuan Garden in central Shanghai with a Japanese friend, where the Pavilion of the Lake was a popular tourist spot.
When we arrived, there was a Chinese man dressed in light blue cotton clothes and wearing his hair in a long queue. If I may add at this point, according to the author Kikuchi Hiroshi, I apparently make frequent use of vulgarisms, such
119 Komori Yōichi, Reishizumu [Racism] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), 90. According to historical records, the law mentioned by Komori should be the “Tokyo’s Ishiki kaii jōrei,” which means an ordinance of “violated conventions” (ishiki, the more serious offenses—violations of a stipulated standard, contraventions of regulations or laws, transgressions, and infractions), and “implicit violations” (kaii, the less serious offenses—acts of negligence, mishaps, or accidents that disturbed the public, damaged property, or injured others). See William Wetherall, “Tokyo’s Ishiki kaii jōrei: Policing Public Order, Safety, Hygiene, and Morality in the 1870s” (2010, http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/yosha/yr/society/Ishiki_kaii_jorei.html). 120 Wetherall 2010. 121 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 137. Emphasis added.
69 as the “toilet,” in my novels. The reason is that I began writing haiku and was influenced by such natural expressions as “horse shit” in the works of Yosa Buson and “horse piss” in the works of Matsuo Bashō. It’s not that I intend to ignore Kikuchi’s criticism, but if you are serious about writing a travelogue about China, since China itself is a vulgar place, it’s almost impossible to give vivid descriptions without breaking some of the rules of etiquette. If you think I’m lying, give it a try. Now let’s go back to that Chinese man. There he was leisurely pissing into the lake. Nothing seemed to faze him in the least—Chen Shufan could raise his rebellious banner in the wind, the popularity of vernacular poetry could die down, or the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance could come up again—nothing. Judging from his serene manner and facial expression, this is the only possible conclusion I could draw. The Chinese-style pavilion that rose in the cloudy sky, the lake covered by a sickly green, and the arc formed by the single stream of urine as it poured into the lake at an angle—this is more than a scene of melancholia. At the same time, it was a bitter symbol of this grand old country. I stared at the figure of this Chinese man, but of course for Mr. Yosoki this wasn’t a rare occurrence at all, unworthy of any particular amusement. “Please observe. Note that what runs over these cobblestones is piss and only piss.” Mr. Yosoki let out a chuckle and went on to turn along the side of the lake. Now that he mentioned it, there was a distinct odor of urine in the air.122
As discussed in an earlier paper,123 considering the fact that the removal of the “queue” or
“pigtail” was an ongoing and widely recognized attempt before and after the Revolution of 1911, a long Manchu queue in 1921 is a very suggestive detail to begin with. As Michael R. Godley suggests in his paper “The End of the Queue: Hair as Symbol in Chinese History,” the hair generated a “semiotics” for the late Qing revolutionists and thinkers. For instance, Zhang
Binglin “cut off his own queue at a public protest in 1900” and “attacked both the Qing dynasty and the reform party headed by Kang Youwei;”124 but even Kang himself also suggested the
Qing emperor to precipitate a change in hairstyle learning from the West and Japan. Heated debates and movements over the haircutting issue resulted in great changes to the society, and
122 Akutagawa 1925: 22-23. Translated in Fogel and Morita 1997: 17. “Kikuchi Hiroshi” is the real name of the writer Kikuchi Kan, annotated as “Kikuchi Hiroshi” in the original text. 123 Junliang Huang, “Gengo/jenda no poritekkusu kara miru Akutagawa Ryūnosuke no seisei: Shina yūki o chūshin ni” [The Becoming of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Language and Gender Politics in Travels in China], in Quadrante, No. 15 (2013.3), 187- 207. 124 Michael R. Godley, “The End of the Queue: Hair as Symbol in Chinese History,” in East Asian History, No. 8 (1994.12), 65.
70 according to Godley, informal queue-cutting “societies” operated within the shadow of the
Forbidden City until, by early 1911, only ten of the several hundred students in one government school, for example, bothered to keep faith with tradition.125 As such, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the queue, which used to be a symbol of Manchu custom and hegemony, became a point of obvious importance to revolutionaries, and its removal at the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republican era was not merely a change in fashion; it was, instead, “one of the better-known symbols of the fall of imperial rule, modernization and political change.”126 Seen in this light, therefore, it is not in the least unexpected that
Akutagawa’s narrator would see the Chinese man with a Manchu queue as “a bitter symbol of this grand old country.” And it would not be forced to interpret this statement from another perspective, proving the anti-modern representation of this man, that is, from the place where it happens—a popular tourist spot, a public space, in the center of the city of the “international crowd.” If the drunken American guy in Hangzhou still cares to “turn his back,” this Chinese man pisses into the lake “leisurely” (yūyū to), in front of the crowd. For me, that is another decisive moment, when the possibility of reading a conservative spirit in this man arises, which consequently makes his behavior almost an overt rebellion against modernity and Westernization, rather than merely a symbol of barbarism and fatuousness in the old country as judged by the logic of Modernization Theory.
Most scholars who take up this episode pay little attention to those details, focusing instead on the general issue of public urination, which is certainly another important perspective from which to examine the plot. The feeling of disgust that Akutagawa’s narrator indicates that he experienced at the scene, understood by scholars to also be the representation of a feeling of
125 Godley 1994: 68. 126 Godley 1994: 53.
71 superiority, is essentially driven by an impulse to precisely identify the “abject,” as we have previously discussed. Such differentiation is itself a process that creates the complex network of social norms, through which the standards for “clean” and “dirty,” “modern” and “pre-modern,”
“civilized” and “backward,” etc., are decided. Adopting the “foreigner’s gaze,” which led Meiji
Japanese into a more “hygienic” and “civilized” lifestyle, modern Japanese travelers in the
Taishō and Shōwa periods brought up the issue of public urination in numerous travel accounts of the colonies, including those outside East Asia,127 and attacked it in the discourses of modernity and colonialism. Travels in China has proven its textual value for studies of those travelogues in this vein. In the current discussion, however, our goal has never been a mere identification of the narrator or the writer’s “gaze” from the outset. To play on words and push the argument a little further, we may even say that neither is sight the only means through which
Akutagawa’s narrator experiences what is in front of him. In the particular scene cited above, for instance, the shock brought by the Chinese man to the narrator is not only caused by “the arc formed by the single stream of urine as it poured into the lake at an angle,” but also by the
“distinct odor of urine in the air.” That is, the abject ceases to be something outside him that can be differentiated, excluded, and rejected from a certain distance. Instead, the abject is there in the air and in his breath, which makes him part of it. Here, the failure of complete or absolute exclusion demonstrates precisely Lippit’s observation (citing Kristeva) that abjection is always marked by ambivalence, and that it exists at the limit of subjectivity and to this extent defines it.128 The abject, being what is necessarily excluded in the formation of Akutagawa’s subjectivity, is also what establishes the border of it.
127 It is commonly mentioned, for instance, in travel accounts of Southeast Asia and Taiwan including Kaneko Mitsuharu and Satō Haruo’s. 128 Lippit 2002: 107.
72 Interestingly enough, though, in Travels in China, the Pavilion of the Lake in Shanghai is not the place where Akutagawa’s narrator laments his farewell with Romantishizumu. The
Xinxin Hotel in Hangzhou, where he witnesses the drunken American pissing in public, is. We may certainly argue that in terms of the “unhygienic” and “barbaric” image evoked by these two guys’ behaviors, they are not much different. And I am assuming that is why most critics have overlooked this episode of Hangzhou and focused only on the Chinese man in the Pavilion of the
Lake. For me, however, this is not simply disillusionment with the modern and civilized
Americans that shocks the narrator, when the American behaves as vulgarly as the Chinese.
Rather, it is a discovery of new facts about the Americans in China as a particularly racialized identity; that is, Akutagawa’s disappointment seems rooted, not only in assumptions about modernity and barbarism, but also about race.
The opening episode “On Sea” (kaijō) in Travels in China offers an entry to understand how Akutagawa sees the American as a distinct “race.” Setting off to China on the 29th of March,
1921, after having temporarily recovered from a sudden illness, the narrator suffered greatly from seasickness on the boat. He writes,
However, the next morning, all the first-class passengers became seasick, and none of them showed up in the dining room, except for one American. But he must have been an extraordinary fellow, because I heard that after he ate, he sat all by himself in the salon, typing away. When I heard that story I was quickly cheered up. At the same time I thought he must have been some kind of monster. To be so self-possessed in spite of such a ferocious storm was a superhuman stunt. Were this American to undergo a physical examination, we might find that he had thirty-nine teeth or had grown a small tail or some other unusual fact.129
That “one American,” who managed to stay unaffected by the ferocious storm when everybody else on board was suffering from severe seasickness, “quickly cheered up” the narrator. The theory that he devised in order to cope with such a difference is a bald racist one. That is, the
129 Akutagawa 1925: 6. Translated in Fogel and Morita 1997: 11. Emphasis in the original.
73 invincible strength of the “one American” proves the existence of a “superhuman” or an
“unusual” species that might have “thirty-nine teeth” or “a small tail.” To a weakened person, who is suffering from a physical disorder as well as a mental disappointment (for every body is literally down except for the “superhuman”), the physical strength of that “one American” is taken by the narrator more as a gift than a threat. To put it in a slightly forced way, this opening scene on the boat can even be interpreted as a moment when the narrator declares the discovery of a new and stronger race—the American.
Turning back to the episode in which the narrator witnessed a drunken American pissing in public several days later in Hangzhou, we start to get a sense of the kind of shock
Akutagawa’s narrator received at the scene. “Oh romanticism. Goodbye forever,” is not just some melodramatic, exaggerated expression. His imaginary escape from the political reality to the romantic past was interrupted, but this time with yet another new discovery, that is, the discovery of a racial hierarchy among the “White,” which is such a sharp contrast to his conception of the American “race” before arriving in China. The drunken American not only pissed in public like the Chinese man, but also used the British slang “bloody” like all the other foreigners (ijin) in Shanghai. His inappropriate behavior in public makes him a barbarian in the narrator’s eyes, because that is considered to be what only the uncivilized Chinese would do, and, more importantly, this illusion is also accompanied by the demythicization of the power that the
American could have possessed as the “White,” but lost while exposing the phallus in public.
On the other hand, as a connection one will probably make immediately, the word
“bloody” carries with it the long and bloody history of the Protestant Reformation in England,
Henry VIII’s drama with his daughter Mary I, and the brutal executions of Protestants for which
Mary I—“Bloody Mary”—was responsible when she was Queen of England. In other words, the
74 term “bloody” is associated with the medieval history of Britain, therefore serving as a signifier of the image of the country. In Hangzhou, the narrator surprisingly found another ijin who resembles the “foreigners in Shanghai” in the sense that they would “always use this terrible
‘bloody’ instead of ‘very.’” After his encounter with the drunken American in Hangzhou, where the officially empowered British were not even present, the narrator was able to confirm his sense of the unevenness within the category called the “White.” As a result, his “exclusionist spirit” was provoked by a discovery of the secondary “White,” rather than the “Yellow.”
The subject that the narrator was aroused to “exclude” is relevant to the current discussion, especially given what we have discovered about his “twisted feelings” towards the
“White” in Shanghai, represented by two figures: Jones and the strong American man he met on the boat, and about the racial “abjection” (i.e. the “yellow face”) that he identified. For critics such as Kawamoto Saburō, Akutagawa’s declaration of a disillusionment here romantishizumu, in which many Taishō writers’ shina shumi (interests in China) had been rooted, established
Akutagawa’s as a “rational account” of the reality in modern China in Travels in China, as opposed to the tendency to romanticize “Shina” that one can find in works of such writers as
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Sato Haruō.130 That is to say, for Kawamoto, Akutagawa’s disillusionment with romantishizumu is nothing but a collapse of the writer’s shina shumi after seeing the reality of China. In this view, which many critics of the Taishō writers’ China stories commonly share, the subject of both “romantishizumu” (romanticism) and “shumi” (interest) is interpreted as “China” or “the Chinese,” leaving the multinational foreign powers in “modern
China” of the 1920s out of the picture. For me, however, because we have been tracking the narrator’s bodily movements and the “twisted feelings” he exposed in Shanghai, we know that neither the “disillusionment” nor the “collapse” simply happened in Akutagawa’s ideal world,
130 Kawamoto 1990: 142, 144.
75 which was a political vacuum that erected ancient China as its only imaginary “other.” Rather, in Hangzhou, interestingly enough, after giving a detailed account of the cities that would remind him of Chinese classics, the narrator discovers that the “abjection” he wanted to exclude slips into the “(degraded) West” itself. If the racialized identity the narrator adopted in Shanghai is that of the “honorary White,” in Hangzhou, the narrator responds to a newly discovered
“abjection” by resolving to return to the Japanese tradition. For him, that tradition is represented by the Mito Rōshi, who vowed to “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians” (Sonnō jōi) in the
Edo period, a time of seclusion before foreigners were allowed in and accused the Meiji Japanese of “barbaric behaviors,” such as public urination. Akutagawa mentions at one point in
“Shanghai Travelogue” that it is unclear to him “what kind of creatures (jinshu) the Japanese
(nihonjin) are,” but he knows that they will “immediately turn joyous” when they are overseas and see a cherry blossom.131 Fogel’s translation of the term jinshu (race) as “creatures” indicates that to his understanding, what the narrator shows in this statement is a melancholy reflection on the Japanese as a cultural group, rather than an interest in exploring it as a “race.” For me, however, this is precisely a racist interpretation that the narrator makes about race as a cultural construction. In Hangzhou, the narrator seems to “know” better about the ethnicity of the
Japanese when confronted with the degraded “White.” As the domestic and foreign powers wrestle along the way, his dilemma continues in the journey to the Changjiang area.
Zone Three and Four: The Hinterland and Beijing
Compared to the first two parts of Travels in China, the last two sections, entitled
“Yangtze River Travelogue” (Chōkō yūki) and “Beijing Journal” (Pekin nikki shō), are short. In
131 Akutagawa 1925: 73-74. Translated in Fogel and Morita 1997: 37.
76 these two sections, the narrator’s chances to meet “ijin” in the hinterland are significantly reduced, as well. According to Chun-Hao Ying’s study, the Upper and Middle Yangtze River
(including such as Szechuan and Hubei Provinces, also referred to as the “Chōkō [Changjiang] area” in Travels in China) were left almost intact by foreign powers, especially compared to the
Lower Yangtze (such as Shanghai and the Kōnan [Jiangnan] area). However, the Changjiang area had gradually become a new hot spot after World War I, where foreign and imperial powers, returning to Asia from the war in Europe, competed fiercely for resources.132 Starting in the late
1910s and early 1920s, foreign and domestic boats and cargos, stuffed with international traders, foreign products, and local materials, began to pour onto the River. This brought tremendous profits to the trading companies run by foreign powers, but also unavoidably caused intensive economic competition among them, most of this competition was violent and brutal. On top of this, there were multiple civil wars going on between domestic political cliques and local governments. In other words, if in Shanghai Akutagawa’s narrator sought protection from the
“international crowd” in the international settlement, and in Jiangnan he could still be consoled by his romantishizumu, the Changjiang area will be the most chaotic and the least “romantic” part of his trip under a true “state of exception” caused by the war.
Always accompanied by male Japanese citizens who were empowered with strong local networks in China during his visit to the Changjiang area, the narrator immersed himself deeply in contemporary issues of China and East Asia, giving only one account of an encounter with
Westerners. Despite such a short section, Akutagawa exerted himself in describing this scene. It is on the boat from Shanghai to Wuhu around May 17, 1921, where the narrator witnessed an
132 Ying Chun-Hao, Waijiao yu paojian de misi [The Mystery of Diplomacy and Weapon] (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 2010).
77 intensive argument between an elderly Danish gentleman, Mr. Roose, and an arrogant American woman, on the question of whether the Asians are capable of “love.”
According to her opinion, not to mention the Shina people (shinajin), even the Japanese (nihonjin) do not understand what love means. They deserve other people’s sympathy for their ignorance. Mr. Roose expressed his disagreement— while still working on his curry—as soon as he heard this. “No,” he said, “Things like love—even the Asians understand it. For example, there was this young girl from Szechuan, ……” He was about to go on with the story in the way he has always been good at, but the woman interrupted him. She declared, holding a banana that she just started to peel, “No, that’s not love. It’s nothing more than pity.” Mr. Roose stubbornly tried again to continue with another episode: “Then, how about this young girl from Tokyo, she ……” In the end he must have finally infuriated the woman, who suddenly left the table with her husband. Even now I can still clearly remember Mr. Roose’s face at that time. He was going to show us yellow fellows an awkward smile, but then murmured something like “narrow minded,” knocking at his forehead with his forefinger.”133
When accompanied by Jones to Restaurant Shepherd in Shanghai, the narrator firmly rejected the label of the “yellow face” affixed to the Japanese and sought to break down the biological foundation of the idea of race; yet at the same time he attempted to obtain another racialized identity as the honorary White. Here on the boat, he confronted the accusations made by the “degraded White” (i.e., the American) that Asian people could not understand modern and romantic sentiments such as “love.” Even though the Japanese were treated slightly more respectfully than the “Shina people” (as seen in the phrase “even the Japanese”), the narrator readily grouped himself with his “yellow fellows,” showing no interest in building intimacy with any of the biological Caucasians standing in front of him, including the Danish gentleman. The expression “us yellow fellows” bears a sarcastic tone, as I see it; that is, I read in it an acknowledgement by the narrator that he is fully aware of his own position as a “racial minority” in the eye of the “White.” This sarcasm itself seems to relieve his anxiety about being a racial minority in the Westerners’ eye, though, from which we can tell that those “twisted feelings,”
133 Akutagawa 1925: 221. Emphasis added.
78 provoked to the maximum in Shanghai, are reduced to a minimum under the circumstances of the Changjiang area.
The more the narrator moves toward the hinterland, the more he sees a reduction in the political tension between the foreign powers, and the more he immerses himself in the contemporary issues of China. The chaotic political environments, local military and bandits, less modern lifestyle, less international pressure, and the increasing presence of the Japanese during the escalation of the war in the hinterland turn the narrator’s attention to the Sino-
Japanese power struggles, even more than when he was in Jiangnan. But as was the case with the unavoidable collapes of his romantishizumu toward China in Jiangnan, the narrator’s interest in modern Chinese politics comes back into play. Akutagawa writes,
That night sitting on the balcony of Tang’s Garden in a chair next to Nishimura, I badmouthed modern Shina with an almost foolish enthusiasm. What does modern Shina have? Politics, scholarship, economics, arts—aren’t these all declining? Especially the arts. Has there been one single work that one can be proud of since the Jiaqing and Daoguang eras in the Qing Dynasty? And all the people (kokumin), the young and the old, are doing nothing but letting things be. It might be true that there are some energetic youth (wakai kokumin). But the fact is that even in their voices, there lacks a great passion that can echo all people’s (zenkokumin no) hearts. I don’t love Shina. I can’t even if I want to. Whoever is still in love with Shina even after having witnessed their national (kokuminteki) corruption is probably either an extremely decadent sensualist, or a shallow admirer of the shina shumi. No, the Shina people themselves, as long as their hearts haven’t been completely darkened, should hate this country far more than travelers like us.134
This conversation took place in Wuhu, that is, after the narrator’s encounter with the
Danish gentleman and the American couple on the boat. Akutagawa pours out his criticisms of the decline of “politics, scholarship, economics, and arts” in China since the Qing Dynasty— whether his judgment is accurate or not is not our focus here—through an enthusiastic speech of the narrator’s, pointing to the lack of passion in modern Chinese people (kokumin). The term
134 Akutagawa 1925: 218-219.
79 kokumin (civic nation) is used repeatedly in this short passage in the civic or political sense of nation, reminding us of the rise of the discourse of political nation building in Japan since the second half of the nineteenth century, and Fukuzawa Yukichi’s discovery of this term in the modern context.135 Part of the discourse of national identity, therefore, kokumin is considered as opposed to minzoku (ethnic nation), which seeks the cultural identity among a people in the ethnic sense of nation. Invoking the “Shina kokumin” (Chinese nationals) several times in this passage, while referring to them elsewhere as “Shinajin” (Chinese people), Akutagawa makes very clear to his readers his consciousness of nationalism as a civic force, and that of racism/ethnicism as a cultural force. Hence, the narrator’s confrontation with the American couple and the Danish gentleman on the boat as a “yellow fellow” is doubtless part of his continuous racial struggle in the trip, while his disappointment with the political passivity and unconsciousness of the “Shina kokumin” as expressed here is something beyond the scope of romantishizumu.
However, this newly acquired identity of the “yellow fellow” twists again when the narrator is in Beijing, where he spent his last month in China before returning to Japan. Starting to dress in Chinese garb (shinafuku) in Beijing, the narrator visited Gu Hongming, a well- established man of letters and an enthusiastic promoter of Asian culture and civilization.
Akutagawa recorded this meeting with a delightful tone in his “Beijing Journal.” Gu was pleased to see him in Chinese garb, but then commented: “Not wearing Western clothing is quite admirable, though I do find fault with the lack of a queue.”136 This is a surprising development in the writer’s conception of a “Shina” identity, which is again signified by the garb and the queue especially if we recall his awkwardly silent meeting with Zhang Binglin and his encounter
135 Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of A Theory of Civilization (Bummeiron no gairyaku) (trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst, Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1973). 136 Akutagawa 1925: 239. Translated in Fogel and Morita 1997: 44.
80 with the queued Chinese man pissing in the Pavilion of the Lake in Shanghai. At the end of his journey, when walking the Westernized streets of Tianjin, the narrator admitted to the same
“Nishimura” who had listened to him complain about modern Shina kokumin in Wuhu, that
Beijing was the place he wanted to return to, not Japan.137 We are told in Zhang Lei’s study that
Akutagawa dressed in Chinese garb even on his way back from China to Japan. On the train from Osaka to Tokyo, a Japanese passenger guessed that he must have been living in Japan for a very long time, since he spoke Japanese so well.138 In other words, in his own country, where an identity called “Japanese” is attached to anybody whose native language is Japanese, Akutagawa demonstrated the possibility of moving away from both the “White” and the “honorary White” by rejecting Western clothing and inhabiting the Chinese long gown. The choice of clothes here makes an extremely suggestive comparison to his choice of language at Restaurant Shepherd in
Shanghai; but both choices play a decisive role in shaking the common assumption of a fixed identity represented through the notion of biological race.
The rejection of the status of the “honorary White” is not made so explicit in Travels in
China as in the writer’s own choice of clothing upon his return to Japan, but the travelogue does end with a short comment about the Japanese being “yellow.” At the very end of his trip in
Shenyang, a Northern Chinese city, Akutagawa wrote, “When I saw around forty or fifty
Japanese passing by the parking lot in the sunset, I almost had to agree with the Theory of the
Yellow Peril (kōkaron).”139 The context of this one-line comment is unclear. It could be that while getting closer to the China-Russian border, the narrator was reminded of the wide-spread
Theory of the Yellow Peril, which started with the publication of the Russian philosopher and theorist Mikhail Bakunin’s book Statism and Anarchy in 1873 and was popularized in Europe
137 Akutagawa 1925: 264. 138 Zhang 1992: 318. 139 Akutagawa 1925: 264.
81 after the First Sino-Japanese War. Where the writer intended to go with this short statement is also unclear, but at least we can tell Akutagawa’s disagreement with the Theory of the Yellow
Peril, since he noted that he “almost had to agree.” This links back to the first night in Shanghai when the narrator disliked being seen as one of the yellow faces, although in each of the social spaces, just as in all the other scenes discussed in this chapter, there surfaces a completely different set of power relations. With the twists in the final part of his journey, what we can be sure of is that the race question continued throughout his entire trip, and in his struggle with it we see neither an uncritical identification with the “White” nor an uncritical rejection of them.
Furthermore, in Akutagawa’s storytelling, race does not generate any final answer to a confirmed identity, but rather works as something through which the constant formation of the self can be thought of. I have attempted to show, in the foregoing, how this fluid process has been mapped as a movement through the surrounding social spaces that are experienced, measured, and told in
Travels in China.
The Construction of Race: Akutagawa’s Storytelling of Early 1920’s China
In the preceding sections, as a self-conscious reader of the travelogue, I have executed a reading of Travels in China based on two principles: First, the traveler/narrator in the narrative should not be completely equated with the writer outside the text; but neither is he a purely fictional character created in the writer’s imagination. Instead, the two images of the subject (i.e. the traveler/narrator and the writer) are intertwined closely, and they simultaneously bring the different time-spaces, in which they are constructed, into play. Therefore, secondly, the traveler’s stories must always be put back into the social spaces where those travels happened.
That is, his bodily movements should be taken into consideration as a continuum of those social
82 spaces he experiences, not as an apolitical account of his fixed subjectivity. We have examined ample excerpts from Travels in China, putting each of them back into its historical context and also into its relation to the preceding time-spaces. Tracking Akutagawa’s route in China from
Shanghai to the Lower and Middle Yangtze River, then to the Northern part of the continent, I strove to catch the flow of the traveler’s shifting sense of his own subjectivity as a response to the flow of power struggles involved in different social spaces. As the other side of the coin, such an operation also enables us to get an accurate sense of those time-spaces themselves, measured by the traveler’s bodily movements and changing subjectivity. As such, Travels in
China shows itself to be an extremely rich text for the current discussion. Although it is not a
“politically correct” narrative, especially given the writer’s often baldly negative comments on modern China—which may certainly be considered problematic by contemporary critics—it allows us to actually see China in the 1920s as a chaotic whirlpool in which domestic and foreign powers scramble for control, rather than a homogenous space like the stereotypical history of the country.
Race and racism are two key concepts that drive my analysis of the storytelling in Travels in China, although no scholars of Akutagawa seem to have taken this avenue. In the previous discussion, we have briefly touched upon the history of race and racism by referring to the birth of the two concepts, as well as to the exercise of them in Western societies before the twentieth century, which more or less relied upon claims about the physical features of other peoples. But like many other cases in the history of European colonialism and imperialism, in narratives of the
(semi)-colonial China such as Travels in China, the practice of racism usually goes beyond its most traditional sense as a lineage of biological characteristics, and often reflects struggles that exceed an opposition or a dichotomy between two different social or racial groups. My purpose
83 here is neither to judge nor to defend Akutagawa’s personal position by our contemporary demand for a sensitivity to racial equality. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, a moral judgment upon the writer might be able to well serve the goal of a typical sakkaron, but that is an approach that I have been trying to eschew in this analysis. Instead, I want to devote the last section of this chapter to a brief discussion of the issue of racism in the colonial context of East
Asia, in order to better conceptualize Akutagawa’s experience in 1920s’ China.
As many scholars of racism studies have warned us, the history of race and racism cannot be thought of outside the framework of colonialism and imperialism. In his book Colonial
Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert Young asserts that colonialism was “not only a machine of war and administration, it was also a desiring machine” that “continuously forced disparate territories, histories and people to be thrust together like foreign bodies in the night.”140 One of its notorious products is the modern concept of race. Young points out, “Race was defined through the criterion of civilization, with the cultivated white Western European male at the top, and everyone else on a hierarchical scale.”141 In his definition of race, Young highlights the connection between the degree of civilization (“the cultivated”) and the biological characteristics of a certain group (“the white Western European male”) that is indispensible in the racist logic; and this kind of logic is frequently invoked throughout the history of imperialism and colonialism. Akutagawa’s reaction to the “yellow face” in his 1921 trip, for instance, is a good example of perceiving the propagated notion of race in this way. Like Mori Ōgai in
Germany, or Natsume Sōseki in London, Akutagawa struggled with the “yellow” label affixed to the East Asian peoples throughout his stay in China. For him, such a label is necessarily embodied within skin colors and the degree of civilization, or modernization, of the
140 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 93. 141 Young 1995: 89.
84 multinational peoples he encountered. It is a logic internalized not only by those who are at the top of the racial hierarchy, but also by the peoples who have been forced to a lower position; and a pervasive structure that, as Frantz Fanon asserts in Toward the African Revolution, deeply modifies the social constellation and the cultural whole of modern society.142
Living in such a structure, Akutagawa’s struggle with the existing racial categories such as the “Yellow” and the “White” did not transcend the racist logic that always tries to position people in a racial hierarchy based on certain criteria, be it skin colors, physical strength, degree of modernization, or cultural superiority. But at the same time, his encounters with the multi- racial crowd in China proved beyond a doubt the inadequacy of those criteria. The question that arose in his anxiety as a Japanese traveling in semi-colonial China is similar to the one Michael
Keevak raises in his book Becoming Yellow: Who, or what, decides the color of a particular people? Keevak’s study of the “yellow” Mongolian race is a historical approach, in which he argues that three or four hundred years ago, because of their civilizations and willingness to adopt Christianity, the Chinese and Japanese were described as “White” in travel accounts and missionaries’ writings. Drawing on such writings, Keevak further demonstrates that they have also been given other colors such as “brown, red tawny, black, and swarthy,” or in later accounts as “dun, tanned, ashy, sanguine, olive, brunette, ruddy, and florid.”143 Keevak’s point can be supported by Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Of the Different Races of Human Beings (1775),” which is considered to be one of the earliest writings about race. In the essay, Kant announces his belief that “we only need to assume four races in order to be able to derive all of the enduring distinctions immediately recognizable within the human genus,” namely the White race, the
Negro race, the Hun race (Mongol or Kalmuck), and the Hindu or Hindustani race. He further
142 Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (trans. Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press, 1967), 36. 143 Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 31.
85 clarifies what he counts among the first category (i.e. the “White race”), “which is located primarily in Europe, I count also the Moors (Mauritanians from Africa), the Arabs (following
Niebuhr), the Turkish-Tataric ethnic tribe and the Persians, as well as all the other peoples from
Asia who are not explicitly excluded from it by the remaining divisions.”144 In other words, just as the Egyptians used not to be considered “Black,” peoples of East Asia were not associated with “yellow” from the beginning of the history of race; instead, they were considered to be
“White” at first. Kant’s theory of floating racial identities says that all human beings carry with them the same “seed” (from God), but the seeds are developed differently in different climates by different groups of people, and that is how different “races” came into being. But whether in
Kant’s theory of climate and race, or the idea that the Bible identifies White with purity and
Black with evil, or the belief that Asian people have mixed blood of the White and Black, the
“yellowness” of the East Asian has always been an ambiguous and problematic concept.
Modern science had fully validated the yellow East Asian only by the end of the nineteenth century with a negative connotation of that “yellow” color, such as danger or disease, because of the panic caused in Europe and the U.S. by the massive immigration of the Chinese and
Japanese; thus, the “Theory of the Yellow Peril” was created and popularized. As we read in the narrator’s rejection of the “yellow face,” in his “twisted feelings” as a citizen of the “colored empire,” and in his awareness of the “Theory of the Yellow Peril” in Travels in China, biological racism as such was never absent from the colonial history of East Asia, and the association of the
East Asian peoples with a yellow Mongolian race has indeed been internalized as a “scientific fact” for many people, including Akutagawa. But at the same time, his discovery of the
“honorary White” and the “degraded White” during his trip posed questions regarding the labels
144 Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Races of Human Beings (1775),” translated by Holly Wilson and Günter Zöller, in Anthropology, History, and Education (edited by Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87.
86 “Yellow” and “White,” affixed to the Japanese and the American, respectively. Most interestingly, Akutagawa acquired a critical sense of the problematic “yellow” Mongolian race and “white” Caucasian race not by going over historical materials as Keevak did, but by observing and experiencing race in the actual time-space of the colonial territory.
In Akutagawa’s perception of what he encountered in semi-colonial China, we find the complicity between culture and racism which has existed since the nineteenth century. This complicity is visible in his description of the Japanese as a race that will “immediately turn joyous” when they are overseas and see a cherry blossom, as well as in his judgment of a people by the degree of their cultural behavior, use of language, economic power, and so on. Although race is always a cultural construction, cultural racism deliberately makes culture one of the continuous characteristics inherited by a people. The narcissistic “theories about the Japanese”
(nihonjin-ron) that flourished in 1930s’ Japan, starting with Watsuji Tetsurō’s cultural typological study in Climate and Culture (Fūdo, serialized in the academic journal Shisō between 1928 and 1934), were products of such an interpretation of race that replaces biological characteristics, such as skin color, size of skull, diseases, etc., adopted in nineteenth-century physical anthropology, with cultural behaviors. The connection between the cherry blossom and a Japanese identity that Akutagawa made also belongs to this category. As Naoki Sakai defines it, the modern concept of race is “a social system of recognition, constructed through a regime that would immediately make the connection between the very limited bodily characteristics of an individual and his or her belongingness to certain community.”145 Making cultural behaviors part of one’s “bodily characteristics” and examining them in the “social system of recognition,” cultural racism is essentially a theory that offers a form of “scientific knowledge” about mankind,
145 Naoki Sakai, “Reishizumu sutadeizu e no shiza” [Some Points Addressed to Racism Studies], in Reishizumu sutadeizu josetsu [An Introduction to Racism Studies] (Ukai Satoshi, Sakai Naoki, Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Lee Hyoduk ed., Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2012), 15.
87 which is not much different from the explicit theorizations of race that began in the late eighteenth century. But such a system of recognition really makes “culture,” as Balibar sharply points out, “a symbolic structure of inequalities tendentially reproduced in an industrialized, formally educated society,”146 in which an implicit racism lies powerfully hidden but repeatedly reproduces itself from within.
Fanon’s study of the colonial history of South Africa and Europe in Black Skin, White
Masks suggests that society must also already be a racist structure,147 and in that sense, he is right when asserting that colonial racism is no different from any other kinds of racism. That said, representations of the colonial context like Travels in China undoubtedly enables us to see clearly how new racialized groups, as a “cultural, as well as a political, scientific and social construction,”148 are ceaselessly being created in the colonial everyday, and how racial boundaries are being drawn with cultural and linguistic criteria, among many others. In the
“craftiness typical of the colonial situation”149 represented in a city like Shanghai and its surrounding area in the 1920s, subtle accounts of such vivid activities become strikingly easy to find and shocking to read. The perspective for looking at racism in the colonial space that I propose in this chapter is not exactly the capitalist perspective, such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s, which emphasizes that racism normally includes an attitude of disdain for or fear of someone of another group as defined by genetic or social (i.e. religious, cultural, linguistic, etc.) criteria.150
As repeatedly stressed, to solve the “attitude” problem is not our most urgent task here. Rather, I strive to examine racism in Travels in China not as “a super-added element discovered by chance
146 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 25. 147 Fanon 1986: 72. 148 Young 1995: 87. 149 Naoki Sakai, Translation & Subjectivity: on “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 137. This expression is cited from Maeda Ai’s “Shanghai 1925,” in Toshikūkan no naka no bungaku [Literature in Urban Space] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1982), 371. 150 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 29-36.
88 in the course of investigation of the cultural data of a group,”151 but as a structure that modifies the social everyday. It is a true “total social phenomenon” that “inscribes itself in practices, in discourses and representations.”152 In the colonial situation, the operation of racism appears even more manifestative in the “discourses and representations” driven by flagrant power struggles.
Using race as a “method,” I track the practical relations Akutagawa formed with the social spaces he experienced in semi-colonial China, through which he also obtained a shifting sense of his own identity and subjectivity. Such practical relations are critically but forthrightly registered in Travels in China, just as in the works of many other Taishō and early Shōwa writers who visited China in the 1920s, including Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kaneko Mitsuharu, and
Yokomitsu Riichi. Although always presumed by the critical reader to be a representation of the experience of the “colonizer,” and with an imperialist “attitude,” these accounts in fact often end up disclosing a struggle on the part of the Japanese traveler for a tangible racial identity in the colonial context. Unlike Watsuji Tetsurō, who also stayed in Shanghai in February 1927 and witnessed its multinational, multi-racial, and semi-colonial situation but still observed “quietness” and “unexcitement”—which matched his categorization of the “Chinese absence of emotion”— from the faces of the Chinese,153 those writers could not easily establish a simple opposition between China and Japan as the colonized and the colonizer, or adopt a theory of national/racial identity inscribed and essentialized with stereotypes of cultural differences. Their works on semi-colonial China oftentimes present the traffic of racial or ethnical conflicts that exceeds the national boundaries between Japan and China.
151 Fanon 1967: 46. 152 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 17. 153 Watsuji Tetsurō, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study (trans. Geoffrey Bownas, Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1961), 126-127.
89 In those works, we can find someone like Yokomitsu Riichi’s character Yamauchi in
Shanghai (Shanhai, 1928-1931), who is stirred up by the racial confrontations and, turning to an
Asianist positionality, urges the “Asians” (i.e., the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indian) to unite against the “White Calamity” (hatsuka) using the “unique weapon” of Japanese militarism.154 In the same work, we immediately also see the resistance against such a positionality, not only from the Chinese, but also from the Indian. On the street of Shanghai that Yokomitsu describes as
“clashed with different races (minzoku),” we hear the White Russian prostitute, Olga, begging the Japanese man, Sanki, to bring her to Japan; but we also see the Japanese prostitute, Osugi, when followed by a coolie with his hair “in a queue,” panicking: “You’ve got me wrong. I’m not like that.” We are told again and again in those works about the Japanese man’s awkward position in the racial hierarchy in China and his feeling of being “scorned.” Exhausted from
“dealing with broken English,” and rejected firmly by their female compatriots who overtly claim that “Frenchmen are superior people,” they ask “why the only legs not permitted to enter the park from this gate were Chinese.” Like Akutagawa’s narrator, Yokomitsu’s character Kōya encounters the same kind of “twisted feelings” while competing with a Frenchman, an Italian, a
German, and an American for the dancing girl, Miyako’s, attention. In his analysis of
Yokomitsu’s Shanghai, Seiji M. Lippit summarizes, “The spaces of the colonial city…impose a consciousness of racial hierarchy on the Japanese characters.”155
Nothing gives us a clearer idea about the “twisted” Japanese man than the following paragraph about Kōya in Shanghai:
Women he had known in the past had always praised him by saying he was just like a foreigner. However, competing with foreigners by striving to come across as foreign did not work to his advantage with Miyako. He had shown up at
154 Yokomitsu Riichi, Dennis Washburn, Shanghai: A Novel By Yokomitsu Riichi (University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2001), 66. 155 Lippit 2002: 96.
90 her dance hall for ten days now, but her eyes always told him, “Oh, a Japanese. He can wait.”156
Judging from Osugi’s reaction to the Chinese man with a queue, the “foreigner” here can only be
Japan’s racial Other—the “White,” not the Chinese (or the Indian). As we can see in both
Akutagawa’s Travels in China and Yokomitsu’s Shanghai, those feelings are only the beginning, not the end, of their racial struggle in China. In those narratives of semi-colonial China, the body of the traveler is a territory, a space, and a representation of social reality that uses bodily differences (not limited to the physical ones) as its most frequent reference. As I submitted earlier, racism in its various forms becomes a major source of tension in those writers’ storytelling, consciously or unconsciously; and what this tension enables us to see about the chronotopic relations inside and outside the text is far richer than simply the narrator’s certain
“attitude.” Interestingly enough, however, as this kind of tension disappears from the majority of postwar Japanese narration about semi-colonial China, especially in the 1970s, we are led into a completely different kind of time-space of China that is always haunted by the “unsayable” experience.
156 Yokomitsu and Washburn 2001: 51.
91 Chapter 2
Through the Lens of the “Other”: Hayashi Kyōko’s Storytelling of the
Shanghai Alley-Community
Moving on from prewar narratives of semi-colonial China like Akutagawa’s, which were written in the 1920s and 30s, this chapter will take up works dealing with the same semi-colonial
China—indeed the city of Shanghai in the 1930’s and 40’s—written in postwar Japan. In doing so, I do not mean to be inattentive to the heterogeneity of those “prewar narratives” in any sense; neither do I intend to argue for a homogeneous political entity called semi-colonial China. Often grouped as “the Taishō and early Shōwa Japanese writers who visited China” in studies of cultural history of Japan and China, the prewar writers who included Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kaneko Mitsuharu, and Satō Haruo, in no sense belonged to a unified literary, aesthetic, or political “school.” However, as authors who spent time in the same geographical space and immersed themselves in the same “contact zone” called Shanghai, these writers shared a similar interest in establishing ongoing relations with what Akutagawa had called the “international crowd” (sekaitekina gunshū) they encountered there. It is also in Mary
Louise Pratt’s sense of the “contact zone” that we may consider semi-colonial China as a common subject for those writings. Yet, as I will show, depending on the author and the specific historical circumstances within which a work was produced, what Pratt describes as “conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”157 in those “contact zones” could be described quite differently. That is, although semi-colonial China was a political entity with ambiguous national boundaries and constant jostling for control between ruling powers,it
157 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.
92 undoubtedly also constituted a continuous world characterized by the “spatial and temporal co- presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect.”158
The “international crowd” appearing in Japanese narratives of the 1920s and early 30s
China remained the subjects of the “contact zone” even after the Japanese defeated the other foreign powers and took control of China from 1937 and onwards. The White Russians and the
Jews became owners of the stores in the neighborhood market; the British who continued to stay in the English-style streets started to manage the property for the Japanese; and the Indians were put in all the Japanese ethnic schools as gatekeepers. However, it is my observation that unlike the depictions by Akutagawa discussed in the previous chapter, the “spatial and temporal copresence” of the “international crowd” is an aspect seldom foregrounded in postwar narratives of semi-colonial China, which instead become firmly organized around a direct opposition between Japan and China, and often allude to the struggles with the question of war responsibility that faced writers in postwar Japan.
In this chapter, our spotlight will be on the postwar Japanese writer Hayashi Kyōko
(1930- ) and her autobiographical novel Michelle Lipstick159 (Missheru no kuchibeni, 1980) set in the Shanghai international settlement in the 1930s and 40s. Born in 1930 with the name
Miyazaki Kyōko, Hayashi moved to Shanghai with her family the next year, when her father assumed a position at the Shanghai Branch of the Mitsui Corporation (Mitsui bussan). After living in the Shanghai international settlement for fourteen years, Hayashi was repatriated to
158 Pratt 1992: 7. 159 As Hayashi indicates in the story, “Michelle” is the brand name of a lipstick (made in France) that the second daughter of the protagonist’s family brings back home as a souvenir from her school trip to Northern China in 1943. In all the English studies of this work that I have read so far, “Missheru no kuchibeni” is translated as “Michelle’s Lipstick.” I will use “Michelle’s Lipstick” when I cite those works, but use “Michelle Lipstick” in my own translation.
93 Japan with the other female members of the family in late February, 1945,160 and five months later was exposed to the atomic bombing in Nagasaki and miraculously survived. Thus Hayashi rose to fame as a writer of atomic-bomb literature (genbaku bungaku) in 1975, when she won first the New Writer’s Prize and then the more prestigious Akutagawa Prize of that year with her debut novel Ritual of Death161 (Matsuri no ba, 1975), a story told by a first-person narrator who is a Nagasaki bomb-victim. “Concerned with the theme of physical degeneration and psychological demoralization in the hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivors) subculture”162 as nearly all her later genbaku stories would be, Ritual of Death has always been the most thoroughly studied work of Hayashi, as well as being seen as a representative work of atomic-bomb literature of Nagasaki. Also a winner of several other major literary awards including the
Kawabata Literary Prize (awarded in 1984) and the Tanizaki Prize (awarded in 1990), Hayashi has become well known in postwar Japan for her extraordinary experience with and miraculous survival of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, as well as for her firm and persistent criticism of nuclear power in Japan. As “Japan’s most prominent atomic-bomb writer
160 Hayashi recalls in “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka” [Shanghai and August Ninth] (in Ōe Kenzaburō, Nakamura Yūjirō, Yamaguchi Masao ed., Bunka no genzai: chūshin to shūen [The Present of Culture: the Center and the Peripheral], Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981, 101-121) that she left Shanghai in March 1945. In another story published in 1977 and entitled “Echoes” (“Hibiki”), she confirms, “In March of that year [1945], we had left Shanghai and returned to Nagasaki.” (Hayashi Kyōko and Margaret Mitsutani, “Echoes,” in Manoa, Vol. 13, No. 1, Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War, Summer 2001, 2) But in an essay published in 2001 entitled “Shanhai-jin to Shanhaikko” [Shanghai Natives and Children of Shanghai], Hayashi changed her statement to “the end of February in 1945” (Ajia yūgaku, Issue 33, 2001a, 92), which matches the “Hayashi Kyōko nenpu” [The Chronological Record of Hayashi Kyōko] edited by Kanei Keiko in Hayashi Kyōko’s Shanhai/Missheru no kuchibeni: Hayashi Kyōko chūgoku shōsetsu shū [Shanghai/Michelle Lipstick: Selections of Hayashi Kyōko’s Novels about China] (Tokyo: Kōdansha bungeibunko, 2001b) and the one by Kuroko Kazuo in Hayashi Kyōko ron: Nagasaki, Shanghai, Amerika [A Study of Hayashi Kyōko: Nagasaki, Shanghai, and America] (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, 2007). There are also scholars such as Ōhashi Takehiko who still believe that Hayashi left Shanghai in “March 1945” (Ōhashi Takehiko, “Majiwari to shunkyo: Hayashi Kyōko ‘Missheru no kuchibeni’ no sekai,” in Nihon bungei ronsō, ed. Katayama Tōru, Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 2003, 208). Watanabe Sumiko explains in her paper “Hayashi Kyōko no shigoto” [On Works of Hayashi Kyōko] (Daitō bunka daigaku kiyō, Vol. 42, 2003.9, 90) that the repatriation took as long as a month, and Hayashi and her family arrived in Isahaya in “late March,” 1945. In a very recent interview with Hayashi, however, both dates are mentioned (Hayashi Kyōko, Kan Tōsei, Miyazaki Saeko, “Intabyū: Hayashi sensei ni kiku” [Interview: Listen to Hayashi Kyōko], in RIM, No. 33, 2010.9, 28, 31). 161 Matsuri no ba was first translated into English under the title Ritual of Death by Kyōko Selden in Japan Interpreter, 12-1, 1978. 162 John Whittier Treat, “Hayashi Kyōko and the Gender of Ground Zero,” in Paul Gordon Schealow and Janet A. Walker ed., The Women’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing (Stanford University Press, 1996), 268-269.
94 alive today,”163 Hayashi’s works are widely read and well received by sympathizers of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, critics of nuclear power and Japanese imperialism, and
Japanese feminists, mostly as the testimony of a survivor of the atomic-bombing.
Hayashi’s most productive years occurred after 1975, when she published intensively about the events of August Ninth, and occasionally about her childhood in the semi-colonial
Shanghai. Her personal experience of living in the US in the mid-80s and the increasing visibility of the issue of radioactive waste in postwar Japan, especially after the dreadful 2011
Tōhoku earthquake, brought new force to her argument of the criticism of nuclear power, which still takes August Ninth as its entry point. Hayashi’s identity as an atomic-bomb survivor or a hibakusha has for decades continued to inspire her writings about nuclear power and serve as the exclusive theme in the majority of her works. Among the few exceptions are Michelle Lipstick and Shanghai (Shanhai, 1983). For the first time with the serialization of this work, China, or
Shanghai, became another recognized “origin” (genten) of Hayashi’s literature among her readers and critics.
Michelle Lipstick was published as a book by Chūō kōronsha in February 1980, thirty- five years after Hayashi’s last experience of Shanghai. But very similar to Takeda Taijun’s
Shanghai Firefly (Shanghai no hotaru, 1976) that we will examine in the next chapter, it first came out as a series of short stories in the journal Umi between January and November 1979.164
Starting with the first story “The Alleyway of the Old Lady” (“Rotabu no roji”), Hayashi revisited her childhood memories of Shanghai and reproduced them in a total of seven short stories: “The Alleyway of the Old Lady,” “Crowded Street” (“Muregaru machi”), “A Road in the midst of Flowers” (“Hana no naka no michi”), “The Whangpoo River” (“Kōhokō”), “Cultivated
163 Treat 1996: 262. 164 Hayashi 2001b: 435.
95 Land” (“Kōchi”), “Michelle Lipstick” (“Missheru no kuchibeni”), and “The Projection Screen”
(“Eishamaku”). Unlike the first six stories that all came out in Umi, the last one “The Projection
Screen” was published first in another journal Fujin kōron in December 1979. These seven stories were then organized chronologically into a book entitled Michelle Lipstick. Its storyline starts in 1938, when the young protagonist returns to their home in Shanghai after the Battle of
Shanghai (dainiji Shanhai jihen, or songhu huizhan, 1937) was over, and ends in 1945 after her hibaku (exposure to atomic bomb) in Nagasaki and her return to the mother’s hometown Isahaya in the Nagasaki Province. As such a coherent plot is provided in the book, centered on the everyday life in the protagonist’s childhood and adolescence.
Readers might notice that the storyline of Michelle Lipstick matches Hayashi’s personal history to a very high degree. In fact, it is many critics’ observation that Hayashi’s works are rarely fictional but mostly autobiographical. Hayashi once admitted in commenting on her debut novel Ritual of Death that she had tried to write about August Ninth “as truthfully as I could”165 in that work. Of the often emphasized “truthfulness” in Hayashi’s so-called “atomic-bomb literature,” John Whittier Treat asserts, “One cannot easily absolve Hayashi Kyōko of the charges that her work is, in fact, often monotonously autobiographical, relentlessly morose, and petulantly indignant.”166 Similarly, Hayashi’s experience of Shanghai is almost always taken to be in a similarly self-disclosive mode, so much so that in his “Commentary” (kaisetsu) on
Michelle Lipstick, Kawanishi Masaaki uses Hayashi’s maiden name “Miyazaki” to refer to the family of the protagonist depicted in the story, without giving any explanation.167 Although this is not going to be my approach to Hayashi’s works, I can certainly see that those stories are
165 Hayashi 1981: 117. 166 Treat 1996: 266. 167 Kawanishi Masaaki, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Hayashi 2001b: 419. Hayashi herself does not mention the family name of the protagonist in the novel.
96 always told in a realistic way rooted deeply in the writer’s personal experience of the past.
During my conversations with Hayashi in December 2012 at her residence in Zushi, Japan, too, some of the details about Shanghai described in her works came up from time to time as part of her memories of her own past.168 I was also able to identify traces of her Shanghai time in the layout of her kitchen and the content of her diet, which reminded me very much of the life of the young female protagonist “I” in Michelle Lipstick.
That being said, however, in the current discussion Michelle Lipstick will be addressed as an autobiographical novel, as the subtitle of the book’s 2001 version “Shanghai/Michelle
Lipstick: Selections of Hayashi Kyōko’s Novels about China” (Shanhai/Missheru no kuchibeni:
Hayashi Kyōko chūgoku shōsetsu shū) suggests. That is, we will look at Hayashi’s stories of
Shanghai in Michelle Lipstick as something based on her personal experience (and hence,
“autobiographical”); but my effort here is not to restore a “truthful” record of the writer’s past out of those narratives, as a typical reader of the autobiography or the memoir usually has the tendency to do. With the understanding of the arguably obvious fact that Hayashi created the protagonist of Michelle Lipstick out of a personal history of her young self, we will also see abundant textual evidences showing that it is never a faithful projection. Consequently, I hold that we should consider that those stories are told in a strategic way by narrative techniques, constructing the “past” into a time-space from a particular perspective.
In the “Author’s Words” added to the 2001 version of Michelle Lipstick, entitled
“Through the Eyes of the Children, as It Is,” Hayashi writes, “The amorphous time (mukei no toki) settled under the name of the ‘past’ is, for me, not the reproduction of memories, but rather
168 I visited Hayashi Kyōko’s home in Zushi on December 22, 2012 with three other scholars: Shimamura Teru, Wang Zhongchen, and Murakami Yoko.
97 seems to be something constructed and shaped into a form.”169 Judging from the rest of the essay, to “construct and shape” the past into a form would seem to mean revisiting the hazy memory of her childhood with her adult consciousness in order to make sense of those things that were not clear to her when she was a child. Her sense of “constructing the past” is concrete and particular rather than abstract and universal: it always points to her present as a hibakusha, manifesting an intuitive impulse to understand her own past before the insuperable trauma of hibaku. That present for Hayashi never moves away from August Ninth. In this sense her approach to the past is not premised on an understanding of the need for constant reconstruction and renewal in the present, as would be the case in, for example, a Benjaminian or Marxist sense.
Invoking Hayashi’s statements, this chapter will bring other elements of the present into play and take this construct as a social product, rather than the work of an autonomous consciousness that aims to rebuild the individual’s internal, apolitical world.
In other words, what I want to focus on in this chapter is not retrieving historical information about the young Hayashi in the 1930s, but instead on how the writer Hayashi in the
1970s fashioned the “amorphous time” she spent living in the semi-colonial China into something with a form, and what she wanted her readers to experience through this construction of the “past.” Put another way, I will ask the following questions: Why did Hayashi decide, after thirty-five years of silence, to publish Michelle Lipstick to share her experience of the semi- colonial Shanghai, to which she had never returned since leaving in the spring of 1945? What story is Hayashi trying to tell through the character of this young protagonist, in the form of an autobiographical novel? In her storytelling about Shanghai, as compared to her genbaku literature, what kind of different time-space does Hayashi unfold? How does her approach to
169 Hayashi 2001b: 413-416. This book is a republication of Shanghai (Chūkō bunko, 1987) and Michelle Lipstick (Chūō kōronsha, 1980). Page numbers of Shanghai and Michelle Lipstick quoted in this chapter will all be referring to the page numbers in this book.
98 that particular Sino-Japanese history reflect the postwar reality that she was facing in late 1970s and early 1980s Japan? I raise these questions in an attempt to understand Michelle Lipstick in relation to the social spaces surrounding Hayashi in postwar Japan.
If “August Ninth” is a temporal trope in Hayashi’s genbaku stories that defines the very specific relationships between spaces of similar traumatic experiences, the roji (alley-community) in the international settlement can be taken as the spatial “origin” in Hayashi’s stories of
Shanghai through which China and Japan are represented over time. Compared to Nagasaki’s central position on the Japanese mainland during the Pacific War, the roji is from start to finish a peripheral place. Critics of Michelle Lipstick usually take the roji as a “symbolic space” that suggests how it was possible to live an apolitical life in wartime; and for them, this possibility can be proven with reference to Hayashi’s personal experience in the past. At the same time, such critics firmly believe that this is exactly what Hayashi intended to convey in stories like
Michelle Lipstick: daily life during wartime in a uniquely harmonious world primarily inhabited by children and women, whose depiction can be read as a resistance against the dominant, masculinist narratives about the war produced by male writers.
Emphasizing the crucial spatial and territorial significance of the roji in Michelle Lipstick,
I will argue that the roji in this story is a deliberately constructed wartime “reality,” and that its time-space is configured through the double-layered structure of the reticent child narrator’s consciousness. The “double-layered structure” (nisō kōzō)170 is a term I borrow from Kan
Satoko, who has analyzed how we find in Michelle Lipstick an intertwining of the writer’s memories of the prewar Shanghai and her post-August Ninth consciousness. From my perspective, however, this “double-layered structure” does not merely signify the co-existence of
170 Kan Satoko, “Hayashi Kyōko no Shanghai, onnatachi no roji: ajīru no gensō” [Hayashi Kyōko and Shanghai, the Roji of the Women: Fantasy of the Asyl], in Ritsumeikan gengo bunka kenkyū, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2008.2), 64.
99 memories from those two distinct times, but also reveals how Hayashi’s reproduction of prewar memories is shot through with responses to the changed social and political environment of the
1970s. Moreover, we cannot overlook the fact that all this is presented through the child narrator’s gaze. Since children are always a minority, and hence a kind of “Other” in any society, we may say that in Michelle Lipstick, everything is presented through the eyes of the “Other,” in such a way that the peripheral becomes a location that seems to be central. In other words, it is a story “through the eyes of the children,” as Hayashi herself asserts in the title of the “Author’s
Words” in Michelle Lipstick and as many critics have also stressed. But to me, what is being watched through the eyes of this reticent “Other” in the periphery can never be an account of the past “as it is” (ari no mama).
Wartime Shanghai’s Alley-community: A Constructed “Reality” in Michelle
Lipstick
Michelle Lipstick begins with a tense confrontation between Japanese and Chinese civilians in the Shanghai international settlement in 1938. In the opening scene, the young protagonist “I” comes back from Nagasaki with her mother and three sisters; the father, who has also returned after the Battle of Shanghai arriving a few days earlier than the rest of the family comes to pick them up at the Shanghai port. Three rickshaws are hired for the six members of the family to go through a very dangerous area—an “extraterritorial area” (chigaihōkentekina machi)171 that shelters the coolies and many anti-Japanese activists—before arriving at their home on Mile Road located in the South tip of the Hongkew (Hongkou) District.
171 Hayashi 2001b: 204.
100 While Hayashi does not explicitly identify it as such, Hongkew was the northern sector of the old international settlement and an area that had gathered more and more Japanese residents since the Shanghai Incident (daiichiji Shanghai jihen, or yierba shibian, 1932). Japanese had begun to live in Shanghai before the 1930s. Kawanishi Masaaki suggests in his “Commentary” on Michelle Lipstick that the earliest Japanese residents appeared in Shanghai around 1863, after an Asian Hall (tōyōkan) was established in the Hongkew quarter. In 1868, the first Japanese store in Shanghai, the Tashiroya, was opened; and the Japanese consulate was founded in
Shanghai in 1872.172 According to historical records, Japan established diplomatic relations with the Qing government based on the “Treaty of Tientsin” signed on September 13, 1871, in Tianjin by the Japanese Minister of Finance Date Munenari and the Qing Viceroy of Zhili Li Hung-
Chang. The treaty includes eighteen articles, among which Article VIII that states: “At the ports appointed in the territory of either Government it will be competent for the other to station
Consuls for the control of its own merchant community.”173 Hence, starting in the following year (1872), Japan began to send consuls to Beijing and other port cities in China, including
Shanghai, whereas the Qing government did not start sending consuls to Tokyo until 1876.
When the Japanese realized that the Article VIII of the Treaty of Tientsin in fact also guaranteed the Qing government extraterritorial rights in the Japanese port cities, unsurprisingly, they revised the Treaty. But the Treaty was undoubtedly signed based on a mutual recognition of the
International Law by the two countries, given that the Qing government’s body of foreign affairs
(the Zongli yamen, established in 1861) published a Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s
Elements of International Law (“Wan guo gong fa,” translated by the American Presbyterian
172 Hayashi 2001b: 418. 173 Treaties, Conventions, Etc., between China and Foreign States, Vol. II, Second Edition, published by Order of the Inspector General of Customs, 1917, 510.
101 missionary W.A.P. Martin) in 1864, and in 1868, the Meiji government announced that it would act in accordance with the International Law.
As we know from the history of the Shanghai concessions, after the 1937 battle, the international settlement became more obviously split into several parts.174 The Hongkew quarter that had long been occupied by the Japanese, also referred to as “Little Tokyo,”175 literally became a Japan town in the old international settlement, bordered by the Whangpoo (Huangpu)
River and a portion of the Soochow (Suzhou) Creek. Within the borders, however, the family of
“I” does not pick a typical neighborhood as most Japanese residents of that time would do. Their community is located on the border of the zone of Japanese influence along the banks of the
Whangpoo River, from which “I” can see the rest of the old international settlement that accommodates other foreign powers, including the British and the American, on the opposite
(northwest) side of the River. Still protected by the Japanese police forces and the imperial armies, this area is a more complex environment where there are unidentified people going in and out and moving furtively around the labyrinth-like alleyway (the roji) on a daily basis.
Research on Shanghai at that time shows that the Hongkew Market, a major commercial center, was only about four to five minutes’ walk away from the child narrator’s residence (four to five minutes for a seven-year-old, that is). That was a site where all kinds of commodities drew an enormous number of people every single day. Critic Kuroko Kazuo asserts that the father chose to live in a neighborhood like the roji because of his preference to be close to foreigners: he had grown up in a family that ran a Western restaurant in Nagasaki and spoke
174 For a historical account of Shanghai under Japanese occupation in the 1930s in particular, please see Riwei Shanghai shi zheng fu [Shanghai City Government Under Japanese Control] (ed. Shanghai shi dang an guan, Hong Kong: 1986-1988). 175 For historical records of Japanese communities in Shanghai, please see Bickers and Henriot 2000, especially Christian Henriot’s article “Little Japan in Shanghai: An Insulated Community, 1875-1945” included in this book. But I hesitate to agree with Henriot on his conclusion that “the Japanese do not seem to have left an explicitly visible legacy” in Shanghai (146).
102 good English.176 To me, that is an imprudent assertion. In the story, the young protagonist’s father holds a post in the “M Corporation” (M bussan), a company that controlled at least three piers on the east bank of the Whangpoo River that were connected by the company’s private launches.177 Hayashi indicates the nature of the collaborative relationship between the workplace of the father and the Japanese military authorities in her description of several supporting characters, who frequent the protagonist’s home. Among them are spies who work for the military authorities, traders who smuggle wartime supplies through the black market, and so on. The father works in an office located in the international settlement, which was itself a whirlpool of the post-1937 black market in Shanghai. In short, the M Corporation seems to be a company responsible for retaining and transporting wartime supplies for the Japanese imperial armies and civilian population. It seems more logical to conclude that a post in such a company would require the father to remain active in various networks involving local powers and the black market.
Moreover, historically speaking, the Mitsui Corporation (Mitsui bussan)—generally considered by Hayashi scholars as the prototype of the “M Corporation” in Michelle Lipstick—is the first general trading company (sōgō shōsha) in Japan. It was established as a pro-government corporation in 1876, and played the role of a “statutory company” (kokusaku kaisha) in Japan’s imperial history by contributing greatly to the economic growth of modern Japan starting in the
Meiji era. As Sakamoto Masako points out, in the war to ensure the movement of goods and supplies, the range of activities that companies like Mitsui Corporation were involved in went beyond business activities and ventured into war-related ones, such as providing military
176 Kuroko 2007: 99. 177 Hayashi 2001b: 301.
103 supplies and maintaining local stability.178 Interestingly enough, Hayashi’s father worked in the
Coal Department (sekitanbu) of Mitsui Corporation during the 1930s and 1940s in Shanghai.
Tim Wright points out in his studies of the supply and demand structure of Shanghai’s coal market that in its relation to the history of the development of coal industry in modern China, no new mining rights were granted to non-Chinese companies after they had gained rights to some of the traditional sites during the period between 1895 and 1903. This made the decrease of the foreign share inevitable as the coal industry expanded.179 At the same time, however, as Tsukase
Susumu argues in his studies of the coal market in wartime Shanghai, the demand for coal continued to increase as Japan shifted to a wartime regime after the Manchurian Incident in 1931.
Yet because of the Nanking government’s policies of developing the domestic coal industry and raising import tariffs on coal, shipping Japanese coal to Shanghai became even more difficult.180
Thus, the stakes in the battle over coal resources in 1930s Shanghai became particularly heightened both from the perspective of economics the political and military senses as well.
Japanese businessmen like Hayashi’s father and the father of the protagonist in Michelle Lipstick were forced into a situation in which they had to seek collaboration with China’s indigenous capital in order to “provide military supplies and maintain local stability.”
In the roji, the protagonist’s family rent their house from a Chinese landlady. Her son belongs to the richest class in Shanghai and is the employer of all the coolies working at the port; her grandson turns out to be both an enthusiastic student of the Japanese language and an anti-
Japanist. Most of the other residents are relatively well-to-do (hikakuteki yūfuku na) people,
178 Please see Sakamoto Masako’s Zaibatsu to teikoku shugi: mitsui bussan to chugoku [Zaibatsu and Imperialism: the Mitsui Corporation and China] (Kyoto: Mineruva shobō, 2003) and Kasuga Yutaka’s Teikoku nihon to zaibatsu shōsha [Imperial Japan and the Zaibatsu Trading Companies] (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2010) for more discussions of the history of Mitsui Corporation. 179 Tim Wright, Coal Mining in China’s Economy and Society 1895-1937 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 197. 180 Tsukase Susumu, “Shanghai sekitan shijyō o meguru nitchū kankei: 1896-1931” [The Sino-Japanese Relations around the Coal Market in Shanghai, 1896-1931] in Ajia kenkyū, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1989.9), 68.
104 Hayashi writes, including a British property manager who works for the landlady, a family of a native police officer who works at the Municipal Council, and so on. A few houses away from theirs, however, there is also a brothel run by a White Russian prostitute frequently visited by
Japanese sailors and others. Thus, the residents in the roji are, to a certain degree, a mix of nationality, ethnicity, social class, and professional occupation. In other words, compared to the unitary communities of Japanese in Hongkew, or the M Corporation’s company housing, the roji is a multinational, multicultural, and multi-class world; and precisely because of that, it is also an appreciable source of information for the father and his company in the wartime.
Even though the roji is not as safe as the unitary Japanese communities, given its location it is still under the protection of the Japanese police forces and at the same time is included in the network of the powerful local capitalists. In that sense, the residents there are in a much better position compared to most people living outside the concessions. In 1938 Shanghai in general, to borrow the journalist and literary critic Tachibana Takashi’s words, “one could find everywhere political or economical traffic between equally shrewd people, among whom it would be impossible to know who might be your friend or foe. Every single day one heard about murder, abduction, blackmail, outrage, robbery, and fraud, just like he or she has the daily meals.”181 Being constantly under the threat of danger, the area that the three rickshaws run through between the Shanghai port and the roji in the opening scene of Michelle Lipstick is, surprisingly, referred to by Hayashi as an “extraterritorial area.” We know that in the context of
(semi)- colonialism and imperialism, it is the concessions that are usually described as
“extraterritorial” or exceptional. That is, they are the anomie of a sovereign state, where the foreign powers are exempted from all the local laws and policies, and are ungoverned; a
181 Tachibana Takashi, Tanaka kakuei kenkyū zen kiroku, ka—rokkiido jiken kara Tanaka taiho made [A Complete Record of Tanaka Kakuei Studies (Vol. 2): from the Lockheed Bribery Scandals to the Arrest of Tanaka] (Kōdansha, 1980), 227. For more discussion on terrorism and urban crimes in Shanghai between 1937 and 1941, please see Wakeman 1996.
105 circumstance that Giorgio Agamben calls “degree zero of the law.”182 As a matter of fact, as late as the time when the extermination of Jews in Europe started in the late 1930s, the international settlement in Shanghai was still “an open city, requiring no papers or visas of any sort for entry” for foreigners.183 This fact is stressed over and again in the memoirs of the Jewish refugees about the Shanghai international settlement, which was then their only hope for life after having been rejected [for] a visa to enter any of the European countries.184 But at the same time, the history of the concessions shows that such a state of exception in the Shanghai international settlement does not necessarily indicate an absence of law, because there still existed different sets of orders created and promulgated by the powers dominating the concessions. Compared to those, the truly “extraterritorial” area that Hayashi describes is, on the other hand, a place caught in between the zones of foreign and local influence. Close to the port and at the borderline of the
Japanese quarter, it shelters people from the lower strata of society and all kinds of “suspicious” activities. This is one of the key locations in Michelle Lipstick where phantoms of danger and violence appear, a stateless place that is not in a state of exception but is defined by a permanent absence of any kinds of law.
The fact that the family “returns” to the roji after the Battle of Shanghai indicates that its members have been living there long before Japan officially took possession of Hongkew in
1937, probably since before 1932. Hayashi acknowledges at the very beginning of the novel that after the outbreak of the Shanghai Incident in 1932, the young protagonist’s family also evacuates to Nagasaki in order to avoid the war. Yet, they appear to be extremely nervous
182 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51. 183 David Krauzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: the Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938-1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976), 20. 184 For some examples, please refer to Sigmund Tobias’s Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), and Liliane Willens’s Stateless in Shanghai (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2015). Visas were not necessary for entering Shanghai then, but the Jewish refugees still had to obtain a visa issued by a third country to be able to leave their own countries. Please see studies of Ho Feng-Shan and Sugihara Chiune, two diplomats of the Republic of China and Japan in Europe at the time, for details of their courageous and humanitarian actions of issuing thousands of (transit) visas to help the Jews escape Europe.
106 outside the zone of Japanese influence. Hayashi describes the tension between the Japanese family and the Chinese rickshaw pullers when they pass through the area in great detail and summarizes this tension as gishin anki—“Suspicion begets monsters,” for both sides. The father gets on the first rickshaw and the youngest daughter sits on his knees. Following the father are the two elder daughters, who get on the middle one. “I” then rides on the last rickshaw with the mother. Before leaving the port, the father tells the elder daughters and the mother to “shout loudly” if they see the rickshaw pullers attempting to go a different direction. After leaving the port, he “looks back from time to time” in order to make sure the rest of the family are following.
Whenever the father does that, the two elder daughters on the middle rickshaw would also look back and check on the mother. The mother would, whenever the distance between the second and the third rickshaws goes beyond three meters, kick the board of the rickshaw and demand the puller to “go faster,” using the Shanghai dialect. Before approaching their home, the father gives the rickshaw puller a direction that is in fact a detour to the back door of the house, for the purpose of hiding where they actually live. Once they are in the “town of the tonyannin” (tōyōjin, or “Japanese” in the Shanghai dialect),185 however, “I” very sensitively catches a sign of nervousness in the rickshaw pullers as they start to run faster. They look more stressed, as if they could not stand being there for any longer. The protagonist’s family, on the other hand, feels much more at ease when the rickshaws enter the roji. Hearing the sound, their neighbors come out of their houses and warmly greet the returning family. The mother then replies in
Japanese, “Tadaima” (We’re back), and adds, “It’s good to see everybody safe.”186
185 In Michelle Lipstick, Hayashi glosses the term tonyannin as tōyō oni [devils from the East], and describes how the Chinese neighbors would still call the family of the young protagonist “devils from the East” despite the fact that they are getting along well. Kawanishi Masaaki adopts this explanation in the “Kaisetsu” of Michelle Lipstick, too. In fact, tonyannin in the Shanghai dialect simply means tōyōjin, or “Japanese.” It has no negative connotations. This is probably a misunderstanding caused by the similar pronunciations of “nin” in the Shanghai dialect and the “oni” in Japanese that Hayashi picked up from people in the roji when she was little. 186 Hayashi 2001b: 211.
107 The return of this Japanese family to the roji, acknowledged by the mother with the suggestive “tadaima,” could be taken as a declaration of the speaker’s status as the “colonizer” in
1930s’ China. Despite this unmistakable status of the narrator and her family, however, Michelle
Lipstick has seldom been taken up in postcolonial criticism. Instead, it obtains its alibi from the fraternity of the Japanese family and their Chinese neighbors in their everyday life, centered on the women and children. In Michelle Lipstick, the children in the roji all get along very well, and the young protagonist feels that the Chinese mothers treat her as if she were their own daughter.
Over the years, the protagonist’s family has always been treated with goodwill by the Chinese community, especially by the Chinese landlady Rotabu. In return, the mother has been repeatedly asked to go to the authority to serve as the Japanese guarantor of an arrested neighbor or their employees, including Rotabu’s grandson, Shin, who is on the short list that the authority keeps for suspicious anti-Japanists. According to “I,” it is Rotabu’s protection that allows the family to stay in the roji without being chased out by the British property manager after the
Battle of Shanghai. Proud of the “streets of the British culture” (watasitachi no bunka no machi)187 in the Hongkew, the manager dislikes the Japanese in particular, because, unlike the wealthy Chinese tenants of the roji who usually have no prejudice against adopting a westernized lifestyle, the Japanese prefer to change the entire setting of the house as soon as they are allowed to move in. Taking a chance after the war in 1937, the manager has successfully chased all the other Japanese families out of the roji but only failed with the protagonist’s family because of
Rotabu’s intervention. As “I” recalls, normally Rotabu would leave all the renting business to the hands of the manager, but she would hate to see the mother leaving, for she likes her for
187 Hayashi 2001b: 213.
108 being friendly (kōiteki) with the Chinese and caring little about one’s nationality when socializing with the neighbors.188
The roji in Michelle Lipstick, adjacent to the “extraterritorial area” that Hayashi describes in the beginning of the story, is a world surprisingly harmonious and stable. A paragraph that
Hayashi added to the “Author’s Words” of the collection of Shanghai stories years later might best describe this: “[Although the Japanese were living there as the rulers (kunrin suru nihonjin),] our relationship with the Chinese neighbors in the roji was not much different from the one in any Japanese communities. We lived together in peace and quiet (heionna seikatsu).
And it was not just we. Most of the Japanese got along well with the Chinese people.”189 The roji is shaped into a refined space, or an “Asyl,” to borrow Kan Satoko’s term,190 centered on two leading female characters—the Chinese landlady Rotabu and the protagonist’s mother—and people, mostly women, who contribute to the “affinitive relationship” (shinwatekina kankei)191 in the neighborhood. This “Asyl” is certainly nothing like a commune where the oppressed class can be accommodated, embraced, and emancipated; in fact, the spotlight of the novel is never on the poor and the homeless. Rather, it provides an allegoric paradigm of the ordinary everyday, a location where national and ethnic conflicts may be transcended because it belongs to the peripheral, embodied in the women and children.
Many critics believe that what stands behind this harmonious relationship between the two leading female characters is their power, that is, Rotabu’s capital and the mother’s status as a
Japanese living in Shanghai. Taking the roji in the story as Hayashi’s (partly idealized) memories of her childhood reality, they consider Michelle Lipstick to be a source of examples of
188 Hayashi 2001b: 211. 189 Hayashi 2001b: 416. 190 Kan 2008: Title. 191 Ōhashi 2003: 212.
109 women who managed to have high visibility and true power under certain circumstances even during the war. For instance, while pointing out that the roji is an image created by Hayashi out of her nostalgia for the old hometown Shanghai, Kawanishi Masaaki still appreciates it as a
“world that narrates about immaculateness” (muku katari no sekai), the place where Hayashi spent the wartime years.192 In Kawanishi’s interpretation, it was a world centered on the
“Godmother”193 of the roji—the landlady Rotabu, who is the symbol of power throughout the story; and a world upheld also by the voluntary collaboration of Hayashi’s mother. In other words, for Kawanishi, the roji is a unique space where the two mothers, representing the two countries, were able to coexist peacefully in spite of their opposing positions defined by the war.
Similarly, Kan Satoko also takes up the representations of women in the roji, and conceptualizes the “affinitive relationship” among them with a solidary identity connected through their gender, as indicated in the wordings of her paper’s title —“the roji of the women.”194
Without neglecting the important role that gender and sexuality generally play in
Hayashi’s works, especially her genbaku stories,195 however, here I contend that there are two points of difference about the female perspective of Michelle Lipstick from many existing criticisms of the work, including the abovementioned ones. First, I hold that we should never assume that any works engage a serious discussion on gender and sexuality merely because they were written by female writers or because they are about women. In other words, a work written by a woman or about women is not necessarily or spontaneously feminist. May-yi Shaw’s argument on the “unique perspective of the female” in Michelle Lipstick, for instance, jumps too
192 Hayashi 2001b: 426. 193 Hayashi 2001b: 418. 194 Kan 2008: Title. 195 For an introduction to studies on this topic, please see, for example, Du Shansha’s “Hayashi Kyōko no bungaku ni okeru faminizumu no kōsatsu” [A Feminist Reading of Hayashi Kyōko’s Literature] (thesis, Shandong University, 2010); and Li Qiuju’s master “Faminizumu shiten de Hayashi Kyōko no bungaku ni okeru jyoseizō e no kōsatsu” [An Feminist Investigation of the Images of Women in Hayashi Kyōko’s Literature] (thesis, Hebei University, 2013).
110 quickly to the fact that Hayashi was the only female among those Japanese writers who had traveled to Shanghai during the war.196 Shaw’s conclusion is false, for the appendix of the study by Zhao Mengyun that Shaw relies upon includes books and essays about Shanghai published by other female Japanese writers who had either traveled to or lived in China during the war, such as Mori Michiyo197 and Yoshiya Nobuko.198 But more importantly, for me, to state that Michelle
Lipstick is a work written by a female writer, or that its storyline is centered on the female characters’ everyday life, is too obvious and easy and does not make the conclusion that the roji should be considered a unique world under the control of powerful women in any sense more self-evident. Precisely because Kawanishi, Kan, and Shaw all take Michelle Lipstick as
Hayashi’s autobiography, their articulation about the solidarity or collective identity of the neighbors in the roji very easily slips into a discussion of Hayashi’s personal past in semi- colonial China and then links to her positionality in the postwar discourse of wartime literature dominated by male writers.
Secondly, reading the story against its wartime backdrop, I find an interesting paradox between the powerful presence of these women in the story, on the one hand, and their powerlessness when confronting the war on the other. And this paradox is why I would not follow the argument of the preceding scholars who claim that the roji exemplifies womanpower in wartime. I can agree that women are deliberately foregrounded in this story and represented
196 Zhao Mengyun, Shanghai bungaku zanzō: nihon-jin sakka no hikari to kage [A Literary Afterimage of Shanghai: Flashes and Shades of Japanese Writers] (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 2000), 24-26. In her book, Zhao discusses six male writers who had written about the semi-colonial Shanghai—Taoka Reiun, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Muramatsu Shōfū, Yokomitsu Riichi, Hino Ashihei, and Takeda Taijun. But I could not identify the place(s) where she points out that Hayashi Kyōko was the only female Japanese writer who had traveled to and written about wartime Shanghai as May-yi Shaw claims in her dissertation (Shaw, “Wartime Diaspora: The Reworking of Cultural and National Identity Among Chinese and Japanese Writers in 1930s and 1940s Wartime China,” Harvard University Dissertation, 2010, 86-87). 197 Mori Michiyo (1901-1977) was a novelist and poet who married to Kaneko Mitsuharu, also a novelist and poet. For a more detailed introduction to Mori’s work about Shanghai, please refer to Zhao Yi’s article “Mori Michiyo no Shanghai: Kaneko Mitsuharu to hōrō no tabi e” [Mori Michiyo’s Shanghai: A Vagrancy with Kaneko Mitsuharu], in Surugadai daigaku ronsō, No. 34 (2007). 198 Please see Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973, a Japanese novelist), Senka no hokushi/Shanghai o yuku [Going through North China and Shanghai in the War] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1937).
111 in an affinitive relationship. And as we can see, even the title “Michelle Lipstick” bears an obvious indication of gender. But that does not make Michelle Lipstick a chant of powerful or autonomous women. Rather, the fact that these women are consistently absent at the scene of the battle throughout the war makes the “central” role they play in the day-to-day circumstance almost ironic. As mentioned earlier, the protagonist’s mother is sent back to Nagasaki with the girls each time before the outbreak of the battles. Similarly, the landlady Rotabu, considered by
Kawanishi to be the “Godmother” of the roji, is sent to the safety of the countryside before the battle in 1937. The protagonist and her family come back to Shanghai about ten months after the outbreak of the battle and Rotabu a year later; but they all return to the roji escorted by the male members of their families. In the case of Rotabu, her escort would be her son, who is not only as rich as she is but also has more political capital s as the employer of all the coolies at the port.
Hayashi shared her own experience of the evacuation of women at wartime in a 2010 interview. She said that when the defeat of Japan became obvious in February 1945, the Mitsui
Corporation ordered its staff to send all their dependents back to the homeland before the war started. Hayashi’s parents were so eager to send the girls back to Japan as early as possible that they ended up buying the boat tickets on the black market, because, Hayashi recalled, “they knew what could happen to women in the state of war.”199 In her stories of wartime Shanghai, too, the women in the family are always the first things to transfer whether Japan wins (in the
Battle of Shanghai) or loses (at the end of the Pacific War). And as long as they are in being moved, they are in hands of men and the wartime regime, not of their own. Their “peaceful” everyday becomes the symbol of manpower instead of womanpower, because only by keeping their women safe, can men overcome the fear of loss, castration, and humiliation that women’s
199 Hayashi, Kan, and Miyazaki 2010: 31.
112 presence always reminds them of. It is from this perspective that I argue that the roji in Michelle
Lipstick embodies precisely the eternal and complete loss of power in women during the wartime.
Critics preoccupied with the idea of the “Godmother” of the roji have claimed that
Michelle Lipstick is a story about women and that the father is absent.200 Although these scholars are right, to a certain degree, about the minor impression that the fatherly characters give in the story, I argue that despite their limited presence in the plot, their power pervades the everyday life of the roji. Kawamura Minato asserts that the protagonist’s father is nobody but “a civilian working in a trading company” and that her family is “matriarchal.”201 But our previous discussion of the M Corporation suggests that Kawamura’s assertion about the father is not well founded. And it is my observation that in Michelle Lipstick, although not always in the spotlight, the father is always there, protecting the family at each crucial moment highlighted in the story.
This includes their return to the roji, the young protagonist’s unexpected injury, the fire panic on
December 8, 1941, home meetings with visitors from Japan, and so on. Even when Rotabu runs to the mother asking for her help because a fake Japanese policeman has shown up at their house to arrest Shin for an anti-Japanist charge, the mother’s first reaction is to reject this request, because, she says, her husband “is not home yet.”202
In other words, while constructing an image of the peaceful alley-community centered on the female, Hayashi has to allow the male in the roji to also retain an active profile because, although kept low-key and sometimes unsaid, they still play an important role called the
“protector” in wartime. Sometimes this profile is better shown in the supporting male characters, including those who would sacrifice women to serve their own political agenda. A colleague of
200 Inoue Satoshi, “Hayashi Kyōko to Shanghai: sono ‘sei’ to ‘shi’ o chūshin ni” [Hayashi Kyōko and Shanghai: on her “life” and “death”], in Kaishaku, No. 54 (2008), 52. 201 Kawamura Minato, “‘Shanhai’sareta toshi: itsutsu no ‘Shanhai’ monogatari” [The “Shanghai”-nized City: Five Stories of “Shanghai”], in Bungakukai, Vol. 42 (1988.11), 269. 202 Hayashi 2001b: 231.
113 the protagonist’s older sister named Hamada, for instance, risks the eighteen-year-old girl’s life when he asks her more than once to hide some confidential documents and dispose of them for him. In the story, the oldest daughter of the family is offered a job in the father’s network and starts to work in “F Company” in Spring, 1942. There her responsibilities mainly include the investigation of the resistance forces on Chiang Kai-shek’s side, especially the investigation of industrial equipment and the ideological orientation of the laborers.203 The “F Company” is located in the second floor of the “Shōkin Building” on the Bund,204 which is the Shanghai
Branch building of the old Yokohama Specie Bank, a bank founded by the Japanese government in 1880 that played a significant role in Japanese trade with China.205 From there we can roughly guess what the “F Company” does, although it remains unarticulated in the story. Since the oldest sister ends up bringing those documents home and burning them with her mother, who is as panicked as the daughter when she finds out about the sensitive information secretly passed into her young daughter’s hands, this does not happen completely outside the roji. Rather, it establishes a connection between the roji and the outside political world, in which the female is still put in a position that is far from being “powerful.”
As the story unfolds, it becomes more and more evident that what has been constructed in the roji is at most merely a superficially powerful and autonomous space for the women. In the story, from time to time, Hayashi overtly switches the question of the gender boundary to the one about the national boundaries, where the reason for the powerlessness of women can be attributed to the state. In the episode of the fake Japanese policeman, for instance, Hayashi writes, after the man has been chased away by the mother,
203 Hayashi 2001b: 310. 204 Hayashi 2001b: 309. 205 For more discussion about the activities of Yokohama Specie Bank’s Shanghai Branch in early 20th century, please see Wenxian Xiao’s paper “Yokohama shōkin ginkō Shanhai shiten (1900-13nen): Honkon Shanhai ginkō, Chaataado ginkō to no hikaku o tūjite” [The Yokohama Specie Bank Shanghai Branch (1900-13): A Comparison between the Hongkong Shanghai Bank and the Chartered Bank], in Keizaishi kenkyū, No. 14 (2010).
114 “Shin didn’t do anything suspicious. Please go to the military police and talk to them.” Rotabu begged Mother. “We’re in trouble.” Mother said, “In the case of the fake policeman, since it’s not involved with the authority, we were able to take care of it easily. But next time with the military police, we will be dealing with the state (kuni).” To be able to save Shin, they must have evidence that can prove his innocence. “Can we prove it?” Mother asked. “I can prove it!” Rotabu swore, pressing her chest. “That won’t help much.” Mother said. “What should we do, then?” Rotabu asked. “I don’t know. Until the military police takes action, there is nothing we can do.” Mother said. “Not even though you’re Japanese?” Rotabu asked. “Not even though I’m Japanese.” Mother answered.206
After this conversation, the young protagonist recounts how the two mothers stand silently next to each other, with their eyes looking empty, just like the Chinese people who have been stopped behind a cordon. The sense of emptiness and powerlessness they have when confronting the state is brought up again at the very end of the story by another mother-and-son pair. The older son of a Japanese family living in Shanghai, addressed as “Tsuda’s older brother,” joins the army in China around 1943 and is put in jail after the defeat of Japan. The young protagonist and her mother run into the Tsudas at a movie theater in Isahaya, after the girl has been exposed to the atomic bombing in Nagasaki and is suffering from its aftereffects, and “Tsuda’s older brother” has become completely wordless. Questioning what all this is about, the mother of Tsuda says,
“How can we ever understand what the state is thinking (okuni no koto)?”207 At the end, it is precisely the “protection” of the state that leads to the young protagonist’s unfortunate hibaku in
Nagasaki. Together with the boy’s victimhood, it demythologizes the illusory masculinity of the state and proves the failure of the presumed gender structure in the empire’s imagination. This tension is always embedded in the text of Michelle Lipstick, which, in spite of the harmonious and peaceful picture of its everyday, is indeed a struggle between the state and the individual— men and women—during the war.
206 Hayashi 2001b: 238. Emphasis added. 207 Hayashi 2001b: 386. Emphasis added.
115 Therefore, to summarize, I do not take the high visibility of women in the roji as a sign of womanpower in the wartime; nor for me, is the roji is a location of female solidarity. Rather, the women and the “affinitive relationship” among them are not only the manifestation of the power status of the men standing behind, but are also sustained by the latter. In other words, the female gender in this story is not the subject of, but an entrance to the time-space of the world in the roji.
Because of my different interpretation of the gender politics in this story, what Kan Satoko calls the “crack” (kiretsu) in the solidarity of the women of the roji is thus a crack in the Japanese nationality, regardless of gender. In her paper, Kan focuses on a Japanese prostitute, who works at the brothel located about four or five houses away from the protagonist’s home, as someone naturally different from the mothers in the roji. This character appears when the young protagonist, the five-year old “I”, is injured while playing tag with the other children in the neighborhood. She is then carried to the nearest house—the yard of the brothel—for first aid, and there, she and her father run into the Japanese prostitute, who tries to speak to the father in
Japanese but get completely ignored. “I” hears her voice, and sees her lower body, but fails to see her face because of the angle.
This Japanese prostitute is described in great detail under the name of “Okiyo” in other works of Hayashi, such as “Echoes” and “Kōsa;” but in Michelle Lipstick, she remains a nameless and faceless existence throughout. The only clue given about her in that story is a brief sentence in Japanese coming from a distance and addressed to the father: “Sir, isn’t that blood?!”
Judging from the mother’s objection to letting the children play in front of the brothel, and also from the images of Japanese prostitutes in Hayashi’s other works, Kan then considers the being of this Japanese woman in Michelle Lipstick to be an immanent crack of the collective identity shared by the two mothers and the other women. She asserts that while maintaining the
116 “solidarity” among the roji women on the surface, the young protagonist’s mother in fact never stops to ruthlessly exclude “that kind of woman” (anna onna) like the Japanese prostitute from the family-oriented roji.
For me, however, the exclusion of the Japanese prostitute points to something that goes beyond gender solidarity, as the exclusion does not just come from the mother, but the father also completely ignores her for multiple times. Neither is the exclusion directed to “that kind of woman” in general, given that the owner of the brothel—a White Russian prostitute—not only has a name and a face in the story, but also accepts the father’s gratitude for her help after the young protagonist’s wound has been taken care of. Contrastively, the nameless and faceless
Japanese prostitute in Michelle Lipstick can be identified only by the few Japanese words she has said; and precisely because of that, she seems to have triggered a feeling of shame among her compatriots, both men and women. Like the Japanese prostitutes in so many other writings about the gaichi such as Tanizaki Junichirō’s Memoirs of Shanghai (Shanghai kenbunroku,
1926), the most difficult challenge that they have to face in the empire’s overseas territory is not sexual oppression, but the risk of losing their status as Japanese. In Memoirs of Shanghai, the nameless Japanese dancer that Tanizaki meets at a café in the international settlement bets him for a sexual relationship in exchange for taking her back to Japan, a request that is, of course, rejected.208 Similarly, in Hayashi’s “Kōsa,” “Okiyo” is one of the very few Japanese prostitutes who would work at a public brothel and who are willing to deal with the Chinese coolies— people whom even the “Osugi” in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai would reject, as briefly touched upon at the end of last chapter. In “Kōsa,” considered by her fellow Japanese—the protagonist’s
208 Tanizaki Junichirō, “Shanghai kenbunroku” [Memoirs of Shanghai] (1926), in Tanizaki Junichirō zenshū, Vol. 10 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1967), 556-558.
117 mother in “Kōsa”—as “a national disgrace” (kokujyoku),209 “Okiyo” is excluded from the
Japanese community, and has to line up with the Chinese to get her vaccine shot.210 In other words, these women are not just expelled from the patriarchal family system, but also deprived of the possibility of establishing a relationship with the Japanese men—the only mediation through which they can obtain a relationship to the state. Seen in this light, the Japanese prostitute in Michelle Lipstick can be considered a “crack” in the imaginary solidarity of the
Japanese nationals rather than gender identity. In the story, she is visible as a Japanese only in the eyes of a five-year-old: when the young protagonist asks her parents if the woman they have run into at the brothel is Japanese, the only answer she gets is, “Well…” (saa).211
This peripheral space called the roji—“peripheral” because it was marginalized from
Japanese communities in other areas of Hongkew—is a well-constructed stage not just for the women, but also for all its residents. If “August Ninth” in Hayashi’s genbaku stories connects various locations through their relations to an unchanging reference point of time, then the roji is constructed into an integrated space where various people’s wartime experiences merge together and interpenetrate. Among the “various people” who actually lived in Hayashi’s alley- community, however, only certain kinds appear in Michelle Lipstick as the roji residents. Here, I am not using the term “constructed” merely in the sense that all memories are necessarily representations of the past and therefore are also social products of the present. Rather, I want to also emphasize that in this particular text, the roji is a deliberately constructed space rather than a place that accommodates the writer’s wartime experience “as it is,” which can be easily proved by an inter-textual reading of Hayashi’s works. For instance, according to Inoue Satoshi’s research, Hayashi’s father was actually living in company housing most of the time and only
209 Hayashi Kyōko, “Kōsa,” in Giyaman bīdoro (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978), 167. 210 Hayashi 1978: 168. 211 Hayashi 2001b: 253.
118 came back to the roji twice or three times a month to check on the family.212 In Shanghai
(Shanhai, 1983)—a travelogue of Hayashi’s 1981 trip to Shanghai, she reveals that her entire family had actually stayed at the Mitsui Corporation Housing next to Pier One in Pudong (the
East side of the Whangpoo River) for a year or two until Spring 1941.213 However, in Michelle
Lipstick, the readers are under the impression that the whole family of the protagonist has lived the seven years between the Battle of Shanghai and the end of the Pacific war consistently in the roji, without any interruption. In Shanghai, Hayashi also recalls that it was from the windows of their home at the company housing that she usually watched the ships coming into the Shanghai port when she was a child; but in Michelle Lipstick, when the young protagonist looks out over the landscape of the Whangpoo from the “windows,” Hayashi always puts her behind the windows of the kids’ room of their home in the roji.214
In fact, if we take a look at those autobiographical narratives of Hayashi’s personal history, we realize how she reshaped the roji into a consistent, harmonious wartime “reality” by eliminating the discordant episodes from the picture. Hayashi tells us in Shanghai that the professions of her neighbors in the roji ranged from “carpenters, owners of pork poultry, police of the Municipal Council, concubines of the grocery store owner, and so on.”215 But among those neighbors, only the family of the police makes its presence in Michelle Lipstick because of the friendship between their daughter “Omi” and the young protagonist, hence they appear naturally as a good neighbor. In her essay published in 2001 under the title “Shanhai-jin to
Shanhaikko” (Shanghai Natives and Children of Shanghai), Hayashi tells her readers that there was an instance after the Shanghai Incident when her sisters were playing jump rope in the roji,
212 Inoue 2008: 53. 213 Hayashi 2001b: 120. 214 Hayashi 2001b: 307. 215 Hayashi 2001b: 106.
119 when somebody threw a bag of human feces at the girls from the second floor of a house nearby.216 Such hostile neighbors of course never appear in the roji in Michelle Lipstick, just as the one or two years of the family’s absence from the roji is never mentioned in the story. The landlady’s granddaughter, Popo—a girl who was two or three years older than Hayashi and was one of her playmates in the roji—is also left out of this story. The same essay, “Shanhai-jin to
Shanhaikko,” includes Hayashi’s confession that when she was living in the roji, Popo was her only “natural enemy” (tenteki), because she hated all Japanese including Hayashi and would look at her with a squint eye each time when they pass by each other.217 Popo came up again in an
2010 interview, when Hayashi described Popo as an “impertinent” (namaiki) child who made her feel she should not have been living in the roji.218 Unsurprisingly, however, neither Popo nor the guilty neighbors ever play any roles in the roji in Michelle Lipstick.
Through the Eyes of the Reticent Child Narrator
In the previous section, I offer an overview of the general chaotic state in Shanghai under the control of multiple foreign powers, especially Japan, in the late 1930s. Under those circumstances, however, the roji in Michelle Lipstick from 1938 to 1945 appears to be a particularly peaceful and harmonious time-space, represented in the “affinitive relationship” that is woven into the everyday life of the women and children living there. This makes an interesting contrast to the wartime backdrop of the whole story. Consequently, I have been striving to make two points about this peculiar image of the roji. First, I consider the harmony in the roji to be a constructed “reality” of wartime, which means that the author has tailored this place where we can find peace, love, and friendship in the truculent wartime, by foregrounding
216 Hayashi 2001a: 94. 217 Hayashi 2001a: 95-96. 218 Hayashi, Kan, and Miyazaki 2010: 29.
120 certain symbolic episodes while cutting off the discordant ones. Second, I contend that this peaceful, lovely, and friendly time-space called the roji in Michelle Lipstick is not a representation of the womanpower that “performs” into the wartime everyday, as many critics have argued. Frequently the roji in Hayashi’s Shanghai stories ends up becoming the alibi for
Japanese imperialism in China, that is, it becomes a place where such a topic can easily be brushed aside. But that representation is not established through the subjectivity of the women in the roji. As pointed out in the previous discussion, since they are constantly under the protection of men and the state, they are the object rather than the subject of the roji—ironically, it is precisely this kind of “protection” that transfers the young protagonist to the time-space of the
Nagasaki on August Ninth.
Interestingly enough, in Michelle Lipstick, the full image of the roji as a harmonious world is perceived through the eyes of the reticent child narrator, i.e. the young protagonist, not the mothers. If the women are the entrance through which the reader enters the world of the roji, the child narrator’s gaze is their eye to look into this world. Through such a gaze, the issues of gender and nationality under colonialism are refracted and represented in such a way in Michelle
Lipstick that suggests a broader vision of the Sino-Japanese national conflicts or that at least brings up possibility of transcending the national boundaries in a narrative of the Sino-Japanese war. Simply put, it is the reticent child narrator in the story that makes it possible for a time- space like the roji to exist in a wartime narrative without provoking any sense of incongruity among readers. May-yi Shaw, in her analysis of Michelle Lipstick, argues that the Japanese writers who had traveled or lived in China during the war and who wrote about semi-colonial
Shanghai “all use the lens of the adults to focus on the glamorous, sensational, or disharmonious
121 aspects of Shanghai,”219 with the exception of Hayashi. Whether or not Hayashi was the only one, Shaw is right to pin down the peculiar lens of the children through which the story unfolded.
Living in wartime, the children in the roji are of course not completely insensitive to issues such as race and ethnicity. For instance, the landlady’s grandson Shin, a college student, and the child narrator and her sisters would shout to each other “Tōjō [Hideki] is bad!” or
“Chiang Kai-shek is bad!” when they had a fight.220 They also seem to have a very accurate sense of the difference between tonyannin (Japanese) and tsunkonin (Chinese). But overall, in
Michelle Lipstick Hayashi strives to keep the children in the roji as aloof from the war as possible. The child narrator, for example, is always insulated from the violence of the war. This does not just refer to her evacuation to Nagasaki with her mother before each of the battles, but is also the impression she leaves in her everyday life. Historically speaking, as Edward M. Gunn points out in his study of occupied Shanghai, there were no more decisive or full-scale military operations after 1937.221 After the Battle of Shanghai and by 1941, Shanghai, especially its
French and the British concessions, experienced a short time of relative prosperity and autonomy, or a state of “quasi normalcy” as Christian Henroit and Wen-hsin Yeh call it.222 It was a time when Shanghai was called the “solitary island,” or gudao. Cut off from European cities that were busy trying to avoid war in Europe or prepare for it, the concessions in Shanghai observed a blooming black market brought by the huge number of the refugees seeking for protection during the war. Firmly controlled by the Japanese and their Chinese collaborators, Hongkew, too, was free from any more major battles. In the story “Kōchi” in Michelle Lipstick, the child narrator observes that between 1939 and 1940, the street fighting in Shanghai ends and the battlefront
219 Shaw 2010: 86-87. Emphasis in the original. 220 Hayashi 2001b: 228. 221 Edward M. Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937-1945 (Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1980), 1. 222 Christian Henroit, Wen-hsin Yeh, “Introduction,” in In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation (Christian Henroit and Wen-hsin Yeh ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.
122 moves to the hinterland of China.223 However, Shanghai was not completely free of small-scale military operations. Only a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the
Japanese forces in Hongkew “invaded the international settlement”224 by crossing the bridges over the Soochow Creek. On the Whangpoo River, there was also fire from the Japanese forces.
“At dawn on December 8, 1941,” the French historian and Sinologist Marie-Claire Bergère has written, “the Japanese ships opened fire on the last British gunboat still at anchor on the
Whangpoo, the Petrel.”225
In Michelle Lipstick, however, the child narrator only recalls hearing about this incident from her mother. Woken up by a panic caused by a fire that has broken out at Zhapu Road and
Wuchang Road (close to the Bund) one night, the family goes to the roof to make sure that the situation is under control. There, the mother tells the children that the fire reminds her of what she saw from the same rooftop when the Japanese cruiser Izumo226 attacked the Petrel and sank it to the Whangpoo River at dawn on December 8.227 However, the conversation about the fighting on December 8 is immediately interrupted by the scene of the fire and this ends up being the only place in the whole story where the incident is brought up. Just as what we find in many other places in Michelle Lipstick, the child narrator only gets to hear vaguely about all the events, instead of witnessing it with her own eyes. And we learn that all she notices about the beginning of the Pacific War that broke out in December 1941 is that the French, British, and American cargo boats have suddenly disappeared from the Whangpoo River and that the flags flapping on the top of the buildings along the Bund have been quickly changed to the Hinomaru flag.
223 Hayashi 2001b: 332. 224 Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity (Trans. Janet Lloyd, Stanford University Press, 2009), 288. 225 Bergère 2009: 299. 226 Historically, Izumo was an armored cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy that had played an important role during the course of the total war between Japan and China since 1937. Although not mentioned in the story, on the same day (December 8, 1941), Izumo captured the United States Navy river gunboat USS Wake on the Whangpoo River, without a shot being fired. Ironically enough, on 24 July 1945, Izumo was sunk at dock in an American air attack on Kure, Japan. 227 Hayashi 2001b: 285.
123 Moreover, Hayashi adds that it is from behind the windows of the kids’ room in her house at the roji that the child narrator views the scenery of the Whangpoo River and the Bund in the mornings of that winter.228 The “kids’ room” thus naturally becomes a layer of “insulation” that keeps the world apolitical as in a child’s eyes; and because of that, the roji in Michelle Lipstick has frequently been considered by readers and critics as an argument that “the dividing line among issues such as races, ethnicities, traditions and customs is often hazy in the eyes of the children.”229
Haziness about political issues in the eyes of the children in Michelle Lipstick is not generally shared by Hayashi’s other stories of the war with a juvenile protagonist. In 1977, two years before the serialization of Michelle Lipstick on Umi, for instance, Hayashi published a sequence of twelve short stories on Gunzō, including one entitled “Echoes” (“Hibiki”) that is based on her own experience of Shanghai and her hibaku. The stories were put together and published under the title of Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Giyaman bīdoro) by Kōdansha in 1978.
Although Cut Glass, Blown Glass is generally considered to be a work dealing with the theme of genbaku, “Echoes” gives surprisingly rich details of the child narrator’s memories of the Izumo and the incident on December 8, 1941, in the Shanghai international settlement. But at the same time, precisely because it is a genbaku story, the child narrator here is shaped into a completely different figure, in sharp contrast to the aloof “I” in Michelle Lipstick.
For example, Japan’s attack on the international settlement in 1941 that is only lightly touched upon in Michelle Lipstick as hearsay, is described in detail in “Echoes.”
At three or four in the morning of 8 December, Shanghai was awakened by the sound of cannon fire. My mother ran upstairs to our room on the third floor, pulled open our dresser drawers, and got out our best clothes, normally reserved for special occasions. “Put these on,” she said, then added, “and stay under the
228 Hayashi 2001b: 307. 229 Shaw 2010: 88.
124 covers.” If we had to leave in a hurry, she wanted us to be wearing our most durable clothes. She followed my father up to the roof.230
Although still not able to directly witness the Izumo opening fire at the Petrel with her own eyes, the child narrator of “Echoes” gets to experience this memorable event. She and her sisters are awakened by their mother in the middle of the night and told to get ready to leave in a hurry and to “stay under the covers.” Later that day on her way to school, she further recounts witnessing a military cordon near the bridge: “A naval brigade, rifles with bayonets close at hand, stopped all
Chinese whose movements looked suspicious, questioning them one by one. Military guards patrolled the city in groups of four or five.”231 For critics of “Echoes” such as Lianying Shan, the details about the shots between the Izumo and the Petrel depict the child narrator’s face-to- face confrontation with the brutality of war in Shanghai that resonates with her experience of
August Ninth. By this, Shan articulates the author’s interconnected traumatic experiences of the empire’s colonial past, marked by both Shanghai and August Ninth. In particular, Shan points out, stories like “Echoes” uncover “Japan’s colonial violence in Shanghai that has been obscure in postwar Japanese consciousness.”232 In other words, while this kind of violence remains obscure behind the “windows of the kids’ room” in Michelle Lipstick, the child narrator of the roji in Hayashi’s genbaku stories, such as “Echoes,” holds a place that is much closer to the fighting and is therefore a victim exposed in a much more undefended way to the violence of war.
Moreover, this victimized child narrator also confesses having an emotional attachment to the Izumo, a cruiser that plays a significant role in her everyday life in “Echoes,” but is only a trifling existence in Michelle Lipstick. Guarding the Whangpoo River and the nearby areas
230 Hayashi and Mitsutani 2001: 8. 231 Hayashi and Mitsutani 2001: 8. 232 Lianying Shan, “Implicating Colonial Memory and the Atomic Bombing: Hayashi Kyōko’s Three Short Stories,” in The Southeast Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XXVII (2005). An electronic version of the article is available at http://www.uky.edu/Centers/Asia/SECAAS/Seras/2005/Shan.htm. Emphasis added.
125 under the Japanese influence, its presence gives the young protagonist of “Echoes” a sense of security.
The flagship of the Japanese navy’s so-called Chinese squadron, the Izumo was assigned to guard the Whangpoo. A decrepit old ship that had done its part in the Russo-Japanese War, it was heavy and broad-hipped, more like a mother duck than a fighting vessel. It was anchored at the Izumo Pier, on the Hongkew side of the river, which was under Japanese rule. … The Izumo was anchored directly across from the Customs House. If you drew a line connecting the ship, the bridge, and the Customs House, you'd have a long, thin triangle with the bridge at the right angle. The side from the Customs House to the Izumo slanted across the Whangpoo, and my house was along the straight line between the pier and the bridge. … I’d go there every day to sit and gaze out over the water. Boats from all over the world, of all shapes and colors, came into port. Most didn’t stay long, though. I'd go out to see the cargo ship that had come in the day before, painted a shade of green that brought visions of prairies, only to find it already gone. But the Izumo never moved. Whenever I went to the river, there it would be, clinging to the pier. As I watched it, I became convinced that certain warships were stuck fast where they were. But then one day, the supposedly immobile Izumo vanished. I was dumbstruck. The mere fact of its absence was surprising enough, but I had never realized what an enormous space it had filled in the river. The pier had lost its master, and the Whangpoo that stretched all the way to the opposite bank was far wider than I had imagined. The ship that had disappeared without a trace soon became the subject of rumors among my mother’s Japanese friends. Wondering if this meant war, they anxiously eyed the storm clouds over America and Japan and waited for the Izumo to return. Hearing the grownups talk in hushed tones made me nervous. I couldn’t really tell if my fears were rooted in the war that seemed likely to start any moment or in myself, but it was clear that one reason for them was that the ship was no longer there, proudly waving the navy flag.233
From these paragraphs, we learn that unlike the “I” in Michelle Lipstick who barely sees and talks about the Izumo, here in “Echoes,” watching the cruiser becomes part of the child narrator’s routine. She is very clear about its history and goes to the river to “gaze out over the water” everyday. The Izumo remains the only unchanged part of that scenery; and with its “navy flag,” it becomes a symbol of the state power that soothes the overseas Japanese residents’ fears.
Then the ship disappears suddenly from the Whangpoo only to return several days later from its
233 Hayashi and Mitsutani 2001: 5-7.
126 practice maneuvers up on the Yangtze River. The child narrator reports that upon the ship’s return, the insecurity of living in a foreign land caused by its absence inside her is gone. As such, throughout this short story, the child narrator appears to be a victim of “Japan’s colonial violence” in the sense that she is not only exposed to military operations, but also permeated with the militarist ideology of wartime Japan. Watanabe Sumiko interprets the term “echoes,” or hibiki, as the sound of the bombing from the Izumo on December 8, which, in her point of view, marks the real beginning of the war for Hayashi.234 Following Watanabe’s interpretation, we may then say that the war never really begins for the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick.
The child narrator in “Echoes,” unlike the narrator in Michelle Lipstick, is extremely sensitive to the changes in the surrounding political environment. After giving a lengthy account of an unfriendly encounter between an American gunboat, a British gunboat, and the Izumo at the pier that she and her sisters happen to witness one morning, the child narrator in “Echoes” describes the rumors of war between Japan and America becoming more realistic and concrete.
“War is coming! Shouldn’t you be leaving?!” my mother asked our Chinese neighbors, but they just laughed and answered, “No, we’re fine.” It was strange to see them so complacent. From their behavior, my mother and father concluded that it would be a while before the war started. Contrary to their expectations, the Pacific War broke out on 8 December of that year.235
We learn from the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick that her parents do not base their decision to evacuate or not on their neighbors’ behavior. Instead, as Hayashi indicates, the executive personnel of the M Corporation have always been able to grasp some insider information because of its close relationship with the military authorities and the government; and the father is always able to learn the news from his colleagues before it gets on the newspaper.236 Living under such a layer of “insulation,” the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick cannot and does not
234 Watanabe 2003: 95. 235 Hayashi and Mitsutani 2001: 7. 236 Hayashi 2001: 279.
127 need to be really engaged with the wartime violence of political conflicts between nations. In
Michelle Lipstick, whenever the neighbors talk about the battles between Japan and China, the conclusion of their conversations is always left up in the air and they always appear worried and sad about the possibility of a battle between the two countries.237 On the other hand, their reaction to the possibility of war between Japan and America is never mentioned.
The comparative reading of Michelle Lipstick and “Echoes” depicts two completely different child narrators in the two stories, one is aloof from the war and the other is not only physically more involved, but also emotionally more attached to her national identity. The purpose of my investigation is certainly not to find out how much Hayashi actually witnessed or remembered about the battles and incidents during her fourteen years in Shanghai. There is also no need to ask why she decided to put certain information into one story while leaving it out of another. Rather, our focus here is a question of “representation,” not only in the theoretical sense of the term, but also as a concept particularized and contextualized by our reading of the above texts. Since I take all of Hayashi’s Shanghai stories as narrative accounts (to borrow Hayden
White’s term) based on historical reality that has been tailored from various perspectives, our task here is not to seek the “truth” of the writer’s past, but to analyze her strategies of representing various time and space in wartime China in her work. Unlike Lianying Shan’s approach that takes Hayashi’s texts as part of the Japanese colonial memories and personal traumas, my interest is in the question of the representation and communication of her memories and personal traumas. I believe that the question of representation cannot be avoided when dealing with Hayashi’s stories that tell of those historical events buried in her memories of
Japan’s colonial past for the following two reasons. First, in theory, since all storytelling
237 Hayashi 2001: 216. To describe the neighbors’ state of mind, Hayashi uses a term annotated both in the Shanghai dialect and Japanese: shinkureshi, and kokoro ga kurushii [the heart being choked up with sadness]. But the term shinkureshi normally would just mean “tiring” or “tough,” and does not necessarily have anything to do with one’s state of mind.
128 involves language, it would make every narrative account of a personal experience simultaneously a social construct. And secondly, as we continue to engage more of her narratives published in different times and under different contexts, we will realize how Hayashi has tailored different stories out of her experiences about Shanghai and how her stories provide different images of Japan’s colonial past when told in those particular ways. Therefore, to me, the fact that Hayashi happened to be a young girl when she experienced events in Shanghai is far less suggestive than the fact that several decades later she decided to recount her experiences of
Shanghai through the lens of a young girl. In the former, Hayashi is a passive object of the
Japanese empire and a passive writer who is enslaved by her memories; whereas in the latter, she constructs the roji in her storytelling by deliberately disclosing what the young protagonist sees or remembers, as well as what she does not see or remember.
Here lies a second divergence between my approach and that of critics who believe “what they [the children] do see and pick up from the environment become acutely more interesting and perceptive.”238 My analysis of the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick certainly relies upon what she sees and picks up from the environment, but it is what she does not see and experience in wartime that is most telling about the fact that the roji of the past is a representation or a construct that should always be perceived as a narrative strategy of the writer and her responses to the present. Hayashi writes in “Shanhai-jin to Shanhaikko,” “Ignorance is the privilege that only children can have.”239 So is aloofness, and the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick appears to be aloof from the surrounding circumstances. For instance, the rickshaw pullers, who have frightened Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and “many Japanese women who have just disembarked” with their “sleazy appearance” at the Shanghai port, seem friendly and harmless in the seven-year-old
238 Shaw 2010: 88. Emphasis in the original. 239 Hayashi 2001a: 96.
129 girl’s eyes. After the mother rudely kicks the board of the rickshaw, the young girl notices that they smile out of suspicion and unease, and silently endure the extra pressure added to their shoulders by the action. Despite her extremely nervous and cautious parents and older siblings and the unfamiliar area full of possible danger, the child narrator submits that by looking at them, she cannot imagine them hurting “us Japanese” at all.240
The child narrator’s ignorance and aloofness is, first of all, one of the effects of the layer of “insulation” that comes along with the father’s post at the M Corporation, a fact that is never foregrounded. According to the story, the family has been living in the roji since 1932, so the father is apparently not one of the gold diggers who went with the tide of the times and flooded to the empire’s new overseas territory in late 1930s, as described by Uchiyama Kanzō (1885-
1959) in his memoir of Shanghai. A Japanese businessman who lived in Shanghai between 1913 and 1948, Uchiyama ran a bookstore (the Uchiyama Shoten) that carried primarily Japanese volumes and hosted many left-wing Chinese writers and activists—and it stood in front of the bus stop where little Hayashi and her sisters used to get on and off the bus to school.241
Uchiyama recalled that after Japan’s occupation of Shanghai in 1937, the 30,000 Japanese living in Shanghai soon increased to more than 100,000. The ferries from Nagasaki to Shanghai were always crowded with people who wanted to make a fortune in Shanghai, many of whom had to wait a week or ten days in Nagasaki to get a ticket.242 Christian Henriot’s observation is not much different from Uchiyama’s, in the sense that in his study of the Japanese community in
240 Hayashi 2001b: 205. Emphasis added. 241 Hayashi 2001b: 94. 242 Uchiyama Kanzō, Shanghai, Xiahai: Shanghai shenghuo 35 nian [Shanghai and Xiahai: the 35 Years Living in Shanghai] (trans. Yang Xiaozhong, Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 2012), 84. This translation is based on Uchiyama’s memoir of the thirty-five years he lived in Hongkew, Shanghai, entitled Sonhei, ōhei: Shanghai seikatsu sanjyūgonen (Iwanami shinsho dai 16, 1950). The numbers that Uchiyama provides do not match historical records, but his observation of the sudden increase of the Japanese population in Shanghai in the late 1930s is accurate. According to Wada Hirofumi, Xu Jingbo, Nishimura Masahiro, Miyauchi Junko, Wada Keiko ed., Shanhai no nihonjin shakai to medeia: 1870-1945 [Japanese Communities in Shanghai and Media: 1870-1945] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2014, 2), the Japanese population in Shanghai was 23,672 in 1937, and increased to 51,093 in 1939. It exceeded 30,000 for the first time in 1938.
130 Shanghai, he also points out that “commercial opportunities were the primary force that attracted tens of thousands of Japanese to Shanghai both before and after 1937.”243 Attached to the M
Corporation, the father in Michelle Lipstick is however depicted rather as one of the people responsible for leading the “tide.” The family even hosts five gold diggers from the parents’ hometown in Nagasaki after the Battle of Shanghai. The five men are referred to as the “dollar- buying men” (doru-gai no otoko), who came to Shanghai under the larger context of the worldwide recession in the 1930s. Considering the gap between the Mitsui “Dollar-buying
Incident” (doru-gai jiken) that took place shortly after the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident on September 18, 1931,244 and the major timeline of this story (after 1938), it is hard to claim a connection between the two. However, in the “Doru-gai no otoko” episode, the child narrator states that the five men from Nagasaki arrive in Shanghai in the winter of the year when she was five years old.245 So this could be around 1935. In any case, Hayashi’s point here is to confirm seeing a huge number of Japanese civilians, including the five men from the parents’ hometown, flooding into Shanghai for economic reasons in the 1930s. But interestingly enough, after all the articulation of the “doru-gai no otoko,” at the end of this episode, Hayashi added a warning to her readers that the child narrator’s memories are inconsistent (chiguhagu).246
As a dependent of her father, the child narrator never has to make the effort to survive a single battle in Shanghai while living there between 1931 and 1945. The story in Michelle
Lipstick starts when the family returns from Nagasaki after the 1937 Battle of Shanghai. A detailed description of the debris left behind by the battle sets the scene: empty market and
243 Bickers and Henriot 2000: 164. 244 The Mitsui “Dollar-buying Incident” (doru-gai jiken) was a scandal centered on the Mitsui zaibatsu. (http://www.mitsuipr.com/history/Taishō/dollar.html) The historian Louise Young summaries the incident as follows: “After insisting for years that Japan maintain a convertible currency, the zaibatsu bankers engaged in a fever of highly lucrative speculation against the yen in September and October of 1931, undermining the frantic efforts of the government to shore up the value of the yen in order to keep Japan on the gold standard” (Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, University of California Press, 1999, 189). 245 Hayashi 2001b: 241, 255. 246 Hayashi 2001b: 262.
131 streets covered with rubble, piles of sandbags used for the shooting, damaged windows and walls with countless craters, and traces of invasion in their residence. It was “the largest and longest battle of the entire eight-year War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945),”247 which broke out in Hongkew and Yangshupu (two quarters of the international settlement situated to the north of the Soochow Creek) and lasted three months, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 Chinese.248
“The gutters ran with blood,” reported the journalist Robert Guillain.249 In the story, Hayashi also explains the scale of the battle by citing a sequence of numbers from a book entitled
Conquer Central China (Chūshi o yuku),250 published in 1940 by the Publisher of War
Commemorative Albums in Central China (Chūshi jūgun kinen shashinchō kankōkai).
According to the book, China committed thirty divisions to the battle, each with 1,300 soldiers to withstand the attack of a division of 9,000 Japanese soldiers.251 It was no doubt a fierce battle, but the numbers all come from research that Hayashi did many years later before writing
Michelle Lipstick,252 not from the child narrator’s perception or experience of the war. In other words, it is the writer, not the child narrator, who is able to grasp the totality and the details of the battle of 1937. When the child narrator returns to Shanghai, her family only has to endure a
247 Frederic Wakeman, The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6. 248 The number of Chinese people killed and injured in this battle that Hayashi makes note in Shanghai is 250,000 (Hayashi 2001b: 53). But Wen-hsin Yeh believes that this number should be 300,000 (“Prologue: Shanghai Besieged, 1937-1945,” in Wen-hsin Yeh ed., Wartime Shanghai, London: Routledge, 1998, 2). Frederic Wakeman adds another 170,000 to this number for people who died between the battle of Shanghai and the time Nanjing fell on December 12, 1937 (Wakeman 1996: 6). On the other hand, the number of deaths and injuries on the Japanese side is said to be around 40,000 (Furumaya Tadao, “Nitchū sensō to Shanghai minzoku shihon” [The Sino-Japanese War and Shanghai’s National Capital], in Dentōteki keizai shakai no rekishiteki tenkai, gehen, ed. Hayama Teisaku, Abe Masaaki, Nakayasu Sadako, Tokyo: Jichōsha, 1983, 79). Wen-hsin Yeh believes this number should be 50,000 (Yeh 1998: 2). 249 Bergère 2009: 290. 250 According to Hayashi’s explanation, the “Central China” in the book covers the eight provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Henan, and Sichuan. 251 Hayashi 2001b: 331. Both Wen-hsin Yeh and Parks M. Coble point out that there were in total 200,000 Japanese soldiers sent to the battlefront in Shanghai (Yeh 1998: 2; Parks M. Coble, Chinese Capitalists in Japan’s New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 11). Frederic Wakeman also agrees on this number, specifying that the Japanese forces had only “six divisions and six independent brigades” (Wakeman 1996: 6). 252 Ōhashi Takehiko writes in his paper “Majiwari to shunkyo: Hayashi Kyōko ‘Missheru no kuchibeni’ no sekai” that Hayashi brought this book with her when they left Shanghai in 1945, and re-read it when writing Michelle Lipstick (Ōhashi 2003: 208).
132 brief food and energy shortage until “the market reopens”253—their house still stands, and the M
Corporation distributes dried meat and canned fruit to its staff everyday. The signs of the aftermath of the war in Shanghai is, for her, and in this particular story, no more than the occasional encounter with dead bodies lying on the streets; a nameless skull picked up by the
Japanese soldiers who were responsible for the safety of the Japanese children in their school trip to a former battlefield; an unexpected experience with a cemetery of Chinese civilians while working on a field in the suburb; and constant concerns about safety. These are certainly tough situations for a child to handle; and as Ōhashi Takehiko points out, the constant worries about safety threats only belong to a wartime sensibility.254 But at the same time, the child narrator in
Michelle Lipstick never has to experience and witness what Hayashi recalls in her 2003 essay
“Swing, Swing” (“Būranko, būranko”) about Shanghai. In this recent essay, Hayashi’s experience of the wartime violence is described more vividly and with more tension, and the writer considers herself to have experienced and witnessed more than enough of the miserable condition of the Chinese and their harsh revenge on the Japanese “colonizers” (shinryakusha) during the war in the midst of a normal everyday.255 We do not know what exactly Hayashi had encountered during the war, but for the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick, the war mostly exists only in the debris, traces, confidential reports, news, and people’s premonition of the war and fear afterwards.
As early as March 1943, the father has already heard about the possibility of Japan’s surrender from his colleagues coming from the Tokyo headquarters.256 Five months before the end of World War II, the female family members were sent back to Nagasaki, again in order to
253 Hayashi 2001b: 216. 254 Ōhashi 2003: 209. 255 Watanabe 2003: 94. 256 Hayashi 2001b: 278-279.
133 avoid any possible confrontation in the aftermath of the defeat of the Japanese empire in its overseas territory. Whenever the escalation of the war either actually involves Shanghai or has the possibility of involving Shanghai, the father will also evacuate, but he will always leave
Shanghai later than the rest of the family and return earlier, in order to make sure that not only is the political environment relatively stable but also the living conditions are acceptable. In other words, even when they do evacuate, the kind of evacuation that the child narrator experiences during the war is unlike that of the civilians who tried to escape Hongkew and flooded into the international settlement and the French concession for shelter. As Uchiyama recalls, this kind of evacuation happened everyday with the Chinese civilians who relied on those groundless rumors about the next battle between Japan and China. Uchiyama describes one of his encounters with those Chinese refugees, reporting that he offered some tea to a Chinese mother who was walking to the international settlement on an incredibly hot summer day with a breast feeding baby in her arms and three young children. He also knew cases in which the crowd of the Chinese refugees eventually made some of the Japanese residents—those who did not have access to the
“confidential reports” about the progress of the war—decide to evacuate, too, and most of them returned to Japan for good.257 Similarly, in the “Author’s Words” added to the 2001 version of
Michelle Lipstick, Hayashi notes that at some point in 1943, after watching hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians escaping Hongkew everyday, their family, too, had to evaluate the situation and decide whether they should return to Japan or not.258 Eventually they did nothing.
In Michelle Lipstick, however, not only are there no direct encounters with any of the battles, but we also do not hear about any efforts to move around trying to escape the danger of the war in vain. Under the protection of the father, who is an extension of the Japanese nation and part of
257 Uchiyama 2012: 154-157. 258 Hayashi 2001b: 415-416.
134 the network of national power, the child narrator does not recall feeling much hardship or traumatic experience during the war that has disturbed her quiet life in the roji.
The child narrator’s ignorance and aloofness also come from the loss and misplacement of memories that often happen to children, from whom one normally cannot expect to hear a complete story of the past. Like most of the survivors of a modern catastrophe such as the
Holocaust, in her genbaku literature Hayashi relies on her personal memories for an authentic narrative of August Ninth, and considers the efforts to provide that kind of narrative to be her mission as a katari-be. Many of such personal memories, including Hayashi’s, are about the narrator’s experiences in a rather early stage of his or her life. Admitting the possibility of false or distorted memory that might exist in some of the details, however, most of them at the same time would insist on the accuracy, objectivity, and authenticity of their childhood memories of the event, especially in cases such as the Holocaust and August Ninth. Hayashi was a fifteen- year old child when she became the victim of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, only five months after her repatriation to Japan from Shanghai. But despite this small five-month gap, her genbaku stories never stress the fact that she was a child when it comes to providing information about the details of August Ninth like she did in her Shanghai stories. People might argue that in
Michelle Lipstick the narrator recounts a wide range of her childhood years from age of five to fifteen, which does allow the possibility of lost or misplaced memories typical to younger ages.
But even when she talks about things that happened only one or two years before the memorable
August Ninth, such as witnessing the scene when her older sister and her mother have to burn confidential documents at home, she emphasizes over and again that she was just an innocent young student, whose memories are inconsistent and who cannot grasp the whole picture. In the
135 episode of the “dollar-buying men,” Hayashi overtly warns her readers that the child narrator’s memories are inconsistent.
As previously discussed, it would be meaningless for us to take on what Hayashi actually remembered or should have remembered as a teenager in each case, or to accuse her of remembering one thing over another. Rather, in tracking Hayashi’s usage of the lens of childhood as a narrative strategy in the textual space of Michelle Lipstick, we stop looking at the narratives merely as fragments of a “lucky” girl’s (i.e. Hayashi’s own) peaceful childhood in
Shanghai that is atypical in the wartime. It reveals to us how the reality of the peripheral—the roji and its women and children—in Michelle Lipstick should be perceived in the continuity of their peripheral position, not by overturning the power hierarchy and taking them as powerful and omniscient. For instance, in addition to the powerlessness of the women of the roji already described, it is equally important to recognize the symbolic representation of young girls in literature. That is, they tend to be treated as the target of the violent gaze, the representation of victimhood under sexual and gender suppression, or the symbol of invisibility in modern history of human beings, before they even qualify to enter the discourse of motherhood—one of the most common arenas for discussions about gender oppression. As the Japanese scholar of children’s literature Kume Yoriko points out in her article, “How Do We Tell Stories about
‘Young Girls?,” they have always been and are still increasingly being exposed to violence
(bōryoku sei) in literature and mass media, the power apparatus of which is simultaneously a form of representation that involves political implications.259 In Michelle Lipstick, although the child narrator is unavoidably affixed to political categories, whether self-consciously or not, she is not approached as a figure of “future adults” or the “future citizens of Japan” discussed in
259 Kume Yoriko, “Ika ni ‘onna kodomo’ o kataru ka” [How Do We Tell Stories about “Young Girls”], in Nihon kindai bungaku, No. 59 (1998), 148.
136 Maeda Ai’s reading of children literature.260 Although Hayashi forthrightly defines herself as a
“young national of the victorious country” in her essay “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka,” the complicity between the child narrator and the nation (okuni) is at most only vaguely implied in the novel. Far from the protagonist in a typical story of the juvenile literature who usually plays either the role of the “child as critic” or the “child as merrymaker,”261 the reticent child narrator herself in Michelle Lipstick can be described as an embodiment of political invisibility inserted in the narrative apparatus of the story.
At the same time, this narrative apparatus is still different from what many critics, such as
May-yi Shaw and Kuroko Kazuo,262 have pointed out about how Hayashi deliberately chooses the perspective of her younger self for her work. This kind of articulation is apparently based on a presupposition shared among those critics, that takes the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick as
Hayashi’s “younger self.” Shaw, for instance, defines Michelle Lipstick as a “collection of essays on Hayashi’s childhood memories of Shanghai,”263 as well as a book that faithfully restores fragments of the writer’s early life. Citing several passages that describe how naturally the child narrator has adopted to the local life in Shanghai in the story, Shaw concludes:
“Shanghai determined some of her [Hayashi’s] core characters, worldviews, language usage, preferences, customs and habits, and senses and sensibilities.”264 This is not necessarily a false conclusion, but to submit it based on textual evidences drawn from the figurative child narrator in Michelle Lipstick could be problematic. Since my perception of the story is different in the sense that I take it as an autobiographical novel, I consider the construction of the child figure in this story as a narrative strategy that does not promise its link to a faithful restoration of the
260 Maeda Ai, “Higuchi Ichiyō’s Growing up” (“Kodomo tachi no jikan,” trans. Edward Fowler), in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity (ed. James A. Fujii, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 111. 261 Maeda 2004: 111. 262 Kuroko 2007: 97. 263 Shaw 2010: 108. 264 Shaw 2010: 91.
137 writer’s younger self, be it total or partial. Rather, based on an inter-textual reading of Hayashi’s works centered on the child narrator, I argue that the reticent child narrator in Michelle Lipstick is uniquely constructed by the writer. It is indeed shaped as a deliberately chosen perspective of
Hayashi, but it speaks to the time-space of her present, not the past.
The Other Time and Space (1): After August Ninth
In the previous section we look at how the time-space of the roji is represented through the lens of children in Michelle Lipstick. When the battle is over and the child narrator is back in
Shanghai, she plays tag with the Chinese kids in the roji, and goes to the Hongkew Market with the landlady Rotabu’s maid Mingjing to buy black bread at a shop run by a White Russian. The
Whangpoo River and the Bund are always outside the windows of the kids’ room. Every day, she and her sisters attend the Japanese ethnic school, where the security guards are neither
Japanese nor Chinese but all “indo-san” (Indians).265 At home, she hears about the execution of a Chinese civilian from a guest, who is an army civilian employee (gunzoku) who came to
Shanghai right before the outbreak of the battle in 1937, working to transport rice and other war supplies from the hinterland to Shanghai. She also witnesses a dead body—one of the “dollar- buying men” who committed suicide on the boat from Nagasaki to Shanghai—carried into her house; he appears to be a former Japanese army employee but she never gets to see his face (just like the face of the Japanese prostitute whom she ran into once at the White Russian’s brothel in the roji). To me, those faceless and nameless people have a symbolic meaning in the story, that is, the child narrator’s everyday life in the roji appears to be always close to but at the same time safely kept away from the brutality of the war. After a comparative reading with another
265 Hayashi 2001b: 298.
138 emplotment of the same historical time and space but told from a different perspective (i.e. the perspective of a young victim of the war in “Echoes”), I contend that both the roji and the child narrator in Michelle Lipstick are constructions that embody the writer’s responses to her present, rather than merely a nostalgic re-articulation of the earlier years when she lived in the old
“hometown” Shanghai.
I have briefly referred to Hayashi’s stories as “narrative accounts” before, in the sense that they are always figurative and allegorical, to quote Hayden White.266 White’s articulation of historical narratives is based on the notion that history in general is always allegorical, and
“narrativization” is the only way to understand human actions encroached in historical texts. In
Hayashi’s case, her self-definition as a storyteller (katari-be) of the historical events in Shanghai and Nagasaki lies precisely on this question of narrativization, which appears as fundamental to her as to White. That is, storytelling, which is a task she considers as her “mission” (shimei), seems to be the only way for Hayashi to understand and communicate the past. In order to elucidate this point, her genbaku bungaku or “atomic-bomb literature,” although not the object of textual analysis in this chapter, might be a good example to raise here. Emphasizing the incommunicable part of her August Ninth experience, Hayashi never takes “keeping silent” as an option as many survivors of the modern catastrophe would do. Like the survivors of the
Holocaust in Saul Friedlander’s description, Hayashi had the urge to tell her stories to “the rest” and to make “the rest” participate in them.267 Her strong sense of continuing to tell about her experience of hibaku is for her the only way to make sense of the (in)human actions of atomic-
266 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (The John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 48. 267 Saul Friedlander, “Introduction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” (Saul Friedlander ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 19.
139 bombing and the war; and her genbaku stories and their broad reception show precisely the capability of such narrativization.
On the other hand, however, the strong expressions such as “shimei” (mission) and
“katari-be” (“storyteller,” but could also claim on a sort of agency) used frequently by Hayashi and her supporters seem to have provoked objection among some critics, too. For instance, at a literary round-table talk (zadan) among Karatani Kōjin, Nakagami Kenji, and Kawamura Jiro that was published on Gunzō in 1982, Nakagami, the famous burakumin novelist and essayist in postwar Japan, pointed out that Hayashi appeared not to accept any true identification with “the rest.” Nakagami thus pushed his critique even further as to call Hayashi an “atomic-bomb
Fascist” (genbaku fashisuto).268 Agreeing with Nakagami in that regard, Karatani submitted that
Hayashi had been trying to reproduce (saigen suru) her experiences, which should always already be representations (hyōshō) themselves.269 Karatani called this the “weathering” (fūka) of those experiences, which was ironically what Hayashi herself had intended to resist with her storytelling, a task considered by herself as her “mission” (shimei). But that sense of “mission” itself was already a manifestation of the weathering, added Kawamura.270 This kind of criticism comes mostly from Hayashi’s insistence upon the historical and psychological isolation of atomic-bomb survivors and her indication of the incommunicability in writings of hibaku for the non-hibakusha audience, although she never gives up communicating her experiences.
Nakagami, Karatani, and Kawamura find in Hayashi’s atomic-bomb writings an obsession
(shūnen) with herself and August Ninth as a her denial of the possibility for the non-hibakusha to have a real understanding of her hibakusha experience are made very obvious.
268 Karatani Kōjin, Kawamura Jirō, and Nakagami Kenji, “Sōsaku gōhyō,” on Gunzō 37, No. 2 (Feb. 1982), 288. 269 Karatani, Kawamura, and Nakagami 1982: 289. 270 Hayashi in fact expresses the same concern in Hayashi Kyōko, “Naki ga gotoki” [As if nothing had happened] (1980), Hayashi Kyōko zenshū [The Selected Works of Hayashi Kyōko], Vol. 1, Nihon tosho sentaa, 2005, 315.
140 The unsaid or “unspeakable” part of historical events inscribed in her narratives of
Shanghai, however, is different from the “incommunicability” that is emphatic in her hibakusha experience, or in any kind of experience; and this is something also missing in White’s vision. It is an unavoidable question in our discussion of those postwar narrative accounts of the war, though. In the next chapter, Takeda’s stories of the defeat of Japan in the gaichi is also taken up as a socially constructed representation of historical reality, and I put the unsaid part in his works under the spotlight as well. White points out that in narratives of the historical event in question, reality “wears the mask of a meaning,”271 and that we can only imagine but never experience the completeness and fullness of such reality. But both Hayashi and Takeda’s works prove that not only the completeness and fullness but also the reticence of reality can be meaningful.
The reason I feel comfortable making the distinction between Hayashi’s genbaku stories and her stories of Shanghai first of all lies on the sharply different characters of both events seen from Hayashi’s personal history, as she has articulated repeatedly on many different occasions.
In a collection of her essays entitled Fall in Love with Nature (Shizen o kou, 1981), for instance,
Hayashi asserts that she can only think of her life by dividing it into two periods: before and after
August Ninth.272 She further explains the difference between the two in her 1981 essay “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka.” She writes, “Compared to the Shanghai years, August Ninth is and will always be the negative (fu) no matter how the world changes. … There is no explanation whatsoever for me of August Ninth, or August Sixth. No ideology, no claim, no history, no era, has anything to do with August Sixth or Ninth. It is the nuclear versus human beings, and nothing else. It is by nature different from my time in Shanghai.”273 As previously discussed,
271 White 1987: 21. 272 Hayashi Kyōko, Shizen o kou [Fall in Love with Nature], in Hayashi Kyōko zenshū, Vol. 7 (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, 2005), 75. 273 Hayashi 1981: 113-114. Nagasaki was bombed on August 9, 1945, three days after the first atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima on August 6.
141 the event of August Ninth remains the unchangeably negative part of Hayashi’s life and is essentially an incommunicable traumatic experience; but at the same time, for Hayashi, there is also always an immanent craving to speak about them. On the other hand, the fourteen years spent in Shanghai also had a huge impact in her personal history. In “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka,” Hayashi writes, “I grew up in Shanghai between around Shōwa 6 [1931] and the
March of Shōwa 20 [1945], the fourteen years starting from when I was younger than one to when I was fourteen. Those fourteen years were such an essential time in the first half of my life up till today, during which I have been showered with sunshine both physically and mentally.
For Japan, which had entered the first decade of the Shōwa era, it was also a time that the national prestige was going up. I was living in Shanghai as a young national of the victorious country, Japan.”274 Unlike Hayashi’s experience of August Ninth, there is a twist from the positive to the negative in her Shanghai experiences. That is, the positive meaning of Shanghai in her personal history changed to the negative when she found out what was really happening while she was there, and, it always seems to be the positive part that seeks communication, whereas its negativity always remains in the shadow. Since her Shanghai experiences were published in the 1979 serialization of Michelle Lipstick depicted semi-colonial China as a distinct theme in her life along with August Ninth, by crafting a stereotypical roji, contemporary scholarship on Hayashi’s work always focuses on the “positive” part. The negativity in those experiences, however, unlike the “absolutely negative” hibaku experiences that are readily apparent, has remained buried in the dark most of the time.
Hayashi’s genbaku stories and her Shanghai stories can also be differentiated loosely along the division between the positionality of imperial Japan as the war victim and as the war criminal. In Cut Glass, Blown Glass, for instance, the author shows strong feelings of anger and
274 Hayashi 1981: 106-107.
142 sorrow for the victimized self; whereas in Michelle Lipstick, we observe a sense of her guilt and shame that defines the reticent child as the other. The literary critic Kuroko Kazuo points out,
“What lies in the heart of Hayashi Kyōko’s view of history is … the ‘victim’ in the case of the
Asian/Pacific war, but the ‘criminal’ in the case of China (Shanghai),” an understanding that is considered by Kuroko to have become the “common sense” in the postwar.275 Kuroko’s association of the “victim” and the “criminal” with geographical concepts is not entirely precise, for in the case of her genbaku stories, Hayashi never merely advocates for the victimhood of
Japanese or Asian people alone. Instead, as she states in her 1981 essay, “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka,” those stories outline a confrontation between “the nuclear versus human beings, and nothing else.”276 That is, her criticism of the nuclear events exceeds any national or ethnical boundaries and is directed to a catastrophe of mankind. She makes no indication of an exclusive
“Japanese victimhood” in her storytelling about the atomic bombing—victims of other nationalities appear in her works such as Ritual of Death, for instance—especially when she starts to relate her attack on nuclear power to social problems throughout Japan and the world in recent years.
In contrast to Hayashi’s consistent articulation of the borderless victimhood of atomic- bombing in her genbaku stories, however, is the narrator’s strong self-consciousness of being
Japanese in China in her narratives of Shanghai. The child narrator in “Echoes,” for example, is apparently very attached to her Japanese identity as a young national living in the gaichi
Shanghai. Since her encounters with wartime violence in Shanghai is taken as part of the traumatic memories of Japan’s imperial past just like August Ninth, this emotional attachment of the narrator is also inscribed as a symptom of the victimized individual under Japan’s wartime
275 Kuroko 2007: 120. 276 Hayashi 1981: 113-114.
143 ideological brainwashing. In works such as Michelle Lipstick where an affinitive relationship transcending the Sino-Japanese national boundaries is believed to exist, the child narrator’s identification with the Japanese empire as a “young national” can still be detected in her reticence. Furthermore, in “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka,” Hayashi describes her strong desire in the 1970s to show the Chinese people a new and righteous postwar Japan when the two countries started to restore diplomatic ties. As she recalls, she experienced a strong feeling born out of her “Japanese pride” (nihonjin no mentsu) when she saw the signing ceremony of the normalization of the Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations on television, despite the fact that (and precisely because) China used to be her “homeland” (sokoku).277 It was essentially a feeling of shame about what the Japanese empire had done in China during the war, perhaps also a feeling of guilt for having been a passive part of it. In short, in Hayashi’s narratives of China, what
Kuroko points out about the “criminal” is accurate, in the sense that the “Japaneseness” of the writer herself and her narrators—whether emphatic or not—always indicates her consciousness of Japan as the war criminal.
As a result, completely different patterns of time and space unfold in Hayashi’s storytelling of August Ninth and Shanghai. In those on the genbaku, August Ninth is the rhetorical “Ground Zero,”278 made into more of a temporal origin than a spatial concept. From this origin, everything begins, and to it they will all return. Whether the stories are about
Hayashi’s first visit of Hiroshima (Safe, or Buji, 1981), or about her visits to the nuclear plants in
New Mexico during her stay in America (The Blue Sky of Virginia, or Vaajinia no aoi sora, 1988;
To Louie, Again, or Futatabi rui e, 2013), or about her concerns of the health issues of the hibakusha and their children, including her own son, that repeatedly appear in so many of her
277 Hayashi 1981: 112. 278 Hayashi Kyōko, “Gurando zero ni tatte” [Standing at the Grand Zero], in Nihon kindai bungaku, No. 68 (2003), 108-117.
144 works over the years, the insights into the various moments of her everyday life always go back to that one moment on August 9, 1945. In this sense, time in Hayashi’s genbaku stories is frozen: even though those stories touch upon the reality of years after her hibaku, they have not really moved beyond the “Ground Zero.” In “Shanhai to hachigatsu kokonoka,” Hayashi admits,
“Whenever I write, I put myself next to the side of death and write from there. This is something that I am entirely conscious of. Facing a blank piece of paper without any words on top, there is a dazzling sense of life. Facing such life, I write about death.” She continues, “Say that I depart from the experience of August Ninth, and try to write about the lives of other men and women who have no relation to the August Ninth incident. Still, I probably just cannot help but to look at the matters of men and women with the consciousness of negativity. As long as I am a hibakusha, it cannot be helped if I cannot get rid of that consciousness. It will also be unavoidable if the keynote of my writing stains with a deep color of death.”279 From this absolute origin called August Ninth, Hayashi weaves in and out all sorts of stories about atomic- bombing and nuclear power, with her materials organized radially around the center—Nagasaki,
Japan, on August 9, 1945.
Compared to the scattered places connected through the one unchanging temporal point—August Ninth—in those genbaku stories, the spaces of prewar China represented in
Hayashi’s Shanghai stories such as Michelle Lipstick appear to be a constellation of peripheral fragments, circling around but never making real connections to the center. For me, the obstacle between the said and the unsaid in those stories is a result of the writer’s consciousness of her
“Japaneseness” as the negative, a consciousness gained after the end of the war, not before it. It is hence a “double-layered structure,” or nisō kōzō, of consciousness, as I elucidate at the beginning of this chapter; and the reproduction of Hayashi’s prewar memories is not merely shot
279 Hayashi 1981: 105.
145 through with a response to the social and political environments in the 1970s, but also penetrated by August Ninth. Hayashi’s experience of August Ninth can never be eliminated from any of her works, which were all published in the postwar period. Therefore, the temporality in
Hayashi’s Shanghai stories, the basis of my discussion is fundamentally different from the radial pattern we find in her storytelling about atomic-bombing in general. It is instead a linear time but going backwards. That is, although chronologically speaking, the fourteen years of
Hayashi’s “positive” experiences in Shanghai happened before August 9, 1945, they are re- articulated in her Shanghai stories precisely through the underlying “negative,” not the other way around. When reading Hayashi’s Shanghai stories, we have to always turn the chronological order of the events backwards and perceive their temporality in a way that is opposite to the usual: there is first the postwar present (the “negative”), then the prewar past (the “positive”).
Thinking along this line, we can now better understand the writer’s “circling around the center.” Since as Hayden White argues, narrativization of the historical event always attaches a moral value to it, we are always confronted with the historical reality as a sequence of already moralized judgments in those works, no matter how much Hayashi argues that her account in
Michelle Lipstick is a narrative of history “as it is.” For Hayashi who was writing about
Shanghai in the late 1970s—a “honeymoon-like” period in the history of Sino-Japanese relations,280 the representations of the roji are a set of moral judgments of the writer’s traumatic past, based on which she could deal with the present—a present of the “affinitive relationship” established between the two countries. Using “Michelle Lipstick” as a rhetorical device,
Hayashi opens up a political time-space in which the underlying negativity of the past that has its roots in the conflicts between nation states is embraced by a possibility of transnational transcendence in the peripheral that is not all-powerful, but still meaningful. But at the same
280 Yinan He, “Forty Years in Paradox: Post-normalisation Sino-Japanese Relations,” in China Perspectives, No. 2013/4, 7.
146 time, because of the lack of theoretical tools for postcolonial criticism in the 1970s, Hayashi’s articulation of the “past” in Michelle Lipstick could not be a systematic critique of Japanese imperialism and colonialism in China. And precisely because what was central in the reality of the roji is not revealed, the kind of “transnational transcendence” depicted in the peripheral can only remain a proposal for dealing with a present that asks for stories of friendship between the two countries that are unable to really embrace the colonial past.
It is the “double-layered structure” in Hayashi’s Shanghai stories that makes it hard to fit them into the categories of either autobiography or pure fiction. In fact, questions of genre were thrown at Hayashi regarding her genbaku stories first. At the 1982 Gunzō round-table discussion among Karatani Kōjin, Nakagami Kenji, and Kawamura Jiro, Nakagami openly admitted that he had not changed opinion about Hayashi since meeting her in a literary circle a few years ago. He stated that most of Hayashi’s so-called novels, including the award-winning Ritual of Death with which she made her debut in a literary journal, are in fact not qualified as shōsetsu, or novel. In that regard, Nakagami objected to putting Hayashi’s works under the rubric of shōsetsu, and to give her the title of novelist.281 According to Nakagami’s bitter criticism, Hayashi seems to believe that “merely writing about atomic bombing achieves something literary,” and she
“should have thought that just writing so artlessly about the atomic bomb could be literature, or that she thought it could be publishable in a literary magazine.”282 Apparently, for Nakagami, the writing of personal experience does not automatically become aesthetic and literary. This makes an interesting contrast to scholars of the Holocaust such as Berel Lang’s definition of literary or figurative representations of the modern catastrophe: if seen within Lang’s framework,
Hayashi’s account of August Ninth will be considered as nothing but an account of “literature.”
281 Karatani, Nakagami, and Kawamura 1982: 274-94. We have to bear in mind that those comments raised at the roundtable were addressed to Hayashi Kyōko’s works published before 1982. 282 Treat 1996: 264.
147 Seeking the “actuality” and “literalness” of the event in the narratives of the catastrophe, Lang rejects any figurative, metaphoric, or poetic mode of representation in narratives of history
(mainly referring to novels and poetry), and incautiously (in my point of view) advocates for the
“truthfulness” of the historical discourse found only in literalist chronicles.283 For Nakagami, however, literature not only can convey the historical truth, but also must be a fine performance of the representational. To his point of view this is a level of performance that Hayashi’s stories obviously do not attain.
Lang’s objection to figurative representations of the Holocaust especially in the forms of novels and poetry comes, according to Hayden White’s interpretation, from his concern of the
“dangers of narrativization and the relativization of emplotment.”284 For Lang, the figuration of historical events would always need to transform the “real” events into a story that at once individualizes and generalizes the agents and agencies involved in those events. In particular, it transforms those agents into the kind of “intending, feeling, and thinking subjects with whom the reader can identify and empathize,”285 which would mean to turn away from literalness and to write about, not within, the historical event. In his own book Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, citing Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel, Lang makes it very clear that for him, writing poetry or fictions about Auschwitz is itself a “contradiction” in terms, because it calls into question “the moral and aesthetic justification for the very act of writing about the Nazi genocide.”286
However, in their criticism of Hayashi’s account of August Ninth, Nakagami and the other two participants at the Gunzō roundtable discussion accused her for her failure to generalize the historical event in terms of Lang’s assumption of writing stories about the event. Their
283 Please see Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Lang elaborates on language and narratives of historical events especially in the chapters “Language and Genocide” and “The Representation of Evil: Ethical Content as Literary Form” of the book. 284 White 1992: 44. 285 White 1992: 45. 286 Lang 1990: 125.
148 arguments were centered on Hayashi’s insistence upon the historical and psychological isolation of atomic-bomb survivors, and pointed to her indication of the incommunicability in writings of hibaku for the non-hibakusha audience, as previously mentioned. It is from this perspective that those Japanese critics questioned Hayashi for being a writer of literature, because a large part of the aesthetic value of literature is judged precisely through emotional resonance and understanding shared between the writer and the reader.
In other words, genre has been a significant question for critics of the narratives of modern catastrophes such as the Holocaust, August Ninth, and Japanese imperialism in China, for it is extremely suggestive of the narrator’s positionality, which then determines his or her approach to the historical event and the reproduction of it. Hayashi’s emplotment of August
Ninth will undoubtedly be too literary and figurative for many scholars of the Holocaust such as
Lang, and thus probably cannot be discussed within their framework that advocates for an
“intransitive writing” (i.e. the writer being neither an active agent nor a passive patient) about the
Holocaust. On the other hand, however, when we try to think of Hayashi’s stories of August
Ninth outside the prevalent modes of writing about the Holocaust, and put it in a literary setting instead, we still find Hayashi’s positionality in her genbaku stories being called into question by influential critics such as those at the Gunzō roundtable.
The main complaint about Hayashi’s narratives of the historical event is her positionality as the storyteller, or katari-be. The term katari-be used by critics (such as Kuroko Kazuo) as well as by Hayashi herself287 might bring Walter Benjamin’s storyteller to mind. But in my interpretation, Hayashi’s narratives of her experiences of August Ninth and the war would probably rather have demonstrated to Nakagami, Karatani, and Kawamura the supersession of the traditional storytelling in the Benjaminian sense. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Benjamin
287 See such as Hayashi 2005: 315.
149 attributes the disappearance of the art of storytelling to the dissemination of information as the new form of communication, which can never keep a story free from explanation when it is reproduced. He also emphasizes the necessity of keeping a state of mental relaxation in the art of storytelling, which does not mean a tensionless plot, but is rather a description of the distance between the storyteller and his/her story, or between the listener and the story. Seen in that light, even though Hayashi’s unmediated and direct experiences of August Ninth and the war make it possible for her to become a storyteller in the Benjaminian sense, her strong sense of having as her “mission” to tell people something that they will never truly understand but nevertheless must listen to carefully can prevent her from realizing the state of mental relaxation in her storytelling, that prevents her stories from being reproduced.
At the same time, Hayashi’s stories are equally difficult to fit into the category of the modern novel in Benjamin’s discussion. Benjamin relies on Georg Lukacs’s notion when he talks about the novel form. For Benjamin, the modern novel signals the decline of storytelling in the modern time even before the dissemination of information is considered. In Lukacs’s theory, time must be included among novel’s constitutive principles and in its inner action must engage nothing else but a struggle against the power of time. This struggle is absent in both Hayashi’s genbaku stories and her stories of Shanghai, for neither of them unfolds a temporality that challenges the dominating power of time, which rests in the eternal “present tense” of August
Ninth and the roji (in different ways, of course). As such, in a sort of alienation of time, the stories do not generate the kind of memory that occurs as a “creative force affecting the object and transforming it,”288 but instead claim ownership of the memory, rendering it impossible for the object to transform.
288 Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 127.
150 By calling herself a katari-be, or “storyteller,” Hayashi apparently not concerned about the Benjaminian senses of aura or the storyteller. Thematically speaking, for her, storytelling is more like a history-telling, but under the name of literature. In her narratives of August Ninth, the eternal theme is death, not in its abstract sense, but in the storyteller’s most unmediated and direct experience of the historical reality—the death of the hibakusha on August Ninth and beyond. Like Benjamin’s storyteller and many others, Hayashi has borrowed her authority from death; but unlike the former, her stories are always shot through with explanation, and her readers are always deprived of the ability to reproduce them. On the other hand, her way of communicating personal experiences is different from the artisan form of communication in the
Benjaminian sense, but not in the exactly same way as information is, either. Information, according to Benjamin, does not “survive the moment in which it was new.”289 But Hayashi’s katari of the atomic bombing rather refuses to welcome the moment of the new—it only lives in the past and never stops destroying the new, by constantly bringing back old memories of August
Ninth and condemning the self-forgetful listener. Throughout Hayashi’s writing career, from her very first well-known genbaku story Rituals of Death to the more recent To Louie, Again, August
Ninth appears again and again to prevent readers from forgetting the old and turning to the new.
This destructive mode of storytelling can be seen in many narratives of imperialism and colonialism, such as the memoirs of the hibakusha, the “Comfort Women,” or other victims of the war. Thus, we are confronted with the task of finding a different way to frame Hayashi’s storytelling, which is questioned by supporters of the literalist approach to the historical “truth” but at the same time does not quite fit in the discussion of the traditional storyteller in literature, either.
289 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 90.
151 Responding to Nakagami, Karatani, and Kawamura’s criticism of Hayashi’s literature of the atomic bomb raised at the Gunzō roundtable in 1982, Hayashi’s supporters such as the political scientist and literary critic Ito Narihiko and literary scholar Komai Tamae immediately published several articles to defend her.290 In addition to providing a different reading of
Hayashi’s novel Safe (Buji, 1981), which was the target of textual criticism at the Gunzō roundtable discussion mentioned above, Ito (later endorsed by Komai) charges Nakagami,
Karatani, and Kawamura for their tendency to treat works that take up intense political themes as non-literature and criticizes the dichotomy they perceived between politics and literature. In my point of view, however, the Japanese critics at the Gunzō roundtable argued precisely in favor of a possible combination of a political or historical event and a literary form (with the caveat that
Hayashi’s writing did not meet their expectations); many survivors and scholars of the modern catastrophe are the ones who have made that kind of division and raised doubts about imaginative writings of such historical events.291 As such, Ito and Komai’s responses initiated a debate on the thematic interpretations of Hayashi’s genbaku stories, leaving the other critique raised at the roundtable untouched. That is, Hayashi’s positionality as the katari-be or
“storyteller,” criticized by Karatani as her tendency to be the agent (dairi-nin) of her experience and the problematic narrativity and temporality of her genbaku stories (for Nakagami, Karatani, and Kawamura) are completely left out in this kind of defense that is generally very thematic.
While focusing on the interpretation of individual works or on the theme of atomic bombing at
290 Please see Itō Narihiko, “Gendai no shōki to kyōki” [The Sanity and Insanity of the Modern], in Bungakuteki tachiba, Spring 1982, 64-74; and Komai Tamae, “Kaku taiken no ‘fūka’ ni kōshite—Hayashi Kyōko no kinsaku o megutte” [Resisting the “Weathering” of the Nuclear Experiences: on Hayashi Kyōko’s Recent Work], in Minshu bungaku, August 1982, 96-101. Of course there are many other scholars who do not question Hayashi’s status as a literary writer. For example, Watanabe Sumiko considers literature to be the weapon that Hayashi uses to deal with the nuclear issue (Watanabe 2003: 42). Ōhashi Takehiko also addresses the effectiveness of Hayashi’s novels in “Majiwari to shunkyo: Hayashi Kyōko ‘Missheru no kuchibeni’ no sekai” (Ōhashi 2003: 209). 291 Berel Lang is one example. He writes, “[Paul] Celan’s poetry thus suggests a general paradox for imaginative writing about the Nazi genocide: the more specific and direct the historical address of such writing, the greater the constraints on its literary or poetic character.” (Lang 1990: 140)
152 the very general level, this kind of defense cannot be an effective examination of the way
Hayashi structures her stories—those about August Ninth and beyond—in order to communicate her personal experiences.
After the long discussion of Hayashi’s narratives of the “past” in this chapter, focusing on questions of genre, form, and the textual/contextual configurations of those works, the question for us now is how postwar Japanese writers communicate their personal experiences during the war through their storytelling. In Michelle Lipstick—an autobiographical novel and a narrative account—the past is constructed within the time and space of the roji and presented to the reader.
It is a past reproduced on top of Hayashi’s awareness of the present, after August Ninth and as part of the postwar discourse of Japan’s war crime. It is also a set of moral judgments about the history of Japanese imperialism in China given by Hayashi as her responses to the diplomatic efforts between the two countries in the 1970s. However, at the same time, compared to the variety of “Shina” experienced and witnessed by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and many Japanese travelers in the 1920s and 30s who are the presumed hostile “colonizer,” the supposedly unbiased and friendly narrator in Michelle Lipstick (and many other postwar narratives of semi- colonial China) is only able to tell a very specific history imprisoned in fragments of their experiences. This state of alienation is made more explicit in Shanghai, a travelogue of
Hayashi’s 1981 trip to China when she returned to the former international settlements for the first time in thirty-six years.
153 The Other Time and Space (2): After Shanghai (1983)
Saul Friedlander, commenting on postwar narratives of Auschwitz, states that “it is the reality and significance of modern catastrophes that generate the search for a new voice”292 of the history-teller. This “voice,” for Friedlander, does not exist as an a priori of the event, but is born out of the desire to understand it. For Hayashi, the desire to make sense of the past in
Michelle Lipstick constructs the past through the “negativity” of the present into a continuum of the two. On the one hand, her storytelling of the colonial time in Michelle Lipstick belongs to the constructs of public-collective memory of Japan’s imperial past in the postwar discursive space.
In that sense, we should never neglect the fact that it is an autobiographical account that engages numerous historical elements. On the other hand, her voice, while excavating and interpreting fragments of the past, goes beyond its faithful projection. As I have strived to argue in my examination of the various perspectives of Hayashi’s plotting of the historical events, it is also a text that conveys how Hayashi has come to terms with and confronted decisive elements of her own life at a specific moment of the present. Her storytelling of August Ninth and Shanghai in the 1970s and 1980s has provoked debate among both literary scholars and opponents of literary accounts of modern catastrophes. When seen in another light, it might resemble the voice of the historian of the Holocaust in Friedlander’s ideal, in the sense that it integrates the personal memory and a voice of the self-conscious narrator—the introduction of what Friedlander calls
“commentary” into the narrative.293 Hayashi’s storytelling tends to go to another extreme, compared to the deeply involved but still radical and objective historian in Friedlander’s ideal, because Hayashi’s positionality as the katari-be of an incommunicable or a unspeakable
292 Friedlander 1992: 10. 293 James E. Young, “Between History and Memory: the Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor,” in History and Memory, Vol. 9, No. 1/2, Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory — In Honor of Saul Friedlander on His Sixty- Fifth Birthday (Fall 1997), 50.
154 historical experience would probably involve her too deeply to be radical and objective. But nevertheless, her ongoing narrative grasp of events is certainly part of the historical reality itself, which defines both the present and the past as a continuum for her and her readers.
As I have already shown, the conclusion that Hayashi has reached, in her confrontation with the past through the present, is a transnational effort embodied in her construction of the everyday of the peripheral, or the shūen, in Michelle Lipstick. This effort is, however, interrupted by a failure (and an unwillingness) to make real connections with what is at stake in the center. After Hayashi revisits China thirty-six years later, in Shanghai (Shanhai, 1983), she expresses her disappointment for the new reality in China and proposes transnationality in a yet different form. Shanghai is considered by Kawanishi Masaaki as a full-length novel (chōhen shōsetsu)294 and won the Joryū bungakushō (Women’s Prize for Fiction) in the year that it was published. But following other scholars’ observations as well as Hayashi’s own description,295 I will call it a travelogue. It is a collection of essays about Hayashi’s trip to China in 1981 that were first serialized in the journal Umi between June 1982 and March 1983, and was published as a book by Chūō kōronsha in May 1983. Among the ten short essays included in this work, three are in fact about Hayashi’s visit in Suzhou, so it seems to be more accurate to call this a narrative account of China, rather than limit it to Shanghai as the title misleadingly suggests.
Rather than making a comparison between the general representations of Shanghai or
China in the 1940s and 1980s in Hayashi’s storytelling, I want to stay focused on several scenes in which Hayashi recounts the roji during her trip in 1981 and briefly discuss how she lets this new experience of China intervene in her imagination of the roji’s transnational space. Although
294 Hayashi 2001b: 429. 295 Both Inoue Satoshi and May-yi Shaw call Shanghai a “travelogue” in their articles cited previously. On the back cover of Shanghai/Michelle Lipstick: Hayashi Kyōko chūgoku shōsetsu shū, the editor describes it as a ryokō no ki, or “records of a trip.” Furthermore, in the “Author’s Words,” Hayashi cites Shanghai when she recounts the details of her trip to Shanghai on August 9, 1981, the same trip that Shanghai tells about.
155 most critics have been indiscriminately considering the two works as Hayashi’s “Shanghai stories,” the two-year temporal gap between the publication of Michelle Lipstick and that of
Shanghai is crucial. Contrary to May-yi Shaw’s assertion that “Both works were triggered by
Hayashi’s return visit in 1980,”296 Hayashi’s first return visit to China in the postwar took place on August 9, 1981,297 a year and a half after the publication of Michelle Lipstick. Her trip thus becomes a key to differentiating the two images of the “past” constructed by Hayashi at similar times of the present: Shanghai is also mediated by her encounter with the postwar China, and
Michelle Lipstick is not. Our discussion of the socially constructed and constantly changing self of the traveler during his or her trip in Chapter One could still be an interesting perspective to unfold Hayashi’s travels in postwar China; interestingly enough, in her essay about her second return visit to Shanghai in 1996, entitled “In my trip to Shanghai” (“Shanghai e no tabi de”),
Hayashi states that she thought of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels in China (Shina yūki, 1925) while she was on a sightseeing boat floating along the Whangpoo River. In Akutagawa’s travelogue, the Whangpoo River is described as the headwaters of diseases; for Hayashi, the
Whangpoo is the Mother River, and it was the colonial concessions that had caused the diseases in 1920s’ China.298 But here, I would like to direct attention to Hayashi’s discovery of alienation in the space that she has associated with affinity in Michelle Lipstick. Confronted by the national boundaries, Hayashi writes, “The activities of the Chinese and we foreign travelers were exhaustively separated. The toilet paper, bath towels, body bars, the flush toilet and the shower in the hotel room were all of fine quality. The Friendship Store was fulfilled with all kinds of goods. … Even in the waiting room of the train station, we were separated from the
296 Shaw 2010: 108. 297 This date is used in both of the “Hayashi Kyōko nenpu” edited by Kanei Keiko and Kuroko Kazuo; and Hayashi herself also states in the “Author’s Words” that she visited Shanghai for the first time since her repatriation in 1945 on “Shōwa gojyūroku- nen hachi-gatsu kokonoka” [August 9, Shōwa 56]. 298 Hayashi Kyōko, “Shanhai e no tabi de” [In my trip to Shanghai], in Yomiuri Shinbun (August 7, 1997).
156 general Chinese.”299 In Suzhou, at a tourist site, the resting place open to the Japanese tourists was made into a forbidden zone for the general Chinese tourists. The special treatment given to the Japanese tourists became a burdensome alienation for them. During the five-day trip, they were taken to places that had been set up for them to see and spoke to people who had been prepared to talk. On each floor of the hotel building that they stayed, there was a young man watching them and he also took the key away after they had entered the rooms. In addition to the segregation defined by nationalities that was arranged by the Chinese state, Hayashi also found the Chinese people appear to be independent, moderate and friendly, as well as very careful with the Japanese. At the same time, her sense of guilt for the past made her almost feel servile
(hikutsu) in front of the Chinese and always move under self-surveillance. This estrangement under the friendly gesture taken by the two nations at that time makes an astonishing counterexample of, and thus also a challenge to, the wartime roji in Hayashi’s storytelling of
China before her visit in 1981. In her 1997 essay, Hayashi even describes this trip as what has cured her “homesickness” for Shanghai.300
In Shanghai, the memory of the past and the experience of the present are always interwoven, and the past flashes back in this narrative only as fragments. Children have disappeared from the roji and all other public spaces in Shanghai and Suzhou; and simultaneously, Hayashi’s narrative about the past shifts to its more brutal aspects, filled with numbers and data about the incidents, dangerous areas, and battles in the past. She also recounts in detail her uncle’s photo studio on the Wusong Road, a street next to the roji, where the huge slum was located. It was a place where Hayashi and her sisters often visited and where soldiers would always come to take photographs before going to the battlefront in order to have them sent
299 Hayashi 2001b: 136. According to Hayashi, the Friendship Store in Shanghai used to be where the old British consulate was. (Hayashi 2001b: 117) 300 Hayashi 1997.
157 to their family in Japan in case they might die on the battlefield. The route of the sightseeing bus reminded her of the layout of the old city during the war and thus brought back fragments of the memory of the past. Feeling that as a child she was not guilty and that it could not be helped if the Chinese tour guides in the tour group found out about her past, Hayashi was also wrestling with shock and embarrassment when she heard the term “the invasion of imperial Japan” from the tour guides. On her sightseeing route, Hayashi rediscovers the victimhood of the peripheral—the “weak people” (jyakusha) like herself and those women in the roji, who were able to maintain an affinitive relationship in the past. She realizes that the foundation of the future that the two countries are striving to establish will not be those stories of the “weak people;” therefore, they can only disappear sadly as some momentary events (isshun isshun no dekigoto). In the new Shanghai, Hayashi observed that the complete silence about the past was what the two countries ask for the future (and the present); and because of that, stories of the
Japanese residence of the gaichi, or the “weak people” in her view, are being violently erased from history.
Shanghai ends with a hint of an interrogative tone about such a future, although to me,
Hayashi’s storytelling in Michelle Lipstick engages a similar violent operation to obscure the
“central” behind the name of transnationality. When Hayashi introduces the analogy between her father and a Japanese engineer working at the Baoshan Steel Factory whom she met during her trip in Shanghai, she is in a way also cutting off some stories of the past. Recalling her mother’s early years in Shanghai, Hayashi would always describe in great detail what a humble, respectful and egalitarian person she was. But when it comes to her father, what she can say is that he was a typical “Japanese” in Shanghai.301 Disappearing in silence, the victimhood of the peripheral will end up becoming something anti-redemptory in this kind of storytelling. The
301 Hayashi, Kan, and Miyazaki 2010: 36.
158 transnational effort that Hayashi has found in it is consequently not much more than a repetition—or a revision—of the old empire’s imaginary East Asia that was prosperous, as we can see in her criticism of the lack of a collective consciousness called “We Asians” (watasi- tachi ajia-jin) in China that is opposing Europe (the “seiyō”).302
302 Hayashi 2001b: 191.
159 Chapter 3
The World as a Spatial Continuity over Time: Takeda Taijun and the
Postwar Discourse of the Defeat of Japan
Takeda Taijun (1912-1976) was another writer who left a rich body of commentary about semi-colonial China and the defeat of Japan. Unlike Hayashi Kyōko who did not enter the world of popular literature as a novelist until the 1970s, Takeda started publishing in literary magazines in the 1930s, after dropping out of college.303 Generally considered a “postwar Japanese writer,”
Takeda’s first well-known essay, Sima Qian (Shiba Sen, 1943), was published during World War
II, four years after his return from the battlefield in China as a soldier subject to the Japanese empire. As the author of several works based on his experiences witnessing and living through the defeat of Japan in the Shanghai international concessions (the gaichi, or the overseas territories), he is considered by many critics, including Karatani Kōjin, to be one of the pioneers who “represent the core of postwar Japanese literature.”304 In other words, just as for Hayashi
Kyōko, whose works are indebted to her childhood experience in the Shanghai alley-community, the sources of Takeda’s literature, thinking, and philosophy were the wars between Japan and
China in the 1930s and 40s. Compared to the other writers this dissertation considers, however,
Takeda is worthy of extra attention because of his unique experience both on the actual battlefields and the site of the defeat. In Karatani’s opinion it was because he actually faced the
“ruins” and “chaos” of Shanghai during the war that Takeda was able to turn toward fiction
303 Takeda Taijun was born to a family of a Buddhist priest. In April 1931, he entered the Tokyo Imperial University to study Chinese literature. But about two months later, he was arrested for participating in the Leftist movements, and had to drop out of college after the incident. He then returned to his Buddhist training, but maintained an active relationship with the Chinese literary coterie he got familiar with at the university, which was led by the famous Luxun scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910- 1977). 304 Karatani Kōjin, “Rekishi to tasha” [History and the Other], in his Shūen o megutte [In Regard to the End] (Kodansha gakujutsu bunko, 1995), 214.
160 writing after the war.305 Hirano Ken also comments in History of Shōwa Literature (Shōwa bungaku shi, 1963), when he refers to writers such as Takeda, Ōoka Shōhei and Hotta Yoshie, that the accumulation of these experiences of the war and defeat helped these previously unknown literary youth become the “first voices” of the postwar Japanese literary world.306
Based on his experiences, Takeda takes up historical and philosophical themes including race, nation, death, destruction, and redemption that make his works productive sites for reflection on the postwar discourse on the defeat of Japan.
Since the war, Takeda has expressed his critical views of Japan’s war crimes explicitly and implicitly in his novel Landscape of Luzhou (Roshū fūkei, 1939) and the critical work Sima
Qian, as well as such other pieces published after the war as The Judgment (Shimpan, 1947) and
Anemophilous Flowers (Fūbaika, 1952), and his final work, Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976). Most of his works are fiction; this allowed Takeda to digest his wartime experiences as well, but is also why the Japanese postwar literary world never considers him merely a war critic. Takeda studies produced by Japanese academics generally brush his war critique aside as “Takeda’s sense of guilt toward the Chinese people,” in contrast to the overwhelming majority of studies devoted to investigations of Takeda’s literary, philosophical and religious thought both at the micro and the macro levels.
Beyond Japan, Takeda has attracted considerable attention for his reflections on Japan’s war responsibility, and The Judgment is probably the work of his most widely cited by many international scholars in the course of rediscovering postwar literature as a type of historical testimony on the war. Barbara Hartley, for instance, is undoubtedly one of the most productive of the very few Western scholars who are actually studying Takeda, and I find her essay on
305 Karatani Kōjin, Karatani Kōjin shū 5: Rekishi to hanpuku [The Collected Works of Karatani Kōjin, Volume 5: History and Repetition] (Iwanami shoten, 2004), 262. 306 Hirano Ken, Shōwa bungaku shi [History of Shōwa Literature] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1963), 252.
161 Japan’s war crimes in China typical of the global discussions of war responsibility. In her essay,
“Competing Historical Perceptions in Japan’s Post-war Narratives,” Hartley asserts that The
Judgment provides “a reading of Japan’s wartime history that is very different from official narratives.”307 That is, speaking out against the “official Japanese reluctance to take responsibility for Japan’s wartime atrocities and colonial excesses on the Asian mainland”308 that could be clearly observed in the 2005 “textbook controversy” in Japan, Hartley insists that re- reading the kind of “cultural production” that Takeda exercises in The Judgment is an effective way to prevent the perception of total erasure in the Japanese popular consciousness of any sense of culpability for Japan’s war crimes.
On the other hand, quite strikingly, we see some Takeda scholars in China, such as Feng
Yuzhi, arguing something completely different, yet they have a similar interest in exploring
Takeda’s reflections on Japan’s wartime actions including his own. In his paper entitled “The
Secret Confession and the Inadequate Self-reflections on the War: On Takeda Taijun’s The
Judgment,” Feng focuses on the literal message conveyed by the letter written by the character,
Jirō, which constitutes an important part of the novel’s narrative. Feng argues that Takeda has drawn the character Jirō from the perspective of a war victim rather a war criminal when describing the pain and struggles that Jirō has to go through to gain self-awareness, and concludes that Takeda’s self-reflections on war responsibility in The Judgment are at best of defective (bu chedi de).309
Another Chinese scholar, Cheng Tongshe, who has also written intensively on Takeda and his war experiences, however, holds a different view from Feng. Citing Jirō’s confessionary
307 Barbara Hartley, “Competing Historical Perceptions in Japan’s Postwar Narratives,” in China-Japan Relations in the Twenty- first Century: Creating a Future Past? (Michael Heazle and Nick Knight ed., Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2007), 101. 308 Hartley 2007: 93. 309 Feng Yuzhi, “Yinmi de gaobai yu buchedi de zhanzheng fansi: lun Wutian taichun de Shenpan” [The Secret Confession and the Defective Self-reflections of the War: On Takeda Taijun’s The Judgment], in Journal of Ningbo University of Technology, Vol. 24, No. 3 (September 2012), 11-14.
162 letter, Cheng stresses that the story should be read as an embodiment of Takeda’s deep regret over what he did during the war in China. Referring to a short article that Takeda contributed to the journal Chinese Literature Monthly (Chūgoku bungaku geppō) in 1940, Cheng writes, “For obvious reasons, in the pieces published during the war, Takeda could not fully elaborate on the question of who should be responsible for the debris and dead bodies that he saw in China. But what can be clearly seen in his several postwar works is the writer’s feeling of regret and his consciousness as a criminal caused by the catastrophe brought to the Chinese people by Japan’s invasion.”310 Cheng strongly defended Takeda again in a more recent paper entitled “On Takeda
Taijun’s ‘War Experience’ and His Reflections on China.” Reviewing Takeda’s relationships with China and Chinese literature over the years as represented in some of his novels, Cheng contends that Takeda’s feelings toward China remained complex throughout his entire life because they were dominated by the sense of remorse that belongs to a former Japanese soldier.311
Cheng’s argument regarding Takeda’s reflective attitude toward Japan’s war crimes is supported by many other Chinese scholars, including Xu Jingbo312 and Li Qingbao.313 If we look only at the conclusion, this kind of argument could appear to resonate with many Japanese scholars’ observations on Takeda’s sense of guilt toward China. But unlike studies that aim for broader discussions of Takeda’s literature and thought rather than merely focusing on Takeda’s
“sense of guilt,” Cheng and his supporters’ articulation of Takeda’s positionality seems merely to
310 Cheng Tongshe, “Cong Wutian taichun de xiaoshuo kan riben duihua zhanzheng de xingzhi” [The Characteristics of the Japan-China War as Seen in Takeda Taijun’s Novels], in Journals of Henan Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2006, 33(2), 186. 311 Cheng Tongshe, “Wutian taichun de ‘zhanchang tiyan’ yu duihua sikao” [On Takeda Taijun’s “War Experience” and His Reflections on China], in Journal of Japanese Education and Japan Studies (East China University of Science and Technology Press, 2010). 312 Xu Jingbo, “Zhaohe shiqi riben zhishiren de zhongguoguan guankui: yi zuojia Wutian taichun de zhongguo yinyuan he zhongguo xushuo wei li” [Observing the Views on China Produced by Japanese Intellectuals in the Shōwa Period: A Case Study on the Japanese Writer Takeda Taijun’s China Karma and Chinese Narratives], in Japanese Studies, 2011(6). 313 Li Qingbao, “Riben zhanhoupai zuojia Wutian taichun de zhandi tiyan” [On the Japanese Postwar Writer Takeda Taijun’s War Experience], in Journal of Chifeng University (Social Science), Vol. 32, No. 8 (2011.8).
163 demonstrate Takeda’s sincerity in his war criticism as the ultimate goal of their studies. On the other hand, if we read Cheng’s argument alongside Hartley’s, we can say that to a certain degree,
Cheng and Hartley share a high regard for Takeda and The Judgment, in the sense that they both see the text as a useful source to resist the historical revisionism observed in the official war narratives of postwar Japan. But Hartley, unlike Cheng, is not concerned about arguing for
Takeda’s personal sense of remorse over the war. Instead, she devotes herself to a criticism of the discourse of Japan’s official war narratives by looking through literary works such as
Takeda’s.
With the above scholarship in mind, this chapter proposes to look for a slightly different approach to Takeda and his works in the postwar discourse on Japan’s defeat. Unlike Feng and
Cheng, I am not chiefly interested in seeking a conclusion concerning the Japanese writer
Takeda Taijun’s attitude toward China or Chinese people regarding the war. Quite the contrary,
I want to eschew the tendency to look at history through the national paradigm, because such a perspective makes visible only those historical and social relations that are defined along the national boundary and speak for the individual only as a legitimate embodiment of the nation.
Looked at in this way, these visible aspects will lose their concreteness and become predictable, and history will be represented merely as a self-repeating image consisting of individuals and events that can be objectified and reified. On the other hand, I also find that such approaches to reading Takeda within the framework of postwar Japanese literature and/or Japan’s war criticism focus too much on the literal content of his works. Instead, this chapter will take up three works of Takeda’s—Sima Qian (1943), The Judgment (1947), and Shanghai Firefly (1976)—and read them against several of his essays written between those years. Reluctantly leaving Takeda’s other works and important thoughts for future projects, I focus on the formal structure of each of
164 the three works to observe how they are always in dialogue with Takeda’s perception of the structure of history, while his writing evolves over time. In all three works I will consider how
Takeda’s preoccupation with the destruction (metsubō) of certain national or linguistic spaces is linked to his figuration of the absolute continuity of the world. I then come back to the question of war criticism in postwar Japan and China by briefly discussing the contrast between Takeda and his contemporary scholar of Chinese literature, Takeuchi Yoshimi, to be able to show that this kind of thinking, which does not limit itself to the theme of the text but engages it structurally, will reveal an alternative way of perceiving and representing the past that belongs to a transnational history.
Spatiality as Critique: Sima Qian (Shiba Sen, 1943)
While they have yet to be widely translated and read in the English world, Takeda’s works are highly appreciated in postwar Japan for their complex literary sensibility, their historical accuracy, and their invocation of a religious sublime. Noted as one of the distinctive characteristics of his work is the strategy of forgoing linear temporality in favor of a paratactic constellation of spaces. In a discussion of temporality and spatiality in history, literary scholar
Komatsu Keiichi considers Takeda together with Karl Löwith and Jacob Burckhardt, two modern thinkers who are interested in the critique of historicism. Komatsu reveals a linkage between the three thinkers (actually two, for Komatsu relies heavily in his interpretation on
Löwith’s understanding of Burckhardt). Komatsu argues that in the “transversal surface
(ōdanmen)”314 of history that Löwith and Burckhardt explore in their historiography, their perspective resonates perfectly with Takeda’s perception of history as a spatial concept. Here,
314 Komatsu Keiichi, “Rekishi no kūkansei to jikansei: Reivitto, Burukuharuto, Takeda Taijun” [Temporality and Spatiality of History: on Löwith, Burckhardt, and Takeda Taijun], in Philosophy Iwate, No. 43 (2011.11), 55.
165 Komatsu glosses the term ōdanmen with the German word Querschnitt that Burckhardt uses in his text and leaves its meaning unelaborated. But he assures his readers immediately that it has first of all to be “an antithesis of progressive history.”315 Hence, according to Komatsu, although the three thinkers differ to a very great degree in their thoughts, all are opposed to the notion of hatten (development or progress) in their view of history.316 That is, they do not take temporal development or progress as the fundamental principle.317 Instead, for Löwith (and Burckhardt, too, Komatsu holds), the past is not something that has passed and become the opposite or the preliminary step of the more evolved present; rather, the past is something that would come back or repeat. It is everlasting and typical, and it continues around the existence of the human being.318 Komatsu links this view of the past to the total continuity in the history of Takeda’s
“world,” which is also not temporal, but spatial.
I differ from Komatsu, however, in avoiding any implication of a “spatial history,” but for different reasons in the cases of Löwith/Burckhardt and Takeda. As I understand what
Löwith and Burckhardt mean by the “transversal surface of history,” it is, as Komatsu has indicated, a view of history outside the perspective of linear temporality. This does not necessarily mean that they would articulate history as a spatial concept. We can see in both
Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949)319 and Burckhardt’s Reflections on History (1950)320 that the two thinkers pay little attention to the concept of space, but instead focus on articulating the non-successional relationship between the past and the present, or between the past generation and the current generation. Both Löwith and Burckhardt hold that history has to be “recovered and rediscovered” (in Löwith’s words) or “remembered” (Burckhardt’s) by the living
315 Komatsu 2011: 50. 316 Komatsu 2011: 55. 317 Komatsu 2011: 50. 318 Komatsu 2011: 53. 319 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949). 320 Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History (trans. M.D.H., London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1950).
166 generations, because “history was not an objective science concerning neutral facts but the record of facts which one age finds remarkable in another.”321 In other words, the permanent continuity of history outside time for Löwith and Burckhardt does not necessarily point to the continuity of the world as a space, although Löwith does stress the significance of nature, which might be interpreted as material space.
On the other hand, although Komatsu’s invocation of Takeda’s idea of space is insightful and accurate, I find his use of the word “spatial” (kūkanteki) in a “spatial history” deviates slightly from Takeda’s original context when he makes the time-space comparison in the discussion of history. That is, although the terms “space” (kūkan) and “spatial” (kūkanteki) are generously used in Sima Qian that deals with the Chinese author of Shiji (Records of the Grand
Historian, 100BC), Sima Qian, Takeda never uses the adjective “spatial” to define “history” in this work. In Sima Qian, based on the history of the vicissitudes of the ancient Chinese kingdoms, emperors, and heroes, Takeda illustrates the spatial structure of the world in Shiji and engages in philosophical discussions of several important concepts such as continuity, multi- centralism, and totality. His concern with space became a fundamental part and a mark of his thought since with Sima Qian and is often cited by critics such as Komatsu who are fascinated by the idea of a “spatial history.” However, although Sima Qian is a critical work centered on the grand historian, Takeda chooses his words carefully while discussing history, especially when it comes to the time-space paradigm. He uses the terms kūkan (space) and kūkanteki (spatial) only to discuss the structure of the world and he generally uses them in a very literal way to describe something that is very material. For instance, commenting on the way the Basic Annals are interconnected in Sima Qian’s Shiji, Takeda writes, “The ‘Basic Annals of Xiang Yu’ and the
‘Basic Annuals of Gaozu’ are not connected vertically and temporally, but horizontally and
321 Löwith 1949: 20.
167 spatially (kūkanteki ni). … The splitting of the ‘center of the world’ into two would mean that two human substances (ningen busshitsu) moved with the intention of occupying one space
(kūkan). Because of the ‘Basic Annals of Xiang Yu,’ the Basic Annals in Shiji becomes three- dimensional (rittaiteki), and the movement of the very center becomes the content.”322 Here, when Takeda says that the “Basic Annals of Xiang Yu” and the “Basic Annals of Gaozu” in Shiji are connected “spatially,” he obviously has in mind the actual map of the Chu and Han kingdoms under Xiang Yu and Gaozu (Liu Bang)’s lead, and sees the two “centers,” Xiang Yu and Gaozu, trying to occupy the space of the ancient Chinese world. Takeda then describes his observation of an episode in the “Basic Annals of Xiang Yu” in which the individual heavenly body and the universe are connected in a physical way that is very spatial. He writes, “The fun part of the episode ‘Feast at Hong Gate’ is not in the ‘event’ and such; it does not exist in the contingent and temporal. It is the charm of the necessary and spatial (kūkanteki na) connections, and the movements of every individual heavenly body (tentai) that shapes the movement of the whole universe. … Because of this episode in the ‘Basic Annals of Xiang Yu,’ the Basic Annals embodies the three-dimensional and spatial (kūkanteki na) connections, and proves itself to be the universal center of Shiji in general.”323 Takeda further points out that this space between
Heaven and man is inhabited by the ancient Chinese emperors and empresses, when he concludes, “The ‘Basic Annals of Empress Dowager Lü’ is a story of a woman who comes and goes in the space (kūkan) between Heaven and the man.”324
As clearly indicated in these quotations, the term “space” is most frequently used to refer to either the physical space of the world and the universe, or the material space of the text of
322 Takeda Taijun, Shiba Sen [Sima Qian], in Takeda Taijun zenshū daijūichikan [The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, Volume 11] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971a), 40. Emphasis added. 323 Takeda 1971a: 42-43. Emphasis added. 324 Takeda 1971a: 49. Emphasis added.
168 Shiji. As Takeda reads through the Hereditary Houses and the Tables that follow the Basic
Annals in Shiji, his use of the noun, “space,” and the adjective, “spatial,” becomes more historically specific and more “visual.” He writes, “The Basic Annals continue and rotate temporally,”—describing the difference between those chapters in Shiji, using temporal and spatial concepts—“and the Hereditary Houses stand side by side spatially (kūkanteki ni) constituting a world.”325 He then continues, “In the world of Shiji, continuity is thought over spatially (kūkanteki ni) and generally (zenmenteki ni). … What Shiji takes up as a problematic is the continuity of the entire world in Shiji. We can say that the individual discontinuity is rather supporting the continuity of the total world. Because the world in Shiji is persistently a historical world that is constituted spatially (kūkanteki ni), the continuity of it has to be spatial (kūkanteki), too.”326 These assertions might sound theoretical and abstract if read in line with the notion of fragmentation in postmodern theory, but here is what Takeda really means: “Looking at the
‘Tables of the Hereditary Houses,’ we do not feel that time has caused all the changes, the vicissitudes, or the inevitable death of all living things. Rather, we feel that we are physically looking at a space (kūkan) called the total of the world (sekai zentai).”327 In other words, in Shiji, for Takeda, “space” could mean the ancient Chinese lands and kingdoms, the universe in which the planets are moving around a center, or the conflicting positions of Xiang Yu and Gaozu represented by their spheres of influence. He further elaborates this concreteness of “space” in history more explicitly: “When people who have read the ‘Yearly Tables’ start to talk about their
‘feelings” or “emotions,’ that might not sound very theoretical. But in fact, seeing each part of the world simultaneously based on the Tables would mean to think about history spatially
(kūkanteki ni). And that could be to look at and think about the historical world within the
325 Takeda 1971a: 49. Emphasis added. 326 Takeda 1971a: 70. Emphasis added. 327 Takeda 1971a: 72. Emphasis added.
169 absolute continuity.”328 We can even find an example in which Takeda relies upon the term’s most direct meaning, i.e., the physical space of the text. As he writes in Sima Qian, “… And these facts enable each section to connect either vertically or horizontally. Furthermore, because they are written down on the graph where numbers in all the lines and sections that represent the emperors and the name of the eras are listed all around, it forces the reader to spatially (kūkanteki ni) move his eyes vertically and horizontally on the Tables.”329
It is my observation that Takeda discusses the question of space intensively in his analysis of the Basic Annals, the Hereditary Houses, and the Tables, but to a lesser degree in the
Biographies, because the first three deal with actual territorial conflicts. What we do not find in
Sima Qian are instances in which “space” is used figuratively, that is, when spatial terms are used to describe abstract concepts such as the “inner space” of the text, or the structure of history.
Instead, Takeda uses the adjective “spatial” mostly to refer to land, territory, and other “external” spaces. Even in advocating his important idea of the historical world as “spatially constituted”
(kūkanteki ni kōseisarerta rekishi sekai) or arguing that the continuity of the world is also
“spatial,” Takeda never leaves the context of the Chinese kingdoms in Shiji. Every character and kingdom that he reads about in Shiji is unexceptionally traceable on the map of the ancient
Chinese world. For him, the world of Shiji is concrete precisely because it is spatial. Hence, in
Takeda’s Sima Qian, which articulates the historical world of Shiji, history is accessed only through concrete spaces, namely, the territorial spaces in ancient China. When Takeda talks about the “world” or history being spatial, he is talking about a historical world like the one in
Shiji. Even when he argues, once in the entire work, that history needs to be thought about
“spatially,” he is amazed by the layout of the Tables in Shiji, which he thinks will allow the
328 Takeda 1971a: 73. Emphasis added. 329 Takeda 1971a: 74. Emphasis added.
170 reader to see every part of the world (i.e., each kingdom) simultaneously. The discussion is still within the context of the concrete world of ancient China.
The question then becomes: What kind of “world” is it? As soon as we follow Takeda, who is following Sima Qian, and pin down the emperors/empresses, heroes, and kingdoms on the ancient map of China, we will realize immediately that they all share the same destiny, called
“destruction” (metsubō). This concept is most thoroughly and systematically elaborated in a postwar essay of Takeda’s, entitled “On Destruction” (“Metsubō ni tsuite,” 1948), in which
Takeda emphasizes the importance of recognizing both the “universality of destruction”
(metsubō no fuhensei) and its tendency to be detested (imikirau) or forgotten due to the instinct for self-preservation, in the sense of both the individual and the race. In Shiji, however, what was once the center of the world was all destroyed or replaced in the end. In such a world, which does not allow any absolute or eternal centers, although the parts are always spatially related to one another in territorial struggles, none can establish any long-lived hegemony.
Here we can easily elicit the two characteristics of Takeda’s concept of the “spatially constituted world.” First, by always referring history back to the specific “world” of Sima Qian,
Takeda is resisting the reification of history that ignores all the spatial and concrete relationships that constitute the world. Secondly, because Takeda’s “world” is a total space that lives on the inevitable and continuous destruction of each of its parts, it is necessarily a “system of relationships without a center,”330 to borrow Karatani Kōjin’s words. In his essay “History and the Other,” Karatani points out that the perspective that Takeda tries to read into Shiji is “an attempt to grasp history in spatial terms, to evacuate meaning, ideal, telos from ‘world’ history
330 Karatani 2004: 259.
171 and to see there instead a ‘system of relationships without a center.’”331 The “relationships”
(kankei) highlighted by Karatani here overlap with what Takeda calls, in Sima Qian, the
“connections among people” (ningen no renkan)332 as set forth in Shiji, where Sima Qian presents the human being (ningen) as a “political being” (seijiteki ningen) who can fall into two categories. That is, “political beings” are either one of the many “centers” (such as emperors) or those who surround them (such as the historian Sima Qian himself). According to Takeda, the political being must be an independent individual in order to become a force that drives the
“world.” But unlike Löwith’s and Burckhardt’s struggling “man,” who remains the permanent center of history and hence guarantees the permanent continuity of history, for Takeda, it is not the fate of individuals but the relationships between them that form the center of the system.
These relationships, I contend, work not in order to build the superficial bonds between political beings, but to connect the individual to an inner, invisible structure. The world as system is based on the movements that such relationships generate within its spatial structure. In
Takeda’s view, since Sima Qian’s vision allows for only one continuity, that is, the absolute spatial continuity of the “world,” the destruction of “parts” is inevitable and necessary and no single absolute and eternal “center” can exist. Hence, Takeda’s conception of the “world” does not at all follow the rule of the world in the Hegelian or Marxist way, which either considers it the necessary fate of Asia to be subject to Europeans or tries to free Asia from such a fate while it has inherited the same sense of temporal development and Eurocentrism.
Neither is the spatial structure of Takeda’s “world” in any way similar to the fetish of space that some scholars have developed as a weapon against the fetish of time in modern history.
331 Karatani Kōjin, Shūen o megutte [On the End] (Tokyo: Fukutake shoten, 1990a), 212. Here, I borrowed Seiji M. Lippit’s translation of this sentence from Karatani Kōjin: History and Repetition (ed. Seiji M. Lippit, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 205. Emphasis added. 332 Takeda 1971a: 40.
172 When they turn to the concept of “space” and engage in a comparative perspective on the world as an alternative to the unevenness that accompanies the linear temporality dominating the
Eurocentric definition of modernity, most of these scholars are “ranking societies according to spatial distance from an empowering model that radiated the achievement of industrial and technological supremacy—namely, the countries of Euro-America—and expected identification with it,”333 to quote Harry Harootunian. In those cases, Harootunian points out, modernity is
“identified with a specific place that is more important than its status as a secular and historical form of temporalization;”334 and this specific place is often fixed with origins. Harootunian is very cautious about this kind of hegemony presumed by space in modern capitalist society. But to my understanding, Takeda’s invocation of space is fundamentally different from the kind of spatialization that Harootunian warns about. For Takeda, the spatial constitution of the world in
Shiji never presumes a single origin or origins, but is instead a process of the destruction of its parts. Neither does it privilege any “empowering model” over the rest of the world. The world, as the only absolute continuity, is not even comparable in the first place. It is itself the totality; and a space outside it can only be imagined as a “vacuum” (shinkū). It is in this sense that I want to be careful with the slippery term “spatial history,” which has been created and invoked as an unquestioned concept by so many critics such as Komatsu who write about Takeda’s “world.” In discussing Takeda together with Löwith and Burckhardt, Komatsu addresses the “spatiality” of
Takeda’s world as opposed to the linear temporality that Löwith and Burckhardt are also against, which would risk engaging an analogic comparison between the two theses. In fact, as Karatani also points out, Takeda’s sense of “space” surely stands outside the linear temporality of capitalist progress, but it is also completely different from the kind of spatiality that Nishida
333 Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,” in Boundary 2, 32:2 (2005), 30. 334 Harootunian 2005: 34.
173 Kitarō’s or Watsuji Tetsurō’s works embody.335 Although Karatani does not elaborate on this point, it seems obvious to me that Watsuji’s use of “space,” for instance, is a perfect example of the kind of spatialization of history that Harootunian criticizes.
Takeda’s notion of the world’s being constituted spatially is certainly much more profound than a mere identification of the “world” with the ancient Chinese territories in Shiji.
First of all, in considering Sima Qian’s writing, Takeda notes that the problem of representing the continuity of the world in historical writing is quite different from that of representing the life of an individual or of a nation. Looked at from a purely temporal perspective, the world would appear discontinuous; because of their mortality, humans, too, cannot overcome discontinuity.
Takeda considers Sima Qian’s “world,” by contrast, to be represented as a continuity, that is, a spatial continuity. Sima Qian’s world is the sum of its spatial parts. Reading through the chapters of Shiji, that give accounts of ancient Chinese nations that either have perished or have temporarily managed to survive, Takeda proposes that history is not narrated by Sima Qian in story lines, but rather in patterns. The totality of those patterns unfolded in the narrative of Sima
Qian creates an imaginary “world” with a continuous and stable structure that involves no progress, but whose eternity is guaranteed. On the one hand, recalling Löwith’s and
Burckhardt’s objection to progressive history as discussed earlier, we might also be reminded of the modernist view of history as an “entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism … as the final stage, has resolved all the previous ones.”336 Harootunian criticizes this citing Ernst
Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times. For Harootunian, history is, in Bloch’s words, “a polyrhythmic and multispatial entity.”337 On the other hand, we must keep in mind that the “spatiality” in
335 Karatani Kōjin, Kindai Nihon no hihyō: Shōwa hen (jō) [Criticism in Modern Japan: the Shōwa Era, I] (Tokyo: Fukutake shoten, 1990b), 209. 336 Harootunian 2005: 52. 337 Harootunian 2005: 52.
174 Takeda’s “world” leads not just to the simultaneous existence of multiple spaces outside a linear temporality, but also a structural question that Löwith and Harootunian do not touch upon. As we know, in Shiji, the discontinuity, interruption, and competition between the parts of the world can only reinforce the absolute continuity of the latter as a total space. Therefore, for Takeda, what persists in the world is precisely its structure as a totality. In such a structure, both its eternity and its continuity are therefore formal, not substantial. As such, although Takeda does not deploy such terminology as “pattern” and “form” in Sima Qian, the approach to history that he extrapolates from Shiji is, in Karatani’s term, “almost structuralist (hotondo kōzōshugiteki).”338
Takeda’s view of the “world” as the only absolute continuity in Sima Qian is considered by scholars such as Yonetani Masafumi as an attack on imperialism and colonialism then predominant. In his paper “On Miki Kiyoshi’s Philosophy of World History: the Japan-China
War and the ‘World,’” Yonetani looks at Takeda’s analysis of Shiji as presenting a model in which imperialism and colonialism are overcome by the “world” that they attempt to dominate.339 Yonetani observes the homage that Takeda pays to Sima Qian in the conclusion of
Sima Qian, where Takeda compares the Japanese people, who believe that Japan has become the center of the world, with the historian, who devotes himself to recording stories of destruction that argue against any consistent centers of the world. In the conclusion, Takeda takes a sarcastic tone: “Sima Qian created the world in Shiji. As a result, the center becomes something untrustworthy, and he is trapped in a distrust of the human race (ningen fushin). For us Japanese who believe in the absolute superiority of our race, that is ridiculous. In our case, to participate in history only means to believe in Japan and the centers of Japan. No other ways but that can be
338 Karatani 1990a: 212. 339 Yonetani Masafumi, “Miki Kiyoshi no Sekaishi no tetsugaku: Nitchū sensō to ‘sekai’” [On Miki Kiyoshi’s Philosophy of World History: the Japan-China War and the ‘World’], in Hihyō kūkan, Vol. II No. 19 (1998), 62.
175 considered.”340 Similar ideas can be found in the preface to the second chapter of Sima Qian, where Takeda also highlights the opposition between the wartime Japanese and Sima Qian—they are opposites in terms of their fundamentally different perception of the world. Takeda warns his readers, “The conception of the world that he [Sima Qian] created and the conception of the world that we continue to create have some fundamental conflicts. In some senses, the conclusion of history that he has written down and the conclusion of history that we Japanese are writing engage totally opposite things in them.”341 In the preface, Takeda does not go further than those few lines to clarify the “conflicts” and “opposing things.” But what he means is quite obvious if we read them together with the conclusion. That is, despite their shared consciousness of an unfolding history of the world as a whole, the wartime Japanese, who believe in their
“responsibility” to establish the strong and new center of the world, essentially see Japan (the local, the partial) as the ultimate totality, whereas for Sima Qian, the “world” is a world of interrelationships that cannot be transcended by any concept or person. It is precisely in this sense that Takeda advocates for a re-reading of Shiji in wartime Japan.
The conclusion of the first version of Sima Qian was, however, as Yonetani notes in a footnote, deleted in the essay’s postwar version(s).342 Yonetani does not make it clear which version he is referring to. The Takeda specialist Kawanishi Masaaki confirms Yonetani’s observation in his work The Biography of Takeda Taijun (Takeda Taijun den, 2005) with more details on the 1948 version of Sima Qian, which was published under the title The World in Shiji
(Shiki no sekai) by Seishisha.343 In this 1948 version, according to Kawanishi, the entire conclusion disappears, and some parts of the preface are deleted or moved, including the part in
340 Takeda 1971a: 113. 341 Takeda 1971a: 26. 342 Yonetani 1998: Footnote 77. 343 Kawanishi 2005: 194.
176 which Takeda explains why he feels it necessary to take up Shiji at the time of the war. The well-known literary critic and author of Takeda’s chronology Furubayashi Takashi explains in his commentary on The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, citing Takeda’s own words, that the changes were made by the editor alone “due to the specific publishing situation of the time and had nothing to do with the intention of the writer.”344 Interestingly enough, the 1948 version of
Sima Qian highlighted by Kawanishi and Furubayashi is not the only one lacking the conclusion.
In Sōgensha’s 1952 version and Kōdansha’s 1965 version of the work, for instance, the conclusion is also deleted. Needless to say, those changes demonstrate clearly that, as Yonetani is convinced, Sima Qian was taken by the authorities as a book of world history predicting the destruction of Japan and the bankruptcy of Japanese imperialism.345 This opinion is shared by
Karatani in his book History and Repetition (Rekishi to hanpuku, 2004),346 as well as by many other critics, such as Ozaki Hotsuki and Takeuchi Yoshimi. Ozaki reads Sima Qian in a more specific context and interprets Takeda’s “world” as an “embodiment of the critique of the
Greater East Asian Writers Conferences”347 (Dai Tōa Bungakusha taikai, 1942-1944). And in his commentary on the 1965 version of Sima Qian, Takeuchi considers this critical essay to exemplify the “literature of resistance” (teikō bunken)348 in general.
For me, however, the question of destruction raised in this important wartime work goes beyond the purpose of imperial or colonial criticism and plays a much more crucial role in elucidating Takeda’s thought. Sima Qian is just the beginning of Takeda’s broader reflections on the structure of history over the years. In Sima Qian, the destruction stays in the gaze of the
344 Furubayashi Takashi, “Kaitai” [explanatory notes], in Takeda 1971a: 389. 345 Yonetani 1998: 62. 346 Karatani 2004: 261. 347 Ozaki Hotsuki, Kindai bungaku no shōkon: kyū shokuminchi ron [Wounds of Modern Literature: on Former Colonies] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1991), 47. 348 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Takeda Taijun’s Shiba Sen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1965), 225.
177 observer, or of the person Takeda calls the “bystander (bōkansha)”,349 who observes only from a time that postdates the destruction and who is hence not the executor, or the “actor (kōdōsha).”
But when the ending of the war becomes reality rather than a wish or a belief, Takeda realized a more real sense of “destruction” through Japan’s defeat, especially given the fact that he was experiencing it outside the empire and in its gaichi colony in Shanghai. On the one hand, as
Honda Shūgo correctly points out, having heard about the air raids in Japan’s major cities and the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the gaichi colony, it would be only natural if in Takeda’s imagination the victimhood of the naichi metropole was “desperately expanded.”350 For a good example to bolster this point, we might temporarily turn to the experience of Hanamori Yasuji (1911-78), the former editor of the popular postwar journal
Kurashi no techō (Notebook of Everyday Life), who lived and served in the war with China at the same time as Takeda. Unlike Takeda, however, Hanamori struggled in the years before the empire’s collapse in Tokyo and then describes his feelings of relief whenever he recalls the day of the defeat because he had been able to survive. Hanamori writes in the 1973 poem “Song of
Hatred for the Days of the 28 Years,” “That day/for us/the only certain thing was/that the war was over//This/probably means/that we have passed without having to die … Japan has surrendered/The Great Japanese Empire has collapsed//But/we/did not get killed/we/did not become slaves/or forced laborers/or have to be castrated//To be honest/we/felt disappointed/If this is it/they should have lost earlier/I thought.”351 Hanamori’s “disappointment” is first of all a feeling of relief because the end of the war would suggest (whether correctly or falsely) that wartime hardships were over, and most importantly, that he had survived. Hanamori was at the
349 Takeda 1971a: 113. 350 Honda Shūgo, “Takeda Taijun,” in Haniya Yutaka ed., Takeda Taijun kenkyū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1973), 120. 351 Hanamori Yasuji, “Nijūhachi-nen no hibi o tsukon suru uta” [Song of Hatred for the Days of the 28 Years], in Kurashi no techō, Issue 2, No. 25 (1973.8).
178 same time “disappointed,” precisely because as far as he could see, Japan was not destroyed and that was “it” about the defeat. But the excitement of survival belongs only to survivors; in that sense, Takeda is undoubtedly a stranger to the Hanamori kind of survival. And so is he, as well, to Hanamori’s disappointment. Hotta Yoshie, who was with Takeda in Shanghai when Japan surrendered, recalls, that Takeda was so convinced of the fall of Japan that after the defeat he was prepared to write a history of the “kingdom called Japan that once existed in the East.”352
The contrast between Hanamori’s and Takeda’s reactions to the defeat and their imaginings of the future of Japan reveals the relevance of Takeda’s geographical positioning at the end of the war to his theory of destruction.
On the other hand, however, we should not attribute the sense of collapse felt by Takeda in Shanghai entirely to the outsider’s “exaggerated imagination” of what befell the people in the metropole. Honda admits, as Takeda himself also stated on many occasions that the drastic changes in social realities that Japanese residents in the gaichi were facing were still striking.
Honda writes, “As long as one is Japanese, no matter how low his rank, in China he used to be the ruler, the man of power, and the oppressor. But after simply falling asleep one night, he has fallen into the category of war criminal, or a suspect of that kind.”353 In “On Destruction,”
Takeda’s essay written shortly after the defeat, he describes the state of mind of the Japanese residents after the defeat as the kind of fear or anxiety that might feel if one were standing at the edge of a cliff and could see nothing but smoke and fog.354 This feeling, also manifested as a feeling of “empty silence” (kūkyo na sizukesa),355 occupies the heart and mind of the “criminal”
(zainin) when surrounded by the celebratory atmosphere on the streets of the gaichi after the
352 Noma Hiroshi, “Takeda Taijun no chōhen shōsetsu” [Takeda Taijun’s Novels], in Noma Hiroshi Sakuhin Shū 11 [The Collected Works of Noma Hiroshi, Volume 11] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), 134. 353 Honda 1973: 120. 354 Takeda Taijun, “Metsubō ni tsuite” [On Destruction], in Takeda Taijun Zenshū daijūnikan [The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, Volume 12] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979a), 96. 355 Takeda 1979a: 92.
179 defeat. In the midst of this cold silence that belongs only to himself, Takeda writes, the criminal begins the effort to make sense of the event of losing the “daily meaning of justice” by desperately searching for ideas that he can hang on to as a consolation. “Destruction” is one of them.
Destruction is not our fate alone. It is that of each and every one of the living. There are nations in this world that were once destroyed. So are there such races. But the nations that have destroyed those nations, and the races that have destroyed those races would probably be destroyed themselves soon. Destruction is by no means an individual misery to marvel at. It is rather an accurate fact (seikakuna jijitsu) that follows the physical and the spatial laws of the world. It is nothing more than a fact that is limitlessly right and repetitious, exactly like the laws of constellatory movements and vegetal growth. This huge construction (kōseibutsu) that we call the world is something that destroys certain peoples and nations and gains nourishment from that destruction for its own sustenance, just as the individual human being will take the lives of individual animals and plants, eat and drink every bit of them, and digest them for his own nutrition. The war leads to the destruction of certain nations, but that is merely a light movement of digestion, or a phenomenon of menstruation, or even a yawn, inside the body of the world. For the world, the conflicts and destructions happening among the dozens of nations inside its womb are nothing but an exercise of the internal organs that helps improve the circulation of blood. Without this exercise, the world itself might well be weakened and eventually die.356
As I suggested earlier, “On Destruction” is the first time that Takeda systematically elaborates the universality or inevitability of destruction (a point that he made in Sima Qian as early as 1943). And, as Kawanishi holds in The Biography of Takeda Taijun, it is in “On
Destruction” that Takeda combines those thoughts with his real experience of the defeat in
Shanghai, to develop the conception of destruction.357 As we can see from the paragraph above, in “On Destruction” Takeda is able to grasp the concreteness of the “relationships” between political beings in their movements and to elaborate synchronically on the laws and rules of
“destruction.” The leap between the two texts clearly shows the impact that his experience of the
356 Takeda 1979a: 92-93. 357 Kawanishi Masaaki, Takeda Taijun den [The Biography of Takeda Taijun] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), 216. But Kawanishi does not consider “On Destruction” a work that embodies Takeda’s most fundamental and mature thoughts of the world. Instead, thinking highly of the eschatology elaborated in it, Kawanishi holds that Takeda was able to compose “On Destruction” only because he was the one who wrote Sima Qian.
180 defeat of Japan in Shanghai has had. Rather than looking at the movements retrospectively and depicting an ambiguous but arbitrary picture of the “relationships,” as he does in Sima Qian, in the postwar essay destruction is proclaimed as the “organic law” (to borrow Emmanuel
Lozerand’s terms) of the life of the universe, as well as of nations and individuals.
Lozerand agrees with many Japanese scholars such as Yonetani and Takehashi Keita,358 who have paid attention to Takeda’s concept of destruction, and understands that “On
Destruction” considers destruction to be “like an ultimate destination, rather positive, however, in the sense that the erosion and fatigue impinging on those who have known disasters seem to be factors of enrichment.”359 Lozerand sees a paradoxical link between the negative and the positive in Takeda’s argument by following the logic that the ruin, the discontinuity of the individual or the part (which is never the “real” destruction because, according to Takeda, only the total destruction of the world can be the “real one”), will actually lead to the “progress”360 of the absolute continuity of the universal. I would hesitate to use the term “progress,” however, because there is no evolution whatsoever of the world after all the partial and “unreal” destruction has happened. But Takeda does entertain ideas of the renewal, the refreshing, or at least the sustaining of a healthy system of the world in “On Destruction,” all based on the notion that the world is an “organism.” There, the eschatological tragedy of a certain portion of humanity becomes what nourishes the long life of humanity in general. It is also in this sense that we see a departure of Takeda’s “world” from the Hegelian totality, if we agree with what
Louis Althusser says about Hegel’s conception of the world, that the Hegelian totality is “the alienated development of a simple unity, of a simple principle, itself a moment of the
358 Please refer to Takahashi Keita, “Haisen to ‘zanyo no seizon’: Takeda Taijun ‘Metsubō ni tsuite’ ron” [The Defeat and the ‘Rest of Life’: on Takeda Taijun’s ‘On Destruction’], in Kokugo kokubun kenkyū, No. 140 (2011.9). 359 Emmanuel Lozerand, “In the Time after the Defeat: Sakaguchi Ango, Takeda Taijun, and Takeuchi Yoshimi (1946-1948),” in Japan’s Postwar (ed. Michael Lucken, Anne Bayard-Sakai, and Emmanuel Lozerand, Trans. J.A.A. Stockwin, New York: Routledge, 2011), 87. 360 Lozerand 2011: 88.
181 development of the Idea.”361 These “moments” of the simple internal principle of the Hegelian totality, as “alienations,” or “phenomena,” are all “equal to one another” in Althusser’s interpretation. Therefore, their totality is not “the structured unity of a complex whole” but “the simple unity of a totality” in which the parts are indifferent to each other. Takeda’s concept of the “world” is, in contrast, closer to a kind of Marxist materialism. It is organic, which means that every concrete difference featured in it is not indifferent to the others. Like the Marxist totality, it is also “a decentered structure in dominance,”362 and the movement of the concrete is precisely a practice rather than a static moment.
This practice of the concrete—in which it is transformed from the isolated individual into a part of a complex relationship—is caught very clearly in “On Destruction,” yet in Sima Qian
Takeda presents only a vague structure that is supposed to rely upon such practices. It is significant that one text was written before the war and one after it ended, which must have configured different circumstances for the writer’s perceptions of this exercise called destruction, as well as of the world itself as a total space. But if we look at the textual structure of Sima Qian rather than the social context, we will discover a similar pattern there. In Sima Qian, the narrative of Shiji is put into a literary device created solely by the historian Sima Qian, who is both the political individual and the literary man who records history from the perspective of a bystander after everything has become the past. By inserting such an all-knowing, solo recorder of history into his critique, Takeda unpacks his idea of the world, which is a totality that survives the constant destruction of its fragments, not just through words but also through the structure of the narrative. That is, there is a formal relationship between the recorder (who is at the same time the narrator and the historical author) and the world. To a certain degree, Takeda himself,
361 Louis Althusser, For Marx (trans. Ben Brewster, London & New York: Verso, 2005), 202-203. 362 Althusser 2005: 256.
182 in Sima Qian, is as much a recorder as Sima Qian is in Shiji; both of them are bystanders in the world and observers of contemporary events. The history that they record has exactly the same structure as their texts—it is a practice of fragments under one absolute totality, and it is looked at in a single conscious man’s gaze.
The Privilege of Consciousness: The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947)
What enables Takeda and Sima Qian to see the structure of the world in this way is precisely the privilege brought by their consciousness (jikaku), which is articulated in their writing, or “recording,” of the events. In the case of Shiji, Sima Qian, the historian, is the one who is aware of the vicissitudes of individual entities and the continuity of the world as a total space. Based on his apprehension of the “world” in Shiji, Takeda then becomes the conscious one—in Sima Qian and in wartime Japan—with a vision of the postwar world because of this consciousness. Takeda has already warned us of the “scariness of records” (kiroku no osoroshisa) at the beginning of Sima Qian. Recording the world is essentially an act of re- perceiving (minaosi kangaenaosu) the world, as Takeda accurately points out in Sima Qian.363
Had the recorder not taken up his pen, there would have been no record of the world. But “as soon as it is written down, it will be the truth and remain for all generations.”364 Takeda invokes the Taoist concepts of “idleness” (mui) and “nature” (sizen) to describe the historian’s work of recording. “He just records, and does nothing else.” Takeda writes, “But by recording, he is actually doing everything.”365
Takeda is, therefore, aware of the power that Sima Qian possesses as the grand historian in producing a record of the ancient Chinese world, while exercising this power of the all-
363 Takeda 1971a: 6. 364 Takeda 1971a: 15. 365 Takeda 1971a: 18.
183 knowing narrator in his own essay Sima Qian. In Sima Qian, Takeda appears to be not only a privileged reader of the Chinese world recorded in Shiji, but also a prophetic critic of what is going on in wartime Japan, thus occupying what Komatsu Keiichi calls a “privileged position”
(tokkenteki tachiba).366 As Takeuchi Yoshimi writes in his 1952 commentary on Sima Qian, although Sima Qian is not an “I” novel, it is “from beginning to end a self confession (jiko kokuhaku) of the author in terms of the work’s way of thinking (hassōhō).”367 What Takeuchi has observed is precisely this omniscient perspective on the events in the work that privileges the writer’s consciousness and turns the whole work into a prophecy.
Interestingly enough, however, in Takeda’s other popular postwar work, The Judgment
(Shinpan), which was published two years after the end of World War II, “confession”
(kokuhaku) is employed as one of the narrative strategies, though not the only narrative device, in order to create a multiple layering in the consciousness of the characters. The young Japanese soldier Jirō, who has just returned from the front, confesses his engagement in the wanton killing of Chinese civilians in a letter addressed to the protagonist, “I.” One of the killings that struck
Jirō the hardest involved the inhumane treatment of an elderly couple discovered in a burnt out village. In this incident, which actually follows another group killing in which Jirō has participated, although the couple represents no threat to the soldiers and it is under circumstances in which nobody else is around, Jirō still callously shoots the husband when he actually has the choice of letting the victim live. He leaves the wife unharmed, but she is condemned to a slow and agonizing death alone because she is deaf and almost immobile. Those dark events in Jirō’s past change him into a different person. Because of his mental burden he decides to tell his fiancée about what he had done on the warfront before he writes the letter and confesses to “I.”
366 Komatsu 2011: 59. 367 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Takeda Taijun, Shiba Sen: Shiki no sekai [Shiba Sen: the World in Shiji] (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1952), 197.
184 Just as he has anticipated, this confession soon puts an end to their otherwise very harmonious relationship. When the war finally ends, Jirō decides not to allow himself to be repatriated to
Japan. He decides to stay in China for the rest of his life alone to confront the people whom he has hurt is his own way of punishing himself and atoning for his crime.
In a sense, Jirō’s decision is symbolic and could thus open up new possibilities in the search for a transnational framework in the discourse of the Japan-Chinese war. These possibilities are conveyed to the reader through a specific narrative device. That is, just as his past crimes can be captured only in his own utterances, the drastic change in Jirō’s view of life and death is disclosed nowhere but through the same narrative mechanism, i.e., the letter addressed to “I.” The letter is a critical element in the structure of the novel, for it is the device that upholds Jirō’s confession and that invites heteroglossia to the inner space of the text. I would not make the same argument as Barbara Hartley, that the letter is “a narrative device used to confirm veracity,” that it “provides a more objective account than that given by a narrator who can have a vested interest in presenting information in a manner designed to mislead the reader,” and that “it can also be used to convey information that is too volatile or confronting to be conveyed through the general narrative.”368 Rather, I follow Murakami Katsunao’s argument that the letter makes the novel a “forum of multiple voices.”369 Murakami’s 2012 paper,
“Questioning the Privilege of ‘Consciousness’: the Possibility of the Novel in Takeda Taijun’s
The Judgment,” is a crucial inquiry into the form of Takeda’s war narratives that asks why it has to be the novel specifically that Takeda chooses “as the constitution to register his consciousness of sin and redemption (shokuzai ishiki) toward China after the war.” Although Sima Qian has
368 Hartley 2007: 99. 369 Murakami Katsunao, “‘Jikaku’ no tokkensei o tou: Takeda Taijun ‘Shimpan’ ni okeru shōsetsu no kanōsei” [Questioning the Privilege of ‘Consciousness’: the Possibility of the Novel in Takeda Taijun’s The Judgment”], in Nihon kindai bungaku, Issue 87 (2012.11), 69.
185 always been considered by Takeda critics to be the best of Takeda’s works, Murakami holds that
Takeda’s postwar novels convey his intention to go beyond Sima Qian and to go further with his shokuzai ishiki. Citing The Judgment as a successful experiment, Murakami identifies the heteroglossia in the mechanism of this novel, configured by Jirō’s act of confession in the letter, as the key to answering the question that he has proposed above. In this regard, Murakami views the critical essay Sima Qian as a work that lacks the multiplicity of voices because of its dependence on the privileged consciousness of the narrator/writer. He starts with a critique of
Sima Qian’s all-knowing narrator by juxtaposing the essay with the Kyoto School philosopher
Kōyama Iwao’s The Philosophy of World History (Sekaishi no tetsugaku, 1942). For Murakami, the two texts are comparable precisely because of the plurality of the historical world (rekishiteki sekai no tagensei) that they both advocate, while at the same time two works have traces of what he calls “the privilege of consciousness” (jikaku no tokkensei) that negates such plurality.
Only when we understand this privilege of consciousness, can we explain why, in The
Philosophy of World History, Kōyama’s Japan is able to endorse the plurality of the “centers” of the world as its rebellion against Euro-centric historical narrative on the one hand, while on the other having no problem legitimizing its own desire to become the privileged “center” in Asia.
The “plurality” in Kōyama’s assertion is thus considered by Naoki Sakai as nothing other than a kind of singularity370 because it replaces universality with a non-European particularity: so long as the subject of world history is regarded in the same light as national identity (such as
“Japanese”), an effective criticism of such problematics as Euro-centrism or modernity will be impossible. Murakami approaches Kōyama’s work with a different focus, though. Rather than criticizing the basic logic at work in Kōyama’s argument as no different from the mono-centrism
370 Naoki Sakai, Shizansareru nihongo, nihonjin: “Nihon” no rekishi-jiseiteki haichi [Stillbirth of the Japanese as an Ethnos and as a Language] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1996), 36.
186 that it censures, Murakami wants to figure out how the paradoxical logic works. He tries to make sense of the contradictory but harmonious coexistence of the critique of European mono- centrism and the advocacy of Japan’s mono-centrism in Kōyama’s argument. According to
Murakami, Kōyama apparently believes that from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Japan was the only Asian country “conscious” of the trend of global history to change from unitary (i.e., one that is in accordance with the expansion of European imperialism) to plural; with this “consciousness,” Japan was able to gain a “spiritual autonomy” (seishinteki jishusei) enabling it to absorb and eventually overcome the culture of the European Other.
Kōyama takes this as the reason why a certain superiority or privilege over Japan’s Asian neighbors such as China can be claimed.371 Similarly, to follow Murakami’s argument, traces of such privileged consciousness can be found in Sima Qian, because Takeda also looks at world history on a meta-level from the positionality of the self-conscious historian Sima Qian while unfortunately omitting any self-reflection on the dangerous power of this privileged consciousness that both he and Sima Qian possess.
In The Judgment, this privilege of consciousness takes a different form from Sima Qian, but continues to possess power through “recording,” or narrating, the past events. From here I make a significant departure from Murakami’s reading of these two works. Based on the fact that the world of Shanghai in The Judgment is represented as a “forum for multiple voices” rather than the solo voice of the grand historian, Murakami sees the possibility of a criticism of the question of “the privilege of the subject” that is missing from Sima Qian, a criticism not in the form of a critique but in the form of the novel.372 He does not explain the sudden change from “consciousness” (jikaku) to “subject” (shutai) in his terminology, but from this change we
371 Murakami 2012: 68. 372 Murakami 2012: 69.
187 can surmise that Murakami takes consciousness and subjectivity as two things that can occur simultaneously and endure. For Murakami, this multiplicity of voices comes from both the
“multi-national” circumstances (ta-kokuseki sei)373 of 1940’s Shanghai and the multi-layered structure of narrative in the novel itself. Out of these multiple voices, Murakami holds, emerges the new scenario of the concrete individual as a challenge to meta-level world history in the eyes of Sima Qian. In my interpretation, however, the world of Shanghai described in The Judgment inherits the most fundamental characteristic of Sima Qian’s “world,” in the sense that it lacks a definite “center.” But at the same time, within the inner space of The Judgment that is opened up by Jirō’s voluntary “confession,” despite the multiplicity of voices, we see a similar operation that would attach a kind of authority to their narrative of the past events, just as in Sima Qian and
Takeda’s narratives. In the letter in The Judgment, for instance, Jirō discloses something that nobody would ever have known about had he not confessed. The protagonist “I” reads the letter, and then the reader reads what “I” has read. The relaying of this piece of information configures the chain-like structure in a mode of narrative that reveals a hierarchy among the multiple voices according to their distance from the center of “truth.”
If the homophonic characteristics in Sima Qian can be said to resemble what Mikhail
Bakhtin says about the monologic European novel, the multiple voices and a privileged consciousness highlighted in The Judgment might well remind us of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel in Bakhtin’s analysis, in the following two ways. First, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics, Bakhtin criticizes “consciousness in general,” or a monologic perception of consciousness,374 in the European novel. He asserts that in such a work, everything that is “true”
373 Murakami 2012: 69. Murakami names this the “multi-nationality” (takokuseki-sei) of Shanghai, which I feel hesitant to agree with simply because using this expression would be overlooking the statelessness of the gaichi colony that reacts to the Japanese and European wartime imperialism at its terminal stage. 374 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.
188 can find a place for itself only within the boundaries of a single consciousness, that is, the consciousness of the author, which is most likely embedded in the hero’s self-consciousness, so that the other consciousnesses in the text can be perceived, analyzed, and defined only as objects or as things. In this sense, in Sima Qian, we can clearly see the dominance of the recorder’s consciousness and the lack of “dialogue” between the historical characters and the historian, which resemble the pattern of narrative in the European novel in Bakhtin’s analysis. To the contrary, in The Judgment, the voices of the characters, such as “I,” Jirō, and Jirō’s fiancée’s father, remain “independent” and “are combined in a unity of a higher order.”375 They are independent and self-developing, neither subordinate to the author’s voice or consciousness nor objectified by each other. Yet they coexist, “side by side and simultaneous, as if they existed in space and not in time.”376 Simultaneity, or coeval-ness, is precisely what Bakhtin’s concept of
“dialogue” reveals about the relationship between two independent consciousnesses, or “worlds,” in the novel. In the case of The Judgment, that Jirō and “I” are in dialogue means that here,
Takeda is not only advocating the same spatial pluralism as in Sima Qian, but is also asserting a kind of temporal synchrony between the characters.
But as I pointed out earlier, despite such a dialogic coexistence of the independent consciousnesses in the novel, the voices in The Judgment are not necessarily equally “authentic.”
In this regard, perhaps Bakhtin’s line of reasoning about Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel alone is not sufficient for our analysis of the multiple voices in The Judgment. The voices of Jirō and “I,” for instance, are “independent yet combined in a unity of a higher order;” that is, they are vertically overlapped rather than just horizontally juxtaposed. Yet, Jirō’s consciousness also claims more authenticity than the others’ because it is closer to the “truth” that is disclosed in his
375 Bakhtin 1984: 21. 376 Bakhtin 1984: 28.
189 own confession, although this is still different from having a predominating consciousness (such as that of the author) in the European monologic novel. The multi-dimensional configuration constituted by the relationships among those voices is possible only because the privilege of the confessor’s consciousness has fabricated a power hierarchy between himself and all the others.
This hierarchical relationship in fact also catches Murakami’s attention, but is articulated from a different perspective. After reminding us of the “scariness of records” that Takeda has elaborated in Sima Qian, Murakami argues that the confession is a move Jirō makes in order to rebuild the humanness within his inner world that has been destroyed in his war experiences. By unveiling his past wrong deeds when nobody else is aware of them, Jirō not only regains authority as the “recorder,” but also becomes capable of returning to the old self that “has received higher education,” compared to the others who “have little intelligent training,”377 simply because only he is the only one “conscious” of what has happened and under constant self-surveillance. Thus, Murakami argues, Jirō differentiates himself as a human being from the world of the “animals,” which does not possess a record or a history.
What Murakami fails to carry out in his discussion, however, is an interrogation of the truthfulness of Jirō’s “truth.” The “forum of multiple voices” in The Judgment, to my understanding, not only generates dialogue among multiple characters as Murakami and some other critics have argued, but also creates a tension among them due to the delay in providing certain information and even a loss of the access to the “truth.” The fact that this truth is disclosed in Jirō’s own confession must mean the eternal surrender of its truthfulness as the price that the “recorder” must pay for gaining the privilege of consciousness: the exclusive authority and power that the confessor wins by declaring himself to be the only insider or memory holder
377 Takeda Taijun, “Shimpan” [The Judgment], in Takeda Taijun Zenshū dainikan [The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, Volume 2] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971b), 15.
190 of a certain event will be forever haunted by a reasonable doubt regarding the truthfulness of his memories and narration. He might be able to claim a distinct history that is to his advantage but, at the same time, he can never eliminate the possibility that this history is nothing but a distorted illusion based on some “truth” that cannot be demonstrated.
Published in 1947, The Judgment and its textual structure can surely shed some light on understanding Takeda’s conception of the postwar narrative of Japan’s invasion and defeat, although for a very long time (and even today) critics of this novel have focused on the literal messages inscribed in the text. It is undeniable that Takeda’s questioning of the legitimacy of the war and Japan’s responsibility in The Judgment is a pronounced critique of Japan’s imperialism, which stands out among literary works of the immediate postwar period. But at the same time, because such insights are deployed in a device that allows the possibility of distortion and thus casts unresolvable doubts upon the “truth,” the criticism of war embedded in such a voluntary confession is left deliberately ambiguous. Although The Judgment has become the most cited work in discussions of Takeda’s critique of the war, I argue that we should not neglect the ambiguity of Takeda’s critique because of the nature of the narrative structure. I mean by
“ambiguity” a completely different dimension from Feng Yuzhi’s accusation of “deficiency” of
Takeda’s critique, as introduced at the beginning of this chapter. For Feng, Jirō’s pain and inner struggles depicted by Takeda are disturbing, but this is only because Feng has wrongly expected the humanity of the assailant to be completely erased in what he considers a “perfect” (chedi de) criticism or confession of killing. But evil does not always have to come from the preexisting deficiencies of a person’s human nature, or from the pathological abnormality of a particular group of people. That is why we cannot console ourselves with the convenient conclusion that a genocide such as the Holocaust and the massacres in Japan’s wartime colonies are a question
191 outside humanity. To follow the line of thought that Zygmunt Bauman develops in Modernity and the Holocaust, instead of simply restating the diatribe that the Shōwa military authorities and government carried out the most monstrous piece of “dirty work” in history on the modern
Chinese, we must ask such crucial questions as by whom and under what circumstances the actual work was done.378 It was obviously a project pushed forward by inhuman drives, yet carried out by human hands. In Bauman’s examples, “ordinary good husbands” are proved to be
“selfish creatures, caring only for their own stomachs;”379 in Jirō’s confession, the compassionate man, who has “hated things such as to bully a cat or dog, or to kill a creature,”380 kills the old couple without even remembering their faces. Evil comes from a failure to think, as Hannah
Arendt makes clear in the concept of the banality of evil.381 The killing scene described in Jirō’s confession shows precisely this “vacuum-like state (shinkuu joutai)”382 of the killer’s mind.
Apparently, Feng takes Takeda’s accurate grasp of the banality of evil simply as a defense of the evil and therefore, to him, it becomes an insincere reflection and an avoidance of the confrontation with the deeds. Consequently, Jirō’s confession is never a real confession to Feng, who thus refuses to forgive Jirō. But without being forgiven, Jirō’s capacity to act (even to confess, for example) would be confined to one single deed from which he could never recover, and this is precisely what makes him “remain the victim of its consequences forever.”383 Feng’s reading is an overcontextualization of the text, which certainly does not mean that contextualizing postwar Japanese writers’ works is not important at all. Quite the contrary: I have seen too many critics’ failures in providing a justification of history because of the problem of decontextualization. However, Feng’s claim of China’s victimhood in his critique of The
378 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 4. 379 Bauman 1989: 7. 380 Takeda 1971b: 17. 381 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem-A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 382 Takeda 1971b: 17. 383 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 237.
192 Judgment lacks validity and seems rather to be a matter of structural, political, and social necessity. We can realize the power of forgiveness when Arendt points out in The Human
Condition that forgiving is “the only reaction which does not merely re-act but act anew,”384 and when this is also affirmed by Rey Chow (citing Jacques Derrida) as “a vertical descending movement given from above to below.”385 Feng’s refusal to forgive Jirō is not based on a careful consideration of the banality of evil but simply on a refusal to let go of this power, which is, as pointed out above, precisely what makes the man he is accusing the victim.
To repeat, I disagree with this kind of hasty accusation of Takeda’s “defective” reflections on the war in The Judgment, underlying which is a general proposition on China’s eternal victimhood. Neither the accusation nor the proposition is bolstered by any interests other than a subjective judgment of the “positionalities” of the character and the writer that the accuser catches in or between the lines of the text, so that they only run idly in the claim of an eternal victimhood, by which the accuser is in fact giving up on mourning for the actual deeds. That said, I do agree that Takeda’s war critique in The Judgment has some ambiguity. That is, because Jirō’s consciousness of the evil he has done is uttered in the form of a written record of confession and addressed to another character in the novel, Takeda forever deprives us of the possibility of knowing the real “truth” in Jirō’s past. This narrative device is used more than once in Takeda’s storytelling about the battlefield. In his 1939 novel Landscape of Luzhou, for instance, the whole story relies upon a letter that the narrator receives from her late friend, who has worked in a hospital as a nurse in Luzhou during the war. This ends up being the narrative account of Takeda’s personal experience in Luzhou as a soldier in July 1938.
384 Arendt 1998: 241. 385 Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 119.
193 How should history at the abstract level be looked at in such a structure, then? Compared to Sima Qian, The Judgment approaches history not from the panoramic perspective of the world’s totality with its fragmentation at the sub-level, but through close-ups of the hierarchical relationships among the fragments. In this novel, Takeda again takes up the concept of destruction, but this time in a more imaginary way. It is the total destruction of the world—just like the destruction described in The Revelations—that becomes the presumed reality of all mankind in The Judgment. Takeda puts aside the discussion of the absolute continuity of the world in Sima Qian for a moment, proposing the opposite question: when the world is destroyed and man is facing his punishment, how shall we gain access to history?
In the narrative device of The Judgment, we discover a history that does not have an ultimate “truth” to be recovered, and that even if we could successfully differentiate among the multiple voices and enter each of the social spaces they disclose, at the end of this overlapping vertical structure there is still no definite truth. Consequently, the kinds of claims that attempt to establish the authenticity of a single mysterious origin, as well as a system that derives and develops from it, would be unimaginable. For Takeda, the world does not evolve in a linear way.
If “evolution” necessarily engages a comparison between the primitive and the advanced over time, then Takeda’s “world” does not evolve at all. Neither is it a “dialectical development based on the ceaselessly emerging new situation that is always brought about by the conflicts and contradictions,”386 as Sakamoto Hiroshi argues in his paper, “On Takeda Taijun, Subjectivity, and the Public Sphere.” Instead, Takeda’s is a kind of “stagnational view of history” (teitai shikan), which is, in Takeuchi Yoshimi’s words, probably the only view Takeda could have taken to counter the predominating “flow view of history” (nagare shikan) in his time, which
386 Sakamoto Hiroshi, “Takeda Taijun, shutaisei, kōkyōkūkan” [On Takeda Taijun, Subjectivity, and the Public Sphere], trans. Tan Ren’an, in Journal of Modern Chinese Studies, No. 27 (2013), 10.
194 advocated the unbroken line of Emperors in Japan.387 In The Judgment, Takeda’s focus is shifted to the political being that he brought up in Sima Qian but could not elaborate on.
According to Kawanishi Masaaki, it is only after the end of the war that Takeda began to be able to scrutinize the world from a microscopic perspective by reading such authors as Dostoevsky and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.388 Interestingly enough, however, this time Takeda’s individual enters the picture in an atomistic, rather than a structuralist, way.
Takeda first introduces the notion of the “atom” by using the phrase “human atom”
(ningen genshi) in Sima Qian to refer to the political being, particularly the heroes that are active in the world in Shiji.389 It is part of a physico-chemical view of the world in Buddhism, as
Takeda himself explains in his commentary on Okamoto Kanoko’s novel Shōjō ruten (Wheel of
Life, 1940). For quite a long time, Takeda was apparently preoccupied with this view, but critics such as Noma Hiroshi believe the view does not simply come from the influence of Buddhism.
Noma writes in his essay “Takeda Taijun no chōhen shōsetsu” (“On Takeda Taijun’s Novel”),
“Takeda often studied Atomic physics. When he was in Shanghai, there was rumor saying that
Japan would soon disappear because of the atomic bomb. Takeda studied nuclear physics very hard because of that. He worked for the publishers in Shanghai but only published three books, one of which was Ishihara Atsushi’s Introduction to Physics. And I heard that he had been studying Yukawa Hideki’s theory of elementary particles since the wartime.”390 Nevertheless, it is in The Judgment that Takeda fully elaborates on the trope of “molecule” for the first time, when Jirō explains what he used to think about life and death in the earlier stages of his life.
But I did not admit that I was a cruel man. In the constant transfers of the corps and the exhausting work that continues day and night, I even began to forget
387 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Takeda Taijun Zenshū daikūykan [The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, Volume 9] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979b). 388 Kawanishi 2005: 227. 389 Takeda 1971a: 98. 390 Noma 1988: 140-141.
195 the fact of the killing, not to mention the face of the man that I killed. And, without taking too long, because there was another killing conducted by me alone, not by the group, my memories of the previous time began to fade so quickly. Maybe the instant of killing is the only time when human beings would seriously think about killing another person or creature. I remember shooting a toad with an air gun when I was about 14 or 15. In fact, since I was a little kid, I have rather hated things such as bullying a cat or dog, or killing a creature. My hatred of those things almost appeared to be a kind of timidity. But around that time, from my studies of physics and chemistry, my brain was overwhelmingly dominated by the theory that all materials are constituted of atoms. That is to say, if reduced to atoms, nothing exists as creatures or anything else. I was strangely influenced in my own way by the argument that the sacred life is merely a substance if decomposed into molecules. Therefore, there would be no need to be afraid however you treat this thing that is but a “substance.” To kill a creature is just like decomposing some thing, and it involves no evilness or judgment—that is what I was thinking.391
So for the young Jirō, as he would confess later in his letter, the sacred life used to be understood as a decomposable substance that could be reduced to the level of molecules. Seen in this light, the act of killing means no more than a mere change of the form of life, and thus involves no sense of guilt or shame, nor should it arouse any controversies on the question of inhumanity. As he explains later, although his emotion tells him that this thinking is very wrong, it only increased his desire to execute the toad, just for the satisfaction of being able to control his own feelings. In any sense, this personal way of comprehending life and death that Jirō developed in his early life certainly would not be able to help save the lives under his gun at the warfront. In the letter, Jirō recalls that at each site of killing described in The Judgment, he would feel himself entering a “vacuum-like state.” At the instant of killing, he always hears the sound of pulling the trigger against a completely silent background; and after the killing, there remains only something that is “as insensitive as lead (namari no yōna mushinkeina mono).”
After he has just shot two innocent men, he even asks why killing a person is evil at all, upon hearing his comrade’s disgust.
391 Takeda 1971b: 17.
196 Atomism is certainly not the direction in which Takeda wants to take history, though.
Takeda expresses his unchanged belief in the world as an organic whole by having one of the characters—a soon-to-be-stateless Japanese man who lives with a stateless German Jewish woman—make a speech about the “law of conservation of energy” in the world, arguing that despite the common destructive movements among individual nations, the world of mankind conserves its energy and will neither be changed nor destroyed.392 So in terms of his perception of the structure of the world, we still see the coherent thread linking Takeda’s works from Sima
Qian to The Judgment, as well as some of his later writings. However, in The Judgment, Jirō challenges that kind of theory by asking what would happen to the individual in such a world and also by pointing out that the idea of the absolute continuity of the world would not solve any problem regarding the punishment or redemption of the individual. At the same time, we must note that Jirō puts atomistic theory into question as well, when after the end of the war, he realizes that he cannot imagine spending his life and growing old with his beloved fiancée without constantly recalling the faces of the old couple he killed during the war. Thus The
Judgment confronts the world after the real destruction. First, it does not give up the imagination of the world as a surviving totality, whether in the form of a system or of a sum of energy.
Second, having indicated the inaccessibility of the ultimate “truth” in the structure of history, it devotes the larger part of the investigation to the practices of the individual in the establishment of such a structure. Unlike what atomism would assert, however, neither the individual nor the world is flat. The world is not a sum of indistinctive atoms, but is driven by numerous relationships among individuals.
392 Takeda 1971b: 8-9.
197 History over Time: Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976)
The controversy over life and death as an atom in Takeda’s early work, which reflects his theory of the “world” and the individual, comes back in the form of an “uncanny molecule” in
Takeda’s last work, a collection of stories published as Shanghai Firefly almost thirty years later.
The stories were published serially in the journal Umi between February and September, 1976, discontinued after that because of a deterioration in Takeda’s health that eventually caused his death. The stories that had appeared in Umi were then put together as a book by Chūō kōrōnsha after Takeda passed away in October 1976.393 In this work, atomism again serves as a target for
Takeda to destroy, just as in The Judgment he outlines Jirō’s conversion from a believer in human life as a form of molecules to a confessor who looks for individual values and responsibility. But before we get to the trope of the molecule in this novel, I should first point out some differences in Shanghai Firefly compared to Takeda’s earlier writings: several temporal features differ from his earlier works and its narrative structure is unlike The Judgment. First of all, the temporal setting of Shanghai Firefly is unique. During his career, Takeda published several works on China and Shanghai that would conventionally be labeled as Shanhai mono
(“works on Shanghai”) or Chūgoku mono (“works on China”) by his critics and readers. In those works, he often recalls the time between 1944 and 1946 when he lived in the Shanghai concessions, but most of them depict what he experienced in the colony only after the defeat.
Shanghai Firefly, in contrast, is the only work that actually goes back to unfold the story up to the moment before the empire’s termination. Secondly, the fact that this novel was written thirty years after Japan’s defeat allowed the writer the time to reflect on the event in a way that is different from his writing in the immediate postwar years. The thirty years between the defeat
393 Takeda Taijun, Shanhai no hotaru [Shanghai Firefly] (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1976).
198 and the publication of the novel were, as Ishizaki Hitoshi states, a period during which the
Japanese perception of a foreign Shanghai had finally matured.394 Here Ishizaki is apparently comparing these perceptions of Shanghai in the 1970s (including Takeda’s) to those of the immediate postwar years. Ishizaki makes no reference to the restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and China in his paper, but judging from his use of the term “mature,” we can tell that he probably thinks positively about those thirty years. Ishizaki incorporates all the changes that occurred during those thirty years, including the historical legacy of the development and accumulation of capital and all sorts of inequalities hat accompanied the capitalist expansion, and that is lacking in the writings of most travelers, reporters, and military journalists of the wartime or the immediate postwar period, including the young Takeda. In this way, Shanghai Firefly appears in Ishizaki’s discussion as a rich text that “talks” to Takeda’s earlier works. For us, because of these temporal features, the novel responds to our interest in discovering a transnational and trans-era spectacle of the two countries as the writer moves between them over time.
It is convenient for our discussion that Ishizaki links the temporal gap between Takeda’s experience of the defeat and the publication of this experience to the concept of “travel,” by stating that the gap of thirty years “penetrates the essence of ‘travel.’”395 I consider this a sudden move because Ishizaki does not make the reason for such a linkage clear in his article, and there is no further elaboration of what exactly he means by the “essence of travel.” If we are to interpret it for our purposes, however, we can take this opportunity to make our own link between Takeda and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, despite the fact that the two years that Takeda lived in the Shanghai concessions should not count as “travel” in the word’s most rigorous sense.
394 Ishizaki Hitoshi, “Kokuten: Takeda Taijun no ‘Shanhai’” [A Dark Spot: Takeda Taijun’s “Shanghai”], in Geibunkō (2009), 80. 395 Ishizaki 2009: 80.
199 They are comparable in that the episodes of Akutagawa’s travelogue, Travels in China, as discussed in Chapter One, were published several months or even a few years after his return to
Japan from the trip. The travelogue is a recollection based on his travel notes. Similarly, although Shanghai Firefly was published thirty years later, this first-person novel relies heavily upon a journal Takeda kept in Shanghai.396 It is, to cite Barbara Hartley, “a fictional although semi-autobiographical account” 397 of Takeda’s time in Shanghai that is fiction but includes strong parallels between events depicted in the narrative and the novelist’s real life experiences to the extent that the narrator/protagonist has the same name as the author. Indeed, although many of Takeda’s works have “Sugi” as the protagonist’s name, in Shanghai Firefly he is “Mr.
Takeda,” using the Chinese characters of Takeda’s own name, while the phonetic notation of it is in the Shanghai dialect “Wūdeisiisan (Mr. Takeda).” Many researchers, including the Takeda specialist Kawanishi Masaaki, share Hartley’s opinion and hold that Shanghai Firefly is a semi- autobiographical account of Takeda’s years in Shanghai. In The Biography of Takeda Taijun,
Kawanishi concludes, after a careful comparison between the novel and Takeda’s Shanghai diary, that Shanghai Firefly is a re-presentation (saigen shita mono) of Takeda’s life in Shanghai, which he created based on numerous references to the journal.398 As I indicate in the introduction, Takeda’s Shanghai diary had been donated to the Museum of Modern Japanese
Literature at Komaba, Tokyo, but was later recalled by his bereaved family and is therefore currently unavailable to researchers and general readers. Kawanishi is among the few lucky people who had access to it before it was again sealed. If Kawanishi’s observations are
396 Kawanishi 2005: 482. 397 Barbara Hartley, “The City as Liminal Protagonist in Takeda Taijun’s Shanhai no Hotaru (Shanghai Firefly),” 2. This paper was presented to the 18th Biennial Conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia at the Australian National University from 8th to 11th July 2013 and has been peer-reviewed and appears on the Conference Proceedings website by permission of the author, who retains copyright. http://japaninstitute.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/u6/03_Barbara_Hartley- JSAA2013.pdf 398 Kawanishi 2005: 482.
200 appropriate and reliable (and given his scholarly reputation, I believe that they are), it would mean that at a very late stage of his life, Takeda reflected on earlier years recorded in his journal to write Shanghai Firefly. Seen in this light, the trope of the “molecule” that appears on the opening pages should not be taken as a metaphor that Takeda either favored in literary production or picked randomly for a later work. Rather, it symbolizes something that still sparkled in the dark memories of the war when, facing death, he flashed back some thirty years.399
That said, the fact that Shanghai Firefly is in the form of a novel not a diary, makes it possible to compare it with The Judgment as two works of the same genre. It is important to keep in mind that since Takeda could have simply published the diary, or at least a revision of it, his insistence on the novel form is itself suggestive. In this realm, Mikhail Bakhtin’s profound perception of the uniqueness of the stylistics of the novel as a genre might again be stimulating.
Writing in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin states, “The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice. In it the investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls.”400 The diversity of social speech and individual voices that can be artistically organized in the novel seem to have been the reason for its popularity among postwar
Japanese writers such as Takeda Taijun, Ōoka Shōhei, and Noma Hiroshi for their war narratives, rather than choosing the essay, interview, speech, memoir or diary. We have looked at Jirō’s letter in The Judgment, which is one of the semi-literary forms that Bakhtin mentions when he
399 Takeda’s death was unexpected because his illness was thought to be a less acute one. But his health condition had been unfavorable since his thrombus in 1971, and after that Takeda could not use his right hand freely. After this, Takeda’s works were actually all written down by his wife Yuriko, following his verbal instructions. The postwar Japanese writer, Ōoka Shōhei, believes that the memories of Shanghai were something that Takeda was trying to put down in writing, even though it was very difficult for him at the time, which could even be threatening to his life. Unfortunately, it did become his last piece. For more information about Takeda’s passing, please refer to the special issue devoted to Takeda Taijun in the journal Umi, December, 1976. 400 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 1982), 262.
201 names diversity as one of the stylistic characteristics of the novel, with concrete examples. And we have discussed at length how this device works in The Judgment to alter the way that Takeda allows Jirō’s consciousness to perform to the reader. The diary is another semi-literary form considered by Bakhtin as supplementary to the direct authorial literary-artistic narration in the novel’s stylization. Interestingly enough, not only was Shanghai Firefly never published as a diary, it does not include any journal narration.
Without neglecting the intrinsic diversity of voices in the novel as a genre, we cannot help noticing that the language and the style (which, according to Bakhtin, are themselves already a combination of languages and a system of styles) of Shanghai Firefly are far less heterogeneous than those in The Judgment. The form of the novel prevents the narrative of
Shanghai Firefly from claiming to be the authentic truth that only the author knows, as it would have been had it remained in the form of the diary. In that sense, Takeda gave up any claim to the privilege of consciousness that he would have been his had he published the diary. By choosing the form of the novel, he allows for the possibility of finding other “truths” about the city of Shanghai that are different from his depiction in Shanghai Firefly as Hartley calls it, “an insulated terrain in the hell of a war.”401 However, it is also undeniable that this novel lacks a polyphonic and vertical structure like the one in The Judgment. Instead, it unfolds quite monologically in the voice of the sole narrator of the story, “Mr. Takeda.” All the other characters are represented by this single voice. In that sense, the consciousnesses of the characters in Shanghai Firefly are juxtaposed horizontally, but all subordinate to the self- consciousness of the hero.
However, the less polyphonic narrative does not necessarily mean that a less multi- dimensional representation of history is embedded in the inner structure of the text. Starting with
401 Hartley 2013: 3.
202 the line that reads, “Shōwa 19 and 20, I wonder which summer was hotter,” Shanghai Firefly immediately drops us at the intersection of different times and spaces, forcing us to walk with all kinds of dialogues and tensions at work between them. Shōwa 19 and 20 (the years 1944 and
1945) are undoubtedly significant in modern history because of the enormous implications of
World War II and its end. However, before we go into the details of the events, the names that one chooses to mark the era already imply the opening of a different discursive space. For instance, if we follow the Christian calendar and designate those two years as “1944 and 1945,” we are immediately looking at the defeat of Japan not as part of a national history but as part of the end of a world war, simultaneously inviting into the scenario various relationships intertwined outside the imagination of a closed space called “Japan.” We all understand that no matter which era/year names we used, it would be impossible to stay only within the imaginative boundaries of the nation and to think about the defeat only in the domestic context. In other words, whichever perspective we choose to take, a plurality of worlds, which are all arbitrarily marked in one periodization or another, will exist simultaneously. That said, however, by marking the two years as “1944 and 1945,” the focus of the perspective is obviously shifted beyond the national boundaries of Japan. In contrast, era names such as “Shōwa” would, as
Karatani Kōjin points out, “make one forget relations to the exterior and construct a single, autonomous, discursive space,”402 that is, a “communal, illusory space”403 called Japan. In such a case, the focus of attention will be purposefully kept within the discourse of Japan’s domestic periodization called Shōwa, which starts in the year 1926. Hence, we may say that when Takeda recalls the time of the defeat as “Shōwa 19 and 20,” he is putting the whole story back into the
402 Karatani Kōjin, “The Discursive Space of Japan,” trans. Seiji M. Lippit, in boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 3, Japan in the World (Autumn 1991), 192. 403 Karatani 1991: 193.
203 frame of a history with great particularity, while leaving the universality only in the background.404
What significance does it bear, then, that the defeat of Japan is recalled with a zoomed-in focus on the discourse of the Shōwa? Takeda wrote the novel in 1976, a time that, technically speaking, still belongs to the long Shōwa era. But according to Karatani, although the Shōwa era did not formally end until 1989, when the Shōwa Emperor Hirohito died, the term Shōwa generally referred to the prewar period. “The term postwar is applied to the period after Shōwa
20,” Karatani writes, “Similarly, since 1965, the word postwar itself has seldom been used. It was around 1965 that people began speaking of the end of postwar literature; conjointly, the term
Shōwa lost its significance as a historical division.”405 That is to say, by opening up the story in
“Shōwa 19 and 20,” Takeda is making the contrast between the “Shōwa” of the prewar/wartime years and the 1970s, a time when “Shōwa” had “lost its significance as a historical division” in reality. In between, there is not only a gap of thirty years, but a crucial difference in nuance as well. Karatani considers the discursive space of 1970s’ Japan as resembling that of the Taishō period (1912-1926), in the sense that both Taishō and the 1970s display “the combination of a sense of achievement and an autonomous internalization,”406 or jiheisei.407 He specifies the
“things Taishōesque” as having “emerged from a consciousness of autonomy, as tension between
Japan and the West began to ease following the Russo-Japanese War, and Japan proclaimed its separation from Asia.”408 This conclusion is slightly different from that of other historians such as Frederick R. Dickinson, who urges us to take the aftermath of World War I, instead of the
404 However, this does not mean that the seireki, or the Christian calendar, is therefore a universal periodization that carries no particularity. Like any kinds of periodization, it is itself but one of the many possible ways to narrate the history of mankind and is precisely what shapes our perceptions of that history. My point here is simply to emphasize the international stage that seireki would lead us to, as compared to the localness of the Shōwa vocabulary. 405 Karatani 1991: 195. Emphasis in the original. 406 Karatani 1991: 197. 407 Karatani 1990a: 26. 408 Karatani 1991: 202.
204 Russo-Japanese War, more seriously, arguing that the war not only “marked a dramatic increase in Japanese power in Asia”409 but also played a great role in the histories of labor activism, urbanization, public media development, and so on, in modern Japan. The point here is that both of these scholars agree on the “sense of achievement” and the “autonomous internalization” in the Taishō period. Karatani furthermore holds firm that what he says about the Taishōesque things also applies to the 1970s. Just like the Taishō period, which is characterized by “a self- complacency that can introduce anything from the outside without actually maintaining a conception of the exterior” and “a delusionary, insular mentality that thinks of itself as worldwide,”410 the 1970s also lack that kind of “exteriority.”411 In other words, Takeda was writing Shanghai Firefly from within a closed, autonomous discourse of the Japanese nation and culture in the 1970s, about a time, “Shōwa 19 and 20,” in which Japan was going through great confusion and chaos, even facing the danger of destruction, and was therefore cut wide “open.”
During the two years of Shōwa 19 and 20 that the novel Shanghai Firefly covers, in parallel with the process of the Pacific War, the ego of the Japanese empire came to its terminal stage. When we talk about those “two years,” moreover, we should never overlook the fact that
Takeda actually moved from Tokyo to Shanghai in the summer of Shōwa 19 and spent the whole year of Shōwa 20 in Shanghai. That is, we must realize that even those two years of the wartime
Shōwa, which we feel the urge to take as homogeneous “local time,” in fact involved a drastic movement within the empire from the metropole to the colony, a movement which brings the multilayers of social spaces to our attention and questions the assumed homogeneous temporality
409 Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 21. 410 Karatani 1990a: 205. 411 For more discussions on Karatani’s ideas on “exteriority,” please see Carl Cassegard “Exteriority and Transcritique: Karatani Kōjin and the Impact of the 1990s” (Japanese Studies 27[1], May, 1-18), and Barbara Hartley “The Subversive Girl and National Discourse in Pre-war Japan: Takeda Taijun’s Kizoku no kaidan” (Asian Studies Review, September 2008, Vol. 32, 361-374). In his recent work Iki no shikō: tasha, gaibusei, kokyō [Reflection on the Threshold: Other, Exteriority, and Home] (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankai, 2013), Isomae Jun’ichi also provides a profound critique of Karatani and this concept.
205 of the “local.” The summer of Shōwa 20, which Takeda spent in the Shanghai concessions, would, for instance, simultaneously open up a contrasting social space that reacts to and superimposes upon the summer of Shōwa 19 that was lived in Tokyo. It can also, as an extension of such a colonial encounter, link to the social and political spaces between Japan and
China in the mid-1970s, after the two countries had restored diplomatic relations and the Chinese
Cultural Revolution had finally come to an end.
Of all the complexity of different times and spaces inscribed in the text, the pair of spatial comparisons that scholars of Shanghai Firefly single out is, for quite obvious reasons, the one between Japan and China in the wartime. Takeda’s decision to go to Shanghai in Shōwa 19 provides a good case for such studies. As is well known, Takeda was sent to the warfront in
China in October 1937, three months after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 7, 1937) ignited total war between Japan and China. Although he had been a scholar of Chinese literature for a few years before that, it was the first time he had set foot in China. It is only natural to imagine that the impact of this experience was critical, as his first encounter with China was set in a peculiar way that was also tragic, for the young and enthusiastic scholar. As a matter of fact,
Takeuchi Yoshimi later recalled that Takeda became a totally different person in terms of his writing style and personality412 after going to the warfront in China in the late 1930s and meeting
Chinese people for the first time. Takeda himself once stated in a sad and sarcastic tone about his first encounter with the Chinese, “At least half of them were rotten, silent dead bodies.”413
Interestingly enough, however, it is difficult to find many works in which Takeda directly recounts the two wartime years that he spent in China. He once described, in a 1940 essay, the
412 Takeuchi Yoshimi el., “Takeda Taijun: sono shigoto to ningen,” in Haniya (1973): 240. 413 Takeda Taijun, Chūgoku bungaku geppō dai 5 kan (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1971c), 136.
206 dreadful landscape and dead bodies that he saw in China when he went as a soldier.414 Thirty years later, he described the same scenery to Hotta Yoshie in one of their interviews as part of his confession. Although very short, this confession includes a denunciation of the war, in which he stated that for him, the thing called “war” is extremely “embarrassing, painful, and disgusting
(hijōni hazukashii shi, kurushii shi, iyana koto).”415 On the other hand, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, Takeda returned to this war experience time and again as an indirect but unavoidable reference in his later works. Precisely because of the profound insights displayed in those works, when people look retrospectively at Takeda’s second trip to China in 1944, more likely than not they will interpret it as a well-planned escape from the risk of being conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army for a second time.416 However, Takeda avows in Shanghai
Firefly that this is not true. While admitting that a conscription notice would not be delivered to those who had moved to Shanghai, he denies that “Mr. Takeda” went to Shanghai for that purpose.417
In June of Shōwa 19, Takeda took a position in the China-Japan Cultural Association
(Chūnichi bunka kyōkai) in Shanghai, crossing the national border again, this time of his own free will. Signs of Japan’s defeat were becoming more obvious since the spring of that year, and
Tokyo started to struggle with serious shortages of food and other necessities. In the critic
Yamamoto Kenkichi’s words, Takeda jumped to China when the war situation was already indicating Japan’s irreversible defeat, and if you think about the timing after everything is over, you will probably consider such a move funny or inexplicable.418 But Yamamoto also recalls
414 Takeda Taijun, “A Letter about Chinese Culture,” in Chūgoku bungaku geppō, Issue 58 (1940.1). 415 Takeda Taijun, Hotta Yoshie, Taidan: watashi wa mō Chūgoku o kataranai [Interview: I will Never Talk about China Again] (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1973), 38. 416 Kawanishi Masaaki is one of those who hold this opinion. See the “Takeda Taijun nenpu” [The Chronological Record of Takeda Taijun] in Kawanishi 2005: 496. 417 Takeda 1976: 50. 418 Yamamoto Kenkichi, “Takeda Taijun,” in Haniya 1973: 105.
207 that at the farewell party before Takeda’s departure, Takeda used the metaphor of the huge cushions hung on the hull of a boat that help avoid direct contact when the boat arrives at the wharf, to explain his own desire to play a role that could help to reduce, as much as possible, the crash between the two countries. Yamamoto regards this insight of Takeda’s highly, commenting that although it would have been easier to stay in Tokyo and passively wait for the war to end, Takeda chose to pursue the “one percent of hope” in the ninety-nine percent hopeless international situation, however little his personal power might have been.419
Yamamoto’s interpretation of Takeda’s trip to China in 1944 is cited and elaborated upon more fully by Ōhashi Takehiro and three other co-editors in Shanghai 1944-1945: Annotations of
Takeda Taijun’s Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai 1944-1945: Takeda Taijun “Shanhai no hotaru”
Chūshaku; hereafter Chūshaku), the most detailed and reliable annotation of Shanghai Firefly published so far in Japan. In its reading of the scene in which the “Shanghai firefly” appears at the beginning of the novel, Chūshaku provides a unique interpretation of the meaning of the symbolic “firefly” by invoking Yamamoto’s comment on the “one percent of hope” and the “99 percent” of hopelessness. On a hot day in the summer of Shōwa 19, Takeda arrived in Shanghai and was finally able to locate his office in the former French Concession, requisitioned by the pro-Japanese Wang Jingwei Government after July 30, 1943.420 That night, he took a walk with his Japanese colleague in the quiet atmosphere that was “nowhere to be found in Tokyo.”421 Let us first take a look at this scene.
And then there was a firefly floating in the air. It wove a trail of pale light and brushed gently across my face. After that, it disappeared, waving and blinking, just like an uncanny molecule of the air. The light coming from it would draw a soft, weak line when it flew away. When it stopped somewhere, the light blinked
419 Haniya 1973: 105. 420 Zhao Mengyun, “Takeda Taijun ‘Shanghai no hotaru’ kara mita ‘Chūnichi bunka kyōkai’” [A Glance at the China-Japan Culture Association through Takeda Taijun’s Shanghai Firefly], in Higashi-Osaka daigaku/Higashi-Osaka daigaku tanki daigakubu kyōiku kenkyū kiyō, Issue 2 (2005), 15. 421 Takeda 1976: 18.
208 and blinked. Just when you thought it had disappeared, it appeared again. Nobody noticed the existence of the firefly. It was the Shanghai firefly, a firefly from a foreign land coming to greet me fresh from the boat. I must have been so distracted with the beginning of a new and curious life to be touched by it. But there was certainly the light of the firefly flowing through the streets. It was around the middle of June. The suffocating and uneasy summer heat was approaching.422
Based on the connection that Yamamoto has made between Takeda’s “remarkable action”
(rippana kōdō) of flying to China and the hopeless war situation in Japan, Chūshaku pushes it further to interpret the waving and blinking light of the firefly as the symbol of a China that represents “hope.” It starts with the expression “unstable light” that has been favored in narratives of modern Chinese literature and history as a metaphor of a weak but persistently hopeful image of “China.” After briefly citing two other works that belong to Takeda’s early
Shanhai mono, Chūshaku then makes note of a tendency shared by the male protagonists of the two novels, which indicates that they both construct a new image of “China” after their encounters with young Chinese female characters. Finally, Chūshaku concludes that it is therefore possible to take the blinking, weak but persistent light of the firefly depicted in the opening pages of Shanghai Firefly as a projection (tōei) of the protagonist’s, or Takeda’s, yearning for an imaginary “China.” For Takeda, as Chūshaku assumes, both Shanghai and the
China-Japan Cultural Association were sites for Japanese and Chinese writers to communicate with one another, and at the same time for him to achieve his own goal of working between to bring them together.423
However, both Chūshaku and Yamamoto’s article are extremely vague about the meaning of “hope.” Shōwa 19 and 20 belong to the time when Shanghai was still registered in
422 Takeda 1976: 18-19. Emphasis added. 423 Ōhashi Takehiko, el ed., Shanhai 1944-1945: Takeda Taijun “Shanghai Firefly” Chūshaku [Shanghai 1944-1945: Notes of Takeda Taijun’s Shanghai Firefly] (Tokyo: Sōbunsha shuppan, 2008), 20-22.
209 the Japanese postal service as “City of Shanghai, Nagasaki Province, Japan.”424 It is true that many studies hold that Mainland China should not be considered as a fully colonized territory and discussed along with Japan’s former colonies such as South Korea, Taiwan, and the
Southern islands, let alone Manchuria, which was considered to be a modern nation-state by
Prasenjit Duara.425 But this does not weaken the argument that the concessions belong to a yet very different discourse, which is exceptional even within the framework of Mainland China, because the concessions were essentially colonies. For the Japanese nationals who lived in
Shanghai before the end of the war, the international settlement in the Hongkew (Hongkou)
District was probably the only “Shanghai” they knew. That is to say, given the extremely complicated distribution of political, economic and military powers in China during the war, and depending on who is the viewer and narrator, the landscape that a property name will invoke changes drastically. There is another “Shanghai” (or other “Shanghais”) existing outside the concessions, and another “China” (or other “Chinas”) struggling outside Shanghai—a complication sketched out in the first chapter that follows Akutagawa’s route. But the “China” in Yamamoto and Chūshaku’s remarks, made in the 1960s and the 2000s, respectively, is obviously confusing the multiple geo-spatial layers embodied in the proper name “China.” Seen in this light, therefore, the “hope” that Yamamoto and Chūshaku see in Takeda’s action of moving from Tokyo to the Shanghai international settlements is nothing but an illusion imposed upon an imaginary community. Moreover, the imagined “China” here, represented by the semi- colonial city of Shanghai, is obviously not seen as a typical gaichi (one of Japan’s overseas territories) subordinate to the hierarchical imperial system generated by the naichi (the Japanese
424 Zhao Mengyun, Shanhai bungaku zanzō: nihon-jin sakka no hikari to kage [A Literary Afterimage of Shanghai: Flashes and Shades of Japanese Writers] (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 2000), book jacket. This is also mentioned in Hayashi Kyōko’s “Shanhai (Shanghai),” in Shanhai/Missheru no kuchibeni: Hayashi Kyōko chūgoku shōsetsu shū [Shanghai/Michelle’s Lipstick: Selections of Hayashi Kyōko’s Novels about China] (Tokyo: Kōdansha bungeibunko, 2001), 109. 425 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).
210 mainland). Since “hope” is such a rare word to use for a colony as a contrast to the “hopeless” metropole, it can be said that when Yamamoto and Chūshaku made those statements, they were not assuming the discourse of colonialism, but rather a parallel relationship between two modern nations. However, judged according to the fatal struggles among domestic political parties and warlords that would make “China” all along a questionable sovereign nation, this assumption is regrettably also an incautious one.
In short, “hopefulness” and “hopelessness” are oversimplified terms that violently reduce the complications of the Shanghai whirlpool that Takeda experienced before the end of the war.
Such an interpretation is essentially a superficial dualism based on a fictional dichotomy of
“Japan” and “China,” which is proven to be an ineffective strategy, particularly for comprehending the discourse of “Shōwa 19 and 20.” As mentioned earlier, although Shanghai
Firefly also deals with multiple themes such as destruction that Takeda had worked on in his better known works, insightful studies of this novel are lacking, probably because of the tendency to read it as a story that plays around a cheap manifestation of “hope.”
What needs to be clarified here is that, although the existing scholarship on Shanghai
Firefly holds that the novel cheers a celebration of “hope,” I argue that it simply starts with a reflection on the forms of life and death. It is true that, technically speaking, the novel never gets to the point when Japan actually loses the war. Nor did Takeda include any bloody scenes of battlefields or brutal class struggles in the novel, as many stories of the colony would have done.
The Shanghai depicted in Shanghai Firefly even appears to be a place where “it feels as if there were not a single bullet that would fly into this city.”426 As Barbara Hartley writes, “While the lives of subjects in other parts of the empire, including the Japanese mainland, may have been pushed to the brink, daily routine in Shanghai continues—on the surface at least—with a
426 Zhao 2000: 151.
211 disturbing semblance of normality.”427 In short, the optimistic tone that Takeda adopts in describing the fate of the city and the feelings such as “openness and freedom” that are ensured by the city’s more plentiful material provisions compared to the naichi’s might give readers the illusion of a sort of brightness that was incongruous with the war. But more questions must be asked: if such a bright tone cannot be simply interpreted as “hope,” then, taken in Takeda’s broader conception of “survival” and “death,” what would Shanghai’s survival really mean?
Does it literally mean the opposite of death in Takeda’s theory of a spatially constituted world history? With a strong presentiment of the inevitable defeat, yet far away from the metropole, what exactly does Takeda see and feel about the structure of wartime colonialism (and its failure) when the Japanese empire is approaching its terminal stage?
To address these questions, let us return to the scene in which the Shanghai Firefly makes its first appearance and try an alternative way of interpreting its symbolic meaning by relating it to Takeda’s trope of the molecule. If we think about it, it is actually quite strange to see a firefly flying on the streets of Shanghai. As we know, fireflies are normally found only in quiet areas, or at least not in brightly lit cities. But on the other hand, although the firefly described in the novel might be fictional, it must carry certain significant symbolic meaning for Takeda to have highlighted such an episode. In the scene cited above, contrasting with the descriptive language of the whole paragraph that Takeda employs to unfold the picture of the firefly, the trope of the
“uncanny molecule of the air” (kūki no kikaina bunshi) stands out. In my understanding, this trope is precisely what discloses Takeda’s interpretation of the representational “Shanghai firefly,” whether it is fictional or real.
It may be said that the term “uncanny molecule of the air” is itself an uncanny way to describe fireflies. It comes from nowhere and even brings a sense of oddness to the sentence.
427 Hartley 2013: 3.
212 But Takeda did not randomly pick this metaphor. If we relate it to Takeda’s earlier works, we will find a surprisingly large number of examples of his obsession with the “molecule” (bunshi) trope as part of his vocabulary to understand the history of death. In the previous sections I have touched upon Takeda’s interest in the atomistic theory as expressed in Sima Qian and The
Judgment. We can also see the Buddhist source of his insights into this kind of theory in his
1958 essay “Back to the Atom” (“Genshi e kaeru”), in which he provokes a brief discussion on the different forms of funeral rites, concluding that they all lead essentially to the return of the human body and bones to their original, atomic form.428
It is well known in Japan that Takeda Taijun, who used the name Satoru when he was young, was the second son of the chief priest of the Chosen Temple in the Bunkyo District,
Tokyo. He inherited a position from the master of his father based on an arrangement by the two made before he was born, and was supposed to carry on the master’s—Takeda Hōjun’s—temple after he finished his Buddhist training. Although Takeda did not follow the path that he was supposed to take, being born to a Buddhist family and being expected to live a life as a monk certainly had a great impact on his thinking. Out of all the doubts and questions that he tortured himself with when he was younger, the one thing that mattered the most to him as a Buddhist was the question of saitai, or having a wife. On various occasions, including his well-known interview with Terada Tōru, later published under the title “The Matter of ‘Kill’ and ‘Being
Killed’” (“‘Korosu’ koto, ‘korosareru’ koto”),429 he brings up the contradiction between the advocacy of abstinence in Buddhist teaching and the marriage of Buddhist priests in their actual lives. On the one hand, Buddhism encourages abstinence and does not welcome the idea of
428 Takeda Taijun, “Genshi e kaeru” [Back to the Atom], in Takeda Taijun zenshū, daijūsankan [The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, Volume 13] (Chikuma shobō, 1982), 334. 429 Takeda Taijun, Terada Tōru, “‘Korosu’ koto, ‘korosareru’ koto” [Killing and Being killed], in Takeda Taijun zenshū, bekkan ni [The Collected Works of Takeda Taijun, Extra Issue 2] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979c), 118.
213 intercourse; but on the other, sex is the only way that human beings can reproduce and continue.
For Takeda himself—his own birth as the child of a priest and his Buddhist wife—becomes an embodiment of such an unsolvable paradox and, consequently, a symbol of something that has to, but is not supposed to, exist. Takeda mentions the strong sense of humiliation, shame, and guilt that he has had about his own existence since he was young.
The young “Mr. Takeda,” living in the Shanghai international settlement as the
Publishing Department Chief of the China-Japan Cultural Association, continues to reflect on this question in a self-mocking tone in Shanghai Firefly. At a funeral of some stranger held in a foppish and boisterous Chinese Buddhist temple, “Mr. Takeda,” who follows a friend all the way there just to get a free meal, recalls that he has read in one of Lu Xun’s essays that criticizes
Buddhist monks’ ironic custom of eating meat and taking wives: “We call the child of the monk the little monk. The little monk becomes the monk after the daddy dies. The monk now can give birth to another little monk.”430
The Buddhist idea of the atomic form of life is historicized by Takeda in The Judgment and Shanghai Firefly. In Shanghai Firefly, for instance, he brings the reader back to the wartime
Shōwa years, the war, and the colony, through this imaginative “tunnel” between the two chronotopes opened up by this “uncanny molecule of the air” that travels between the two texts across different times and spaces. The molecule of the air that has “brushed gently across my
[Mr. Takeda’s] face” in the Shanghai concession reminds us of the molecule considered by Jirō to constitute the sacred life, and to eternally free it from the concept of death, when he still believes that life and death are but different forms of an aggregation of molecules. But the difference is that, in Shanghai Firefly, Takeda makes the presence of the molecule extremely visual. Rather than citing some verbal description from the confession of one of the characters
430 Takeda 1976: 81.
214 (as in The Judgment), here Takeda uses the image of the firefly that appears directly in front of the protagonist’s eye to visualize the molecule. Seen in this light, those basic elements of life, and death, are floating in the air all over the seemingly quiet streets of the gaichi colony, ready to be absorbed into the breath of the living at any moment, again a failure to completely exclude the abject, just as with Akutagawa’s narrator. And this is accurately caught by (and only by) “Mr.
Takeda,” who has just come from the metropole—the pivot of the empire, which is at the time facing its biggest crisis of destruction.
Takeda had not taken much time to theoretically or philosophically elaborate on the question of destruction in Shanghai Firefly before his sudden illness prevented him from finishing it. But judging from what he did accomplish, destruction is still one of his main concerns, only here it is embedded inconspicuously in the timeline of the events rather than in the characters’ dialogue, as in The Judgment. What Takeda does in this text is to let the historical events speak for themselves about destruction, which is a different strategy from that employed in Sima Qian and in “On Destruction,” too, in which the author dives right in and develops a systematic argument. Shanghai Firefly starts from the time when “Japan” is the only and absolute center of everything on the Japanese mainland, and when the “white people” also have to merge into the crowd and watch the Japanese Imperial Army marching along the streets of Shanghai. 431 It highlights the first impression of the gorgeous European-style buildings in the concessions, which astonish “Mr. Takeda” from Tokyo and even make him feel that he has seen part of a dream.432 Those buildings are the legacy of the British and French colonizers, the predecessors of the Japanese imperialists who have then either been put in concentration camps or escaped from the city after the Japanese takeover. Before the end of the war, even someone
431 Takeda 1976: 54. 432 Takeda 1976: 14.
215 like Takeda gets to reside in a three-story mansion with just one colleague. But gradually, the
Japanese start to struggle with food in Shanghai, too, and more and more Japanese residents have to be repatriated. The story ends with the rumor that American soldiers are going to land in
Shanghai433 to announce the defeat of Japan. The city of Shanghai, however, seems always to be able to sustain the crises. As “Mr. Takeda” and Professor O agree in their discussion on the future of Shanghai after the Americans come, “Shanghai people do not like destruction
(hametsu).” Therefore, “whether it is the court noble or the Samurai coming, or it is the businessman flourishing, Shanghai will continue to survive without a concern.”434 But then
Takeda adds, at the very end of the conversation, which is also the end of the book, that, no matter how much “Mr. Takeda” and the Professor talk about it, “there is no way that Shanghai would change a bit in its looks, intentions, physiology, intake, and excretion.”435
But the Shanghai that managed to survive the war between Japan and the Kuo Min Tang
(KMT) eventually did change. The KMT, which won the second Sino-Japanese war, was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) only four years later, and retreated from the mainland to Taiwan. The CCP then also went through various struggles and crises, while gradually becoming a completely different political entity from what it had imagined when it was founded in 1921. Written as it was in 1976, the year that the Cultural Revolution finally ended,
Takeda’s story has an open but very suggestive ending. Precisely because of the thirty years between the novel’s end and when it was actually published, the historical events of those years are already part of the readers’ consciousness when they read the novel and serve as an extension of the chronological story line in Shanghai Firefly. In other words, Shanghai Firefly might not have a polyphonic narrative structure, but the temporal gap of thirty years between the inner and
433 Takeda 1976: 265. 434 Takeda 1976: 267. 435 Takeda 1976: 267.
216 outer spaces of the text adds tremendous depth to the entire narrative. The past events cease to be the objectified past, but start to gain meaning and performativity precisely because of the novel’s relationship to the reality of the time when it was being written. For this reason, the storylines inside and outside the story do not make history in Shanghai Firefly a linear structure.
On the contrary: temporality, to the different social spaces in this novel, is like the center to concentric circles—an axis when they are in dialogue.
Hence, in the relational spaces of Shanghai and Tokyo, supported by the events of the twentieth century, Takeda’s view of the world displayed in earlier works resurfaces. That is, if we remind ourselves what happened to the British, the French, the Japanese, the Americans, the
KMT and the CCP in Shanghai, and what happened to Shanghai itself both inside and outside the story, we will realize that for Takeda, destruction of any concrete force is still inevitable and it is not a negative thing for the world. On the other hand, though, Shanghai Firefly deals with the question of particularity—the concreteness of the particular—more seriously than the previous works. Earlier, we tried an alternative interpretation of the opening scene of the firefly, looking at it not as the vague “hope” of China but as a symbol of the very basic unit of life. Here, life seems to be once again broken down into molecules, which is the least concrete form of human life. But just as in The Judgment, Takeda inserts a critique of the atomistic theory into the later parts of the novel in which the primordial form of life itself also demonstrates an astonishing power of destruction.
In the second to last chapter of the book, entitled “Decaying Garden” (“Haien”), “Mr.
Takeda” encounters the Shanghai fireflies, this time in the plural, in an “uncanny dream”
(Takeda uses the same adjective “uncanny,” or kikai na, again here). It is in early to mid-1945, when defeat is approaching, and “Mr. Takeda” has been given the chance to occupy a luxurious
217 mansion abandoned by its former owners, who have fled back to Europe. During a pitch black and soundless night, when “all the lights both upstairs and downstairs are completely off,” “Mr.
Takeda” dreams of witnessing the dead body of his housemate “Miss Xia,” who is also one of his
Chinese colleagues working for the China-Japan Culture Association. In the dream, “Mr.
Takeda” stares astounded at the dead body of “Miss Xia” that rises above his head and hovers in the air, while knowing at the same time that the real “Miss Xia” is wandering somewhere unaware of this serious situation. As we can readily imagine, this sight of death creates a mysterious, ritual, and grotesque atmosphere. And then the Shanghai fireflies appear in a swarm.
Her “dead body” gradually moved to the side. Standing right below, I stared at it without feeling any fear. Doesn’t the “dead body” have any weight? Not possible. There must be something I haven’t noticed that remains hidden. The human being is an organic substance, not inorganic matter, even after it has become a dead body. It is probably going to start giving out a putrid smell any minute now. And from that we can probably tell whether it really has weight or not. Is the “dead body” soft, or hard? I stretched out my arm in order to confirm that. As I had expected, there was a solid substance. No matter how wrongly it is taken, the dead body of Miss Xia belongs to her, and it can never be anybody else’s. But, if that is the case, how come it can float in the air? Gradually, I found myself under the pressure of an unexpected fear. I must look very, very carefully. Right. What I hadn’t noticed till now is that her dead body was being bolstered by a bed unimaginable to this world, and that is why it did not fall. It was an ebony-like bed made of a dense swarm of worms, so dense that it would make one feel itchy by looking at it. Moreover, the worms were all fireflies. I could vividly see the red tails and heads that are unique to the fireflies. The fireflies were still wriggling while falling on each other and squeezing together. Slight sounds—there were slight sounds coming from the swarm. I strained my ears and listened very carefully. It sounded like the black bed was eating her while bolstering her from the bottom. The worms have already occupied the inside of her and were eating all of her brain and internal organs. Did the fireflies have such a function? It must be a habit that they have been carrying on since hundreds of millions years ago. What place in Shanghai do so many fireflies inhabit?436
The Takeda specialist Guo Wei is also attracted to this scene and mentions it in her article
“‘The Woman who Eats’ and ‘The Firefly that Feeds on the Woman’—Thesis on Takeda
436 Takeda 1976: 216-217.
218 Taijun’s Shanghai Firefly.” Her concern is to point out that Takeda was inspired by his wife
Yuriko in this account, because the idea of the dream in fact comes from Yuriko’s diary, which predates Takeda’s story.437 In the journal of May 24, 1972, Yuriko writes that she had a grotesque dream the night before of lying on a bed of fireflies and being eaten by them. She discussed this with her husband because she “felt like it was a bad omen.”438 Comparing the dreams of “Mr. Takeda” in Shanghai Firefly and Yuriko in her diary, it is easy to identify the similarities. However, we can grasp a more accurate understanding of Takeda’s motivation for adding this episode only when we look more closely at the part that is not in Yuriko’s diary.
Yuriko’s dream provides only the basic outline of the bed made of fireflies and the body lying on it, whereas in “Mr. Takeda’s” dream, Takeda adds an abundance of detail to discuss the doubts and beliefs about life and death that flash through the dreamer’s mind when he views the shocking scene. Unlike the opening scene, here life appears in the form of something that has weight and smell. The human being is an “organic substance,” Takeda writes, and even the dead human body is a “solid substance” that can be touched and felt. Moreover, life is concrete and specific whether it is alive or dead, and it belongs to this particular person and nobody else. Life and death are never merely a change in the form in which the molecules are put together or driven apart, as the atomistic theory would argue, which would erase the question of humanity
(both in the general and the individual sense) once and for all.
Takeda does not stop with criticism of the atomistic theory. In the same scene, the concrete life is under the threat of destruction by the fireflies—the symbol of the indistinctive unit of life. Here we see the juxtaposition of the two theories of life, as well as an interesting
437 Guo Wei, “‘Mono o kuu onna’ to ‘onna o kuu hotaru’: Takeda Taijun Shanghai Firefly ron” [“The Woman who Eats” and “The Firefly that Feeds on the Woman”: Thesis on Takeda Taijun’s Shanghai Firefly], in Kokugakuin zasshi (2010.2), 30. 438 Takeda Yuriko, Takeda Yuriko zensakuhin 3: Fuji nikki (ka) [The Collected Works of Takeda Yuriko, Volume 3: Fuji Diary, II] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1994), 280.
219 twist between them, rather than one being brushed aside and replaced with the other. In the dream, the fireflies have occupied the internal organs of the human body and have started to feed on it. After “Mr. Takeda” has realized the surprising number and the unexpected function of the fireflies he has the same questions—“Where?” and “Since when?”—that he had earlier in the chapter regarding the millions of nameless members of the local Chinese forces of which the
Japanese are unaware, including the Leftists and Rightists of the KMT, such as the Blue Shirts
Society (Lan yi she), who are described as living somewhere in the city and secretly moving in the dark.439 With no clear answers to those questions, Takeda implies in the cases both of the fireflies and of the nameless multitudes inhabiting Shanghai that the activities “in the dark” are precisely the start of the process of destruction. The nameless, abstract, and vague individual elements start by absorbing nutrition from the existing forms of life and power, as “Mr. Takeda” witnesses in Shanghai and end by eventually replacing them, but still under the permanent dread that they themselves are also “edible” or replaceable. Here, to quote Kawanishi Masaaki’s comments on Takeda’s novels after The Judgment in general, “there is a world where the killed or eaten one gazes at the killer or eater.”440
What Takeda does in Shanghai Firefly, then, transcends the discussions of destruction in the previous works, in the sense that this time, the practices of the “organ” of the world are no longer part of an abstract description of the total system, but are examined with concrete examples of historical occasions. In Shanghai Firefly, Takeda walks his readers through the time right before the death of the empire and the birth of the next form of existence; catches the movements and exchanges between powers, life and death at the darkest and most sensitive moments; and allows those observations to be constantly related to later events through his
439 Takeda 1976: 202. 440 Kawanishi 2005: 223.
220 reflections on them thirty years after the defeat. Instead of simply stressing that the races and nations that have destroyed other races and nations will themselves eventually also be destroyed, he goes so far as to touch upon the question of the beginning of life. Take the following scene from the chapter “Hybrids (Zasshu),” at a gathering in the spring of the year of the defeat, the very drunk “Mr. Takeda” is stripped naked in order to help relieve his pain caused by alcohol.
His private parts are exposed in public, but he feels “neither embarrassed nor strange.”441 In his drunken imagination, the erect penis, which is compared to a “gun barrel” (hōshin) fully loaded with “bullets (dangan)” and “gun powder (kayaku),” is targeting a female somewhere in the four-dimensional space (yojigen kūkan no isei), ready to fire (which it did at the end). Then the drunken “Mr. Takeda” gives a sober speech about the start of life:
All in all, everything starts at the tip of this. This is great. Whether it is pureblooded or hybrid, all will start at this point and nowhere else, and cover the whole planet. We will continue to breed. So will the wandering Jewish race.442
Shanghai Firefly is unanimously considered by the critics to be a novel of asceticism because, starting from the point when “Mr. Takeda” arrives in Shanghai and throughout his time there, he has been publicly claiming that he will “stop being a man” as long as he is in
Shanghai.443 Therefore, to a certain degree, the description of the bare sexual organ and the scene of intercourse, even if just in the imagination, will probably shock the reader. But, on the other hand, we must keep in mind that in Shanghai Firefly sex is discussed as a means of reproduction rather than a desire for physical pleasure, so this scene should not be so surprising after all. By looking at sex in its reproductive function, Takeda once again very clearly articulates the destructive character of the world with a concrete paradigm: the war is what is
441 Takeda 1976: 188. 442 Takeda 1976: 188-189. 443 Takeda 1976: 113.
221 destroying the Japanese empire, yet the “gun barrel,” “bullets,” and “gun powder” are also where
“everything starts.”
Conceptualizing Personal Experience into a Transnational History
In this chapter I have analyzed three works of Takeda Taijun that were published at intervals: during the war, immediately after the war, and thirty years after Japan’s defeat. I have scrutinized some of the formal properties of these texts, including the characters’ voices, the narrative devices, linguistic features such as metaphoric representations, and the temporal and spatial relations inside and outside the text, arguing that in the case of Takeda’s literary production, the structure of the text can serve as a proper register for the structure of history as he perceives it. That is, I try to understand how he wants history to be regarded, not by summarizing what he says about history per se but by interpreting how he wants his narratives of historical events to be experienced. In Sima Qian, Takeda started to formalize a theory of the
“world” as the only absolute, continuous, and organic system, which is sustained and nourished from the ceaseless and inevitable destruction of its parts. He articulates this world from the positionality of the only all-knowing historian, who sees more of the totality than the particularity when he takes the retrospective view. In The Judgment, by engaging multiple voices and consciousnesses, Takeda creates an inner structure of the world resembling the one of his view of history and starts to present this world not only with an emphasis on its total structure, but also with great attention to the realities of the individual’s situation in the process of destruction. But here, Takeda resists the idea that there is an ultimate “truth” buried in such realities. Finally, Shanghai Firefly mobilizes various social spaces along a chronological timeline over a span of thirty years, using the dialogues among them, inside and outside the text,
222 to represent the concreteness of the individual and the world and their simultaneous involvement in the movement called destruction. Takeda developed his thinking about the war, the “world,” life and death, and the individual step by step into a mature theory over the years between those works, and he himself also shifted from the side of the people who “write history” to those who
“make history,”444 as Watanabe Kazutami has said.
In Takeda’s literary production, I find the possibility of a transnational history that could be a productive way of considering history in the postwar discourse of Japan’s defeat. Although
I have not pointed it out explicitly in this chapter, it should be obvious from the discussions so far that the structures of Takeda’s texts and his idea of history always go beyond national boundaries. When Takeda explores the patterns of history in Shiji, although he is looking at ancient Chinese history while thinking of wartime Japan, his argument is never limited to the dichotomy between the two countries. The same point can be made regarding The Judgment and
Shanghai Firefly: the former looks at the defeat not as an event specific to Japan but as an example of destruction in the destiny of every nation, while the latter is basically a story of newly stateless people—the Jews, the White Russians, with the Chinese and Japanese to be added to the list. Unlike his lifetime friend and colleague Takeuchi Yoshimi, who believes the
Enlightenment values of modernity “can only be concretized in the institutions of the nation- state”445 and who takes Chinese literature “as a medium to establish Japanese thought,”446
Takeda never took the nation-state for granted. Shanghai Firefly, for instance, is the best example to show the contingency of Japan’s becoming a modern nation-state after the defeat and the American occupation. I do not intend to articulate a critique of Takeuchi here, for, as Su Ge
444 Watanabe Kazutami, Takeda Taijun to Takeuchi Yoshimi [Takeda Taijun and Takeuchi Yoshimi] (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2010), 85. 445 Naoki Sakai, “Civilizational Difference and Criticism: On the Complicity of Globalization and Cultural Nationalism,” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 17, No. 1 (2005), 191. 446 Sun Ge, “Reading Takeuchi Yoshimi and Reading History,” translated by Viren Murthy, in The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (ed. Viren Murthy and Axel Schnelder, Leiden: Brill, 2014,) 113.
223 correctly points out, “any historical events cannot leave the situation of its period,” and “using contemporary standards to judge history is anti-historical.”447 Just as Hayashi’s works in the
1970s lack postcolonial criticism, Takeuchi and many of his contemporary critics were unable to transcend the national boundaries in modern historicism and the dichotomy between Europe and
Asia that they internalized. In that regard, Takeda was among the very few who were able to effectively cope with such limitation in his reflection on the national boundaries. What I mean to argue by comparing Takeda with Takeuchi here lies in the remarkable differences in their understanding of space, not in their overall achievements as important thinkers of postwar Japan.
Neither is this exactly an opposition of their views of history. In fact, Takahiro Nakajima elicits elements of an “eschatological view of history” from both Takeda’s Sima Qian and Takeuchi’s comments on the essay, considering it a representation of their attempt to “find messianic time in historical materialism.”448 However, in terms of the understanding of space, there is a contradiction between them, in that, as Kawanishi Masaaki accurately points out, space continues vertically and temporally for Takeuchi, and that is exactly the opposite from
Takeda.449 Takeda does not consider time as vertical from the outset, and so an unbroken temporal continuity carried on in a certain geopolitical space, just what any nation-state would claim about its own history, is unimaginable. Transnational history instead becomes the only way for Takeda to perceive the world, because it does not presume a fixed Self and Other and project everything onto that single relationship. Instead, it truly opens up the discourse to all kinds of “relations” in the term’s most genuine meaning.
447 Murthy and Schnelder 2014: 116. 448 Takahiro Nakajima, “An Eschatological View of History: Takeuchi Yoshimi in the 1960s,” in Murthy and Schnelder 2014: 140-141. 449 Kawanishi 2005: 193.
224 For Takeda such a transcendental framework and philosophy of history is unavoidably coexistent with the invisibility of war violence and crimes caused by national conflicts. In
Takeda’s Sima Qian, The Judgment, and Shanghai Firefly, for instance, along with his attempt to
“find messianic time in historical materialism,” which arguably can be considered a profound critique of wartime Japanese reality, we also find in the space of Takeda’s texts (i.e., in the mode of his storytelling) a lack of structure where historical events can be directly confronted and where historical “truth” is allowed to exist. This is certainly not to say that any advocacy for transnationality will necessarily neglect national conflicts; in fact, a truly transnational history can only build upon a profound understanding of historical facts of the so-called national. But in
Takeda’s case, a large part of the historical and factual foundation of his conceptualization of the transnational—the “world”—seems to have remained “naturally” unarticulated in the way he tells about history and thus kept private throughout his career, just like his Shanghai diary.
225 Epilogue
This dissertation is a response to some of the questions about the past events in East Asia that took place in the first half of the twentieth century under modernism, colonialism, and imperialism that I had with me when entering the Graduate School at Cornell University six years ago. Being aware of the ongoing controversy over those events, I was not just interested in finding out more historical “facts” about the past but also (or more) curious about how they are articulated and represented in the present. The historical narratives discussed in this study are all considered as socially constructed accounts of the wartime everyday reality in semi-colonial
China that have been influential in prewar and postwar Japan, conveyed to the reader in their particular but commonly allegorical ways. For me, the politics of storytelling in those narratives is at once a manner of speaking, a mode of discourse, and a performance, a production of meaning. Hence, the distinction between “true” and “false” is not as important as that between
“real” and “imaginary” in our discussion; for, any given set of real events can be emplotted in any number of different ways and told as any number of different stories.
The discussion in this thesis is unfolded with the above understanding of the historical narrative and centered on several other key concepts—travel, time, social space, and subjectivity/consciousness. The storyteller’s traveling experience sets up the argument in two ways. First, it provides a topos where we can examine the social formation of the subjectivity and the “fluidity” of it; and second, since we are dealing with narratives written many years after the events, it also serves as a trope that describes the slippery connection between the narrative and the event. Time and social spaces inscribed in the text and its historical context are the loci that we look at both in the story and in its storytelling. They are at once concrete and allegorical;
226 and by keeping track of them, we, as readers, establish a relationship with the writer, the text, and the context at the same time that enables us to perform a less imaginary or arbitrary analysis of the historical narrative ourselves.
At the end, such a formal reading of literature, which is not necessarily a neglect of the content, though, proves to be itself a possible means to produce meaning. This dissertation reveals to us, for instance, a shift in the storytelling of semi-colonial China among Japanese writers who wrote about the past that they had experienced and witnessed, which is opposite to what the majority of criticisms of those texts have been arguing for. But our (i.e., the readers’) criticisms are all parts of the social reality in the writer’s present that his or her storytelling responds to. That is, reading, like writing, is a production of meaning; and it belongs to the continuum of the social space that also reflects in the writer’s production, and that might even have an impact in their representation of the past events. A dominant way of reading those
Japanese writers’ travel accounts of semi-colonial China that we find in postwar literary criticism is, for instance, to consider them as only belong to a shameful imperial past—unless the sense of guilt embodied in the work matches the “postwar Japanese guilt”450 of the critic—and hence something that should be at best passing mentioned among the oeuvre of those writers. Although it is unarguably necessary to examine the text within its historical and political context, a criticism of “political correctness” alone is obviously neither sufficient nor productive.
The purpose of my analysis is, however, not to seek the salvation that may help those writers, or those testifiers of the past events, overcome their sense of shame. As stated at the beginning of this dissertation, the question of the sense of shame is a much larger and more complex topic. What I look for is an alternative way to read literature for the sake of the text’s historicity—not for its “political correctness”—that we may provide as critics and readers. It
450 Fogel 1989: 581.
227 should also be a way to politicize literature rather than treat it as an apolitical source of information or an unmediated reproduction of the everyday, of which we find plenty of counter- examples in many historians’ works, such as Weipin Tsai’s Reading Shenbao: Nationalism,
Consumerism, and Individuality in China, 1919-37.451 To achieve these goals, and to be able to better articulate my argument, I will certainly need to examine a broader body of historical narratives than the ones addressed in this dissertation. But I hope I have been able to make a meaningful first step.
451 Weipin Tsai, Reading Shenbao: Nationalism, Consumerism, and Individuality in China, 1919-37 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 60. For instance, Tsai mixes Lao She’s novel Luotuo Xiangzi with the historical record of a bank clerk, Wang Zhixin, to discuss the reality of semi-colonial China without differentiating the various fundamental differences between her evidences.
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